American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2015 Research Post 2

Lori Wheeler

America and Its Romantic Ideal of the Native

          Only one-sixteenth of me is descended from Cherokees.  As a child, I always wondered which sixteenth of me. I knew it was my high cheekbones and my long dark hair, but was that it?   Almost every other part of me was Irish: the freckles, the pale skin, and my feistiness.  Much of this I got from my maternal lineage.  As I grew up, my paternal grandmother, who was also of Irish descent, would speak of her mother-in-law in hushed, reverent tones.  Even now at the age of eighty-seven, my grandmother refers to her mother-in-law as Mrs. Wheeler.  Partially, this is because my grandmother grew up in an age when it was anything but polite to speak of your elders with familiarity, but in large part this is due to the fact that my grandmother, like me and my generation, grew up in a culture that romanticized and revered the American Indian.  Until studying literature, the Native American was my only conceptualization of the Romantic.  Therefore, I was intrigued to find The Last of the Mohicans on the syllabus.  Other than the several titles of Sherman Alexie that I have read, I have not had the experience of Native American writing, and I have certainly never studied it with an analytical eye.  After reading from Cooper’s classic, I revisited two of Alexie’s most memorable books, Indian Killer and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to look at the modern characterization of Native Americans in fiction for adults and for young adults, respectively.

          Sherman Alexie is himself a Native American and writes about his culture and for his people.  He is outspoken in interviews and in his own writing that the plight of the Native American is still a struggle, and very much a mystery to non-Indians.  Most of his writing features Native American protagonists dealing with the conflicting worlds of the reservation and modern American cities.  His novel Indian Killer is a gritty exploration of that struggle. Born to an Indian woman and given up for adoption, John Smith is adopted into a wealthy white home that simultaneously encourages his exploration of his heritage and discredits it.  Through a haze of mental illness and a misguided attempt to reconnect to his native culture, Smith puts himself in the middle of ritualized killings of whites in Seattle.  Alexie rejects Cooper’s representation of American Indians as either all good (Uncas) or all bad (Magua), and embraces the dichotomy of the modern Native American who must balance both worlds without being shunned by both.  As a Native American, Smith receives the physical blessings and stoicism of his people to further his individualistic experience apart from his family and the society in which he was raised.  He begins work on a construction crew and becomes a kind of neo-warrior, comfortably willing to risk his life on the skeleton of a new high rise building to meet the demands of his reclaimed identity.  Smith also becomes involved in a Native American student group at a local college campus and finds himself facing the hypocritical academia of an American Indian “expert” who makes false claims about his own heritage and profits from it.  A very shallow reading of Killer presents Cooper’s all-bad Native American to modern society, but a more adept reader easily sees the Romantic pull of Smith’s biological heritage on him and Alexie’s use of it to create a realistic portrait of today’s Indian. 

          The tradition of the Romanticized Native American tends to push us toward a tragically romantic reading of Killer, in which Smith avenges the self that was stolen from him by his adoption.  However, this reading does not ring true—to Romanticism or to Native American culture.  What Alexie manages to do through Smith’s story is to illustrate the cultural issues that plague American Indians as a racial group and ultimately bring about their demise.  It is still a tragedy, but not of epic proportions.  John Smith does not represent the entire American Indian population, but his illnesses do.  Apropos of his name, Smith tries to live in both worlds, but finds that he cannot.  Frequenting an Indian bar, he finds those around him laughing and wanted to laugh himself because he “knew his laughter would make him feel more like a real Indian” (Killer 277).  Not only because he is a stranger in both the American and Indian worlds but also because of the demons that plague him, he cannot find a healthy way to participate in either place.  Sadly, this is a Native American reality that Alexie recreates for his readers.  There is nothing romantic about an entire ethnic group feeling alienated from all cultures, their own included.

          The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a fictionalized autobiography in which Alexie recreates the same complexities of Native American life found in Killer but written for adolescent readers.  Diary follows the story of Junior’s transition from reservation schools to American schools off of the rez.  As much bildungsroman as American Indian story, Junior faces the challenges of adolescence: hormones, identity, acceptance, however these issues are made even more complex by the fact that he must face them in town and on the reservation.  While providing a refreshingly realistic portrayal of Native American culture through narration and illustrations, Alexie seems to romanticize American Indian culture through the attitudes of the adults on the reservation and the respect that Junior pays them.  The bildungsroman genre provides a sturdy vehicle for progressing this romanticized view of American Indian culture in that it places the protagonist in the position of a hero on a journey to adulthood and understanding—a journey through which the individual experiences the sublime and the gothic in search of unity and transcendence.  All of the characteristics of a romantic coming-of-age story appear in Diary.  Junior’s reservation life is the gothic setting for his terror of a life that will simply repeat a generational failure to live out the potential of one’s life.  Until he believes that he can make a life for himself off the reservation, Junior worries that like his gifted musician father, his dreams will die in a bottle. 

          Alexie paints a picture of a young man who struggles to create and sustain relationships amidst the struggles of growing up in two places, but accurately paints a picture of what it is like for a Native American to maintain relationships on and off the reservation.  Junior faces pressure from both sides to be exclusively Native or exclusively American.  If he chooses to live life only as an Indian, his white friends will never see him as anything more than an eccentricity in their own lives, but if he chooses to be anything but Indian, he faces the scorn of the reservation.  Somehow, Junior finds a way to balance both aspects of his identity.  Not surprisingly, his understanding comes through a connection with the natural world on his reservation.  Much like the pine trees growing on his reservation, which are “older than the United States,” alive when Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin were alive, Junior begins to understand that his Indian heritage transcends history (Diary 219).  He finds that he is free to be both Native and American; he discovers the ability to nurture his reservation friendships and his American dreams.  

          Although it is more heavily portrayed in Alexie’s writing for adolescents and young adults, the romantic ideal of the American Indian persists.  However, for Sherman Alexie, the romanticized Indian is only useful when it enables critical reflection the state of today’s Native American cultural identity.  In both Killer and Diary, Alexie uses irony to turn the notion of the romantic Indian on its head.  He uses this romanticized ideal to criticize America’s ignorance of and dismissal of the dilemma of the American Indian.  Cooper anticipated the tragedy of Native American culture in the death of Uncas and the isolation of Chingachgook.  However much Cooper saw a partnership between American Indians and the colonists who would become America, portrayed by Hawkeye’s commitment to Chingachgook, he did not anticipate the end of the frontier in The Last of the Mohicans.  It is Alexie who deals with the end of the frontier and asks what happens to the American Indian when whites refuse to see them as complex beings, preferring to think of them as either all good like Uncas or all bad like Magua.

Bibliography

Alexie, Sherman. Indian Killer. New York: Grove Press, 1996. Print.

          ——-. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007. Print.

          http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/interviews/ba2000-06-01.htm