LITR 5731: Seminar in American Minority Literature

Student Research Project , fall 2004

Susan Cummings

research journal

Controversy and Freedom
in the Native American Literary Canon:
Sherman Alexie, Chrystos, Joy Harjo

In writing this research journal, I will develop the material to be used the freshman level Humanities 1301 class I currently teach at Lee College. The course provides students with structured exposure to the body of work recognized in the Western canon as the humanities: music, literature, visual art, film, performing arts, communications, and drama. The online course catalogue describes the course as:

A multicultural, interdisciplinary introduction to the study of humankind's cultural legacy in at least four of the disciplines of the humanities, which are approached individually, in synthesis with one or more of the others, or thematically: the visual arts, motion pictures, architecture, music, dance, philosophy, and literature as well as the social sciences, history, mathematics, medicine, physical sciences and communication as they have contributed to that cultural legacy.

The structure of the graduate course LITR 5731: Seminar in American Minority Literature lends itself well to the enrichment of the freshman level course by providing topics for analysis of minority literature that can be woven into the framework of HUMA 1301. The structure provides entry into topics such as choice, voice and the dilemma of assimilation as expressed in American minority literature. In using those topic labels and descriptions, students in HUMA 1301 will be able to compare and contrast the minority experiences of controversy and choice with dominant culture expression of those same experiences. 

            One objective of HUMA 1301 is to “provide opportunities and materials that can help students “establish broad and multiple perspectives on the individual in relationship to the larger society and world in which he/she lives, and to understand the responsibilities of living in a culturally and ethnically diversified world.” Themes examined in LITR 5731 could be easily folded into HUMA 1301 curriculum. The themes of controversy, mythology, religion, and freedom are appropriately explored in the literature section of Humanities 1301. For purposes of this research journal, I will concentrate on the Humanities 1301 themes of controversy and freedom as they relate to several objectives in LITR 5731.

The two LITR 5731 course objectives that lend themselves well to the topics introduced to freshmen in the HUMA 1301 course are Objective 4: To register the minority dilemma of assimilation or resistance and Objective 5: To study the influence of minority writers and speakers on literature, literacy, and language. Specifically, within Objective 5, I will concentrate on 5a:  To discover the power of poetry and fiction to help "others" hear the minority voice and vicariously share the minority experience; and 5b: To assess the status of minority writers in the "canon" of what is read and taught in schools (plus the criteria determining such status).

LITR 5731 Objectives 4 and 5 provide entry into the themes of controversy and freedom examined by students in HUMA 1301. The works of African American, Native Americans and Mexican American writers provide rich veins of controversy and freedom, waiting to be mined for comparison and contrast with the examples provided in dominant culture (or Western) literature. For purpose of focus, this journal will concentrate on the writings of Native Americans, in particular those of the last 30 years of the 20^th century.

The works of Sherman Alexie, Chrystos and Joy Harjo provide opportunity to examine the controversy involved in the dilemma of the Native American’s aspiration to and rejection of assimilation. The works of those same writers will give examples of the freedom minorities take and those the dominant culture allows in literature through the genres of memoir, poetry, short story and novels. Through literature, Native American writers perform a dance of reconciliation. Through words, they attempt to reconcile their heritage as children of North America’s ancient heroes to their lives in concentration camps in their own country. Through words, they attempt to reconcile their history of independence to a future that may foster economic survival, but at the cost of cultural extinction. For the contemporary Native American writer, literature gives voice to the conflict of cultural and racial genocide with the life-sustaining aspects of assimilation.

I have selected the work of Native American authors as the subject of this journal because Native Americans are the most underrepresented population on the Lee College campus. The likelihood of a dominant culture student or another minority student running into or even being able to identify another LC student as Native American is highly unlikely. Majority students are likely to develop their perceptions about Native Americans from pop culture and historical accounts rather than firsthand experience. Therefore, the average LC student is more likely to have developed an opinion of Native Americans based on past dramatic, literary, or film accounts rather than the status of their 21^st century counterparts. The chart below illustrates the percentages represented by ethnic groups. In actual numbers, international students account for 77 individuals while Native American Students number just 44. That’s United States and Native America history in a statistical nutshell. What’s more, these figures suggest a 21^st Century symbol of the historical significance of the immigrant in American society.

2004 Annual Data Profile submitted to State Coordinating Board

Clearly these figures demonstrate the relevance of Objective 5a: To discover the power of poetry and fiction to help “Others” hear the minority voice and vicariously share the minority experience.” If the American literary canon does not embrace the voices of its indigenous writers, the scholars – indeed, the Americans – of today and tomorrow will fall back on stereotypes and historical accounts written by the dominant culture to create a meaning for the term “Native American.” The integration of Native American writers in HUMA 1301 units on freedom and controversy provides a freshman level application of LITR Objective 5a. By reading and explicating the works of Sherman, Harjo and Chrystos, freshman will have a more accurate understanding of what it means to be a Native American in the 21^st century. Critics have pointed out that differences between Euro-American and Native American cultures include their treatment of sacred and secular texts or traditions. For the Native American, there is no difference. Because the secular is sacred, the oral traditions of indigenous Americans should be as valuable to the study of these civilizations and their descendents as the study of Beowulf or the works of Homer.

            Given the complex nature of Native American identity, it is no wonder that the general public and 20^th century academia have employed or at least tolerated literary stereotyping. Stereotypes have usefulness because they provide a “short hand” for talking about a group. Some scholars, though, suggest that the “Indian fad” of the 1960s contributed to a muddled view of Native American identity and voice, making it difficult to distinguish single literary voices from the throng of writers “playing Indian.” (McFarland, 1997). Swann suggests that the works of writers like Sherman, Harjo and Chrystos, illustrate the inter-dependence of the individual and group voices: that the most powerful Native American works are those that speak as an individual, but act representationally.

Sherman Alexie

Registered in Coeur d’Alene tribe, Alexie Sherman was born in 1966 and raised on the reservation near Spokane, Washington.  His life experience is a thousand emotional echoes away from the indigenous life detailed by Black Elk. Those echoes, though, resound in his writing while he navigates his country as a 20^th century traveler with dual citizenship: as an indigenous person in the land of his heritage and as the survivor who is recognized as a citizen of the government occupying the land of his ancestors.

            Alexie’s work clearly provides readers with access to the modern Native American’s set of two parallel universes: one, the indigenous surface of Earth whose cultural strengths and underpinnings are being burnished or worn through by the movement individuals who also live in the other universe, a occupying force whose material abundance and opportunities for are abundant for the individual willing to forget the past and relinquish righteous claims to a difference group identity and purpose.

            Rader suggests that ubiquitous icons of the dominant culture reinforce Native Americans sense of “otherness” and lay claim to their dreams. “It is in that country of reality and imagination that Alexie and his characters experience the anxiety of simultaneously desiring the dream American movies and television offer and rejecting its scripted version of what American life and culture must be and do.”(Rader, 159). Sherman Alexie’s “My Heroes Have Never Been Cowboys” provides an excellent example of the clear-eyed knowledge that media, history, and the future remain in conflict for Native Americans.

Arthur, I have no words that can save our live, no words approaching forgiveness, no words flashed across the screen in the reservation drive-ion, no words promising either of us top billing. Extras, Arthur, we’re all extras” (First Indian, 104).

That sounds rather like American Purgatory, rather than the American Dream. In other words, Sherman is suggesting that today’s Native Americans can never fully achieve the promise of the American Dream. All they can hope for is to exist somewhere between the romance, tragedy, and fertility of the group identity of the past and the dulled isolation and sterility of modern American life where the individual has greater value than group. Off the reservation and without the marker of language, Native Americans blend into an mélange of Americans who are the descendents of those who destroyed the possibility of a sovereign and viable Native American culture.

            Native Americans are not without cultural, collective and individual power, though, in Alexie’s work. In this section of Alexie Sherman’s Split Decisions, he emphasizes words as weapons against the pressures of assimilation and survival.

My

heroes

carry

guns

in

their

minds.

            Alexie wrestles with the concept of individual cross-cultural relationships, which he characterizes as “treaties” between eager but doubtful partners, descendants of treaty partners from long ago. In “Tiny Treaties,” he writes

Sometimes when an Indian boy loves

a white girl and vice versa

it’s like waking up

and half of the world

on fire. You don’t know if you should throw water

onto those predictable flames

or let the whole goddamn thing burn.

Alexie’s poem indicates a certain amount of ambivalence, but certainly not indifference in assessing these relationships and their inevitable elements of controversy.

Chrystos

            Chrystos, who was born in San Francisco in 1946, identifies herself as a Native American. I could not locate documentation of her registry with a specific tribe. Chrystos describes herself as an urban Native American. She has lived for more than a decade on Bainbridge Island in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to claiming her Native American ancestry, Chrystos has claimed an additional minority marker: she is a lesbian and is politically active on behalf of numerous gay and lesbian causes. I have found no insights into the nature of her name. In addition, literary criticism of her work is scarce. Perhaps that is because she is not exclusively a poet or writer. Nonetheless, her work includes five books of poetry and the inclusion of her work in various collections and anthologies, including “Unsettling America.”

            The vary nature of the issues with which Chrystos chooses to engage is controversial. That controversy bleeds over into the content of her poetry through an edgy sensuality that speaks to the near extinction of Native Americans as well as the joyful proclamation of lesbian love. Freshmen level students acquainted with the basic poetic devices of rhyme, rhythm, work meaning and doublespeak will find her work easy to access. One work that speaks to the legacy of Native American/U. S. conflict is “I Have Not Signed a Treaty with the United States Government.”  Directly addressing the government of the United States, Chrystos trumpets her claims – and her people’s claims – to sovereignty. Her powerful word choices express frustration, dignity, outrage, equanimity and black humor. At one point, she declares the United States null and void:

“No this US is not a good idea   We declare you terminated.” She rejects the failed treaties as well as the cultural imperialism (McDonald’s) inflicted upon the land of her forebears. While Not Signed lacks the “grey-eagle, spirit soaring” stereotyped lyricism many readers might expect from an activist poet or her ancestors, it still expresses the sentiments of an unsquashed people. “In Portrait of Assimilation,” Chrystos provides a clear picture of a man who represents mainstream America. Without the title or an understanding of the coded phrases, freshman students might read the subject of this poem as a middle-class “Everyman.”  Phrases like “it’s really him” and “He’s wrapped old style in a red & blue blanket” suggest that the reader look further for clues about the meaning of the poem. Some of those clues come from the “prairie of green gold wall to wall carpet [that] says nothing.” In the indigenous world, the prairie and the person on it would communicate. Not in the plastic white man’s world.

Joy Harjo

Harjo was born in 1951 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She is a registered member of the Muscogee Creek tribe. Her poetry unquestionable is strengthened because of her formal and informal education: she graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts, a boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico. After graduation she joined a Native American dance troupe and worked a series of odd jobs before pursuing a college education. She also plays in tenor sax in a big band.

Harjo’s work employs the imagery of nature and patterns of memory as she explores humor, joy, despair, and spirituality. Sometimes there’s an  “ oh, by the way, she’s an American Indian” quality to her work. The contemporary settings of the narratives of her work enable her to reach out to non-native American readers in a spirit of mutual experience.  Her characters speak from their urban experiences (which is reflective of Harjo’s own life), but often evince memories of their pasts as individuals and as a member of a group that no longer has a robust existence in its own country. Because she uses contemporary settings, language, and characters, Harjo makes contact with any individual or group who perceives the urban experience as a negative experience.

At the same time, Harjo gives literary evidence of the value of the group, an oft-cited characteristic attributed to Native American culture. Numerous critics have remarked that individual expression that acts representationally for the group. In the introduction to a poetry anthology, Brian Swann writes “the Native American poet seems to work from a sense of social responsibility to the group as much as from an intense individuality.” Harjo’s work is a great example.

In “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,” any poor, urban woman can identify with the speaker, who is dangling outside her apartment window pondering “to be or not to be” questions. Even in her anguished assimilation into an urban world that both crowds and isolates its members, the speaker knows she is part of a greater group, another tribe even.  In the fifth stanza, “She sees other buildings just like hers. She sees other women hanging from many-floored windows counting their lives in the palms of their hands and in the palms of their children’s hands.”  There are other Indian women like her and other non-Indian women, too. In the expression of that knowledge and the sentiments is evokes, Harjo keeps alive the Native American tradition of the individual who speaks for the group.

In “I Give You Back,” Harjo rhythmically exorcises fear. She casts out fear of physical want as well as psychological need. She reclaims the power to government her own life in what she chooses to remember, do, and embrace. Casting out fear, though, might mean casting out much of her Native American identity. Is not that identity rooted partly in fear of past atrocities and in grief for a people’s future that was extinguished? How to balance the empowerment of fearlessness with the desire to cling to heritage is the question she waits until the last line to express. But until the last lines

But come here, fear

I am alive and you are so afraid

                                                of dying.

the speaker suggests that the freedoms to be an individual and to eliminate the negative markers of minority membership are the desirable aspects of assimilation. Only at the end of the poem do we see that while assimilation may provide broad avenues to new economic and political horizons, it might also mean the death of group identity.

            In conclusion, this research journal has given me ample opportunity to find examples of Native American work that voices the pros and cons of assimilation while developing and then voicing individual and group identity. Assimilation and self-expression are seldom without controversy for the minority voice. Ironically, the very government that illegally occupies the land of the Indian Nation, the government that sets aside reservations for the progeny of those it attempted exterminate, that government allows freedom of voice for those it oppresses. It legally permits itself to be criticized and chastised by those it systematically repressed. The Native American voice is heard in part because of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is given to all. The corollary to desire to speak is the desire to be heard, the very basis of all literature. Native Americans have taken that freedom and, even if the First Amendment were not in place, I suspect that like other minorities, they would employ to an even greater extent the language devices that allow truth to be spoken in terms that can be decoded only by members of that minority.

Journal Resources

1. Andrews, Jennifer. “In the Belly of a Laughing God: Reading Humor and Irony in the Poetry of Joy Harjo.” American Indian Quarterly, Spring 2000. Vol 24, Issue 2. Academic Search Premier database.
2. Bankston, Carl, III. “First Indian on the Moon.” The Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, May-June 1994, pg. 15. Gale Literary Database
3. Gale Literary Database biography of Sherman Alexie
4. Gale Literary Database biography of Joy Harjo
5. Gillan, Maria Mazzioti and Gennifer Gillan, eds. “Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry” , Penguin Books. New York. 1994.
6. Kloppenburg, Michelle R. , “Reading the Voice: Native American Poetry on the Page,” Journal of American Culture, Summer 1996, Vol. 19 Issue 2, pg 2.
7. Lang, Nancy . “Twin gods bending over:” Joy Harjo and poetic memory.” Melus; Fall 1993, Vol. 18 Issue 3, p41, 9p. Academic Search Premier database.
8. Lee College HUMA 1301 Syllabus online http://www.lee.edu/syllabus_descr.asp?CRSE_ID=001519
9. McFarland, Ron. “Another Kind of violence: Sherman Alexie’s poems”, American Indian Quarterly; Spring 1997, Vol 21 Issue 2, p251, 14 p.
10. Naitum, Duane, ed., “Harper’s Anthology of 20^th Century Native American Poetry,” Harper & Row, San Francisco. 1988.
11. Rader, Dean. “Word as Weapon: Visual Culture and Contemporary American Indian Poetry.” Melus, Vol. 27. No.3 fall 2002.
12. UHCL LITR 5731 Syllabus online

12.  http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/LITR/5731/