LITR 5731: Seminar in
American Minority Literature
Student Research Project
James R. Hood
2 December 2004
Loss and Survival: Exploring the Minority Narrative of Resistance and Assimilation
While the origins of each of this country’s minority groups differs from those of others, most of these peoples share a similar experience of loss and survival in their stories of resistance to and assimilation into the mainstream of American culture. Each group suffers losses of one form or another, yet each manages to “survive” those losses—at least to some extent, it seems—in becoming part of the overall picture of American culture. In particular, the African-American, Native American, and Mexican-American minority narratives reflect these stories of loss and survival, and this essay will attempt to compare and contrast those elements in hopes of placing each within the context of American culture as it stands today.
The African-American minority narrative is unlike that of either the Native Americans or Mexican-Americans, since the origins of the latter two groups are believed to have been rooted in the Americas rather than other continents. The significance of that fact implies that the African-American narrative begins elsewhere, and literature such as The Life of Olaudah Equiano gives an account of how the African-American minority narrative began on the “dark continent” of Africa.
Writing as Gustavus Vassa, Olaudah Equiano describes growing up in his African village while living in constant fear of being kidnapped. As if the threat of being taken while one’s parents were out gathering food were not enough, it seems that even village chiefs were not above bartering away the lives of some of the villagers for goods offered by the slave traders, so even the adult members of the village were at risk as well. Equiano and his sister are taken by traders, and while his description of the loss of his family and home is moving, it pales with his tale of surviving the “middle passage” on the slave ship.
Unfamiliar with any of the customs of his captors, Equiano believes that, after seeing
a large furnace of copper boiling and a multitude of black people, of every description, chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and, quite overpowered with horror and anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little, I found some about me, who I believed were some of those who brought me on board, and had been receiving their pay: they talked to me in order to cheer me, but all in vain. I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair. They told me I was not . . . . (Equiano 57)
Equiano survives not only this middle passage stage of his capture, but manages to make a “final passage” to Europe, where he writes an account of his experiences describing his own loss and survival.
Frederick Douglass writes from the perspective of a slave’s narrative, and while he does not suffer the terror of having to make the forced migration from Africa in the middle passage, he endures loss as well. He is separated from his family at an early age, yet he must focus on surviving the slave experience in order to set change in motion. He does so by becoming literate, and manages not only to escape, but to become an outspoken opponent of the institution of slavery. Some twenty years after the emancipation of the slaves, however, Douglass expresses concern for the future of his culture:
Laying aside all prejudice in favor of or against race, looking at the negro as politically and socially related to the American people generally, and measuring the forces arrayed against him, I do not see how he can survive and flourish in this country as a distinct and separate race, nor do I see how he can be removed from the country either by annihilation or expatriation. (Douglass 438)
It appears that Douglass realizes that assimilation into the “dominant” culture is imminent if his culture is to “survive and flourish” in this country, even if it means that there is a “loss” of one’s own culture, to a certain degree, that accompanies that “survival.”
Of the inner conflict that arises from this struggle to survive in a different culture, W. E. B. Du Bois writes in The Souls of Black Folk that
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois 946)
While Douglass and Du Bois seem to at least acknowledge the possibility that Blacks will lose even more of their past culture if they are to survive, it creates a paradox that we see in other minority narratives as well—to “survive” the losses that one’s minority group suffers requires that one endures even more loss (of one’s culture) in assimilating into another culture. In other words, in order to survive, minorities seem destined to lose even their very identities, melding with that which they have resisted up to that point.
A case in point of resistance to the “dominant” culture is the Native American narrative. Almost from the outset, it seems that the relationship between Native Americans and the “dominant” culture has been defined by the degree of resistance, if not to the Europeans’ arrival to this continent, their encroachment across it in the name of “Manifest Destiny.”
With the arrival of the Europeans came not only a culture that was more “advanced” (if one considers the knowledge and use of weapons such as pistols and rifles a measure of being an “advanced” society), but one that had at its disposal the means to decimate entire nations—diseases such as smallpox, for which indigenous peoples had no “resistance” whatsoever, having never been exposed to it. One of the more controversial stories surrounding the “resistance” of Native Americans to the onslaught of the European conquest of this continent involves a “conspiracy” by Lord Jeffery Amherst and others to distribute smallpox-infested blankets to several Native American chiefs in an attempt to use what amounts to “biological weapons” to annihilate the opposition. Whether Amherst actually did intend to use smallpox as a weapon against Native Americans, or whether he merely wished to “inoculate” them against the disease has historians divided on the issue, largely due to the fact that it is doubtable that he was even aware of the existence of “germs,” much less the concept of “germ warfare” at that time in history. Regardless of whether the invading Europeans intended to use smallpox as a “weapon of mass destruction,” the fact remains that the Native Americans’ resistance to the disease—and to its carriers, the early European settlers—was largely futile.
After the initial decimation of a large percentage of their peoples, Native Americans found that they were to suffer yet more losses at the hands of the European settlers. As the new population of immigrants grew, Native Americans were forced further west, displacing entire societies of indigenous peoples who had lived on their land for generations. The “removal” of Native Americans from their ancestral lands came largely as a result of new laws but those “laws” had come about not as a result of any democratic process that involved the affected individuals, but in a unilateral move on the part of a “new” American culture intent on making better use of this country’s vast, untapped resources than these “savages” were capable of doing. The crux of the issue, therefore, was one of economics, and it seems that this theme of dispossessing the Native Americans of their rightful claims was one that would continue well into the future—the Native Americans’ losses would be the “new” Americans’ gain for years to come.
One loss that the Native Americans suffered that did serve to galvanize their resistance to the westward expansion of the new Americans was that of the wholesale destruction of the bison population. Since a large portion of the Native Americans’ culture revolved around that resource, the destruction of entire herds at the hands of the new Americans was akin to destroying not only a country’s food supply, but viewed as an attack upon its belief system as well. Native American opposition to this onslaught manifested itself in the form of armed resistance, but the eventual results were predictable, given the military strength of the new Americans—even more loss of life and land for the Native Americans.
This is not to say that resistance on the part of the Native Americans did not continue, however. In The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society, we learn that ”In 1864, the Colorado militia massacred a band of friendly Cheyenne at Sand Creek. Cheyenne, Sioux, and Arapaho soon responded in kind. The Plains wars had begun” (Nash 450). In fact, in the thirty year period following the discovery of gold in California, while some ninety percent of the state’s Native American population fell to disease and violence, some of this country’s indigenous peoples—“the Nez Percé in the Northwest, the Apache in the Southwest, and the Plains Indians—resisted stubbornly” (Nash 449).
Despite their best efforts to protect their lands and lifestyle against wave after wave of pioneers followed by the military forces of the new Americans, Native Americans soon learned that resistance alone was not sufficient to stem the tide of westward expansion. Some groups of Native Americans sought peace through diplomacy, hoping to retain at least a portion of their lands and lifestyles, but again, the government continued to act unilaterally by passing laws designed to eliminate the Native Americans’ culture by denying them the freedoms—both physical and spiritual—that they had enjoyed prior to the Europeans’ arrival. One such law was the Dawes Act of 1887, in which “Federal authorities extended government jurisdiction to reservations and warned tribes not to gather for religious ceremonies” (Nash 451). By doing so, the government was imposing laws that were “aimed at ending Indian power and culture” (Nash 451). Since, as mentioned earlier, much of Native American culture revolved around hunting, the government’s agenda became clear when Civil War hero William T. Sherman warned that “all who cling to their old hunting ground are hostile and will remain so till killed off” (Nash 450). Resistance, it seems, would only hasten the inevitable loss of Native American land and lifestyle, though submission and assimilation offered little as an alternative.
In Black Elk Speaks, we find an excellent account of this Native American minority narrative on loss, survival, resistance and assimilation as the title character tells his life story through author John G. Neihardt over the course of several meetings. Of the inevitable loss that his people will suffer, Black Elk recalls a story that his father had told him as a child:
A long time ago my father told me what his father told him, that there was once a Lakota holy man, called Drinks Water, who dreamed what was to be; and this was long before the coming of the Wasichus. He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back into the earth and that a strange race had woven a spider’s web all around the Lakotas. And he said: “When this happens, you shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land, and beside those square gray houses you shall starve.” They say he went back to Mother Earth soon after he saw this vision, and it was sorrow that killed him. You can look about you now and see that he meant these dirt-roofed houses we are living in, and that all the rest was true. Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking. (Black Elk 8)
Black Elk believes that the old man’s prophesy has come true, and that his people are destined to suffer the starvation of both body and soul by virtue of having to endure this loss of land and lifestyle that defines their existence.
Black Elk describes the bitterness of this loss by relating an incident near Pine Ridge, wherein he and Red Crow were eating papa (dried meat) in a tepee when soldiers attacked. He states that
While we were doing this, the soldiers shot at the tepee, and a bullet struck right between Red Crow and me. It threw dust in the soup, but we kept right on eating until we had our fill. Then we took the babies and got on our horses and rode away. If that bullet had only killed me, then I could have died with papa in my mouth. (Black Elk 202)
This claim of wanting to at least have the dignity of having died with a full stomach of meat refers to the theme of starvation as a symbol of their betrayal at the hands of the Wasichus. Black Elk states of the promises of assistance made by the Wasichus that “There were many lies, but we could not eat them” (Black Elk 165), as well as stating that “we got more lies than cattle, and we could not eat lies” (192). After the massacre of innocent Native American women and children at Wounded Knee at the hands of the government, Black Elk laments that “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream” (Black Elk 207). While his people suffered the loss of a dream, there are those who manage to survive and at least tell of the dream that vanished with the death of so many innocent people.
Although the notion of the “vanishing” Native American is often perpetuated in literature and film, the reality of the situation is that the Native American peoples are certainly, like the African-Americans whose past includes the shameful episode of American history during which slavery was an institution, “survivors.” In Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, we find that Native Americans are still struggling to survive their being stripped of much of their land and lifestyle.
Much of Alexie’s work centers on these stories of survival, and the settings for many of these vignettes are on the reservations upon which many Native Americans still live. In his short story, “Witnesses, Secret and Not,” the story centers on an investigation into a possible homicide for which no hard evidence exists. In fact, the authorities have not yet produced a victim, prompting the narrator to state that “Sometimes it seems like all Indians can do is talk about the disappeared” (Alexie 222). This might allude to the notion that some Native Americans refer to their culture’s past as having disappeared, yet the fact remains that their culture, while having certainly changed due to the losses that they have endured, has not “vanished.” It still survives, although it teeters somewhere between assimilation and resistance.
One culture that seems to have fared the American minority narrative of loss, survival, assimilation and resistance better than the others is that of the Mexican-Americans. Part of the reason that the Mexican-American peoples might have made the transition from resistance to assimilation more quickly than the other groups lies in the fact that the “conquest” of Mexico by the Europeans took little more than a decade, whereas the African-American and Native American stories of loss and survival span the better—or, perhaps, the worse—part of this country’s history.
Unlike the European settlers who came to this country primarily as family units, the Spanish explorers who first came to what is now Mexico were men who either had no families or men whose families remained at home while they came to lay claim to that portion of the New World. Since these explorers had no family ties in the New World, they intermarried with the natives, and it is this mestizo, or mixed, race from which the Mexican peoples (and, therefore, Mexican-Americans) are descended. Mexico won its freedom from Spain in 1821, but its glory was short-lived, as first the annexation of Texas and then the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw one-third of Mexico’s land eventually ceded to the United States by 1848. The discovery of gold in California shortly thereafter only added insult to the injury, and some Mexican-Americans still resent having found themselves to be “outsiders” after having held Spanish land grants in this country for several generations.
With regards to the literature of Mexican-Americans alluding to the loss and survival theme that we see in African-American or Native American works, most of what we find are references to the loss of “borders.” Since the relationship between this country and Mexico has often been defined by geographical borders, one might suppose that there exists as well a “border” between the two cultures, although it is not so clearly defined as a line on a map, and it is the gradual erosion (or loss) of this cultural border upon which much of the literature focuses.
In his novel Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya tells the story of Antonio, who is torn between the old customs of his Indian heritage and the “new” customs of his peoples’ conquerors, although it has been several hundred years since that conquest. He values the philosophy of the curanderas, yet he feels obligated as well to adhere to the teachings of the church. He feels as though he cannot embrace one or the other totally without suffering the loss of a part of his heritage, or at least without losing his innocence. Near the end of the novel, his father states that “when we dream it is usually for a lost childhood, or trying to change someone, and that is not good. So, in the end, I accept reality—“ (Anaya 248). Antonio, therefore, realizes that surviving a loss—in his case, the possibility of a lost childhood—requires that one face reality, much as Black Elk and other Native Americans have done with regards to their loss of land and their former lifestyles.
In Pat Mora’s poem “Depression Days,” we hear the speaker’s concerns about the loss of one’s culture as well:
“Depression
Days”
I buy the dark with my last fifteen cents.
Reel after reel, I hide on the decks with men
who fill their chests with salt air of the high seas,
who sing, “red Sails in the Sunset.”
I try not to think of the men who climbed
on the cold truck with me this morning,
stomachs screechy as gears. We were hungry
for paychecks. I try not to think
of last night on my cot, my private reel,
me a border kid, smelling Colorado, gripping an ax,
slicing that old pine smell, playing CCC lumberjack
in a house dark from my father’s death.
Our skin puckered this morning, shrank from the desert
wind that slid into the wooden barracks herding us
around the stove’s warm belly, my joke to the do,
“Am I alive?” limp as the clothes bags around our necks.
I try not to think of eh sergeant spitting, “Delgado,”
and I step from the line, his glare at my dumbness.
“I said Delgado,” me saying, “I am Delgado.”
The twitch of his lips. The wind
Then his “see me later,” later trying not to hear
his brand of kindness, “You don’t look Mexican, Delgado.
Just change your name and you’ve got a job.”
My father eyeing me.
So I buy the dark with my last fifteen cents.
I try not to think of the bare ice box, my mother’s
always sad eyes, of my father who never understood
this country, of the price of eggs and names and skin.
Pat Mora
The speaker in the poem must choose between assimilation into the “dominant” culture, which requires that one turn one’s back on one’s own culture (by changing one’s name) literally in order to survive, or resistance to that change, which will result in the loss of an opportunity to survive those “depression days.”
This type of paradox is typical of the minority narrative, and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros offers vignettes from the Mexican-American minority narrative that seem to echo those sentiments. In the short story “Eyes of Zapata,” she writes from the voice of Emiliano Zapata’s lover, who speaks to him honestly of her peoples’ struggles:
Everyone was tired, exhausted from running from the Carrancistas. The government had chased us almost as far as Jojutla. But you spoke in mexicano, you spoke to us in our language, with your heart in your hand, Miliano which is why we listened to you. The people were tired, but they listened. Tired of surviving, of living, / of enduring. (Cisneros 106-107)
Other selections, such as “Bien Pretty,” describe characters in search of their roots, having long since lost touch with the customs and language of their ancestors through generation after generation of assimilating into the “mainstream” of American culture. Interestingly enough, however, these survivors do not seem to have dwelled upon their peoples’ past losses to an extent that they lose sight of the future.
While Mexican-Americans therefore seem to have weathered their group’s losses and moved towards assimilation more quickly than either African-Americans or Native Americans. it might be argued that the latter groups have endured greater losses at the hands of the “dominant” culture for a much longer period of time. Mexican-Americans did not suffer the indignity of having been made slaves, nor did they endure the loss of life and lifestyle that the Native Americans have suffered, although both groups were dispossessed of vast amounts of land in the name of “Manifest Destiny.” The literature of all three minority groups, however, reflects the theme of loss and survival, and illustrates the paradox of choosing assimilation into or resistance to an American culture that itself survives and thrives on the diversity that minority groups such as the African-Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican-Americans bring to it.
Works Cited
Alexie, Sherman. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven. New York: Harper, 1993.
Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. New York: Warner, 1972.
Black Elk, Nicholas, and John G. Neihardt. Black Elk Speaks. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. New York: Signet, 1987.
---. “The Future of the Colored Race.” North American Review 1st ed. Ed. James Russell Lowell. Boston: May 1886. 437-440.
Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. Ed. Paul Lauter. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.
Equiano, Olaudah. The Life of Olaudah Equiano. The Classic Slave Narratives. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. New York: Signet, 1987.
Nash, Gary B., et al. The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society. 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 2000.