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Between Two Fires
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14865 |
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BOOK WORLD
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10 / 1988 |
3,213 Words |
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Louis Owens
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American Indian fiction--the phrase evokes difficulties in definition, beginning with a glorious European error which, in the fifteenth century, placed the North American continent along the banks of the Indus River. Through a wish-fulfillment on the part of Columbus, Native Americans--all three hundred-plus tribal cultures--became "Indians." And the moment European colonizers began to write about this fresh continent as the new Eden, new Canaan, or El Dorado, the Indian began to inhabit a crucial place in a developing myth. He was the servant of the Serpent, Satan, in the wilderness Garden, the nemesis to be crushed in a holy war by the armies of Christ. When white invader and red native began to mix, the "breed" came into existence--the mixed-blood who represented the greatest threat of all, a shadowy Ishmael wandering between red and white worlds, shunned by and threatening both.
Out of this history of geographic error, genocidal warfare, and delusive mythmaking, a new subgenre in American literature has arisen: the American Indian novel. Although Indian writers today produce an impressive range of poetry, drama, and shorter fiction, it is in the contemporary novel that the full complexity of the Indian identity is engaged.
Early American Indian novels
As a rich oral tradition, American Indian literature is ancient. The first novel by an Indian writer, however, did not appear until 1854, when the Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird) published The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, a heavily fictionalized biography of a Mexican bandit. As a child, Ridge had seen his father and grandfather murdered and had witnessed the federal government's theft of Cherokee lands and the Trail of Tears that marked the tribe's removal to the Indian Territory. Yet this first Indian novelist felt compelled to disguise his outrage. Turning several minor real Joaquins into a single revolutionary waging bloody war against his people's oppressors, Ridge declared that the outlaw "leaves behind him the important lesson that there is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals--whether it arises from prejudice of color or from any other source; that a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society."
Almost half a century later, in 1899, Simon Pokagon, hereditary chief of the Potawatomi, published O-gi-maw-kwe Mit-I-gwa-ki (Queen of the woods). Disguising nothing, Pokagon used real events and names (even giving his own to the protagonist) to make his heavily romantic plea for temperance and justice for the red man.
While Pokagon's Queen of the Woods eloquently depicts the difficulty of the Indian in a white-dominated world, it wasn't until Mourning Dove's Cogewea, The Half-Blood in 1927 that the form of the contemporary Indian novel began to take shape. Musing upon her "half-breed" status, Mourning Dove's protagonist feels alienated from both worlds. "Yes," she declares, "we are between two fires, the Red and the White." It was in the flickering light of these two fires that Indian writers were to work, beginning with John Joseph Mathews' Sundown in 1934.
Mathews captures in his protagonist, Challenge Windzer, the naturalistic victim common in modernist fiction, while he joins Mourning Dove in introducing the figure that has come to dominate American Indian writing: the alienated Indian or
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