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Between Two Fires
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14865 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1988 |
3,213 Words |
| Author
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Louis Owens
Louis Owens' teaches English at the University of New Mexico.
He is coauthor of American Indian Novelists and author of
Steinbeck's Revision of America. |
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
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