|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Living to Tell the Tale
| Article
# : |
10391 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1993 |
2,092 Words |
| Author
: |
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. |
MOUNTAIN WINDSONG
A Novel of the Trail of Tears
Robert J. Conley
Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma, 1992
218 pp., $19.95
DEAD VOICES
Natural Agonies in the New World
Gerald Vizenor
Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992
152 pp., $17.95
Since James Fennimore Cooper's ultimate Mohican padded stealthily out of the eastern forests, Americans and Europeans have loved literary Indians. Real-life, contemporary Native Americans can be somewhat disturbing. Because they often come from reservations where 80 percent unemployment, the scourge of fetal alcohol syndrome, and the highest teenage suicide rate in the nation make life hard, living and breathing Indians aren't very romantic material. Literary Indians, on the other hand, are quite the opposite: safe, serene, and intensely romantic. Even the occasional marauding literary half-bread, such as Blue Duck in Larry McMurty's novel Lonesome Dove, is securely contained within the tradition of the Vanishing American. In the last two decades, however, novels by real-life Indians have begun to displace those about Indians by non-Indians. Today, with more than sixty published novels about Native American authors, it seems the Vanishing American has reappeared and is armed with a word processor.
From the University of Oklahoma Press this fall come to novels about Native Americans by Native American authors: Robert J. Conley's Mountain Windsong and Gerald Vizenor's Dead Voices. Within these books are two ends of the contemporary spectrum of Indian fiction. In Mountain Windsong, a reader will recognize very familiar territory: the plight of the romantic Indian. In Dead Voices, the reader is apt to recognize very little, for if Conley's novel is a historic, though somewhat subversive, romance, Vizenor's is a postmodern trickster assault on what we think we know about novels and Indians.
The Trail of Tears
In the summer and fall of 1838, federal troops under Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott captured and imprisoned fifteen thousand members of the Cherokee Nation. Herded from their plantations, farms, and towns to be held in
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
