“In American literature there’s a lot happening. How wonderful it is to hear Native American writers, African American writers and writers from other countries. All those diverse voices make up the
country, make it whole.”
—grace paley,
Village Voice reading, March 28, 1999.
“To tell stories in order to keep alive, and through stories, the history and all the ghosts are part of it.”
—sherman alexie,
Village Voice reading, January 9, 1997.
The first event centering Native American authors at the Village Voice took place in 1986 with the presentation of an anthology of contemporary Native American poetry, The Clouds Threw This Light,1 brought together and edited by the polyglot Edouard Roditi.2 Opening the reading, he expressed his regret that the collection was not multilingual, “an impossible task,” he admitted, “since it included seventy-seven poets from as many different tribes and languages.”
The poems he read in English highlighted “the importance given to the land in which Native Americans had lived for four thousand years without exhausting its bountiful resources.” One of their aspirations was a return to their roots, as seen in William Jay Smith’s iconic poem “The Tall Poets” with “Come down here to join me in my pirogue / and together we shall thread our way through the innumerable / Louisiana bayous / . . . / the land of my birth.”3 Roditi spotted Jill Scott Momaday in the audience, the daughter of N. Scott Momaday, the first Native American author to be awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize (1969) for his novel House Made of Dawn4 and, unceremoniously, he began to recite her father’s poem “The Wound”: “The force lay there in the rupture of the flesh, there in the center of the wound.” This wound of the land had become the source of a new Indigenous literature that started to flourish in the 1980s: the Native American Renaissance.
At the time, in France this writing genre was hardly visible, and, if published at all, was rarely identified as such. However, in 1992 a young editor, Francis Geffard,5 with a passion for Native American cultures and arts, created the collection he called Terre indienne. Over the years, he would bring most of the great voices of the Native American Renaissance to the public eye here.
James Welch
“Are you Indian? And, if you’re not Indian,
Who are you?”
—welch, Village Voice reading, May 10, 1992.
Raised on two different Montana Indian reservations, James Welch was at the Village Voice on May 10, 1992, to launch the French translation of Winter in the Blood,6 eighteen years after its American publication. Having left his reservation in central Montana, the unnamed protagonist of the novel is without a future. After many years away and most distraught, he returns home seeking to reconnect with his roots from the past. He goes to meet the oldest man on the land, Yellow Calf, a blind yet wise hermit who, living alone in close contact with nature, embodies the memory of the place, its history, and even the lives of its successive generations.
A gentle man with sad eyes, but a big, illuminating smile, Welch read the poignant passage of his main character’s visit to this venerable old figure. Among other stories of the reservation, Yellow Calf describes the massacre of their tribe, the Blackfeet. In that terrible Montana winter of 1870,* Yellow Calf witnessed its horror, but set out to save the life of a woman who turns out to be the protagonist’s once beloved but now dead grandmother.
Odile, James Welch, and his French translator Michel Lederer, May 10, 1992. © C. Deudon
“The process of cultural recovery has started,” Welch told us. Slowly reconnecting with his origins, this wanderer recognizes the elder as his own grandfather. “Identity and knowledge of the tribal self are linked,” the author concluded. We might add that, uprooted and exiled from their homeland over so many years, the Native American who longs to return to their origins will become a recurring motif in Welch’s novels and Native American literature in general.
Q: “Do you have someone in your family who witnessed the massacre referred to by this old man?”
Welch: “My great-great-grandmother lived to be so old that I learned from her what she had seen in that time when reservations were not formed. They lived a nomadic life, and she told my father many stories about it, including the massacre of a village in which everyone was killed and the lodges burned down with bodies inside. It was these details that haunted me as I was writing my novel Fools Crow.7 I tried to set a record of those events and of their consequences, and, among them, the worsening of the relations between Indians and whites, but also the strife they occasioned between tribes, tearing them apart. Writing Fools Crow from the point of view of an Indian was my attempt at an oral history of that time, even though I wrote it in the European form of a novel.”
Q: “Writing your novels in English, do you lose something of the way you want to convey ancestral stories or describe Indian life?”
Welch: “Indians don’t use oral traditions anymore. We write like Americans; we put the work into the form the American people can read. Do not forget that most Native American writers are not full-blooded Indians, but mixed blood from European descent, and therefore, are bicultural. However, every Native American writer is influenced by their own tribal language. The naming of each detail of the environment and of the reservation life, apprehended in the tribal language, gives a density to the English language which the English word alone cannot give, but words in English do not always translate the meaning and the rhythm the poet carries in his mind.”
Q: “Is your novel autobiographical?”
Welch: “Most of my life, I lived away from my reservation and felt a lack of a close connection with the tribal community and even forgot my language which I used to speak growing up on the reservation in the 1940s and ’50s. It was a time of forced assimilation: children were torn from their parents and sent to boarding schools, cut off from their roots, their families, their communities, and their languages. For many decades, Indians could not speak their own languages.”
Reconnecting with the Native reservation was not easy, and Welch recalled his own experience: “Going home after a long absence, all my body ached, my throat, my bad knees, my head.”8
Louise Erdrich
“These stories come out of the earth—where the people are from.”
—erdrich,
Village Voice reading, October 1, 2008, quoting from The Plague of Doves
The Native American author (mixed German-Chippewa-Ojibwe blood) of more than twenty novels, collections of poetry, nonfiction, and children’s books, many of them awarded literary prizes, Louise Erdrich stands out as one of the dominant voices of contemporary American literature. To enter her world of fiction is to get tangled in the skein of her stories about ordinary and extraordinary Indigenous American characters of varied tribal and multiracial origins. Grounded in the complex realities of Native American life, her tales are infused with memories of true historical events and ancestral lore laced with magical realism and trickster wit.
I vividly recall that spring-like day of February 16, 1988, when Louise and the Native American writer Michael Dorris, her husband at the time, appeared at the door of the bookshop. Michael shook hands with me before introducing her, a tall, elegant figure in a beige trench coat, shyly holding a bouquet of daffodils she extended with a gracious smile.
Fame had preceded their performance and the place was packed with people eager to meet this celebrity couple, particularly Louise, the author of Love Medicine,9 her debut novel and a bestseller in the States that was to set the literary trend of linked stories in a long narrative.
In her preface to the reading, the scholar Joëlle Rostkowski, author of Le renouveau indien aux Etats Unis,10 identified the two authors in light of recent developments in Native American literature. “These new writers,” she explained, “are aware of the risk of being confined to the category ‘Indian American literature,’ but they are ready to take it on in order to be part of the American literary scene and of the new generation of American novelists. Having attended universities, these young, talented artists are not living on reservations, but live and function in two different universes. Their works have the merit and interest of being a bridge between two different cultures.”
“There is some confusion here,” the scholar Marc Chénetier interjected, stressing that “American literature is one, not divided into different categories. These writers are not Indian writers or Indian American writers, or women writers or male writers; they are good writers. I do believe in the specificity of their works, obviously, but it seems that the great features of American literature are those we see in them, namely a prodigious sense of place, space, and voices.”11
Reacting to Chénetier’s reference to “confusion,” quick-witted Louise bantered that she was adding even more of it with her fiction characters of Polish and French descent. She first read a short passage from Love Medicine in which Lipsha, “her beloved character” and the typical trickster of Native American folklore, tries to resurrect the lost love between his grandparents through the “love medicine” he has concocted. Alas! His potion turns out to be fatal to his Grandpa who, luckily, appears in a dream to his widow, declaring eternal love to her.
Erdrich then followed with an excerpt of magical realism from The Beet Queen,12 depicting a scene in which a mother brings her two children to the fairgrounds where the Great Omar accomplishes stupendous airplane stunts to the amazement of the crowd. Invited to climb into his cockpit, their mother rises into the sky with the pilot, while, powerless and mesmerized, the two children watch the plane disappearing away . . . “soon only a white dot . . . and to vanish.” Abandoned, the children now have to face an unknown life, one they could never have imagined before.
Stories of such forsaken youngsters are “a recurring reality of Indian life and theme of Native American literature,” Michael Dorris said, introducing his first novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water.13 The father of three adopted Native American children, he described his novel as yet another story of abandoned offspring.
On October 1, 2008, after too many years of absence, we were thrilled to welcome back Louise Erdrich for a joint reading with the American scholar and author Peter Nabokov.
In his introduction, their French publisher, Francis Geffard, hailed the growing popularity of Erdrich in France and identified Nabokov as an anthropologist renowned for his fieldwork among hundreds of different native tribes throughout North America.
Nabokov opened his talk by referencing his Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places14 as a book about the ways Native Americans relate to nature: “Their relationship to their land is a dimensional space with which Indian peoples have to negotiate in multiple ways for subsistence. The sacred places are what Pierre Nora in France calls Lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory, sacred, because they evoke fear and even terror, feelings connected with a kind of power these places conceal and which has to be handled very carefully.”
Asked by someone in the audience if these sacred lands were sites with a specific telluric energy, Nabokov did not go along with such an idea, preferring an approach based on cosmology or cosmic configurations of the landscape. He told us how for Native Americans, “Indian lands are inhabited by the invisible which they say they see, claiming that the white man lives in another land. Yet a sacred place was not necessarily the grandiose landscape we may imagine and could just be a spot of moisture, for moisture means beans, butterflies, tadpoles, rainbows, life, and subsistence.”
A woman of decided charisma, Erdrich then introduced The Plague of Doves, her twelfth novel, “the one closer to my own life on the reservation where I grew up,” she explained. Philip Roth called her recent narrative saga “a dazzling masterpiece,” a remark that reminded me of a conversation with Louise years beforehand. She had told me that one of the authors she admired the most was Tolstoy and, once a year, she would reread Anna Karenina.
Louise Erdrich at her first Village Voice reading, February 16, 1988. © C. Deudon
The idea for this novel had come to her from a notice in an old newspaper recounting the lynching of three thirteen-year-old Native American boys, hung from a tree where swarms of doves congregated each year, “flying from afar, through woodlands to descend on the fields and destroy harvests.” Due to a lack of suspects and witnesses, the boys had been blamed for the murder of an entire family. “I have long been haunted by this story,” Erdrich told us.
Set in a fictitious town in North Dakota with the foreboding name of Pluto, it follows the tense relationships among several families whose silences and long-buried secrets have been kept through generations, leaving enduring scars. “This novel,” she stressed, “is a series of stories about what happens when there is no justice and what it generates in the town through blood-related generations.”15
Q: “Where do your [stories] come from?”
Erdrich: “As a child and growing up, I always loved being around the older generation, something common with the older child in the family. I grew up listening not to stories told around campfires, but from people at the power plant, at school laundry, at grandfather’s butcher shop. I listened to all kinds of people and not only to Indians, but also to people of other origins.
I’m from the Turtle Mountains, not really mountains, rather hills in North Dakota, the land of Dakota and Lakota. In a very small part of that region, there is a reservation where my mother is from. My grandfather is a Chippewa, and my mother a Métis whose language is a mixture of Cree and French eighteenth-century language, similar to French Canadian. My father is of German origin. I wrote about both sides of my family. My mother and father are both teachers.
Q: “Would you say that the dominant trait of Native American cultures is storytelling?”
Erdrich: “People crave to tell stories. I don’t know why, but they do . . . and telling those stories, they laugh a lot. This is why I’m learning Ojibwe, to understand why people laugh so much.”
At the end of this session, Louise spoke about her bookshop in Minneapolis, Birchbark Books & Native Arts, an Indian community bookstore for the advancement of Native cultures and languages. At that time, the community was working on a large-sized map of the Indian lands of North Dakota, replacing all the American names with their original ones.
Sherman Alexie
“I think Indian writers write about the kind of Indians we wish we were, and I write about the kind of Indians we are, with all our strengths and weaknesses.”
—alexie, Village Voice reading, January 9, 1997.
For his first appearance at the Village Voice on January 9, 1997, Sherman Alexie arrived late, greeting the audience with an explosive “Hello, I’m tired although they bumped me up to first class. Amazing! All night horizontal. Better than my house. I’ve been traveling around, and I’m ‘the Indian du jour.’” [laughter]
The star of the day looked like the Native American of childhood imaginings with his long, jet black hair plaited in the back, a jocular, impressive, but also most endearing young man ready to conquer the world. Over the years, Alexie presented two of his books at our bookstore—his novel Indian Killer on January 9, 1997, and Flight on May 15, 2008. The following exchanges are taken from these two readings.
As a prologue to his first reading, he described the decor of the place he came from—the Spokane reservation, an isolated community “with many conservative, small-minded people who have their own strange ideas of what Indians are. On the other hand, when I started traveling, I met people who knew little about Indians.”
Q: “Touring abroad, do you find a difference between reactions at home and those of European audiences?”
Alexie: “In my reading tours I have more questions about my hair than about my writings, and when I travel abroad and end up on a panel discussion, usually I’ll be the only American with a bunch of international folks. Everyone is just hammering on the US which they hate, and they just go on and on. . . . One of the great ironies is that here I am the only American, and an Indian at that, suddenly feeling patriotic and who ends up defending the US. [laughter] I’ve never been more of a patriot than abroad. Then, I feel that it’s time to go home. so that I can start hating my country again. [laughter] Oh Dreamland! The rage to return to it!”
Q: “How did oral tradition shape your own voice?”
Alexie: “I grew up in two different traditions in my house: one the Buffalo, the bully, all alcoholic liars, and the other one, Coeur d’Alene, the female side of my family, a sacred traditional environment far more involved in the daily culture, ceremonial tradition, powwows and the rest of it. Its emblem is the salmon . . . [looking around the audience] the sleek and persistent salmon. [laughter] It makes me feel so good to hear so much laughter. I grew up on the Rez, in federal government housing, and these stories of the people I grew up with end up in a bookstore in Paris! It feels like an epic journey! It also feels vaguely silly, like all human endeavors being vaguely silly.”
Q: “What about the salmon?”
Alexie: “Yes, to come back to the reservation—a dam was built upstream on the river, precisely the part of the river that flows through the reservation, and the dam eliminated the salmon—the very focus of our cultural, religious, and economic life, and now there is no salmon. We fought the Washington Water Power and they had to pay the reservation millions of dollars in damages. But mostly we lose. There is also uranium mining on the reservation; employment rose dramatically, but cancer is also on the rise.”
Q: “Are structural and mining projects imposed on reservations or negotiated?”
Alexie: “The situation of Indians comes down to treaties. Every Indian nation signed a peace treaty with the federal government. We agreed to quit fighting in return for certain rights: hunting rights, fishing rights, land rights, mining rights, the right to determine our economic future, the right to be a sovereign nation. According to those treaties, we are supposed to exist as nations within the nation of the US. We are supposed to be separate and equal.”
Q: “And on the ground, how is it going?”
Alexie: “Well, you guessed it. The reality is something else. What happened is that the American government threw tribes on lands they thought totally useless, but, in their infinite wisdom, they put Indians on lands which were rich in minerals and oil. [laughter] Over fifty percent of oil deposits are on Indian lands: seventy percent of uranium deposits, twenty percent of ancient forests, all together representing a GNP superior to any country in the world. Well, the US government couldn’t let us have rights over those; it would mean that we would have serious political power. As a result, no treaty has ever been honored, and our lives are a continued fight to win pieces, bits, of treaties.”
Q: “You’ve written a number of books for young adults. Did you read much in your boyhood?”
Alexie: “I read a lot very early on, and I read everything from Steinbeck to Stephen King. People in my family knew that I loved books, and my grandma gave me books all the time. She spoke English, but did not write it or even read it well. She bought books by the cover and bought all the ones with an Indian on the cover [laughter], most of them being Indian romances with warriors. When I got to college, I took a poetry writing class and my professor, a Chinese man, guided me through contemporary Native American poetry. I was twenty years old, and nobody had ever shown me anything written by an Indian. The book was four hundred pages long, and I read it through and through in one night. I was just amazed. I had no idea that anybody wrote about our lives this way. I read the poem ‘Oh Uncle Adrian, I’m in the Reservation of My Mind’ by Adrian Louis.
I read it and that was it. . . . [pensive pause] That was it! That night, I wrote five poems, and I’ve never stopped since. I still think I live in poems. I wrote seven drafts the past couple of days in France . . . but forgot them on the train!”
Q: “Is poetry your religion?”
Alexie: “I question everything, I don’t believe in any God. I believe in stories. They are my gods.”
David Treuer
“People tend to read Indian American fiction as a work of anthropology. I want to unhinge my books from that kind of reading.”
—treuer, Village Voice reading, May 15, 2008.
At the time of his reading at the Village Voice on May 17, 2002, David Treuer was the youngest of the Native American writers featured in this chapter and the author of two novels, Little (1995) and The Hiawatha (1999).16 He was the son of an Ojibwe mother and a father whose family had fled Austria and Nazism to immigrate to the US in 1938. After a wandering life he met his future wife, a Native American woman, and together they settled on her Leech Lake Reservation in Northern Minnesota.
In Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (2012), Treuer provides a close portrait of his father: “Here (on the Rez), [he] felt safe for the first time in his life. More than that, he felt he had found, with his new friends and new family, something that had eluded him all the years before. He devoted his life (and still devotes it) to the community he has come to call his own, and is as passionate today about the rights and respect owed to Indians as he was when he moved to Indian country in the 1950s.”17
David Treuer, May 17, 2002. © C. Deudon
In his introduction to the author, Francis Geffard highlighted the originality of his work, explaining that “only recently, a Native American writer such as David Treuer could tell Indian stories outside the Native American context and its myths.”
A slender man with the look of an adolescent, his piercing dark eyes behind small round glasses, Treuer read the first chapter of his novel The Hiawatha. It opens with the unforgettable scene of a fawn gone astray in a parking lot where homeless people let it wander freely. But a gentle hand on its fur soon startles it. “In an instant, it is running. It jumps once, and then again. In two leaps it is over the fence. . . . The men watch the deer bound down the weedy and trash-strewn slope to the freeway and into the traffic. . . . The deer is dead.”18
Simon, the novel’s protagonist, witnesses this frightening scene on his way to a reunion with his mother he has not seen during the ten years he has been in prison. The fate of the deer seems to foreshadow the horrific revelation to come that he was the one who murdered his own brother.
Q: “In the scene you’ve just read, there is no lead indicating that the mother and the son are Indians. Could the deer stand symbolically for the destiny of Native Americans?”
Treuer: “People tend to read Indian American fiction as a work of anthropology; they think that Indian American novels show what it’s like to be an Indian whether on a reservation or in the city. But nobody says, ‘Ah, I’ve just finished Proust, and I know exactly what it was like in Paris in 1902 and what it’s like to be French.’ Nobody would say that because it’s idiotic. I want to unhinge the book from that kind of reading. I want a book that you couldn’t use to comment on what life is like. Stendhal compared the work of the writer to that of a mirror drawn along a path. But it’s much more than that. It’s not landscape portraiture. What we have here is something brand new.”
Q: “What do you mean by ‘brand new’?”
Treuer: “We think and see through very narrow channels. I say ‘Indian’ and, immediately, there are certain things that will occur in most people. When I moved to Minneapolis, I noticed the degree to which people did not want to see Indians and did not see them. Their eyes would skip the Indian over because he did not fit their fantasy.”
Q: “You mean a denial of Indian existence?”
Treuer: “To people, the word ‘Indian’ summons up more a concept than a geographical reality. To us, it evokes reunions with family and friends on reservations amidst immensities, wondrous spaces, but it also evokes what someone recently told me: ‘We have less of everything.’ For my part, I consider that we have more of everything—more poverty, more skills to keep our heads above water, more laws, but also more resilience and resistance, more intensity in relationships, more desperate tragedies.
Something is happening today. Children claim their Indian past more than ever, but they tend to keep lower standards. I’ll say to them: ‘Strive for the best and get personal . . . don’t go on repeating ‘I’m Indian,’ but say, ‘This is my life, my personal life.’”
Q: “You put the accent on the personal, the individual, rather than on being ‘Indian.’ How can Native American literature reflect this without losing its specificity?”
Treuer: “For me, writing became an opportunity to get into the individual, allowing surprise and revelation, but this can only happen through the writer’s freedom to show that his character’s life is significant for him alone. If my character has made a mistake, like Simon in this novel, for instance, it’s not because he’s Indian, not because the family moved to the city, not because of this or that. There’s no good reason for what he did. There’s no compelling rationale for what he did: murder his brother. It is his deep personal tragedy. That’s what it is.”19