Five Native American Writers

Native American writers of the twentieth century are faced with many difficult, even paradoxical, questions about how to express the dilemmas of their people. They write, for the most part, in the language of the conquerors, yet Native myths, legends, and modes of thought have had an importance influence in shaping them. They know of the past through conflicting sources: the dominant culture's interpretations and the oral traditions of their own people. They also write from the vantage point of those to whom the tragedies of the past can seem rather remote. Though the battles and the overt oppression were barely over when many of them were born, their experience has been that of the bland, institutionalized racism of the federal government and the bitter, pointless animosity of much of the white world. They also have an entirely different experience of the world-at-large from previous generations of Native Americans for, whether the writer is a housewife on a reservation or the product of an Oxford education, the European-American world has entered her experience in thousands of ways. They occupy, therefore, an unusual position somewhere between insiders and outsiders. They feel themselves to be inherently part of their culture yet also experience great difficulty in discovering what their own precise identities may be.

This problem of identity is so central to Native American literature of this century that nearly all of the novels, poems, and stories discussed here

the old ways is made explicit. The degree of relationship between hero and author is also quite clear as the circumstances of Windzer's life are closely related to those of Mathews' own. But the character's assimilationism leads to his feeling that he has been cut off from his roots and this engenders a crisis for him that exceeds Mathews' own grappling with the problem. Nonetheless the sense of drifting inevitably away from the security of tribal social organization--with its reciprocities and mutual interests--engendered a feeling of near hopelessness in John Windzer and prompted him to place the weight of failed hopes on his son Challenge. McNickle, however, left it to his protagonist to discover the dimensions of this burden for himself. From the time of his first draft of The Surrounded (entitled The Hungry Generation) the importance of McNickle's theme was apparent. A publisher's reader in 1929 noted that the novel's theme of "wandering between two generations, two cultures" was excellent and suggested that such work might signal "a new Indian literature to rival that of Harlem," site of the famous renaissance of African-American arts and letters (qtd. in Vizenor Introduction Native 15). The original version of the no