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 feature it as the primary problem besetting the principal characters. Whether they are returning to their homes from the outside world, reflecting on the conflict between Christianity and tribal belief systems, contemplating the meaning of being half-breed (parents of different races) or mixed-breed (parents of different tribes), reacting to the passing of the previous generations, or simply trying to live from day to day, the characters in recent Native Ameri...