can literature are primarily asking who they are. This is the central problem for the writers as well and they (along with some of their characters) continually ask where they stand as mediators, translators, interpreters of their culture--working in a hard-to-define space between Native cultures, between past and future generations of Native Americans, between the oral tradition and modern literature, and between the oppressed and the dominant culture.
This essay examines the problems inherent in this intermediary position as they are explored by a variety of Native American writers. The essay is centered around Black Elk's oral autobiography and five novels: D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded (1936), N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968), Robert Welch's Winter in the Blood (1974), Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977), and Louise Erdrich's second version of Love Medicine (1993). Numerous other works of fiction and poetry supplement the discussion of the problem of the mediative status of Native American writers in this century. The writers studied here were interested in a literature of protest to some degree: dismantling persistent stereotypes, critiquing the dominant culture, and "mak[ing] manifest the crimes of the past" but they were seldom overtly didactic (Ruppert 3-4). And issues of open conflict between the Native and white cultures decrease in importance across the chronological span of these works. In their place Native American writers offered subtler examinations of the damage done to their cultures. As might be expected, there is a world of difference between the bewilderment and shock that characterize the narrative of Black Elk, a witness of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the novel by Louise Erdrich, an Eastern-educated, half-German, half- Ojibwa writer in the midst of her career today. And, while it is difficult to trace a general trend from only a few examples, it certainly becomes clear that Nativ...