Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian NovelThis first book-length critical analysis of the full range of novels written between 1854 and today by American Indian authors takes as its theme the search for self-discovery and cultural recovery. In his introduction, Louis Owens places the novels in context by considering their relationships to traditional American Indian oral literature as well as their differences from mainstream Euroamerican literature. In the following chapters he looks at the novels of John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, and Gerald Vizenor. These authors are mixedbloods who, in their writing, try to come to terms with the marginalization both of mixed-bloods and fullbloods and of their cultures in American society. Their novels are complex and sophisticated narratives of cultural survival - and survival guides for fullbloods and mixedbloods in modern America. Rejecting the stereotypes and cliches long attached to the word Indian, they appropriate and adapt the colonizers language, English, to describe the Indian experience. These novels embody the American Indian point of view; the non-Indian is required to assume the role of "other". In his analysis Owens draws on a broad range of literary theory: myth and folklore, structuralism, modernism, poststructuralism, and, particularly, postmodernism. At the same time he argues that although recent American Indian fiction incorporates a number of significant elements often identified with postmodern writing, it contradicts the primary impulse of postmodernism. That is, instead of celebrating fragmentation, ephemerality, and chaos, these authors insistupon a cultural center that is intact and recoverable, upon immutable values and ecological truths. Other Destinies provides a new critical approach to novels by American Indians. It also offers a comprehensive introduction to the novels, helping teachers bring this important fiction to the classroom. |
Contents
John Rollin Ridges Masquerade | 32 |
John Joseph Mathews | 49 |
The Novels of N Scott Momaday | 90 |
James Welchs Acts of Recovery | 128 |
Leslie Silkos | 167 |
Erdrich and Dorriss Mixedbloods and Multiple | 192 |
Gerald Vizenors Trickster | 225 |
Notes | 255 |
References | 275 |
Common terms and phrases
Abel Abel's alien American Indian Quarterly American literature Archilde Bakhtin bear Bearheart become Beet Queen Blackfeet Blackfoot Blood Ceremony Chal characters Cherokee child Chippewa Cogewea culture D'Arcy McNickle Dawn death Dialogic Imagination discourse displaced Dorris dream Empire Writes Back Enemy Sky Euramerican evil father Featherboy Fools Crow Gerald Vizenor Griever House identified Indian authors Indian identity Indian world Indian writers James Welch Joaquin Murieta John Rollin Ridge killed Kiowa language Lipsha lives Louise Erdrich Love Medicine Mathews McNickle's Michael Dorris mixedblood Momaday's mother mountains Mourning Dove Mourning Dove's Murieta myth mythic Nanapush narrative narrator Native American Navajo Nector oral tradition Osage Paula Gunn Allen Postmodernity protagonist Pueblo rain Rayona reader reservation Ridge Ridge's role sacred says Scott Momaday sense Silko story storyteller suggests Surrounded Tayo Tayo's tells thinks tion Tosamah tribal tribe trickster underscores University vision Winter Woman words Yellow Calf