Post by Okwes on Aug 22, 2006 10:05:50 GMT -5
American Indian Writing, Seen Through a New Lens By DINITIA SMITH
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/dinitia_sm\
ith/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Published: August 19, 2006
www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/books/19indi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/books/19indi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>
LEECH LAKE RESERVATION, Minn. — The novelist and critic David Treuer
of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe here does not look like the received
image of a Native American. With his pale skin and brown hair, many
people would not even take him for an Indian.
[http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/19/arts/19indi_CA1.190.jpg\
] Craig Lassig for The New York Times
David Treuer calls Indian depictions inauthentic and flawed.
Readers' Opinions Forum: Book News and Reviews
<http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/book\
newsandreviews/index.html?page=recent>
Enlarge this Image
[http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/19/arts/19indi_CA0.190.jpg\
] Craig Lassig for The New York Times
David Treuer at a tourist attraction in Bemidji, Minn.
Nor, Mr. Treuer noted as he sat in a faded bar on the Leech Lake
Reservation, does his résumé sound like the stereotype of the
Native American.
Now 35, he was educated at Princeton
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/pri\
nceton_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> (as were his two brothers;
they were inspired to apply there by the movie "Risky
Business"), and is an English professor at the University of
Minnesota
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/uni\
versity_of_minnesota/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , Minneapolis. His
mother, an Ojibwe tribal judge, met his father, a Jewish Holocaust
refugee from Austria, when he was teaching high school on the
reservation.
"My life will rarely be interpreted as Indian unless I translate it
myself," Mr. Truer said.
But in two books to be published later this month by Graywolf Press, he
is mounting a challenge to the whole idea of Indian identity as depicted
by both Native and white writers.
"Native American Fiction: A User's Manual" is a kind of
manifesto, which argues that Native American writing should be judged as
literature, not as a cultural artifact, or as a means of revealing the
mystical or sociological core of Indian life to non-Natives.
"He's exploring and revealing a truer history of Native
Americans," said Toni Morrison
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/toni_morri\
son/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , his former professor at Princeton.
"We tend, even now, to like ethnic literature to contain our notion
of what the iconography is."
In the book Mr. Treuer takes on Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko,
James Welch, Sherman Alexie and other Native American writers. He finds
much to praise but argues that the works of Indian authors are often
read as ethnographies, when they should be read as literature. In
addition, some Native writers, he says, use pictures of Indianness
passed down by white authors including Rousseau, Walter Scott, James
Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt
Whitman. He contends that they even reflect "The Education of Little
Tree," a best seller in the 1970's and 80's written by
Forrest Carter, who was discovered to be a violent racist, a Ku Klux
Klan
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/ku_\
klux_klan/index.html?inline=nyt-org> member and a speechwriter for Gov.
George Wallace of Alabama.
Ms. Erdrich, also an Ojibwe, is a great novelist, Mr. Truer writes, but
her books are not authentic Native texts, though they may appear to be.
She misuses Ojibwe words, he says, calling them "display, with
language itself a museum piece." The characters in "Love
Medicine," her best-known book, are modeled on people of the Turtle
Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, but don't even speak the right
dialect, he says. Ms. Erdrich did not return calls for comment.
While also praising Mr. Alexie, a Spokane-Coeur d'Alene Indian, for
his abilities as a novelist, Mr. Treuer compares him to Mr. Carter. The
characters in Mr. Alexie's novel "Reservation Blues," Mr.
Truer says, are like those in "Little Tree": burlesques, with
prose full of mixed metaphors and far-reaching similes. For example, in
"Reservation Blues," when someone speaks, Mr. Alexie writes that
"his words sounded like stones in his mouth and coals in his
stomach."
Flawed prose and clichéd images and ideas, Mr. Treuer contends, are
typical of writing about Natives — whether by Indians or whites
— and are excused because they fit the culture's preconceived
notions of what Indians and Indian life are like.
"What he's saying is that the identity of the writer doesn't
count," Mr. Alexie said of Mr. Treuer in a telephone interview.
"That eliminates the way books work in the world."
Actually, Mr. Treuer is very much concerned with identity. "The
Translation of Dr. Apelles: A Love Story," the other book he is
publishing next month, is his third novel. It's a story within a
story. On the one hand, it's a 19th-century Indian romance, replete
with stock characters from Native literature: the orphaned hero, the
spiritual leader who shows him the true way, Indians with a special
harmony with nature.
But the main character, Dr. Apelles, is, like Mr. Treuer, a contemporary
Indian, an intellectual and a mix of modernity and tradition who, the
book suggests, is translating the story from an unnamed language.
Dr. Apelles is himself untranslated, a man who cannot make sense of his
own history, his personal narrative, perhaps because it falls between
two cultures, two languages.
Something of the same could also be said of the author. Mr. Treuer was
born in Washington, where his father, Robert, worked for various federal
social service programs. His mother, Margaret, was a nurse and attended
law school, ultimately becoming one of the first female tribal judges.
David was 7 when the family moved from Washington to a small house with
an attached trailer on the edge of the Leech Lake Reservation. "By
reservation standards we were very comfortable," he said.
He attended Bemidji High School, whose student population was a blend of
Indians and whites. He was in the marching band and played Dungeons and
Dragons. But his mother also encouraged him to attend Ojibwe ceremonies,
and he learned to live off the land like many of his Native relatives.
Princeton, for the first time, he found himself almost without the
companionship of other Indians, and his years there were lonely — a
time, he said, when he "had to prepare the story of my own
life," to try to explain himself and his apparently anomalous
background as a Native American to his fellow students and professors.
While in Ms. Morrison's class, he began his first novel, called
"Little," about a mysterious Indian boy who goes missing. It was
published in 1995. (His second novel, "The Hiawatha," was
published in 1999.)
Today Mr. Treuer — with his wife, Gretchen, who is half Seneca
Indian, and their small daughter, Elsina — still lives part-time
near the Leech Lake Reservation, a vast expanse of flat, sandy land in
northern Minnesota, dotted with clear blue lakes and pine forests.
There, near many of the 150 members of his extended family, he continues
to hunt, trap and harvest wild rice.
He is on leave from the university, and will spend the next year and a
half on the reservation recording, transcribing and translating Ojibwe
speech in hopes of preserving the language, which is spoken by only
about 15 percent of the tribe.
He sees no disjunction among his efforts to preserve Ojibwe language,
his fiction and his criticism of exceptionalism in Native American
literature. All, he said, are concerned with his interest in narratives.
From the Boston Tea Party to "Dances With Wolves," to the New
Age movement, Mr. Treuer said, sitting in the bar in Bena, a small
settlement on the reservation, Natives are inextricably bound up in the
myths white Americans have created about what the country was, what it
is and what it represents.
Indians occupy "vast territories of the imagination," he said.
"The stories America tells itself about itself involve us, but most
people will never meet or talk to one of us."
With his work, whether fiction, criticism or lexicography, Mr. Treuer
said he was trying to create a new Indian story, one in which Native
literature joins the mainstream of American letters, while Indian
traditions receive their proper attention from scholars and are
preserved from extinction.
"Words are the most powerful shaping tool," he said.
"Writing, speech, language don't just communicate fact, they
create fact."
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/dinitia_sm\
ith/index.html?inline=nyt-per> Published: August 19, 2006
www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/books/19indi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/books/19indi.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1>
LEECH LAKE RESERVATION, Minn. — The novelist and critic David Treuer
of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe here does not look like the received
image of a Native American. With his pale skin and brown hair, many
people would not even take him for an Indian.
[http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/19/arts/19indi_CA1.190.jpg\
] Craig Lassig for The New York Times
David Treuer calls Indian depictions inauthentic and flawed.
Readers' Opinions Forum: Book News and Reviews
<http://forums.nytimes.com/top/opinion/readersopinions/forums/books/book\
newsandreviews/index.html?page=recent>
Enlarge this Image
[http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/08/19/arts/19indi_CA0.190.jpg\
] Craig Lassig for The New York Times
David Treuer at a tourist attraction in Bemidji, Minn.
Nor, Mr. Treuer noted as he sat in a faded bar on the Leech Lake
Reservation, does his résumé sound like the stereotype of the
Native American.
Now 35, he was educated at Princeton
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/pri\
nceton_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org> (as were his two brothers;
they were inspired to apply there by the movie "Risky
Business"), and is an English professor at the University of
Minnesota
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/uni\
versity_of_minnesota/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , Minneapolis. His
mother, an Ojibwe tribal judge, met his father, a Jewish Holocaust
refugee from Austria, when he was teaching high school on the
reservation.
"My life will rarely be interpreted as Indian unless I translate it
myself," Mr. Truer said.
But in two books to be published later this month by Graywolf Press, he
is mounting a challenge to the whole idea of Indian identity as depicted
by both Native and white writers.
"Native American Fiction: A User's Manual" is a kind of
manifesto, which argues that Native American writing should be judged as
literature, not as a cultural artifact, or as a means of revealing the
mystical or sociological core of Indian life to non-Natives.
"He's exploring and revealing a truer history of Native
Americans," said Toni Morrison
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/toni_morri\
son/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , his former professor at Princeton.
"We tend, even now, to like ethnic literature to contain our notion
of what the iconography is."
In the book Mr. Treuer takes on Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko,
James Welch, Sherman Alexie and other Native American writers. He finds
much to praise but argues that the works of Indian authors are often
read as ethnographies, when they should be read as literature. In
addition, some Native writers, he says, use pictures of Indianness
passed down by white authors including Rousseau, Walter Scott, James
Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Walt
Whitman. He contends that they even reflect "The Education of Little
Tree," a best seller in the 1970's and 80's written by
Forrest Carter, who was discovered to be a violent racist, a Ku Klux
Klan
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/ku_\
klux_klan/index.html?inline=nyt-org> member and a speechwriter for Gov.
George Wallace of Alabama.
Ms. Erdrich, also an Ojibwe, is a great novelist, Mr. Truer writes, but
her books are not authentic Native texts, though they may appear to be.
She misuses Ojibwe words, he says, calling them "display, with
language itself a museum piece." The characters in "Love
Medicine," her best-known book, are modeled on people of the Turtle
Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, but don't even speak the right
dialect, he says. Ms. Erdrich did not return calls for comment.
While also praising Mr. Alexie, a Spokane-Coeur d'Alene Indian, for
his abilities as a novelist, Mr. Treuer compares him to Mr. Carter. The
characters in Mr. Alexie's novel "Reservation Blues," Mr.
Truer says, are like those in "Little Tree": burlesques, with
prose full of mixed metaphors and far-reaching similes. For example, in
"Reservation Blues," when someone speaks, Mr. Alexie writes that
"his words sounded like stones in his mouth and coals in his
stomach."
Flawed prose and clichéd images and ideas, Mr. Treuer contends, are
typical of writing about Natives — whether by Indians or whites
— and are excused because they fit the culture's preconceived
notions of what Indians and Indian life are like.
"What he's saying is that the identity of the writer doesn't
count," Mr. Alexie said of Mr. Treuer in a telephone interview.
"That eliminates the way books work in the world."
Actually, Mr. Treuer is very much concerned with identity. "The
Translation of Dr. Apelles: A Love Story," the other book he is
publishing next month, is his third novel. It's a story within a
story. On the one hand, it's a 19th-century Indian romance, replete
with stock characters from Native literature: the orphaned hero, the
spiritual leader who shows him the true way, Indians with a special
harmony with nature.
But the main character, Dr. Apelles, is, like Mr. Treuer, a contemporary
Indian, an intellectual and a mix of modernity and tradition who, the
book suggests, is translating the story from an unnamed language.
Dr. Apelles is himself untranslated, a man who cannot make sense of his
own history, his personal narrative, perhaps because it falls between
two cultures, two languages.
Something of the same could also be said of the author. Mr. Treuer was
born in Washington, where his father, Robert, worked for various federal
social service programs. His mother, Margaret, was a nurse and attended
law school, ultimately becoming one of the first female tribal judges.
David was 7 when the family moved from Washington to a small house with
an attached trailer on the edge of the Leech Lake Reservation. "By
reservation standards we were very comfortable," he said.
He attended Bemidji High School, whose student population was a blend of
Indians and whites. He was in the marching band and played Dungeons and
Dragons. But his mother also encouraged him to attend Ojibwe ceremonies,
and he learned to live off the land like many of his Native relatives.
Princeton, for the first time, he found himself almost without the
companionship of other Indians, and his years there were lonely — a
time, he said, when he "had to prepare the story of my own
life," to try to explain himself and his apparently anomalous
background as a Native American to his fellow students and professors.
While in Ms. Morrison's class, he began his first novel, called
"Little," about a mysterious Indian boy who goes missing. It was
published in 1995. (His second novel, "The Hiawatha," was
published in 1999.)
Today Mr. Treuer — with his wife, Gretchen, who is half Seneca
Indian, and their small daughter, Elsina — still lives part-time
near the Leech Lake Reservation, a vast expanse of flat, sandy land in
northern Minnesota, dotted with clear blue lakes and pine forests.
There, near many of the 150 members of his extended family, he continues
to hunt, trap and harvest wild rice.
He is on leave from the university, and will spend the next year and a
half on the reservation recording, transcribing and translating Ojibwe
speech in hopes of preserving the language, which is spoken by only
about 15 percent of the tribe.
He sees no disjunction among his efforts to preserve Ojibwe language,
his fiction and his criticism of exceptionalism in Native American
literature. All, he said, are concerned with his interest in narratives.
From the Boston Tea Party to "Dances With Wolves," to the New
Age movement, Mr. Treuer said, sitting in the bar in Bena, a small
settlement on the reservation, Natives are inextricably bound up in the
myths white Americans have created about what the country was, what it
is and what it represents.
Indians occupy "vast territories of the imagination," he said.
"The stories America tells itself about itself involve us, but most
people will never meet or talk to one of us."
With his work, whether fiction, criticism or lexicography, Mr. Treuer
said he was trying to create a new Indian story, one in which Native
literature joins the mainstream of American letters, while Indian
traditions receive their proper attention from scholars and are
preserved from extinction.
"Words are the most powerful shaping tool," he said.
"Writing, speech, language don't just communicate fact, they
create fact."