Post by Okwes on Mar 22, 2007 14:18:26 GMT -5
American Indian Writing, Seen Through a New Lens
By DINITIA SMITH
Published: August 19, 2006
www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/books/19indi.html
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.
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 (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, 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, 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
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.
At 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."
By DINITIA SMITH
Published: August 19, 2006
www.nytimes.com/2006/08/19/books/19indi.html
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.
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 (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, 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, 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
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.
At 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."