Native American Fiction: A User's Manual by David Treuer

Somewhere along the way--in the eighteenth century perhaps--Indians became associated with a very specific set of virtues.  And then, at a later point Indians were perceived as having vanished.  Or, if we hadn't disappeared entirely, we were no longer perceived as being pure.  We were diluted by blood and experience.  This, in the imagination, happens during the start of the reservation period (because of the qualities of pride and independence and...)  Somehow the virtues have remained, though we are gone.  And Indians and Indianness persist as ghosts persist: as hovering presences that can be evoked and appealed to, linked to life but separate from it, no longer a reality, or in reality.  We became but an essence.

In one essay in his book Native American Fiction: A User's Manual, David Treuer tells an anecdote about signing books in Finland, where a man, dressed in jeans and a vest with a long black braid, asked him to sign a picture of himself, writing "To Lonely Wolf."  "Don't you mean Lone Wolf," Treuer asked, but no--his spiritual name was Lonely Wolf.  A parody of a Native American name, but sported with deadly earnestness.

I'm teaching a class in the spring on contemporary Native American fiction, and I'm pretty anxious about it.  The anxiety centers around being a figure like Lonely Wolf: a person whose sympathy with Native Americans, or the Native Americans he has imagined, precludes actually hearing or listening to the Native Americans of reality.  A person who likes the idea of Native America, but who's never met a real Native American.  As a teacher, it's a hard triangulation to make.  Students expect expertise, and while I'm certainly an expert in literature and reading it, my expertise in Native American issues is as shrunken as any white person's necessarily is.  But I think these texts, and these people, are worth listening to, as is only infrequently done--Treuer calls it "Indian silence"--and so I have to put myself in the position of a listener, too.  No braids, no vest.

Treuer's set of essays acts as a kind of manifesto about how to read Native fiction.  He talks about several authors and texts I'm planning on reading, like James Welch's Fools Crow and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine.  One of his central arguments is that these novels are about culture, but they are not culture, even though that's the way we often read them, as tangible an artifact as a ribbon shirt or a piece of black-and-white Pueblo pottery.  I have trouble with the rigidity of that distinction.  Are no novels "culture" or is this a special distinction for novels by Native authors?  Culture, as Treuer describes, is embodied in the lifeways of his Ojibwe community, distinct from the literature that an Ojibwe person (like Erdrich) might reproduce.  But is that because the novel is necessarily a European form, and if so, how does that square with Treuer's own dismissal of the question of authenticity?  But Treuer's certainly right when he says that the novels are not allowed to be literature, a right which Anglo-American authors have enjoyed for centuries.  For this reason he even expresses doubt whether "Native American fiction" is a meaningful category at all (a bold move, given the title of the book).

In the process, Treuer dissects a lot of cant about Native American qualities in these novels.  Critics claim that Love Medicine employs the "polyvocality" of Ojibwe myth, but Ojibwe myths, as Treuer shows, are narratively straightforward.  The language of Fools Crow is modeled less on Blackfeet language than on the epic similes of The Odyssey.  The myth-poems of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony have more in common with modern notions of poetry than Pueblo myths, which are not poetry at all.  (Though, one might argue, they're not really prose either.)  In all these cases, what the novels possess is not culture but a desire for culture, a longing for authentic indigenous experiences, constructed with the familiar tools of the American fiction tradition.  Though I'm not sure Treuer intended it, there's something tragic in that, a suggestion that, perhaps unknowingly, these authors are reaching for something with tools that can never accomplish it.  Treuer's essays end up being a kind of deconstructivist project.

Treuer warns that it might seem he's giving these novels "harsh treatment," but frequently stops to remind us that he has great admiration and love for Erdrich, Welch, Silko, etc.  He only wants them to be read honestly.  Except when it comes to Sherman Alexie, whose work he rips apart with the precision of a butcher working on a carcass.  He compares Alexie's Reservation Blues to a famous hoax novel, The Education of Little Tree, which was a popular memoir of a Native child until it was exposed as having been written by a white KKK leader.  In that essay he wants to undermine popular ideas of authenticity, and reclaim Little Tree as an "Indian novel" because it shares many qualities with other imaginative renditions of Indianness.  But the opposite is also true: Alexie's work, as described by Treuer, is chock-full of bad stereotypes and nonsense about racial purity.  I've never actually read Alexie, but Treuer's account confirmed a lot of what I've intuited--plus, it's always fun to read a good takedown.