Robert Dale Parker

Tradition, Invention and

Aesthetics in Native American

Literature

1968: Native American literary renaissance

Native American Literature

dominant Caucasian perspective

•  surprise at existence and quality of Native American literature

•  goes against long-held stereotypes of Indians in North America

•  focus on orality, poetry

Native American perspective

•  long history of telling stories, and aesthetic pleasure in language

•  increasing numbers of very talented writers

•  profound aesthetic concerns: “aesthetic taste has a thousand faces”

•  may simultaneously address social concerns

issues chosen by (and for) Indian writers

four topics

•  young men’s threatened masculinity

•  the oral

•  the poetic

•  renegotiations of what the dominant culture understands as authority

four themes

•  gender

•  sexuality

•  stereotypes

•  appropriation of Indian culture and intellectual property

ideologies of masculinity

•  contact with Europeans has deprived Indian men of their traditional roles

•  western presumption of male role as breadwinner

•  Indian men misread what they do as ‘nothing’ (i.e. don’t have 9-5 jobs)—uncertain, passive masculinity

•  can be understood as Indian epistemology of ordinary everyday living

•  intersecting ideologies of labour, masculinity, capitalism, race, and culture

aesthetic forms

the oral

•  often understood that European literary forms are in print, while Indian forms are oral

•  privileging of print forms (modern, intellectual, rational, complex) over oral (traditional, spiritual, folklore, simplistic)

the poetic

•  conflation of the oral with the poetic

•  rewriting of Indian literary forms as poetry rather than as narrative fiction

pleasure in text

•  extraordinary sense of ordinary beauty in Indian writing, pleasure in routine, in continuity of daily life, in “being”

•  abstract descriptions of form claimed by Europeans in fact have no cultural specificity

•  de-Europeanizing forms of literature claimed by white writers and theorists

•  de-colonizing stereotypical forms deemed Indian, or even produced as Indian by white writers and theorists

•  Parker bucks the current trend of trying to find an authentic Indian form

challenging essentialism

•  Thomas King argues that there are a wide diversity of Native Americans and Native Canadians who are all considered Indians

•  refusal to speak for all Indians by Indians, whereas white people often volunteer for this job

•  he says “to put anybody into a role like that, particularly a non-Native, is maddening” (1063)

•  on/off reservation

•  full-blood, half-blood, etc.

•  speak tribal language

•  traditional vs white educations

•  university educated vs uneducated

•  raised by birth family vs. adopted out to white families

•  etc.

Smoke Signals How to be a real Indian

•  independent film (1998)

•  screenplay by Sherman Alexie based on short story “This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona”

•  predominantly Native American cast, crew, writers, etc.

stereotypes and essentialism

•  does this film seem to challenge or reinforce essentialism and stereotypes with respect to masculinity and traditional roles of Native men?

next week

Tuesday

•  Alan Lawson

•  The Anxious Proximities of Settler (Post)Colonial Relations

•  p. 1210

Thursday

•  Kincaid

•  A Small Place

•  p. 1224