Rambling Thoughts and Other Stuff...

New Year Rulin's for 2012

2011-12-31T12:23:00.021Z

Discussion of Woody Guthrie's 'New Year Rulin's for 1942' have been all over the internet this week with some inferring that Woody's inclusion of hygiene matters (3, 4, 5, 9, 11) as an indication that the Huntington's disease which killed him twenty-five years later, at the age of 55, was already at work. Maybe that's so. Maybe not. Maybe he was just so busy spilling words onto paper (the Woody Guthrie Archives contain the lyrics to nearly 3000 songs) that some of life's more mundane tasks occasionally got forgotten.

You can tell he's concerned about the way he's treated his family. You can tell that, at the age of 30, he's thinking about his health - eat good, drink very scant if any - and about his spirit - don't get lonesome, stay glad, dream good, love, love, love - and about the need to take action and not waste time. I see Woody's rulin's as a to do list, a way of taking small but meaningful steps to self improvement. He's not making any grand promises here, but he is saying he's going to try to do better than he has done in the past. Isn't that what we should all be doing?

Having given up making resolutions I know from the outset I won't be able to keep, I've taken inspiration from Woody's Rulin's, and drawn up a set of my own.

A Review of 2011

2011-12-31T02:23:00.001Z

This is the third annual review I’ve written since setting off on this journey. One more should see me through to the end, at least as far as submitting my dissertation and preparing for the final viva. The viva, the ultimate test of whether or not my work stands up to scrutiny, will come in just over a year’s time. Not too much over, I hope, for I fear that my husband’s patience has its limits. And so does mine. After three years, we are both anxious to get our lives back. Anxious to load up our bikes and find a nice quiet road to pedal down for a few months. Route 66 sounds good, passing through abandoned Oklahoma towns on the way to the west coast. So does the northern tier trans-America route as plotted out by the good people at the Adventure Cycling Association – from Bar Harbor, Maine all the way to Anacortes in Washington state. Or better yet, their Lewis and Clark route which passes right through my hometown. No detour required. That would be appropriate, considering I’ve spent much of the last three years reading the expedition journals and pouring over maps of their route. Though at 3,262 miles long, the ACA route is a couple of thousand miles too short for my taste, so detours would be called for.

Wherever our bikes take us, though, I feel certain that we will travel east to west, for the pull to the west, the pull towards home gets stronger with each passing year. Like a rainbow trout that’s swallowed a nightcrawler, something is tugging at my insides. If I’m to stop from being turned inside out, I am sure that that is the direction I must go. Or am I just imagining that’s the case? Is it simply that I’ve been immersed in the mythologies of the American West so long now that I’ve started to believe they are true? Have I grown nostalgic on memories from my youth, recollecting the stories of my people for the purpose of writing a book so that I believe what is over still is? Sure enough, I’m being lured back – I’m allowing myself to be lured back. It won’t take much for Idaho to reel me in and claim me once more. But it’s a scary prospect, having spent half my life elsewhere. What if I moved back and it was different? What if I moved back and it was the same?

All of that is in the future, though, too far off for me to seriously consider right now while there’s still work to be done.

Let me just finish what I started here, and look at what I’ve done this past year so that I can reassure myself that I am indeed moving forward (even while contemplating a step back).

Progress on Dissertation:

40,000 words submitted for the M.Phil. upgrade viva to Ph.D.
Upgrade viva passed in September
Novel: 70,000 words written
Thesis: 16,000 words written

Conferences, Presentations and Events Attended:

Publishing Panel, UoC, 27 April 2011
Writing the Self, UoC, 1 June 2011
The World Through Memoir, UoC, 15 June 2011
Winchester Writers Conference, University of Winchester, 29 June 2011
Historical Fiction with Stella Duffy and Emma Darwin, 22 September 2011
Workshop with Stella Duffy, 25 September 2011
Royal Society of Literature discussion with Sebastian Faulks, 24 October 2011

Publications:

‘Cowboys and Clowns’, Moonlight Mesa, January 2011
Review of Eddie Chuculate’s Cheyenne Madonna, The Short Review, February 2011
Review of Cris Mazza’s Trickle-down Timeline, The Short Review, March 2011
Review of Belle Boggs’s Mattaponi Queen, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, vol, no 1 spring 2011
Review of Linwood Laughy’s Fifth Generation, Western American Literature, spring 2011

Other:

Peer reviewed 1 essay for Short Fiction in Theory and Practice
Part-time teaching on undergraduate programme at University of Chichester
Part-time employment as student mentor at University of Portsmouth
Editor of THRESHOLDS Short Story Forum

So, what’s left to be done?

I’m on schedule to complete the first draft of Legacy by the end of March. I’ll then return to my thesis and complete my chapters on Identity and Authenticity, hopefully by the end of June. I’m waiting to hear whether or not my proposal for the Affective Landscapes Conference at the University of Derby has been accepted, but if it has, this should spur me into getting a useable chunk of work completed by mid-May. I’ll be finished teaching, marking and mentoring around the middle of June, and will be just about finished with my work on the website, so I’ll then have a solid three months without distractions (I’ll be lucky) to redraft and polish before getting everything ready to submit in mid-October. Then the viva in January 2013, and barring any major rewrites, off on the bikes as soon as the weather starts to warm up.

How's that then? Sound like a plan?

Ten Events That Shaped the West

2011-12-09T18:55:00.007Z

Here's an article from True West Magazine, published in February 2007. It lists some of the events of the frontier era of American history which the author points to as helping to shape not only the country but also the identity of the American people. It's disappointing, but not surprising, that the list focusses almost exclusively on events that reinforce the heroic myth of Manifest Destiny and western expansion. The one exception is The Battle of Little Bighorn - but even here the author manages to give a sympathetic account of Custer's defeat: ‘…the weapons the soldiers were issued were single-shot Springfield trapdoors with copper casings that jammed, while many of the warriors had armed themselves with lever-action Winchesters.’ In effect what he’s saying is that the Indians, by being better armed, weren’t playing fair. It makes a change, but I’m still not going to shed any tears over the 7^th Cavalry, I’m afraid.

Gen. George Armstrong Custer

This article got me to thinking, so I’ve put together my own list of events which, through research for my dissertation, I believe had the greatest impact on the development of the West – for better or worse:

Removal of eastern tribes to lands west of the Mississippi

1. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 which doubled the size of United States lands overnight and gave purpose to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806.

2. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 that set in motion the Trail of Tears, opening land for white farmers and transferring the country's first inhabitants (many of whom were also farmers) into marginal lands in the West.

A Forty-Niner

3. The arrival of Christian missionaries in the West in the 1830s, seeding internal conflicts within tribes, and helping to destroy traditional culture.

4. The California Gold Rush of 1849 which encouraged 300,000 people to head to the west coast to seek their fortunes. In just six years, the population of San Francisco increased from 200 inhabitants to 36,000. The influx of large numbers of immigrants had a devastating impact on the Native population. It is estimated that between 1845 and 1870, as many as 120,000 Indians – or four-fifths of the population – died as a direct result of the gold rush.

5. The Indian Appropriations Act of 1851which sought to confine Indians on reservations.

6. The near extermination of the buffalo in the 1870s, destroying a vital food source for Indian people throughout the central plains.

Fencing in the frontier

7. The introduction of barbed wire in the mid-1870s. Barbed wire fencing was first marketed at farmers as an effective method for keeping cattle off of cultivated land. Cattlemen were initially opposed to its use because it stopped livestock from finding better grazing on open lands, but by the 1880s Texas ranchers used barbed wire to protect their land from overgrazing. With the arrival of the railroad, it was no longer necessary to move cattle to markets on long trail drives and by the 1890s, open ranges were a thing of the past.

Early Homesteaders

8. The Dawes Act of 1887 further damaged traditional Indian life by allotting parcels of land to individual members of the tribe and encouraging private ownership and farming. The remaining ‘unassigned lands’ – often the majority of already reduced reservations – were then opened up to homesteaders.

9. In 1892, the Johnson County War broke out in Wyoming after years of competition between small ranchers and

Invaders, held at Fort D.A. Russell, 1892

wealthy cattlemen who grazed their livestock on public lands. After small ranchers were accused of cattle rustling, two dozen gunmen were brought in from Texas to protect the large ranching interests. Dubbed 'the Invaders,' the Texan mercenaries had already lynched a number of small ranchers when they and some of their supporters were trapped at the T.A. Ranch by the county sheriff and a posse of 200 men. During the ensuing stand off, the Wyoming Governor cabled President Harrison on behalf of the mercenaries, requesting he intervene to save them. Forty-five men were eventually rescued by the 6th cavalry and taken to Fort D.A. Russell to await trial. Charges were never filed against the 20 wealthy stockmen who were said to be behind the lynchings, however, and the men arrested at the T.A. Ranch were released on bail before disappearing into the woodwork. Comparisons with contemporary political and economic conflicts are easily made.

Oklahoma Land Rush 1889, by Xiang Zhang

10. The various land runs in the West brought an influx of white farmers onto the grasslands. Good harvests over several years encouraged even more farmers onto more land, and over the years the use of modern machinery brought still more land into production. Poor farming methods, however, destroyed the soil's natural resilience, and led to severe erosion. When the drought began in 1930, crops failed and, without vegetation to hold it in place, the land was exposed to further erosion by the wind. In parts of Oklahoma, as much as 75% of the topsoil was lost in dust storms between 1930 and 1940.

South Dakota, 1936

Using creative writing to increase confidence and motivation for learning amongst adult literacy students

2011-11-20T12:00:00.005Z

Rationale

During the last few years I have taught Literacy to a variety of learners in circumstances ranging from discrete courses for those with learning difficulties to long-term unemployed adults and those engaged in training as part of the last government’s Train to Gain scheme. Regardless of the situation, I have often found motivation particularly lacking when it comes to writing tasks. Learners can easily see the value of reading as it’s a skill we use every day in tasks as unrelated as shopping, driving and cooking. The printed word is everywhere. What’s more, it has authority. When something is written down it is perceived to carry a certain amount of importance, therefore motivation to read is generally quite high. Writing, however, is easier to avoid. What’s more, because the written word is viewed as having authority, many people – even those with sound ‘literacy skills’ – feel insecure about their ability to express themselves on paper. This reluctance to write, I believe, stems from the fact that historically, the act of writing was most frequently practiced by the educated and ‘ruling’ classes. For those engaged in physical labour, where strength and manual dexterity had obvious financial benefits, writing was seen as having little practical value.

My background is in Creative Writing and my purpose in carrying out this research was to look at ways Creative Writing might be used to empower learners, increasing their self-confidence and motivating them to improve their literacy skills. I wanted to look at the ways Creative Writing has been used by other educators and to gauge its effectiveness in teaching Literacy. I also wanted to gather new ideas and teaching methods to improve my own practice.

An Extremely Brief History of Literacy, Literature

and Publication in Britain

From the beginning, writing has been an occupation practiced almost exclusively by the ruling classes. These were the people, educated and literate, who had time and money to spare on the reading, production and commissioning of literature. Epic verse, inspired by ancient folklore, were among the first stories ever committed to paper, around the 8th century. These were followed by Romance sagas, between the 11th and 16th centuries, recounting the fantastical exploits of their authors’ moneyed patrons. Histories, memoirs and biographies of this time also focused on the great and the good. It was not until the middle of the 18th century, with the growth of the middle classes and an increase in literacy, that the novel – an extended and realistic prose-fiction narrative – emerged in Britain.

Information about the numbers of people able to read during these periods is sketchy as definitions of literacy varied considerably. Donald Stark (no date) cites Cressy’s attempts to deduce literacy levels by counting those who were able to “write their own name on official documents, as opposed to those reduced to using marks of some description.” With this method, Cressy concluded that “90% of men and 99% of women were illiterate in the age of Henry VII, while over 70% of men and 90% of women were unable to spell their name on the Protestation Act of 1642.” Stark (no date) continues to trace the growth of literacy through depositions from the Northern Circuit Assizes which shows illiteracy in men falling from 65% in the 1640s to 30% a century later. He is cautious, however, of giving too much credence to these figures, stating:

Assumptions that good readers could sign their names can easily make us under-estimate the numbers of literate people.... There remained also a not inconsiderable difference between being able to read print...and handwriting. As an example, [citing Thomas’ anecdote] when the Elizabethan non-conformist John Penry wrote to his wife from prison, he assumed that the letter would be read out to her, while nevertheless expecting her to read the Bible and teach their daughter to do so.

Limage (2005) agrees with Stark’s findings that only since the Protestant Reformation encouraged independent study of the Bible, has importance been placed on the ability to read.

The ability to write, however, an essential part of the literacy definition today, was thought to require a higher level of education (Stark, no date), and so remained the preserve of the upper classes until very recent times. The effect of this is that the voices of those with lower literacy skills have often gone unheard, increasing their sense of marginalisation, alienation and unimportance. Worse still, because society seldom hears these voices first hand, our view of the world is skewed, shaped by our perceptions rather than by reality. When history is recorded, interpreted and modified by third parties, the distinction between fact and fiction is endangered.

Creative Writing and Skills for Life

The benefits of Creative Writing are largely ignored in the Adult Literacy Core Curriculum which places an emphasis on reading skills over the skills needed to write fluently. Where it does deal with writing, importance is almost exclusively centred around technical competence in grammar, spelling and punctuation. While the Curriculum does touch on writing for a specific purpose, achieving Level 1 and Level 2 Literacy qualifications requires no written work at all. Writing on the NRDC website, Samantha Duncan (2007) fears this sends a message to learners and teachers alike that writing has less value and therefore less importance. And creativity, of course, doesn’t get a look in.

Creative Writing is, however, used as a launch pad for the teaching of literacy skills in a variety of settings outside the confines of Skills for Life programmes. Across the country, writing projects sponsored by the Arts Council offer support and encouragement to adult learners interested not so much in perfecting their use of the apostrophe as they are in expressing their thoughts, feelings, dreams and ideas, sharing their experiences and gaining a sense of validation and belonging. Such programmes, frequently targeting groups which at some level have been excluded from the wider community – the homeless, disadvantaged youths, single mothers, mentally ill, the elderly, prisoners, etc. – offer a safe environment where writing is valued as much for its content and meaning as for its structure. In this atmosphere, learners gain confidence as well as new skills, and, according to Sam Brookes (2002) who discusses a project sponsored by Consignia’s Stepping Stone Fund, frequently go on to dedicated literacy programmes to further their writing activities.

The Fall of Community-Based Creative Writing Projects

and the Rise of Creative Writing within Literacy Provision

Since the 1980s, adult evening classes in Literature, Creative Writing and other forms of artistic expression have come under increasing pressure to provide learners with qualifications. O’Rourke (2005:35) writes that in the following decade, classes which had previously encouraged participants to enjoy and develop artistic pursuits had their funding directly tied to achievement:

Where adult education had once been able to provide forms of social and cultural association that enabled individuals and groups to access and develop forms of cultural activity on the basis of need, interest and use they now had to work within a framework driven by individual progress.

Today, with the emphasis firmly on providing Skills for Life qualifications, tutors are pressured into delivering a curriculum which appears to value reading and form filling over the ability to communicate in creative and individual ways. This impression is supported by the fact that seven out of nine projects currently organised by the National Literacy Trust are involved in the promotion of reading. Only one project, Everybody Writes, sets out to engage primary and secondary school pupils and their teachers in writing activities.

But the news is not all bad. Teachers themselves are a creative breed and many have used Creative Writing activities in their Literacy sessions all along, searching out competitions and other venues where student work can be publicly recognised. Since 2003, the BBC Skillswise website has published online stories by Literacy learners, providing a valuable forum for underheard voices, as well as a motivation to learn and improve skills. And finally, those in charge are beginning to see the merits of Creative Writing within the Skills for Life framework. The first Skills for Life writing event, Voices on the Page, which Duncan (2007) promoted on the NRDC website is one example where learners are being actively encouraged to take up Creative Writing. With an online anthology of all stories submitted, awards for regional winners and a published anthology of selected stories, Literacy learners have been given a national arena in which their voices can be heard.

Prison Writing

According to a survey carried out by the British Dyslexia Association, cited by the National Literacy Trust (2007), half of all prisoners in the UK have poor literacy skills. The Trust also states that in 1998, of those prisoners who completed the Basic Skills Agency literacy assessment “60% had problems with literacy, and 40% had a severe literacy problem.”

Since 1992, the Arts Council of England and the Home Office have supported a Writers in Residence programme which places writers alongside offenders to promote self-expression, literacy training and job skills. Prisoners are engaged in a range of literacy-based activities, from story-telling to publishing magazines and anthologies. Seeing their work published provides offenders with a major boost in self-esteem and for many it is the first time they have experienced a real sense of achievement. In A Life Sentence, director of the Writers in Prison Network, Clive Hopwood (2006), states:

The best reward of all is watching a man, who's been told he's a failure all his life, stand up at a book launch and read out the first poem he's ever written. You'd have thought he'd just won the Booker Prize... Or the lad who can't read or write, whose mates on his landing have taught him the lines of his role in a radio play, record his scene and leave the room as if he's walking on air.

Talking about the psychological and social benefits of Creative Writing, Julian Broadhead (2006), founding editor of Prison Writing, states: “Within the environment that many prisoners live when not in prison, crime is often regarded as a means of expression. Through criminal skills or a capacity for violence, many career criminals have made their mark on a world that would have otherwise ignored their existence.” In agreement with Hopwood, Broadhead sees Creative Writing as a positive way for prisoners to become recognised, through publication in prison magazines and awards such as those sponsored by prison arts charity, The Koestler Trust.

Creative Writing tutors frequently encourage their students to “write what you know”, and many Creative Writing programmes begin with a unit on autobiography. According to Hopwood (2006), this can be particularly valuable in prison. Referring to autobiographical writing as a “tool for change” which allows prisoners to confront their actions and to seek self-knowledge, he writes in Life Stories:

For many prisoners incarceration offers the first chance in their lives (let alone their adult lives) to pause, reflect and move on. Given the opportunity, encouragement and guidance most prisoners (many unbidden) will write autobiographically: 'How did I get to where I am today?' Autobiography seeks to make sense of the present by re-examining the past. It is an unconscious desire to gain insight in order to influence the future.

Writing about prison literacy programmes in Literacy Today, Judith Williams (2002) quotes an inmate who described the empowerment he had gained from a writing project: “The simple act of writing down what I was thinking and feeling opened my eyes to the power of words.” That is the difference between reading and writing: we read other people’s thoughts, ideas and feelings, but we write our own. Reading is a passive act; writing is power.

Rising Professionalism

In 1969, Lancaster University was the first British university to offer an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, with the University of East Anglia introducing their now famous MA programme the following year. Today, the UCAS website lists 700 undergraduate degree programmes at 75 UK universities in which Creative Writing is a major element. Approximately one-third of these universities also offer MA degrees in the subject and according to Stephanie Norgate, programme co-odinator for the MA Creative Writing programme at the University of Chichester, many publishers now look upon MA degrees as a clearing house, giving preference to unknown authors who have achieved a Distinction. What this means, of course, is that work by those writers lacking these qualifications is far less likely to get noticed or to move beyond the slush pile. The implications for Literacy learners is obvious: publication is out of the question. Or is it?

The Future

In this age of student-centred learning, the use of Creative Writing (particularly autobiographical-based writing) in the teaching of adult Literacy is invaluable. What we, as educators, do in the classroom involves much more than teaching people how to read and write. National policy would have us believe that attainment of these skills alone is the route to success, the cure for all our nation’s social and financial woes, but everyone involved in teaching knows that the real keys to success are self-belief and aspiration.

The saying that everyone has a story to tell is cliché, but true. And the stories our learners have to share – stories they want to tell and stories we need to hear – are every bit as valuable as those told by the educated elite. As teachers, it is our challenge to provide learners with the means to share their stories, to help them affirm “this is who I am and I matter”, to encourage them to play a positive part in the world, and to show them that they can achieve.

Student publications are one way we can help give our students a voice and show them that they matter. Publication does not have to mean professional publication. Photocopied student newspapers or journals serve the same purpose, even if on a smaller scale. For the past five years, Highbury College lecturer Sheila Haines has helped her LDD students publish their writing this way and Southdowns lecturer, Carol Westron, has seen her Literacy students win prizes at the Winchester Writers’ Conference and other other national Creative Writing competitions. The Internet is a massive forum for new writers of all abilities, with the BBC’s RaW website being amongst the best known. And, for those with money, self-publication is always an option.

Changes to My Practice

Research for this project has encouraged me to become more creative in my approach to Literacy teaching and to view the Adult Literacy Core Curriculum as a guide, rather than a manual requiring strict adherence. Discussions with colleagues have turned up a raft of ideas such as shared writing projects, in which students work together to write a story. Exercises such as this not only address literacy issues but also encourage team work, organisational skills and planning strategies.

A couple of teachers also suggested using music as a way of relaxing students and improving concentration and memory. Another exercise which I have recently used is to give students part of a story which they are asked to complete. This exercise can be adapted to a wide range of students by giving them more or less of the original story with which to work. More advanced learners can simply be given an opening paragraph, while others can be given all but the ending, and material can be presented in written or audio form.

One area of Creative Writing which I will devote more time to is poetry. Poetry can be particularly beneficial for lower-level learners as there is less emphasis on the “rights and wrongs” of literacy conventions.

In my more advanced Creative Writing classes, students workshop one another’s stories. I encourage them to look for the strengths of each piece and ways they might be improved upon. Although this is not something I’ve done with Literacy learners, I think a similar exercise could be useful if focused on proofreading for spelling, punctuation and grammar. Helping students to develop such “editing” skills when reading others’ work will help them to focus on these issues in their own.

Conclusion

By its nature, Creative Writing is student-centred and student-led, focusing on issues relevant to the individual. Research for this project has shown that it is an effective tool for teaching Literacy and for increasing self-confidence and motivation amongst learners.

New Visions of the Old West: Blood Meridian as a reflection of anxiety

2011-10-14T10:08:00.016+01:00

This section carries on from Perception, Character and Mood

photo by Brian Lary

During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States military took part in a series of engagements which many Americans found morally questionable[1], shaking the previously firm belief that

America

was a force for good in the world. The rise of the Red Power movement and its close associate, the American Indian Movement, and publication of books such as Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) also encouraged the dominant American culture to question the treatment of the nation’s first inhabitants. Growing environmental concerns, and Cold War anxieties added to the uncertainty which many Americans felt. At the same time, American writers began to challenge received notions of Western American history, and the revised literary mythologies they created reflected the nation’s mood by offering new perceptions (Lewis, 2003) of a West without heroes. Most notable of these anti-westerns is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985).

Dan Moos describes Blood Meridian, with its scenes of unremitting violence and moral depravity, as ‘a Western in which we would rather not believe’ ([no date];23). Set in the final days of the Old West period of American history, Blood Meridian recreates the exploits of the Glanton gang, a group of scalp-hunting mercenaries hired to remove Indians from the Southwest. Based on historical events, the novel explores the nature of evil and man’s seemingly inherent penchant for violence. As a reflection of that violence, the landscape against which the action is set is ‘wholly without [the] nurturing abilities’ (Holmberg 2009:172) shown in the novels previously discussed:

They rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land on some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. (47)

Holmberg describes the setting of Blood Meridian as ‘a pre-lapsarian world’ and ‘a land of light, dark, and formlessness’ (2009:172), without even the concept of morality or justice. The West McCarthy portrays is a churning, chaotic void where ‘death seem[s] the most prevalent feature of the landscape’ (McCarthy 1985:47) and even the elements appear to be at war.

The novel follows the sixteen-year-old boy known only as ‘the kid’ who, after surviving a barbarous attack by a Comanche war party, joins the Glanton gang’s bloody venture. Accompanied by the mysterious Judge Holden, a demonic and apparently omnipresent figure, the gang’s exploits become increasingly violent as they progress westward through an increasingly hellish landscape:

They crossed the malpais afoot, leading the horses upon a lakebed of lava all cracked and reddish black like a pan of dried blood, threading those badlands of dark amber glass like the remnants of some dim legion scrabbling up out of a land accursed…They crossed a cinderland of caked slurry and volcanic ash imponderable as the burnedout floor of hell… (ibid:251)

That the devil himself is loose upon the earth, orchestrating constant war, is the novel’s theme, and as the gang sits around a fire one night, the judge proclaims the sanctity of war and its eternal nature:

War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other.’ (ibid:248)

photo by Michel Mayerle

When asked why war endures, the judge replies that it is ‘because young men love it and old men love it in them’ (ibid:249). War, he states is the ultimate game, a way for men to prove their skill and their superiority over other men. ‘War’, he tells them finally, ‘is god’ (ibid). It is a bleak assertion – that lust for violence is an innate characteristic of man, a driving force which precludes any hope for redemption or true moral enlightenment. In this world, we are all condemned.

Jay Ellis, however, offers a more optimistic reading by suggesting that the ‘meridian’ in the title represents a point in time where the constant and indiscriminate violence of ‘pure war’ is finally brought under control (2006:85), becoming a demarcation between the lawlessness of the Old West and the advent of a new social order. The novel’s cryptic epilogue can be seen as a representation of that meridian on the landscape:

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. (McCarthy 1985:337)

That the man ‘progressing over the plain’ is digging postholes for a barbed wire fence is the most common interpretation of this passage[2], illustrating that the introduction of barbed wire in the 1870s marked a turning point in the landscape and history of the West. Barbed wire proved an effective means of protecting and confining cattle, and its proliferation brought an end to free-roaming stock herds in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The open space across which the Glanton gang moves without impediment is, in the epilogue, reined-in by the approach of civilisation. Ellis (2006) suggests that this image shows that the anarchic freedom and moral vacuum of the unfenced West comes to an end at the novel’s close, but I would argue that the novel itself indicates otherwise.

By the end of Blood Meridian, the Glanton gang are themselves destroyed, with the judge as the last survivor. The final paragraph switches into present tense as the judge dances naked in a barroom full of revellers. He is ‘huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant’ (ibid:335), and as he dances, the narrator repeats the judge’s claim:

He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die. (ibid)

The final lines of the novel are portentous. The judge is the immortal embodiment of evil, and as long as he and human beings – war’s ‘ultimate practitioner’ (ibid:248) – come together, violence will continue to exist.

photo by Jason Conlon

The landscape in Blood Meridian is unquestionably hellish. It smoulders in the heat of underground coal fires which have been ‘burning there a thousand years’ (ibid:138) and has ‘rocks [that] would cook the flesh from your hand’ (ibid). It is a world where leather-winged bats fly through the evening dusk like ‘dark satanic hummingbirds’ (ibid:148) and ‘the western sky [is] the color of blood’ (ibid:152). Though it has an outwardly hostile appearance, however, nowhere does the landscape instigate violence: it is a passive witness to the actions of the Glanton gang rather than a participant, and unlike the landscape in Postcards, The Virginian and O Pioneers!, there is no sense of it as a sentient or intelligent force. In Blood Meridian, the characters are possessed of and possessed by a great evil, and this evil skews perceptions of the world. The land is perceived as hostile because those who move across it are hostile, yet its inaction within the narrative suggests that it is not, itself, malign.

Author David Vann describes McCarthy’s representations of landscape in Blood Meridian not just as a reflection of the evil of his characters, but as a ‘portrait of us’ (2009), a representation of blame within our own internal landscapes. Blood Meridian, he says ‘focuses on our greatest shames’ including the genocide of Native Americans, and the near eradication of the buffalo (ibid). Written in the light of these historic atrocities, as well as atrocities from more recent times, McCarthy’s novel rejects the confidence and optimism of Wister and Cather and expresses our modern anxieties and uncertainty about our place in the world.

photo by Steven Ritts

In Western literature, landscape serves a variety of functions: it can literally ground a story within a physical environment, providing depth to historical content and authentic, meaningful detail for the creation of a vivid and specific sense of place; it can reflect the personality of characters and the overall tone of a novel, adding layers of meaning; and it can influence characters’ actions by helping or hindering their progress. Landscape can be active or inactive; malign or benign. It can be an independent character in its own right, and the driving force within the plot.

The belief that Native Americans are, by virtue of ancestry alone, connected to the land in a spiritual sense which goes beyond any relationship which Euro-Americans can experience, is widely asserted by Native and non-Native writers and critics alike. By claiming that early white writers portrayed the land as a hostile force, Proulx upholds this received notion and refers to a literary tradition which I argue does not exist.

In Postcards, ‘Hellhole’, and throughout Proulx’s body of work, landscape is a sentient force with agency and intelligence. She depicts the natural world as a god-like being, capable of offering redemption and exacting revenge. Wister and Cather wrote of the healing powers of nature a century ago, but of all the texts discussed in this chapter, it is only in Proulx’s work that we find landscape portrayed as a deliberately aggressive force, actively opposing those who interfere with it.

Wister and Cather wrote with optimism about a new land, and used landscape to reflect the reader’s desire for a positive and prosperous relationship with the earth. They had confidence in the frontier and in the future of the United States. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, that confidence is shaken. Threats of warfare, terrorism and ecological disaster trouble us daily. As we contemplate the likelihood of our long-term survival, our perceptions of the earth are distorted and reshaped with new contours, colours and textures. The literary landscapes we imagine today are reflections of our deepest anxieties and fears.

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[1] In 1971, the court martial of US Army officers brought to public attention the mass rape and murder of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai during the height of the Vietnam War; in 1973, the American-backed coup in Chile led to the assassination of Socialist president Salvador Allende, and the torture and murder of thousands of his supporters; from 1980, US Armed Forces began supplying arms to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua while ignoring reports of human rights abuses by the rebels; and CIA-trained ‘death squads’ carried out numerous massacres in El Salvador, killing an estimated 63,000 civilians during the 1980s and early 1990s (Blum, 1995).

[2] Ellis reports that Harold Bloom dismissed the suggestion that the figure is driving a posthole digger into the ground, and quotes Bloom’s response when Peter Josyph made this claim: ‘No, no, no, that's a very bad interpretation. That two-handed implement is, as I say, doing one thing and one thing only: it is striking fire which has been put into the rock, clearly a Promethean motif, and he is clearly contrasted with creatures who are either goulish [sic] human beings, if they are human beings, or already are, in fact, shades, looking for bones for whatever nourishment that might bring about.... I cannot see that as any kind of allegory of anything that has happened to the American West’ (Ellis, 1997:90).

Perception, Character and Mood: Landscape as a Reflection

2011-10-03T18:20:00.000+01:00

In ‘Dangerous Ground,’ Annie Proulx contends that early writers considered western landscapes to be ‘hostile’ and that ‘[a]lmost never did the protagonist display any sense of belonging to or understanding of the country through which he journeyed, nor did he try to learn much about it’ (Proulx 2008:15). While this may be true of the adversarial adventure stories featured in the later dime novels, Proulx’s statement is far too generalised and she offers no specific examples to support this claim.

In her own work, Proulx uses landscape to explore the psychology of her characters. External landscape reflects the internal contours and depth of vision her characters possess and, as a driving force within the plot, landscape controls their movements and influences what they can and cannot do. Her characters are frequently outsiders, alienated in some way from the society around them, and rootless either by choice or coercion. It is clear, however, that landscape is more than simply a mirror, reflecting and reinforcing her characters’ struggles. The open spaces which dominate her writing have a pensive quality, arid and remote, yet geologically and historically complex, and mood, plot, action and theme are all influenced by the shape and behaviour of the land.

In Proulx’s first novel Postcards, Loyal Blood flees the farm he loves after accidentally killing his girlfriend Billy. As he takes a final look at ‘the rich twenty-acre field propped open toward the south like a Bible’ (1992:14), we feel his emotional attachment to the land he has loved and nurtured:

Beautiful pasture, four or five years of his work to bring that field up, none of Mink’s labor, his, draining the boggy place, liming and seeding to clover, plowing under the clover three years running to build up the soil, get the sourness out, then planting alfalfa and keeping it going, look at it, sweet good stuff, nutty, full of nourishment. That’s what made those cows give the butterfat, nothing Mink did, but him, Loyal, the best pasture in the county. (ibid)

Proulx’s lingering and detailed description of the Blood family’s Vermont farm hangs over the rest of the novel as a reminder of what Loyal has lost. He is homeless, now, but more than that, he is alienated from the ground which fed him and gave him purpose. As he travels west, he dreams of a new beginning and a farm of his own:

His own place would be a small farm, maybe two hundred and fifty acres, gently swelling earth like the curve of hip and breast, good pasture. He saw his Holsteins grazing, up to their hocks in good grass. The soil would be crumbly and stoneless. There would be a stream with flat rich bottomland on each side for corn and hay crops, and a woodlot, say fifty acres of tall straight hardwood, a sugarbush, low branched sweet trees on a south slope. On the height of his land he imagined a stand of evergreen, and in the dark spruce a spring welling up from the earth’s pure underground water. (ibid:59-60)

Proulx gives Loyal Blood a vision of a western agrarian idyll which will allow him to reconnect with the soil and provide him with spiritual sustenance. It is this hope of ‘curing his trouble with the earth’ (ibid:209) which drives him on, but Loyal has committed a heinous act, and the forgiveness he craves is beyond his reach. In a perpetual act of penance, he allows himself few comforts as he drifts through a remote western landscape.

Through a series of jobs – mining, prospecting, fossil hunting, and trapping, work which although imbedded in the landscape is the antithesis of farming – he is eventually able to buy a small plot of land in North Dakota. It is not the lush and fertile farmland of his imagination, however, but a ‘bony square of earth’ (ibid:210), dust-blown and dry. But Loyal is, as his name implies, faithful to the land, feeding it, nurturing it, and coaxing it to bloom. He finds solace as he works the soil but though two decades have passed since he committed his crime, the earth remains parched and without compassion. Instead of offering Loyal redemption, the land actively pushes him away:

The equinoctial dry storms came, wind and soil and locked knots of tumbleweed bouncing across the fields, gathering fellow weeds as they rolled, spraying the earth with seed. He’d hear them at night working up against the house with muffling scratches. (ibid:218)

When his farmhouse is encased by tumbleweed, and relentless winds cast balls of fire across the prairie, it is as though the landscape conspires against him, judging and convicting him, and planning his execution. The rejection is complete. Once more, Loyal is wrenched from the soil and resumes his solitary wandering through the lonely spaces of the West.

In the short story ‘Hellhole’, Proulx once more depicts landscape as having an inherent primacy over man. In the story, fourteen-year-old Creel Zmundzinski had been heading for a life of crime when Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Orion Horncrackle arrived at the St. Francis Boys’ Home:

“I want a tell you that you’re not as much orphans as you think. You was born in a wonderful, wild place and I think that if you let Wyomin, your home state, and its wildlife stand in for your human parents you will do pretty good.” (Proulx, 2005:6)

Horncrackle believed in the redemptive powers of the wilderness and under his guidance, Zmundzinski’s life was turned around. Now, as a Game and Fish Warden himself, Zmundzinski finds the land is also capable of vengeance.

Catching a California preacher who has just shot and butchered a cow moose in a no-hunting area, leaving its calf orphaned and defenceless, Zmundzinski directs the man to a gravel parking strip next to the road known as the Pinchbutt Pullout, and begins writing the man a citation. As the preacher works himself into a rage, stamping his feet and cursing Zmundzinski to hell, ‘tendrils of smoke [rise] in a circle around him’ (Proulx, 2004:9). Through his disregard of hunting regulations, the poacher has alienated himself from lawful society, and through his lack of concern for wildlife, he has alienated himself from the natural world. Though the legal system may be ineffective, however, Nature proves expert at obtaining swift justice:

“What?” [the preacher] said as the gravel sagged beneath his feet. There was a sound like someone tearing a head of a lettuce apart. The gravel heaved and abruptly gaped open. The hunter dropped down into a fiery red tube about three feet across that resembled an enormous blowtorch-heated pipe. With a shriek the preacher disappeared. (ibid)

As word of the ‘Hellhole’ spreads among the Game Wardens, more and more poachers are punished by the landscape they abuse. Proulx ends the story with a cautionary note, however, indicting human intervention as an ultimately destructive act. The popularity of the ‘Pinchbutt pullout’ where the judgements are passed has not gone unnoticed, and when Zmundzinski returns the following season the pullout has been developed into a ‘multiple use enlargement’ (ibid:14), with ‘room for fifty cars, fancy trailhead signs […] the works’ (ibid:13). The Hellhole has been covered over and sealed up. Depending on one’s perspective, the earth has been tamed, or it has been destroyed.

In Proulx’s memoir Bird Cloud, she writes of her visits to a golden eagle nest on her property in Wyoming. Returning to the nest after several months’ absence, she finds it empty and ponders the fate of its former residents: ‘Wyoming winter is a hard time for even these hardy creatures, but the snares and instruments of humans are more deadly than weather […]’ (2011:233). Like the paving-over of the Hellhole, human activities in the landscape seldom have positive results.

It would be wrong to ascribe an ecological agenda to Proulx’s work, however, or to assume Horncrackle’s romantic view of nature is her own[i]. She is pragmatic about the environment and displays little interest in writing about untouched, virgin landscapes (Brown, 2009). She has, though, voiced concerns about man’s long-term impact on the environment. In an interview with Aida Edemariam she states:

I’m appalled at what human beings have done to the planet. I think it would be quite marvellous if human beings disappeared [….] 100 years ago I would have written the great-fight-against-the-elements kind of books, whereas now the landscape has moved from being the great enemy to being the victim. (2004)

While neither Postcards nor ‘Hellhole’ portray landscape as a passive victim, by showing its active opposition to those who abuse it, Proulx reflects contemporary concerns. Landscape would have no cause to fight back if it was not under threat.

With Loyal Blood and Creel Zmundzinski, Proulx offers two ways of looking at landscape: as an entity to be harnessed, brought under control and utilised, or one to be protected and conserved. Both stories regard the landscape as an independent and sentient entity, responding to the actions of man, and directing the fate of characters within the narrative. Whether or not that landscape is hostile, however, depends entirely on one’s own perception.

Contrary to Proulx’s claims that the first western writers emphasised the hostile potential of the frontier, two of the earliest examples in the western canon, The Virginian (1902) and O Pioneers! (1913), clearly depict the land as benign. Although Wyoming, in Wister’s The Virginian, is acknowledged to be a ‘lonesome country’ where old trappers are likely to become ‘skewed in the haid’ (Wister, 1902:56), it is the absence of human companionship, not the land, which is the danger. Even the Eastern narrator experiences no feelings of trepidation when he arrives at Medicine Bow for the first time and is confronted by ‘a land without end, a space across which Noah and Adam might come straight from Genesis’ (ibid:18). It is, without doubt, a foreign landscape to him, but the narrator does not perceive, and nor does he discover in the course of the novel, an innate hostility in the arid and unpopulated expanses of sagebrush. On the contrary, the size of the landscape and its undeveloped state enthrals him, and later he reflects on how comfortable he was in his western surroundings by acknowledging a sense of kinship with the earth:

To leave behind all noise and mechanisms, and set out at ease, slowly, with one packhorse, into the wilderness, made me feel that the ancient earth was indeed my mother and that I had found her again after being lost among houses, customs, and restraints. (Wister 1902:246)

The Virginian, the cowboy figure whom the narrator so admires, also feels a deep connection with the Wyoming landscape. He, too, is an Easterner by birth, but after he and Molly marry, it is to the ‘true world of the mountains’ (ibid:314), further into the West, that he takes his bride, not to the ‘civilised’ comforts of the East. As he and Molly sit beside a mountain stream, the Virginian attempts to express the spiritual bond he has with the surrounding landscape and his desire to become a physical part of it:

Often when I have camped here, it has made me want to become the ground, become the water, become the trees, mix with the whole thing. Not know myself from it. Never unmix again. (ibid:321)

The landscape of Wyoming and the ‘unsurveyed and virgin wilderness’ (ibid:315) of the sparsely inhabited western reaches of the country represent a natural purity to the Virginian, a world which has not been defiled by the complications of human society. He recognises that, in its natural state, the land possesses a redemptive power, and at their bridal camp in the mountains, we see how that power washes over him and cleanses him of his remorse for the hanging of his friend Steve. As the burden of guilt and anguish are lifted from him, he is transformed from a man ‘whose hand knew how to deal death’ and, in Molly’s eyes, reborn as an innocent youth (ibid:321).

Nowhere in The Virginian does Wister portray a sense of hostility or inherent malevolence in the landscape. When he writes of ‘the long slant of ragged, caked earth…with its single tree and few mean bushes’, and describes the ‘universal dryness’ of the alkali desert (ibid:197), he is not suggesting a malign force within the natural world. Instead, the malign force is Balaam, a man known for his ill-tempered and brutal treatment of horses. Wister uses the lifeless quality of the ‘dingy, yellow world’ (ibid) of the desert scrubland to mirror Balaam’s lack of humanity and to build tension towards the scene’s climax. The threats that exist in this desert landscape arise from people, not nature, and landscape merely serves to reflect the conflicts between men.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, as western tribes were forced to cede land to the federal government, the West was opened up for white settlement. Prior to 1862, settlers had to purchase land from the government, and movement to the West was measured, restricted to those with capital. After the introduction of the Homestead Act, however, anyone over the age of twenty-one could claim 160 acres of undeveloped free land west of the Mississippi River, on the condition that they ‘improved’ the land and occupied it for a period of five years. Many of those who took up homesteads in the West were poor immigrants from northern Europe, with little experience of farming. Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! (1913) chronicles the last decades of the nineteenth century as the families of immigrant homesteaders struggle to eke a living from the Nebraska prairies.

For most homesteaders, the prospect of owning land was something they could not have previously considered: agricultural land in the East was out of reach to all but the wealthy and those with inheritance rights. But to possess the title to one’s own land represented opportunity, the freedom to work for oneself, and the chance to secure a future for one’s children. Because of what it represented, many homesteaders, particularly those who had emigrated from Europe, ‘had the Old-World belief that land, in itself, [was] desirable’ (Cather 1913:8) and were therefore willing to endure the hardships to stake their claims in the West.

In his seminal essay, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History,’ Frederick Jackson Turner defines the frontier lands which the homesteaders moved into as being ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilization’ (Turner 1893:3). The land with which the homesteaders were confronted was not like the land they had previously seen. Being untouched by the plough, in what were frequently remote and arid locations, the frontier generally bore more resemblance to the ‘savage’ wilderness than it did to the verdant farmland of the East, and Cather uses this ‘untamed’ imagery to create a sense of the anxiety felt by some of her characters. To the inexperienced farmer, the land was ‘a wild thing that had its ugly moods’ (Cather, 1913:7) and behaved ‘like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces’ (ibid:8). Cather describes the newly-settled Nebraska prairies as though they were a living creature, to be conquered and tamed through cultivation, but though the land is ‘wild’ and unpredictable, it is never described as hostile. Even when the young Carl Linstrum looks across the ‘vast hardness’ (ibid:5) and feels that ‘men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty’ (ibid) he is only acknowledging man’s frailty.

In O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson takes control of the family farm after her father dies. Three years of drought and crop failure, ‘the last struggle of a wild soil against the encroaching plowshare’ (ibid:18), have forced many of her neighbours to sell their property and move to the city, but Alexandra convinces her brothers to stay. Like the Virginian, she believes in the land’s enduring power of rejuvenation and creation, and believes that the land will take care of them if they remain faithful to it. Though it is partly through her perseverance and her business acumen that the farm eventually prospers, she refuses to take any credit, telling her childhood friend, Carl Linstrum:

We hadn’t any of us much to do with it, Carl. The land did it. It had its little joke. It pretended to be poor because nobody knew how to work it right; and then, all at once, it worked itself. It woke up out of its sleep and stretched itself, and it was so big, so rich, that we suddenly found we were rich, just from sitting still. (45)

Alexandra clearly sees the land as a sentient being, and while her father valued the homestead because of the security it offered his family, her relationship with the land goes deeper. She feels ‘in her own body, the joyous germination in the soil’ (ibid:80) and reveres the land in a spiritual sense. Alexandra recognises that the power which the land possesses is far greater than any power which the humans who inhabit it may have, acknowledging the temporary and therefore subordinate status of man within the natural world: ‘We come and go,’ she tells Carl, ‘but the land is always here’ (ibid:122).

Both The Virginian and O Pioneers! depict feelings of hope and optimism in the frontier West and American confidence in the future. In each novel, the landscape is represented with sympathy and insight, and characters are portrayed as having a desire not just to develop and utilise the land for economic gain, but to unite with it on an emotional level. I would suggest that the most hostile landscapes in Western American fiction – or at least the most hostile perceptions of landscapes – come not from these early texts, but from some of the more recent.

[i] In an interview with Emma Brown she has stated, ‘I don’t see nature as a healing force.’ (Brown, 2009)

Pan-Indian Landscapes in Alexie’s Reservation Blues

2011-08-27T10:08:00.001+01:00

This section carries on from 'Environmental Indians'...

Alexie’s representations of place have also attracted criticism. While Reservation Blues (1996) and his earliest short stories are primarily located on the Spokane Indian Reservation and are littered with authentic place names (Wellpenit, Spokane Falls, Riverfront Park, Reardon), Alexie provides few visual references to landscape which would anchor these stories to a specific geographical location. Owens describes the reservation portrayed by Alexie as being ‘a vaguely defined place where people live in cheap federal housing while drinking, playing basketball, feuding with one another, and dying self-destructive and often violent deaths’ (1998:71-2). Bernardin takes up this point and suggests that Alexie deliberately uses what she refers to as ‘generic signifiers of “Indianness”’ (2004:167) to build a physical world recognisable by his target audience – young Native Americans[i]. The reservation Alexie describes could be anywhere in the country, and just as there are few visual clues to identify the location of his stories, there is little to distinguish Alexie’s Spokane Indians from members of any other Native American tribe.

Fellow Spokane, the writer and academic Gloria Bird regards Reservation Blues as a ‘partial portrait of a community wherein there is no evidence of Spokane culture or traditions, or anything uniquely Spokane’ (1995:49). Instead, she claims, Alexie has incorporated linguistic features from other tribes such as the greeting ‘ya-hey’ which is similar to the Navajo greeting ‘ya-tey’, and use of the word ‘sweatlodge’ instead of the Northwest term ‘sweathouse’[ii]. Bird’s concerns are that Alexie’s incomplete, and at time incorrect portrayals of Spokane culture ‘misconstrue what is Indian, or specifically Spokane, to the general public’ (ibid).

Bernardin suggests that Alexie has deliberately created a generic reservation backdrop with culturally generic Indian characters in order to garner a ‘pan-Indian readership’ (2004:167). Indeed, Alexie often seems keen to build an alliance between diverse Native tribes, emphasising their commonality as a brutalised people. In Reservation Blues, the Spokane storyteller, Thomas Builds-the-Fire speaks of this unity to the Flathead woman, Chess:

We were both at Wounded Knee when the Ghost Dancers were slaughtered. We were slaughtered at Wounded Knee. I know there were whole different tribes there, no Spokanes or Flatheads, but we were still somehow there. There was a part of every Indian bleeding in the snow. All those soldiers killed us in the name of God, enit? They shouted “Jesus Christ” as they ran swords through our bellies. Can you feel the pain still, late at night, when you’re trying to sleep, when you’re praying to a God whose name was used to justify the slaughter? (Alexie 1996:167)

Through the use of non-specific representations of landscape and Indian culture, Alexie unites Native Americans in a single grieving consciousness.

While details of the physical location are scarce, the historical aspects included in the wider definition of landscape serve to create a real and realistic space within the novel. In the opening scene, the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson arrives at the town of Wellpinit on the Spokane Indian Reservation. As Thomas Builds-the-Fire directs Johnson to the mountain home of Big Mom, the tribe’s seemingly immortal spiritual matriarch, the reader is given a brief glimpse of the town and surrounding landscape, primarily through the use historical anecdotes:

The town of Wellpinit sat in a little clearing below the mountain. Cougars strolled through the middle of town; a bear once staggered out of hibernation too early, climbed onto the roof of the Catholic Church, and fell back asleep. A few older Indians still lived out in the deep woods in tipis and shacks, venturing into town for funerals and powwows. Those elders told stories about the gentle Bigfoot and the Stick[iii] Indians, banished from the tribe generations ago, who had turned into evil spirits that haunted the forests now. (ibid:7)

Described as being ‘the only town on the reservation’ (ibid:3), Wellpinit is seen to be isolated, and its absence from maps creates an illusory impression which is reinforced by references to mythological beings, and by the figures of Big Mom and Robert Johnson – a man purported to have been murdered in Mississippi decades before. In contrast to Owens’ depictions of the forest as the natural home of the Stehemish people, Alexie offers a perception of the woodlands around Wellpinit very similar to perceptions found in many European folktales, where the forest is viewed with suspicion as home to witches, goblins and malevolent spirits.

The sense that Wellpinit is indeed a haunted place is furthered by Thomas, who:

thought about all the dreams that were murdered here, and the bones buried quickly just inches below the surface, all waiting to break through the foundations of those government houses built

by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. (ibid:7)

Wellpinit is haunted by its history, and one of the motifs which runs throughout Reservation Blues regards the historical slaughter of a herd of Spokane horses. In 1858, in retaliation for the defeat of American soldiers in an earlier battle, Colonel George Wright ordered his troops to destroy 800 Indian horses. Intermittently throughout the novel, the horses are heard to scream in agony:

As she stepped out of her front door, Big Mom heard the first gunshot, which reverberated in her DNA. She pulled her dress up around her waist and ran for the clearing, heard a gunshot with each of her footfalls....

Big Mom ran to the rise above the clearing where the horses gathered. There, she saw the future and the past, the white soldiers in blue uniforms with black rifles and pistols. She saw the Indian horses shot and fallen like tattered sheets. (ibid:9-10)

This episode is clearly a defining moment in Spokane history, one which heralded the end of the old way of life prior to the tribe being forced onto the reservation. That the gunshots ‘reverberate’ in Big Mom’s DNA more than a century after the assault shows that there is a causal link between past and present, between time and space. In her vision, after all the other horses have fallen, Big Mom watches a single colt, the last survivor of the slaughter. When this animal, too, is gunned down it is given human form: ‘That colt fell to the grass of the clearing, to the sidewalk outside a reservation tavern, to the cold hard coroner’s table in a Veterans Hospital’ (ibid:10). The implication could not be more clear: the social deprivations visited on Native Americans today are a direct consequence of historical events. As the extracts above demonstrate, Teuton’s argument, that Alexie disregards the historical realities behind contemporary depictions of reservation poverty, is unfounded. In Alexie’s world, history does not remain in the past but continues to reverberate in the DNA.

In the early part of his career, the period to which Reservation Blues belongs, Alexie strove to reach a Pan-Indian audience, and to this effect he recreated the Spokane Indian Reservation with a deliberately amorphous appearance. By focusing, primarily, on those physical details of place which are immediately recognisable to Native Americans on reservations across the United States, Alexie reinforces the common history and common suffering of Native Americans. Despite its almost generic qualities, however, the reservation he depicts is specifically Spokane.

[i] In an interview with John Purdy (1997), Alexie is dismissive of the work of Gerald Vizenor, known for his elevated narrative style saying, ‘If Indian literature can’t be read by the average twelve-year-old kid living on the reservation, what the hell good is it?’

[ii] Bird’s criticism could also be levelled at Owens whose mixedblood Flathead character McBride uses the word ‘Yatahey’, a variation of the Navajo greeting ‘Ya’at’eeh’, and who also uses the term ‘sweatlodge’ (Owens 1992:181, 189).

[iii] Stick Indians appear in the oral tradition of many tribes in the Pacific Northwest, including the Spokane and the Nez Perce. These mythic figures are said to inhabit the woods where they lure people with whistling sounds and by mimicking the laughter of children. Indians who disappeared and were never found were thought to have been kidnapped by the Stick Indians, and some reports claim that the Stick Indians ate their victims. (Clark, 1988:50-51)

Environmental Indians: fact or fiction?

2011-08-05T14:35:00.001+01:00

Since the increased public awareness of environmental issues in the 1960s, Native Americans have been closely associated with numerous ecological campaigns under the implied authority of having a uniquely harmonious and non-invasive relationship with the natural world. In one now notorious television commercial, an ‘Indian’ in traditional dress is shown paddling a birch bark canoe through a polluted waterway of an industrial city. Upon landing his canoe on the litter-strewn shore, the man walks to the edge of a highway where a bag of rubbish, tossed from a passing car, lands at his feet. The voiceover delivers the campaign’s message: ‘Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t.’ As the man turns to face the camera, a tear runs down his cheek and the narrator makes the emphatic statement: ‘People start pollution; people can stop it’ (Keep America Beautiful, 1971).

The commercial is today considered controversial on two counts: that it relies on a stereotype of Native culture; and, perhaps more damningly, that Iron Eyes Cody, the actor featured, was not Native American at all, but an Italian American who claimed to be Indian. This second point will be discussed in Chapter Two, with regards to identity formation and transformation, and in Chapter Three in my exploration of authenticity and cultural appropriation.

Schwenninger (2008) traces the roots of the stereotype of the environmentalist Indian to Cooper’s representation of the noble savage[i] in The Last of the Mohicans, and also links it to the rise of the Boy Scout movement in the early twentieth century. Referring to Philip Deloria’s study on the history of appropriation of Native American culture by European Americans, Schwenninger states that the Canadian author and co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America, Ernest Thompson Seton, ‘believed that American Indians were (or had been) in special touch with the natural world and should thus serve as the models for young European American boys who had gotten soft and had lost touch with the natural environment’ (Schwenninger 2008:24). While many American Indians, including the writers Louise Erdrich and Paula Gunn Allen, actively promote a belief in a heightened environmental concern amongst Native Americans, others do not. The Spokane writer Sherman Alexie, whose work has a largely contemporary focus, takes a far less romantic view of ‘Indianness’ and shuns what he sees as the stereotypical view of Indians. In an interview in the Iowa Review, Alexie says:

Indians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That’s one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They’re two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we’ve been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we’re just as wasteful as other people….The average everyday Indian – he’s not an environmentalist – he could[n’t] give a shit. Just like the average American. I grew up with my aunts and uncles and cousins throwing their cans out the window. (Fraser, 2000)

Alexie, who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington state, is dismissive of Native American writers who portray Indian culture as though it were static: ‘[They] throw in a couple of birds and four directions and corn pollen and [call it] Native American literature, when it has nothing to do with the day-to-day lives of Indians’ (ibid). Alexie believes that this ‘concern with place’, found in the work of many contemporary Native writers, is ‘detrimental’ to Native American literature because it sustains a ‘myth’ about Indianness which alienates modern-day Native American readers (ibid). Alexie’s own portrayals of Indian life, on and off the reservation, are starkly realistic, focussing on the spiritual, social and economic challenges faced by contemporary Native Americans, and frequently satirise the ‘noble savage’ and eco-conscious images pervasive in American media. In the short story ‘Amusements’, for example, Alexie exposes the effects of alcohol dependency and the cruelty which arises from a broken community:

After summer heat and too much coat-pocket whiskey, Dirty Joe passed out on the worn grass of the carnival midway and Sadie and I stood over him, looked down at his flat face, a map for all the wars he fought in the Indian bars. Dirty Joe was no warrior in the old sense. He got his name because he cruised the taverns at closing time, drank all the half-empties and never cared who might have left them there. (Alexie 1993:54)

Instead of taking care of their friend, the narrator and Sadie proceed to take advantage of Dirty Joe’s intoxication. Such portrayals have led to criticism from a number of key Native writers and scholars who are concerned that by examining the prevalence of alcoholism, violence, mental illness and seemingly endemic poverty, Alexie is reinforcing a more detrimental stereotype of the ‘doomed’ and ‘self-neutralizing’ Indian (Owens 1998:72-3). Sean Kicummah Teuton summarises the criticism, stating that some critics believe Alexie ‘does not sufficiently contextualize this Indian poverty’ (2008:207), and the dysfunction it produces, by attributing it to the colonial practices of forced assimilation and genocide which Native American peoples endured. What is more, Teuton argues that by highlighting dysfunctional behaviours, Alexie risks harming Native Americans still further:

In representing Indigenous people’s poverty and its attendant social ills as a commonplace to dominant culture, Reservation Blues [Alexie’s first novel] risks playing into the hands of mainstream readers who wish to believe Native people are socially degenerate. (ibid)

Teuton’s concern is that by examining contemporary Native American poverty and dysfunction without showing the government policies and historical events which caused it – an assertion I reject, Alexie leads his readers – Indian and ‘mainstream’ – to believe that poverty and dysfunctional behaviour are natural characteristics of Indian culture.

In the following section, I will show that Alexie does indeed direct his readers to actual events in Spokane history which can be seen as causes of contemporary suffering. That these connections are implicit, rather than stated directly, should not be regarded as a weakness.

Native American Perceptions of the Other in Louis Owens’ Wolfsong

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Louis Owens’ widely-discussed novel Wolfsong (1991) illustrates both the homecoming nature of Native fiction, and an eco-conscious world view which exists in opposition to the view of the white community and westernised Indians. At the opening of the novel, a road crew is carving a new route through the temperate rainforests in the Cascade mountains of western Washington state. The land has been designated a wilderness area[i], but government authorities have recently granted permission for the construction of an open-pit copper mine. From the cover of the trees above the road crew, Jim Joseph makes a one-man protest, shooting at the bulldozers to disrupt their progress.

To Jim Joseph and the traditional Stehemish people, the ancient cedars are sacred, and as he makes his escape through the forest to his hidden camp, we see that he is at home there, comfortable and familiar in what is to him a deeply intimate space. As Joseph’s ‘boots [sink] into the forest floor’ (Owens, 1991:5), Owens depicts him as being part of the forest, and this connection is strengthened as spirits emerge from the trees when the old man begins to dance:

Between the trees the shadows began to move. First a flicker like the waving of a branch or a ghost of rain or moth, and then a steadier movement and finally they began to come out into the spaces between the trees and weave and step. (ibid:6)

When Jim Joseph dies of an apparent heart attack, his nephew, Tom, returns from college in California to attend the funeral. As a child, Tom had listened to his uncle’s stories about the wolf spirit and ‘the real world, before everything became crazy’ (ibid:34), while his older brother Jimmy ‘ran off down the gravel road to play with the white kids in town’ (ibid:37). Now, on his return home as an adult, Tom feels something of his uncle’s connection to the land and has ‘a sudden impression that the peaks surrounding the valley [have] shifted to block [his] way out’ (ibid:41). Inheriting the wolf spirit which guided his uncle, Tom feels the urge to take up the fight against those who would destroy what remains of the forest, but his mother warns him that ‘[there are] things you would have to know now to stay in this valley…Things no one can teach you’ (ibid:77-8). Tom’s mother realises that the world has moved on and that the knowledge needed to return to the old ways, even if it were possible to do so, was lost long ago. Hiking into the wilderness in a quest for his spirit guide, Tom wonders what the ‘real names’ (ibid:94) are for the mountains around him. The old language has been lost, and even the stories which place the Stehemish people within the landscape and give them identity have been all but forgotten.

In Wolfsong, Owens presents two distinct and opposing perceptions of the natural world – that of Tom who turns to the landscape for spiritual renewal, and that of the largely white-operated enterprises which seek to exploit its natural resources. Looking across the landscape to Dakobed, the one peak whose ‘real name’ has survived, Tom begins to understand the importance of the land:

He stared at the white mountain, the center, the great mother, and tried to feel what it had meant to his tribe. They had woven it over thousands of years into their stories, telling themselves who they were and would always be in relation to the beautiful peak. Through their relationship with the mountain, they knew they were significant, a people to be reckoned with upon the earth. Away in four directions the world streamed, and Dakobed was the center, reference point for existence. One look, and a person would always know where he was. (ibid:92-3)

Tom realises that the landscape is key to who the Stehemish are as a people, providing them with an identity which is distinct from other tribes. In contrast, the White perception is that the mountains are an impediment to financial gain:

The loggers – growing more and more desperate – cursed the mountain for having spawned a wilderness around itself, a barrier between saws and timber. The miners looked at the mountain and thought of copper and molybdenum and more. (ibid:93)

Language, and the loss of language, plays an important role in the way the earth is perceived in Wolfsong. Jim Joseph explains how the government school where he was sent as a boy left his mouth ‘swollen and dry with someone else’s words’ (ibid:5) and later, he tells Tom that before the arrival of white men, the concept of ‘wilderness’ did not exist:

[…] there wasn’t any wilderness and there wasn’t any wild animals. There was only the mountains and river, two-leggeds and four-leggeds and underwater people and all the rest. It took white people to make the country and the animals wild. Now they got to make a law saying it’s wild so’s they can protect it from themselves. (ibid:81)

Through the loss of his indigenous language, Jim Joseph has become disconnected from the land and his traditional culture, yet he sees irony in the language that has been imposed upon him. The loggers and miners curse the wilderness as a physical barrier which impedes their progress, but the designation of land as a ‘wilderness area’ implies the land’s need of protection. The wilderness is a threat to the loggers and miners, but it is also threatened by them.

Jennifer Brice points to the role of religion in shaping non-Native perceptions of landscape: ‘Simply stated, whites are taught (by the Bible, for one, which gives man “dominion” over the earth) to see the land as separate from themselves’ and to use its resources for their own benefit (Brice, 1998:127). Because white culture does not view the earth as a sentient being, human needs take precedence over the needs of the earth. Tom Joseph’s mother makes a similar observation, about Christianity and the way white society perceives its relationship with the land:

“Indians used to know how to live so’s we didn’t destroy our mother earth. We had to live that way because we knew we would always be here. I think white people treat the earth like they do because they think they’ll only be here for a little while. They believe Jesus Christ, our Lord, is going to come and fix everything and take them all away, so they don’t take care of things.” (Owens 1991:77)

Although she, herself, is a Christian, Tom’s mother is aware of the damaging effects which Christianity has had on her people. Ultimately, however, she is pragmatic, and tells Tom that ‘things got to always change’ (ibid:77). For her, change is unstoppable, and Tom’s challenge is to find a way to reconnect with and honour his Stehemish roots in this changing environment.

Owens portrays a marked difference in perceptions of landscape along ethnic lines. Not all Native writers, however, subscribe to this view.

[i] Federal lands designated as wilderness are protected from use by motorised vehicles and from all forms of development.

The Significance of Landscape in Literature of the American West

2011-06-15T15:30:00.003+01:00

The Broad Expanse: charting the landscape

Western literature is tied to place more than any other regional form. As we read the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel or an Annie Proulx short story, we traverse a world of staggering imagery: jagged peaks of distant blue mountains, arid expanses of red desert and sagebrush, and hip-high seas of winter wheat rippling and cresting in a prairie breeze. It is a world of wide-open spaces and unpopulated places, where characters come and go, but the land is constant and forever.

In her essay ‘Dangerous Ground’, Annie Proulx argues that landscape is much more than what the landscape historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson describes as being ‘a portion of the earth’s surface that can be comprehended at a single glance’ (2008, p. 12). Rather, she offers her own broader definition:

Landscape is geography, archaeology, astrophysics, agronomy, agriculture, the violent character of the atmosphere, climate, black squirrels and wild oats, folded rock, bulldozers; it is jet trails and barbwire, government land, dry stream beds; it is politics, desert wildfire, introduced species, abandoned vehicles, roads, ghost towns, nuclear test grounds, swamps, a bakery shop, mine tailings, bridges, dead dogs. Landscape is rural, urban, suburban, semirural, small town, village; it is outports and bedroom communities; it is a remote ranch. (ibid:10)

As Proulx points out, landscape goes beyond the physical, beyond what can be touched and seen and experienced, and includes those sometimes transient and elusive influences which help to shape the environment. Landscape possesses not only the physical elements of geography, geology, flora and fauna, but also the products of civilisation which are scattered across the land itself – rural communities and cities, and all the detritus those communities produce. But landscape is also history, the people who trod the ground before us, and the events which took place at other points in time. Beyond the tangible landscape lies another which is perceived rather than seen, a landscape in which all of preceding time continues to exist.

Fifteen thousand years ago, glaciers and glacial floods scoured much of the northwestern United States and dropped boulders the size of houses across the prairies; in the first millennium BC, the Nez Perce left pictographs and petroglyphs of bighorn sheep on the stony walls of Hell’s Canyon; from the 1830s to the 1880s, wagon trains wove their way across the West, and the ruts carved into the earth by the wheels of their wagons remain visible today in the sagebrush hills of Idaho and Oregon. The swollen flanks of the Snake River, and the mighty Columbia which it feeds, bear testimony to the twentieth century’s desire to illuminate the night – damming the waterways to make the deserts bloom; abandoned homesteads remind us that we are only visitors in this land, that we make a pact with the environment, and must live on its terms or get out. The asphalt ribbons we leave behind, cross-hatching the plains and winding through river valleys, speak perhaps of our impatience, our need to always be somewhere other than where we are. Swathes of clear-cut amid the trees; dynamited hollows of open-cast mines; wolf reintroduction in central Idaho: each mark we leave will be a window through which future generations will perceive how we lived today.

This chapter will analyse critical perceptions of representations of landscape by Native and non-Native writers and critics, and will consider the cogency of those arguments in relation to key literary texts from the American West. It will also consider the way perceptions of landscape are realised in literature, and how these literary perceptions are themselves perceived by readers and critics in turn. This discussion is further complicated by essentialist arguments involving perceptions of race and ethnicity, and attempts by writers and critics to identify perceptions of the other.

The Frontier West: inventions and perceptions

The white settlers who moved into the frontier depended on the land for their livelihood. As trappers, farmers and ranchers, their ability to adapt to and understand the environment was paramount for their survival. Those who were adept, forming connections with the land and learning its lessons, found purpose and satisfaction in their work. Those who lacked an understanding of the land’s temperament, however, perceived the western frontier – prone as it was to the vagaries of nature – as a threat. Drought, pestilence, seasonal fires and months of sub-zero temperatures tested the newcomers’ endurance and wit. Early western literature took its inspiration from these people, and in turn, the landscape of the West and the many challenges it presented became embedded in western fiction.

When discussing the use of landscape, critics often draw a division between the work of Native and non-Native writers. From the Euro-American perspective it is argued, the western landscape offers opportunities and challenges: it is something to be conquered or overcome, harnessed, manipulated, used and transformed for profit. For the Native American, the land is regarded as a sentient being, intimately known and understood, revered as the giver of life.

In the essay ‘Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place’, the Chippewa writer Louise Erdrich discusses the traditional view of the eternal nature of landscape. By occupying a place for generations, she argues, a tribe’s history, its connection to the land, and its sense of collective identity were bound together by storytelling, a Native American tradition which itself is deeply based in the land. The telling and re-telling of stories that took place in a landscape which the people already knew intimately, reinforced their understanding of their surroundings and made ‘[p]lace and people inseparable’ (Erdrich, 1985). The Nez Perce, like other Native American tribes, point to features in the landscape to pass on their cultural knowledge and recount the history of their tribe: a basalt outcrop on the hillsides overlooking the Clearwater River provides a lesson in neighbourliness; a rocky mound near Kamiah, Idaho holds the story of creation and the origins of the people themselves. This ability to read the land, and understand its significance, provides a constant reminder to the people of who they are.

Heart of the Monster near Kamiah, Idaho

By contrast, Erdrich argues, western society is alienated from the land. Citing Alfred Kazin, she points to the tendency of white writers to describe the landscape in detail as an indication that they are not connected to the natural world, and that, unable to hold it within themselves, they attempt to recreate it through words:

In renaming and historicizing our landscapes, towns and neighborhoods, writers from Hawthorne to Cather to Faulkner have attempted to weld themselves and their readers closer to the New World. As Alfred Kazin notes in ‘On Native Grounds,’ ‘the greatest single fact about our American writing’ is ‘our writers’ absorption in every last detail of this American world, together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.’ Perhaps this alienation is the result of one difficult fact about Western culture – its mutability. Unlike the Tewa and other Native American groups who inhabited a place until it became deeply and particularly known in each detail, Western culture is based on progressive movement. Nothing, not even the land, can be counted on to stay the same. (Erdrich, 1985)

For Euro-Americans, she argues, landscape is not constant: native grasslands are ploughed up and destroyed, rivers are dammed and redirected, and ‘limestone mountains [are] blasted into likenesses of important men’ (ibid). The earth is being continually altered and reshaped to meet the shifting demands of modern American society, which itself is in a perpetual state of flux.

The writer Louis Owens, of Choctaw, Cherokee and Irish decent, supports Erdrich’s claim that Native American writers have a world view which is distinct from their White counterparts. Owens argues that Native writers, rather than placing their characters in a position of superiority to the landscape, promote the view that human beings are simply one part of the natural world:

Native American writers are offering a way of looking at the world that is new to Western culture. It is a holistic, ecological perspective, one that places essential value upon the totality of existence, making humanity equal to all elements but superior to none and giving humankind crucial responsibility for the care of the world we inhabit. (Owens 1992:29)

This perception of man’s dependence on the world around him engenders a sense of humility and the belief that all things are linked together for a larger purpose. By connecting human existence directly to the landscape, and making it part of the landscape, human vulnerability is exposed and the necessity of an eco-conscious world view becomes apparent.

Another common theme in Native American fiction is the Indian protagonist’s feelings of dispossession, a feeling predicated upon a prior experience of belonging. This theme is particularly evident when the protagonist is, as is the case with the vast majority of Native American authors, of mixed decent. Novels such as D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded, John Joseph Matthews’ Sundown, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, James Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony all feature mixed-blood protagonists caught between opposing worlds: the traditional Native world and progressive American society. William Bevis (1996) points out that while Euro-American fiction frequently centres around plots in which the protagonist leaves home to discover his identity, fiction by Native writers most frequently involves the protagonist returning home after a period of time spent in the ‘white’ world. In Native American novels, he states, returning home to ‘a past where one has been before, is not only the primary story, it is a primary mode of knowledge and a primary good’ (Bevis, 1996:29). Only by returning to their Native cultural roots and re-engaging with the landscape of their birth do the protagonists find spiritual healing and a sense of wholeness.

20 Essential American Indian Novels

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Filling in the Gaps in the Corps of Discovery Journals

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Numerous works of western fiction have drawn inspiration from the Lewis and Clark journals since their official publication in 1814. Most, such as Vardis Fisher's Tale of Valor (1960) and Brian Hall's I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company (2003) have attempted to fictionalise what is known about the expedition, relying on the journals to structure the narrative and provide the bones of character development while relating the story of the expedition from the perspective of one or more real life members of the party. James Alexander Thom's Sign Talker (2000) tells the story from the viewpoint of George Drouillard, the Corps’ half-blood Shawnee interpreter, while Anna Lee Waldo's Sacajawea (1978) and Diane Glancy's Stone Heart (2003) present the story from the point of view of the expedition's only female member. Others, such as Will Henry's The Gates of the Mountains (1963), present the story from the point of view of a fictional character placed into the heart of the action. Richard S. Wheeler's Eclipse (2002) and Frances Hunter's To the Ends of the Earth (2006) both focus on the years following the expedition's return, and speculate on the mystery surrounding Lewis's premature death in 1809.

While a number of novels touch upon the time that the Corps of Discovery spent with the Nez Perce and draw attention to the warm relations that developed, few explore the claim that Clark fathered a child with a Nez Perce woman, or what may have subsequently become of that child[i]. What we know about the Lewis and Clark expedition comes primarily from the journals, and amid the detailed descriptions of previously unknown flora and fauna are a number of references to sexual encounters between the enlisted men and Indian women. On October 12^th, 1804, Clark records:

a curious Cuistom with the Souix as well as the reckeres is to give handsom Squars to those whome they wish to Show Some acknowledgements to— The Seauix we got Clare of without taking their Squars, they followed us with Squars […] two days. The Rickores we put off dureing the time we were at the Towns but 2 Handsom young Squars were Sent by a man to follow us, they Came up this evening and peresisted in their Civilities. (Moulton)

In the earlier field notes of the same date, Clark writes that guests to whom these ‘civilities’ were made were ‘despised if [the women were] not recved’, but records that ‘we Still procisted in a refusial’ (ibid). These and similar entries are intriguingly – and perhaps purposely – vague, for while it is apparent that the enlisted men indulged in sexual encounters, there is no clear admission or denial that the Captains did likewise.

In Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (1984), the historian James P. Ronda writes extensively about the sexual customs of the northern plains tribes and cites a number of early Euro-American visitors to the region who documented their encounters with willing Arikara women. During their journey, the expedition found a number of tribes who used sex as both a bartering tool and as a means of showing hospitality, but among the Arikara and neighbouring tribes, ‘women sought sex with Europeans as a way to pass the strength and skill of the outsider to their mates’ (Ronda, 1984:63). Ambrose (1996) describes seven occasions when Native women were offered to the men of the expedition between May 1804 and the winter of 1805-06 when the party were settled at Fort Clatsop near the mouth of the Columbia River.

Once the Corps returns to the Nez Perce, on their return journey east, however, all discussion of sexual interaction stops. Jones (2004) finds this highly suspicious, especially as relations between the men and the Nez Perce were so amiable. He speculates that these were ‘some of their happiest weeks of the journey’ for the men, and is doubtful that Clark, ‘this most agreeable of captains[,] remained celibate’ (Jones, 2004:138-9). Jones goes on to suggest that the apparent abstinence of the captains may have lapsed at this particular time as a result of their anxiety about recrossing the Bitterroot Mountains which had caused them such difficulty the previous year. He emphasises that the party were ‘desperate to acquire more horses’ in preparation for the crossing, exchanging ‘everything they could, including buttons cut from their uniforms’ and ‘good relations’ (ibid).

Nez Perce tribal historian Otis Halfmoon (2001) believes that it was during this six-week period, as the Corps waited for snow to melt in the mountains, that Tzi-Kal-Tza was conceived:

The old time method of making allies, creating allies with another people...was through intermarriage, and children. And some of the women slept with Lewis and Clark, and York...We know two children that was left with the Nez Perce people that were created in 1806. We had a son of Clark, and we also had a son from York... (part 8)

Halfmoon asserts that Clark’s child[i] was viewed by the Nez Perce as a bridge between the two cultures, and that he inspired the Nez Perce to maintain good relations with the fur trappers who appeared soon after the Corps departed, and with the white settlers who later moved into the region. Although Tzi-Kal-Tza was not the only child to have resulted from encounters between the Corps of Discovery and Native women, his birth represents a turning point in the history of the Nez Perce tribe. Within the span of his lifetime, the Nez Perce world changed utterly.

[i] In a footnote to the May 10^th, 1806 entry of the journals, Moulton also reports that a baby was conceived from York but that the child ‘did not live to maturity’.

[i] Zoa L. Swayne’s Do Them No Harm! (2003) and Pat Decker Nipper’s Love on the Lewis and Clark Trail (2004) draw upon the journals and Nez Perce oral tradition, and focus on Clark’s purported relationship with a Nez Perce woman. Linwood Laughy’s The Fifth Generation also mentions the child which was born after the expedition’s departure in 1806.

Locating the West: a geographical, temporal and imaginative space

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Until the end of the nineteenth century, the West was not situated in a static geographical location. In its earliest guise, it encompassed all but the thinnest margin along the eastern edge of the continent. Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio – all states now firmly entrenched in the geographical East – at one time lay beyond the frontier within an unknown and unexplored western territory. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, the frontier retreated physically as each new wave of white settlement pushed it ever closer to the Pacific coast. Since then, the frontier has retreated from us in time. Consequently, the meaning of ‘the West’ has changed, and continues to change on a regular basis.

It is no surprise, then, that ‘literature of the American West’ has an equally fluid definition, and cannot be described simply by its position west of the Mississippi River. With works set in such diverse regional locations as the Nebraska prairies (Midwest), Arizona deserts (Southwest), coastal rainforests (Northwest) and urban centres, it involves much more than the mere occupation of a space.

Nor can western literature be defined by the birth place of the writer whose works fall under its banner, for many of its most familiar names are not originally from that region. Owen Wister was only ever a visitor to the West, spending no more than a few months there at any one time. Wister, though, identified with an idea of the West as a place where one could take control of one’s life, start over again and refashion oneself into something new. For Wister, the West was untarnished by the moral corruption which he felt was pervasive in the East. In an early scene in The Virginian, the newly-arrived eastern narrator finds himself in a saloon in Medicine Bow:

Here were lusty horsemen ridden from the heat of the sun, and the wet of the storm, to divert themselves awhile. Youth untamed sat here for an idle moment, spending easily its hard-earned wages. City saloons rose into my vision, and I instantly preferred this Rocky Mountain place. More of death it undoubtedly saw, but less of vice, than did its New York equivalents. And death is a thing much cleaner than vice. (Wister, 1902 [2009]:31)

From the very start, Wister can be seen to fabricate a romantic image of the West, in direct opposition to the East. The West, in Wister’s imagination, has a natural and untamed purity which is reflected in the ‘wild and manly’ figure of the cowboy:

Daring, laughter, endurance – these were what I saw upon the countenances of the cow-boys. And this very first day of my knowledge of them marks a date with me. For something about them, and the idea [emphasis added] of them, smote my American heart.... In their flesh our natural passions ran tumultuous; but often in their spirit sat hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected shining their figures took a heroic stature. (ibid)

Virginia-born Willa Cather spent all but twelve years of her life in the East, yet she too is firmly linked to literature of the West through her novels O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918). In his essay on Cather, ‘“The West Authentic,” the West Divided’, William Handley examines the way that Cather, and other Easterners came to identify themselves with the West. Referring to the essay’s epigraph by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke about the individual’s ability to retrospectively ‘compose within ourselves our true place of origin,’ Handley discusses how eastern-born writers such as Wister, Cather and Roosevelt ‘located in their experiences out west the sentimentalized source of their true identity’ (Handley, 2004:72-3), romantically ascribing an emotional sense of belonging in the West. Similarly, many contemporary writers whose works fall within the bounds of western American literature grew up in other regions of the country. Barbara Kingsolver was born in Maryland and grew up in Kentucky, but has created a literary home for herself in Arizona; Annie Proulx lived most of her life along the eastern seaboard before moving west in 1994 and writing three volumes of Wyoming stories; Richard Ford grew up in Mississippi and Arkansas, and lived a somewhat nomadic existence before moving to Montana where the majority of his stories are set; Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island, and spent most of his formative years in Tennessee before moving to Texas in the 1970s.

What makes these writers western writers is the connections they make with the landscape in which their stories are set. Annie Proulx has stated that for her, character and place should reflect one another (Detrixhe, 2005), and her work clearly illustrates this in the way it focuses on marginal characters in marginal regions. Her landscapes are often harsh, stark and lonely, as indeed are her characters. Likewise, Cormac McCarthy uses landscape, not just as a backdrop, but as a means to reveal something deeper about his characters and plots. In Blood Meridian (McCarthy,1985), the landscape is described in hellish terms, mirroring the satanic figure of the judge and his murderous followers:

They crossed the del Norte and rode south into a land more hostile yet. All day they crouched like owls under the niggard acacia shade and peered out upon that cooking world. Dust-devils stood on the horizon like the smoke of distant fires but of living thing there was none. They eyed the sun in its circus and at dusk they rode out upon the cooling plain where the western sky was the color of blood. (McCarthy, 1985:152)

Louise Erdrich

Many scholars, both Native and non-Native, argue that Indian writers offer a view of the natural world which is distinctly different from that portrayed by white writers. Because Native people have often lived within a specific region for millennia, it is argued that they have a uniquely symbiotic alliance with the land. In the Nez Perce culture, for example, the creation story ‘The Heart of the Monster’ explains not only how features of the landscape were formed but also how the Nez Perce people came into being. The Chippewa writer Louise Erdrich argues that ‘Native American groups who inhabited a place until it became deeply and particularly known’ developed an intimate relationship with the landscape, which non-Native inhabitants cannot possess (Erdrich, 1985).

Since the 1960s, and the emergence of the environmental movement, Native Americans have frequently been portrayed as being the natural custodians of the environment, possessing ‘sacred knowledge’ which allows them to act as protectors of ‘Mother Earth’. In the introduction to Listening to the Land (2008), Lee Schweninger chronicles the debate in the environmental ethic argument about the Indian regard for nature. Schweninger cites writers on the subject of Indian history and culture, such as Calvin Martin, J. Baird Callicott and David Lewis, who support the claim that Native Americans traditionally felt a sense of respect and responsibility for the natural world, and quotes Callicott as saying that ‘the world view typical of American Indian peoples has included and supported an environmental ethic’ (2008:4). Tom Regan and David Waller, however, claim that the evidence supporting this argument is ambiguous, and that portraying Indians as environmentalists is damaging in that it ‘trivializes American Indian cultures’ (ibid) by reducing them to a stereotype, and ignores contemporary concerns about poverty and cultural appropriation. Anthropologist Shepard Krech III and geochronologist Paul Martin go even further, and refute claims that the indigenous people of North America ever held a sense of guardianship, arguing that Pleistocene hunters contributed to the extinction and near extinction of many animal species. Most controversially of all, Sam Gill claims that a belief in ‘Mother Earth’, closely associated with Native American spirituality, is not a traditional concept at all, but arose from the appropriation of European imagery by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh in the early nineteenth century. Gill claims that this metaphorical language was then picked up by other Native Americans, by way of expressing their relationship to the environment, and spread to subsequent generations by ethnographers (Schweninger, 2008:5).

Whether or not this relationship is seen as historically based, however, is beside the point. That so many Native American writers speak about having a relationship with the landscape, today, and represent this relationship in their work, indicates the strength of feeling which surrounds this topic.

As we’ve seen, western literature by both Native and Euro-American writers, is deeply embedded in a specific regional location. The writer’s knowledge of the environment, and their relationship with it, enables him or her to depict landscapes which are far more than mere backdrops. In western fiction, the specific landscape in which a story is set is essential to the plot; the western story cannot be lifted out of its own location and transplanted elsewhere without destroying its integrity.

Landscape, however, is just one element which distinguishes western fiction from other forms of literature. Historical subject matter, whether used as the basis for historical western fiction or as a reference point providing context for stories set in the present day, is seldom absent. Historical events such as the Lewis and Clark expedition continue to provide writers with rich and tantalizing sources of material.

Western American Literature: an expansive canon

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The canon of western American literature encompasses many forms: popular and literary fiction; nature writing; personal essays and memoirs; and historical studies. It is an area of literature which is nearly as vast as the land from which it emanates. A brief survey of the novels which fall beneath its banner confirms the diverse range of work it includes: Zane Grey’s classic of the western genre Riders of the Purple Sage (1912); Willa Cather’s depiction of the female agrarian struggle in O Pioneers!; A.B. Guthrie’s mountain man adventure Big Sky (1947); Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952); and Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1972) are all novels which are widely studied in connection with the American West. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985); Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories; Barbara Kingsolver’s BeanTrees (1988); Larry McMurtry’s antiheroic, anti-western Lonesome Dove (1990)[i]; the Navajo mysteries of Tony Hillerman (1925 – 2008); and the novels and short stories of Richard Ford (b. 1944) also feature on academic syllabi.

American Indian writers have also made major contributions to the body of western literature, and since N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) won a Pulitzer Prize and sparked the ‘Native American Renaissance’ (Lincoln, 1983), many of these have been retrospectively added to academic syllabi and examined within western American literary criticism[ii].

A century before Momaday, John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867), a mixed-blood Cherokee, became the first American Indian to publish a novel with The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854). Though the novel featured conflicts between Euro-American settlers and Mexicans, rather than Native Americans, the story paralleled much of Ridge’s own family’s experience of racism and displacement (Owens, 1992:32-40). Forty-five years later, Simon Pokagon, a Potawatomi Indian, is credited with writing the second Native American novel, Queen of the Woods (1899)[iii], and in 1927, Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range, by Mourning Dove (1888-1936), became the first novel to be published by an American Indian woman[iv] (Owens, 1992:40). The 1930s saw the publication of two novels by Indian writers, Sundown (1934) by John Joseph Mathews and The Surrounded (1936) by D’Arcy McNickle. In all, nine novels by Native Americans were published prior to Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (Owens, 1992:24). Today, the works of many Native American writers including James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Louis Owens, Paula Gunn Allen, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Linda Hogan, Simon Ortiz and Sherman Alexie feature prominently in anthologies of western literature, western criticism, and in anthologies for the separate field of Native American literature.

There are a number of characteristics common to most western fiction: explorations of historical subject matter and a heightened awareness of landscape are almost always present to some degree. Themes of identity are another major concern. In The Virginian, Wister was eager to define a Western regional identity that was opposed to what he saw as the degraded values of the East, and since then, Western writers have carried on this tradition, identifying themselves as different to and separate from their Eastern counterparts and removed from the national orthodoxy.

Questions of identity are especially pronounced in the works of Native Americans, many of whom were either themselves subjected to the assimilationist practices of federal boarding schools or are the descendents of those who were. In his autobiography, My People the Sioux, Luther Standing Bear describes how, upon arrival at the Carlisle Indian School, children were banned from speaking their own languages, dressed in ‘new outfits of white men’s clothes’ and made to choose new names for themselves (1928:133-135). An emotional conflict, pulling the protagonist between the traditional world of his ancestors and the modern white world, features heavily in the work of Native American writers. This conflict is further compounded by issues of mixed ancestry: until recently, Native writers have been almost exclusively of mixed American Indian and Euro-American descent, and Native fiction frequently centres on the search for identity of a ‘mixed-blood’[v] protagonist.

Sundown (1934), by the Oxford educated writer John Joseph Mathews, himself one-eighth Osage, tells the story of mixed-blood Chal Windzer. After leaving the reservation to attend university, Chal comes to believe that white society is superior to that of his own people. Though he denies his tribal heritage and attempts to imitate the white men with whom he associates, he finds that he is never truly accepted by or at home in the white world, and like most mixed-blood characters, he is forever torn between two opposing cultures.

'Indianness' and mixed-blood identity dominate the novels and short stories of the Spokane writer Sherman Alexie, and throughout his work he poses questions about what it is to be Indian: is one Indian by simple fact of ancestry; can one truly be Indian if he does not speak the language of his forefathers or practice traditional beliefs; can one be a ‘real’ Indian away from the reservation? In his first novel, Reservation Blues (1996), Alexie describes the internal and external conflicts which the mixed-blood Indian faces on the reservation and in the white world. In one scene, the Indian woman known as ‘Chess’ is disturbed by the sight of a white woman with an Indian child and wants to tell the woman that:

…the child was always going to be halfway. He's always going to be half Indian...and that will make him half crazy. Half of him will always want to tear the other half apart. It's war. Chess wanted to tell her that her baby was always going to be half Indian, no matter what she did to make it white. (Alexie, 1996:283)

Chess wants to protect the child, but more than that she wants to protect the tribe from the growing number of ‘quarter-bloods and eighth-bloods [who] get all the Indian jobs, all the Indian chances, because they look white’ (ibid). Mixed-bloods are viewed both as victim and villain, undesirable and damaging to the tribe.

Western American literature includes many genres and sub-genres, but like all regional literatures, location is at its heart. The West, however, as a physical space within the North American continent has numerous borders and numerous definitions.

Locating the West: a geographical, temporal and imaginative space

It is no surprise, then, that ‘literature of the American West’ has an equally fluid definition, and cannot be described simply by its position west of the Mississippi River. With works set in such diverse regional locations as the Nebraska prairies (Midwest), Arizona deserts (Southwest), coastal rainforests (Northwest) and urban centres, it involves much more than the mere occupation of a space.

[i] Michael Kowalewski refers to the New York Magazine television critic John Leonard’s assessment of the television adaptation of Lonesome Dove as being an anti-Western because of McMurtry’s refusal to conform to the heroic tradition of a romanticised West (Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West p. 3).

[ii] William Apess, a mixed-blood orphan of Pequot descent published his autobiography Son of the Forest in 1829, and Luther Standing Bear, a mixed-blood Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation published two volumes of memoirs, My People the Sioux (1928) and Land of the Spotted Eagle (1933).

[iii] Louis Owens points out that ‘[a]ccording to James A. Clifton, Queen of the Woods was most likely written by the wife of Cyrus Engle, Pokagon’s attorney, agent, publisher, and advisor’ (Owens, p. 259).

[iv] Suzanne Lundquist’s Native American Literatures (2004) is one of the few critical studies to include S. Alice Callahan’s novel Wynema: a child of the forest (1891) in a survey of Native American fiction.

[v] The term ‘mixed-blood’ is most often used to describe persons of mixed Native American and Euro-American ancestry. In the United States, ‘mixed-blood’ is considered to be a neutral description and is not generally viewed as an epithet in the way that ‘half-blood’ and ‘half-breed’ frequently are.

The History and Development of Western American Literature

2011-04-01T18:53:00.003+01:00

The origins of western American literature can be found in the written accounts of the explorers and adventurers who delved into the wilderness beyond the Mississippi River at the turn of the 19^th century. Commissioned with exploring the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase, which had doubled the size of United States territory, and finding a trade route to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery set forth in the spring of 1804 into a vast unknown. Over the course of nearly two and one-half years, the six men tasked with documenting the expedition produced enough material to fill the nearly five thousand pages of Moulton’s definitive edition of the journals. In their close observation of both the landscape through which they travelled and of the Native people they encountered, the men not only recorded the events of their explorations but ‘gave reality to the Louisiana Purchase’ (Lyon, 1999:5) itself.

In the introduction to ‘The Written Donnée of Western Literature’, James Maguire refers to the Lewis and Clark journals as the ‘headwaters of western American literature’ (1987:68). Although the journals were not officially published until 1814, government documents and newspaper reports about the Corps of Discovery, as well as accounts by Alexander McKenzie and other contemporary explorers, ignited the public’s curiosity about the West. These early documents, combined with visual representations of the interior landscape[i] and the tribespeople living there, fuelled the public imagination and created a demand for frontier literature. Timothy Flint’s romantic novel Francis Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot (1826) and James Fenmore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826), are the direct antecedents of the western novel and of contemporary western literature.

While these novels brought the frontier into many affluent homes, their readership was limited by expensive production costs. As a result of technological advances in the mid-nineteenth century, however, paperbound books could be produced for a fraction of the former price. Prices fell still further with the innovative marketing and distribution strategies of New York publishers Erastus and Irwin Beadle, making the new ‘dime novels’ affordable to a much wider audience (Brown, 1997).

In 1860, the Beadles published their first dime novel, Malaeska: the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, by Ann S. Stephens. The novel was an immediate success and within the first few months of publication sold sixty-five thousand copies, convincing the Beadles of the public’s appetite for inexpensive, mass-produced adventure stories (Stanford University, 1997).

Although Malaeska was set in rural New York state and therefore cannot geographically be described as a western novel, it contained many of the physical and cultural challenges embodied by that genre: a wilderness landscape, isolated and industrious white settlers, and ‘a savage Indian tribe’ (Stephens, 1860). As is the case with the traditional western novel, Malaeska was also located in the past. Set during the first half of the eighteenth century, the world of Malaeska was vastly different to the world inhabited by its readers.

Discussing the popularity of the early dime novels in his introduction to The Literary West, Thomas Lyon puts the public’s demand for fictional adventure down to a growing sense of physical security in a largely eastern audience, and by implication, a growing ennui: 'as civilization spread and real-life opportunities for individual heroism and decisive action dwindled and as the Indians and the wilderness presented less and less and, finally, no significant challenge, the Western prospered' (1999:6). If adventure was not to be found in one’s own life, it could be found, vicariously, in the pages of a novel.

The best known books of the dime novel era are probably those from the Buffalo Bill series, begun by the writer Edward Judson, under the pen name Ned Buntline. Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men (1869) was the first in a series of more than one hundred books embellishing the real life exploits of the adventurer and showman William Cody, and helped to create in him a national folk hero (Stanford University, 1997). After Judson’s death, Colonel Prentiss Ingraham took over the Buffalo Bill series, refining the fictional Bill’s traits and shaping the character of the upright western hero in a mythical version of the West where good always prevails, a theme which persists in popular western fiction to the present day. By the 1880s, however, public tastes had shifted to detective stories and urban, industrialised landscapes. The rapid output from many writers also meant that western dime novels were too often simply reformulations of previous work[ii]. The public had new interests and expectations and the popularity of the western dime novel went into decline.

With the publication of Owen Wister’s The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains in 1902, however, a new kind of western novel began to emerge. Born in 1860 into a wealthy Philadelphia family, Wister suffered from neuralgia and repeated bouts of severe depression during his youth (Lyon, 1999), and, after agreeing to his father’s demand that he enrol at Harvard Law School, experienced a ‘total nervous collapse’ (Shulman, 1998:xv). In the summer of 1885, Wister travelled west on medical advice to take a ‘rest cure’ at the ranch of Major Frank Wolcott[iii] in Wyoming Territory. Thomas Lyon refers to this time in the West as being ‘the transforming event of Wister’s life’ (1999:83), leading not just to the restoration of Wister’s health, but to the restoration of the western novel.

Over the next fifteen years, Wister continued spending his summers in the West, and ‘developed a theory of real Americanism based on what seemed to him the western essence – rugged individualism, physical beauty and courage, and casual directness, combined with a natural, non-effete refinement’ (ibid) which he synthesised into the figure of the unnamed hero of The Virginian.

The novel’s publication transformed the western from the sensationalism of the dime novel to a more complex study of life in the West with political and social undertones, which in the case of The Virginian explored the meaning of democracy, the rule of law and relationships between the sexes. Widely regarded as the first western novel, The Virginian bears all the characteristics of the genre: a modest but noble hero challenged by cultural and moral conflicts on the open plains, cowboys, cattle rustlers, self-reliance and frontier justice.

Although The Virginian was based on Wister’s own experiences in the West, the novel’s action spans a period from 1874, a decade before his first visit to Wyoming Territory, to 1890, and in his preface he refers nostalgically to the novel’s historical location:

Had you left New York or San Francisco at ten o’clock this morning, by noon the day after to-morrow you could step out at Cheyenne. There you would stand at the heart of the world that is the subject of my picture, yet you would look around you in vain for the reality. It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which memory can take, will bring you to it now. (Wister, 7)

Some scholars, though, argue that the West portrayed by Wister never existed at all. In the introduction to the 1998 edition of The Virginian, Schulman describes the way in which Wister rewrote the history of the 1892 Johnson County (Wyoming) War from the perspective of the wealthy cattle barons with whom he stayed during his visits to the West. Citing Richard M. Brown’s study, No Duty to Retreat (1991) and Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (1978), Schulman points out Wister’s contradictions of documented accounts:

In places as diverse as Wilmington, North Carolina, and Johnson County, Wyoming, outsiders – Republicans and Populists in Wilmington, townspeople, small farmers, and ranchers in Johnson County – democratically gained control of local government. At the extremes, as in Wilmington and Wyoming, the leaders of the old order resorted to violence to expel the upstarts. In Wister’s version, however, the élitist defenders of privilege are not violently suppressing a democratic protest movement. Instead, Wister disguises their activity as “ordinary people” taking “justice” into their own hands. (Shulman, 1998:xviii)

According to Nathaniel Lewis, western American literature strives to achieve what Baudrillard refers to as the ‘production of the Real’, a weaving together of history and mythology to create a newly fabricated reality. The evidence of this production, he claims, is then so thoroughly erased that the reader comes to believe that what is contrived is in fact true (2003:192). In the case of The Virginian, the corporate ranchers of Wyoming, who protect their access to open-range grazing by attacking small ranchers and homesteaders, are seen as the defenders of democracy, and it is this version of events which is often viewed as historical ‘truth’ (Shulman, 1998).

[i] Major Stephen Harriman Long’s survey expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1819-1820 was accompanied by the landscape painter Samuel Seymour and Titian Ramsay Peale, who specialised in natural history. Theirs were the first images to be made in situ of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains (Hassrick, pp. 20-30).

[ii] Ingraham is said to have written one dime novel of 50-70,000 words per week, and to have produced over one hundred Buffalo Bill stories, as well as many other dime novels (Stanford University, 1997).

[iii] Wolcott was the leader of the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association who in 1892 led a group of attacks on small ranchers whom they accused of cattle rustling, sparking the Johnson County War. In The Virginian, Wister rewrote history to show Wolcott and other big ranchers in favourable light (Shulman, 1998).

A Story Writing Challenge

2011-03-05T07:44:00.001Z

My copies of Award Winning Tales have just arrived in the post this morning, and I'm very pleased to see that my story 'The Difference Between Cowboys and Clowns' has made it into print. The story was a finalist in the NYCMidnight Short Story Challenge a couple of years ago, a competition I can't recommend highly enough.

In the challenge, participants are divided into groups, and each group is given a writing genre and a topic which must feature in the story. In the initial round of the competition, participants are given one week in which to complete a story of 2500 words. That year, my genre was 'Romantic Comedy' and my subject 'Rainbow'. Goodness, I thought, as I received my instructions (by email at midnight, NYC time).

Having a severe disinclination towards 'romance' (it's a long story - don't ask), I was less than thrilled with the genre I'd been given. And as for rainbows (deep sigh), although I really do appreciate them, all I could think of in conjunction with 'romance' were girly images of Pegasus, multi-coloured gonks and numerous other highly embarrassing motifs from an earlier and less cynical point of my life. But I'd already paid my entry fee and, skinflint that I am, couldn't back out now. The best thing, I decided, was to put it all to the back of my mind and let my subconscious stew on it a while.

The first idea to emerge from the caldron was set in the in the late 1960s and involved a folk singer called 'Rainbow Sprinkles' who was secretly in love with John Lennon. Things start to go pear shaped, though, when she sees John naked on the 'Two Virgins' album cover. I could see the comedy; I could see the potential for romance. But that story idea quickly fizzled out.

Now, anyone who knows me well knows that 20 years of living in the UK has done little to temper my cowboy inclinations, and it wasn't long before images of the naked John Lennon (and Yoko) were usurped by Pegasus again, which (thankfully) was even more quickly transformed into something slightly less flighty (like the pun?). By the end of the day, I was frantically researching rodeo clowns and barrel racing on the internet - those girly images be damned! If I was going to have to write a romantic comedy, it would involve a bit of blood, brahma bull snot, and gore.

Knowing only a little about the romantic structure (boo, hiss), I turned back to the internet for help and discovered that 'the hero/ine's innermost fears and weaknesses must be exposed' and that s/he must 'exhibit emotional courage'. Hmm. That's okay, I told myself, I can do that. Perhaps it doesn't have to be as trite as I thought.

I quickly sketched out my characters: my heroine, Dakota Styrone - desperate to win the barrel racing championships; object of her affections, Lyle Crabtree - three-times winner of the All Around Cowboy of the Year title; Dakota's love rival, Jo-Jo Wheelan - last year's barrel racing champion; and Smithy, the shy rodeo clown ('we prefer to be called bullfighters these days').

The Nemesis (Jo-Jo - boo!), I learned, must try to stop our Hero (Dakota - yea!) from reaching both of her goals (the barrel-racing title and her love interest, Lyle Crabtree). I divided the story into three acts (ah, the Magic Three) and followed a structure loosely based on that laid out in Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey. Then I got back to the serious business of barrel racing - learning about clover-leaf patterns, five-second penalties, and how to keep a horse running in a straight line into the third barrel by applying pressure with the right leg, as well as tips on bullriding and Stetson hats. Youtube, my friends, can be an invaluable resource.

It's a predictable story, of course (Rom-Coms usually are), so I won't bother telling you the ending (you can order a copy of the book, though, if you like), but it taught me a great deal about writing. It taught me to step outside my comfort zone and to take chances; it taught me to write about things I don't know (but only after learning about them, first); and it taught me that the best thing for 'writer's block' is to sit down and start pounding out the words. Mostly, though, it taught me that there's a story - and sometimes a decent story - in any scenerio you come up with.

As for the rainbow? That was the name of Dakota's horse.

'The Difference Between Cowboys and Clowns' was a Finalist in the 1st round of the 2009 NYC Short Story Challenge and Finalist in the 2009 Cowboy Up contest by Moonlight Mesa Associates.

Whose True Grit is Truest?

2011-03-03T22:32:00.002Z

Although I consider myself politically left of centre, I've always enjoyed John Wayne's westerns. When I was growing up in 1970s America, Wayne stood for something people longed for - a simpler time when the good guys were easy to spot and the bad guys always got what they deserved. Wayne's own rightwing leanings didn't come into it. It was a film, afterall. Fiction. People used to be able to leave their politics in the cinema lobby and enjoy the myth. Times change: we're all postmodernists now.

I looked forward to seeing the remake of True Grit because a) I like westerns, and b) I like the Coen brothers (at least Fargo, O Brother, and No Country). I'm afraid their True Grit, however, just didn't live up to my expectations. The performance of Hailee Steinfeld as fourteen-year-old Mattie was quite exceptional - her earnestness was unflinching, and of all the characters it is she who has true grit. Jeff Bridges was less convincing, though he worked hard to capture the tough-as-nails on the outside, soft-as-sh*t on the inside Rooster as portrayed by Wayne. But ... (you knew it was coming), there was one point in the film, after which I was dragged right out of the West and back into Vue cinema at Gunwarf Quays: when the La Boeuf is accidentally shot by Cogburn, the bullet passes through his shoulder, entering the front of his fringed leather coat and exiting through the back. Though there was a considerable amount of blood on La Boeuf's shirt, quite remarkably, there was no stain on his coat. The exit hole was clean as a whistle. That lost it for me. Why show me a mouldy man hung up in a tree and fingers chopped off, and then show me a completely - and more importantly - unbelievably unbloodied coat? I'm not looking for a bloodbath, just consistency.

A Review of 2010

2010-12-31T12:22:00.001Z

Ethel Louise Mabry

The end of another year is upon us and I am reminded of my grandmother’s claims that time speeds up as one gets older. As a kid, in Idaho, I was dumbfounded by this idea. Science was never my strongpoint, but I knew, somehow, as the interminable years of my childhood wore on that such a statement must go against some law of physics. ‘Don’t go wishing your life away,’ she’d tell me as I itched to break free of high school classrooms, anxious to join the world outside my small town. Even in grade school, at the age of nine or ten, I kept track of the school days, crossing them off one by one, willing each of them into the past so that I could be released into the freedom of summer. I was in a hurry to be somewhere else, do something new, start living my life. Anxious for time to pass.

Grandma was right, of course. She always was. Time does speed up as a person gets older. It’s a fact. Physics be damned!

And though I always find myself feeling sombre at the crest of a new year, I have no time for regrets (yes! I’m still in a rush): I must get back to my dissertation. In order to assuage my feelings of time wasted and time lost, and to assure myself that I’m moving forward and not back, I’ve compiled a list of the work I’ve done in the past year. I wish it was more.

Progress on Dissertation
· Completed outline of novel
· Written another 30,000 words of first draft of novel
· Completed 10,000 words of critical work

Conferences, Presentations and Events Attended
· Publishing Panel, UoC, 29 April 2010
· Research in Progress Conference, UoC, 15 May 2010
· Anxieties of Identity Conference, University of Portsmouth, 21 May 2010
· Small Wonder Short Story Festival, September 2010

Papers and Presentations
· ‘Voices of the American West: striving for authenticity’, Research in Progress, 15 May 2010
· ‘Indianness and Identity in the Novels and Short Stories of Sherman Alexie’, Anxieties of Identity, 21 May 2010

Publications
· ‘Bastard’, in In Our Own Words, MW Enterprises, April 2010
· Review of Freedom and Madman of Freedom Square, London Magazine, April/May 2010
· Review of Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians, The Short Review, November 2009
· Review of Sherman Alexie’s War Dances, Western American Literature, Spring 2010
· Review of Belle Boggs’s Mattaponi Queen, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, (pending January 2011)
· Review of Linwood Laughy’s Fifth Generation, Western American Literature, (pending Spring 2011)
· ‘Cowboys and Clowns’, Award Winning Tales, BL Coffield ed., (pending Spring 2011)

Shortlists and Awards
· ‘Gathering Fragments of Light’, Honorable Mention in the Carpe Articulum Novella Contest, April 2010

Miscellaneous Other
· worked as Additional Support Tutor at Portsmouth College, Jan – June
· three weeks cycling in France, July
· provided mentoring and student support at University of Portsmouth, Oct – Dec
· ongoing development and administration of the THRESHOLDS short story forum

An exploration into developing a set of marking conventions for creative writing

2010-11-12T23:17:00.001Z

Background

Almost uniquely amongst academic studies, the Creative Arts are notoriously difficult to assess. Unlike other subjects, they are not about the learning of facts or the expression of theories, and consequently, they cannot be assessed using traditional methods of exams and essays. In Creative Writing modules, work must show an understanding of techniques and an understanding of the effects those techniques have upon the reader. It is a practical skill which can only be assessed by its final product—a piece of written text structured to achieve a desired purpose.

Creative Writing students frequently, and occasionally even tutors, argue that assessment stifles creativity and that writing, as a form of self-expression, should not come under the usual sets of criteria given to other, more prescriptive subjects. Critics of assessment claim that Creative Writing cannot be judged objectively, as assessors will automatically be biased against any work whose style or subject matter they do not personally appreciate.

This is of course nonsense. Creative Writing can and should be assessed against a set of criteria based partly on learning outcomes and partly on guidelines used to judge writing in different contexts. While it is true that aspects of Creative Writing remain somewhat subjective, just as with any other form of art, it is also true that many of the individual elements, particularly technical elements, are of a more black and white nature, i.e. there is/are: good descriptions and poor descriptions; successful structure and unsuccessful structure; consistent narratives and inconsistent narratives; correct punctuation and incorrect punctuation.

Again, critics will argue this premise, citing well-known authors who have successfully experimented with form, and who, like E. E. Cummings and Virginia Woolf, have become part of the literary canon. The differences between the writing of these authors and that of writers using the experimental tag, as a protection against criticism, are of intent and consistency. Under Grading Considerations for Creative Work, in the handbook for the School of English and Creative Studies at Bath Spa University [no date], the author makes a similar statement: “Creative writing makes its own rules. As assessors, we attempt to judge how rigorously and conscientiously those rules have been conceived, and how effectively and persuasively they have been carried out.”

In September 2005, I accepted a part-time post teaching Creative Writing to undergraduate Humanities students. As no formal marking conventions were available for this course, I was presented with those for English Literature (see Appendix 1). According to Dr. Siobhán Holland, (2002a), this scenario is not uncommon on programmes where Creative Writing is a minor part of a department’s provision. Having plenty of experience assessing Creative Writing in a workshop setting, but no experience in marking work with percentage grades, I felt I needed a structured template to guide me. Taking the Literature conventions, plus criteria cobbled together from learning outcomes, formal criteria from my own Creative Writing degree and judges’ criteria from writing competitions, I constructed a marking sheet with twenty-five elements which I rated 1— 4 (see Appendix 2), giving marks out of one hundred. I then used this at the end of the first semester, when assessing students’ work.

For the most part, I was satisfied with the resulting marks, however there were several instances where my gut feeling was that the marks were too high. In response to this, I lowered several of the top and mid-range marks by 6-8 percentage points. The second marker agreed with these new high and middle range marks, but felt that the three bottom marks should be raised. Once marks had been agreed, I then found that two separate percentage marks needed to be given—one for the creative piece of writing, and one for the critical commentary. When the two pieces were separated and graded according to the results of the marking sheet, the scores altered wildly. Consequently, these separate marks needed to be re-jigged, in an ad hoc fashion, in order to conform to the overall marks. The whole process felt inexact, and as each of the twenty-five elements was marked separately, this system was very time consuming. I came away feeling there must be a better way.

Summary of Research

My first step in revising this assessment method was to contact my own dissertation tutor to get her feedback on my marking sheet. She commented that the breakdown of skills for which I was looking, was essentially correct, although she thought that some of the wording could be more specific. She also felt that a number of the criteria were focussed on the reader’s reaction to the student’s work, rather than on the work itself, (personal communication, 17 Feb 2006).

She also provided me with some general information about what qualities each level of work might contain: 40-49 being fragmented and poorly expressed, but containing an idea of a story; 50-59 being competent, but possibly cliché and dull; etc.

At this time, I also began exploring marking conventions from other institutions and located, what I considered to be a clearly-written set of conventions in the handbook of the School of English and Creative Studies at Bath Spa University (no date). In addition to the marking conventions, the handbook gives a detailed description of the assessment process, the programme’s aims and objectives and also clearly explains the other considerations which influence grading, such as the level of consistency and integrity of narrative voice and competence in the basic techniques and elements of Creative Writing. Although I had included a similar set of aims and objectives, advice about redrafting, guidelines for presentation of work and guidelines for the critical analysis in my unit handbook, the Bath Spa handbook stated much more explicitly what was expected from its students.

In comparison to those of Bath Spa (see Appendix 3), the overall aims and objectives included in my handbook (see Appendix 4) were quite simplistic. I decided to review these details and incorporate the aims and objectives as laid out in my lesson plans (see Appendix 5), to give students a more complete sense of what I expected them to be able to achieve by the end of the term.

Additionally, I decided to review my guidelines for the critical analysis and consider ways in which the criteria for this part of the final assignment could be made more specific.

The majority of Creative Writing programmes offered at degree level require students to reflect upon the writing process and to engage in an academic discussion with regards to the material they have studied, its influences upon their own work and the feedback they have received during workshopping and the redrafting process. In the critical analysis, students are able to put forward arguments which support decisions they made in their choice of genre, style and attempts at experimentation. It is here that the tutor can gauge to what extent the student has achieved and incorporated the learning outcomes in an academic, rather than an artistic, manner.

The Trouble With Language

While gathering my research, I became aware that a battle is raging amongst Creative Writing tutors regarding the language used in assessment criteria. In her paper, Assessing the Criteria: An Argument for Creative Writing Theory, Amanda Boulter argues against the use of language which she considers indistinct and unquantifiable. She asserts that “the magic key” for assessing Creative Writing is clear criteria and lists a number of words and phrases which she believes should be struck from assessment vocabulary:

vividness; particularised detail; selectivity; originality; economy and coherence of structure; voices that are convincingly and powerfully imitated; persuasiveness; eloquence; writing that is moving; integrity of voice; authenticity; subtle use of language. (2004, p.135)

Likewise, Patricia Duncker, in the introduction to Creative Writing on the British Arts Council website (no date), rails against the use of wording which she considers vague:

Most university assessment criteria once included dubious phrases such as ‘indisputably original’ or ‘of publishable quality’. I have never found two writers who agreed on a precise definition of ‘originality’ and how it could be assessed. So much badly written nonsense and best-selling vacuous cliché is published every year that being ‘publishable’ cannot be a failsafe assessment criteria....The emphasis now falls on more obviously technical aspects of writing, control over language and form, a clearly developed individual style and an intelligent inventiveness.

Judging the technical aspects is of course, what I was attempting to do with my original marking sheet. Yet technical aspects aside, it is incumbent upon the Creative Writing tutor to also make judgements about the quality of the art. So once again, we are back to looking at the language with which these judgements are made.

High on the list of criteria of all Creative Writing tutors with whom I have worked, is the concept of originality. Though Duncker believes criteria of this sort to be ambiguous, originality continues to be something we all look for as tutors, and strive for as writers. I carried out my own little survey, amongst my community of writing colleagues, asking for their definition of the word ‘originality’ and how they would go about assessing this quality. Most agreed that originality has not so much to do with the story itself, but more with the author’s ability to make the reader view the world in a different way. We all recognise ‘tired’ plots brimming with clichés and characters we’ve come across before. Prime-time television is full of them. And we all recognise something that is new, fresh and exciting, something that surprises us and makes us think. This is originality.

Duncker’s assertion that the phrase ‘of publishable quality’ is of little value is also not fully justified. While it may be true that many works of popular fiction appear ‘badly written’ and ‘vacuous’ (when compared, I presume, with literary fiction), these works satisfy the desires of a large sector of the reading public. The fact that they have found publication, in what is an increasingly competitive market, is evidence that they have achieved a certain quality of worth.

Publishers are primarily motivated by money and must protect their assets and reputations by ensuring that the work they accept is at least of a certain technical competence. Likewise, because of the variety of styles and genres which fall within the boundaries of Creative Writing, it is inappropriate, and indeed undesirable, to be prescriptive when it comes to assessment criteria. Each work will be guided by the ‘rules’ of its particular genre. For this reason, and in order to allow students the freedom to find their own voice, criteria need to be broad enough to accommodate a variety of styles and forms.

And finally...

After digesting assessment information from various sources, I met with a more experienced tutor to discuss criteria and marking procedures. She provided me with assessment guidelines for one of the modules she taught, along with a scoring sheet with a total of seven simplified criteria including Boulter’s disliked concept of originality (see Appendix 6). This helped to reinforce my belief that my preference for “writerly terminology” is acceptable.

It also confirmed an idea that had been taking shape since I began researching this topic, which is that Creative Writing tutors formulate marks not by any numerical process, but through experience, as tutors, as readers and as working writers. It is through experience that we recognise the relative value of the written word. It is through experience that we know when something works. And it is through experience that we know when something doesn’t.

How findings will affect my professional practice...

The one thing which all of my sources agree about, when it comes to assessing students’ work, is that whatever criteria are given, in whatever format, they need to be made understandable in order to give students the best opportunity for success. As tutors, we want our students to succeed and the criteria we set are meant to guide them in the right direction. Not all criteria, however, will apply to all forms and genre of writing, so the criteria we give cannot be made absolute. We are, after all, teaching Creative Writing, not Technical Writing.

Though there is much debate regarding the language with which these criteria are written, I still support the use of terms such as originality, eloquence, sophistication and authenticity as long as the meanings of these terms are made clear to students. These criteria cannot simply be listed in the module handbook and never referred to again. They must become a part of the session work, through the building of students’ literary vocabulary, close analysis of published and peer work and raising student expectations of their own creative efforts. These terms are part of the language of Creative Writing and by doing away with them, we would de-emphasise the art in favour of rules.

There will always be a certain amount of subjective response, when assessing artistic forms such as Creative Writing. As tutors, we need to recognise this and to minimise its effects as much as possible. By teaching our students how to reflect upon and judge the quality of their own work, through critical analysis, and to support the choices they make in the development of their writing, we go some way to eliminate the traps of personal bias.

Using information gathered over the course of this assignment, I created a new set of marking conventions (see Appendix 7), containing Boulter and Duncker’s contentious language. Since then, I have discussed these with my students and referred to them repeatedly when analysing published work, to help them become familiar with their usage.

What I have come to understand is that ultimately, Creative Writing tutors must rely upon our experience, both as astute readers and practicing writers, when assessing student work. Assessment of this sort cannot be one-hundred percent foolproof. Contained within the process of creativity is experimentation, and experimentation, by its nature bends—and even breaks—accepted rules. It is through experience, not through tick-box evaluations, that we are able to judge whether these experiments are successful.

* * *

References

Bath Spa University (no date) “Grading considerations for creative work” in the School of English and Creative Studies Handbook [online]. Available from: http://ecs.bathspa.ac.uk/current/undergrad/ creative-writing/creative-studies-handbook.htm [Accessed 10 Feb 2006].

Boulter A (2004) “Assessing the criteria: an argument for creative writing theory” in the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 1 (2), 134-140.

Duncker P (no date). In the Introduction to the British Arts Council’s web page on Creative Writing [online]. Available from: http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-literature-activities-creativewriting-intro.htm [Accessed 13 Feb 2006].

Holland S (2002a). Creative writing: a good practice guide, a report to the Learning and Teaching Support Network [online]. London, English Subject Centre. Available from: www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/archive/publications/reports/ cwguide.pdf [Accessed 10 Feb 2006].

Further Reading

Jones RC (2001). “Standards in creative writing teaching” in Bell J and Magrs P (eds) The creative writing coursebook Macmillan.

Holland S (2002b). Communicating about assessment, [online]. London, Higher Education Academy, English Subject Centre. Available from: http://www.english. ltsn.ac.uk/explore/ resources/assess/modes.php [Accessed 10 Feb 2006].

Roehampton University (no date). Creative writing assessment criteria: written work [online]. Available from: www.roehampton.ac.uk/emlzone/documents/Assessment Criteria/CreativeWritingAssesmentCriteria.doc [Accessed 12 Feb 2006].

Sweet Briar College (no date). English department assessment goals, [online]. Available from: http://fiction.english.sbc.edu/dept% 20assessment%201.html [Accessed 15 Feb 2006].

University of Adelaide (2005) Assessment [online]. Available from: www.arts.adelaide.edu.au/humanities/english/creative/ masters.html#Assessment [Accessed 13 Feb 2006].

University of Birmingham (2003). Levels, assessment and marking: mark descriptions for the marking of assessed work [online]. Available from: http://www.cll.bham.ac.uk/Levels%20Assessment%20and%20Marking.htm [Accessed 12 Feb 2006].

Rambles and Writing

2010-10-26T11:23:00.000+01:00

Between the end of May and the start of October, I had the dubious luxury of unemployment - not official unemployment which requires one to be seeking paid work, but the off-the-books kind of unemployment which doesn't show on government statistics and makes no demands apart from economic miserliness. Having spent the past few terms teaching, in one capacity or another, I greeted the summer as an opportunity to concentrate on my novel. Ahead of me stretched three, maybe even four student-less months, during which I could, if I remained focussed, bang out the rest of my first draft in a mere 625 words a day. I had counted them, the words, one by one, then grouped them into doable, bit-sized chunks. I had a plan and it sounded so easy.

The first few weeks of my unemployment went blissfully well as I knuckled down to my new routine. Being a natural early riser, I relished my quiet mornings at the keyboard, a jug of thick Arabica at my elbow and a full day of uninterrupted writing ahead of me. I was in a privileged and sacred space: if anyone asked, I could call myself a writer.

I made a number of surprising discoveries in those early weeks as the plot slowly knitted itself together: Bob Dylan made a guest appearance, as did the spirits of the 34 Chinese prospectors who were murdered at Deep Creek cove in Hells Canyon in 1887. And Halahtookit, the man who was the inspiration for the story from the very beginning and who I regarded as a central character, quietly slunk away. He is not gone entirely, mind, but remains aloof, his voice barely audible. From the corners of the page, I see him watching me now, assessing my worthiness to tell his story. I learned a lot during those weeks about what my novel would and would not become.

And then my husband took his annual summer holiday. In previous years, his employers - perhaps fearing he might leave - have allowed him to take his full entitlement in a single six-week block, on occasion going so far as to add a few weeks of unpaid leave. During these extended summer holidays, we have travelled abroad with our bikes, adding another country or three in our ongoing, but segmented, round the world cycle ride. This year, however, conscious of the new financial climate, and with a new manager on board, his company were slightly less accommodating. His six weeks of holiday were narrowly chopped in two, with a slice of work, two weeks thick bisecting our travel plans.

With my budding novel calling to me, I was secretly glad that our summer travels were curtailed, and during the month of June I sent my husband to explore the margins of the south coast on solo cycling daytrips as I remained at home, my writing routine intact. Then, in July, we had our three weeks in France, cycling from Cherbourg to Bordeaux to see the Tour de France flash past.

The month of August came and went without a sideways glance at my novel. I had a book of short stories to read, and a review deadline to meet. Then it was the short story website at the university, the design and construction of which I had become entangled with, that demanded my attention. Finally, September, and I returned to the keyboard with relief. For three precious weeks, the writing flowed.

And then the telephone rang.

Back to the world of paid employment, now, and my writing routine is in shatters. There is a trade off between time and money, money and time, and no easy reconciliation in sight. Anxiety levels remain high as the first anniversary of my PhD studies comes and goes, and I number the words that are as yet unwritten. I feel them slipping from me, splitting up, dividing, scattered across the hollow prairies of the pages…

Thresholds: home to the international short story forum

2010-09-20T17:40:00.000+01:00

I am pleased to annouce that Thresholds is now up and running. Please register here and have a look around the site.

Thresholds is the only online forum dedicated to the writing, criticism and study of the Short Story. Undergraduate students are welcome to join the forum as Associate Members, with access to our extensive resource lists, articles, interviews and our student-led blog. Postgraduate students are invited to join our team of bloggers and contribute to a wide variety of discussions about academic life, their own research and writing projects, and literary news.

We will also run student-led writing workshops, and provide opportunities for peer review. Our inaugural edition contains an exclusive interview with the internationally acclaimed writer Hanif Kureishi who discusses his recently published Collected Stories. In October, we will host our first live Question & Answer session with Adam Marek, author of the weirdly wonderful collection Instruction Manual for Swallowing.

Contributions are welcome for the following departments: Featured Profiles, Recommended Reading, and Exercises.

Register now and make your voice heard!

The College and University Scramble for PhD Funding

2010-08-28T14:49:00.021+01:00

On Tuesday, this week, I went to a seminar in London about locating funding possibilities for Creative Writing PhDs. What I learned was not good. At least not for me. The already slim opportunities that exist for Arts and Humanities research are now anorexic, and I emerged from the session kicking myself for having wasted £30 on the train fare simply to confirm what I already suspected: it's very unlikely I will receive funding because - like most postgrad Creative Writing students - I have not followed the traditional (i.e. preferred) academic route. To be honest, rather than traipsing all the way to London for this news, it would have been less expensive and more convenient if I had just gone to Online PhD or one of the other online sites offering information and advice to postgraduate students.

In short, this is what I learned: funding bodies such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council like to play safe and are rightly cautious when it comes to allocating money. When deciding what students to fund, they favour those with academic track records that can be held up for scrutiny by academics in other fields. The merit and abilities of Creative Writing postgrads, therefore, are measured with the same yardstick as research students involved in the sciences. And a 'mature student' returning to university to do a Biochemistry PhD, after twenty years in a variety of odd jobs, is not going get funding, either. Regardless of how brilliant s/he may be.

For anyone with vague hopes of being funded to do a PhD in Creative Writing in the UK, here is the route you need to take: A and A* grades in the A-Levels needed to get you onto an English Literature/Creative Writing programme at a pre-1992 university; a 1st in that degree; and an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing at an equally well-regarded institution immediately (or very soon) after completing the BA. It is essential that you remain focussed on your goal at all times and never allow yourself to become distracted by things such as marriage, kids, and the need to pay bills. Whatever you do, do not get sidetracked by LIFE. Having a life outside of academia will not help you in any way whatsoever. Neither will having a list of publication credits. Or, apparently, that MA with Distinction if you don't already have a BA with top marks. In short, it all goes straight back to those A-Level grades. Any variation in this route towards the PhD provides funding bodies with a reason to weed-out your application. Be warned.

It is also important, when considering a university for PhD studies, that a student should not automatically go back to the university where they received their MA - regardless of how much they like their supervisors, or the praise they received. When the AHRC marks a candidate's application, they also evaluate the suitability of the institution the student is with to determine if that institution has the specific resources the student's research requires. And by resources, they are not referring to the highly-esteemed writers who make up the supervisory staff overseeing the student's research. In other words, if your project involves research into the literature and history of the American West, as mine does, the university needs to have suitable resources (a specialist library, a programme in American Studies, a museum of barbed wire, etc) with the materials you are likely to draw upon. The fact that you've already spent hundreds of pounds on Amazon, building up your own specialist library doesn't count for a hill of beans.

Lastly, those applying for funding need to demonstrate the 'impact' their research will have, i.e. how it will benefit the academic world (or even better, how it will benefit SOCIETY) and to show that it will lead to more than the publication of a book. Here's a hint for anyone filling out applications: tell them you'll be presenting papers at specific, high-profile conferences; reading at specific, high-profile literary events; and publishing papers in specific, high-profile, ACADEMIC journals. If you mention that your novel will win the Booker Prize and lead to world peace as well, it can't hurt.

If I had known these things when I started, I might have done things differently...In fact, I might not have gone down this road at all. So perhaps it's a good thing I didn't know. I am, despite the bile rising up in my throat, happy to be shuffling along this dusty path, and I'm happy with the university I chose. I just wish I weren't so desperately poor at this time in my life...

For those of you who are plotting your route to a PhD, here are some links to sources of funding which may prove fruitful:

Arts and Humanities Research Council
Economic and Social Research Council
National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts
The Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
National Endowment for the Arts
Hotcourses

Where's the Summer Gone?

2010-08-25T14:13:00.000+01:00

It’s been a very short, very intense summer here in Portsmouth (not to mention, a very damp and grey one) and though I feel I’ve made good progress on a number of projects, I have sorely neglected my blogging responsibilities, here.

Summer, for me, began when my temporary teaching post at Portsmouth College came to an end in late May and I was finally able to get down to some serious writing. For six solid weeks, I faithfully kept my commitment to work on the novel from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., five days a week. That period of frenetic activity came to an end after the first week of July when I went on a three-week bike ride in France. My big plans for continuing to work on the novel, in the tent each evening, came to naught. All I really wanted to do at the end of a long day’s ride was to eat and crawl into my sleeping bag.

On my return, at the beginning of August, my attention turned, not back to my own novel, but to a collection of short stories by the American writer, Belle Boggs. Earlier in the summer, I had agreed to review the book, Mattaponi Queen, for the new journal, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice. I’ve written a number of reviews, in the past few months, and each time I do I realise what a good discipline it is for developing my own writing. The 3000-word review finished and submitted, I then focussed on Thresholds, the new short story website which I’m involved in developing at the University of Chichester. I’ve been working pretty much non-stop for the past two weeks, tweaking the design, uploading content and making contact with university Literature and Creative Writing departments throughout the English-speaking world in preparation for the launch at the end of September. This is an exciting project which aims to build a community of postgraduate students involved in the study and writing of short stories. All worthy stuff, but nothing to do with my own research project…

Now, however, I’ve cleared the decks, transcribed the notes I made while cycling, and am ready to knuckle down to my own research and novelling activities, once more. Oh yes – and the blog. I will resume my sporadic blog posts, as well.

A Discussion of Sherman Alexie's novel, Indian Killer

2010-06-25T14:54:00.001+01:00

A year after the acclaimed Reservation Blues, Sherman Alexie’s second novel, Indian Killer received reticent praise when it was published in 1996. It is a book which he, himself, seems both drawn to and repelled by. In a 2002 interview with Duncan Campbell, Alexie states ‘It’s the only one [of my books] I re-read. I think a book that disturbs me that much is the one I probably care the most about’1. He has expressed dissatisfaction with it, artistically, describing it as a failed mystery novel and ‘pretentious’ for its literary ambitions2. Maya Jaggi writes that he has now distanced himself from the novel and feels ‘overwhelming disgust’ [Alexie’s words] towards the violence portrayed3. Apparent in Reservation Blues, his previous collection of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and his poetry, Alexie’s own rage rises to its peak in this novel, with an outpouring of fictional vengeance for historical crimes.

In previous discussions of Alexie’s work, I have traced the rise and fall of his fundamentalist leanings through his use of racially essentialist identifiers, and in this book that practice, too, rises to its peak. Using the same formula as I have with his other books, I counted the number of direct racial references in 40 randomly selected pages. The number of references was as high as 30 on a single page, and the average worked out to 8.2.

Indian Killer is the story of John Smith, a twenty-seven year old Indian man, adopted at birth by white parents, who may or may not be the ‘Indian Killer’ terrifying the white residents of Seattle. Soon after the opening of the book, a white man is found murdered and scalped. When a white university student is kidnapped from outside of a reservation casino and murdered, his friends seek revenge and threaten to take the city into a race war.
Though Smith is obviously suffering from a severe mental illness, Alexie gives his rage a sense of justice through his imagined violent kidnapping, moments after birth. The kidnapping is portrayed with military precision: a helicopter, a commando-esque figure, a childless white couple waiting expectantly in the wings. This is the ‘mythology’ with which John torments himself from an early age, explaining how he – a brown-skinned child – came to be with white parents.

Although his parents, Daniel and Olivia Smith, are themselves benign, their efforts to nurture a positive Indian identity in John adds to his torment. Unaware of what tribe he has come from, they provide John with a non-specific mix of cultural influences, reading him storybooks about Indians, teaching him words in a variety of Indian languages gleaned ‘[f]rom books, Western movies, documentaries’ (12), and taking him to all-Indian basketball games. As a baby, he is baptised by a Spokane Indian Jesuit priest, a man who was to influence him profoundly. John consequently develops a confused idea of Indianness and realises from a young age that he belongs neither to the white world of his adoptive parents, nor to the Indian world of his unknown birth mother.

At different points throughout the book, John imagines what his life would have been like on the reservation, complete with a loving Indian family. It is an idealised vision of a strong, culturally vibrant, supportive community where everyone is healthy, happy and valued.

Not knowing his own tribal heritage, John tells people who ask what he believes they want to hear. To white people he is Sioux, because Sioux Indians represent the stereotype which white people immediately bring to mind when imagining Indian culture; to other Indians, he claims to be Navajo because they are viewed with a greater degree of respect by other tribes.
Though he attempts to form relationships with other Indians, as seen by his visit to Big Hearts Juice Bar and his association with the student activist, Marie Polatkin, his fragile, fabricated identity prevents him from getting too close. He is also cut off from his adopted family and the men he works with on the construction site of Seattle’s ‘last skyscraper’. The only people with whom he has developed any kind of a long-term bond are Paul and Paul Too, two black men who work in an all-night donut shop. Though John seldom speaks when he is in their company, the men accept his strange behaviour with compassion and humour.

John, however, is not the only character in this book who is filled with rage. Marie Polatkin, an undergraduate student at the University of Washington, incessantly challenges the liberal white professor of her Native American Literature class, Clarence Mather. She is critical of Mather’s choice of texts, memoirs co-authored by white writers, and novels by white men claiming to be Indian. One of these white men is the former Seattle policeman-turned-crime-writer, Jack Wilson.

Orphaned as a child, Wilson took refuge in the study of Indian culture and longed for what he imagined to be a communal utopia. His fantasies are very similar to John’s, and in an attempt at gaining access to a tribal family of his own, he finds – or possibly invents – a distant Shilshomish ancestor.

In Chapter 3, we are told that John has begun thinking about killing a white man ‘but he was not sure which white man was responsible for everything that had gone wrong’ (27). When he strays into a university powwow, he and Marie Polatkin meet for the first time. With trepidation, he agrees to join her in the owl dance, knowing that ‘many Indian tribes believed the owl was a messenger of death’ (37), though his dancing is stiff and self-conscious.

Like John, Marie struggles with her own identity issues. Growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, she was (like Alexie) ‘[a] bright child who read by the age of three’ (33) and became isolated from her peers. While she studied and achieved academically, other children learned their traditional tribal culture – the language, the customs, the easy banter. Now, at university, she sees herself as something less than wholly Indian, and as a student in Seattle has found many other such ‘outcasts from their tribes’ (38).

After leaving the powwow, John walks through a busy street and accidentally bumps into a group of people. A young white man tells John to “watch your step”, then asks if he as “had a few too many” (41). The young man refers to John as ‘chief’, as John’s foreman does, and though in neither case is there obvious malice – or even sarcasm, as Grassian (112) suggests – it is this casual racism which we are led to believe that tips John over the edge. John knows that he is an intimidating figure and plays up to the warrior image, but the young man tries to placate him by flashing a peace sign. The chapter ends with John ‘[c]arefully and silently’ (42) following the young man as he makes his way home.
Alexie leads us, most convincingly, to believe that John is ‘the killer’ though he takes pains to conceal the murderer’s identity. There are, however, other suspects. Both Marie Polatkin and her cousin Reggie, a ‘half-breed’ with blue eyes have their reasons to hate white men, and Marie argues that the killer – called the ‘Indian Killer’ by the media – may not be Indian at all. The suggestion is made a white killer, who scalps his victims and leaves two owl feathers by way of a signature could be carrying out the murders as incitement for a race war.

          When a young boy, Mark Jones, is kidnapped, the reader is reminded of John’s own fantasies of having been kidnapped4, making him the most likely suspect. Though the boy is undoubtedly terrorised during this ordeal, the killer shows a certain amount of compassion and eventually returns the child, unharmed, to his sleeping mother’s arms.
          Throughout the book, Indians are given the moral high ground with other such examples of compassion. This, though, is seen as both a strength and a weakness in character. As a young boy, John had been befriended by Father Duncan, the Spokane Jesuit priest who baptised him. When he was six years old, the priest showed him a stained glass window depicting the martyring of Jesuits by Indians. The priest explains to John that the Indians were trying to force the white people from their lands, and when John asks why the Indians didn’t kill all of the white people the priest replies that “[t]hey didn’t have the heart for it” (14), even though the white men exhibited no such qualms and killed “most of the Indians” (ibid). At the end of the book, we are given a similar anecdote when Reggie, who is hitchhiking, is picked up by a white farmer. He tells the farmer that he is on the run, then tells him about Captain Jack, a Modoc Indian who attempted to lead his people back to their homeland in California and held off the cavalry for months before eventually surrendering in order to save the women and children.
          While the violence perpetrated by ‘the killer’ is brutal, the attacks on homeless Indians, committed by Aaron Rogers in retaliation for the Indian Killer’s supposed killing of his brother, is even more graphic in its intensity, partly due to the overtly racist nature of the attacks and to Aaron’s lustful enjoyment of them. Although he is portrayed as evil, Aaron’s initial desire for revenge is, to some extent, understandable. He lashes out in anger at not having protected his younger brother and is anxious to find someone to blame. Less understandable is the evil committed by the talk radio host, Truck Shultz, a Rush Limbaugh figure, who deliberately sets out to raise emotions and encourage white aggression towards the Indian community.
          At the climax of the book, John has taken Wilson prisoner and is holding him on the upper floor of the vacant skyscraper where he has been working. Wilson, is the one white man John believes he needs to kill. Wilson tries in vain to convince John, as he has convinced himself, that he is not a white man at all but that he, too, is Indian.
          Like Mather, Wilson is representative of the type of white American for whom cultural appropriation is seen to be a positive affirmation of respect, but which is in fact deeply harmful. Both men profit by writing about Indians and presenting false and damaging material for consumption by a gullible white audience. Wilson, a man who is totally sympathetic to the Indian cause is nonetheless seen as being instrumental in the destruction of true Indian identity. After disfiguring Wilson, John leaps to his death, and when questioned by police, Marie Polatkin is adamant that John was not the Indian Killer.
          The final chapter, entitled ‘A Creation Story’ shows that the killer is still alive. In the final scene, the killer performs the Ghost Dance and his strength increases as more and more Indians join the dance – a dance which, if successful, will destroy the white people forever.
Ultimately, the killer is not an individual person but is the ‘spirit’ of the injustice, terror and violence inflicted on Indians from the onset of colonisation. That spirit, the book posits, is immortal and will continue to immerge from time to time until the purpose of the Ghost Dance is realised.

1 Campbell, D. (2002) ‘Voice of the New Tribes’ in Conversations with Sherman Alexie, Nancy Peterson, ed. 2009.

2 Weich, D (2007) ‘Revising Sherman Alexie’ in Conversations with Sherman Alexie, Nancy Peterson, ed. 2009.
3 Jaggi, M. (2008) ‘All Rage and Heart’, The Guardian, 3 May 2008 [online]. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/may/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview13. Accessed: 25/06/10.
4 Prior to the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, reservation children were routinely removed from their birth families, without consent, and place with adoptive white parents

Congratulations to Barbara Kingsolver

2010-06-09T21:32:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Barbara Kingsolver for winning the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction for her novel The Lacuna. Despite the guff from Sherman Alexie, I've ordered myself a copy.

New FaceBook forum for Short Story writers

2010-06-05T08:11:00.005+01:00

I am involved in setting up a new online forum for Postgraduate Creative Writing students working with the Short Story form. The forum is based at the University of Chichester, in West Sussex, but welcomes research students from around the world. The forum, itself, won't go live until September, but the FaceBook group is gathering momentum and we now have students from across the UK and the United States. Once it is up and running, the forum will provide a space for MA and PhD students to come together and share their experiences as writers and academics, test ideas, give and receive feedback on work in progress, and exchange advice and information. The site will include a blog, student-led discussion threads, links to online resources, workshops, and live question and answer sessions with professionals in the writing and publishing community. We are equally interested in engaging in discussions of a critical nature, looking at contemporary literary and cultural theory in relation to the Short Story. Please click on the title link above, or below, and have a look at what we're doing and what we have planned.

FaceBook Rough Draft Forum.

‘Indianness’ and Identity in the Novels and Short Stories of Sherman Alexie

2010-05-27T17:21:00.003+01:00

This essay was presented at the 'Framing the Self: Anxieties of Identity in Literature' conference, sponsored by the Centre of Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth, 21st May. Some of the material included has been adapted from earlier postings.

The Quest for Identity
The quest for identity is the overriding theme in the work of almost all Native writers. Four centuries of colonisation, during which children, mixed and full-blood, were taken from their homes and ‘civilised’ have scoured away nearly all remnants of traditional Indian identity. Sent to boarding schools such as that in Carlisle, Pennsylvania whose motto was ‘Kill the Indian, Save the man’, these children were no longer permitted to speak their own languages, wear their own clothes, or pray to their own gods. Imperfectly assimilated, they lost their voices and their histories, and found themselves balanced between two opposing worlds: the old world where they no longer fully belonged, and the new world in which they would be no more than immigrants, always foreign, always trying to fit in.

Questions of ‘Indianness’ dominate Alexie’s stories, and race is a concern shared by nearly all of his characters. In the early books, in particular, the reader is never allowed to ignore the issue of race nor to identify with his characters simply as people. When I first came to Alexie’s books, I found references to race and ethnicity to be so frequent that I carried out a brief survey, a practice I have continued. Selecting forty pages at random, I count all direct references, including tribal affiliation, blood quantum, and slang. Using this method, I found an average of 2.2 direct references to race per page in The Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven (1993), 3.5 in Reservation Blues (1995), 4.3 in The Toughest Indian in the World (2001), 3.9 in Ten Little Indians (2004), 2.6 in Flight (2007), and 1.6 in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007). Over the course of his career, Alexie’s representation of Indian identity has changed dramatically, moving from the fervent and angry tribalism of his reservation stories, to a sense of otherness in an urban environment, and on to a more pan-Indian and polycultural stance1. This paper will explore the trajectory of racial identity in Alexie’s work and show how his early focus on ethnicity has given way to more universal themes since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Blood Quantum
Blood Quantum is used by the U.S. government to measure a person’s Native ancestry for the purpose of defining their ethnic inheritance and establishing their entitlement to treaty benefits. Many tribes have adopted this system to determine eligibility for tribal membership, requiring a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CIBD), issued by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Tribes, however, are able to set their own minimum requirements so the necessary quanta differ from one nation to another: for some tribes including the Eastern Band of Cherokees, as little as 1/16th tribal ancestry is needed, while others require as much as ½. Among the Native population, there is a great deal of debate about this issue, particularly as it allows an outside body to decide one’s ethnic identity. According to US Census Bureau statistics, approximately 2.5 million people are full-blood American Indian or Alaska Native, with a further 1.6 million being of mixed Native and non-Native decent2.

Throughout Alexie’s work, he poses the question: What is Indian? Is one Indian by simple fact of ancestry? Can one truly be Indian if they don’t speak the language of their forefathers or practice traditional beliefs? Can one be a real Indian away from the reservation?

Reservation Blues
In Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues (1995), the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson arrives at the Spokane Indian reservation in search of healing from the seemingly immortal spiritual matriarch Big Mom, a musical genius who taught Elvis, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Johnson leaves his guitar, an instrument that has been possessed since he made his pact with the devil, with Thomas Builds-the-Fire. The guitar speaks to Thomas, telling him to form a band with his friends, Victor and Junior. Thus Johnson’s Faustian contract is transferred to the new band, ‘Coyote Springs’. With more than a little help from Johnson’s guitar, the band quickly gains a following, including two white groupies, Indian wannabes Betty and Veronica. As Coyote Springs’ reputation grows, they are invited to play at the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. There, they meet Chess and Checkers Warm Water who join the band to sing backing vocals. Later, when Chess catches Victor and Junior having sex with the white women, she accuses them of betraying their DNA (pp. 81-82). The debate about interracial relationships and mixed-blood inheritance is one which Alexie returns to time after time.

After two executives from Cavalry Records arrive at the reservation to hear Coyote Springs play, the band is invited to New York to audition for the record company boss. Indians are enjoying a wave of popularity in the music business and Cavalry Records is eager to cash in on the trend with an all-Indian act. Johnson’s guitar, however, the force behind the band’s rise, no longer performs and when they fail the audition, the band implodes. Betty and Veronica, however, have also been approached by the record label on the strength of being one-quarter Indian.

Knowing that their Indian connections are tenuous at best, Veronica protests, telling the record company executive, ‘We ain’t that much Indian.’ With a nod to blood-quantum laws, she is told ‘You’re Indian enough, right? I mean, all it takes is a little bit, right? Who’s to say you’re not Indian enough?’ (p. 272).

Towards the end of the book, Chess, who is concerned about the dilution of Indian blood from mixed-relationships, takes the opposite view. Seeing a white woman with a mixed-blood son, she tells her: ‘Your son will be beaten because he’s a half-breed....No matter what he does, he’ll never be Indian enough’ (p. 283). Chess wants to protect the child, but more than that she wants to protect the tribe from the growing number of ‘quarter-bloods and eighth-bloods [who] get all the Indian jobs, all the Indian chances, because they look white’ (ibid). Mixed-bloods are viewed both as victim, and villain, undesirable and damaging to the tribe. In his own life, Alexie (who is ¾ Indian) claims to have ‘made a conscious decision to marry a fellow [N]ative American’ and has stated that he would prefer that his children do the same (Campbell, 2003).

Toughest Indian in the World
The nine stories in The Toughest Indian in the World (2001) move off the reservation into the urban environments of Spokane and Seattle. The ‘urban Indians’ at the heart of these stories are educated, middle class and sober, and outwardly at least, they are fully integrated into the dominant white society. For most, however, race is ‘a constant presence’ (p. 14), and whether they are involved in mixed relationships or not, they find themselves caught between two worlds in which they can never fully belong.

· Class
In ‘Class’, Edgar Eagle Runner, a lawyer, meets and marries Susan McDermott. Her white family boycott the wedding, but his ‘dark-skinned mother’ is ‘overjoyed’ by his choice of bride:
She’d always wanted me to marry a white woman and beget half-breed children who would marry white people who would beget quarter-bloods, and so on and so on, until simple mathematics killed the Indian in us (p. 40).

Grassian suggests that this desire for pale-skinned descendants is evidence of Edgar’s mother’s self-loathing (p. 163), but I would argue that it is simply an acknowledgement that life would be easier if these children were seen (and saw themselves) as white. ‘[W]hen I think about Indians,’ Alexie has said, ‘all I think about is suffering. My first measure of any Indian is pain’ (Nygren, 2004).

When Edgar discovers that his wife has had an affair, he begins to patronise prostitutes whenever he is away on business. In San Francisco, he phones an escort agency and asks if they have an Indian woman. By this time he has slept with seventeen prostitutes, ‘all of them (like his wife) blond and blue-eyed’ but admits that he’d never had sex with an Indian woman (Alexie, p. 43). When a white woman wearing a long black wig shows up at his hotel room he declares that she is his last prostitute.

In another attempt to reconnect with his Indian roots and find a community where he truly belongs, Edgar visits a bar frequented by Indians. There, he argues with a man and accepts a challenge to fight. He is desperate to prove himself worthy and justifies entering into a brawl he knows he cannot win because ‘[d]eep in the heart of the heart of every Indian man’s heart, he believes he is Crazy Horse’ (p. 53).

When he wakes in the backroom of the bar, Sissy, the Indian bartender, is washing blood from his face. Still anxious to be accepted by another Indian, he makes a pass at her, but she quickly reproaches him. Sissy realises what Edgar does not: though they are both Indian, they are from different worlds.

Ten Little Indians
Ten Little Indians (2004) is the first collection to be written after September 11, 2001, and in numerous interviews, Alexie has discussed the way the events of that day changed the focus of his work. Where many of his earlier stories were tainted with an antagonistic ‘them and us’ tribalism which examined the minutiae of Native American adversity, the stories produced after that date incorporate a broader, more universal view of the human condition. While his protagonists are still almost exclusively Indian, their personal traumas are not defined by, nor the result of their ethnicity. They are human beings first, and Indian by accident of birth. It is this breaking down of old tribal affiliations – affiliations that encourage an unwavering sense of righteousness – that sets this collection apart from Alexie’s previous books.

· The Search Engine
In 'The Search Engine', nineteen-year-old Corliss sees herself as being different from the other members of her tribe. She is solitary and bookish in a communal society of blue-collar sensibilities. After straying across a book of poems by Harlan Atwater, a previously unheard-of Spokane Indian, she sets off on what Jennifer Ladino describes as a modern-day vision quest, in search of the author and her own identity (Ladino, 2009). What she finds, of course, is not what she expects, for Atwater who was adopted out of the tribe and raised by white parents, is Indian in DNA only. At the end, both are left struggling with the question ‘What is Indian?’

Two stories, 'Can I Get a Witness' and 'Flight Patterns', deal explicitly with the after-effects of 9/11. In the former, an unnamed middle-class Spokane Indian woman is having lunch in a Seattle restaurant when a suicide bomber walks in off the street and detonates the bomb strapped to his chest. At its centre, the story criticises America’s indulgence in what Alexie describes as ‘grief porn’ (p. 91) which flowed from the media after the 9/11 tragedy, and questions the way that those who died were treated as heroes. When the woman suggests that some of those killed may have deserved to die and that somewhere a wife or a daughter ‘thanks God or Allah or the devil for Osama’s rage’ her rescuer repeatedly says ‘I don’t want to hear it’ (p. 93).

Since September 11, 2001, Alexie has frequently spoken about the dangers of tribalism and how his position with regards to his own tribal identity has changed. It was tribalism which caused men to crash planes into the Twin Towers and it was tribalism which prevented Americans from asking why people would do such a thing. When George W. Bush said to the world, ‘You’re either with us or against us’ he not only stifled debate, but also set in place the rules for membership of his particular tribe of patriotic Americans. By refusing to consider the woman’s argument, that some who died in the Twin Towers were themselves guilty of heinous acts, the man in the story is protecting his place within the tribe.

Absolutely True Diary
Many of Alexie’s stories contain thinly veiled references to his own experiences. In the young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), fourteen-year-old Junior, was – like Alexie – born with hydrocephalus, and – like Alexie – witnessed numerous family tragedies while growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Also like Alexie, Junior finds his mother’s name printed inside a school textbook. This experience spurs them both into seeking a better education at a school in the white farming community of Reardan, Washington, twenty-two miles away. Describing the transition from the reservation school to Reardan, Junior says:

     I woke up on the reservation as an Indian, and somewhere on the road to Reardan, I became something less than Indian.
    And once I arrived at Reardan, I became something less than less than less than Indian. (p. 83)

Junior realises that there is no hope for him on the reservation, and that if he is to have a chance at a better life, he must find a place for himself in the white world (p. 217). Placed chronologically in real time, this story marks Alexie’s own early search for identity.

Drawing heavily on his own childhood experiences, but written after 9/11, we see how Alexie’s idea of identity has expanded to include more than ethnicity. As Junior reflects on who and what he is, a new type of tribalism begins to emerge, tribes based on shared humanity rather than fundamentalism:

     I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants3. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookworms.

And the tribe of cartoonists.

And the tribe of chronic masturbators.

And the tribe of teenage boys.

And the tribe of small-town kids.

And the tribe of Pacific Northwesterners.

And the tribe of tortilla chips-and-salsa lovers.

And the tribe of poverty.

And the tribe of funeral-goers.

And the tribe of beloved sons.

And the tribe of boys who really missed their best friends. (p. 217)

War Dances
The shift in Alexie’s perspective of identity becomes dramatically evident in War Dances (2009), his latest collection of stories and poems. In it, references to race plummet to just 0.6 per page – a startling change and evidence of Alexie’s transformation into something more than an Indian writer. For the first time, there are two stories in which the protagonist’s ethnic origins remain entirely unstated – an acknowledgement that there are universal themes which rise above culture and race. That is not to say, however, that being Indian is no longer important.
In the title story, the narrator experiences an inexplicable deafness in one ear, and worries that his childhood hydrocephalus may be returning, or that a tumour is growing inside his brain. As he contemplates his own mortality he remembers the death of his father from diabetes and alcoholism.

Recalling an incident during his father’s last stay in hospital, the narrator ponders the role which nostalgia plays in Indian society, dismissing it at first as a ‘false idol’ (p. 37) that provides only a ‘thin blanket’ of comfort (ibid)4. As he goes in search of a literal blanket, to keep his ailing father warm, he meets a Lummi man whose daughter is about to give birth. The soon-to-be grandfather has created a ‘new tradition’ (p. 35) and performs a naming ceremony for he unborn child. As he gives the narrator a Pendleton blanket, the Lummi man insists on blessing it with a healing song. The narrator thinks little of the old man’s spiritual power, but when his own father breaks into a healing song for himself, he feels compelled to join in. The song, he knows will give only temporary comfort, but he realises now that temporary is ‘sometimes good enough’ (p. 40).

With this collection, Alexie has left behind his fundamentalist expressions of identity and replaced them with universal experiences of grief and hope and love and fear. Regardless of race, religion, or any of the other tribes which human beings have devised to separate us from each other, there is still a common humanity which binds us together. At last, it seems that the answer to Alexie’s question – what is an Indian? – has been answered: an Indian is a human being.

Endnotes

1 The term polyculturalism was coined by Vijay Prashad in Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting (2001) as an alternative to multiculturalism which he believes is divisive and leads to racism.

2 United States Census Bureau [online] available at: http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/c2kbr01-15.pdf accessed 16 May 2010.

3 Alexie describes the way that Native Americans, today, are being assimilated into contemporary American society – through popular culture and urbanisation – as similar to the experience of foreign immigrants.

4 The idea that nostalgia has a corrosive and deadly affect was previously voiced by Preacher in ‘What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church’ in Ten Little Indians, p. 228.

Bibliography

Alexie, S. (1996) Reservation Blues. London: Minerva.

Alexie, S. (1997) The Lone-Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. London: Vintage.

Alexie, S. (2001) The Toughest Indian in the World. London: Vintage.

Alexie, S. (2004) Ten Little Indians. London: Secker & Warburg.

Alexie, S. (2007) The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. London: Anderson Press.

Alexie, S. (2009) War Dances. New York: Grove Press.

Allam, L. (2006) Reservation to Riches: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie. In N.J. Peterson, ed. Conversations With Sherman Alexie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009, pp 157-168.

Campbell, D. (2003) Voice of the New Tribes. In N.J. Peterson, ed. Conversations with Sherman Alexie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009, pp 113-120.

Frank, R. (2001) ‘Sherman Alexie In Conversation with Ross Frank PhD’ [online] Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWolPAoDk3g [Accessed 8 May 2009].

Grassian, D. (2005) Understanding Sherman Alexie. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.

Jones, L. (2004) William Clark and the Shaping of the West. New York: Hill and Wang.

Ladino, J.K. (2009) ”A Limited Rage of Motion?”: Multiculturalism, “Human Questions,” and Urban Indian Identity in Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians. Studies in American Indian Literatures Vol 21, No 3 pp 36-57.

Nygren, A. (2004) A World of Story-Smoke: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie. In N.J. Peterson, ed. Conversations With Sherman Alexie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009, pp 141-156.

Review of Sherman Alexie's War Dances

2010-05-17T00:42:00.002+01:00

My review of War Dances, Sherman Alexie's latest collection of poetry and short stories, has just been published in Western American Literature, Vol 45, No 1, Spring 2010. The article is available on Project Muse.

Voices of the American West: Striving for Authenticity

2010-05-17T00:26:00.001+01:00

Introduction

As part of my research project, I am writing a novel set in the American West, with historical and contemporary narratives. From the outset, I have had two major concerns: how to access an accurate and authentic historical voice; and how to represent a Native American character in a culturally authentic manner. This paper will provide a context for those questions and look at the ways in which I have addressed them in my research.

The Importance of Authenticity in Western American Literature

No other region-based literature, and certainly no other genre is as concerned with the issue of authenticity as is literature of the American West. Even historical fiction, the form most closely associated with representations of actual people and factual events is at ease with supposition and probability. Western fiction, however, is often seen to regard its subject as if it were a holy relic, to be revered and scrutinized, but not to be tampered with in any way. Since Owen Wister published The Virginian, considered to be the first Western novel, in 1902, writers of the American West have been at pains to adhere to the known facts, reluctant to fabricate or experiment with alternative histories. Authenticity, not creativity, is viewed as the primary criteria for evaluating this literature. And so we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to be ‘authentic’?

According to Nathaniel Lewis, western literature strives to achieve what Baudrillard refers to as the ‘production of the real’, weaving history and mythology together into a fabricated reality. The evidence of this production is then so thoroughly erased that the reader comes to believe that what is contrived is in fact true. Western literature fabricates a history which people want to believe, and because they believe, it becomes authentic (Lewis, 192). Authenticity, therefore, is more than just the simple reproduction or imitation of the original, but is in fact the creation of something which is itself, real (Lewis, p 5).

What is ‘The West’ and Western American Literature?
From the beginning, literature of the American West was presented in a way that was historically faithful. Because it was grounded in specific detail with place names, dates, and historical figures and events that were already known to the reader, it achieved a level of authenticity that other regional literatures did not.

Many of the early writers whose works fill the canon of western literature, including Owen Wister and Willa Cather, were not, however, Westerners themselves. These writers were born and lived most of their lives in the East, yet they identified with the idea of the West and helped to develop the mythology of exploration and adventure in a new land where one could start life all over again.

Their claims to authenticity were helped by the fact that they were writing about a ‘vanished world’ (Wister, 1955, ix), a world which the reader could only visit in the pages of a book. What’s more, these early novels were written for an Eastern audience with no personal experience of life in the West, but plenty of romantic notions. Readers wanted confirmation that the West was indeed as they imagined, and the early writers provided them with the dramatic landscapes and heroic characters they needed.

Like Cather, who was born in Virginia, and spent all but twelve years of her life living in the East, many contemporary writers who find themselves linked to ‘the American West’ grew up in the Eastern part of the country. Barbara Kingsolver was born in Maryland and grew up in Kentucky, but has created a literary home for herself in Arizona; Annie Proulx lived most of her life along the eastern seaboard before moving west in 1994 and writing three volumes of Wyoming stories; Richard Ford grew up in Mississippi and Arkansas, and lived a somewhat nomadic existence before moving to Montana where the majority of his stories are set.

The West itself, however, has never been situated in a static geographical location. It has, from the start of European settlement in North America, always had a retreating frontier. In its earliest guise, it encompassed all but the thinnest margin along the eastern edge of the continent. Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio – all states now firmly entrenched in the East – lay beyond the frontier within a vast unknown. When I was at school in the1970s, American schoolchildren were taught that the West encompassed everything between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean, a definition which I, living a thousand miles to the west of the river boundary, found somewhat confusing. Until the early part of the twentieth century, the frontier receded physically with each new wave of white settlement pushing it ever closer to the Pacific coast. Since then, it has retreated from us in time. Consequently, the meaning of ‘the West’ has changed, and continues to change on a regular basis.

It is no surprise, then, that Literature of the American West has an equally vague definition, and includes works set in such diverse locations as the Nebraska prairies, Arizona deserts and coastal rainforests. What unites them within a single genre is their concern with place, and their realistic representations of landscape.

The Importance of Place

Western writing is tied to place more than any other regional form. As we read the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel, or an Annie Proulx short story, we traverse a world filled with iconic images: startlingly red deserts, jagged mountain peaks, and arid expanses of sagebrush or hip-high winter wheat. It is a world of wide-open spaces and unpopulated places, where characters come and go, but the land remains – regardless. In the West, landscape offers opportunities and challenges: it is something to be conquered or overcome, harnessed and transformed; a setting both for dreams and postmodern nightmares.

In writing of the West, landscape is not a mere backdrop, providing scenic vistas. Being distinct and specific, it is linked so closely with character and plot that the story cannot simply be lifted up and transplanted to another location. Landscape is integral to story, and without attention to this key element, there is no authenticity.

Historical Authenticity

As well as authenticity of place, the writer must consider questions of historical authenticity and ask: how much responsibility does the fiction writer have to represent real people and real events accurately? A writer of science fiction, magical realism, or romantic comedy would probably not be expected to adhere to the ‘truth’, even when working with an historical subject. As discussed, authenticity is crucial to the western novel and readers of the genre are well-known for picking out flaws in a novel’s factual content.

There is, however, an artistic need to strike a balance between authenticity and readability. Between 1934 and 1989, the amateur historian Zoa L. Swayne collected Nez Perce stories originating from around the time of first contact, some coming from the descendents of Nez Perce who met Lewis and Clark, some from interviews with early pioneers who had been told the stories by Nez Perce friends, and others from newspaper reports. Though her book, Do Them No Harm! (1990) is written in the style of a novel, Swayne goes to great lengths to demonstrate the book’s historical authenticity by providing eighteen pages of endnotes and appendices, four pages of bibliography, and bracketed translations of Nez Perce words within the text. Drawing heavily on the journals kept by the men of the Corps of Discovery, she knits together the numerous anecdotes in her collection. The result is a narrative, which, like all historical novels, is part fiction and part fact, but her strict historian’s presentation creates a major challenge for the reader. Her book is difficult to read simply as a story, which, despite the demand for ‘real history’, is what most readers of the genre wish to do.

Another difficulty in Swayne’s novel surrounds the lack of distinction between fiction and non-fiction. While the authorial notes about Nez Perce customs and references to source material give the writing historical credibility, the inclusion of undocumented material is presented in the same emphatic manner. The danger is that this imaginative content will be received by the reader as being factual and that it will come to be accepted as historically accurate.

This danger is further illustrated in a subsequent novel by the writer Pat Decker Nipper (Love on the Lewis and Clark Trail, 2004) which again makes use of a number of respected historical texts to strengthen its claim to historical authenticity, but draws its storyline almost entirely from five pages of Swayne’s book, and focuses primarily on the imaginative content. Fiction writers are well-known as packrats, gathering ideas from many different sources, borrowing one another’s characters, and developing one another’s plots. Because both books claim historical authenticity, the casual reader will undoubtedly confuse fiction with fact, resulting in the muddying of already murky historical waters.

Cultural Appropriation

This leads me on to what is possibly my greatest concern in the writing of my own novel. The historical narrative I am writing centres around an actual Native American figure about whom very little is known – Halahtookit, the Nez Perce son of the explorer William Clark. Many fiction writers would rejoice at such a find – an intriguing ‘character’ which they can manipulate to their own ends without the worry of being criticised for historical inaccuracy. But in writing about a real Nez Perce personage – particularly so because I am not from the Nez Perce community – I am treading upon culturally sensitive ground. Like New Agers wafting sweetgrass smoke during imitation ‘cleansing rituals’, fiction writers are too often guilty of cultural appropriation and the misrepresentation of historical events and people. Swayne’s novel is an example of how the written word can acquire an authority it doesn’t deserve. As soon as something is written down, regardless of its factual content, it achieves a sense of permanence. And as that ‘information’ is transferred to conversations, student essays, web pages and books, that permanence, and its perceived authenticity, is strengthened. A lie told often enough becomes truth: Baudrillard’s ‘production of the real’.

It is partly for this reason, I believe, that the Spokane Indian writer Sherman Alexie is so critical of non-Native writers who write about Native American characters. He is quoted in numerous interviews, referring to Larry McMurtry, Tony Hillerman and Barbara Kingsolver, as ‘colonial writers’ who appropriate Native voices. Being ‘outsiders’ to Native communities, Alexie asserts that they possess neither the cultural knowledge nor the experiential insight to accurately portray Native American lives. He defends portrayals of white characters in his own writing, however, by claiming to know what it is like to be white. In an interview in the Iowa Review he states: ‘I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day’ (Fraser, 2001). This seems a reasonable statement, but the difficulty with Alexie’s cultural rule for writers is that it limits people to writing only about those things with which they have direct experience. It follows then, that ‘fiction’ would be reliant solely upon strictly autobiographical content. Such a situation would be an anathema to the creative community.

Alexie is not just critical of non-Native writers who attempt to write about Indian characters, however. He is equally dismissive of Native writers who perpetuate the romantic trope of the noble Indian by continuing to use cultural images which he believes are no longer relevant in contemporary Native American society (Fraser, 2000). Alexie has built a career on portrayals of contemporary Indians in contemporary settings, on and off the reservation, but he in turn has been criticised by Native writers of perpetuating the far less positive stereotype of the Indian figure visited by tragedy and self-destruction. Lewis Owens and Gloria Bird have both expressed their concerns that Alexie’s choice of negative images is more destructive than the enduring romanticism of White liberals (Bernardin in Lewis 2003, p166).

There is, in fact, another strand to the authenticity debate, focusing on Native American writers and writers of mixed Native and non-Native ancestry, which has caused many critics to question what being an Indian actually means, and what entitles a person to be known as an Indian writer. Some would argue that being Indian is simply down to genetics, that one’s ancestry is the sole determinant, while others, such as Alexie, dismiss mixed-blood writers like William Least Heat-Moon, who have had little connection with reservation life, as ‘Indian-esque’ (Cole, 2003). But I will leave this complex debate on Nature vs Nurture, tribal enrolment and blood-quantum for another paper.

Perhaps, though, we should question this preoccupation with authenticity and the value placed on it in the evaluation of literature. By clinging to what is perceived as ‘real’ and attempting to replicate it, and only it on the page, Western literature rejects the influence of other voices and is at risk of atrophy. Lewis argues that ‘because western writers so often stake their claims based on the authenticity of their work, rather than, say, creativity or individuality, they are left with a strange and largely unproductive form of literary inheritance’ (2003, p 10). The concern for authenticity, and the cultural reluctance to stray off the well-trod path into the realms of invention limits us to regurgitation and repetition. The ‘burden of authenticity’, Lewis warns, is a trap in which the mythological West, the West that was or the West we are told existed once in a heroic past, takes precedence over a writer’s attempts to discover a new literary territory.

In recent decades, the romantic view of the West, where individualism is reined-in by personal integrity and ‘progress’ is always good, has been torn apart by writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx. The contemporary view of the past is a sceptical one in which we have come to suspect the motives of the guy in the white cowboy hat. McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian and Proulx’s short story collection Close Range, are just two examples of the postmodern nature of contemporary western fiction which subverts heroic representations of the West. Gone are the valient images of honour, redemption and progress. Gone is the West where the men are invulnerable, emotionally self-reliant and unquestionably masculine.

In my own literary endeavours, I continue to return to the question – can a non-Native writer, living outside the Native community, ever write authentically about Native experience? Appropriation of voice does not just extend to questions of ethnicity, of course, but also to questions of individuality. It is equally justifiable to ask if a writer can ever get inside the head of a character which is not autobiographically based. Undoubtedly there are many hazards in taking on a viewpoint outside of one’s own experience, but with careful research and attention to cultural accuracy, the answer must be yes.

Fiction is fiction, after all, and I have not set out to write a history of the Nez Perce people, or a biography of Halahtookit. Perhaps, however, a new definition of authenticity is called for – one in which invention, not just reproduction is seen to provide a new, but equally valid perspective on reality.

Bibliography

Cole, W. (2003) Sherman Alexie in Conversation with Williams Cole. In N.J. Perterson, ed (2009). Conversations With Sherman Alexie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 106-112.

Cormier, L. (2009) Cultural Appropriation: It’s Not Only Your Story. Historical Novels Review, 48, pp. 6-9.

Fraser, J. (2000) An Interview with Sherman Alexie. In N.J. Peterson, ed (2009). Conversations With Sherman Alexie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 83-95.

Handley, W.R. and Nathaniel Lewis, eds. (2003) True West: Authenticity and the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Ibold, H. (2000) The Toughest Indian in the World: An interview with poet, novelist, filmmaker Sherman Alexie. Idaho Mountain Express [online] 21 June. Available at: http://www.mtexpress.com/2000/06-21-00/6-21alexie.htm [accessed 12 April 2010].

Lewis, N. (2003) Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Nipper, P.D. (2004) Love on the Lewis and Clark Trail. San Jose: Syringa Books.

Owens, L. (1992) Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Wister, O. (1902) The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains. Reprint (1955). New York: MacMillan.

Two Publications in One Week

2010-04-29T13:51:00.004+01:00

Many thanks this week to Steve O'Brien, editor of London Magazine, for publishing my reviews of Amnesty International's short story anthology Freedom, and Hassan Blasim's collection The Madman of Freedom Square. Thanks also to Marlow Peerse Weaver for publishing my story Bastard in volume 8 of the series In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself.

Personal Identity and the Formation of a Concept of Self

2010-04-08T09:29:00.006+01:00

One of the things that I’m exploring, in both my novel and in my thesis, is the idea of identity: what it is; how it is developed; and how it changes throughout a person’s life. This search for self-discovery is a common theme in fiction, particularly so where issues of race are involved. Sherman Alexie, for instance, has built his whole career on writing about characters who are caught between two cultures, trying to find out who they are, who they ally themselves with, and where they fit into the world they inhabit.

Sociologists tell us that identity can be described in a number of ways, including as an external perception of the individual by those around him, as a contrast to an Other, and as the individual’s own perception of self. Though these definitions are interconnected, for the purposes of this discussion I will primarily focus on the last.

There are many factors which contribute to our perception of self, including nationality, race, gender, social class, occupation, family position, personality traits, age, religion, and political allegiance. Each of these factors will have a greater or lesser degree of importance to each individual, playing a greater or lesser role in the way in which the individual sees himself.

Some of these factors, such as ethnicity and gender, are genetically imposed upon us at birth, and only through extreme measures like gender reassignment, can they be altered. Some, such as age, occupation, education, and family position change naturally over the course of a lifetime. Many others, including nationality and political allegiance, are subject to voluntary change. On a physical level, one can choose, or at least affect the appearance of, hair and skin color, and the shape of one’s body. In addition, there are factors which may come and go during our lives, such as involvement with social groups and activities. Sometimes these involvements are short-lived or ephemeral, particularly when they are inspired by celebrity or fashion. Often, however, when these involvements become true passions, they become as much a part of who we are as those factors we inherit, possibly more so because we have chosen them and desire to be seen as belonging to a group of like-minded adherents.

In the modern world, one can choose to align oneself with any number of options, developing and reinventing identities at different points in life. One can choose to be a member of the Women’s Institute, a Goth, a Christian, a supporter of Manchester United, a writer, a cyclist, a care giver, a rugby player, a Conservative, or indeed any combination of an almost unlimited number of possible identities. In his essay, ‘Popular culture and construction of postmodern identities’, Douglas Kellner writes that identity has become complicated by an ever-increasing number of options. The expanded possibilities with which people, today, are faced can lead to anxiety ‘[f]or one is never certain that one has made the right choice, that one has chosen one’s “true” identity’ (p142).

On Being an Other

Kathryn Woodward (1997) describes identification as ‘…the process of identifying with others, either through lack of awareness of differences or separation, or as a result of perceived similarities…’ (p14). As it relates to belonging, identity involves an emotional investment with or attachment to a group, and this leads on to the formation of the idea of ‘us’ and ‘them’. As the number of possible social allegiances expands, however, Kellner asserts that so does the individual’s need to be recognized by other members of the group to which he belongs (p142). Referring to Riesman et al (1950), he writes that the individual ‘is dependent upon others for recognition and thus for the establishment of personal identity’ (ibid). The individual’s view of himself is shaped, in part, by the group’s perception of the individual and by the perception of people outside the group. Because others recognize us as being part of the group, we come to see ourselves in the same way. Conversely, we are also recognized as not belonging to certain other groups. In this way, identity is determined as much by the groups with which we associate ourselves as it is by the groups with which we don’t: it is determined as much by what we are not as it is by what we are.

Growing up in the United States, my own identity was not defined so much by my status as an American, as by my status as a western American. Of even reater geographical importance was the state in which I was born and raised. In America, my identity was largely shaped by my allegiance to Idaho; in Idaho, my identity was refined still further by my allegiance to the northern part of the state. In the UK, however, where I am instantly recognized as an American, my nationality now plays a more significant factor in the way I define myself. This aspect of my identity sets me apart from those around me, and although it is not something which I have deliberately sought to cultivate, I have found that this perception of Otherness has increased, not decreased, in the more than two decades that I have lived here. Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it has played an even greater part in the way in which I see myself. Though this self-perception waxes and wanes, after living more than half my life in the UK, I see myself more as an American now than I did at any time prior to 2001. This part of my identity is influenced not so much by my similarities with those around me, as it is by the differences.

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Identity in Traditional Societies

In traditional societies, identity is largely fixed from birth by a set of established social roles. The individual is subordinate to the group, conforming to the roles and expectations which have developed over millennia for the benefit of the community as a whole. Writing about individuals born into traditional communities, Kellner states that ‘[o]ne was born and died a member of one’s clan, a member of a fixed kinship system, and a member of one’s tribe or group with one’s trajectory fixed in advance’ (Lash and Friedman, 1992). In this system of predefined roles and fixed identities, he asserts, there is little opportunity, expectation or desire for change, and ‘[i]ndividuals did not undergo identity crises, or radically modify their identity’ (ibid).

Although Halahtookit was half white, it is my belief that he would have identified himself solely as Nez Perce and would not have experienced the level of cultural anxiety expressed by many contemporary people of mixed-race. What is more, while he was raised with the absence of a biological father, it is my assertion that his traditional society would have filled that void with surrogates. In addition to this, oral history reports that the Nez Perce experience of the Corps of Discovery was by in large a positive one. One can assume, therefore, that Halahtookit learned about Clark and the circumstances of his birth via the oral tradition of passing on tribal history. Otis Halfmoon describes Clark’s son as a ‘tie’ which the Nez Perce had with Lewis and Clark and that this tie was one of the reasons the Nez Perce worked to preserve good relations with the white trappers and settlers who followed. http://lewis-clark.org/content/content-article.asp?ArticleID=991

(A full discussion of Native American Identity and Blood Quantum will follow)

My Two Magna Cartas

2010-03-13T11:08:00.003Z

Two years ago I wrote my first novel in thirty painful days, following Chris Baty's NaNoWriMo model. It was a dystopian story about a world in which a seemingly benign state deftly removes those of its citizens which it deems to be the unproductive – the disabled, the ill, and the elderly. It has all been done before, of course, but I like to think that my story added something new to the genre, a contemporary comment about ruling a society through fear and the way in which religion can be used to either keep people in check or stir them into action. I like to think that there is a germ of something really quite good hiding within that 50,000 words, and one day I'll go back and salvage what I can and build it into something great.

Baty's book, No Plot? No Problem: A Low-stress, High-velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days, chivvies participants along with a combination of good-natured pep talks of the you-can-do-it variety and stern advice on overcoming 'writer's block' through the discipline of daily writing. One of the exercises I found most insightful was an examination of the books I like to read and those I am apt to dismiss.

In a chapter entitled 'The Two Magna Cartas', the reader/writer is encouraged to make a list of the qualities he enjoys in a novel. Baty calls this list the Magna Carta, and suggests that the qualities one appreciates as a reader will be the qualities one excels at, as a writer.

As a way of reminding myself where my priorities should be as I struggle with my second attempt at novel writing, here is my Magna Carta I.

These are the things I enjoy in novels:

Third-person, present tense narration;
Unreliable first-person narrators;
A distinct narrative voice;
Multiple viewpoints;
Non-linear plots;
Short chapters;
Playing with language;
Beautifully constructed sentences;
Psychological conflict;
A search for identity;
A big, unseen enemy;
Landscape;
Landscapes that mirror emotional conflicts;
Rural settings;
Character-driven stories;
Puzzles;
Protagonists who are on the outside;
Protagonists seeking forgiveness;
Characters on the edge of madness;
Characters struggling with religious/moral issues;
Protagonists racked with guilt;
Flawed characters;
Punchy dialogue;
Dream-like narratives;
Implausible events made real;
Finely crafted imagery;
Ambiguous endings;
Positive, life-affirming messages.

Baty describes Magna Carta II as the ‘Evil Twin’ – a list of all those things which I, as a reader, find unappealing in a novel. Here’s my list:

Protagonists I don’t connect with or don’t care about;
Nasty characters without redeemable qualities;
Two-dimensional characters who serve only one purpose in a story;
Gratuitous anything;
The writer’s pomposity showing through in the narration;
Preaching – messages which are too obvious or overworked;
Teenaged angst;
Middle-aged angst;
Endless descriptions that don’t serve a purpose within the plot;
Mute characters in particular, and lack of dialogue in general;
Anything with ninjas;
Simplistic plots of good vs evil;
Interesting strands of plot which are not fully explored or are simply dropped midway.