A Trek Back in Time


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Gathering historical research on William Clark's Nez Perce son

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During the past year, I have been attempting to gather all available information about William Clark’s supposed Nez Perce son, variously known as Tzi-Kal-Tza, Halahtookit, Al-pa-to-kate, Daytime Smoke(r), and Son of Daytime Smoker. The name I find the most poignant, however, the name that links into my research on personal identity, is the one he is said to have called himself – Clark (Moulton, vol 7, p 241). * The idea for my project started to emerge about ten years ago, when I visited the Nez Perce Historical Museum in my hometown of Lewiston, Idaho. Among the exhibits were collections of artifacts from early white settlers, the Nez Perce tribe, and the Lewis and Clark expedition which passed through the region twice: in September 1805, on their way to the west coast; and in May 1806, on their return journey to St. Louis. As I grew up in Lewiston, I thought I knew the history of the area fairly well, but tucked into a display of beaded gauntlets and stone tools was a piece of i
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A Discussion of Sherman Alexie's novel, Indian Killer

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          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 ambitions 2 . Maya Jaggi writes that he has now distanced himself from the novel and feels ‘overwhelming disgust’ [Alexie’s words] towards the violence portrayed 3 . 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.  
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The Significance of Landscape in Literature of the American West

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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, bu
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