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Native American novels and novelists exist in a complex historical and critical context. There are approximately 310 distinct Native American cultures existing in the continental United States, using languages from seven different language families. Speaking of Native Americans or Indians as though the members of various tribal societies hold a singular worldview comes from faulty and uninformed thinking. Native American novelists often identify themselves first according to their tribal affiliation, then according to their indigenous identity, and finally in terms of their American citizenship. Such categories, however, become further complicated by the question, "What, exactly, is an Indian?" in terms of blood quantum, participation in tribal communities, and degrees of assimilation into Western cultural ways, including conversion to Christianity.

Native American peoples, historically, have experienced gross injustice. Precontact estimates for American Indian populations in North America are 15 million (Stiffarm and Lane, 27). Disease, warfare, genocidal policies, and U.S. government legislation against traditional cultural practices reduced Native populations to 10 percent of their original numbers.

Many Native novelists recount the impact on their people of numerous laws passed against them by the U.S. government. Among the laws most frequently referred to in Native fiction are the following: The Indian Removal Act (1830), The Major Crimes Act (1885), The General Allotment Act (1887), The Indian Citizen Act (1924), The Indian Reorganization Act (1934), The Indian Claims Commission Act (1946), The Termination Act (1953), The Relocation Act (1956), and The American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978). Essentially, these laws forced various Indian tribes to move from their immemorial tribal lands to "Indian Territory" (Oklahoma); forced tribal governments to adhere to American legal ideologies; allotted portions of communal lands to individual tribal members (thus becoming taxable property); left all other Indian lands open for homesteading; forced U.S. citizenship onto members of indigenous nations; and reorganized traditional tribal systems of government into councils patterned after corporate leadership. In other words, Native peoples have generally been denied self-determination.

The history of Native American novels is often divided between works written before and after N. Scott Momaday's 1969 Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn. Edward M. Bruner says that before 1970, the story told by anthropologists about American Indians was that "the present was disorganization, the past was glorious [or barbaric--noble or savage], and the future assimilation." After 1970, the story took on a "sharp epistemological break," where "the present was resistance, the past was exploitation, and the future was ethnic resurgence" (Bruner, 18). While any attempt to reduce an entire body of works to simple thematic descriptions is fraught with flaws, Bruner's descriptions are useful in describing the ways that academics have read Native experiences, including Native authors.

Few novels by American Indians were published before Momaday's House Made of Dawn. Those novels that were published, though, have significant historical, thematic, and artistic merit. In 1854, John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee) published The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murietta, the Celebrated California Bandit. Scott B. Vickers says that although the novel describes "the trials and revenge of a mixed-blood Mexican," the novel is actually "a picaresque western adventure based on the resistance of California Natives to the incursion of whites brought on by the gold rush." Ridge's personal history is probably more fascinating than his novel. Ridge was among those on the Trail of Tears during the Cherokee Removal from their eastern homeland to Oklahoma. Ridge's grandfather and father were both assassinated for their part in signing away their ancestral lands without permission of the tribe. S. Alice Callahan's (Creek) Wynema: A Child of the Forest was published in 1891. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff notes that "this novel incorporates explanations of Creek customs" and is a fictional account "of the events that led to the murder of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee," as well as a novel that pleads for "women's rights and suffrage" (Ruoff, 222). A Potawatomi Indian, Simon Pokagon was the last Native novelist to publish during the 19th century; he published Queen of the Woods in 1899. Ruoff describes this novel as "a romance that laments the Potawatomi's loss of their Edenic past and warns about how alcohol can destroy Indians and whites" (Ruoff, 148).

Early 20th-century novels include Cogewea: The Half-Blood (1927) by Mourning Dove (Okanagon-Colville), Brothers Three (1935) by John Milton Oskison (Cherokee), and Wah'Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man's Road (1932) and Sundown (1934) by John Joseph Matthews (Osage). D'Arcy McNickle (Cree/Metis/Salish) also published three novels prior to the era that Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance: The Surrounded (1936), Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize (1954), and Wind from the Enemy Sky (published after McNickle's death in 1978). Of these early 20th-century novels, three have received considerable attention and acclaim: Mourning Dove's Cogewea, John Joseph Matthews's Sundown, and McNickle's The Surrounded.

Cogewea is a romantic/tragic tale of a mixed-blood woman who is wooed by two men--a mixed-blood (the foreman on the ranch where Cogewea lives) and a duplicitous, fortune-hunting white man. In Paula Gunn Allen's words, "The novel turns on the question of identity--a question peculiarly American. Cogewea's conflict between traditional family values and the siren call of city life and modern values very nearly costs her her life" (79). Matthews's Sundown is the story of a Osage Indian, Challenge Windser, the son of a man who believes in progress, and a traditional Osage mother. Chal enrolls in college, joins the U.S. Army Air Corps, and is so seduced by the white man's world that he becomes somewhat ashamed of his Indian heritage while remaining attached to his mother and her spiritual values. Terry P. Wilson claims that "The last portion of the novel focuses on Chal's inability to develop meaning and direction in his life after the war, wavering between the hedonism and decadence of oil-rich Indians and the hardheaded capitalism of the white men" (Wilson, 247). An excellent full-length study of Matthews's intellectual contribution to human letters can be found in Robert Allen Warrior's Tribal Secrets. In this book, Warrior challenges traditional interpretations of Matthews and his works; he sees Sundown as a literary treatise on the survival of Native identity against overwhelming odds (Warrior, 26).

McNickle's The Surrounded tells the story of Archilde Leon, another mixed-blood whose forays into the white world leave him disassociated and silent. Louis Owens writes: "Again and again in the novel, understanding fails and something goes inexplicably wrong for the Indians, as if they are in the grip of an incomprehensible fate--as if, in fact, McNickle's Indians are playing out their tragic roles in the American epic, roles that simply require that they perish and that deny them what Bakhtin calls 'another destiny or another plot' " (65). McNickle's Natives are "surrounded"--like fenced-in cattle--by powerful alien government and religious representatives trying to turn Indians into artifacts or remake them into their own Euro-American image. These themes--loss of land, identity, and traditional beliefs complicated by mixed-blood identities--go through a revision in the works of Momaday and those novelists that followed him. Indeed, as Louis Owens suggests, "other destinies" than degradation, poverty, and forced assimilation are possible for Native Americans.

The most prominent post-Civil Rights novelists include N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), James Welch (Blackfoot-Gros Ventre), Louise Erdrich (Chippewa), Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa), and Linda Hogan (Chickasaw). Sherman Alexie (Coeur d' Alene), Thomas King (Cherokee), and Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee) are also rapidly becoming well-known and highly acclaimed novelists. While these authors address unique tribal problems and issues, common themes abound. One prevalent theme involves the movement of various characters from profound, debilitating suffering into well-being, brought about through ceremonial reclamations of their traditional heritages. Both House Made of Dawn and The Ancient Child by N. Scott Momaday are founded on this plot. None of the above authors claim that Native peoples can return to ancient material or spiritual culture. For example, Leslie Silko's character Tayo, in her novel Ceremony (1977), must create a healing ceremony out of his own troubled past and a combination of revised Pueblo and Navajo myths and rituals. His acknowledgment of the necessary role of the ceremony means that myth and ritual are dynamic processes, and that revelation of the sacred is ongoing.

Sexual perversion, violence, and abuse are also typical themes in these novels. In fact, sexual violence is a predominant symbol for the psychological condition of disassociation experienced by many characters. The works of Linda Hogan (especially Solar Storms [1995]), Leslie Silko (especially Almanac for the Dead [1991]), Sherman Alexie (especially The Toughest Indian in the World [2000]), and Louis Owens particularly explore this topic. Perhaps all of Louise Erdrich's North Dakota novels--from Love Medicine (1984) to Four Souls (2004)--are grounded on the exploration of intimacy patterns, especially as these patterns relate to complex genealogies and religious ideologies. In these works, harmony and respect between genders is also a symbol for harmony in the world. Other issues that these novelists explore include those of mixed-blood identities, the significance of place, the coexistence of spiritual truth with everyday existence, the significance of ancestors to full well-being, and the comic (not tragic) nature of Native discourse. Many of the novels by these authors are peopled with characters who demonstrate that truth comes into the world with two faces--one smiling, the other frowning. And yet, the comic mode prevails, strongly suggesting that the most profound dislocations can be overcome.

All these contemporary authors have won numerous awards for their fiction; their art both represents their particular traditional perspectives and transcends cultural boundaries. Moreover, all these authors are still living as the 21st century opens. Most are also poets, short-story writers, autobiographers, and critics and either have been or are currently university professors.

Literally dozens of other Native authors have written or are writing novels. Many writers have proved very prolific, yet are not as widely known as those previously discussed. Joseph Bruchac's (Abenaki) works, for example, appear in more than 400 publications. His novel, Dawn Land, re-creates the value system of precontact Natives. He has also recorded traditional stories and made them available in print and on audiocassettes known variously under the general title Keepers of the Earth. Bruchac cofounded the Greenfield Review Press so he could promote the works of emerging Indian authors. Janet Campbell Hale's (Coeur d'Alene) The Jailing of Cecelia Capture (1985) was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna), well-known activist and critic, also wrote a novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983). The now-deceased husband of Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris (Modoc), wrote A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987) and, with Erdrich, coauthored the financially successful The Crown of Columbus (1991).

Legitimate concerns abound. Can, should, or do individual American Indian authors represent the views and beliefs of those tribes from which they come? Who owns traditional beliefs? And who, if anyone, has the right to police the creative products of individual Native American writers? More important, can individuals from one tribe claim to know the belief systems of those from other tribes? Some critics, for example, claim that Leslie Marmon Silko "fell from the sky." The implication of such a statement is that Pueblo creation narratives are emergence narratives: Original Laguna people emerged from the earth rather than fell from the sky. The origin myths of the Iroquois describe the original people as falling from a world above this one. In other words, critics are suggesting that Silko's use of Laguna mythology without permission in her novel Ceremony marks her as someone who does not respect her beliefs. The fact that Silko also incorporates Navajo mythology is also suspect to some critics. Many Coeur d' Alene were upset with Sherman Alexie's depiction of reservation life in the film Smoke Signals (adapted from his fiction), a fact that brings into focus the problems of one urban Indian's interpretation of collective reservation experience. When Native peoples have traditionally been misrepresented, the new focus on their problems in literature (even by insiders) could be seen as perpetuating the victimage. Who, from any family, dysfunctional or not, wants any member to presume to describe the family as a whole? Craig S. Womack (Muskogee Creek and Cherokee) has written Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999), and Arnold Krupat has written Red Matters (2002), both of which explore these dilemmas. Many of these issues also collapse boundaries between and among ethnology, mythology, history, politics, and multicultural studies. Can Natives and non- Natives engage in dialogue across such vast boundaries? Is it the moral imperative of our time to hear the stories of the "other" with the hope that such shared experience can help humans overcome suffering, violence, and humiliation? And, finally, do we have to be a people in order to learn from them?

Bibliography:

Allen, Paula Gunn. "Mourning Dove (Humishuma)." In Voice of the Turtle: American Indian Literature 1900-1970, edited by Paula Gunn Allen, 78-79. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994.

Bruner, Edward M. "Experience and Its Expressions." In The Anthropology of Experience, edited by Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner, 3-33. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Churchill, Ward, and Glenn T. Morris. "Key Indian Laws and Cases." In The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistence, edited by M. Annette Jaimes, 13-23. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. "The American Indian Fiction Writers: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, The Third World, and First Nation Sovereignty." In Nothing but the Truth, edited by John L. Purdy and James Ruppert, 23-39. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001.

Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1963.

Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the AmericanIndian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

Ruoff, A. Lavonne Brown. "S. Alice Callahan." In Handbook of Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget, 221-225. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996.

Ruoff, A. Lavonne Brown. "Simon Pokagon." In Handbook of Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget, 277-281. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996.

Stiffarm, Lenore A., with Phil Lane, Jr. "The Demography of Native North America." In The State of Native America, edited by M. Annette Jaimes, 23-55. Boston: South End Press, 1992.

Vickers, Scott B. Native American Identities. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Warrior, Robert Allen. Tribal Secrets. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Wilson, Terry P. "John Joseph Matthews." In Handbook of Native American Literature, edited by Andrew Wiget, 245-251. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996.

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