Native American Literature: Traditional Stories/Literary Stories
Session
Coordinator: Janet Labrie
Department of English
University of
Wisconsin-Waukesha
Dancing the Gap?
Cinema and American Indian Autobiography
This paper revisits Krupat’s
1981 assertion that Indian autobiography is a contradiction in terms from the
perspective of the recent relative success films by American Indians have
enjoyed. These films, The Business
of Fancy-Dancing by Sherman Alexie in particular,
should give us pause to consider in what way cinema may be a medium in which to
re-examine the connection between oral and written narratives.
Two initial items this examination considers are: one, the way many American
Indian literary works are regarded as “autobiographical” by white audiences
looking for a true representation of Indian life through fiction, and two, the
comment by Alexie in the screenplay notes for Smoke Signals where he confesses, “I
used to think that movies were real. I mean, I thought, I truly believed,
that every movie was a documentary.” The Business of Fancy-Dancing addresses
both of these concerns, and in turn presents a critical approach to how
literature and film may be re-representing to an audience the reality of oral
story telling. The question of audience in the American Indian autobiography is
a heavy one, and the film does not hold itself up as an autobiographical
narrative. Only an audience who is familiar with Alexie’s
works would read that into the story. Ultimately, an examination of Fancy-Dancing asks that we, as an
audience, consider the ways in which we are reading American Indian texts from
literary to oral, to popular, and in what ways these readings are
contradictions with their own sets of gains and losses.
Gina Caison
University of Alabama-Bermingham
caisson@uab.edu
“Coyote Writes a
Novel: Thomas King’s
Faced with the dilemma of assimilating to European American stylistics and losing one’s traditional narrative and cultural ways or accommodating both cultures in some hybrid format, Thomas King has found a third alternative. In Green Grass, Running Water King has constructed a complex and brilliantly funny satire of the traditional Euro-American canon, at the same time asserting Native culture and story-telling as primary. Through the use of Coyote, the Four Old Men/Women, traditional oral narratives and the Cherokee language, King invokes another world and with it another world view. They are put on a collision course with Moby Dick, the Lone Ranger, Robinson Crusoe, The Deerslayer, and John Wayne. While the resulting novel is not a model for future Native American poetics, it certainly models an alternative relationship to the written word.
Julie Tharp
jtharp@uwc.edu
“Detecting Indian
Style: Writing Beyond the Clues in Native American Mystery Fiction”
For minority writers, writing in the detective fiction genre is an inherently subversive act. It is even more so for Native Americans when they bring their own cultural values and traditions to the telling of a mystery as they deconstruct a traditionally conservative genre. Although one could apply this theory to many Native American mystery writers, Louis Owens’ Bone Game in works to subvert even the subversions as Owens weaves history, mysticism, and humor into an almost accidental detecting process.
Janet Labrie
jlabrie@uwc.edu
“Will the Real Black
Hawk Please Stand Up?”
As much or more than it is the
Margaret Rozga
mrozga@uwc.edu