Novels:
Little
The Hiawatha
Dr Apelles
Essay Collection:
Native American Fiction
from Native Amerian Fiction: A users manual
A few years ago I had the honor of going to Finland to promote the Finnish edition of my second novel, The Hiawatha. Toward the end of my stay, after a dizzying week of interviews, readings, signings, and photo shoots, I gave a reading at a Helsinki bookstore. The place was crowded with attentive Finns. After the reading and after a dialogue with a noted scholar of Native American literature, I retreated to the book-signing station in the center of the bookstore. A line had already formed, and so I began chatting and signing. After a few “typical” Finns got their books signed, I looked up and saw a man who (I must admit) looked a lot more Indian than I do. He was tall and thin. His skin was dark, and he wore his graying hair in a long ponytail. When he spoke, his English was nearly perfect.
He said that he enjoyed the reading and discussion. I said thank you. He told me that he had been to a number of Indian reservations in the United States. I said that’s very nice. I then reached out to take his copy of The Hiawatha so I could sign it. But the man stepped back and wouldn’t let me touch the book. Instead, after shielding the text with his body, he handed me something else to sign instead. It was an 8 X 10 glossy portrait of him. He was seated astride a low stool and, with his hair in two long braids, he wore jeans and vest (Levis and cowhide), and cowboy boots (with impractical back-slung Mexican heels), and a black stovepipe hat that went out of style with real Indians sometime in the late nineteenth century. For some reason I still don’t understand he was holding a very pretty sky blue guitar.
He leaned over the table and said, “Write it to Lonely Wolf.”
I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly. “Who?” I asked. “What Wolf?”
“Lonely Wolf,” he said.
The customer is always right, I said to myself and prepared to sign it. “To Lone Wolf. No problem.”
“No. No. It’s Lonely Wolf. That’s my spirit name.”
I was always taught to be polite and I figured that a small grammatical mistake shouldn’t stand between a man and his real spirit name, so I said, “You mean Lone Wolf, don’t you? Just Lone Wolf?”
“No, Lonely Wolf is my spirit name.” He was getting upset. I didn’t know if he had paid for his book yet.
“Sure. What the hell. Lonely Wolf it is.”
I signed it, right across the top of his guitar.
~
Language can, alas, confound even the loneliest wolf. And I still think of him. I wonder how he’s doing. I wonder if that really was his spirit name. I wonder if the language barrier kept him from assuming his real spirit name. There is, after all, a big difference between being a lone wolf and feeling like a lonely wolf.
Whether or not he got his own name right, he is not alone. There are many people who want badly to be Indian no matter the difficulty. It is a widespread phenomenon. There are writers like the poet Red Hawk who take Indian names and seem to practice Indian beliefs. [In my mind’s eye I can still replay a poetry reading given at Princeton by Red Hawk. I can see him, with his beard and bald head and robes, prancing around the Jimmy Stewart auditorium waving a turkey feather over an abalone shell in which smoldered Western sage and chanting the chorus to his poem.] There are also the nameless many, mostly sympathetic white people, who go on vision quests and go into sweat lodges, and find there, in those modern reinventions, some connection to the past. And there is also Shania Twain.
As an Ojibwe man I can tell you that there are many Ojibwes who wouldn’t mind in the least if Shania Twain were Ojibwe, and there are as many, even now, who are willing to make her one. It was a day of great sadness when the world learned that she was not Ojibwe. In the early days of her career, when few had heard of her, she told interviewers and said in her publicity material that she was Ojibwe by birth and that Shania meant “I’m On My Way.” When her album Come on Over went multi-platinum, and she was suddenly in everyone’s radar, she had to confess: she wasn’t Ojibwe by blood. Her stepfather was Ojibwe. “Shania” (a stage name at first) doesn’t mean anything in Ojibwe, though again, there are as many Ojibwes who are only too willing for obvious reasons to make it mean whatever she wants it to mean. One magazine profiler wrote that even though Shania wasn’t Ojibwe by birth, she was so beautiful and her album had sold so well she was Ojibwe as far as he was concerned.
What are we supposed to do with all of this? Take the case of Ian Frazier, who got into a terrible disagreement with Sherman Alexie regarding his book On the Rez. Frazier asked a simple question: what’s so bad about wanting to be Indian? Ignoring, for a moment, centuries of attempted genocide, followed (very strangely) by an immediate and overwhelming respect for Indian ways, I suppose there is very little wrong with it. And if white people want to be Indian, I guess I don’t care too much. Someone else’s self-loathing is not terribly interesting to me—after all, I’ve got my own to worry about. It is too bad that the debate between Frazier and Alexie centered on whether or not Frazier had the right to write about Indians. A more productive exchange would have addressed the very thin and skewed research Frazier had done for the book: he only got to know one family well, interviewed white priests rather than Indian leaders, and must have felt so unprotected and vulnerable and out of his element that he clung to the few people who seemed to accept him—and in this, he is more Indian than he could possibly know. An even more productive exchange would have been about why and how Frazier thought he could be Indian, or “feel” Indian. It was a missed opportunity. What is worth noting is the idea that it is possible to become Indian; that it is possible to access or assume an Indian identity—not to misrepresent yourself for gain or notoriety like Shania, but to actually think that you can and do possess an Indian spirit. What is worth thinking about is what this sentiment says about how Indianness is conceptualized.
The strangeness of the idea is even more striking if you insert other races and cultures into the same sentiment. I have an African spirit in me. I have a Chinese spirit. My given name is Jim Johnson, but my French spirit name is Jacques LaGarde. I have an American spirit.
Somewhere along the way—in the eighteenth century perhaps—Indians became associated with a very specific set of virtues. And then, at a later point Indians were perceived as having vanished. Or, if we hadn’t disappeared entirely, we were no longer perceived as being pure. We were diluted by blood and experience. This, in the imagination, happens during the start of the reservation period (because of the qualities of pride and independence and…). Somehow the virtues have remained, though we are gone. And Indians and Indianness persist as ghosts persist: as hovering presences that can be evoked and appealed to, linked to life but separate from it, no longer a reality, or in reality. We became but an essence.
This essence is all pervasive. It has invaded Ian Frazier, Shania Twain, Red Hawk, and it exists in relation to them and to others as something that they can access if they know the right way to ask. Like the Spiritualists at the turn of the century, the idea is that if you do the right thing, provide the right chants or attitude, or have help from spiritual professionals (in this case “authentic” Indians), you can gain access to the spirit. In both instances—the mesmerics in the ninetieth century and those with “Indian spirits” now—language is a pesky issue best left ignored. What is interesting is that in most of the cases of ouiji- and séance-induced communication with the other world, language was not a barrier. The spirits communicated in whatever language the listeners spoke, and the spirits (even if in life they had been illiterate) wrote in the language of the petitioners. It is easy to see that the spiritual program of the nineteenth century functions a lot like Indianness does in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the desire for a connection is far more important than the actual means or logic of that connection.
For those who want to be Indian, who have Indian spirits and spirit helpers and spirit names, Indianness is nothing more than a sensibility, an attitude or spiritual pose they strike, because nowhere in their self-concept or concept of Indianness is the idea that culture (in this case Indian culture) is lived through language and custom and community and history. For them, Indianness is beyond language.
Perhaps this is why Indians usually live in the imagination as images, as pictures, not as sounds, not in language. Perhaps this is why in order to be convincingly Indian it is only really necessary to look a certain way—Indian identity is largely a pantomime or a painting, or if it is a story, the volume has been turned down. This would explain the fanatical attention paid to skin color, mode of dress, hair length, and the size of one’s belt buckle or the narrowness of the bolo tie. Perhaps this is why that Finnish man could be Lonely Wolf: he need only feel a certain way and then dress the part in order to convince himself. And perhaps this is also why Native literature is so often concerned with two seemingly different things: image and emotion.
Most novels written about and by Natives are visual documents—stories that craft sequences of images more than matrixes of human interactions; stories that if you were to do a word count would have much less dialogue and more physical description than most any other genre of literature. And wedded to these images are sentences of raw and deep emotion (think of the crying Indian in the commercial protesting pollution, or of Wind-In-His-Hair proclaiming his friendship atop a cliff as Kevin Costner rides into the future, or of those colonists dressed as Mohawks during the Boston Tea Party). Think of what Little Tree says about the song his grandmother sings to him: “Grandma began to hum a tune behind me and I knew it was Indian, and needed no words for its meaning to be clear . . .” Or think of what Silko says about Pueblo storytelling: “Pueblo people are more concerned with story and communication and less concerned with a particular language… the particular language being spoken isn’t as important as what the speaker is trying to say…” I doubt that Pueblo-language activists, those who are desperately trying to keep their languages alive, would share this sentiment. And this sentiment is precisely the one that, years ago, birthed this precious bit of dialogue in The Last of the Mohicans: “Ugh,” said Uncas.
To be fair, in life there might be many aspects of identity that are extra-lingual and extra-experiential. And while there might be things beyond language in life, there is nothing beyond language in literature. Literature is language. Yet we see the same logic in Lonely Wolf’s self-portrait. There is the idea that Native literature, or literature written by Natives can perform culture… that, by appealing to the earth or to circular storytelling or by including myths and so on, our literature can channel that hovering, ghostly sensibility into our prose. It seems to me that we read Native literature the same way that those who want to be Indian read themselves: wishfully, hopefully, inaccurately, and, ultimately, by channeling ideas (not actualities) of Indian culture—the ghostly amino acids, those ethereal building blocks of life—into our interpretations and our work.
