23 November 2009

American Indian Authors: Linking Past and Present

Writers tackle wide-ranging themes, often defying expectations

American Indian author Kimberly Blaeser, of Chippewa and German background, examines tribal and family lore in her poetry.

By Michael J. Bandler
Staff Writer

Washington — As American authors of varied ethnicities continue to gain popularity worldwide, the creative work of American Indians — in poetry, fiction and history — is becoming ever more visible.

Modern American Indian writing (dating from the mid-20th century to today) is often divided, chronologically as well as thematically, into three generations. The first, closest to the mythology of early tribal communities, is represented by such internationally known authors as N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko. The second, a group that includes such familiar names as Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie, tends to be more issue-oriented, more contemporary, yet still connected to the past. The third, encompassing young poets and writers of fiction, is just beginning to emerge.

Kimberly Blaeser, an award-winning poet and essayist of the second generation who was raised on a reservation in Minnesota, has remained loyal to American Indian traditions and to her own family history that interweaves German and Anishinaabe (Chippewa) backgrounds. In works such as her 2007 collection of poems Apprenticed to Justice, she embraces community and family lore as “those pieces of time/all multi-colored and mismatched fashion” that “tell their own stories,” using memory as one of her touchstones. And she blends elements of her mixed-blood heritage with others drawn from the natural world and issues of the day.

She is most driven, she said, to pursue stories about American Indian experience that “were not able to be told in the era in which some of my relatives lived, or were not honored, because of racial discrimination or because of a different sort of emphasis within written history.” At the same time, she seeks to represent the essence of a mixed-blood woman in the 21st century.

Blaeser said she is “trying to find some kind of balance between the work I do as a writer and teacher and what is possible to accomplish in making reforms in our society. I’m also very concerned about our natural world — protecting it, but also realizing its spiritual quality. I feel that my writing is less about fighting for a place as a writer as it is about trying to make some sort of gesture — or write some kind of pathway — that helps us all move forward as Native people. I want it to be accessible, and beautiful as a work of literature, but I also want it to do something in the world both affecting and effective.”

Debra Magpie Earling, of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the U.S. Northwest, once served as a public defender in the Tribal Justice System in Montana and was on track for a career in law when she enrolled in a literature course taught by the late American Indian novelist James Welch. It changed the direction of her life. Earling, who is on the faculty of the University of Montana’s creative writing program, is known in literary circles mostly for her first novel, Perma Red, which was published to great acclaim in 2002.

“My stories are mostly about women and their treatment in Native American communities,” Earling said, citing her forthcoming depiction of the life of Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their exploration of the American West in the early 19th century. Another project, which earned her a Guggenheim fellowship, focuses on a woman warrior in Montana in the 1940s. “I’m interested in powerful women and how they retreated [in response to violence and abuse]. I think Indian women are ready to speak about this, but they’re land mines to write about.”

Debra Magpie Earling, an American Indian author based in Montana, published her acclaimed first novel, Perma Red, in 2002.

“What I write about is controversial,” she said, “because [these themes] really do call into question the treatment of Indian women by men in the past and present. The power of Indian women is what I’m mostly focused on.”

“I’m beginning to explore stories and ideas that make some people uncomfortable — sacred stories that were never told or revealed outside the tribe,” Earling said. She used to look up the stories “to see if they had been told, and try not to reveal anything. But now, I actually feel that I’m writing what I’m called to write, and being the individual that I’m called to be,” even if it means breaking old taboos against sharing tribal stories with outsiders.

In recent years, younger, lesser-known American Indian writers such as Gordon Henry, Eric Gansworth, Stephan Graham Jones and Eddie Chuculate have begun to attract attention. In 2007, Chuculate (of Cherokee and Muskogee Creek descent) won the O. Henry Award — a literary prize in the United States that is limited to short fiction. He contributes stories to a number of respected journals, and his first short-story collection, Cheyenne Madonna, will be published in the spring of 2010.

“There’s a huge variety in what we see in contemporary Native writing,” Blaeser observed. Even though Native literature is rich in historical allusions and often evokes the past, “I don’t want to suggest in any way that it’s stagnant,” she said. “People are working with that material in interesting, exciting new ways. Native writing has become a part of the larger indigenous literature.”

Kimberly Blaeser introduces and reads four poems from her collection, Apprenticed to Justice:

• “Apprenticed to Justice”: introduction (audio file), full poem (audio file)

• “Family Tree”: introduction (audio file), full poem (audio file)

• “Fantasies of Women”: introduction (audio file), full poem (audio file)

• Refractions: introduction (audio file), full poem (audio file)