WHERE HAVE ALL THE NA WRITERS GONE?
When I taught English in Browning, my students were just making the transitions away from the old culture. Some of them were Blackfeet speakers and lived on ranches where lodges were put up in summer. Male relatives were still hunters and mothers could still clean “supputsies” as well as making frybread. But others were the children of whites or “double-breeds” who knew a bit about the world outside the bubble on the East Slope. Both categories became leaders — or not — in the following decades.
These people are in their 70’s or 80’s now, though some have died. Among them was Dorothy Still Smoking (living), who read her doctoral dissertation in London; Darrell Robes Kipp, her friend, who founded the Piegan Institute; Eloise Pepion Cobell who sued the US government for mis-using the tribal trust fund and won the case; and a host of others who worked to create the tribal bank, the tribal college, Siyeh, and other governmental functions like Fish and Wildlife or Land Management or the casino. It has been a great gift and inspiration to watch them grow.
These Blackfeet were the age and kind of the tribal people who created the Native American Literary Renaissance of the Sixties: Welch, Momaday, Erdrich, Silko, et al. They were assimilated enough to handle the language and enter the publication machinery of the US, but they knew rez life.
The two main portals to the scrum were through academics, as did Welch who found a mentor in Hugo; or through journalism like Woody Kipp, who wrote about being in Vietnam and then the second Wounded Knee.
For a while these books sold like wildfire but arguments began about who was truly “Indian” and all that. At first it was good advertising, but soon it was tiresome and the lawsuits cost too much. Publishers were disillusioned and the books were remaindered for $5 each. That’s when I was exiled to Portland in 1973, making a bit of money, so I was able to build a library of my own through Powell’s.
These books are admired by people who write today as “NA writers,” but today the terms and qualifications of the category are highly contentious. A surprising number come in through “horror writing.” As I think about it, the number of disappeared people, people murdered by intimates in the course of drinking or drugging, or people who are known murderers who were never even arraigned, it’s horrible enough.
Add in lack of support systems, corruption, federal disregard. The FBI has a hard time taking interest in “Indian” crimes after the assassination of the agents at Wounded Knee. No one allots resources for adequate investigations, which are problematic anyway since the culture resists outside law.
The rise of “misery lit” found plenty of material among the indigenous but it tended to lump all the traps, neglects, starvations, disadvantages and poverty across demographics. This approach is an affront to those who have with great effort become prosperous respectable people.
At one point I thought that the tribal colleges would produce many new writers, but this has not turned out to be true. These post-high school resources have made huge contributions to morale and achievement, but they are focused on what is practical for making a living. Computers, science/technology, and social services rule the day. History research and editing English are still problematic, but quickly catching up. No other colleges allow the research of parting out a real buffalo and offering a feast. Tribal college is a step to professions, so the first lawyers, doctors, anthropologists and so on are established now.
Another problem is that the internet and the pandemic have totally dispersed and addled the methods and rewards of publishing, which began as a preoccupation of monied and elite Europeans, esp. Brits, and gradually developed into transnational political corporations like everything else. At the same time small publishers online or printing-on-demand are proliferating. The problem is finding them. Which publishing house is a good fit for you as either a writer or a reader? There is talk about the website “concierge” who knows where to find things. Print is displaced by video.
Anthropology turned out to be a blind alley. Preoccupied with holding people at a distance, analyzing them, and claiming to be “scientific,” the anthros have turned out to treat tribal people like endangered species because their base line is always what the group was like when first discovered and identified. Tribes were even given insulting names because they came from better known enemies. Myths and legends or assigning the People to children’s stories as fantasy consolations, are both fossilizing — not living real fusions of the land with the lives.
In an awareness drama of my own white life last summer, a white academic man hoping to be seen as an authority on “Indians” was brought to visit by one of those early students who had built a life as an “Indian education” expert working for a company exploiting education in the big city. Neither of the two men understood that the “Indian writers” the wannabe was looking for were stereotypes that no longer exist, if they ever did. I told them things they didn’t want to hear.
The kick to my gut was my old student, who had no idea that I had changed or had any awareness of any of the work I had done since his youth. It turned out that as my former students became more sophisticated and competent, so did I, but he didn’t know that.
Though he was enrolled as Blackfeet genetically, and grew up in Browning, I now realize he is mostly Métis, meaning that he was apart in some ways, though not as he would have been if he were white. In the city he’s part of a petty-manager poker circle and lives by their standards, I guess. At least he told me defiantly that he doesn’t read, doesn’t know the books that are now famous, and holds me responsible for his faulty education.
Though the highly resented Cree were pushed to the bottom of the barrel when they were imposed on the Blackfeet — but then were freed by the conversion of an old military base into a reservation, taking to a new place the rivalries, coalitions, grudges and finally family fusions that were created. The actual history is being neglected, though it was strong just half-a-century ago. Maybe the Cree were despised by the Blackfeet, but that meant a quiet alliance with whites. Welsh was a product of a double-tribe marriage begun in government school.
In this case and in many other instances, female relatives decided that their particular intelligent male (mostly) would achieve with their urging. This happened even in the close-by white towns. I saw it. I was told it. I’m not sure the beneficiaries realized what was happening. In the meantime, women also achieved, maybe supported by sisters. Aunties were a major force for achievement. They just didn’t write books.
