Gansworth
As my first reading of fiction that is specifically Native American in focus and aim, I was surprised to see the immediate and overwhelming connection of that culture to the lives of its people. Gansworth seems to be practically bubbling over in his fiction with the nature of Native American lifestyle as it fits in with current American civilization.
The conflict in his characters seems to be that difference between the traditional, animalistic and naturalistic Native American views of life and origin and how that fits in with American society, how it has to fit in somehow because it’s inextricable from their lives.
I especially liked seeing the connections from simple understandings of how people can work with the earth and what it harbors--in the growing of corn, beans and squash in the same spot for how they naturally protect and nurture each other--to how Native American people act around each other, how they feel about the people around them. The creation story gave me a sense of how Native American culture feels its placement in the land. Their story (at least, the one put forward in its many variations in the novel) shows their feelings of how we might have come here accidentally, in a spiritual sense, but Skywoman as a symbol for the beginnings of our humanity here started dancing and expanding the world she fell to. I can see how this work shows overarching power through the whole, more character and story driven parts of the novel and how it makes this truly Native American literature not because it is a piece of the story, but rather and integral and invaluable basis of all the life shown in the work.
Silko
After watching the video, it seems that Silko’s Almanac of the Dead is more of an anthology of current Native American themes and struggles than a single novel. Her ten-year production of this work seems to be focused more on the statement of current Native American standing in the United States, the information and the reaction than the story. For me, this makes the work a more solid and even realistic writing rather than writing for the sake of writing and making pretty words. She has a clear point—illuminating the people to what native culture is now, how it still holds place in America even though it is now hidden beneath the abused lives of natives.
Each bit of story is fitting with the way natives told their stories, as symbols for the realities of their world, each character embodying pieces remnant of native spirit, beliefs and culture in this land.
As an author, she seems to be a link between current intellectualism and academia that makes up the dominant culture that is flooding America with chemicals and injustice and the original culture that held and cultivated America.
Dreams
Our dream discussion from Almanac of the Dead was very pertinent to me since me and the members of my family have always had vivid, lucid dreams and sleepwalking. It’s strange to see how little the current American culture recognizes dreams as an integral part of one’s mind and how well respected they were in American Indian culture.
We talked about the “dream class” here at WSU and how it teaches people to interpret dreams. From the reading and otherwise, this is an example of how far gone many of these people are from the core understanding of great things. We, as an academic, scientific culture, think we can measure and define everything, saying that all dreams have clearly defined symbols that are the same for everyone. That isn’t the understanding of them by American Indians or any other culture that has put emphasis on what their dreams can mean. These are personal flights of mind and they mean what they mean to an individual person (could even mean nothing). I could have the same exact dream as someone else in our class and it would mean entirely separate things, and it should.
I’ve had amazing and frightening experiences with my dreams and sleepwalking, all of which come from some aspect of my mind and it’s something to be held rather than butchered and scrutinized.
Silko reflects the irreparable differences between this culture and the native culture where, after all these years, we still cannot get a grip on those greater natural mysteries except in imagined, foolish pieces. This has been the most interesting and personally thought-provoking part of her book for me.
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
I liked the way this book incorporated the blending of heritages now. Rayona was a perfect example of a part black Indian and showed how these different types of people, along with Christine and Ida, still hold connections to their native culture.
The book and story itself was compelling and a good read. It was full of
those personal conflicts, secrets and betrayals that we love to explore so much. The clashing of these people from where they were built seems to fit much of what we talked about in class and the overarching conflicts between people of different experiences.
This book was the only book we had where Native American theme was not the primary point of the book, but rather a part of a whole story. Because of that, there was a different perspective on that aspect of the characters’ culture.
Two Old Women
I love books built on practical information along with their overarching story. Two old women seemed, based on its native story, a sort of humorous play on wisdom of elders, a joke of respect when the old women are forced to fend again for themselves in a harsh natural world like the young people. I tried to decode the greater and simpler story throughout the reading that aims at the understandings and meanings within it.
I am surprised, of course, by that type of play on elder wisdom in a culture that so heavily relied on it. Natives, it seems to me, had quite a stronger and better aimed respect for men and women of age (of course, not the decrepit, half-retarded, dying things that make up American elders now). But this story rather pointed me in the direction of honesty and humor in these follies of man, even among the greater ones.
Two Old Women was an interesting read because of how detailed their survival works were, how the author said exactly what they did with and to the ground to make what they needed for sustenance and shelter. As much as books like Almanac of the Dead are useful to dealing with the common day state of natives and current problems, these older pieces of native culture re-worked into a common day is what I like to see. Rather than a fight, it’s survival of the native culture through survival of old wisdom.
Prison Writings
Peltier’s Prison Writings was a book of deep interest to me from the reality that the author lives in. It strikes me as a classic sort of writing for later generations because now, in this time, it will be buried in common ignorance until later we have found new remedies before facing new problems and we realize how little we knew of the times before, and in that we will dig up all the writings that show us what was really happening, the perfect reflections of the times, and we will teach them as though the next generations will learn what we learned too late.
The video helped me with context and how the American Indian population has never disappeared as much of America seems to wish, but not only that; they have also never escaped the same oppression that faced them at the inception of the United States. Now they are a disconcerted population of people whose culture survives but just barely, like their homes.
Peltier shows how little of the American system of overarching justice functions and that it’s still a matter of men vs. men in smaller fights. From the book and the video, I see cowardice in that system of systematic justice that allows evil men to hide from an honest fight at the homes of those oppressed and draws them by a larger fallacy of law to their home-land, so to speak, one by one so that there is no defense for enemies of the state.
