102 AI Lit

English Composition Through American Indian Literatures:

A New Pedagogy

Forward

Indianess (bloodedness) is not required for a student to write using the patterns and forms of American Indian literatures. Teaching the Composition of American Indian Literatures, then, necessitates the capturing of each and every student and exposing him or her into the applicable culture(s). During this experience, students move through four learning phases (foundation, conception, immersion, invention), which enable them to be conscious of and to use the patterns and forms of American Indian Literatures.

The foundation of the culture and the conception of the literatures can best be taught through an “internship,” experience where students participate as readers, writers, and listeners. Most scholars would probably agree that exposing students to a cultural classroom experience helps them become better readers of the literatures.

Students can incorporate oral and written forms of Native American language patterns if they are exposed to a culture. Many contemporary Native American students have never even been to a reservation but have a desire to discover or connect to their perceived “Indian heritage.” These students often take Indian Literature courses, which makes the topic all the more meaningful. Of course, this classroom experience cannot replace a reservation experience, nor is it intended to do so. However, students are introduced to learning phases that are designed to help them gain a better understanding of the applicable culture(s) and to assist them with the composition of American Indian Literatures.

The following four-step learning sequence is designed to be approached in a non-linear and non-sequential manner:

Foundation

The history, anthropology, psychology, and sociology of a culture represent its foundation. A young Navajo growing up on the reservation learns about such mores as the acceptability to marry one's first cousin if that person is from a different clan. Elders discuss the belief in the chindi, the feared ghost of the dead. Even though a Navajo may learn about these elements from personal tribal experiences, non-Native American students and Native American students who did not grow up in a traditional setting learn about the history of the Navajo people. For example, these ancestors did not migrate to North America until after the Ice Age and to the southwest during this millennium. They may also learn about distant cousins to the Navajo: the Hupa, the Tlingit, the Haida, the Tanana, and the Tsetsaut. Learning the foundational aspects of a culture assists the students to begin to understand the culture.

Conception

The writings and literatures of a culture represent its conception. This phase is meant to be experiential for the students as they analyze the structure of the text(s) for such Indian rhetorical devices as circularity and non-linear presentation, multiple points of view, and a-ethnocentrism (cultural honesty).

As a first step in conception, my students read Black Elk Speaks because it is the literal bridge from oral to written stories. Polyvocalism becomes multiple points of view; circularity and non-linear presentation remain intact. A-ethnocentrism remains intact as well and later helps to shape the characteristics of American Indian Literatures.

Students also need to know that stories are not always stereotypically positive renditions regarding the “noble red man” or the union between Indians and nature. These stories often contain a cultural honesty, even if the story is negative. Indians cannot claim, and do not in the literatures, to be universally one with nature. What is present and always has been present in American Indian Literatures, however, is honesty--an a-ethnocentrism. The orator and writer of American Indian Literatures has usually been honest about his or her character's moral acts that are often seen as repulsive to a Euro-American dominant society. Scalping, polygamy, wife stealing, counting coup, slaving, and wife sharing are not taboo subjects in the genre.

Students experience this kind of cultural honesty when analyzing Black Elk Speaks. Among others, the orators willingly speak of the mutilation of Custer's Seventh Cavalry, and Black Elk states, “These Wasichus wanted it, and they came to get it, and we gave it to them” (123). Contemporary examples of such openness can be found in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn where the story opens with Abel returning from prison after seven years for the murder of Fragua, and when he steps off the bus “the door swung open and Abel stepped heavily to the ground and reeled. He was drunk, and he fell against his grandfather and did not know him” (9). Furthermore, no-Name First Raise, in James Welch's Winter in the Blood, besides his obvious namelessness, further demonstrates his disconnected psyche when he urinates on his own father's grave. “In the tall weeds of the borrow pit, I took a leak” (1). Tayo, in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, abuses a skinny, sickly, blind mule in his desperation to get himself and Harley some alcohol (24-26).

Immersion

The immersion experience in a Native American course engrosses, surrounds, and absorbs students into the applicable culture being studied. As a result of my own classroom-based research, I have found that the more complete the immersion of the students, the more effective the classroom experience seems to be. I engage students in three levels of cultural immersion: tertiary, secondary, and primary.

Tertiary Immersion

Tertiary immersion takes place in a classroom and involves creating a tribal sensibility for the students. Even though this aspect of immersion is relegated to the classroom setting, many highly effective elements of immersion can still be accomplished. In order to begin to gain an understanding of the culturally specific works of Native America students must become aware of the culture they are studying.

In order to provide culture awareness, I bring in Native Americans on the first and last days of class, have speakers come to the class, have the students work in groups, make clapper sticks, learn songs (which they sing and clap each class period), have students give oral reports and have both an oral and visual dimension to their research projects, and learn the history and culture of the writers we study. I attempt to make the classroom immersion experience holistic, communal, collaborative, interactive, and enjoyable.

Secondary Immersion

Secondary Immersion occurs when students leave the classroom and enter an experiential aspect of Indian culture. The classroom tertiary immersion experience works well with secondary immersion. Although most students will experience tertiary immersion, it is more effective to add as many secondary immersion experiences for them as possible. For example, I require the students to attend a pow-wow or an Indian performance (when available), and community-based Native American cultural events offer a slightly more integrative opportunity for students, and art shows, museums, and Native American urban social functions are also often available for student research. Secondary immersion is, however, typically culturally non-specific, and does not present a picture of any one Native American culture, which is why secondary immersion works best in conjunction with the classroom experience. Indeed, without the benefit of classroom instruction, the pan-Indian phenomenon inherent in many urban Native American cultural events can easily lead the student researcher to stereotypical conclusions.

Primary Immersion

Primary Immersion occurs when students actually interview an Indian. Of course primary immersion, like primary research, is preferable and necessary for success. Even in my other English courses, I require the students to engage in some type of primary research. For example, I have them conduct interviews in order to see the joy of this method of research, and, hopefully, to encourage them to do their own primary research in the future. My goal is for the students to become researchers themselves so that, ultimately, people will flock to libraries to find out what these budding student researchers have said about a given subject. Both a deeper vertical immersion into one culture and a shallower horizontal immersion into several cultures are used to impress upon students the necessity for exhaustive primary research.

Primary immersion in Native American Literatures involves visiting the specific Indians themselves; for some students this type of immersion can be a bit overwhelming, which is why it may work best in a classroom setting and possibly as a class field trip. For example, the students can interview Indians during a powwow fieldtrip after the students have been briefed regarding proper etiquette, and the students can work together in groups for this task. However, some facilities are specifically intended to provide the un-initiated student with primary immersion in a safe and comfortable atmosphere.

The ideal setting for primary classroom immersion is in the functioning cultures themselves. Pine Ridge, Acoma, Makah, Wind River, Taleoqua, San Carlos, and Hoopa Valley are typical of the ultimate laboratories of this empirical research. Access to these cultural reservoirs is, however, typically not available for beginning researchers unless the classroom is within reasonable proximity of such a culture.

Invention

Invention is the actual composing process itself. A program that has provided students with foundation, conception, and immersion has prepared them for intern level invention. The students are now ready to begin writing using the patterns and forms of American Indian Literatures.

Historical Background

The oral tradition is an aural, visual, public, communal (or tribal), and culturally dependent event in which stories and histories are publicly transmitted polyvocally (more than one person narrating and/or participating in the event) and with a performance dimension (singing, dancing, drumming, clapping, and costuming). Usually in the Euro-American novelistic form, a reader approaches a text in isolation, with an assumption of a sequential un-folding of plot and a linear presentation of form and events--beginning, middle, end--but unlike other experimental rhetorical forms of prose (e.g., The Canterbury Tales, The Sound and the Fury, Finnegan’s Wake, Forgetting Elena), N. Scott Momaday experiments with distinctly Indian non-sequential and non-linear narrative structures in his prose, some decidedly circular, using multiple points of view and inverting expected sequential order, approximating the audience (or reader) response and participation usually inherent in the narrative style of oral traditions.

Momaday is the first author to take Native American Oral Tradition and consciously segue it with Euro-American written form, which won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his first novel, House Made of Dawn. Momaday breaks generic distinctions by mixing such genres as poetry, prose, art, and arrangement of the text on the page (indeed, many scholars and critics disagree about the "proper" generic designations for Momaday's works). For example, in The Way to Rainy Mountain each two-page spread contains three paragraphs, each relating the same experience in either the past, present, or future, or the mythic, historical, and personal in an attempt to create a fused visual and verbal experience (and object) by forcing reader involvement and active participation while locating the individual authorial voice within tribal (communal) sensibility. In Momaday's conscious attempt to meld Native American oral tradition into written novelistic form, he creates a new Native American rhetorical form and expressive style, updating traditional Native American literary forms and suggesting future direction for the canon.

The Manufactured Indian Identity Problem

Identity for Native Americans is a complex and highly controversial issue and was recently thrust into the academic forefront when novelist David Seals, while reviewing The Indian Lawyer, stated that James Welch and Louise Erdrich are not "Indian" enough because they both depict the atrocities that contemporary Native Americans must face but do not demonstrate the strength of cultural values and traditions that have allowed Indians to survive the Columbian trauma and subsequent centuries of xenophobia (648-50).

Today, in the post-Dances With Wolves era, to be Indian is not only socially acceptable, but also politically correct--this has not always been the case. Momaday is in part responsible for this new social attitude about Indians, Indianess, and the quest to capture an Indian in the proverbial familial woodpile. Pretend Indians and Indian wannabes abound; Jamake Highwater and Harley Swiftdeer seem to have assumed Indian identities for the purpose of creating pseudo-Indian heritages to validate their writings and enterprises.

Is Indian authenticity determined by blood quantum, the ability to speak a Native language, being born on a reservation, or being listed on a tribal roll? Sadly, Native Americans are the only group of people who must prove their heritage and cultural identity by carrying a tribal ID or a Bureau of Indian Affairs blood quantum card. On the topic of bloodedness, Karen I. Blu has asserted:

For Whites, blood is a substance that can be either racially pure or racially polluted. Black pollutes White blood absolutely, so that, in the logical extreme, one drop of Black blood makes an otherwise white man [or woman] Black. . . . White ideas about “Indian blood” are less formalized and clear-cut. . . . It may take only one drop of Black blood to make a person a Negro, but it takes a lot of Indian blood to make a person a “real” Indian. (25)

Blu clearly demonstrates the bias and subjective nature of racial identity, but the safest and best definition of Indianess still appears to be Momaday's, "An Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself" (162), even though Arnold Krupat calls this definition hopelessly vague and sexist (186-87). Momaday's definition allows the individuals to make this designation for themselves, rather than having society make it for them.

Besides the controversy regarding blood, much has also been written about the methods of instructing Native American texts in Native American courses or these works being mainstreamed into traditional survey classes. Larry Abbott has been a strong advocate for mainstreaming Native American texts into traditional survey courses, and he has asserted that

along with the obvious revolution in thinking about what constitutes the canon in American literature, there has been a parallel, if quieter, revolution in pedagogy, about how we teach what we teach and why we teach what we teach. (1)

Abbott's comments raise important pedagogical questions regarding whether we choose to use Indian texts in our courses because of the merit of the writings or because it is politically correct to do so.

Many critics feel that as long as specific courses on women and non-Euro-American cultures exist, they will continue to be in the margins of academic thought, and they will not be judged fairly and according to their merit. Similarly, Kenneth Roemer warns against the creation of “literary ghettos" where too much separate treatment could send the teaching of Native American texts in a purgatory of special topics courses and “Indian units”--at best treated on a separate but equal basis, at worst isolated and ignored. (B-l)

The academic goal is for a marginalized work to be mainstreamed into traditional American Survey courses, which would eliminate the need for such culturally specific ones. Native and non-Native texts do work well together, and by teaching these texts together, students will come to understand what Roemer calls "the significant ways that Indian and non-Indian texts speak to one another" (8). Elevating Indian works to the status of a survey course draws them out of the margins and allows students to see the validity of these works and makes the learning experience more objective and diverse.

Return to Class Main Page	*Module 1: Glossary*	*Module 2: Literature*	*Module 3: Education*	*Module 4: Cultures*

*Module 5: History*	*Module 6: Today*	*Module 7: Curriculum*	Module 8: Seminar	*Exit class*

*Return to class main page*	*Module 1: Glossary*	*Module 2: Literature*	*Module 3: Education*	*Module 4: Cultures*

*Module 5: History*	*Module 6: Today*	*Module 7: Curriculum*	Module 8: Seminar	*Exit class*