Literary Critics

"There is a widespread belief that we, Native American and nonnative alike, have nothing to celebrate. All too many believe we should give forth with great trills of mourning. But it is of utmost importance to our continuing recovery that we recognize our astonishing survival against all odds; that we congratulate ourselves and are congratulated by our fellow Americans for our amazing ability to endure, recover, restore our ancient values and life ways, and then blossom."

"Literature is one facet of a culture. The significance of a literature can be best understood in terms of the culture from which it springs, and the purpose of literature is clear only when the reader understands and accepts the assumptions on which the literature is based. A person who was raised in a given culture has no problem seeing the relevance, the level of complexity, or the symbolic significance of that culture’s literature. We are all from early childhood familiar with the assumptions that underlie our own culture and its literature and art. Intelligent analysis becomes a matter of identifying smaller assumptions peculiar to the locale, idiom, and psyche of the writer."

"Most Indian women I know are in the same bicultural bind: we vacillate between being dependent and strong, self-reliant and powerless, strongly motivated and hopelessly insecure. We resolve the dilemma in various ways: some of us party all the time; some of us drink to excess; some of us travel and move around a lot; some of us land good jobs and then quit them; some of us engage in violent exchanges; some of us blow our brains out. We act in these destructive ways because we suffer from the societal conflicts caused by having to identify with two hopelessly opposed cultural definitions of women. Through this destructive dissonance we are unhappy prey to the self-disparagement common to, indeed demanded of, Indians living in the United States today. Our situation is caused by the exigencies of a history of invasion, conquest, and colonization whose searing marks are probably ineradicable. A popular bumper sticker on many Indian cars proclaims: “If You’re Indian You’re In,” to which I always find myself adding under my breath, “Trouble.”"

"No Indian can grow to any age without being informed that her people were “savages” who interfered with the march of progress pursued by respectable, loving, civilized white people. We are the villains of the scenario when we are mentioned at all. We are absent from much of white history except when we are calmly, rationally, succinctly, and systematically dehumanized. On the few occasions we are noticed in any way other than as howling, bloodthirsty beings, we are acclaimed for our noble quaintness. In this definition, we are exotic curios. Our ancient arts and customs are used to draw tourist money to state coffers, into the pocketbooks and bank accounts of scholars, and into support of the American-in-Disneyland promoters’ dream."

"In America, law substitutes for custom. In America, society substitutes for love of family, comrade, village, or tribe. Walden is the self-proclaimed triumph of the isolated, superior individual. Alone with nature, not in it. Not of it. One can be with it as a scholar is with a book, but as an observer, not a creative participant. (2. "The Savages in the Mirror: Phantoms and Fantasies in America")"

"I am Laguna, woman of the lake, daughter of the dawn, sunrise, kurena. I can see the light making the world anew. It is the nature of my blood and heritage to do this. There is surely cause to weep, to grieve; but greater than ugliness, the endurance of tribal beauty is our reason to sing, to greet the coming day and the restored life and hope it brings."

"The community is the greatest threat to the American Individual Ethic; and it is the community that must be punished and destroyed. Not because Americans take much conscious notice of community, but because community is what a human being must have to be human in any sense, and community is what Americans deny themselves - in the name of progress, in the name of growth. In the name of Freedom. In the name of the Hero...It is not so strange that everyman-America hates and fears Communism. The very word strikes at the root of the American way and at the heart of the American sickness: a communist is one who must depend on others. A communist is one who must cooperate. A communist is one who must share. (2. "The Savages in the Mirror: Phantoms and Fantasies in America")"

"One’s emotions are one’s own; to suggest that others should imitate them is to impose on the personal integrity of others."

"When I was small, my mother often told me that animals, insects, and plants are to be treated with the kind of respect one customarily accords to high-status adults. “Life is a circle, and everything has its place in it,” she would say. That’s how I met the sacred hoop, which has been an integral part of my life."

"Indians endure—both in the sense of living through something so complete in its destructiveness that the mere presence of survivors is a testament to the human will to survive and in the sense of duration or longevity."

"Not until recently have American Indian women chosen to define themselves politically as Indian women—a category that retains American Indian women’s basic racial and cultural identity but distinguishes women as a separate political force in a tribal, racial, and cultural context—but only recently has this political insistence been necessary. In other times, in other circumstances more congenial to womanhood and more cognizant of the proper place of Woman as creatrix and shaper of existence in the tribe and on the earth, everyone knew that women played a separate and significant role in tribal reality."

"Because of the basic assumption of the wholeness or unity of the universe, our natural and necessary relationship to all life is evident; all phenomena we witness within or “outside” ourselves are, like us, intelligent manifestations of the intelligent universe from which they arise, as do all things of earth and the cosmos beyond. Thunder and rain are specialized aspects of this universe, as is the human race. Consequently, the unity of the whole is preserved and reflected in language, literature, and thought, and arbitrary divisions of the universe into “divine” and “worldly” or “natural” and “unnatural” beings do not occur."

"We are busily stealing the thunder back, so it can empower the fires of life we tend, have always tended, as it was ever meant to."

"There is such a thing as American Indian literature, and it can be divided into several interlocking categories. The major divisions are traditional literature and genre literature of the present. Traditional literature can be further divided into ceremonial and popular varieties—that is, into canonical works and those that derive from the canon but that are widely told and appeal to audiences gathered on social occasions. Contemporary works, or genre literature, can be divided into the classic western categories of poetry, short fiction, the novel, and drama, with the addition of autobiography, as-told-to narrative, and mixed genre works. Structural and thematic elements from the oral tradition, usually from the writer’s own tribe, always show up in contemporary works by American Indians, and elements from contemporary, non-Indian works sometimes show up in contemporaneous tribal social literature."

"American Indians are not merely doomed victims of western imperialism or progress; they are also the carriers of the dream that most activist movements in the Americas claim to be seeking. The major difference between most activist movements and tribal societies is that for millennia American Indians have based their social systems, however diverse, on ritual, spirit-centered, woman-focused world-views."

"In the culture and literature of Indian America, the meaning of myth may be discovered, not as speculation about primitive long-dead ancestral societies but in terms of what is real, actual, and viable in living cultures in America. Myth abounds in all of its forms; from the most sacred stories to the most trivial, mythic vision informs the prose and poetry of American Indians in the United States as well as the rest of the Americas. An American Indian myth is a story that relies preeminently on symbol for its articulation. It generally relates a series of events and uses supernatural, heroic figures as the agents of both the events and the symbols. As a story, it demands the immediate, direct participation of the listener. American Indian myths depend for their magic on relationship and participation. Detached, analytical, distanced observation of myth will not allow the listener mythopoeic vision. Consequently, these myths cannot be understood more than peripherally by the adding-machine mind; for when a myth is removed from its special and necessary context, it is no longer myth; it is a dead or dying curiosity. It is akin, in that state, to the postcard depictions of American Indian people that abound in the southwestern United States."

"Can we, as scholars and teachers facing the twenty-first century, fail to realize that "something there is that does not love a wall"? Can we in all good conscience persist in walling off the mainstream of American literature for a tiny group of writers, and from the great majority of writers in this century? Isn't it time we realized the absurdity of calling a tiny brook a mainstream, consigning the great river to marginality? It certainly makes the margins the center of the action-an odd way for margins to act! Surely in this time we can cease to behave as though Thoreau's Walden Pond requires we keep literature forever enclosed. Even Henry David came out of prison in time! Let's join him. Let's open ourselves to multiplicity, and let the winds of change and of life blow freely through our conversations."

"The oral tradition is vital; it heals itself and the tribal web by adapting to the flow of the present while never relinquishing its connection to the past. Its adaptability has always been required, as many generations have experienced. Certainly the modern American Indian woman bears slight resemblance to her forebears—at least on superficial examination—but she is still a tribal woman in her deepest being. Her tribal sense of relationship to all that is continues to flourish. And though she is at times beset by her knowledge of the enormous gap between the life she lives and the life she was raised to live, and while she adapts her mind and being to the circumstances of her present life, she does so in tribal ways, mending the tears in the web of being from which she takes her existence as she goes."

"I have memories of tired women, partying women, stubborn women, sullen women, amicable women, selfish women, shy women, and aggressive women. Most of all I remember the women who laugh and scold and sit uncomplaining in the long sun on feast days and who cook wonderful food on wood stoves, in beehive mud ovens, and over open fires outdoors."

"Symbols in American Indian systems are not symbolic in the usual sense of the word. The words articulate reality—not “psychological” or imagined reality, not emotive reality captured metaphorically in an attempt to fuse thought and feeling, but that reality where thought and feeling are one, where objective and subjective are one, where speaker and listener are one, where sound and sense are one."

"You can take the Indian out of Indian country but you can’t take the Indian out of the Indian."

"In the beginning was thought, and her name was Woman. The Mother, the Grandmother, recognized from earliest times into the present among those peoples of the Americas who kept to the eldest traditions, is celebrated in social structures, architecture, law, custom, and the oral tradition. To her we owe our lives, and from her comes our ability to endure, regardless of the concerted assaults on our, on Her, being, for the past five hundred years of colonization. She is the Old Woman who tends the fires of life. She is the Old Woman Spider who weaves us together in a fabric of interconnection. She is the Eldest God, the one who Remembers and Re-members; and though the history of the past five hundred years has taught us bitterness and helpless rage, we endure into the present, alive, certain of our significance, certain of her centrality, her identity as the Sacred Hoop of Be-ing."

"To address a person as “mother” is to pay the highest ritual respect."

"There is a spirit that pervades everything, that is capable of powerful song and radiant movement, and that moves in and out of the mind. The colors of this spirit are multitudinous, a glowing, pulsing rainbow. Old Spider Woman is one name for this quintessential spirit, and Serpent Woman is another. Corn Woman is one aspect of her, and Earth Woman is another, and what they together have made is called Creation, Earth, creatures, plants, and light. [...] This spirit, this power of intelligence, has many names and many emblems. She appears on the plains, in the forests, in the great canyons, on the mesas, beneath the seas. To her we owe our very breath, and to her our prayers are sent blown on pollen, on corn meal, planted into the earth on feather-sticks, spit onto the water, burned and sent to her on the wind. Her variety and multiplicity testify to her complexity: she is the true creatrix for she is thought itself, from which all else is born. She is the necessary precondition for material creation, and she, like all of her creation, is fundamentally female—potential and primary. She is also the spirit that informs right balance, right harmony, and these in turn order all relationships in conformity with her law."

"Now dependent on white institutions for survival, tribal systems can ill afford gynocracy when patriarchy—that is, survival—requires male dominance. Not that submission to white laws and customs results in economic prosperity; the unemployment rates on most reservations is about 50 to 60 percent, and the situation for urban Indians who are undereducated (as many are) is almost as bad."

"The view of Indians as hostile savages who capture white ladies and torture them, obstruct the westward movement of peaceable white settlers, and engage in bloodthirsty uprisings in which they glory in the massacre of innocent colonists and pioneers is dear to the hearts of producers of bad films and even worse television. However, it is this view that is most deeply embedded in the American unconscious, where it forms the basis for much of the social oppression of other people of color and of women."

"The goddess Ixchel whose shrine was in the on Island, twenty miles offshore, was goddess of the moon, water childbirth, weaving, and love. The combination of attributes signifies the importance of childbirth, and women go to Ixchel’s shrine to gain or increase their share of these powers as well as to reinforce their sense of them. Ixchel possesses the power of fruitfulness, a power associated with both water and weaving and concerned with bringing to life or vitalization. Also connected with Ixchel is the power to end life or to take life away, an aspect of female ritual power that is not as often discussed as birth and nurturing powers are. These twin powers of primacy, life and death, are aspects of Ixchel as moon-woman in which she waxes and wanes, sometimes visible and sometimes invisible. Similarly, her power to weave includes the power to unravel, so the weaver, like the moon, signifies the power of patterning and its converse, the power of disruption."

"The nature of the cosmos, of the human, the creaturely, and the supernatural universe is like water. It takes numerous forms; it evaporates and it gathers. Survival and continuance are contingent on its presence. Whether it is in a cup, a jar, or an underground river, it nourishes life. And whether the ritual traditions are in ceremony, myth, or novel, they nourish the people. They give meaning. They give life."

"The tribes see women variously, but they do not question the power of femininity. Sometimes they see women as fearful, sometimes peaceful, sometimes omnipotent and omniscient, but they never portray women as mindless, helpless, simple, or oppressed. And while the women in a given tribe, clan, or band may be all these things, the individual woman is provided with a variety of images of women from the interconnected supernatural, natural, and social worlds she lives in."

"The whole body of American Indian literature, from its traditional, ceremonial aspects to its formal literary aspects, forms a field, or, we might say, a hoop dance, and as such is a dynamic, vital whole whose different expressions refer to a tradition that is unified and coherent on its own terms. It is a literary tradition that is breathtaking in its aesthetic realization and fundamental to coherent understanding of non-Indian varieties of American literature."

"The planet, our mother, Grandmother Earth, is physical and therefore a spiritual, mental, and emotional being. Planets are alive, as are all their by-products or expressions, such as animals, vegetables, minerals, climatic and meteorological phenomena. Believing that our mother, the beloved earth, is inert matter is destructive to yourself. (There's little you can do to her, believe it or not.) Such beliefs point to a dangerously diseased physicality. Being good, holy, and/or politically responsible means being able to accept whatever life brings and that includes just about everything you usually think of as unacceptable, like disease, death, and violence. Walking in balance, in harmony, and in a sacred manner requires staying in your body, accepting its discomforts, decayings, witherings, and blossomings and respecting them. Your body is also a planet, replete with creatures that live in and on it."

"My ideas of womanhood, passed on largely by my mother and grandmothers, Laguna Pueblo women, are about practicality, strength, reasonableness, intelligence, wit, and competence. I also remember vividly the women who came to my father’s store, the women who held me and sang to me, the women at Feast Day, at Grab Days, the women in the kitchen of my Cubero home, the women I grew up with; none of them appeared weak or helpless, none of them presented herself tentatively. I remember a certain reserve on those lovely brown faces; I remember the direct gaze of eyes framed by bright-colored shawls draped over their heads and cascading down their backs. I remember the clean cotton dresses and carefully pressed hand-embroidered aprons they always wore; I remember laughter and good food, especially the sweet bread and the oven bread they gave us. Nowhere in my mind is there a foolish woman, a dumb woman, a vain woman, or a plastic woman, though the Indian women I have known have shown a wide range of personal style and demeanor."

"Democracy by coercion is hardly democracy, in any language, and to some Indians recognizing that fact, the threat of extinction is preferable to the ignominy of enslavement in their own land."

"Myth is a story of a vision; it is a presentation of that vision told in terms of the vision’s symbols, characters, chronology, and import. It is a vehicle of transmission, of sharing, of renewal, and as such plays an integral part in the ongoing psychic life of a people."

"Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn."

"Black, the color of the West, of truth, revelation, and destruction."

"Americans divide Indians into two categories: the noble savage and the howling savage. The noble savage is seen as the appealing but doomed victim of the inevitable evolution of humanity from primitive to postindustrial social orders. The American belief in progress and evolution makes this a particularly difficult idea to dislodge, even though it is a root cause of the genocide practiced against American Indians since the colonial period. This attitude, which I characterize as the Progressive Fallacy, allows American Indians victim status only. And while its adherents suffer some anguish when encountering the brutal facts of exterminationist policies, they inevitably shrug resignedly and say—quite directly—that Indians have to assimilate or perish. So while the Progressives allow the noble savage to be the guardian of the wilds and on occasion the conscience of ecological responsibility, the end result of their view for Indians is the same as its counterpart view of American Indians as howling denizens of a terrifying wilderness."

"Pre-Conquest American Indian women valued their role as vitalizers. Through their own bodies they could bring vital beings into the world—a miraculous power whose potency does not diminish with industrial sophistication or time. They were mothers, and that word did not imply slaves, drudges, drones who are required to live only for others rather than for themselves as it does so tragically for many modern women. The ancient ones were empowered by their certain knowledge that the power to make life is the source of all power and that no other power can gainsay it. Nor is that power simply of biology, as modernists tendentiously believe."

"Love idealizes, or at least traditionally that has been one of the differential diagnoses: love idealizes, adds, but sex is just body meeting body, sometimes with love, sometimes with affection, sometimes with neither, just for the fun or satisfaction of it."

"In a speech last year on women's liberation, I said how wonderful it was for us to be living in a period in which Dostoevski's statement that there was no such thing as an ugly woman was at last coming true. Of course I don't mean that absolutely and literally but I said it seriously in that speech because I was talking about the terrible Madison Avenue-contrived notions of sexual attractiveness that were imposed upon the girls of my generation and how dreadful it was to be made to think, as I did, that you had to conform to some impossible standard of advertising beauty in order to be in the sexual running at all. How can anyone of my generation do anything except celebrate the fact that this is no longer how things are?"

"What I have found in life-it makes me very sad-is that one friend sustains me in one direction, another in another direction. What's missing are the friends who sustain one altogether."

"In the forties Diana Trilling could write words that in their sharp moral focus may remind us of some Victorian prophet: "Ours being in all spheres such a 'know-how' culture, a civilization so brilliantly skilled in turning out anything it sets its hand to and yet so appallingly ignorant of what is worth making or to what use the things it makes should be put, we cannot be surprised that our literature, too, shows a marked ascendancy of craft over conscience. Probably there has never been a time when so many people wrote so 'well' as now but to such meager purpose; when, indeed, the emptier a novel's content, the surer its technical proficiency." If the reader thinks that sounds more like a critic than a book reviewer, he is right. And as a critic, Diana Trilling has range; she is not satisfied to leave literature sitting there uninterpreted in its fullest psychological, social, and political meaning, for she perceives that "literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society." It follows that "just as dictatorship, war, and all the other hideous phenomena of our political day undoubtedly answer a profound need in the modern mass-personality, so the debasement of our literary standards reflects a loss of standard throughout our lives.""

"It seemed to me, ruled my writing, whatever its subject: my belief that even in an unsatisfactory society the individual is best defined by his social geography."

"In the myth, and especially the mythopoeic vision that gives it birth, past, present, and future are one, and the human counterparts of these—ancestors, contemporaries, and descendents—are also one. Conscious and unconscious are united through the magic of symbolic progression so that the symbols can convey direct, rational meanings and stir indirect memories and insights that have not been raised to conscious articulation. In mythopoeic vision and its literary counterparts, the near and the far must come together, for in its grasp we stand in a transcendent landscape that incorporates both. Lastly, the mythic heals, it makes us whole. For in relating our separate experiences to one another, in weaving them into coherence and therefore significance, a sense of wholeness arises, a totality which, by virtue of our active participation, constitutes direct and immediate comprehension of ourselves and the universe of which we are integral parts."

"Paula Allen has uncanny perception and intellect."

"To be sure, the part played by television in disturbing the normal rate of national and even international development and in robbing us of the physical distance which formerly separated us from events and therefore forced us to exercise our own minds and imaginations in order to get even a first grasp on history-in-the-making, is not to be underestimated as a factor in our recent dislocation in space and time. The death of John Kennedy, however, made for a subtler and perhaps a more pervasive disturbance in our historical balance. It altered our sense of ourselves as a people; it deprived us of the promise of a future. What could more profoundly affect the motions of time?"

"Paula Gunn Allen's description of the tribal culture is helpful in understanding this concept of energy dispersal: "The closest analogy in Western thought is the Einsteinian understanding of matter as a special state or condition of energy. Yet even this concept falls short of the Native American understanding, for Einsteinian energy is essentially stupid, while energy in the Indian view is intelligence manifesting yet another way.""

"Old women are powerful. They really are powerful. That's not a culture perception, that's a fact. So, what you do with powerful people whom you don't wish to have powerful is you put a mind trick on the whole society. You convince them that those who have power do not have power. You do that by degrading them, trivializing them, disappearing them, and murdering them. They were murdered in great numbers toward the end of the Middle Ages. And that thing is kept up by talking about "old bags" and "old witches" and "old crones" and making fun of them, laughing, and saying, "Don't go near her-she's got the Evil Eye," which is what immigrant populations do. All those sorts of things instill in the minds of all people that old women are not powerful because, of course, they are. If they weren't really powerful, would it be necessary to do all we do to them? It wouldn't be. (JB: Isn't this one of the lessons now being learned by many women in the United States?) ALLEN: Finally. (JB: A lesson that American Indian women could have taught...) ALLEN: If non-Indians had bothered to pay attention. Yes. I think of old women not as grotesque and ugly, but as singular with vibrancy, alive just as the leaves get before they fall...the older you get the more you come into your own and the more your stability increases and your knowledge and your sense of who you are and how things ought to go."

"Native American writers have always been a major influence on me, like Wendy Rose, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Paula Gunn Allen, just to name a few."

"we may protest that women's small contribution to culture doesn't indicate a lack of capacity but merely reflects the way men have contrived things to be: we can blame women's small place in culture on culture. But this leaves unanswered the question of why it is that over so many hundreds of years women have consented to follow the male dictate and allowed men to fashion the culture according to male design. It also leaves unanswered the even more fundamental question of why it is that in every society which has ever been studied-so Margaret Mead tells us-whatever is the occupation of men has the greater prestige"