Native American Writing
"America is not a young land; it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting." - William Burroughs, Naked Lunch 
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977)
A.A. Carr, Eye Killers (1995)

"He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present [...].He could feel it inside his skull -- the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. [H]e had to sweat to think of something that wasn't unraveled or tied in knots to the past [...]." (Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, pp. 6-7).

Oral Culture

Silko: "it is a culture in which each person has a contribution to make. The older you are the more valued you are but each person is valued. The oral tradition stays in the human brain and then it is a collective effort in the recollection. So when he is telling a story and she is telling a story and you are telling a story and one of us is listening and there is a slightly different version or a detail, then it is participatory when somebody politely says I remember it this way. It is a collective memory and depends upon the whole community. There is no single entity that controls information or dictates but this oral tradition is a constantly self-correcting process."
(Thomas Irmer, An Interview with Silko. http://www.altx.com/interviews/silko.html)

Storytelling

Ceremony

I will tell you something about stories,
[he said]
They aren't just for entertainment.
Don't be fooled
They are all we have, you see,
all we have to fight off illness and death.

You don't have anything
if you don't have the stories.

Their evil is mighty
but it can't stand up to our stories.
So they try to destroy the stories
let the stories be confused or forgotten
They would like that
They would be happy
Because we would be defenseless then.
[...]
And in the belly of this story
the rituals and the ceremony
are still growing.

(Silko, Ceremony, p. 2)

Communal identity -- Storytelling

"when one grows up in the Pueblo community, in the Pueblo tribe the people are communal people, it is an egalitarian communal society. The education of the children is done within the community, this is in the old times before the coming of the Europeans. Each adult works with every child, children belong to everybody and the way of teaching is to tell stories. All information, scientific, technological, historical, religious, is put into narrative form. It is easier to remember that way. So when I began writing when I was at the University of New Mexico, the professor would say now you write your poetry or write a story, write what you know they always tell us. All I knew was my growing up at Laguna, recallings of some other stories that I had been told as a child."

oral tradition -- articulates and passes along a vision of human identity with the land

The Land

"We are the land. To the best of my understanding, that is the fundamental idea embedded in Native American life and culture in the Southwest [...]. The land is not really the place (separate from ourselves) where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies [...]. It is rather a part of our being, dynamic, significant, real. It is ourself, in as real a sense as such notions as 'ego,' 'libido' or social network [...]. Nor is this relationship one of mere 'affinity' for the Earth. It is not a matter of being "close to nature." The relationship is more one of identity, in the mathematical sense, than of affinity. The Earth is, in a very real sense, the same as ourself (or selves), and it is this primary point that is made in the fiction and poetry of the Native American writers of the Southwest." (Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop [1986] quoted in Nelson, "Place, Vision, and Identity in Native American Literatures").

Reinvention of Ceremony and Ritual to Heal Contemporary Wounds

"At one time, the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only the growth keeps the ceremonies strong.
 "She taught me this above all else: things which don't shift and grow are dead things. These are the things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won't make it. We won't survive. That's what the witchery is counting on: that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power wil triumph, and the people will be no more." (Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, p. 126).

"He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that its simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now .[...] There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth, had been laid." (Silko Ceremony, pp. 245-46).

Aspects of the Gothic


Carr also draws upon important strands of American Indian culture, both traditional and more recent Indian fictional forms -- indebted to Silko's Ceremony, for example
relationship between oral and written cultures
relationship between ancient customs and modern world
use of traditional stories and figures -- eg coyote stories, skinwalkers and witchery
experience of alienation among modern Indians that must be dealt with through    engagement with tradition -- ceremonies and rituals as a means of reestablishing    connection with cultural identity
geographical and spiritual importance of the land -- how it has been destroyed by    Euro-American exploitation -- uranium mines, freeways, urbanisation

What these EuroAmerican AND Native American concerns have in common --

Carr BLURS distinctions deliberately, demonstrating similarites and differences: "Clearly, Carr in Eye Killers regards the routes and roots of human (and nonhuman) relationships as pedagogical in nature. The vampires have to learn how to be vampires; they read books and mentor each other. Likewise, the Navajo have to learn how to be Navajo; Coyote, Changing Woman, the elderlies, and the stories themselves are all explicitly represented as teachers. These acts of teaching and learning acknowledge permeable boundaries and redefine cultural boundaries [...]. Carr teaches not only the importance of stories but also the important relationships and transitions between stories. Everyone in the book has vampires (losses, ghosts, regrets, hauntings); everyone in the book has stories." (Eric Gary Anderson, American Indian Literature and the Southwest, p. 194).

Further Reading

Allen, Paula Gunn. "American Indian Literature, 1968-1983," in Literary History of the American West. http://www2.tcu.edu/depts/prs/amwest/html/w11058.html
Anderson, Eric Gary. American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999). On Carr see pp. 14-15, 190-195.
Campbell, Neil. The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
Even, Larry. "Native Oral Traditions," in Literary History of the American West.
Irmer, Thomas. An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko.
Limerick, Patrica Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), Chapter 6, pp.179-221.
Nelson, Robert M. "Place, Vision, and Identity in Native American Literatures."
Silko, Leslie Marmon, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin, 1992).
Links
  • David Murray, Modern Indians
  • WWW Virtual Library - American Indians  Lots of primary texts available here.
  • Voices From the Gap: Women Writers of Color
  • Multicultural American West
  • In the Combat Zone by Leslie Marmon Silko
  • Fences Against Freedom by Leslie Marmon Silko
  • Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and the Effects of White Contact on Pueblo Myth and Ritual by Suzanne M. Austgen
  • Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction by Robert M. Nelson
  • Place, Vision, and Identity in Native American Literatures by Robert M. Nelson
  • A Laguna Woman by Robert M. Nelson
  • Rewriting Ethnography: The Embedded Texts in Leslie Silko's Ceremony by Robert M. Nelson
  • The Kaupata Motif in Silko's Ceremony: A Study of a Literary Homology by Robert M. Nelson
  • An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko, Part 1 by Thomas Irmer
  • An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko, Part 2 by Thomas Irmer
  • Aaron Carr's Eye Killers: Gouging Pan-Ethnic Identity Reconstruction from Vampiric Seduction

    • by Richard K. Mott