American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In 1980, during his keynote address to the UCLA American Indian Studies Conference, Russell Thornton observed that "the future for American Indian Studies is open . . . [either to] blend into other disciplines . . . or become mere components . . . or it could emerge as a discipline, unique and distinct in higher education" [emphasis added]. It is this distinctly contradictory set of options which Jose Berriero has termed "the dilemma" that has frustrated the potential of university-level American Indian education from its outset. Today, however, both the material and the intellectual foundations exist through which American Indian Studies can come into its own, transcending the constraints of Euro-American colonial indoctrination which have been imposed upon it and creating a matrix of knowledge for Native America which Ron LaFrance has called its "symbology of development." The seeds planted during the 1960s, despite all odds, have sprouted and grown, and may well be preparing to bear fruit. This brief survey of the state of affairs within American Indian Studies will endeavor to sketch both problems confronted by the discipline and possible solutions. As with any study of this sort, it does not-in fact, cannot-purport to offer a comprehensive analysis of its subject matter. Rather, it is intended to provide a capsule orientation to the complexity of issues and dynamics involved, and to open the door to further consideration and discussion of the topics raised. And it is intended to extend a definition of American Indian Studies as a fully interdisciplinary academic field which is a viable conceptual alternative to the Eurocentrism inherent in the present intellectual status quo.

The scholar undertaking a study of the origins of drama among the world’s peoples is drawn, by the magnet of cultural conditioning, through the lineage of Western theater to its historic emergence among the Ancient Athenians-only to be confronted by a maze of theories concerning the nature of ritual, catharsis, and Dionysos. These essential issues may seem remote and even irrelevant in the context of a worldly, industrialized culture. The notion of origins too often is presumed to imply an evolutionary development from a crude original form to something more sophisticated or effective. Any such assumption separates us from our ability to understand the potency of earlier theater forms by attributing their vitality to a stage of human development in which people were more easily deluded. The search for beginnings also too often leads to a close scrutiny of localized historical-political factors, which overlooks the more constant factors of the human psyche, which this author believes to be the true source of the power of the art of drama. A cross-cultural approach, which examines performance forms which are clearly on the dividing edge between ritual and drama, can be of use to clear the air. The Water Serpent puppet plays of the Hopi Indians provide such an example. Moreover, these plays concern a central character demonstrating numerous striking and significant cross-cultural parallels to the Greek Dionysos, the founding deity of Athenian theatre.

We have one priceless universal trait, we Americans. That trait is our humor. What a pity it is that it is not more prevalent in our art. -William Faulkner Many early reviewers of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine treat the novel as though it were at heart a tragic account of pain. They see Erdrich as merely a recorder of contemporary Indian suffering, as an evoker of her characters’ ”conflicting feelings of pride and shame, guilt and rage-the disorderly intimacies of their lives on the reservation and their longings to escape.” These critics classify Love Medicine as “a tribal chronicle of defeat,” a ”unique evocation of a culture in severe social ruin,” and an ”appalling account of . . . impoverished, feckless lives far gone in alcoholism and promiscuity.” Each of these descriptions betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the novel; any reckoning of Love Medicine as an ultimately tragic text begs contradiction. To be sure, the book contains much that is painful. Its undying vision, however, is one of redemption-accomplished through an expert and caring use of humor. Erdrich’s characters by novel’s end are not far gone, but close to home; she evokes a culture not in severe ruin, but about to rise; she chronicles not defeat, but survival. Love, assisted by humor, triumphs over pain.

Through White Men’s Eyes; A Contribution To Navajo History: A Chronological Record of the Navajo People from Earliest Times to the Treaty of June 1,1868. J. Lee Correll, editor, Window Rock: Navajo Heritage Center, Sponsored by the Dissemination and Assessment Center for Bilingual Education of the U.S. Office of Education, Department of Health Education and Welfare under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, and by the Arizona Bicentennial Commission, 1979. Prologue, Acknowledgments, Line Illustrations, Photographs, Bibliographies, Indices, Documents (reprinted in volume VI). Six Volumes. $225. Now available from the University of Arizona Press. I Until the 1950s the profession of history had been remarkably derelict in the re-telling of the Navajo and Hopi past. Beginning in the 1880s self-trained scholars, such as the army surgeon Washington Matthews, intensively studied Navajo culture. He was followed by institutional or university scholars of the Boasian school-Gladys Reichard, Clyde Kluckhohn, Edward Sapir, themselves students of Franz Boas, but also Leland Wyman, Franc Newcomb, and Father Berard Haile, who were not trained as anthropologists, but who nevertheless belong to the second generation of Navajo scholars. However, they evinced little interest in Navajo history. Boas insisted on the collection of a vast body of contemporary data which did not lend itself to historical analysis. Meanwhile, except for Frank Reeve in the late 1930s, historians did not enter the field.