So long as the "Indian wars" were still going on, the American people had newspaper headlines and articles to keep them informed about the nature and character of the American Indian. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the fighting, the excitement, and the news about Indians had ended. Euro-Americans were still interested, however, and to satisfy that curiosity the short story became the primary vehicle by which writers expressed their thoughts about the American Indian. Such turn-of-the-century stories have been generally ignored as sources of information about the developing attitudes of the white man toward the American Indian. Literary scholars have understandably passed these stories over because almost all are artistically flawed: the characters are weak, the plots silly, and the themes simple-minded. Historians also have generally passed these stories over because they are, after all, fiction-"made-up" yarns by writers who tended to know little about the Indians they described, and who cared more about selling a story than telling a truth. (To be sure, some scholars no doubt knew that these short stories might yield up useful information about the changing popular attitudes toward the American Indian; but until recently no bibliography of the genre was available, and those who might have been interested in reading this body of fiction about Indians had no convenient way of finding it.) The purpose of this study is to show, through discussion of one character type as portrayed in stories published during a twenty-year period, that the turn-of-the-century short story can give us worthwhile information, not about Indians, but about the attitudes of many whites toward them.

The recent and laudable interest in expanding the canon of American literature has elevated certain works to prominence. One of these is Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. This fine novel has it all-a Native American woman writer, a challenging cast of characters, most of whom have at least some Indian blood, a reservation setting, an honest look at the poverty, suicide, and alcoholism that abound in Indian communities, a frown at the policies and practices of the dominant Anglo society, a wonderfully subtle humor, and, finally, a positive and reassuring focus on the power of love. Love Medicine is an ideal novel to teach, not only because it contains all that and more, but because it works both as a novel and as a series of short stories. Many of its pieces, after all, appeared originally as short stories. Teachers who do not have time to teach the whole novel can assign certain portions of it for class discussion and leave students to read the rest on their own. Unfortunately, however, Love Medicine does not always make a good impression on readers who encounter it for the first time. It strikes them as being made up of a vast sea of partially delineated characters taking part in a wild array of events that span a too-long period of time. Furthermore, because the telling is not consecutive, students find that what plot there is tends to whip confusingly from before 1920 to after 1980. In short, beginning students tend to find the characters confusing, their family trees impossibly contorted, the plot disconnected.

One of the difficulties faced by those of us who teach Native American literature is that our students come to us forearmed with all sorts of generous stereotypes about Indians. Our students tend to think, for example, that virtually all Native Americans live close to the earth, are proud victims of white domination, and are spiritually superior to those who have colonized them. That Indians are humble people who worship a god of nature, peaceful people who love dogs and horses, reverent people who pay daily homage to their mother earth and their father sun. That Native Americans are strong and silent in the face of oppression. That they sit tall on horseback silhouetted against the setting sun. And so on. One of the things that teachers do—or let the voices of Native American writers do for them—is complicate these kinds of stereotypes. Of course, there is usually some truth to stereotypes. The trouble with stereotypes is that people want to be able to oversimplify a complicated subject by taking what may be true for one or two or many individuals and assume that it is true for everyone in a certain group.

Slowly the language has crept into my writing, replacing a word here, a concept there, beginning to carry weight. The constant murmur of the pines, her beloved music, now became comprehensible to her in the same way that flows of Ojibwe language first began to make sense—a word here, a word there, a few connections, then the shape of ideas. It’s amazing that we even have Ojibwe speakers in this century. I get very troubled when I talk about the language. I really do have such regard for it. It’s a very deep, earthy, descriptive, gnarled language. It’s a great language. It’s not simple. It’s intellectually complex, and it’s so far beyond what I could ever hope to achieve in understanding. It’s so tied to the landscape. My love for the language far exceeds my ability to speak it. I just keep trying. In Love Medicine, Lulu Nanapush, who spent her formative years at a boarding school speaking only English, tells about the time Moses Pillager talked to Nanapush: “One summer long ago, when I was a little girl, he came to Nanapush and the two sat beneath the arbor, talking only in the old language.” Much later, as a young woman, Lulu visits Moses on his cat-ridden island and sleeps with him. She wakes up beside Moses to discover that he is talking in a language that she scarcely recognizes: “I woke to find him speaking in the old language, using words that few remember, forgotten, lost to people who live in town or dress in clothes” (LM 81).

The thing is, the events people pick out as magical don’t seem unreal to me. Unusual, yes, but I was raised believing in miracles and hearing of true events that may seem unbelievable. -Louise Erdrich One of the curious problems facing contemporary Native American fiction writers is how they learn about their people’s history, and one of the curious solutions to this problem is that these writers turn to non-Indian authors to fill gaps in their knowledge about the history and traditions of early Indian peoples. It is ironic that the colonialist attitudes that ultimately led to the near obliteration of early Native ways of life and living oral traditions provide later Indians with written sources of information to which they would otherwise have no access. Thus we find N. Scott Momaday reading Elsie Clews Parsons’ ethnographic report The Pueblo of Jemez and using it in his novel House Made of Dawn. We find Leslie Marmon Silko reading the ethnographic reports of the mythical history of the Pueblo people and using them in her story ‘Yellow Woman” and her novel Ceremony. We find James Welch immersing himself in the historical records of the Blackfeet, many of them written by white historians, as he builds his novel Foots Crow. And we find Louise Erdrich reading the pages of an autobiographical narrative by John Tanner, a white captive of the Ottawa and Ojibwa at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, as she develops some of the scenes in her novel Tracks, published in 1988 and set between 1912 and 1924, and, more recently, in her juvenile novel The Birchbark House, published in 1999 and set between 1847 and 1848.