American Indian Culture and Research Journal

[Narrative] is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural. —Roland Barthes [Native American] literature comes from and aims toward a different “map of the mind.” —Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish) “Simon, lost somewhere in between.” Or so Ojibwe author David Treuer refers to his central protagonist near the beginning of his novel The Hiawatha (1997). It is to contextualize his narrative schema that Treuer introduces the leitmotif at an early stage. Centering on images of place and placelessness, this leitmotif—like the novel itself—carries pertinence for current understandings of the Native American novel as a literary form and for critical analyses of tribal fiction. For Simon—who at the novel’s opening has just been released from prison having served a sentence for fratricide—the physical and emotional sense of placelessness is a burden that will be endured until the closing scene. Most importantly, the narrative closure at the end of the novel does not offer the customary image of “the return of the Native,” an image that is often read as a panacea to the trials of colonization and is often now expected by readers of tribal fiction. Instead Hiawatha—its ending and the narrative as a whole—confounds undemanding and comfortable notions of indigenous “return.” In this way, the novel engages the stylistic convention of the return, both as this return has appeared in Native fiction and as readers have interpreted it.

INTRODUCTION William Bevis has argued that, whereas the classic American novel tells a story of “leaving,” in which characters find growth and fulfillment away from the homes they grew up in, the typical Native American novel is based around “homing.” In homing stories, the characters do not “find themselves” through independence but rather discover value and meaning by returning to their homes, pasts, and people. Although Bevis’s notion provides insight into many Native American works, one novel calling for a somewhat different approach is Louise Erdrich’s Tracks. Although notions of “leaving” and “homing” are central to Tracks, they operate in ways far more complex than Bevis’s view suggests. Since the novel’s 1988 publication, scholars have probed its depictions of characters losing, reclaiming, searching for, and finding home. Most have focused on the displacement and marginality the characters experience. Tracks has been described as “a novel entirely haunted by historical dispossession” in which the characters experience “dislocation from their heritage, their environment, and themselves.” A number of scholars have argued that displacement is manifested in the novel thematically and in the disparate voices and multiple perspectives it employs as narrative strategies. This concern with displacement obscures the fact that the novel is about losing home and about finding it. As Tom Berninghausen has pointed out, Erdrich’s characters are working toward “coming home in a social sense, being at home in the tribe’s history, and returning to the particular landscape that is home.” Lydia A. Schultz and E. Shelley Reid have disputed the suggestion that the novel’s narrative discontinuities reflect chaos and dispossession in the lives of the Anishinaabe, arguing instead that they represent the multivocalic strategies of traditional Anishinaabe storytelling—that is, they reflect continuity rather than disruption of Anishinaabe culture. Gloria Bird has pointed out that, although many of Erdrich’s characters live on the margins of society, they are people for whom those margins are home. Similarly, Pauline Woodward writes that Erdrich “offers a new rendering of community” concentrating on the endurance of the Anishinaabe even through the discontinuity they experience. Forces for and movements toward homing are intricately interwoven with energies and actions toward displacement throughout Tracks.

One of the best-studied, least-discussed texts of Native American oral literature is a long Mojave “epic” taken down from a man named Inyo-kutavere by Alfred Kroeber in 1902 and published in 1951. The Mojaves live along the Colorado River at the border of today’s states of Arizona and California. For his publication Kroeber condensed the text from an estimated one hundred thousand Mojave words to about thirty-five thousand words in English. The Mojave language was not recorded. Kroeber entered the story’s details as an interpreter translated them for him over the course of six days. (The old man talked, the interpreter translated, the visitor wrote, and the old man talked again.) The text was published in twenty-nine pages along with forty-eight pages of commentary and twenty-five pages of notes. In 1999, Arthur Hatto, an Englishman and devotee of epics, produced a second book on the text. It is rare for an oral work by a Native American to be accorded one, let alone two, book-length commentaries; it is also rare for any scholar to call a Native American text an epic. The Quiche Maya’s Popul Vuh has that status, but north of Mexico the only such work that I know of is The Trickster, a Winnebago text given and commented on in a book by Paul Radin in 1955. The trickster may be the best-known type of character in Native American literature, thanks partly to Radin. I do not wish to diminish the importance of tricksters but to complement them by taking up this other and hitherto neglected kind of text. We will consider the following: what did epic mean to Kroeber and Hatto; what should we mean by epic, as work and as hero; and how widely spread were works of this kind in traditional Native America? For this article I follow the definition of epic given by Hugh Holman in Handbook to Literature: a long narrative poem in elevated style presenting characters of high position in a series of adventures that form an organic whole through their relation to a central character of heroic proportions and through their development of episodes important to the history of a nation or race.

Let us begin with a simple observation: people like to laugh. The comic instinct can be found in every culture, including every form of humor from slapstick to the sublime. If we are interested in laughing with others rather than laughing at them, there seems to be a consensus in the literature as to what makes something funny, usually focusing on the nature of incongruities. At its simplest, incongruity consists of creating a juxtaposition between two items that normally would not be associated with each other, the proximity of which causes surprise. If the surprise causes an emotional response of delight, especially at seeing the world in a new and different way, that delight will support the interpretation that the juxtaposition is humorous. The emphasis on incongruities helps explain the nature of humor. However, it might be argued that this explanation for humor is insufficient to account for the entire process. In discussing incongruities, the emphasis, to a large degree, is on phenomena that exist outside the mental frame and on the nature of the mental frame. The aspect of the humorous event that lies outside the mental frame need not be explored here. As regards the mental frame, humor theorists will generally consider notions of language and cultural expectations. For example, a native speaker will get the joke, while a non-native speaker will be left in the dark. When it comes to cultural expectations, finding humor in something that is sacred in another’s culture most likely will not result in laughter on the part of one’s conversation partner but instead could instigate a quick end to the cross-cultural encounter.

Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues has inspired both admiration and castigation. Critics such as Stephen Evans, Adrian C. Louis, Joseph Coulombe, and James Cox have praised Alexie’s satiric upending of stereotypes about Native Americans, claiming that Alexie’s work “uses stereotypes . . . of the . . . Indian, in new and entirely moral and ethical ways.” Other critics such as Gloria Bird, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Kenneth Lincoln, and Louis Owens have argued instead that Alexie’s work “simply reinforces all of the stereotypes desired by white readers [of] . . . absurd and aimless Indians.” Yet in his review of the positive and negative scholarship on Alexie, Evans insists that Alexie is “a consciously moral satirist” and not a “cultural traitor.” I would like to contribute to this debate by suggesting a further reason to see Alexie’s work as subversive rather than complicit. In contrast to quite a bit of “multicultural lit,” Alexie’s Reservation Blues does not associate magic with Indian culture so much as with white culture. Much of Reservation Blues turns expected magical tropes on their heads with American Indians presented as the antithesis of magic and the embodiment of rationality. Whether intentionally or not, Alexie confronts stereotypes with their opposites. The text thus inheres magic in the Western rather than in the indigenous, articulating the material struggle at the heart of the colonial relationship. MISREADING MAGIC REALISM Magic realism is widely considered a literary style, but it is more often a critical category. That is, magic realism (codified in German, Spanish, and English in the mid-twentieth century) is more often a term that twentieth-century critics apply rather than a term twentieth-century authors embrace. Critics depend on categories, but writers eschew them, and magic realism is a term almost no writer will claim. In this sense, we can talk about magic realism as an important critical approach linking discussions of literatures written outside Europe or North America or written by immigrants to those centers. This critical approach attends to textual instances in which the fabulous is detailed, the supernatural meets the everyday, and the ordinary and the extraordinary are presented as analogous. Critics identify a text as magic realist if it treats the extraordinary as real.

In our original article in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, we presented the results of a study conducted with adolescents aged thirteen to seventeen of a northeastern tribe. The purpose of our study was to achieve an understanding of the bicultural (tribal and nontribal) ethnic identity of the adolescents, highlighting their unique history and experience as members of the tribe. Northeastern tribal adolescents have a distinct history of longer length of contact with settlers and more intermarriage. Despite this, they have been relatively overlooked in the research literature. Most research on the ethnic identity of American Indian adolescents has focused primarily on tribal identity, and samples have primarily come from those living on reservations. Our study departed from previous research, which focused on tribal and nontribal identity of northeastern tribal adolescents without residential reservation land. We have conducted some additional analyses that have provided some interesting and important findings. In the results of our original article, twenty-one females and nine males returned the mail-out survey; they had an average age of 15.57 years. Eleven of the adolescents lived in the tribe’s home state, and nineteen resided out of state.