Indians, Modernity, and History

This chapter assesses how attitudes started to shift at the beginning of the twentieth century—partly under the influence of Western movies, partly as modernist writers and artists started to idealize the Indian for their own ends, and as other wannabe Indians, most notably Grey Owl, began to develop the association of Indianness with environmental preservation. It also looks at some contemporary writing by native peoples—especially James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko—that aims to reappropriate nineteenth-century transatlantic history in a range of imaginative ways. By writing this fiction today, both Silko and Welch reclaim and rewrite the possibilities inherent for native peoples in the late nineteenth century. In so doing, they demonstrate that despite the importance, then and now, of tradition as both concept and practice within Indian society, identity, and modes of thought, it stands not isolated from modernity, but rather in mediation and dialogue with it. At a time when critical attention within American studies has increasingly turned toward imperialism and transnationalism, to explore the importance of the transatlantic Indian is to provide an important reminder that the internal colonial relations of the United States cannot be separated from these other trajectories.

Tommy Orange Has Company

The recognizable formal structure of tommy orange's there there and its familiar revelations about indigenous american life, as much as the components distinguishing the novel from other Native-authored works that share its concerns, have propelled it to the center of conversations about contemporary Native literature. Yet the excitement about the arrival of a new, talented writer has obscured There There's roots in American Indian literary history, especially its affiliations with novels by other Native authors. As the numerous images of characters in mirrors and other reflective surfaces suggest, Orange establishes Indigenous people looking at Indigenous people, and Indigenous authors looking at Indigenous authors, as foundational to the novel's form. There There reflects the work of many other Native fiction writers, most prominently Sherman Alexie, but also James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, and David Treuer, among others. He evokes the formal features of many of Louise Erdrich's novels, too, but unlike Erdrich, Orange leaves readers with the overwhelming impression of irrevocably damaged Indigenous communities with dismal prospects for breaking cycles of violence and trauma.

Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow

The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.