472 Making It New: 1900–1945part three documents Carlos’s transformation into a radicalized union activist,
working for the Filipino labor and The New Tide movements. The short fourth part,
in turn, shows Bulosan achieving some literary success. Reading The Grass Roof, he
reflects: “Why could I not succeed as Younghill Kang had?” This spurs him on to
write his own story: an act which he sees as his means of fighting for a better life in
America. “The time had come, I felt, for me to utilize my experiences in written
form,” Bulosan explains. “I had something to live for now, and to fight the world
with.” Writing also becomes his means of feeling he belongs. “It came to me that no
man – no one at all – could destroy my faith in America again,” he concludes his
narrative. “It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my
friends, of my brothers ... I know that no man could destroy my faith in America
that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, ever.” Bulosan was to die, thirteen
years after the publication of America is in the Heart, without ever changing his
original nationality. But in writing this book, he firmly laid claim to his place in the
American tradition. As Bulosan put it: “America is not merely a land or an institution.
America is in the heart of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that
are building a new world.” Of that America, he was a full and distinguished citizen.Native American voices
Among Native American writers, the first flourishing of literature written in English
came in the 1920s and 1930s. Prior to that, the only notable fictions were The Life
and Adventures of Joaquin Morieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) by John
Rollin Ridge and O-gî-mäw-kwe Mit-i-gwä-kî: Queen of the Woods (1899) by Simon
Pokagon (1830–1899). The authorship of the latter has been disputed, but the book
by Ridge, a sensationalist novel dramatizing the violent actions of a Mexican bandit
who raided the California gold fields in the early 1850s, was almost certainly the first
novel by a Native American author to be published. Of the several Native American
writers who began exploring the plight of their people in fiction during the earlier
part of the twentieth century, the most renowned were Thomas S. Whitecloud
(1914–1972), John Joseph Matthews (1894–1979), D’Arcy McNickle (1904–1977),
and Mourning Dove (1888–1976). Necessarily, they focused on different tribal
traditions, geographies, and histories, and different aspects of the Native American
experience. What they had in common, however, were certain fundamental concerns
relating to the crisis in their culture. Whatever their approach, all of them were
preoccupied with the debate over personal and tribal identity in the face of land loss,
radical social and cultural change, and the pressure from white society to assimilate
and acculturate Native Americans. The struggle of Native peoples to reconcile their
ancient tribal traditions with the material and moral forces of American modernity
became a dominant, determining theme in their fiction: explored, very often,
through the plight of an Indian of mixed race who, as Thomas S. Whitecloud
observes of his narrator and protagonist in “Blue Winds Dancing” (1938), “don’t
seem to fit in anywhere.” It is a struggle that, only rarely, meets with a successful
outcome. The portrait of Archilde, the young male protagonist of The SurroundedGGray_c04.indd 472ray_c 04 .indd 472 8 8/1/2011 7:54:02 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 02 AM