Research Guide to American Literature

Several of the fiction writers—Erdrich, Hogan, Alexie, Silko, and Welch—
have also published poetry. Alexie frequently cites the Paiute poet Louis as an
important influence: Alexie’s poetry, like Louis’s, is known for its sharp satire.
Tapahonso, acclaimed as a storyteller and performance poet, grounds much of
her poetry in Navajo history and systems of belief. Perhaps the most acclaimed
poet is Harjo, who cites Ortiz and Silko as major influences. Harjo combines
the realistic and social—poverty, time spent in bars, substandard housing, and
relationships strained by lack of material necessities—with mythic conceptions
of the moon, femininity and masculinity, and the power of land. She also plays
saxophone and flute and performs her poetry with the band Poetic Justice, which
has released several CDs.
One of the thorniest controversies in Native American literature centers
on issues of authenticity: who is entitled to speak for whom. In “An Old-Time
Indian Attack Conducted in Two Parts: Part One—Imitation ‘Indian’ Poems/
Part Two—Gary Snyder’s Turtle Island ” (1979), Silko accused Snyder and other
white poets of appropriating native material without truly understanding it. Silko
also published a highly critical review of Erdrich’s The Beet Queen (1986), argu-
ing that Erdrich’s writing was skillful and poetic but that the novel focused too
little on the racism Native Americans face. In a Los Angeles Times book review
(23 January 2000) Alexie castigated Ian Frazier’s best-selling On the Rez (2000):
Frazier had spent months researching the history of the Pine Ridge Reserva-
tion and conditions there, but Alexie claimed that the writer had no right to
tell these stories because he had not lived on or near a reservation and had no
Indian heritage. These sentiments were echoed by many others. In some of her
prose writings Rose discusses whiteshamanism; the term, which was coined by
the Quapaw/Cherokee/Chickasaw writer Geary Hobson, refers to non-Indians
adopting a literary “shaman” identity and claiming a fundamental knowledge they
do not possess and to which they have no right. Rose sees the taking on of the
voice of someone from a different culture as inherently exploitative and unjust. In
her collection Bone Dance (1994) she explains that whiteshamanism represents a
lack of ability to speak from one’s own position and thus is unworthy as an artistic
stance. Alexie takes up a similar theme in his novel Indian Killer (1996).
Stereotypes and the most effective response to them pose another point of
contention and challenge. The two extreme stereotypes—the stoic noble savage
always “in tune” with nature and the lazy, dissolute primitive—stretch back to first
contact experiences, with traces of their beginnings to be found in Columbus’s
journals. Contemporary writers often confront these stereotypes but sometimes
find themselves misunderstood or criticized for doing so. For instance, Erdrich
and Alexie have been criticized for the number of alcoholic native characters in
their works; Alexie responds that he writes about what he witnessed growing
up on the Spokane reservation. He also tries to dispel the notion that American
Indians have an automatic spiritual connection to nature and the land. While
traditional Native American concepts of land, nature, and ownership are differ-
ent from those of European Americans, to view this difference as an inherent
spiritual one overidealizes natives and refuses to see them as fully-faceted human
beings. The literature that has come out of the Native American Renaissance

The Native American Renaissance 107