The Truth About Stories (12 page)

Here is the essence of racism. “Skin makes the man.” A simple
declaration that divides the world up quickly. March believes that anyone who is not
White is inferior, but he's a bigot and a scoundrel whose morality is suspect, and
readers have little sympathy for the man or his views. Deerslayer, on the other hand,
objects to March's simple divisions and offers an explanation for difference that,
on the surface, is more complex and balanced.
Indians and Whites,
Deerslayer argues, while having different-coloured skin, are still both men, men with
“different gifts and traditions, but, in the main, with the same natur'.
Both have souls,” he tells us, “and both will be held accountable for their
deeds in this life.”
⁶

Though both are not necessarily equal.

“God made us all,” Cooper says through Deerslayer,
“white, black, red — and no doubt had his own wise intentions in coloring us
differently. Still, he made us, in the main, much the same in feelin's, though
I'll not deny that he gave each race its gifts. A white man's gifts are
Christianized, while a redskin's are more for the wilderness.”
⁷

As it turns out, March and Deerslayer are not arguing different points of
view, they are arguing variations of the same view. Cooper isn't arguing for
equality. He's arguing for separation, using some of the same arguments that 1950s
America would use for segregating Blacks from Whites. Indians aren't necessarily
inferior. They just have different gifts. Their skin colour isn't the problem.
It's their natures.

So what exactly are these gifts? What are these natures that mark out a
people?

Well, according to Deerslayer, revenge is an Indian gift and forgiveness
is a White gift. Indians have devious natures, while Whites believe the best of a
person. “You were treacherous, according to your natur',” Deerslayer
tells an Indian he has just mortally wounded, “and I was a little oversightful, as
I'm apt to be in trusting others.”
⁸

In the end, all Cooper is doing here is reiterating
the basic propagandas that the British would use to justify their subjugation of India,
or that the Germans would employ in their extermination of Jews, or that the Jews would
utilize to displace Palestinians, or that North Americans would exploit for the
internment of the Japanese, or that the U.S. military and the U.S. media would craft
into jingoistic slogans in order to make the invasions of other countries —
Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq — seem reasonable, patriotic, and entertaining
to television audiences throughout North America.

Reason and Instinct.

White gifts in Cooper's novel are gifts of Reason. Indian gifts in
Cooper's novel are gifts of Instinct.

It would be reasonable to expect Native writers to want to revisit and
reconstruct the literary and historical past, but oddly enough — with few
exceptions such as James Welch's
Fool's Crow
and
The Heartsong
of Charging Elk
, Diane Glancy's
Pushing the Bear
, and Linda
Hogan's
Mean Spirit
— contemporary Native writers have shown little
interest in using the past as setting, preferring instead to place their fictions in the
present.

And I don't have a good answer for why this is true. Though I do
have some suspicions. I think that, by the time Native writers began to write in earnest
and in numbers, we discovered that the North American version of the past was too well
populated, too well defended. By 1968, the cowboy/Indian dichotomy was so firmly in
place and had been repeated and re-inscribed so many
times that
there was no chance of dislodging it from the culture. Like it or not, it was a
permanent landmark, and Native writers who went to
that
past ran into the
demand that Indians had to be noble and tragic and perform all their duties on
horseback.

What Native writers discovered, I believe, was that the North American
past, the one that had been created in novels and histories, the one that had been heard
on radio and seen on theatre screens and on television, the one that had been part of
every school curriculum for the last two hundred years, that past was unusable, for it
had not only trapped Native people in a time warp, it also insisted that our past was
all we had.

No present.

No future.

And to believe in such a past is to be dead.

Faced with such a proposition and knowing from empirical evidence that we
were very much alive, physically and culturally, Native writers began to use the Native
present as a way to resurrect a Native past and to imagine a Native future. To create,
in words, as it were, a Native universe.

I had been teaching at Lethbridge for about a month when a couple of
young men from the Blood reserve arrived at my office. Narcisse Blood and Martin
Heavyhead. Both of them played basketball in an all-Native league, and they had come to
talk me into playing for the team. I told them I was too old and too slow. I told them I
couldn't dribble or shoot or block shots.

It's okay, Narcisse told me, you're nice
and big and can get in the way.

So I said yes. I was lonely, wanted to be liked, wanted to be accepted.
Even if I couldn't play, I could at least make the effort. But in the first game,
I was amazing. Every time I lumbered to the basket, the other players got out of my way.
When I took a shot, no one tried to stop me. I scored six points that night. The next
game I scored eight.

The matter began to unravel in the third game. One of their guards drove
the lane. I stepped in front of him, tried to block the shot, and both of us went down
in a heap.

The guard who had run into me leaped up, concerned. You okay?

Sure, I told him.

Nothing rattled loose, eh?

I have to admit, no one had ever asked me that. Rattled loose?

You know, the guard said, looking embarrassed. The plate.

Plate? I said. What plate?

In your head.

It turned out Narcisse had told the other teams that when I had come up
from Salt Lake City, I had run into a hailstorm, lost control of the truck, and flipped
it. A serious accident that left me with a plate in my head. Everything was okay as long
as I didn't get bumped, because if I did get bumped and the plate slipped, I would
go berserk. It happened once during a practice,
Narcisse had told
everyone, and the guy was still in the hospital.

I don't have a plate in my head.

And with that imprudent remark, my basketball career went down the toilet.
As soon as the rest of the teams in the league found out that they were in no danger
from plate slippage, I was a marked man. I don't think I scored two points the
rest of the season.

Now, where was I?

Oh, yes. Native writers creating a Native universe. For N. Scott Momaday,
the answer, in part, was to write a novel in which aspects of an unfamiliar universe
stood close enough to parts of a known world so that the non-Native reader, knowing the
one, might recognize the other. Ironically, Christianity, which had been a door barred
against Native–non-Native harmony and understanding, suddenly became an open
window through which we could see and hear each other.

House Made of Dawn
, reduced to a Coles Notes blurb, is the story
of a young Native man who returns from World War II to discover that he no longer has a
place in the Pueblo world that he left. The return of the Native. No problem here. A
common enough theme. Until Momaday begins to complicate it.

The protagonist's name is Abel, a name filled with import for a
non-Native audience, conjuring up as it does a whole host of Christian concerns. Abel is
Adam and Eve's son and Cain's brother, and it is Abel whom Cain kills.

Which should be the end of the story. But where
Abel's story in the Bible ends, Momaday's story begins. And here is
Abel's dilemma. When he returns from the horror and destruction of World War II,
he discovers that he has no voice — not literally but figuratively — a
condition that proves to be symptomatic of a larger confusion, a confusion surrounding
the nature of good and evil, not just in the world that Momaday creates but in the world
at large as well. In making parts of a Native universe visible, Momaday also examines
the assumptions that the White world makes about good and evil. Using the occasion of
the war and Abel's trial for killing an albino Indian, Momaday reminds us that
within the Christian dichotomy, good and evil always oppose each other.

Which is why war, even with its inherent horror and destruction, can be
presented and pursued as a righteous activity. And it's why Abel's trial is
not concerned with the reasons he killed the albino but only with the simpler matter of
whether or not he was responsible for the man's death. These questions, good/bad,
guilty/innocent, are simple questions, their answers familiar and satisfying for
Momaday's non-Native audience, and these moments of recognition allow him to
re-ask the same questions, this time within a Pueblo context.

And here, the answers are not so familiar, not so easy, for within the
Pueblo world, evil and good are not so much distinct and opposing entities as they are
tributaries of the same river. In this world, old men in white leggings chase evil in
the night, “not in the hope of
anything, but hopelessly;
neither in fear nor hatred nor despair of evil, but simply in recognition and with
respect.”
⁹
And strong men on strong horses try to pull a live rooster out of
the sand, only to destroy the bird by beating it to pieces against a fellow rider.

The runners after evil and the feast of Santiago.

Strange moments in a strange world.

But not good and evil.

Rather, two ceremonies, ceremonies that describe a part of the complexity
of the lives of the Pueblo people, ceremonies where the basic Christian oppositions have
little meaning. For both of these moments are celebrations, acknowledgements, if you
will, one of the presence of evil in the world while doing nothing to encourage or
prevent it, the other of the need for sacrifice and renewal.

The temptation here, of course, is to dissect each scene, separate out the
elements, and organize them according to colour. The ceremonial run is good. The
presence of evil is bad. The rooster pull is a form of competition and therefore good.
The destruction of the rooster by beating it to death against another human being is
cruel.

How we love our binaries.

But what Momaday and other Native writers suggest is that there are other
ways of imagining the world, ways that do not depend so much on oppositions as they do
on cooperations, and they raise the tantalizing question of what else one might do if
confronted with the appearance of evil.

So just how would we manage a universe in which the attempt to destroy
evil is seen as a form of insanity?

Relax. It's only fiction.

Besides, Native writers aren't arguing that evil isn't evil or
that it doesn't exist. They're suggesting that trying to destroy it is
misguided, even foolish. That the attempt risks disaster.

But you don't need Native writers to tell you that.

Grab a copy of
Moby Dick
and consider the saga of Captain Ahab,
wrapped in rage, as he roams the oceans in search of the great white whale,
accomplishing little more than the destruction of his ship and crew; or turn on your
television and watch a vengeful United States, burdened with the arms of war, bomb the
world into goodness and supply-side capitalism, destroying American honour and
credibility in the process.

Of course, Native writers are engaged in much more than a literary debate
over the nature of good and evil. While writers such as N. Scott Momaday and Leslie
Silko examine these tensions, other Native writers have taken on other concerns. Gerald
Vizenor borrows traditional figures, such as the Trickster, re-imagines them within a
contemporary context, and sets them loose in a sometimes modern, sometimes
post-apocalyptic world. James Welch looks at the question of identity, of place, and the
value of names. Louise Erdrich explores the shadow land of resistance. Simon Ortiz
captures the rhythms of traditional song and ceremony in his poetry. Tomson Highway
handles the difficult matter of reserve community and gender and family relationships.
Lee Maracle and Jeannette Armstrong show how traditional wisdom and customs can suggest
ways to conduct oneself in the present.

But what is most satisfying is knowing that there are
Native writers whose names I have never heard of, who are, at this minute, creating
small panoramas of contemporary Native life by looking backward and forward with the
same glance.

Not so differently from non-Native writers.

The magic of Native literature — as with other literatures —
is not in the themes of the stories — identity, isolation, loss, ceremony,
community, maturation, home — it is in the way meaning is refracted by cosmology,
the way understanding is shaped by cultural paradigms.

Narcisse Blood is a good friend. One time he took me out to visit his
grandfather, who lived in a small house on the reserve. The old man had a garden, and he
took me through it, showing me each plant. Later we had tea in his kitchen.

Did I know about the big storm? he asked.

I had to admit that I didn't.

It was a big one, he said. It came up quick and hard.

So I told him about my trip from Salt Lake City to Lethbridge and how we
had been trapped under a freeway overpass by a storm.

Yes, those storms can be tricky, he told me. You see those tomatoes out
there?

From the kitchen window you could see his garden.

The tomato plants were just beginning to produce fruit.