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Native American Author Roundtable
7.
AOTW: How do you combat "Indian stereotypes" in your writing? Do you feel most writers adequately portray the cultural diversity among Native Americans?
Penina Keen Spinka: I think today's authors are much more concerned in discovering the truth and conveying it out than those of the past who showed Native Americans who could never remember which pronoun to use. Tonto never learned to use the word "I," no matter how long he hung around the Lone Ranger: "Me saw stranger in town." My foreigners mangle the Mohawk language as they learn to speak properly.
W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear: Continuing from the last question, we write from the understanding that people --- even if they be prehistoric --- are all the same under the skin. There is more genetic diversity within a single band of West African chimpanzees than there is in the entire human race. Anthropologists have compiled entire lists of how many traits we share in common. It's an incredibly long list. We are them, they are us.
A novelist's charge, as Win Blevins would say, is to tell the "Truth." We take real human beings and do our best to place them within a different cultural framework. Human behavior is patterned. For example, we can make the assumption that as the PaleoIndians were hunting mammoth to extinction, they, too, engaged in revitalization movements like the Plains Indians did with the Ghost Dance during the near extinction of bison in the 1880s.
As to other writers, we often cringe. With some notable exceptions they tend to write modern patrilineal American values into prehistory. It's deadly difficult to write from within a matrilineage when you weren't raised with that world view. Kinship systems are our constant bane. We have to make complex kinships intelligible to modern Americans. If we tried to use Omaha kinship terms, only people familiar with those kin rules would understand. The worst offenders tend to be the writers who do "Indian Romance" novels. Western authors aren't much better. In their books, all Plains Indians tend to be written as Sioux --- even if they happen to be Mandan, Blackfoot, Shoshoni, or Pawnee. Tribes all had very different origins, histories, and cultures. Michael was so incensed by that stereotyping he penned Morning River and Coyote Summer in sheer revolt.
Writing from within another culture isn't impossible. Oliver La Farge did it. So too have authors like Ruth Bebe Hill, Sue Harrison, Don Coldsmith, Pax Riddle, Win Blevins, and Lucia St. Clair Robson. These are people who go into the Native community, listen, learn, and do the research. Most authors, however, refuse to because it's just plain hard work.
David Matheson: I believe in my book Red Thunder all the Hollywood stereotyping is totally smashed and broken and a new image is portrayed. The new image is one of family, hope, the beauty of togetherness, and unity with nature and a higher power. Our people made their own way in the world. Our people were independent, strong and powerful. They made their own homes, they gathered their own food, and they took care of all the family needs. In their time, they had no old age homes, no orphanages, no prisons, or mental institutions. They made a beautiful society and they raised their children to know about prayer, and being a good person. Our ancestors fought to preserve their way of life, their notion of freedom and their right to be who they are in their own land with every measure that they had. Some gave their own life for the foundation of today and what is represented in treaty and other agreements between our nations and the United States. Our ancestors are patriots and heroes. I believe this new story and this new image of our people needs to be told again and again, and I intend to do that.
Joseph Marshall III: The only way to combat "Indian stereotypes" is to speak frankly from my viewpoint --- the viewpoint of the Native American. As a Lakota I don't feel that most writers adequately portray the diversity among Native Americans, although more and more are headed in the right direction.
David and Aimee Thurlo: We point out that there are great differences in religious beliefs, traditions, ceremonies and practices between Southwestern tribes. We also respect the validity of Native American religious beliefs when compared to Christianity and other practices. We try not to patronize anyone, or present any culture as being the "bad guys" either.
We're not "experts" on any Native American cultures so we won't judge other writers' attempts to portray cultural diversity as being adequate or inadequate. What we value when we read are writers who show respect for all cultures and individuals.
Margaret Coel: I try to create characters with hopes and dreams, failures and successes, and relationships that either enhance or diminish their lives. It happens that my characters are Arapahos --- but they're human beings first. And writers who do their job certainly portray the cultural diversity by accurately portraying whatever tribe they write about. I'm thinking of Tony Hillerman and the Navajos and James Doss and the Utes. After reading those authors, no one would confuse the Navajos with the Utes. And I hope that after reading my novels on the Arapahos, no one would confuse them with other tribes. They are all different.
Thomas Perry: I combat "Indian stereotypes" by trying to concentrate on the things human beings have in common. Jane has an incredibly rich cultural history that's very different from mine, but she uses family the way I do --- to give herself strength, to remind herself that even though what she's doing might be hard, her great grandmother did things that were harder. Jane also tries to remember things that she's been told so that she will know how to behave nobly.
Writing about Jane as a Native American was not as hard as writing about her as a woman. A way I discovered to accomplish both was to see things, as much as possible, through her eyes, looking outward. When any of us is engaged in a serious activity (in Jane's case, a dangerous adventure), we're thinking about the activity, not about ourselves, our sex, or our ethnic identity. A character has to be a person first, and then a woman or a Seneca.
David Marion Wilkinson: I hope to God that I combat stereotypes throughout my work --- not only with Native Americans but all the representative cultures depicted in my books. I try to celebrate the strength of the human spirit and the courage of the human heart. These qualities transcend all racial categories. And real history is always more complex and rich than any stereotype.
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