Samuel Levesque
Contemporary Native American Literature
Háskólí Íslands, Vor, 2005
Amerindian Armageddon:
Introduction: A Road Trip to the End of the World.
Back in 1999, on the eve of the millennium, I took a solo road trip up the west coast of
It stuck with me. A village of some three to four hundred people, tucked into a small, narrow valley leading out into a vast expanse of sand dunes. The surrounding hills were a thicket of over-grown clear-cut. The only sizable buildings were an abandoned wood-chip plant and a tribal office that looked about ready to sink into the sandy soil and disappear. There wasn’t a single house I saw that could have held more than three rooms, and most seemed to have outhouses tacked up out back. Nearly every house had a chimney, a stack of driftwood by the door, an outboard boat that had seen better days, and about three dogs running in the yard. The roads were dirt, not a shop to be seen, and the west end of town was only connected to the local electric system by a jerry-rigged system of extension cords filling the gap that a winter storm had made in the power lines. There were small gardens around the houses, planted with food crops, not a decorative flower in sight, and the nets, crab-pots, and piles of antlers spoke of people still drawing some sustenance from the hills, shores and sea.
A few weeks later I watched a truly awful movie, “The Postman”, yet another of Kevin “Friend to all Indians” Costner’s revolting post-apocalyptic romps, and that village reappeared on the screen. Sure, it wasn’t actually the Quinault Rez, but close enough. The only difference was that this town was full of white people, had its own electric power, and seemed sadly more prosperous than the Rez. Odd.
Then a few weeks back, I reread Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and it all fell into place. This collection of stories and the story “Distances” in particular, all take place within a culture that has weathered what today would be called an apocalypse. Where white sci-fi writers dream up endings for their civilization, many Native American authors are writing post-apocalyptic fiction of their own, based on their lives.
Some, like James Welch in Fools Crow write of the world before and during the fall of Native America, of the smallpox and other plagues that wiped out whole tribes, the systematic slaughter of bands by the cavalry, or individual murders by angry whites. Others, like D’Arcy McNickle, write of the slower, but equally destructive war waged on the Native way of life, on languages, customs, economies and traditions. Still others, like Leslie Marmon Silko in Ceremony seem to say that the world has already ended, when the witchery of European society was let loose on the world. Even the comedic, sarcastic tricksters of Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water have their all-important story of creation interrupted time and again by the backwards dog of white civilization.
The Middle is the Beginning of the End:
Then there are the rest of the stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, stories that share many elements with the post-apocalyptic genre. Its all there, the canned food, the empty cupboards, houses falling apart, jerry-rigged and cold, the ennui, and the isolation. The story titles alone give a feeling of millennialism and the echoes of holocaust: “Every Little Hurricane” calls to mind disasters, “Crazy Horse Dreams” hints at defeat, “The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore” gives a sense of entropy, “This is What it Means to Say Phoenix Arizona” implies the mythical bird reborn in its own ashes, “Jesus Christ’s Half Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation” hints at the Second Coming, and “The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor” calls forth images of inevitable death and radiation. But it is “Distances” with its enigmatic title that truly plunges into Armageddon.
Dancing with Distant Ghosts at the Beginning of Time:
It’s interesting to note that almost (but not quite) all science fiction dealing with life after a holocaust shares some common features. One of the most common is that of people moving back to an agrarian, if not nomadic hunter-gather life style, and the idea that civilization needs to be rebuilt. Interesting because when one thinks about it, as this is the exact opposite of what the Native peoples of the
This is what makes “Distances”, a mere six pages, recounting life on the Spokane Rez after a nuclear holocaust, so fascinating. A post-post-apocalyptic short story, if you will. One wonders if two “post’s” like two negatives, make their own positive.
The story opens, appropriately enough, with a quote from Wovoka, the messianic prophet of the Ghost Dance, a sort of millennialist religious movement that swept through many tribes towards the end of the 1800’s. The Ghost Dance movement resembles in many ways the fundamentalist Christian belief in a global cataclysm that will wipe out the unbeliever and leave the Earth a utopia for those remaining. Throughout his fiction, Alexie touches on the Ghost Dance, making of it a symbol of rebirth and revolution, but in “Distances” he touches on a darker side of the myth. Whereas Wovoka preaches a promised land after the destruction of the white world, Alexie shows us a world so thoroughly destroyed that the Promised Land itself is consumed in nuclear fire. While Alexie places the blame squarely on the shoulders of white men, in the form of Custer, who “must have pressed the button, cut down all the trees, opened up the holes in the ozone, flooded the earth. Since most of the white men died and most of the Indians lived, I decided only Custer could have done something that backward.” (104) This makes logical sense, as most reservations are well away from urban and strategic centers, placed out of the way and often forgotten. In “Distances”, those made meek really do inherit the earth. His narrator nevertheless dreams of television and wakes up crying.
The story parallels the Ghost Dance, but only so far. The narrator is not rejoicing in the brave new world that has thrust itself into being, he is at most surviving, still fearfully attached to relics of the world past, like the transistor radio he rescues from the pyre of the “white” tribal council house the Spokanes are busily burning to the ground. This is another common feature in post-apocalyptic fiction, the idea that the artifacts and knowledge of the pre-cataclysm world are somehow evil, threatening or even satanic. Most white authors of such fiction make it a point of having their heroes fight this sort of thinking, lathering scorn on the Luddites of their fictional futures, whereas Alexie makes it a central tenet of his story. His character is trying to obey the dictates of the Ghost Dance, but falling ever so slowly from its grace, leaving one with the feeling that he might, as Wovoka says, “grow little, just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them [Indians who do not participate in the Ghost Dance] will be turned into wood and burned in fire.” (104) As he says himself late in the tale “I make mistakes”. (109)
Another element that often appears in post-apocalyptic fiction is the birth of mutants and new life forms, often coupled with a eugenic backlash aimed at rooting out the “sickness” of the species. Enter Tremble Dancer, the Urban survivor of the holocaust whom the narrator has a forbidden relationship with. Enter the Others, huge creatures of myth returned “from a thousand years ago”, who prey on the surviving Spokanes, yet remain an integral part of the rebirth of the world. Impregnated by one of these giants, Tremble Dancer dies giving birth to a salmon, in fulfillment of Wovaka’s prophecy that the Great Spirit will “bring back all game of every kind” (104). Another Urban gives birth to “a monster”, and we’re left to wonder what exactly the Great Spirit is trying to bring back. (106) Meanwhile those seen to be infected with the “white man’s sickness” whether an actual malady or just a despairing clutching to the world past, are burnt on the football field, prompting the narrator to proclaim that he is glad to be an orphan. (107) Wovaka’s wooden Indians are therefore burnt in fire.
Time has ceased to exist. The narrator rides his “clumsy horse” to the teepee of a friend, one of the few who have left the rez to explore the post-holocaust world outside. The friend, Noah Chirapkin, tells of a land devoid of time, and nearly lifeless.
“The was no sound...I rode for days and days, but there were no cars moving, no planes, no bulldozers, no trees. I walked through a city that was empty, walked from one side to the other and it took me a second. I just blinked me eyes and the city was gone, behind me. I found a single plant, a black flower, in the shadow of Little Falls Dam. It was forty years before I found another one, growing between the walls of an old house on the coast.” (106)
Without the “white man’s artifact”, the “sinful” watches and clocks that “measured time in seconds, minutes, hours...measured time exactly, coldly” the world is returned to a more natural, yet eerie rhythm. The narrator measures time “with my own breath, the sound of my hands across my own skin.” (109)
When “Custer” murdered time with nuclear fire, the end became the beginning, but for the narrator and the rest of the Spokanes, one wonders if Utopia is really around the corner. One wonders if the Spokanes, with all the practice they have had at surviving are going to flourish in the brave new world, or if the suicidal Custers of the dead world will reach beyond their graves and snuff out the last light. This story answers less than it questions, doubts more than it preaches, and is therefore a far more human story than most of the post-apocalyptic fiction churned out since the industrial revolution. There are no heroes, not glorious rebirth of civilization, no battles with the forces of darkness. Just like life on the Rez, only without Diet Pepsi and television.
The Beginning is The End:
Think if our world were invaded by a strange race, armed with weapons beyond our comprehension and introducing organisms that change the very face of the Earth and lead to starvation, disease, and death. Imagine being herded by forces that, no matter how hard you fight, slowly but surely pack you into holding pens, to be used at their leisure. What story would you think of? More than likely, it would be that classic of apocalyptic science fiction, War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.
Most readers, on encountering James Welch’s Fools Crow would not think of an apocalypse, but that is exactly what most of the book is about. Fools Crow, the young warrior of the title, is living his life in the twilight years of traditional Blackfoot society. The end of this world as he knows it is already upon them, in the form of small-pox, cavalry massacres, barbed wire fences, bullets, treaties, and reservations. Yet few readers seem to focus on this. The whole thing is usually thought of as history, myth, legend, rather than the defeat and collapse of hundreds of societies. One need look no further for proof that history is usually written by the victor.
Fools Crow begins with a character and tribes that, though they have encountered whites, and are encountering them more and more, are still largely untouched by them. They trade for useful things, but they do not war with them, are not yet forced onto a reservation, and are more interested in showing up their traditional enemies, the Crow, than with driving the whites out of their land. They cure illnesses with traditional medicine, participate in ages old ceremonies, marry, trade, and practice their internal politics.
Slowly though, the whites begin to influence the scene, whether indirectly, in the form of small-pox and trade goods, or directly, as in the murder of Yellow Kidney, or the massacre of Heavy Runner’s band at the hands of the cavalry. The reader is shown the destruction of traditional Blackfoot society at the hands of the whites, just as Wells showed us the destruction of the industrialized world at the hands of the Martian invaders.
Yet both books hold out hope, though they differ in the hope that the hold. Wells ends his tale with the death and destruction of the Martian invaders, brought down by diseases they lack all immunity to (the irony of invaders from the Red planet succumbing to the common diseases that wiped out huge swaths of the “red man” is too thick to contemplate here), whereas Fools Crow is offered a vision of his people continuing, changed but still vibrant in a future he can barely comprehend. No last minute salvation for the Blackfoot, just the arduous victory inherent in survival.
Back to the Future:
This War of the Worlds ending fits nicely into “Distances”, where the invaders have been destroyed by their own ignorance, but “Distances” fails to deliver the message of hope that ends Fools Crow.
Alexie ends with his narrator up in a tree, clutching a plastic transistor radio, searching it for flaws. “All the mistakes would be on the inside, where you couldn’t see, couldn’t reach...I held that radio and turned it on, turned the volume to maximum, until all I could hear was the in and out, in again, of my breath.” T.S. Elliot’s “Ash Wednesday” springs to mind:
“This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the word ends,
Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
The plot of Fools Crow, on the other hand, evokes Yeates’s “The Second Coming”:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned...”
But all is not lost in for Fools Crow and his inheritors. His vision shows him the sufferings of his people, but also their hope:
“I do not fear for my people now. As you say, we will go to a happier place, far from these Napikwans [whites], this disease and starvation.” (359)
Whereas Alexie’s ghost dance leaves his narrator up in a tree clutching at the end of the world, Welch gives us brave young man staring the holocaust in the face yet trusting in his vision of his people’s future.
Things Fall Apart:
Things fall apart. Entropy is a universal rule, as far as we know. Civilizations crumble, rise reborn, and crumble again. Armageddon has already happened and will likely happen again soon. There is little use in blame, but much to learn from survivors. To quote R.E.M., “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.”
Things fall apart. But people have this tendency to put them back together. Last time I was out on the Olympic Peninsula, I heard that the Quinaults are making a killing fleecing white tourists at a new resort/casino. More power to them. Things fall apart. People put them back together again.
Works Cited:
Alexie, Sherman: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The Atlantic Monthly Press.
Eliot, T.S.: “Ash Wednesday”, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition, Edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.
King, Thomas: Green Grass, Running Water. Bantam Books.
McNickle, D’Arcy: The Surrounded.
Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony. Penguin Books USA, Inc.
Welch, James: Fools Crow. Penguin Books USA Inc.
Wells, H.G.: The War of the Worlds.
Yeates, William Butler: “The Second Coming”, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Seventh Edition, Edited by M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.
1 comment:
Thought you'd be interested in knowing that the Blogocalypse Carnival is coming to Mostly Harmless April 1. Submissions due March 31. Sorry for the short notice.
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