Sisters in the Struggle

Sisters in the Struggle:

Feminine Dualities in Native American Literature

The literature and art of ethnic minorities has long been a subversive force in the sense that it challenges the often-unjustified norms and values of the ruling class. By writing, singing, painting, or performing works that stand in contrast, whether subtly or blatantly to the established norms, these works subvert, mock, and challenge the perceived reality of the majority, forcing them to confront the troubling possibility that their world-view may not be the only valid one, or worse yet, that it is as flawed as that of those they feel superior to.

Native American literature has challenged Anglo-European notions since it’s earliest publication, just as Native American customs, cultures, and commodities challenged Anglo-European explorers and colonizers during the colonization of North and South America. There is an almost universal political element to Native fiction, whether the subtle barbs of Lucy Tapahonso, the stereotype shattering of D’Arcy McNickle, the tongue-in-cheek revolutionary rants of David Seals, the homey wisdom of Louise Erdrich, or the outright assault on Anglo-European norms employed by Leslie Marmon Silko. While Silko’s work is not the focus of this particular paper, it is worth keeping in mind her oft-repeated remark, to the effect that she was writing in English to “use the enemy’s language against him”.

This is exactly what D’Arcy McNickle and Louise Erdrich’s female characters do, especially in regards to the “good sister” and the “bad sister” which both employ in their novels. These pairs challenge, both by their actions and attitudes, Anglo-European ideals of the feminine and the roles women are assumed to take, as well as Western notions of morality in general. By their refusal to sit comfortably in the box Western literature has built to hold female characters, even feminist ones, these sisters struggle to make know to their Western readers a world-view that is as challenging as it is refreshing, and a threatening as it is timely.

Two Sisters

A traditional Ojibwa story cycle relates the tale of Matchikeis, the “good sister” and Oshikiwe, the “bad sister”[1]. Matchikeis follows the customs and norms of her society, and is considered reliable, hard working, trustworthy, and moral. Oshikiwe is the opposite side of this coin, flighty, lazy, tricky, and loose. In an Anglo-European story, one would expect that the “good sister” would be praised, while the “bad sister” is vilified, just as the dutiful Cinderella is praised at the expense of her “wicked stepsisters”. However, in the Ojibwa stories, this is patently not the case. Both sisters are equally loved, and both are equally heroines in the tale. More than that, they share a husband, quite happily in fact, which in many ways is an affront to Anglo-European notions of family and of female sexuality.

The Ojibwa seem to recognize in these stories an idea, which, despite its obvious logic, has never been popular in Anglo-European thought. In Western culture, the idea that in order to have good, one must necessarily have bad, and that to remove one would make the other meaningless, has always been considered subversive. Western cultures have long propounded the notion that there are both “pure” good and bad, and that one or the other can exist alone. Most monotheistic religions are in fact based on this very principle, and Anglo-European culture is still, at its core, based on these religions.

This, to my mind, is why Erdrich chooses to parallel this ancient story in Love Medicine. By making the two matriarchs of the families portrayed such seeming opposites, and yet having them share the love of one man, Erdrich issues a challenge to the white world’s ideas about the nature of love, female sexuality, and morality.

Marie, the good sister, is everything a respectable wife should be, a good homemaker, loyal to her husband, pious, and very caring towards not only her own children but also those that she has taken in from extended family. She tries to keep her husband from drinking, tries to keep him “respectable”, and strives for a sort of pious peace both for herself and within her community. In this way she is a stark contrast to Lulu, who freely sleeps with whatever man she desires, regardless of marital vows or public censure, whose home seems at first a pocket of chaos, and who seems not to care at all what others in the community think of her.

Yet neither Marie, nor Lulu is as clear-cut as they first seem. While Marie is pious, even aspiring to be a nun, she enters the convent not because she hears the call, but because she dreams of being a saint. Marie’s conception of sainthood is flawed by her pride however. She sees her piety as a way of proving herself superior to whites in general, and to the authoritative nuns who run her school in particular:

“...No reservation girl ever prayed so hard. There was no use trying to ignore me any longer. I was going up there on the hill with the black robe women. They were not any lighter than me. I was going up there to pray as good as they could.... And they never thought they’d have a girl from this reservation as a saint they’d have to kneel to. But they’d have me...”

Her excessive pride is evident elsewhere as well. She brags about her husband’s leadership in the tribe, takes great pride in the accomplishments of her children, and looks down on Lulu and her relations as less respectable. Despite her “goodness”, she is tainted by a kind of feverish pride, which makes her at times makes her seem harsh and unforgiving such as when she uses gossip to punish her friends for nosiness.

Lulu, on the other hand, has many positive qualities that are masked by her bad girl image. She is extremely fond of her sons, no matter who their fathers might be, and runs her home with a firm but loving hand, she “...managed to make the younger boys obey perfectly...while the older ones adored her to the point that they did not tolerate anything less from anyone else.” Her sexuality, the cause of much of her “badness”, is nevertheless also a source of immense power for her, shown to perfect example when she threatens to “hit the tribe with a fistful of paternity suits that would make their heads spin” unless her demands are met by the tribal council, or when Beverly Lamartine is pulled helplessly into her arms, unable to resist her.

Both women share a love in common, that of Nector, Marie’s husband and Lulu’s long-time lover. Both bare him children, and both provide something very much needed in his imperfect life. At the end of the novel, the two do something almost unheard of in a Western story, becoming fast friends after his death, taking care of each other throughout their twilight years. As Lipsha Morrissey recounts:

“ Only Grandma Kashpaw [Marie] wasn’t one trifle current at the insight Lulu showed. She and Lulu are thick as thieves now...”

These paired “sisters” serve as more than just allusions to and ancient Ojibwa story, they subtly challenge the stereotypes of women that are all-too-prevalent in Western writing. Neither Marie nor Lulu really needs Nector; rather, they both want him. They act on their sexual desire, subtly in Marie’s case, and blatantly in Lulu’s, which is an anathema for traditional Western female characters, who are usually acted upon. They are also extremely strong women, the center of their respective families. One gets the impression that Marie would have no problems if Nector left, save that of her own thwarted desire, just as Lulu gets by quite well despite having no male “bread-winner” to support her. Neither woman needs a man, but both want one. The only characters exhibiting such behavior in most Western novels are either whores or libertines. Erdrich’s “sisters” are neither, making their very existence in print a subversion of Anglo-European values.

Catherine the Faithful vs. Elise the Libertine

D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded contains two female characters that in many ways foreshadow Erdrich’s Marie and Lulu. Catherine the Faithful, mother of the protagonist Archilde, and Archilde’s love interest, Elise La Rose. The Salish people, of whom McNickle writes so passionately, shared many cultural elements with their northern neighbors, Erdrich’s Ojibwa, and one can find parallels to the story of Good Sister and Bad Sister in The Surrounded. Catherine is a highly regarded member of the tribe, educated by the Catholic missionaries and daughter of a chief. She is in many ways the epitome of a good Indian woman, whereas Elise, also the daughter of a chief, Old Modeste, is neither pious, nor traditional. She drinks, dances with white men, and is very sexually assertive. Unlike Marie and Lulu, these two women do not share a lover in common, but they both love Archilde, one maternally and one romantically.

However, whereas in Love Medicine Lulu as the Bad Sister is by far the more subversive, in The Surrounded it is Catherine as the Good Sister who most strongly challenges Anglo-European ideas of progress, civilization, and morality.

Elise may be a bit of a libertine, but she is almost expected to be. In the rural West especially, Indian women are often thought of as “easy” and promiscuous, alcoholics and barflies. Elise to some extent fulfills these expectations, and therefore doesn’t challenge Anglo stereotypes to any great degree.

On the other hand, Catherine is educated by priests, married to a successful European farmer, held in high regard by her tribe and in as high regard as an Indian woman might be by the Anglo community. Despite this, or rather because of it, hers is the most subversive role played in the novel. Her rejection of English, her disdain for modern conveniences, and eventual renunciation of Catholic faith make of her life a direct challenge to the ruling ideals of Anglo-European culture.

Despite her marriage to the prickly and proud Max, Catherine chooses not to live in the fine house at the center of the family’s ranch, instead spending her days in the smoky comfort of an old log cabin. She refuses to speak any language but Salish, despite being educated in English and possibly in Spanish as well. Her husband Max is forced to use Salish to speak to his wife:

“When he talked to her he had to use her tongue, since if he tried to use English, which she knew perfectly, she would pretend not to understand”

It is this focus on her language, which slowly leads her away from the white world. The language of one’s thought and dream-life colors one’s social interaction and daily life, and by choosing to live in Salish, Catherine is defying the white world, if only subtly.

This defiance comes out in other ways as well. Catherine’s cabin is littered with “modern” contraptions, all gone to waste and ruin:

“The stove had been worn away by rust but not by use, because she went on cooking over a camp fire. With every new thing it was the same. The Sisters had taught her many arts, but they had not quite taught her to be interested in using them. Possibly there was a deeper reason for her neglect, but on the surface that was what she felt”

Her rejection of white materialism is a striking critique of the differences between the two cultures. While trained in the domestic arts of the white world, she has a nomad’s disdain for bulky possessions and complicated practices that lead to evermore work and an individual being “owned” by their possessions. To Catherine, “it seemed that you could not live in a house as you lived outdoors or in a tepee. The outdoors cleansed itself and so did a tepee. You moved it and the dirt fell out. Besides, you did not mind a little dirt.”

Catherine’s desire to go hunting is another subtle challenge to Anglo-European culture, one that Leslie Marmon Silko uses in as well, both in Ceremony and Storyteller. In Anglo-European culture, hunting is an exclusively male endeavor. White writers speak of “Man the Hunter”, and traditionally regulate women to the role of gatherers, handy-craft workers, and domestics. There are several falsehoods in this perception; most notably that hunting was the main source of food for “hunter-gatherers”. In fact, the gathering done mainly, but not exclusively, by women provided the majority of subsistence for such cultures, making women the center of such tribal economies and as such extremely powerful. Additionally, women in such cultures often hunted as well as the men, particularly when they did not have young children or after their children were grown. (Mander) One rarely hears mention a huntress in Western literature, with the possible exception of Greek myth, with Diana the virgin huntress as an archetypal figure.

Furthermore the crisis of the novel, Catherine’s killing of the game warden, came about largely due to a conflict between two radically different views of the nature and purpose of hunting. For Anglo-Europeans, hunting is often thought of as a recreation, a hobby of the rich and idle, particularly in the early days of North American settlement. (Mander). As such, only certain animals were to be hunted, usually males, which made good trophies. Louise killing a doe, because the meat would be more tender, and Catherine’s acceptance of this, are therefore affronts to the ruling class’s idea of proper hunting, but make perfect sense from the point of view of a subsistence culture. As Louis says to Archilde, “I suppose you shot a fifteen-year old buck like a God-damned white man. That’s tender meat, that, a yearling doe.” Unlike the Natives, the Game Warden sees this as a breach of the law. “You’ve got a doe here. You know there’s a law against killing female deer, don’t you?” This difference in world-view, and the warden’s rejection of the family’s claims to being exempt from game laws leads directly to the death of both Louis and the warden.

Ultimately, it is Catherine’s rejection of Catholicism and it’s faith in authority that makes the strongest statement in the novel. In attempting to ease her guilt over the killing, she first goes to the priest to seek absolution through confession, but leaves the church without achieving peace of mind. It is only after she goes to the elders and asks to be whipped that she achieves a measure of peace.

This is perhaps one of the most radical ideas proposed in the novel. The idea that absolution, and the authority to absolve rest in the individual, and not in an authority above the individual is a challenge not only to the rule of law and of organized religion, but to one of the basic tenants of Western culture itself.

Amongst the Salish, one must go and ask to be punished, and hence absolved, of a wrongdoing. No one has the authority to force punishment or repentance on another without they themselves being guilty of wrongdoing. The Salish were a society without police, without organized structures of coercion and permanent laws that applied without regard to situation. Yet even the Jesuits found them to be “instilled with a sense of Moral Law”. The tradition of the whip negates much of what is thought necessary and right in Western society. No authority, be it God or the penal system, can absolve a person of a wrong unless they choose to be absolved. As Modeste says, “When we were told to give this [whipping] up, they said they would give us new laws. Well, they gave us those new laws and now nobody is straight. Nobody will confess and nobody will go to the white judge...” Such logic renders a thousand years of Western political thought and jurisprudence null and void, making anathemas of these perceived saviors of society. In effect the Salish are saying that the judge who sentences and the jailor who imprisons are as guilty of crimes as the criminals they incarcerate or execute.

This ethos is to be found in only one school of European thought, which was itself largely inspired by the “discovery” of Native American societies, namely Anarchism. Not the anarchism of everyday parlance, the idea of no order or responsibility, but rather the idea that authority begins and ends at the individual, and that the use of coercion for any means is an affront to free will and therefore a kind of criminal act, a theft of choice. As Proudhon, one of the most influential anarchist writers put it:

“To be governed is to watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, not wisdom, nor virtue [to do so.]”

In her rejection of the authority both of Church and Law, Catherine loses her faith, but finds a peace in her last days, having lived a life that, while smeared with tragedy, nonetheless served as a wonderful critique of the contradictions and injustices that underlie the culture that has come to dominate her homeland. As she says after under going her whipping:

“If any of you think I’ve done wrong, it will do no good to say so. To me it is clear and I won’t go back. Only consider. For years I saw how the world was going. You knew my sons and how I prayed to keep them from going to hell. It would have been better if they had been given the whip. Praying was not what was needed for them, and it does me no good. You have made this promise [to forgo the whip in favor of confession] but tonight you ought to forget about it. If you get in trouble over it, it will be nothing new. We have trouble no matter what we do, and we ought to just forget about it and live as it seems best.”[2]

Elise and Catherine, Marie and Lulu. Both pairs challenge Anglo-European thought in ways both subtle and sublime. Whereas it is Bad Sister Lulu in Love Medicine that makes the challenge most clearly, it is the Good Sister Catherine that most challenges the white world in The Surrounded. The reader is forced to recognize the idea that not only are the Good Sister and the Bad Sister equally loved, they are equally important. They are not polarized opposites, but the connected ends of the same circle, with the wealth and variety of human behavior and action stretching between them even as they stand back to back, sisters in the struggle to keep their traditions alive and adapt their people to a new and hopefully better world they will help bring about.

Works Cited:

Edwards, Stuart. Selected Writings of P-J. Proudhon. New York, 1969.

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992

McKnickle, D’Arcy. The Surrounded. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publishing, 1981./

Ceremony. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.

---

[1] From Nina Bjornson’s lecture, The University of Iceland, 15.02.2005

[2] Italics added.

Another Native Lit Response

Samuel Levesque

NA Lit

Response to The Surrounded

At first glance, Storyteller and The Surrounded seem to be very different books. Storyteller is a radical attempt to challenge the conventional novel, incorporating myth, poetry, photography, and short story forms. McNickle’s The Surrounded is, as far as structure goes, a rather standard novel. It has a main plotline beginning with Archilde’s return to his childhood home, moving through a series of events and crisises ending with his arrest. Behind and interwoven into this overall story are the back-stories of many of the characters (such as the story of Max and Catherine’s estrangement) and “side” plots (such as Mike’s torment in the Jesuit school and subsequent cure) that have bearing on the main plot line, but exist as somewhat distinct sections.

It is probably safe to say that The Surrounded had some effect on Storyteller, as it was one of the first novels about Native Americans published by a Native American, but I see Storyteller as more of a response to, rather than an echo of, The Surrounded. McNickle was very “American” in his style and his life, in some ways an example of an “assimilated Indian”, whereas Silko, despite her accomplishments in the “white” world, seems to identify much more with her “Indianness” and defy European-American literary traditions. The difference is that The Surrounded tells a story about Indians in the white man’s language using standard literary forms, while Storyteller tells an Indian story in the white man’s language, without regard to white traditions or form. Storyteller seems to be saying to The Surrounded, “Why don’t you be more Indian? If you’re going to tell stories about us, why tell them like a white man?”

Nevertheless, there are echoes of The Surrounded in Silko’s work. Story and history are central themes and catalysts in both books. Old Modeste’s story at the feast opens Archilde’s eyes to his people and his history, just as Silko’s aunt’s stories kept her tied to her tribe and birthplace. Also interesting is the fact that both books deal with mixed families, Archilde’s Salish-Spanish, and Silko’s American-Laguna. Both involve European people who live and work amongst the Indians, although in McNickle’s character Max, such a life is both uneasy and somewhat lonely.

As far as the women in both books go, there is a noticeable difference. The majority of Silko’s protagonists are women, and many of the most important actors in her tales are mothers, daughters, grandmothers, or other female relations. In contrast, McNickle’s female characters, though important to the plot, serve mainly as catalysts and are not terribly well fleshed out. Both authors write strong female characters, both independent and capable, but Silko’s characters are more fully realized, and more numerous.

Throughout this course, as well as in my outside reading of Native American writing, I have found it interesting how the gender of the author almost always mirrors the gender of the majority of the characters. There are characters of both sexes in both books, but a preponderance of women inhabit Storyteller, whereas it is mostly men who play out the story of The Surrounded. I do not think this has much to do with any chauvinism or blatant feminism on the part of either author, but more with the fact that most writers write what they know. Whether this is also due to some cultural differences, the pueblo peoples matriarchy, or a more separate gender dynamic within NA cultures is more perhaps in the hands of an ethnographer than a lit major.

One motif I see in common between the two books is the idea that what was brought to the Natives by the whites was far more harmful than beneficial, often in subtle ways. Aside from the obvious germs, guns, and alcohol, whites brought with them a material culture and spirituality very much at odds with that of the Salish and Laguna peoples.

It is this cultural/spiritual conflict that lies at the heart of The Surrounded, the imposition of a hierarchal, materialist worldview onto a decentralized, nomadic people. This same conflict comes out in “Storyteller”, and both The Surrounded and “Storyteller” end with someone being punished for a crime, however just or unjust the case may be. Both the protagonist in “Storyteller” and Archilde run into a system of law that will either punish them for something they did not do, or refuse to punish them for something they did do.

The other common motif is the story of the harm done by the Indian Schools, although both books also show some small good coming from them as well. Both Silko and McNickle got their education from mission schools, and whatever their retrospective regrets, it is true that their stories wouldn’t be the same without this intervention, unjustified as it was. Archilde’s time in the schools was unpleasant, but he came away with a useful skill and an ability to function more in the white world than his brother Louis. Silko’s aunt, introduced early in Storyteller, is another example of an Indian educated away from home and returning to her people. This in no way justifies the harm done to Indian children like those in “Lullaby” and Mike and Narcise, but it shows the kind of liminal space these people were forced into by the conflict between their traditional cultures and their western education.

Early Days...Goddamn I'm preachy!

Work and Wealth on the Border:

Representations of Ethnic Economics in the Works of Simon Ortiz and Dagoberto Gilb.

As human beings, we, as personal and social cultural entities, are conscience beings because of story, no other reason. (Ortiz,viii)

As any reader knows, what is left unsaid and unmentioned in a story is often as important as that which is stated. One can call attention to an issue by naming it, or by one’s refusal to speak its name. As often as our words help create the world, so do our silences. Much of what is meaningful and powerful in the world is rarely spoken of, rather it is left unnamed to grow in a void of silence.

Dagoberto Gilb is not one for silences. His The Magic of Blood is a calling forth of the lives, loves, fears and passions of an often-silenced segment of American society. He and Ortiz speak for their people and their selves, weaving tales of poverty and near-poverty, of the duties and failings of fathers, of the disempowerment of men and women (but mostly men) whose lives are forever at the mercy of policies and institutions that they have little or no say in. Gilb and Ortiz look at the oblivion of drink, the complex web of multi-lingual and multi-cultural interactions, and the loss of innocence and coming of age universal to human life. They chose mainly masculine voices to tell the tales, chose short, carefully crafted tales to tell, and chose the voices of the poor, the lower-class, and the struggling.

But for all their similarities, there is a gulf of silence between Gilb and Ortiz in regard to one central theme. While Gilb’s work abounds with references to work and wages, payments, rent, bills, and all the paraphernalia of a currency driven economy, Ortiz barely whispers these words, instead letting his silence speak for him.

Why this glaring disparity between two authors whose stories otherwise seem to have so much in common? Why does one speak with his silence and the other shout? I believe the answer lies in the differing concepts of wealth and work held, and the differing values placed on these seemly central issues by Native Americans and Latinos. But how do these ethnic economics compare to each other, and to mainstream Anglo-American economics, and what can we learn from them?

Dagoberto Gilb and the Latino Work Ethic

“You remember the days when we were not rich, but when poverty was different, not a thing to be ashamed of, and we got along okay. You remember when we had a certain freedom, and you know we don’t have it anymore….”

--John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War (145-146)

Whenever one discusses an ethnic group in a general sense, one has to be careful to make sure that the stereotype is employed as a useful fiction, that while the general state of things might be a certain way, there are always exceptions to the rule. This holds true of an author’s work as well. While Gilb gives us an insight into a world inhabited by many Latinos, it is not the only world they live in. The borders of ethnicity and class are not fixed, but it is often easier to view themes and issues from a generalized view than to attempt to paint an exact portrait of the lives of any group.

The central theme in The Magic of Blood is the struggles of the laboring class in a society where there exist no guarantees to the basic necessities of life. The men and women who make up this class are constantly on the border of poverty. An injury or illness, changing economic trends, the whims of employers or social services, all these can push an individual to one side of the border or the other. This disempowerment is strongly felt by Gilb’s characters. As Frank Lopez, a supporting character in “FDR Was a Democrat” explains as he holds up a finger mangled in a work accident:

“Five months ago I smashed it…They took off my fingernail and bled it and said I crushed the bone. Then, to top it off, the very next day the company had problems and shut down the job. I got one days work.” (249)

One way Gilb’s laborers combat this disempowerment is through a work ethic that accepts lay-offs and unemployment as an inevitable part of working life, but nevertheless takes considerable pride in and places considerable emphasis on skill and perseverance. Gilb’s characters are often multi-talented, able to do a wide variety of work and willing to take whatever work is on offer. The important point is to be working, making a living for oneself and ones family.

Another strategy is a sort of voluntary lowering of material standards. Most of Gilb’s characters take pride in their possessions, even though they are few and far from new. As in the quote from The Milagro Beanfield War, Gilb’s protagonists are not ashamed of their poverty, so long as they have pride in their work and their basic needs are met. A good example is Juan Romero, the title character of “Romero’s Shirt” who “hangs wall paper and doors, he paints, he lays carpet, does just about anything someone will call and ask him to do.” This same character had a car which “he’d kept up since his early twenties…and he worked on it so devotedly that even now it was in as good a condition as almost any car could be.” (94-95) There is a rather stoic, Spartan character to these men, they do whatever they need to get what they need. However, unlike the rural characters in The Milagro Beanfield War, Gilb’s are generally urbanites, to far removed from the land to make a living from it.

The Latino work ethic is strongly related to the idea of machismo, not the Anglicized version of the word, implying chauvinism, violence, and misogyny, but in the Spanish sense, implying a code of honor whereby a man must provide for his dependents regardless of the personal sacrifice involved so long as one’s pride is intact.

While not ashamed of their poverty, Gilb’s creations are acutely aware of it, and it shows in their constant discussion and fixation on finances. There is hardly a story in the book where no mention is made of money. Prices, payments, wages, rent, unemployment benefits, and winnings are a constant theme, restraining or liberating the characters according to the seemingly random fluctuations of the economy. This does not mean that money in and of itself is of primary importance. As the unnamed narrator of “Look on the Bright Side” says at the opening of the book:

The way I see it, a man can have all the money in the world but if he can’t keep his self respect, he don’t have shit. A man has to stand up for things even when it may not be very practical. A man can’t have his pride and give up his rights. (3)

Rather than a prime motivator, money is used as a yardstick by which success is measured, but one gets the impression that despite his emphasis on money, most of Gilb’s characters would sooner give up material success than their own pride.

Simon Ortiz and the Socio-Economics of Native America

“Flat broke, not one sawbuck left.”

Nobody seemed to care much, including Paymaster Philbert. I mean, what’s money? It leaves Traditionals cold. It’s nothing. They had full gas tanks, full stomachs, good friends and family all around…who needs those green frog skins of the whitemen? If it might have made an American a little sick to his stomach to have blown two grand on handouts to strangers…it didn’t bother old-time Indians. Generosity was one of the great virtues of the old-timers, along with endurance and wisdom. They felt good. They weren’t worried. Something would turn up…

--David Seals, Sweet Medicine (54-55)

To understand why the virtual silence on the issues of wealth and work in Simon Ortiz’s Men on the Moon speaks volumes about the Native American worldview, one must examine and understand a system of economics so diametrically opposed to that of the industrialized west that it is rarely if ever discussed in the modern world.

In the Industrialized West, the foundation of the economy is surplus production, that is, producing more than what one needs in order to sell it at a profit. Profit implies competition, and in an equal exchange such as traditional barter systems, no profit is made.

Native Americans continue to be by far the poorest ethnic group in North America, with higher rates of infant mortality, shorter life expectancy, and higher rates of substance abuse than other ethnic groups. However, as Jerry Mander argues in In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, much of this poverty is caused more by the interruption of traditional lifestyles than by any inherent flaw in their traditional modes of survival.

Until roughly 400 years ago, most Native American societies were entirely self-sufficient in food, clothing, shelter, and most other material needs. Trade, in the form of barter, was reserved almost solely for luxury goods. According to Stone Age Economics, by Marshall Salhins, most pre-industrial aboriginal cultures also made of point of “deliberate under-production”.(20)

There is a conscience and consistent disregard for the notion of ‘maximum effort from the maximum number of people’…Labor power is underused, technological means are not fully engaged, natural resources are left untapped…production is low relative to existing possibilities. The work day is short. The number of days off exceeds the number of work days. Dancing, fishing, games, sleep, and ritual seem to occupy the greater part of one’s time. (Salhins, 25)

Salhins goes on to point out that in hunter-gatherer societies the average workday amounted to roughly four hours a day, and that in non-feudal, pre-industrial societies the work day was no more than an hour or so more on average. Many individuals did not do “productive work” at all. All this points to a culture more interested in rest than production, very unlike the Industrial West. (12-150)

Furthermore, most tribes had a combination of traditions and social sanctions that prevented individuals from amassing a disruptive amount of wealth. Reciprocal gift giving, communal food storage, and “potlatch”, the practice of giving away or destroying excessive wealth in order to gain social prestige, were all common practices, and in many tribes they remain so (Mander, 221-224).

These factors lead to an economy so unlike that of the industrialized west as to be almost unrecognizable as such. Rather than measuring wealth in material terms, subsistence economies measure wealth in leisure, communal harmony, and sustainability (Mander, 247-262). In fact, many tribes continue to practice traditional industries in order to feed themselves, and until recently there were many that still lived largely off the land. Examples of this abound in Ortiz’s text, in “Kaiser and the War”, with its recurrent talk of cornfields and sheep-camps, or Jimmo’s father making his own crutches from native wood in “Something’s Going On”. (59-60) As Suzy Erliche of Kotezbue, Alaska put it:

I came from a subsistence family. I grew up that way. I am very proud of it. I want my children to grow up that way. It brings strength to us as Inupiats. It is something different than going to the store. Our grocery store is millions of acres wide, and it brings us pride.

--Thomas R. Berger, Village Journey (165)

It therefore comes as no surprise that Ortiz, a member of the oldest continuously inhabited pueblo in North America would not place a great deal of emphasis on money, or on wage-work. To a traditional, or even quasi-traditional Native American, such things are not only foreign, but also somewhat distasteful. As another Alaskan Native, Antoinette Helmer put it:

Profit to non-natives means money. Profit to natives means a good life derived from the land and the sea…This land we hold in trust is our wealth. It is the only wealth we could possible pass on to our children…

--Jerry Mander, In the Absence of the Sacred (301)

Wealth and Work on the Border: The Anglo-American Reality

The differing views of wealth and work, detailed in Gilb’s work and hinted at in Ortiz’s, serve to illustrate that while the different ethnic groups of the Border Southwest may share some characteristics, other telling differences lie just beneath the surface. When compared with mainstream Anglo culture, these distinctive “ethnic economies” shed a harsh light on the norms and values associated with work and wealth in America’s consumer culture.

Summing up the most basic and general facets of the mainstream consumer culture, one quickly sees the contrasts. Success and economic health are measured almost solely in terms of currency. Nowhere is this more telling than when one examines the Gross National Product (GNP), the primary measurement of economic health according to standard Western economics. The GNP measures the vibrancy of an economy by how much money changes hands, either in earnings or payments, and how often these exchanges take place. The problem is that this system is inherently flawed, as detrimental social costs, such as increased crime rates and hence crime prevention costs or increased rates of disease and hence medical costs, serve to push up the numbers in the very same way that social gains (increased home ownership, for example) do. When viewed from the point of view of either of the two ethnic economic theories previously discussed, this is not only strange, but also downright distasteful. (Mander, 25-30)

The same could be said for the issue of work. Despite growing concern over the nature of work in Anglo-American culture, there is still a common prejudice against manual labor of the sort that Gilb’s character engage in, and against the “lazy” subsistence economy of traditional Native groups. Jobs are ranked according to their rate of pay, and the level of specialization required, not according to their social impact or needfulness. That is to say that a professional athlete, whose work is highly paid and highly specialized, despite the fact that it does little to serve the community, is more highly respected than the multi-skilled handy man employed to repair public parks or the subsistence farmer supporting his family and community.

Finally, the concept of “newness” and its supposed desirability over “old” or “traditional” is not only the foundation of consumerist culture, but also a direct contradiction of both the pragmatism of Latino economic thinking, where one cares for possessions and purchases long-lasting products, and the immaterialist ethos of traditional Native America.

Reaching Across Borders

The hard-working, hard-drinking toughness of the Latino labor class is just one facet of a culture that also places a high premium on family, pride, craftsmanship, and tends to disdain crass materialism in favor of economic prudence. While there is danger in a life lived on the border of poverty, there is also great pride and accomplishments, which are often overlooked by the standard Anglo emphasis on material wealth and “white collar” prestige jobs.

The radically different economic thought behind Native America’s traditional and resilient cultures show by its stark contrast with Anglo-America’s that they are other ways of life possible. In our increasingly money-driven, money-oriented, and money-soaked world the existence of a time-proven and currency-free system offers a refreshingly different vision of a life that is slower, more stable, more relaxed, and free of much of the more egregious aspects of modern life.

Both Men on the Moon and The Magic of Blood are more than just collections of superbly written stories, they are cross-border views into cultures all too often ignored by “mainstream America”, with lessons to teach should the Anglo world wish to sit still and listen.

Works Cited:

Berger, Thomas R. Village Journey: The Report of the Alaskan Native Review Commission. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

Gilb, Dagoberto. The Magic of Blood. New York: Grove Press, 1993.

Mander, Jerry. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992.

Nichols, John. The Milagro Beanfield War. London: Arrow Books, 1974.

Ortiz, Simon J. Men on the Moon. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1972.

Seals, David. Sweet Medicine. New York: Orion Books, 1992.

Response to "Storyteller"

Samuel Levesque

20th Century Native American Literature

Response #1: Storyteller

My response to this reading is very mixed. While I enjoyed many of the individual tales and poems, and found the pictures appealing, the structure of the book (or perhaps it’s willful un-structure) simply confused me. Most of the response questions dealing with Silko’s oral-to-literate strategies have been well discussed in class, but on the issue of authorship, I think there’s a lot more to say.

The question of authorship was perhaps the most interesting to me. In an oral culture, stories are rarely properties. Although a culture might have a taboo against men telling “women’s stories” or telling “winter stories” in the summer, there is rarely if ever the notion that an individual owns the tale. Anyone can retell a good story, adapt it to their own style, change plot elements to make a different point, and not be judged to be “debasing” or even “stealing” a story. What matters is the story-teller’s talent, his or her performance. Story is not a commodity, but rather a common store of knowledge and lore that serves as a communal bond. Story, by incorporating education (cautionary tales, like “Storyteller”, or histories like “A Geronimo Story”) and entertainment, linked with it’s participatory nature, is a sort of cultural glue that binds a community together.

This contrasts starkly with modern Western notions of authorship and literature. In the Western tradition, the person who first writes the story down owns the story, and anyone else using it, or parts of it, must pay the author (either in money or, in the case of citation, homage). Further, due to the fact that the story has a material existence as a written book, one is forbidden to change the story from it’s original form. One would be hard pressed in literary circles, or in the courts for that matter, to get away with writing a story called Jane Eyre, a romping sex-comedy set in pre-industrial England, which mirrors the “original” but takes the plot off on a different tangent for a different audience. Stories, being a form of property in Western thought, must be “original” (which is in and of itself a fiction) and should be kept in their “original” form.

The nature of the experience is also different. Western works are generally read alone, neither performed nor shared. After the reader has finished the book, with it open to the appropriate page, they might discuss it. But they must always be ready to cite the author’s text with a fetishistic zeal to “stick to the story”.

This ownership of story, and even of ideas (witness the hullabaloo that would result from anyone claiming to have “discovered” the Second Law of Thermodynamics, even if said person had never read a physics book...) is utterly foreign to a non-literate oral tradition. Idea’s and stories simply are. They exist to be told, and the telling is what matters.

Silko confronts the reader with this contradiction by telling many different versions of what are in essence the same story. Rather than being inviolate things to be repeated by rote, stories are adapted to audience, teller, and lesson to be imparted. This turns the western idea on its head. Imagine someone telling you the story of The Catcher in the Rye, but altered to be a cautionary tale on the importance of obeying your elders.

There is a distinct contradiction, however, when one looks outside of the stories and at the book itself. While Silko consistently confronts and batters the idea of story as a fixed and permanent thing, in direct opposition to the western ideal of “literature”, the book itself bears a copyright stamp, and anyone using the stories or ideas put forward in it is hereafter required to cite the author as the “owner” of this information. I find myself disappointed that Silko shied away from the truly revolutionary step of refusing to copyright the book and publishing it anyways, making the stories free and adaptable to anyone who wished to use them.

In some ways one could say that in the very act of publishing this book, Silko, rather than using an oral tradition to challenge the “linear, individualistic, Eurocentric, literary tradition” simply converts one to the other. All her other stratagems; her purposeful avoidance of chronological order, the multi-medial aspect of including family photographs, the italic asides in almost every poem, and the formulation of the book as a whole to imply that maybe the stories authored Leslie Marmon Silko and not the other way around, all these fail in the light of the fact that she, and of course her publishing company, now own these stories. Rather than liberating the white man’s language and using it against the oppressor, she has done to her stories what was done to so many reservation plots, namely lost them to the legalities of the white world, whether she wanted to or not.

Perhaps I am taking this to far. But an ongoing theme in Silko’s work is the importance of story as a real thing, an aspect of existence that does not exist only in the airy realms of myth or the ivory towers of academia, but something that continually creates both our dreamscapes and our everyday lives. This is where that tiny little copyright stamp brings the whole thing down. If her aim is to use story, written or unwritten, to break the bonds of Western thought, that little witch-stamp has undone her work in a fundamental way. You can be as revolutionary, break as many “rules” of literature, decency, common-sense**, or whatnot as you like. As long as that stamp is there, you have not broken free. To wed the physical reality of the book with the ideas expressed therein would, to my sideways thinking mind, be a much more powerful statement on what really matters when it comes to stories.

*See what I mean about whoever writes it down first?

** Neither all that common nor sensible, if examined closely. ©Samuel Levesque, 2005

Distances and Foolish Crows

Samuel Levesque

Contemporary Native American Literature

Háskólí Íslands, Vor, 2005

Amerindian Armageddon:

Sherman Alexie, James Welch, and the End of the World as We Know It.

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 Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Midway on my trip, I got lost looking for Ruby Beach, and wound up driving into the Quinault Indian Reservation.

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 Americas experienced. They were agrarian or hunter-gatherers and their world was destroyed, or at least altered beyond all recognition, by the very civilization that so many sci-fi writers leave their characters pinning for after WWIII, a global pandemic, meteor strike, alien invasion, or solar flare.

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. New York, 1993.

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. New York, 1990.

King, Thomas: Green Grass, Running Water. Bantam Books. New York, 1994.

McNickle, D’Arcy: The Surrounded. University of New Mexico Press. Albuquerque, 1997.

Silko, Leslie Marmon: Ceremony. Penguin Books USA, Inc. New York, 1977.

Welch, James: Fools Crow. Penguin Books USA Inc. New York, 1986.

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. New York, 1990.