Native Lit is Dead

What is Native lit?

Take a moment. Think the question over thoroughly. It’s not meant to be a trick.

What is Native lit?

If you’re struggling, try this one instead: What is the connection between the poets N. Scott Momaday and Natalie Diaz? The former is in his late 80s, and the latter is in her early 40s. There’s no shared youthfulness or grizzled veteran status to rope them together. They both make a living by placing words on a page, but the same can be said of thousands of people.

The answer is they, like their ancestors, are Indigenous. Momaday is Kiowa and Diaz is Mojave. Upon reading their latest books for this assignment—Momaday’s The Death of Sitting Bear (Harper, 2020) and Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020)—I found that this supposed link, the meaning for this essay, ultimately meant very little. After reading each book twice, I determined there are few, if any, commonalities between the two poets, besides the fact they have both, unsurprisingly, again produced powerful volumes of poetry.

Native lit, as it has been used to categorize and cordon Native writers for the past 50 years, is meant to classify every person who puts pen to page, lives in the United States, and is Indigenous to this land. Within Native lit, there are subgenres of Native poetry, Native fiction, Native memoir, Native, Native, Native—the word stands there imposingly, refusing to budge. It is meant to signify an industry’s diversity and stand as a proud label for work by people whose sense of self and ways of life survived federal extermination. Yet its effect brings not just pride but limitations.

Native lit is meant to evoke the same five or six Native authors historically held in high regard by the white literary community for convenient reference in reviews like this one.

Native lit is a college course six white students obligingly take at a private university to fulfill nagging degree requirements.

Native lit is a box.

It is a way to keep us separate, at arm’s length from Real Literature. We are still faintly present in the national consciousness, we are still nominated for prizes and end up on bestseller lists, because such tokenism looks nice, and also because the work demands nothing less. But Native lit is still the solid glass wall the colonizers peer through with awe and despair, leaving us akin to the aliens in Toy Story, awaiting The Claw of the Big Five publishing houses to descend and pick one deserving voice out of dozens.

There are benefits to the denial of publicity or publication, a sense of freedom and collectivity that manifests as a middle finger to injustice. In Native lit, community stands as the most valuable aspect of these forced groupings, as was the case with, say, the Harlem Renaissance. The gathering together of Native writers, in ways both organic and inorganic, has built a kinship among them born of the limitations of readers and the publishing industry. A bond rooted in bonds. As a result of artists like Diaz, Momaday, and others producing such undefinable, groundbreaking works, it’s now slowly being acknowledged that our own writing communities and MFA programs, and the writers who come out of them, are on par with any other. Who woulda thunk it? (Us.)

But if the work of Native writers is to exist and flourish in an unbound atmosphere like the work of non-Native creators, it can’t be continually walled off from criticism, or from comparison among the entire field of literature, not just writers’ contemporaneous Indigenous counterparts. Not only is it a disservice to the work, it creates a bottleneck regulated by gatekeepers. This is as much an argument against all such groupings in any creative field as an argument against Native literature as a concept. Our art should be judged not for the revelations of genocide or assimilation it provides Anglo and other non-Indigenous readers, but for how effectively and creatively it tells its story and whether the work itself, not the subject matter, moves the given critic or audience. As David Treuer writes in Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual (2006): “echo not origin.”

And so, it’s crucial for Native writers in this moment when so many are producing breathtaking works but too few are equitably supported and promoted to declare what has always been true: Native lit is not real.

***

The death of Native lit is a good place to start when it comes to addressing Momaday, one of the figures largely responsible for what came to be called the Native American Renaissance. The third sentence in the New York Times’ laudatory review of his Pulitzer-Prize winning debut novel House Made of Dawn (1968) reads, “American Indians do not write novels and poetry as a rule, or teach English in top-ranking universities either.” A slight addendum, then and still now, might have been worth adding: “American Indians do not write novels and poetry [that are equitably funded by the publishing industry.]”

Momaday’s writing reads like that of a master because it is, and his latest offering, The Death of Sitting Bear, which includes more than 200 poems from the last half-century, continues his transformation from mortal wordsmith to living legend. In many respects, he’s long crossed over; after all, there’s already Words from a Bear (2019), an entire documentary’s worth of fellow luminaries singing his praises, plus his many awards and honorary degrees. Momaday belongs to an older generation of artists but his work remains as fresh as ever. His latest poems are refined and fully developed, but also abrupt, with a decisiveness that suggests a lifetime spent meditating on the craft and the ideas and structures that undergird it.

Momaday’s early success with House Made of Dawn led to fellowships, overseas travel, and, eventually, to a tenured academic career, experiences reflected in his latest book. The time he spent teaching American literature at Moscow State University in 1974 informs poems such as “A Siberian Hunter, Remembrance,” as does his time in Alaska; “The Night Sky at Coppermine” is a striking recollection of a particularly spiritual moment when Momaday played witness to the Northern Lights:

[…] I had seen
the Northern Lights before, but they were never like these.
It was an event of great spiritual moment, such as children
know in their wonder and innocence. It was Christmas in
the universe.

But the most apparent influence, at least by my count, appears to be the year he spent in the 1960s in Amherst, Massachusetts, on a Guggenheim Fellowship, studying the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson.

“I learned from her something about the spirit of place,” Momaday writes in the preface. And that much is clear in the book, specifically in “A Note on Animals” and “Division,” two poems from Sitting Bear’s opening section. In the former, Momaday lays out the natural kingdom as he sees it: “Penguins are poker-faced comedians, / the Little Tramps of the polar ice. North of Greenland’s / dog equator, the dogs are alert even as they sleep.” And in the latter, he sits with the night, not fearing the accompanying quiet, but reveling in the release it brings:

There is a depth of darkness
In the wild country, days of evening
And the silence of the moon.

Dickinson’s influence is evident also in Momaday’s rhyme structures, such as the sprint through his evening visions that is “Rustic Dream” (“Please ponder this, / This dream of mine: / An edifice / Of ancient pine”), which follows Dickinson’s favored ABCB beat, though in the book’s final section, he switches to couplets in poems such as “Dancers on the Beach,” “Octave,” and “On the Stair.”

Curiosity in form and subject thread through a sense of internal peacefulness in Momaday’s work, even in moments of despair or doubt. Unlike many late-career retrospectives, the poems here remain fresh by not concerning themselves solely with the sights and sounds taken in by the poet. Momaday isn’t stuck between two worlds, as Abel is in House Made of Dawn. He is a man who knows and appreciates dozens, maybe hundreds, of cultures and histories for the tranquility and answers they bring their modern followers. But it should come as little surprise that it is in exploring and building upon the Kiowa oral tradition that Momaday leaves his most lasting mark. In conjuring the final moments of Sitting Bear, the great 19th-century Kiowa leader and warrior who led his forces against the encroaching imperialist military at great personal sacrifice, this book finds its heart, and Momaday his purpose. It’s difficult to overstate the consideration Momaday has for Satank (Sitting Bear). The book’s title poem is a masterpiece and worthy of its spotlight; its peak arrives not with the end of Satank’s life, but in the contemplation of the beyond that Momaday conjures in the warrior’s voice:

I become the being I was at the mouth of the log.
Between birth and death is the way of the warrior,
And there is nothing at either end but a dream.

After “The Death of Sitting Bear” are three prose poems: “Note (on Set-t’an Calendar Entry),” “Set-t’an Calendar Entry,” and “Susquehanna,” the latter of which addresses “the children whose sacrifice is marked by rows of gravestones in the Carlisle Indian School cemetery.” And this is where my mind drifted back to the concept of Native lit. For readers unfamiliar with the cultural genocide practiced at the boarding schools, Momaday’s note on Carlisle might be a revelation, a moment to gasp at the depravities of America. But for a Native reader it is just that—an informational note clearly written not for them but for the ones who do not know. And I have grown tired of those who do not know.

***

Three years ago, the writer Erika T. Wurth (Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee) laid out a four-part history of Native writing categorized by wave. The First Wave includes all writing from the time of European contact to the 1960s. Then, enter Momaday and his contemporaries, such as Joy Harjo and Louise Erdrich, for the Second Wave, the so-called Native Renaissance. They delivered proof of what had been denied for centuries: that the work of Native artists could stand alongside that of their non-Native counterparts, and exceed it. They wrote honestly and gorgeously about their individual experiences, though white readers often received and critiqued their work not as offerings from specific tribal citizens, but from The Indians. The Third Wave, characterized by the unflinching realism of Tiffany Midge and Sherman Alexie, sought to chip away at that mistaken reading. As with their Second Wave predecessors, these writers were interested in probing the granular realities of the contemporary reservation, while also allowing in darker, more sarcastic humor. The Fourth Wave, according to Wurth, occurred at the turn of the century and was marked by an explosion of poets, novelists, and short story writers who concerned themselves with form and freedom.

If we follow these classifications, Natalie Diaz fits at the latter end of that fourth wave. I would, maybe over-optimistically, argue that Native authors in the United States are currently bracing for a fifth wave, the one that will finally and irreversibly thrust all of our stories into the mainstream. That’s not an entirely positive development, given the predatory tendencies of the publishing, media, and film industries, but it does increasingly appear to be true.

Like Momaday, Diaz also shares a settler religion: Catholicism, in her case. But she is not as interested in gazing outward at the histories of the European societies that brought scripture to our shores. Postcolonial Love Poem often reads as a rally for Native readers and as an overdue wakeup call for the colonizer. I’d wager a guess that if you applied lemon juice and heat, the words “Land Back” would surface on every page; you can certainly feel them lurking between the lines.

It’s difficult to believe that Diaz could again summon the energy she channeled into publicly working through her sibling’s addiction in When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012); I haven’t stopped thinking about “Why I Hate Raisins” since I first finished it. And yet, in her second book, she again dislodges any sense of comfort or satisfaction with the status quo.

One notion I kept coming back to while reading Diaz appeared in a speech she gave at PEN DIY in 2014. “I am not writing about my actual brother,” she said. “I am writing about the things I feel, the things I fear, the things I worry about, the things that wake me up at three o’clock in the morning when I am unable to breathe. That’s what I’m writing about.” Diaz, in whose work tenderness mixes with visceral and raw imagery, states what her poems exemplify: “Every act of violence has a purpose.”

Diaz’s brother and his struggles with addiction are still present in poems such as “The Mustangs” and “It Was the Animals.” But of all the relatives—blood or otherwise—she brings into her work, it’s the Colorado River that attracted my attention. This is mostly because Diaz’s grip on the colonizer’s tongue is transcendent, but also because she does not outright explain every minute or grand feeling she has for the water. In “How the Milky Way Was Made,” Diaz lays out the convergence of water rights and the mortality of nature with such command that her condemnation of modern capitalistic resource allocation and commodification doesn’t bounce around your mind until minutes later, because you can’t stop staring at the opening lines:

My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-
fast flood. Able to take
 
                         anything it could wet—in a wild rush—
 
                                              all the way to Mexico.
 
Now it is shattered by fifteen dams
over one thousand four hundred and fifty miles,
 
pipes and pumps filling
swimming pools and sprinklers
 
                         in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

In the show-stopping “The First Water Is the Body,” Diaz flexes both a sense of humor (“The only red people I’ve seen are white tourists sunburned after staying out on the water too long”) and terrible honesty:

America is a land of bad math and science: The Right believes Rapture will
save them from the violence they are delivering upon the earth and water;
the Left believes technology, the same technology wrecking the earth and
water, will save them from the wreckage or help them build a new world
on Mars.

A similar prodding at American ignorance gloriously and morbidly arrives in “exhibits from The American Water Museum”:

Let the new faucets run in celebration, in excess.
Who lies beneath streets, universities, art museums?
 
            My people!

Its shouted rejoinder is left to ring in the ears.

***

A line in Diaz’s poem “Like Church,” has gnawed at me since I first tripped across it in December:

But it’s hard, isn’t it? Not to perform
what they say about our sadness, when we are
always so sad.

I am stuck in this place often, as both a writer and a reporter. I want to write about Native artists and organizers and politicians and policies and ideas, because those are interesting to me, because I relate to them, and because I know how inadequate the current coverage is. But the deeper I thrust into these white spaces that ostensibly have the power we’ve been denied, and the more open I am about the way I really feel, the more I find myself wanting to recede. To run from it all. Breaking into these spaces is a daunting task. It’s also a sign of immense privilege for those able to complain about such an issue; those whom The Claw deems worthy must decide whether they should try to Indigenize these places or create new ones of our own.

My voice bears some small semblance of weight for a few reasons. In no particular order I am: a writer; a Sappony tribal member; a public-facing, light-skinned member of the media; and, speaking more hopefully than factually, I am halfway decent at what I do, which is be a public-facing, light-skinned Sappony writer. I am not obtuse or ignorant, at least on the matter of why my inbox has been saturated with assignment requests of late. Native matters, and specifically Native art, are steadily considered in. Diaz, Tommy Orange, Elissa Washuta, Terese Marie Mailhot, Rebecca Roanhorse, Jake Skeets, Tommy Pico, Brandon Hobson, and dozens of other writers have all delivered dazzling works within the last few years. Others, like Kelli Jo Ford and David Heska Wanbli Weiden, are fresh on their heels, with new books forthcoming this year.

So what do I make of an open assignment to write about two Native poets who—other than being masters of the craft with new books out—have very little to do with one another as artists or as people? Do I take the money and write some words and cash the check? Do I follow the lead of Joey Clift and approach the assignment in a respectful and conversation-inducing manner? Do I try to perform some high-wire act and note the above and continue on to detail the various qualities I liked, or at least found interesting about the new books? It would be much easier for my sake if the questions listed here were not rhetorical.

Were I, hypothetically speaking, attempting to stay within the bounds, I would try to draw a line between Diaz and Momaday. Maybe I would look to the reflections of Christianity that flit around the corners of their pages, or, in Momaday’s case, often sit dead-center. That would make for an interesting essay because of the role the colonizer’s religion—now our own—has played in our understanding (and often forced adoption) of the rest of their society’s tics. But it wouldn’t necessarily be organic. It would be the result of being offered an opportunity to write about two Native poets because I am a Native writer. I would be stepping into the box and slathering another brick with cement and placing it on the pile.

In my initial attempt of this essay, I failed to land on an answer as to why I accepted this assignment, and why I approached it the way I have. This silence, I felt, was intentional, as the argument against Native lit as a cute packaging shortcut certainly does not trace its origin to my brain. Treuer’s book, published 14 years ago, used this claim as its foundation. The Paris Review was on the case in 2017. Writer Sterling HolyWhiteMountain was gracious enough to hold court on the issue more eloquently than I could ever hope to last summer during an Aesthetics for Birds Q&A. In her introduction to the June 2018 special issue of Poetry, Heid E. Erdrich asserted "there is no such thing as Native American poetry." I even covered this ground in my review of Skeets’s debut last fall. In writing this piece, I was trying to further amplify this long-held critique of the literary community and industry.

But my decision to file at all was also born out of a selfish desire to break my reclusive tendencies and air my grievances rather than smother them in anxiety. In the past three months, I finished my first novel and my first play; unlike my work as a reporter covering Indian Country, these words I have written are not yet public, and they are not a statement of fact but an exploration of form and creativity. They exist only in my mind, on my hard drive, and in emails for a few necessary eyes. I am terrified about what comes next, when they leave my hands and are labeled and critiqued and packaged by people who very well may label, critique, and package them as Native Art and little else. I do not want my work to be viewed solely as Native lit, just as I do not want my reporting work to be viewed only as Native Journalism. I do not want to have my work segregated or classified by the terms of a publishing industry that only knows how to look at the boxes the artists check on their census forms. More than anything, I want to sit next to my fellow Indigenous creators and heroes on bookshelves, but I also want to see my name next to Colson Whitehead and C.E. Morgan and any other great modern novelist. (While I recognize it’s presumptuous to put myself in a hypothetical conversation with such talented writers, I’d only remind you that having dreams like these is my point: I aspire to be as talented, as productive, and as creative as many writers, not all of them Native or Sappony. Why should my work, or anybody’s, be packaged otherwise?)

The failure to consider titles tucked under Native lit as equal (or greater) in style and substance than those under American Lit lies with the education system, academia, publishing, and the other cowering knowledge-holders who have misshapen the truth of the genocidal and assimilative wreckage that was dumped upon us. Because this history has been denied and ignored and rewritten by the remnant traces of Manifest Destiny, Native creators drawing from very unique and personal wells of emotions often end up writing about this barbed form of erasure. It looks different in every poem, novel, and memoir, because the Native experience and relationship with the colonizing force is not a single monolithic, replicable tale, even if the disreputable violence-first tactics employed by those forces often were. And even while Native writers have been kept in this box financially and professionally—by publishers, editors, critics, and often readers—artists like Momaday and Diaz have not allowed their work to be similarly deprived. In their latest books, these two poets have expanded their craft in ways that are unexpected, enthralling, and unrelated to one another.

And so I say again: Native lit is dead, because Native lit never really existed. Only the categories of the colonizer did. And now, thanks to Native artists, those categories are steadily shattering. Let’s finally bury them once and for all.