Indigenous writers’ stories honor, and upend, tradition

I recently read about the severe threat that climate change presents for Native Americans. They have historically been forced onto our country’s least desirable lands, and many of the places they live are becoming uninhabitable because of rising temperatures, erosion and more frequent and intense storms.

All of which brought to mind Louise Erdrich’s stunning 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Night Watchman.” Set in the early 1950s, it deals with the threat of dislocation and withdrawal of government support for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

The termination law of 1953 promised to free Native Americans from their marginal status and make them “full” citizens, granting them “all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.”

Instead, this “liberation” led to the abrogation of treaties, the wholesale termination of tribes’ rights and the loss of 1.4 million acres of tribal land.

The writer being Erdrich, of course, the story is a compassionate human one, filled with ordinary people who rise up against the U.S. government’s impending legislation. The protagonist, in fact, is based on her grandfather, a tribal leader who worked as a night watchman in a jewel factory and took the fight against the dispossession of Indigenous lands to Congress.

As an aside, I’ve long since forgiven Erdrich for her 1995 memoir, “The Blue Jay’s Dance,” the story of her daughter’s first year, in which she tells of writing with her newborn sleeping in a basket at her feet. A new mother myself at the time I read it, I was a hot mess, struggling to adapt to my infant’s entry into my somewhat orderly life. The thought of writing with my baby sleeping peacefully at my feet seemed a mean joke.

Erdrich, whose first novel was 1984’s “Love Medicine,” was part of a Native American literary renaissance that ran from the 1960s to the 1990s and resurrected storytelling traditions that existed for centuries before the arrival of Europeans on North American soil.

Starting with N. Scott Momaday’s “House Made of Dawn” in 1968, the renaissance included Joy Harjo (“The Last Song”), James Welch (“Winter in the Blood”), Leslie Marmon Silko (“Ceremony”) and Sherman Alexie, who published his first two collections of poetry in 1992.

Lately, there has been a new Native renaissance. Its best-known writer is Tommy Orange, whose “There There” tells the story of urban Native Americans and concludes with a powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. Other prominent members of this new wave are memoirist Terese Mailhot (“Heart Berries”) and poets Billy-Ray Belcourt (“This Wound Is a World”) and Tommy Pico (“Junk”).

Orange and Mailhot were classmates in the master of fine arts program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M., a community of emerging writers schooled in Indigenous movements. Largely staffed by and designed for Native writers, the institute has become an incubator of sorts for new voices upending old tropes and stereotypes about Native American literature, experience and identity.

For a taste, here’s how Tin House, publisher of Pico’s booklength poem “Nature House,” describes the protagonist: “He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizzaparlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole.” Writer Pam Houston (“Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country,” “Cowboys Are My Weakness”), who teaches in the institute’s MFA program, says of her experience there: “What I cherish most is the education in the history of my country and in my own whiteness. It’s the arts community of everybody’s dreams … not fraught with hipster condescension and faux intellectualism. It’s truly a place of humanity and lack of fear of emotion.”

Storytelling has always been a huge part of Native culture. It’s refreshing to hear contemporary stories from the new crop of Native writers. As Erdrich’s latest work proves, it’s important to recognize the old ones as well.

Lately, there has been a new Native renaissance. Its best-known writer is Tommy Orange.