I am a gifted indigenous writer and all the good things that have come to me in my professional life have flowed from that fact. I’ve always been willing to state it baldly and explain that it’s not bragging. I deserve no kudos for winning a genetic lottery. Likewise, when I say the Navajo bard, Johnny Rustywire, has more talent than I do, I’m just reporting the fact of the matter.
The “gifted” part came later, but I always knew I was an indigenous writer. If there is a glidepath to becoming an indigenous writer it starts with reading, and reading everything. Just as you must read Anna Karenina to license your opinion whether it really is the greatest novel of all time, and you must read great literature generally so you know it when you see it, that coin has two sides.
It is also necessary that you read crap to license your opinion that it is crap and to develop the ability to know crap when you see it.
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Whoa, Russell, aren’t you buying into culture bound value judgments that put Indians at a disadvantage?
Yes to culture bound but no to Indian disadvantage. If you know of some place from which to write that assumes no cultural values, it’s probably located next door to the pedestal of objectivity the newshounds are always barking over. If you find either location, send me a postcard with the GPS coordinates.
Indian disadvantage? As measured by getting recognized in colonial literary circles, of course there’s a disadvantage. That is real, but it’s an artifact of political values rather than literary values.
As an indigenous writer, you may choose to “go broad” and your melded cultural springboard will be bigger and stronger than somebody’s springboard with only one cultural anchor.
Note that the only white folks who identify as such are white nationalists like the crew around President Trump. Most white writers who are not “nationalists” or “supremacists” (the distinction between the two is contested) see themselves coming from Irish or Jewish or seafaring or cowboy or urban or one of many other non-racial categories. Every way of dividing people unites them in literature that interprets them to others in the diversity hiding under “white.”
The diversity hiding under “Native American” is not well known except by those of us who live in the middle of it. I expect our cultural breadth exceeds that of African-Americans, but they have mined the rich lodes white people have denied and pursued their own voices—quality voices—to an extent we have not. Yet.
African-Americans can’t produce objective quality because white folks say so? I say James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison. My own poetry owes a lot to Langston Hughes.
Indians can’t produce objective quality because white folks say so? I say Vine Deloria Jr., Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Silko, Joy Harjo, Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor.
In both lists above, I could go on, but my point is that your tribal culture is an advantage if you make it so and you will probably find your path before mainstream critics do as long as you stick to quality.
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You may also choose to “go narrow,” and just speak to your own people. If you make that choice, you do not answer to the mainstream critics but you still do answer to literary values—the ability to spread ideas to an intended audience in a memorable way.
You are not more likely a writer if your birth certificate says “white.” The main way to tell if you are a writer is look at your hands and see if there appears to be a keyboard attached or there is a pen or pencil jutting up like another finger. Writers write.
I did not say writers publish. I said they write and they are compelled to write whether or not they publish. I judge that most writers are unlikely to forget their first publication after they have long forgotten their first writing.
I was 15, and involved with the Civil Air Patrol. CAP was about learning and then practicing search and rescue, but I wanted to fly that ancient airplane we got from the government. I went on to do my hitch in the Air Force, and that might have been another reason CAP existed as an auxiliary of the USAF.
My CAP squadron took a field trip to the Tulsa International Airport and I wrote a story about it in the style I was used to from having read Oklahoma newspapers. The Tulsa World printed every word with only one change. I had referred to one of our guides as “Mr. Jones” and the World style manual called for just “Jones.”
Score two. I got my first publication and I learned that all periodicals have a style manual, their own or one of the biggies like Chicago Manual of Style.
After I left home, the first money I earned that did not go for rent or food, purchased a portable typewriter. That enabled me to pile up rejections much more quickly than using the typewriter in the public library.
Is there a book that will turn a non-writer into a writer? I don’t think so. Practice can make you better and you can learn to write reports according to somebody else’s requirements but practice won’t get you from an empty page to a document with content.
There are books that will help solve specific issues.
The best cure for writer’s block I’ve found is in Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. Honestly, though, it’s hard to picture writer’s block without a deadline and a deadline without a paying gig, so it’s a quality problem like paying taxes is a problem for a stock trader. No tax is due on losing trades and the important thing about a deadline is you get paid for meeting it.
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If you need to know the conventional rule, it’s in The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. This is not to say you ought to always follow the rules. I personally would not wish to slay Jack Kerouac on one end or James Joyce on the other end of the grand altar of slavish devotion to the rules. It’s a little late to correct the Star Trek mission from “to boldly go” to “boldly to go” in the interest of not splitting an infinitive.
There are many good reasons to break the rules but among the very best is the attempt to render indigenous words or phrasings in English. This might be called a light version of code-switching, a flitting about among colonial and indigenous tropes that is a hallmark of American Indian literature but is not always understood.
Along the Mexican border, most of us don’t think about blending English and Spanish. We just report how people speak. Add an indigenous language and you have code-switching running free.
When free range code-switching is tamed, the author can create a labyrinth of meaning far more complex than a monocultural critic is prepared to interpret.
Myles E. Johnson had an op-ed in The New York Times on Valentine’s Day setting out what Beyoncé did in her Grammy performance. A woman emoting from women’s common experience without attempting to illuminate that experience for men is being “transgressive.” Ditto a black artist speaking to blacks…I would add a Navajo artist speaking to Navajos.
Transgress away, indigenous writers. You need no permission and you need no validation outside your community. Someday, it will become common knowledge that there are many cultures packed into “Native American” just as there are in “white.” When the gatekeepers decode your multicultural layers of meaning, they may make you famous. But they will not make you an indigenous writer. You were born an indigenous writer.
Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. He lives in Georgetown, Texas.