Sharfeddin, H. (2016) Interior landscapes: techniques for depicting the nuances of interracial relationships. PhD thesis. Bath Spa University. ResearchSPAce http://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/ Your access and use of this document is based on your acceptance of the ResearchSPAce Metadata and Data Policies, as well as applicable law:- https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/policies.html Unless you accept the terms of these Policies in full, you do not have permission to download this document. This cover sheet may not be removed from the document. Please scroll down to view the document. Interior Landscapes: Techniques for depicting the nuances of interracial relationships. HEATHER SHARFEDDIN A complete version of the approved thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Bath Spa University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, Bath Spa University June 2016 INTERIOR LANDSCAPES Interior Landscapes: Techniques for depicting the nuances of interracial relationships. ABSTRACT This research explores techniques for depicting interracial relationships, and their accomanying racial and cultural tensions, in fiction with an emphasis on Native American literature. This includes an examination of assuming other ethnicities through character development, and the line between appropriating racial identity and demonstrating empathy for characters regardless of races. This research specifically addresses techniques for illustrating the post-Civil Rights tensions between Euroamericans and Native Americans within the Interior West. As a non-Native American author native to the American West, I also identify the obstacles and strategies for including interracial relationships within my own work, a novel titled A Delicate Divide , which is based on a historic event: The Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes’ water compact proposal that threatens to strip land owners—primarily white—of their water rights within reservation borders. This research discusses Cosmopolitan and Nationalist arguments in favor and against non-Native American depiction of Indians 1 in fiction, and traces the progression of Euroamerican characterization within Native American fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through its examination of this aspect of racial tension, this research illustrates the arc of sentiment toward the colonizing race from early in the twentieth century, through the Civil 1 Throughout this paper I use the terms Indian or American Indian to clearly identify indigenous natives from post- colonial non-indigenous natives. These terms are consistent with some contemporary Indian self-identification. 1 Heather Sharfeddin INTERIOR LANDSCAPES Rights Movement and Wounded Knee II in 1973 2 (a significant event in Indian history), and into contemporary literature. An important outcome of this research has been my own personal understanding of the methods used to create fictional characters with varying viewpoints on race, including extreme racism, without making the overall nature of the work racist. I examine authors whose work deals heavily in themes of racial identity, racism, and cultural tensions between the colonizing race and the oppressed races. These authors also clearly illuminate the hardships of race relations from each of their characters’ perspectives. This paper discusses my approach to interracial fiction through the use of a third-race or “outsider” perspective to tease out racial stereotypes and cultural differences; the concept of imperative racism as a way in which characters overcome racism; and the use of self-directed racism as a technique for dispelling racial biases. Lastly, I highlight the predominant depiction of reservation life in literature as that of addiction, abuse, and poverty, with methods for updating depictions to a modern industry- and education-focused community, which is present on many of today’s reservations. 2 Wounded Knee II is defined as the 71-day siege of the town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota by Oglala Sioux protesting corruption among tribal officials and the US government’s failure to fulfill innumerable treaties throughout history. More than 60 deaths are attributed to the protest. 2 Heather Sharfeddin INTERIOR LANDSCAPES CONTENTS ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... 1 CONTENTS ..................................................................................................................... 3 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 4 NATIONALIST AND COSMOPOLITAN PERSPECTIVES ON LITERATURE ........... 12 INTERRACIAL UNIONS AND THEIR BIRACIAL OUTCOMES ................................ 16 EUROAMERICANS AND OTHER ETHNICITIES IN NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE ................................................................................................................. 21 INTERRACIAL LOVERS IN NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE .............................. 29 EUROMAMERICAN DEPICTIONS OF NATIVE AMERICANS .................................. 39 COMPARATIVE RACIAL DEPICTIONS IN LITERATURE ......................................... 41 THE IMPERATIVE STRUGGLE OF RACISM .............................................................. 48 A DELICATE DIVIDE: STRATEGIES AND METHODS FOR MY OWN WRITING.. 51 CONCLUSION .............................................................................................................. 63 A DELICATE DIVIDE .................................................................................................... 66 BIBLIOGAPHY ............................................................................................................. 362 3 Heather Sharfeddin INTERIOR LANDSCAPES INTRODUCTION The interior northwestern United States—Eastern Washington and Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and North and South Dakota—is remote: impenetrable mountains, untamed rivers, and disorienting prairies paired with unpredictable and extreme weather. Its urban populations are few and relatively stunted while its rural landscape invites escape. Once an intricate patchwork of territories occupied by Nez Perce, Salish, Blackfeet, Pend O’Reille, and Sioux, to name a few, the region has undergone a post-colonial identity shift to that of ranching and hydropower, agriculture and wilderness playground. In the one-hundred-and-fifty years of Euroamerican occupation, the Interior Northwest has become birthplace and life landscape for generations of non-indigenous people who, in the footsteps of novelist Wallace Stegner, claim nativeness. I am one of these natives, born in Forsyth, Montana near the Custer Battlefield 3 during the Civil Rights Movement. The landscape of the west is a part of my identity, much as it was for the indigenous people who lived here before me. We have experienced in common the warm, wet wind of a chinook ushering in spring after the brutal cold of winter. We’ve tasted brook trout and suffered under the punishing sun on sagebrush prairies. We have contextualized our lives and humanity against the backdrop of rugged peaks so grand that rivers are divided. To grow up in the rural west is to experience its hardships and sweetness first-hand, directly, with your sleeves rolled up and grit under your nails. 3 The Custer Battlefield, also known as the Battle of Little Bighorn, is the site where the US Army 7 th Cavalry—263 soldiers—fought thousands of Lakota and Cheyenne Indians on 25–26 June, 1876. Col. George A. Custer and his men were killed in the largest Army defeat of the Indian wars. 4 Heather Sharfeddin INTERIOR LANDSCAPES For early non-indigenous natives like Stegner, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota 4 in 1890 ended the Indian Wars and opened the west to uncontested settlement and white expansion. Euroamerican writers, looking back on a hard fought victory, entered an era of romanticizing and mythologizing the New West and the fortitude of settlers. These writers could occasionally claim direct knowledge, but more often wrote from the comfort of their eastern seaboard homes, tapping into their east coast sensibilities. They mythologized Euroamerican hardship in the face of a wild land in which Indians 5 were summarily dismissed as “the vanishing people.” As such, Indian identity in literature was often depicted in one of two ways: as savages and villains, or mystical beings who communed with nature, and lived as “one with the land.” When my family moved from eastern Montana to central Idaho in the late 1960s, my sisters and I routinely found Indian artifacts such as arrowheads and stone scrapers in the tilled soil of our vegetable garden. These tools of daily life so foreign to our own existence sparked questions that went beyond passing curiosity. I wanted to know about these people. I wanted to understand them. My family spent the arid summer days at the Salmon and Snake Rivers, where we traced our fingers over ancient petroglyphs and observed the more recently carved teepee rings— flattened circles in the slopes above the river where lodges were erected. We talked about those who had been here before us, always trying to piece together their existence in a canyon we now considered our own. Nez Perce was a name that was tooled onto my father’s leather belt, a gift 4 In 1890 Cavalry Soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed Minneconjous men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. It is considered