Chapter One INTRODUCTION Studies on the Native Tribes of North

Chapter One INTRODUCTION Studies on the Native tribes of North America is an emerging area of research, interdisciplinary in approach, making inroads into diverse fields like history, anthropology, ethnology, mythology, politics, linguistics and literature. Relegated to anthropology as the study of the past or extinct people, it has received due attention only recently with the academia realizing the incongruity of studying about contemporary people within the ancient field of anthropology and the hard fact that the Natives are not going to vanish. The erroneous idea that Natives would die out had theological and scientific backing. Even a renewed interest in the study of tribal people was not very redeeming because they were studied as ‘exotic curiosities’ or anachronisms in the modern age or the nostalgic remnants of a pristine past or the ‘savage’ fortunate enough to be assimilated into the mainstream. Genuine interest in tribal studies for its own sake emerged only recently. It gained impetus with the plethora of Native writers who emerged towards the end of the century. Literature was a forceful medium to voice their concerns. The past and the present of North America would be shallow and incomplete without tribal study. The emergence of post colonial and post modern theoretical concepts that subvert the ‘centre’ and speak for the marginalized served as a springboard for tribal studies. (though many Native writers resent judging their literature by Western concepts) Postmodernism is highly suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or metanarrative 1 and makes room for a plethora of mini narratives thereby questioning the veracity of the dominant ideology and its manifestations. It destabilizes the various binaries, the base on which Western discourse rests and reinforces that reality, which is a social construct, is plural and relative. Post modern narratives foreground polyvocality to emphasize the ideological and political factors involved in the production of meaning. Cues have been taken from post colonial theories which clear the space for multiple voices silenced by the dominant ideologies. Post colonialism’s engagement with and contestation of colonial discourse, power structures and social hierarchies have bolstered subaltern voices. The tenets of New Historicism have also been influential in analyzing tribal literature. New Historicism, a critical practice that developed in the 1980’s places a work in its historical context and tries to unveil the cultural and intellectual history through literature. Sensitive towards different cultures, New Historicists advocate that literary and non literary texts are inseparable and replace contexts with simultaneously existing co- texts. They emphasize on ideology: the political disposition unknown even to an author himself that governs his work. Any study of tribal literature entails a detailed analysis of pre contact and post contact history, the political developments of the period, the descriptions of the Natives in literary and non literary discourse, the mythological aspects of Native culture and so on cutting across diverse disciplines. This study is immensely informed by postcolonial, postmodern and New Historicist literary techniques. The contemporary relevance of the field of Cultural Studies underscores the researcher’s choice of the area. Cultural Studies attempts to understand culture in its diverse manifestations and analyzes the social and political context in which culture demonstrates itself. It seeks to understand how meaning is generated and disseminated through various 2 practices, beliefs, institutions and political, economic and social structures within a given culture. In combining a multitude of theories ranging from feminism, social and political theory, history, philosophy, literary and media theory, communication studies, translation studies to judge cultural phenomena, it takes on a holistic approach. Hence as suggested earlier, this study is interdisciplinary branching into fields as extreme as anthropology and film. Writing, for the tribals has been a creative venture to address the issues that pertain to them in the past and the present. The Native writers seek to discover their identity and to define them through their writing. Writing is also a means to liberate them from the invisible clutches of colonialism and to heal the wounds inflicted by the colonizers through the ages. To this end, they turn to their past, their myths, legends and folklore that informed them who they were and of their relation to the world. They recreate their mythical and legendary figures through their literature. However writing has always been problematic for indigenous peoples who cherished a wealthy tradition of oral literature. Oral stories, an amalgam of Native myths, folktales and legends informed Native world view and Native understanding of the cosmos. They were passed from one generation to the next by word of mouth. In fact, many tribes did not have a well developed script for their languages. Transmitting oral stories in print was highly problematic for Natives. First of all Native oral story telling sessions encompassed the entire community and was a participatory affair unlike the separate acts of writing and reading. Maria Campbell describes the dilemma of the modern Native storyteller “who had to change from telling a story to a group of people to 3 being alone and telling the story to the paper.” (Toye, 3) Secondly, oral stories were narrated in their Native languages and translating them into the English language, with absolutely different sets of linguistic and cultural codes was problematic. Thirdly, oral literature has been looked upon as a debased, inferior version of the authentic written literature. Native writers had to make considerable mediations and compromises to bridge the divide and they have succeeded fairly in conveying a distinct Native sensibility. This aspect of synthesizing the oral and the written has also been focused in this study. The trickster, a feature of tribal orality got incorporated into the written with ease and pervades every work written by a Native writer, in one form or the other. The function of the trickster in Native myth and literature has been scrutinized here. To make themselves heard amid the cacophony of the dominant voices is a Herculean task for the Native writers because their identity has been enmeshed in a maze of stereotypes perpetuated by the dominant discourse. One of the dominant stereotypes was that the Natives were completely lacking in a sense of humor. It is to be noted that this stereotype, which was reinforced by European historical accounts, photographs, film and the media, had no basis. In fact, many writers who take to writing employ humor widely in their works. The present study explores the nuances and subtleties of Native humor. The rich tradition of Native comedy and laughter was downplayed and underestimated by White anthropologists and folklorists, the reasons for which will be explored in the first chapter. The trickster figure indeed played a pivotal role in Native humor. The focus of this study is on this mythical character which figures in the myths and legends of most tribes of North America, and which reemerges in their literature today. A hilarious figure, it appears in diverse names and forms like the Coyote, 4 Nanabozho, Raven, Wisakedjak and so on. Its potential for humor and subversion is the focal point of this study. Michael Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘Carnivalesque’ which he expounds in his monumental work ‘Rabelais and His World’ has been highly useful in analyzing Native humor with reference to the trickster. The attributes of the subterranean folk cultures that resurface time and again at the time of festivals like the carnival, applies very much to Native humor also. Bakhtin’s theory has offered illuminating insights into the topic. The Native writers attempt to survive the trauma of marginalization by reconstructing the humor of the trickster figure in their writings. This thesis focuses on the tenacity and perseverance of Native societies to laugh and celebrate amidst pain and suffering, by recalling and embracing the humor of their mythical trickster. The writers under study are contemporaries- the Cherokee writer Thomas King and the Cree playwright Tomson Highway, both of whom began their literary career almost at the same time. The works under discussion belong to all the major genres and include drama, novel, short story and poetry. The conventional Eurocentric generic divisions do not hold good in judging Native literature because Native literature emerges from the rich source of orality that encompassed poetry, drama, myth and performance. Despite this, for the sake of classification, Native writings have been loosely divided into conventional categories of fiction, drama and poetry, though they overlap into each other time and again. Thomas King is considered in some anthologies as a Native American writer. Defining his nationality is problematic. However since he holds Canadian citizenship and 5 calls himself a Canadian, he is taken as a Native writer of Canada in this study. This again points to the difficulty Natives underwent with regard to aligning themselves to nations, since Natives existed on both sides of the border. King was born in 1943 to a Cherokee father and a mother of Greek and German descent. King grew up in Northern California, received his PhD in English literature at the University of Utah, and worked for a number of years at

Load more