Native American Fiction: A User's Manual Book

In this book, writer and academic David Treuer (Ojibwe) makes a passionate - very, very passionate - argument that Native American literature needs to be taken more seriously as literature and that it should be more rigorously discussed in the context of pure literary merit - and then Treuer goes on to proclaim that there's no such thing as Native American literature. While many of his arguments are undoubtedly thought-provoking, I found that they are partly lacking logical stringency.

Right at the beginning of "Native American Fiction", Treuer writes: "This book does not seek to define what is or what should be seen as Native American literature" - and it's pretty obvious that from this starting point, you simply cannot reach the conclusion that "Native American literature does not exist", because of course you won't find what you didn't look for or even define in the first place. From this perspective, it is slightly ironic that Treuer is calling for more academic rigidity.

Treuer argues that literature's standard should not be authentic representation, and that the literary techniques employed by Native writers are often similar to non-Native writers. The great thing about literature is that is does not serve a single aim - literature can be many things, and of course it can be a means of representation (and I would argue a very important one) and an art form employed to discuss what is essential or authentic when it comes to a culture. Why shouldn't it? Treuer is trying to pin down what the sphere of literature itself, independently from other forms of cultural expression or even culture itself, has generated in regard to Native Americans, which means he is looking at - exactly! - representation, but what is he measuring it against if not authenticity? What constitutes literary merit isn't defined here either.

Talking about the literary techniques employed by Native writers (he especially talks about Louise Erdrich in that context), I was really confused by his argument: On the one hand, he argues against the cliched depiction of Natives (from a racist or romanticised perspective), against portraying them as a vanishing culture, on the other hand, he says postmodern narrative techniques speak against the existence of Native literature. Treuer goes as far as to claim that "modern" equals "un-Indian"! Native people do live in a postmodern world, they are influenced by postmodern writing, so how should they write in order for their work to be categorized as Native literature? Treuer is contradicting himself. His line of thought would mean that because German writers aren't writing as they did before 1900 anymore, German literature has ceased to exist. Is Rilke no German writer because he didn't write like Goethe, because he was influenced by non-Germans, because around his time literature started to split up into new and contradictory (!) movements, and because his only novel is set in Paris? Good luck finding anyone who would maintain this. When Treuer is trying to make the case that Native culture is a LIVING culture, ever-evolving and multi-faceted, he can't cling to some kind of static concept of it, a concept he doesn't even define.

I want to stress though that I'm sure that Treuer is right about many, many things he mentions, especially about the fact that some people tend to project things onto Native Americans because they feel like they are "inconsequential" and/or vanishing, but wouldn't a counter-measure be to stress the accomplishments of modern Native writers, to point at all those writers who represent their tribes, their heritage, but also their lives today, to engage in the discussion about what identity, representation, authenticity and culture mean in Native literature and in our postmodern world? And yes, Treuer is certainly right that it is a question of respect towards these works and of self-respect for the readers and critics to look closely and discuss how well these books are executed, whether they say something meaningful and whether the formal style makes sense or not. I also love that he and his brother are making great efforts to protect, research and teach the Ojibwe language, a task that is probably hard to over-estimate in its importance.

Writing is not, as Treuer claims, mere fantasy, it is always rooted in reality as it is written by real people about real issues. What they create matters. Everyone who ever read Terese Marie Mailhot, Tommy Orange, Brandon Hobson and Joshua Whitehead will have a hard time clinging to cliches about who Native Americans are.