American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Wild and savage people, . . . . they have no Arts nor Science, yet they live under superior command such as it is, they are generally very loving and gentle, and doe entertaine and relieve our people with great kindnesse: they are easy to be brought to good, and would fayne embrace a better condition. -Robert Johnson, Nova Britannia, 1609 We must let you know . . . the Indians are not inclined to give their Children Learning. We allow it to be good, and we thank you for your Invitation; but our customs differing from yours, you will be so good as to excuse -Canassatego (Iroquois), 1744 Schemes to deliver higher education to American Indians arose sporadically throughout the colonial period. Within a decade of the first permanent European settlement at Jamestown, plans were already underway for an Indian college, and similar designs continued periodically throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indians in fact offered the impetus for establishing and maintaining among the nation’s most enduring and prestigious halls of higher learning-such elite institutions as Harvard College, the College of William and Mary, and Dartmouth College.

Native American autobiography did not begin in the nineteenth century when white ethnographers began to collect Indian life histories. Although aboriginal notions of self, life, and writing (auto-bio-grapheme) differed from those of Europeans, pre-contact natives did share their personal narratives. Instead of writing about their lives, though, individuals, often in collaboration with the tribe, shared their stories in oral, artistic, and dramatic modes. This intra-cultural collaborative narration became what Arnold Krupat calls ”bicultural composite composition.” Contemporary Native American autobiographers have attempted to re-create these collaborative processes and to modify aboriginal traditions of personal narrative, often consciously combining their Indian traditions with their white educations. One of the most accomplished examples of this is N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. Momaday’s belief in the transforming capabilities of the imagination, in the synthesizing potential of memory, in the identity-inducing possibilities of the land, and in the power, beauty, and grace of the word, all find their way into The Way to Rainy Mountain. He says: In one sense, then, the way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and it has old and essential being in language.

Now that she was in the city, all the daydreams she’d had were useless. She had not foreseen the blind crowd or the fierce activity of the lights outside the station. And then it seemed to her that she had been sitting in the chair too long. Panic tightened her throat. Without considering, in an almost desperate shuffle, she took her bundle and entered the ladies‘ room. (LM, 131) This panic, depicted in the novel Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, is felt by Albertine Johnson, a fifteen-year-old who is running away from home, not an untypical situation except that Albertine is a Native American and the home she runs away from is a reservation, one similar to the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in north central North Dakota. Albertine sits in a bus depot in Fargo, ND, her destination, her panic partly attributable to the fact that she’s never been away from home alone. Through the depiction of the fictitious lives of multiple generations in Love Medicine and Beet Queen, Erdrich portrays the movement from an ​​Indian culture to American culture, with the process of assimilation culminating in one individual in particular, Albertine Johnson. These two novels are part of a tetralogy proposed by Erdrich (Trucks, the third novel, has been published recently and expands more fully on the members of the earlier generations). Of the two novels that are the basis of this article, Lave Medicine provides more information about this cultural transition, but Beet Queen also provides relevant information, despite the fact that it’s not based totally on Native American culture. In these two novels, Erdrich traces the unique Indian history of the Turtle Mountain Reservation in a manner that is both captivating and informational for the reader, providing an enjoyable fictional story that is solidly based in the facts of the Chippewa Indians of the Turtle Mountain Reservation.

The distortion and misrepresentation of Native American spiritual tradition is nothing new. In many ways the process has been ongoing since the first moment of European arrival, and it has been functioning in an increasingly systematic fashion, under rationales ranging from sheer commercial speculation to that of ”pure scholarship,” ever since. During the last twenty years, the list of those lining up to share in the supposed prestige of American Indian Religious Studies” has come to include a whole bevy of ”New Age” personalities as well as a significant sector of the nation’s academic elite. This is true to the extent that the two groups have become inseparable in some ways, in terms of both outlook and “methodology.”

There are issues worthy of discussion that arise from Ward Churchill’s comments on Mother Earth. There is also the need to state clearly, where he did not, the concerns, perspectives, and conclusions of this study. Further, I have been contacted by several journals to respond to or comment on another version of Churchill’s critique, which was published in The Bloomsbury Review (September, 1988) along with a review article about Mother Earth co-authored by M. Annette Jaimes and Jorge Noriega. The research that led to Mother Earth was motivated by my awareness of a remarkable incongruity between scholars’ descriptions of a figure they call Mother Earth and the ethnographic record. Many notable scholars have described a figure or goddess, usually a personification of the earth, they hold to be central to the beliefs of peoples all over North America since ancient times. The incongruity was all the more complex since I was aware that some contemporary Native Americans often describe similar figures. These claims are not substantiated in the extensive ethnographic records for hundreds of tribal cultures. When I examined the descriptions by scholars to determine their evidence and sources, I found that nearly all are based on the same two statements alleged to have been made by Indians. The descriptions also make an occasional reference to specific North American cultures, most commonly Zuni and Luiseño, where the Mother Earth goddess figures. I went to the historical documents to determine historicity and to the ethnographies searching for evidence of Mother Earth and earth-related concepts (the results of this search are summarized in a bibliographic supplement to Mother Earth, 181-191). Remarkably, what emerged were several lines of narrative, several stories, that reveal much about American history, particularly about the encounter between Native Americans and Americans with European ancestry. These stories continue in this encounter with W. C.