American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Age of Discovery brought to western Christianity a missionary challenge of epic proportions. Medieval Christianity had always claimed to be universal, but it was the geographical discoveries of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries that moved the claim towards reality. By the seventeenth century the frontier of the Christian mission stretched from China to Paraguay, and from Mexico City to Quebec. On that frontier the Society of Jesus was perhaps the best organized and most effective force for the spread of Christianity. Jesuit missions in the New World were a major institution on the frontier and a crucial arena for the confrontation of European and Native American cultures. It is that arena and the meeting of cultural values in one mission region that is the subject of this essay. While historians of the Christian mission and of Indian-white relations have been quick to see the importance of Jesuit missionaries on the frontiers of the Americas, these same observers have done little to explore the theories and methods of the missionaries, and even less quick to examine the impact of the mission on Native Americans. This historiographical failure is nowhere more evident than in studies of the Jesuit missions in New France. From Francis Parkman to the most recent comprehensive history of the Christian mission, the treatment of the missionaries and the Indians has been remarkably similar. The Fathers, so goes this interpretation,

I. Blackfeet surrealism James Welch is Blackfeet on his father's side (Blackfeet say Blackfeet, not Blackfoot), and Gros Ventre on his mother's. He was born in 1940 in Browning, a town of 2000 in northwest Montana which serves as the headquarters and trade center for the Blackfeet Reservation. He attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap Reservations, ultimately graduating from high school in Minneapolis. He attended Minnesota University and Northern Montana College before receiving a B.A. from the University of Montana. He went on to teach in the Creative Writing Program there for two years before leaving teaching to devote more time to writing. Welch published his first collection of poems, Riding the Earth-boy 40, in 1971. Earthboy was the name of a family from Welch's reservation; the 40 refers to the number of acres in their allotment of land. The poems are drawn mainly from Welch's Montana experiences. The collection was reviewed favorably in the Saturday Review (October 2, 1971), but World Publishing Company allowed it to go out of print. Harper and Row has since reissued it, with seven new poems. Welch has attracted some attention in Europe; Roswith von Freydorf Riese, a German poet and critic from Heidelberg, has been translating his poems into German. While some of Welch's poetry is perfectly clear, even to an unsophisticated reader, much of it is difficult to understand. The reason is that like many other American poets today-James Dickey, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Robert Bly and James Wright, to name just a few - he has been influenced by surrealism. The most important direct influences have been the poetry of his friend James Wright and the works of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo.

During the past twenty years ethnic literature and its impact have increased considerably. However, in comparison to Black or Jewish literature, Indian writing has played a relatively small role. While Black and Jewish writers defined themselves in terms of their ethnic identities and expressed their problems and concerns within this context, American Indians did not consider themselves primarily Indians, belonging to one common ethnic group, but emphasized their specific tribal origins as means for self-identification. In the 1970s, this attitude changed significantly with the advent of "Red Power" -a political and sociological movement indicative of the birth of a new sense of identity. Since Indian history was originally transmitted through a strong, formalized oral tradition, there are virtually no written accounts of the original tribal histories, and as a consequence of the modern Indian experience, information on differing American Indian cultures is relatively poor. The destruction of numerous Indian tribes and their being forced to live together in reservations led to an erosion of varying traditions and lifestyles, but at the same time, it contributed to a growing awareness of being primarily Indian. A new prototype was created from characteristics which were supposed to be basically Indian: an undisturbed close relationship to the natural environment and a strong adherence to cultural values-values which actually had been distilled from different tribal traditions. As the prototype arose from an opposition to the white mass society, constantly denounced in the 1970's, it resulted in the image of a wholesome Indian existence with distinct ideological traits. On a literary level, N. Scott Momaday's works reflect a sociological development which seems to indicate a reversal of roles: today it is the Indian way of life which is praised as an example to be followed by the white man. Momaday's first novel House Made of Dawn-awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1969-depicts the painful search for identity; The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) expands the idea and emphasizes the importance of Indian identity; and The Names (1976) evolves this concept in a more individual context.

Defying generic description, The Way to Rainy Mountain is an abbreviated history of the Kiowa people, a re-working of Kiowa folklore, a mixture of legend, historical fact, and autobiography. More precisely, it may be considered a kind of prose poem derived from traditional materials which are perceived personally, an exercise in self-definition made possible by a definition of the Kiowa experience. Ultimately the book 's subject must be understood as language itself- its origins, its power, its inevitable collapse, and finally, its re-birth as art. As Emerson says in Nature, every word was originally a poem, arising out of a need for some means of referring to a concrete phenomenon; for example, he says, supercilious means "the raising of the eyebrow" and spirit means "wind. " But the word, which begins as a metaphor, becomes, through common usage, a cliche and finally sinks into the common earth of denotation. Yet words are the only means by which the poet can give meaning to reality, achieve self-definition, and in the process restore vitality to the words. The structure which outlines the progress of language in The Way to Rainy Mountain is basically that of the relationship of the three main divisions of the book -"The Setting Out," "The Going On," and "The Closing In," a structure to be understood in the conventional terms of beginning, middle, and end, or perhaps, more precisely, of birth, life, and death - the origins, heyday, and final decline of the Kiowas as an independent people. Furthermore, the structure of each of the twenty -four sections which compose the three divisions must be understood as three visions of the Kiowas-that of Kiowa legend (the stories of Aho, the author's grandmother), of Kiowa history (usually facts found in the writings of James Mooney'), and of the author's own perception of himself as an inheritor of the Kiowa experience. These three elements-Kiowa myth, Kiowa reality, and personal vision-may perhaps be understood as Kiowa soul, Kiowa body, and Kiowa (that is, the author's) mind.

American Indian Historical Demography: A Review Essay with Suggestions for Future Research Russell Thornton Sherburne F. Cook. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 522 pp. $6.95 Sherburne F. Cook. The Population of the California Indians, 1769-1970. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 222 pp. $13.95 Sherburne F. Cook. The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. 91 pp. $5.75 The year 1976 might very well be considered a landmark in the study of historic North American Indian populations. It was the publication date of Dobyns' Native American Historical Demography; A Critical Bibliography, Denevan's The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 and a special volume of Ethnohistory devoted to American Indian historical demography, as well as of various journal articles 4 related to this topic. It was also the year of the posthumous publication of the three books by Sherburne F. Cook discussed in this essay: The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization, The Population of the California Indians, 1769-1970, and The Indian Population of New England in the Seventeenth Century. Surely, no other past year has yielded so many significant publications on historic American Indian populations. The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization reprints in one volume six of Cook's essays published initially between 1940 and 1943 as separate volumes in the Ibero-Americana monograph series. The publication is significant simply by making these out-of-print essays available once again, and available widely as a single publication. The six essays forming the book are: "The Indian Versus the Spanish Mission," "The Physical and Demographic Reaction of the Nonmission Indians in Colonial and Provincial California' "The American Invasion, 1848-1870," "Trends in Marriage and Divorce since 1850," "Population Trends Among the California Mission Indians" and "The Mechanism and Extent of Dietary Adaptation Among Certain Groups of California and Nevada Indians." The first four essays focus on various aspects of Indian-white relations and conflicts and are more or less a subunit themselves; the last two essays may be seen as another subunit, complementary to the first four essays but not related directly. To varying extents, all of these six reprinted essays had achieved notoriety as pioneering efforts long before this recent publication. AlI should prove of interest and importance to contemporary scholars.