American Indian Culture and Research Journal

When addressing the theme of religion in contemporary American Indian works of fiction, literary scholarship is often hesitant regarding its critical evaluation. Scholars frequently tackle the fictional treatment of tribal ceremonies and rituals, sacred sites, the repatriation of tribal remains and its legal implications, and Native spirituality in general. The issue of whether or not it is possible to negotiate a middle ground, a balance between traditional tribal and Christian religions, largely remains untouched by literary scholarship. This comes somewhat as a surprise, since the writers themselves are continually discussing the transcultural role of religion for Native American peoples today in terms of mutual and reciprocal exchange. This paper will demonstrate to what effect transculturation is used as a strategy for defining how religion is culturally negotiated in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit (1990), Diane Glancy’s Pushing the Bear (1996), and Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995). I am using the term transculturation employed by Mary Louise Pratt, who understands colonial confrontation as an “encounter” in a “contact zone.” Pratt’s basic principle is that cultures always change, unless they exist in a never-changing, static environment. Instead of dwelling on the frontier concept, the immigration experience, the melting pot, or various concepts of pluralism, Pratt’s focus is on a “zone” which allows—even automatically produces—interaction, exchange, dialogue, and reciprocity. She claims that ethnographers have used the term transculturation “to describe how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture,” and she continues: “While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for.”