American Indian Culture and Research Journal

We’ve been stuck in place since House Made of Dawn. --Sherman Alexie As Louis Owens suggests, the term American Indian Renaissance conveys both short-sightedness and an overstatement of the obvious. If American Indian writers and scholars feel their hackles rising at the moniker, it is because the notion of an American Indian Renaissance “denigrates both the incredible richness of American Indian oral traditions and the contributions long made by American Indian writers to American letters.” Overstatement of the American Indian literary renaissance is likewise misplaced, if nevertheless accurate to some degree: “It is impossible to argue that a renaissance in the American Indian novel has not occurred since the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn in 1968.” The use of the double negative represents as indisputable fact the prolific output of American Indian writers since Abel’s celebrated journey home, while at the same time seeking to distance this phenomenon from the scholarly reflex to canonize. Owens is himself a leading figure among those American Indian artists producing fiction in terms only uneasily labeled “rebirth” from a quattrocento and Anglo-European point of view. This caveat aside, Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) aggressively disputes the Native American Renaissance through the juxtaposition of Indian subjectivity and mental illness. In particular, the psychotic experiences of the protagonist in Alexie’s novel, John Smith, constitute a categorical denunciation of American Indian canon formation based upon modernist precedents.