American Indian Culture and Research Journal

[Narrative] is simply there like life itself . . . international, transhistorical, transcultural. —Roland Barthes [Native American] literature comes from and aims toward a different “map of the mind.” —Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish) “Simon, lost somewhere in between.” Or so Ojibwe author David Treuer refers to his central protagonist near the beginning of his novel The Hiawatha (1997). It is to contextualize his narrative schema that Treuer introduces the leitmotif at an early stage. Centering on images of place and placelessness, this leitmotif—like the novel itself—carries pertinence for current understandings of the Native American novel as a literary form and for critical analyses of tribal fiction. For Simon—who at the novel’s opening has just been released from prison having served a sentence for fratricide—the physical and emotional sense of placelessness is a burden that will be endured until the closing scene. Most importantly, the narrative closure at the end of the novel does not offer the customary image of “the return of the Native,” an image that is often read as a panacea to the trials of colonization and is often now expected by readers of tribal fiction. Instead Hiawatha—its ending and the narrative as a whole—confounds undemanding and comfortable notions of indigenous “return.” In this way, the novel engages the stylistic convention of the return, both as this return has appeared in Native fiction and as readers have interpreted it.