American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Paiute writer Adrian C. Louis’s poetry complicates Native meanings of home and community in painful and sometimes problematic ways, yet it participates in the project, widely shared by Native writers, of maintaining these very essentials of Indian continuance and survival. The importance of home for American Indian writers and their peoples is implicit in the centrality of land and community for both traditional oral and written literatures. Community ideally embraces human and nonhuman life, the physical world, and the world of spiritual reality, all of which are reciprocally related. It is thus supportive, empowering, and dynamic. Community includes land, understood as the grounds of tribal and sacred history, culture, and language. In the framework of such traditional knowledge, home is one’s place within community and land; to some extent, these three terms—home, community, and land—can be used interchangeably, as I will often do here, using home to imply aspects of the other two. For Native peoples the web of home, land, and community has traditionally been the source of identity and of the sense of belonging, in and through family and culture; it is likewise often a source of knowledge and creativity. Native writers often confirm the significance of home to their visions and their work. Thus, for example, Luci Tapahonso writes: “The place of my birth is the source of [my] writing.” And Joy Harjo states: “Oklahoma never leaves us. The spirit is alive in the landscape that arranges itself in . . . poems and stories.” Many critics have also contributed to the project of defining the importance of home, land, and community in Native literature. William Bevis observes that “[i]n Native American novels, coming home, staying put . . . is not only the primary story, it is a primary mode of knowledge and a primary good.” Robert Nelson, who notes that the landscape values he identifies in fiction are also evident in Native poetry, finds that in the Indian novels he discusses “the common referent that serves to define, evaluate, and confirm or validate identity is a physical landscape” and that land offers “the antidote to alienation.” Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver states that the “necessity of community pervades every aspect of Native life,” since “Native peoples find their individual identities in the collectivity of community.” Thus he argues that “[b]y writing out of and into Native community, for and to Native peoples, [Native] writers engage in a continuing search for community.” As these critics’ observations suggest, and writers like Tapahonso and Harjo confirm, for Native peoples a grounding in home and community can be a powerful basis for survival.