Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers

by Bob Blaisdell

  Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers

  EDITED BY

  BOB BLAISDELL

  DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  Mineola, New York

  DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

  GENERAL EDITOR: MARY CAROLYN WALDREP

  EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: ALISON DAURIO

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2014 by Dover Publications, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Bibliographical Note

  Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers is a new compilation, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2014. Bob Blaisdell has selected the stories, provided the introductory Note and the biographical information at the beginning of each story.

  International Standard Book Number

  eISBN-13: 978-0-486-31649-9

  Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

  49095501 2014

  www.doverpublications.com

  Note

  I’M NOT SURE how to generalize these stories, except to remark that there is a disarming humor in many of them, while almost never an unrelenting grimness. Several are dramatizations of education: a child or a grown-up learning the world, a culture, a task, or a family history. Beth Piatote’s gorgeous story, “Beading Lesson,” has it all:

  Maybe next time you come they will be having a powwow at the prison and you can meet my students over there and they can show you their beadwork. I think they always have a powwow around November, around Veterans Day. Your cousin Carlisle and his family come over from Montana last time, and the only thing is, you got to go real early because it takes a long time to get all your things through security. They have to check all your regalia and last time they almost wouldn’t let Carlisle take his staff in because they said it was too dangerous or something.

  What’s that? Oh, that’s all right. Just make it the same way on the other one and everyone will think you did it that way on purpose.

  The first few stories in this anthology, which is arranged chronologically by date of first publication, may frustrate us at odd moments with their broad characterizations that verge on stereotypes, but they are each complicated by an artfulness and depiction of personally observed details of nineteenth-century Native American life and ways. In “The Soft-Hearted Sioux,” for example, Zitkala-Sa tells of the dilemmas faced by a mission-educated young man:

  In the autumn of the tenth year I was sent back to my tribe to preach Christianity to them. With the white man’s Bible in my hand, and the white man’s tender heart in my breast, I returned to my own people.

  Wearing a foreigner’s dress, I walked, a stranger, into my father’s village.

  Asking my way, for I had not forgotten my native tongue, an old man led me toward the tepee where my father lay. From my old companion I learned that my father had been sick many moons. As we drew near the tepee, I heard the chanting of a medicine-man within it. At once I wished to enter in and drive from my home the sorcerer of the plains, but the old warrior checked me. “Ho, wait outside until the medicine-man leaves your father,” he said. While talking he scanned me from head to feet.

  The best stories, like the best stories everywhere at all times, are intense and continually surprising, among them D’Arcy McNickle’s “Train Time,” about a white Indian agent who believes he is doing the best for the children he’s sending away from the reservation to a boarding school. He clearly feels some uneasiness about his decision, a grave doubt that, as we read, dawns on us and leads us to hope that one day the “Major” himself may regret his act of coercion: “Whether the boy understood what was good for him or not, [the Major] meant to see to it that the right thing was done. And that was why, when he made up a quota of children to be sent to the school in Oregon, the name of Eneas Lamartine was included. The Major did not discuss it with him again, but he set the wheels in motion. The boy would go with the others. In time to come, he would understand. Possibly he would be grateful.”

  In Sherman Alexie’s “War Dances,” we feel as if the writer is discovering the story himself and extending conventional short-story boundaries as he composes it: we encounter an interview, a checklist, a poem, a critique of that poem, and continual jokes and revelations. Such unfoldings by Alexie in this particular narrative are comical, moving, and effective. Alexie has built his career reflecting on the everyday bewilderments of multicultural America and what it means, anyway, to identify oneself or others as Natives: “And then I saw him, another Native man, leaning against a wall near the gift shop. Well, maybe he was Asian; lots of those in Seattle. He was a small man, pale brown, with muscular arms and a soft belly. Maybe he was Mexican, which is really a kind of Indian, too, but not the kind that I needed. It was hard to tell sometimes what people were. Even brown people guessed at the identity of other brown people.”

  On the other hand, Duane Niatum’s “Crow’s Sun” is a steady moment by moment depiction of a young Naval serviceman’s introduction to the warden of a Marine Corps brig. Thomas will have to travel in his mind through space and time to endure this initiation:

  Casually, as if just waking up, the Sergeant lets his eyes drift down to Thomas’s shoes and the yellow line.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Young Thomas.”

  The Sergeant’s jaws flush; grow puffy. He lurches from his chair almost knocking it over.

  The muscles in Thomas’s face tighten; his eyes thicken; narrow into tiny moons peering from behind a shield of fern. He sways slightly; stiffens his whole body, not sure what to expect from the man closing in. Grandson to Cedar Crow, Thomas feels his fingers change to claws, to a wing of thrashing spirit flying wildly inside his ear. (Be calm and steady now. This man’s your enemy. Know his every move. Break him like a twig if he tries to harm you. Be the thunderbird in our song. I am Crow, your father.)

  The stories take place from Canada to New Mexico, to the in-between borders mocked and dramatized in Thomas King’s “Borders”:

  “Citizenship?”

  “Blackfoot.”

  “I know,” said the woman, “and I’d be proud of being Blackfoot if I were Blackfoot. But you have to be American or Canadian.”

  There are also the borders and intersections of cultures, as Pauline Johnson describes it through the heroine of “A Red Girl’s Reasoning”: “She belonged to neither and still to both types of the cultured Indian. The solemn, silent, almost heavy manner of the one so commingled with the gesticulating Frenchiness and vivacity of the other, that one unfamiliar with native Canadian life would find it difficult to determine her nationality.” Leslie Marmon Silko, who made her debut on the literary scene at age twenty-one, once said her “search for identity as a half-breed is . . . at the core of her writing.”1

  One of my hopes for this volume is that it inspires more stories by Native writers about that most American theme: discovery.

  I could not have found many of these stories or authors without the loving, dedicated work of a number of editors of previous anthologies, among them:

  Margot Astrov. The Winged Serpent: American Indian Prose and Poetry. Boston: Beacon Press. 1992.

  Laura Coltelli. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1990.

  Rayna Green. That’s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. 1984.

  Institute of American Indian Arts. Both Sides: New Work from the Institute of American Indian Arts, 1993–1994. Santa Fe: The Institute of American Indian Arts. 1994.

 
Karen Kilcup. Native American Women’s Writing: An Anthology, c. 1800–1924. Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers. 2000.

  Thomas King. All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction. McClelland & Stewart Limited. Toronto. 1990.

  Craig Lesley. Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories. New York: Dell Publishing. 1991.

  Duane Niatum. Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry. New York: Harper & Row. 1975.

  Simon J. Ortiz. Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature. Tsaile, Arizona: Navajo Community College Press. 1983.

  Bernd C. Peyer. The Singing Spirit: Early Short Stories by North American Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 1991.

  Kenneth Rosen. The Man to Send Rain Clouds: Contemporary Stories by American Indians. New York: Penguin Books. 1992.

  Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Lauren Stuart Muller, Jane Sequoya Magdalena. Reckonings: Contemporary Short Fiction by Native American Women. New York: Oxford University Press. 2008.

  * * *

  1. Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry. Edited by Duane Niatum. New York: Harper and Row. 1975. 222.

  Contents

  “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” (1893)

  by Pauline Johnson

  “The Soft-Hearted Sioux” (1901)

  by Zitkala-Sa

  “The Singing Bird” (1925)

  by John M. Oskison

  “Train Time” (1936)

  by D’Arcy McNickle

  “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” (1969)

  by Leslie Marmon Silko

  “Turtle Meat” (1983)

  by Joseph Bruchac III

  “Only Approved Indians Can Play Made in USA” (1983)

  by Jack D. Forbes

  “High Cotton” (1984)

  by Rayna Green

  “Snatched Away” (1988)

  by Mary TallMountain

  “Crow’s Sun” (1991)

  by Duane Niatum

  “Borders” (1993)

  by Thomas King

  “The Dog Pit” (1994)

  by Eli Funaro

  “Beading Lesson” (2002)

  by Beth H. Piatote

  “War Dances” (2009)

  by Sherman Alexie

  Acknowledgments

  A RED GIRL’S REASONING (1893)

  Pauline Johnson

  Emily Pauline Johnson (1861–1913) was born on the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ontario. Her father was a Mohawk chief; she was related on her mother’s side to the American novelist William Dean Howells. After her father died she wrote fiction to help support her family and soon became famous on the stage in North America and England, performing readings from her work—outfitting herself as a “Mohawk princess” until intermission, and then for her second act, dressing in an evening gown. In 1886 she changed her name to that of her grandfather, Tekahionwake, though she continued to publish poetry and stories as Pauline Johnson.

  “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” dramatizes a cultural clash between a mixed-race young woman and her white husband: “The country was all backwoods, and the Post miles and miles from even the semblance of civilization, and the lonely young Englishman’s heart had gone out to the girl who, apart from speaking a very few words of English, was utterly uncivilized and uncultured, but had withal that marvellously innate refinement so universally possessed by the higher tribes of North American Indians.” While stagy, the story achieves some degree of pathos and delivers a strong comeuppance to Christian prejudices.

  “BE PRETTY GOOD to her, Charlie, my boy, or she’ll balk sure as shooting.”

  That was what old Jimmy Robinson said to his brand new son-in-law, while they waited for the bride to reappear.

  “Oh! you bet, there’s no danger of much else. I’ll be good to her, help me Heaven,” replied Charlie McDonald, brightly.

  “Yes, of course you will,” answered the old man, “but don’t you forget, there’s a good big bit of her mother in her, and,” closing his left eye significantly, “you don’t understand these Indians as I do.”

  “But I’m just as fond of them, Mr. Robinson,” Charlie said assertively, “and I get on with them too, now, don’t I?”

  “Yes, pretty well for a town boy; but when you have lived forty years among these people, as I have done; when you have had your wife as long as I have had mine—for there’s no getting over it, Christine’s disposition is as native as her mother’s, every bit—and perhaps when you’ve owned for eighteen years a daughter as dutiful, as loving, as fearless, and, alas! as obstinate as that little piece you are stealing away from me today—I tell you, youngster, you’ll know more than you know now. It is kindness for kindness, bullet for bullet, blood for blood. Remember, what you are, she will be,” and the old Hudson Bay trader scrutinized Charlie McDonald’s face like a detective.

  It was a happy, fair face, good to look at, with a certain ripple of dimples somewhere about the mouth, and eyes that laughed out the very sunniness of their owner’s soul. There was not a severe nor yet a weak line anywhere. He was a well-meaning young fellow, happily dispositioned, and a great favorite with the tribe at Robinson’s Post, whither he had gone in the service of the Department of Agriculture, to assist the local agent through the tedium of a long census-taking.

  As a boy he had had the Indian relic-hunting craze, as a youth he had studied Indian archaeology and folk-lore, as a man he consummated his predilections for Indianology by loving, winning, and marrying the quiet little daughter of the English trader, who himself had married a native woman twenty years ago. The country was all backwoods, and the Post miles and miles from even the semblance of civilization, and the lonely young Englishman’s heart had gone out to the girl who, apart from speaking a very few words of English, was utterly uncivilized and uncultured, but had withal that marvellously innate refinement so universally possessed by the higher tribes of North American Indians.

  Like all her race, observant, intuitive, having a horror of ridicule, consequently quick at acquirement and teachable in mental and social habits, she had developed from absolute pagan indifference into a sweet, elderly Christian woman, whose broken English, quiet manner, and still handsome copper-colored face, were the joy of old Robinson’s declining years.

  He had given their daughter Christine all the advantages of his own learning—which, if truthfully told, was not universal; but the girl had a fair common education, and the native adaptability to progress.

  She belonged to neither and still to both types of the cultured Indian. The solemn, silent, almost heavy manner of the one so commingled with the gesticulating Frenchiness and vivacity of the other, that one unfamiliar with native Canadian life would find it difficult to determine her nationality.

  She looked very pretty to Charles McDonald’s loving eyes, as she reappeared in the doorway, holding her mother’s hand and saying some happy words of farewell. Personally she looked much the same as her sisters, all Canada through, who are the offspring of red and white parentage—olive-complexioned, gray-eyed, black-haired, with figure slight and delicate, and the wistful, unfathomable expression in her whole face that turns one so heartsick as they glance at the young Indians of today—it is the forerunner too frequently of “the white man’s disease,” consumption—but McDonald was pathetically in love, and thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in his life.

  There had not been much of a wedding ceremony. The priest had cantered through the service in Latin, pronounced the benediction in English, and congratulated the “happy couple” in Indian, as a compliment to the assembled tribe in the little amateur structure that did service at the post as a sanctuary.

  But the knot was tied as firmly and indissolubly as if all Charlie McDonald’s swell city friends had crushed themselves up against the chancel to congratulate him, and in his heart he was deeply thankful to escape the flower-pelting, white gloves, rice-throwing, and ponderous stupidity of a breakfast
, and indeed all the regulation gimcracks of the usual marriage celebrations, and it was with a hand trembling with absolute happiness that he assisted his little Indian wife into the old muddy buckboard that, hitched to an underbred-looking pony, was to convey them over the first stages of their journey. Then came more adieus, some hand-clasping, old Jimmy Robinson looking very serious just at the last, Mrs. Jimmy, stout, stolid, betraying nothing of visible emotion, and then the pony, rough-shod and shaggy, trudged on, while mutual hand-waves were kept up until the old Hudson Bay Post dropped out of sight, and the buckboard with its lightsome load of hearts, deliriously happy, jogged on over the uneven trail.

  * * *

  She was “all the rage” that winter at the provincial capital. The men called her a “deuced fine little woman.” The ladies said she was “just the sweetest wildflower.” Whereas she was really but an ordinary, pale, dark girl who spoke slowly and with a strong accent, who danced fairly well, sang acceptably, and never stirred outside the door without her husband.

  Charles was proud of her; he was proud that she had “taken” so well among his friends, proud that she bore herself so complacently in the drawing-rooms of the wives of pompous Government officials, but doubly proud of her almost abject devotion to him. If ever a human being was worshipped that being was Charlie McDonald; it could scarcely have been otherwise; for the almost godlike strength of his passion for that little wife of his would have mastered and melted a far more invincible citadel than an already affectionate woman’s heart.

  Favorites socially, McDonald and his wife went everywhere. In fashionable circles she was “new”—a potent charm to acquire popularity, and the little velvet-clad figure was always the center of interest among all the women in the room. She always dressed in velvet. No woman in Canada, has she but the faintest dash of native blood in her veins, but loves velvets and silks. As beef to the Englishman, wine to the Frenchman, fads to the Yankee, so are velvet and silk to the Indian girl, be she wild as prairie grass, be she on the borders of civilization, or, having stepped within its boundary, mounted the steps of culture even under its superficial heights. “Such a dolling little appil blossom,” said the wife of a local M.P., who brushed up her etiquette and English once a year at Ottawa. “Does she always laugh so sweetly, and gobble you up with those great big gray eyes of hers, when you are togetheah at home, Mr. McDonald? If so, I should think youah pooah brothah would feel himself terribly de trop.”