Lee Pulaski, lpulaski@shawanoleader.com
Leader Photo by Lee Pulaski Humanities professor Ryan Winn talks about the portrayal of American Indians in the “Twilight” series while holding up a doll of the character Jacob during a lecture Tuesday for the College of Menominee Nation’s 20th anniversary.
A lecture Tuesday wrapping up the College of Menominee Nation’s 2013 lecture series inquired about what constitutes American Indian literature, but attendees left without a definitive answer.
For Ryan Winn, a humanities and theater professor at CMN, that is just fine with him, because he isn’t sure there are solid boundaries for the literature subset.
“It’s almost an impossible topic to put in one hour,” Winn said. “It’s just an idea to get a conversation going.”
Winn noted to those in attendance that he did not believe it was essential for someone to be “native” in order to write about American Indian struggles and characters. It mainly comes down to doing proper research, he said.
In literature classes, Winn likes to give his students a book with American Indian themes and one that is not. It isn’t until after the students read the books that he reveals the book with the American Indian theme was written by a non-Indian author and vice versa.
“How do we classify American Indian literature? The author’s ethnic background? Did they grow up on a reservation? Do they need to know their native language?” Winn said. “Can anyone write American Indian plays? Who gets deputized as a culture cop?”
As an example, Winn pointed to Nasdijj, who was thought to be an author of Navajo descent and wrote an essay in Esquire in 1999 titled “The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams,” which was about the death of his son from fetal alcohol syndrome. It was revealed in 2006 that the essay was fiction and was written by a European American named Timothy Patrick Barrus.
In society, it can be difficult to determine who is an Indian, Winn said. Blood quantum laws were first established in 1705 as a way of limiting certain ethnic groups’ rights, he noted, but the laws are used by tribes today to see who has enough Indian blood to warrant getting certain tribal benefits, such as casino profits.
“Blood quantum is an ingenious way for Indians to discriminate against one another,” Winn said.
Prior to 1968, only nine novels written by American Indians had been published, according to Winn. He noted that most portrayals of American Indian characters today are still being created by non-Indian authors, and in many cases, the characters have been romanticized.
Pocahontas is an example, Winn said, as the real-life person was only 11 when she met John Smith, who was 28. The historical account is nothing like the Disney animated film about Pocahontas, which portrayed the woman as a young adult, and even the first plays about Pocahontas are done with rose-colored glasses.
The most well-known American Indian character today, Winn said, is Injun Joe from author Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” There is an effort afoot to cleanse the book and refer to the character as Indian Joe, Winn said, noting that he does not advocate changing authors’ words after their death.
“I feel that it fails to show how far we’ve come as a society, so why not look back at the mistakes and see right now that we’re not doing it instead of changing the record of the past?” Winn said.