РефератыИностранный языкLaLaura Coltelli Inteview With Wendy Rose Essay

Laura Coltelli Inteview With Wendy Rose Essay

, Research Paper


LC: In The Third Woman, you have written, ‘It is my greatest


but probably futile hope that someday those of us who are ethnic minorities will not be


segregated in the literature of America." Will you elaborate on that?


ROSE: Well, anywhere in America, if you take a university-level course


on American history or American literature, particularly in literature and the arts, it


only has the literature and the arts that are produced by Americans of European heritage,


even then largely Northern European. We are left out of the books. Black people are left


out; brown people are left out; Indian people are left out. So you get the impression,


going through the American education system, that the only people here are white people.


It’s not just a cultural matter, but it’s a political matter. There is a reason for a


society to be that way, that has the literary capacity and the technological capacity that


America has; there’s no excuse for the people being so blind, for the people to be wearing


a blindfold that way. The only possible reason it could happen is because it’s not an


accident; that it’s planned. Somebody is benefiting by having Americans ignorant about


what non-European Americans are doing and what they have done; what European Americans


have done to them. Somebody is benefiting by keeping people ignorant.


LC: Describing one of your trips, from California to Arizona, you


write that "a half-breed goes from one half-home to the other." Could you talk


on your "half-breed" identity?


ROSE: My father is a full-blood Hopi from Arizona. He lives on the


reservation. My mother is mostly Scots and Irish, but also Miwok, which is an Indian tribe


from the area near Yosemite National Park here in California. I’ve always thought in terms


of being a half-breed because that is the way that both sides of the family treated me.


The white part of the family wanted nothing to do, not only with me, but they were even


angry that at one point my mother married a man who was Welsh. Even being Welsh was too


exotic for their taste.


The Hopi side of my family is more sympathetic to my situation, but our lineage is


through the mother, and because of that, having a Hopi father means that I have no real


legitimate place in Hopi society, I am someone who is from that society in a biological


sense, in what I like to think is a spiritual sense, and certainly in an emotional sense,


but culturally I would have to say I’m pretty urbanized: an urban, Pan-Indian kind of


person. I grew up with Indian people from all over the country, all different tribes. Some


of them had lived on reservations and some of them had spent their whole lives in the


city. I was born in Oakland, which is of course a big city. So there was always the sense


of not really being connected enough to any one group. A lot of Indian writers have


written about that. I think in fact it was James Welch who put it in one of his novels; at


one point the protagonist is asked if being a half-breed meant that he had special


insights and special privilege into both groups, and in fact to paraphrase his answer, he


said what it actually means is you don’t have enough of either group. I can understand


that; I know what he means.


LC: Is your most recent book, The Halfbreed Chronicles and Other


Poems, a new image of the "half-breed"?


ROSE: In The Halfbreed Chronicles I come to terms with that


halfbreededness I was talking about earlier. Half-breed is not just a biological thing.


it’s not just a matter of having one parent from one race and the other parent from


another race, or culture, or religion, or anything of that nature. But rather it’s a


condition of history, a condition of context, a condition of circumstance. It’s a


political fact. it’s a situation that people who would not normally be thought of as


half-breed in a biological sense, might be thought of this way in another sense. For


example, some poems that are in The Halfbreed Chronicles are addressed to people


like Robert Oppenheimer. Nobody would ever look at him in a racial sense as a half-breed


person, yet at the same time he was in a context and at a time, and made choices in his


life, that for me apply the metaphor of half-breed to him. And when people hear the poems


from The Halfbreed Chronicles, very often people of all races and of all


backgrounds, come up to me afterward and say that they can identify with The Halfbreed


Chronicles. To me that means it worked, because that’s the intention. We are in fact


all half-breed in this world today.


LC: What Happened When the Hopi Hit New York is


a kind of journal of your trips to various states. What’s the "Indian


invisibility" you talk about?


ROSE: There are two ways to look at that. One way is the invisibility


that is imposed on Indian people, and that gets back to talking about the American system


of education, in which Indians are deliberately made invisible, in which people can grow


up in an area surrounded by Indian people who have maintained their culture, who still


practice their religion, who live on federally administrated reservation land, and the


non-Indians do not know it. That non-Indian people there can be unaware of that is one


form of invisibility. Another form of invisibility is that which is self-imposed by the


Indian person: in a context of conflict especially, very often in a confrontational or in


an uncomfortable situation, an Indian will turn into a potted plant, if you know what I


mean. An Indian person may withdraw and become part of the furniture or part of the wall.


That’s also another form of invisibility. It’s protective coloration, like camouflage.


It’s a survival trait.


LC: Could you talk about your work as an anthropologist?


ROSE: I told Joe Bruchac when he was asking the same question about


that in another interview–I told him I was a spy. He thought I was kidding and he


repeated the question, and I repeated, "I am a spy." He laughed and figured,


okay, that’s all he was going to get. But I don’t think he realizes to this day that I


literally meant, I am a spy. But not in any cloak-and-dagger kind of way; I’m not out to


hurt anthropologists. But the fact is that the only academic department at Berkeley that


would deal with my dissertation, which involves Indian literature, is the anthropology


department. Comparative literature didn’t want to deal with it; the English department


didn’t want to deal with it, in fact the English department told me that American


Indian literature was not part of American literature and therefore did not fit into their


department.


LC: You talked in the interview with Carol Hunter about your struggle


to protect the burial grounds. You said that you acted as a kind of mediator between AIM


[American Indian Movement] and the archaeologists, who didn’t accept your training as an


anthropologist as valid, since you aligned yourself with AIM.


ROSE: They didn’t really believe that an Indian person would have


studied archaeology. They didn’t take seriously the fact that I had actually trained in


it. I spent five years doing that kind of work, partly to experiment with the idea that if


Indian people go into it maybe there will be some control. If, for example, you found a


human burial in an archaeological site, if there were an Indian archaeologist there it


would be handled differently. People wouldn’t just bring up the remains, and so on. It


didn’t work; I realized after being there for years that archaeologists are just as


capable of lying to Indian people as anyone else. There were some very ugly situations


where archaeologists were calling up Indian activists and making threats on their lives at


one point, in the Bay area, in San Francisco, in Marin County, in particular. When I talk


about protecting the burial grounds, it is both a literal fact and a metaphor. The


metaphor is to protect Indian people through, in some instances, trying to neutralize the


very weapons that are being used against Indians, by mastering those weapons and then in a


sense breaking them from within. it is also a literal fact in the poem by that name,


"Protecting the Burial Grounds." That poem was in fact written in front of a


bulldozer, on top of an Indian cemetery, where we were sitting to prevent the bulldozer


from just going through and ripping up the Indian graves. The mayor of San Jose, which is


the city this occurred in, actually called out a swAT team, which is the Special Weapons


and Tactical squad, the people with the big guns, who wear the army-type uniforms and are


associated with the city police departments. They all came out and they had been told that


there was an Indian riot, that Aim was rioting out there in the cemetery. So they came


with their m i 6s or ml 5 s or whatever, those big rifles-they came nmning out past where


we were. They were looking for the riot. We were the riot and we were just sitting there.


So then finally they left, and we succeeded. We did manage to save that burial ground. It


was in fact preserved.


LC: Does it happen very often?


ROSE: Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Unfortunately we usually don’t find


out that a burial ground has been desecrated until after the fact, because developers know


that if the Indian people are in an area, and non-Indian people who sympathize with these


concerns know that a burial ground is to be dug up or something like that, they will


protest. So they go in, in the middle of the night, and the next morning everybody gets up


and it’s already done.


LC: Speaking about the "system," graduate schools, academia,


do you feel that "there is a line which cultures do not cross," and that every


day "you are bumping into that line," as you once said? Is there any way to


bridge that gap? Can you see the mixed-blood as a mediator between two cultures?


ROSE: I think there is a way. Certainly individuals can cross the


line, or can live on the line. I guess what happens is they live on the line, rather than


trying to cross from one into another culture territory. When I said that, I was feeling


betrayed because of friendships that I had for many years with a number of non-Indian


people; all of a sudden the fact of my being Indian became too much for them to bear, and


suddenly it just became a big issue with them. And similarly with Arthur, my husband, who


is Japanese-American, same thing. His being Japanese-American suddenly became too much for


them and they began acting in a racist way toward us, and we thought they were our


friends. And it happened that that quotation was about that time, and we were both feeling


pretty bitter about what had happened at that point. Sometimes I do feel pretty


pessimistic about it like that, but I also think that even though nobody can ever


completely cross over into another person’s culture, no matter how big a barrier there


seems to be or how different the cultures seem to be, there is a way that some people can


transcend that, just as human beings–as long as they don’t try to ignore the fact of the


culture, as long as they respect the fact that those cultures are different and that


they’re there and that they’re important, that they are important parts of the identities


of both those people, no matter how different they are. If they can meet on that ground,


then I think there is a way to cross that barrier.


LC: You are a poet and an accomplished painter as well. Is there a


kind of interrelated technique between the two media that you use in your poetry and in


your painting?


ROSE: It feels the same doing them. It feels the same way


inside—to do a painting as to write a poem. It feels like the same impulse. The main


difference is, and I don’t know how to explain this, the main difference is that with


poetry I feel like I am tough enough to take the criticism, but if someone doesn’t like my


paintings, I just fall to pieces. I’m more professional about poetry, and less so about


the paintings I think.


LC: American Indian writers and publishing–you have written an


article on that and about the difficulty in locating Native American literature in


bookshops, which, by the way, is also my own frustrating experience. It’s shelved under


"Anthropology," and as you said this segregation is not only philosophical but


economic, not to say political. Quoting Vine Deloria, as you did in the Coyote Was Here


interview, "the fact is that the interest in American Indians is a fad that comes


around every twenty years." Actually, in 1969, Momaday’s House Made of Dawn won


the Pulitzer Prize. In 1985, Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich, won the National


Book Critic’s Circle Award–and deservedly so. Of course, in between, scholars and writers


have been recipients of awards and fellowships, but I am just speaking about awards which


can appeal to a more general and wider audience. Can you see any significant, important


change having taken place in the past few years?


ROSE: As you can see, House Made of Dawn and Love Medicine are


approximately twenty years apart. The way a lot of us are looking at it now, Louise has it


now, we have to wait another twenty years. And she deserves it; both Scott Momaday and


Louise Erdrich certainly are accomplished writers who deserve it. But so is Leslie Silko,


so is James Welch, but their timing was wrong. They came in between fads.


LC: Considering the importance of women in many Indian societies, is


feminism

synonymous with heritage for American Indian women?


ROSE: I would say not. There are a lot of Indian women, myself included, who


consider ourselves to be feminist, but we’re not feminist like non-Indian women are. We


come from a different base; we have a different history. If I’m on the Hopi reservation I


am not a feminist; if I’m in Fresno, California, I’m a feminist.


LC: Native Americans come from different tribal and cultural


backgrounds. Do you see, then, Native American literature as multiethnic as a result of


this?


ROSE: It is of course in fact a multiethnic literature. And there are


certain tribal differences that scholars could pick out if they applied themselves to it.


The further back you go the more evident this is. If you go back to the 1930s, for


instance, you can see very profound differences between what a Pueblo person would be


writing and what someone who is Sioux would be writing. It’s not very new of course to


have all this published literature by American Indian people around. It’s not a brand new


thing; it didn’t just suddenly pop up with Scott Momaday. The Pan-Indian part of it, where


it is not exactly a multiethnic literature, is in the fact that–and this is speculation


on my part; I guess this is part of what I am looking at in my own doctoral


dissertation–most of the people that I perceive who become writers and who are thinking


in terms of actually publishing, and thinking of themselves as writers in the European


sense of a writer and a published work, are people who are in that Pan-Indian world. They


are people who are familiar with Indian people from various tribes. Now there are some


exceptions. Simon Ortiz is an exception. He has a distinctly Pueblo background, but as an


adult has become Pan-Indian, has traveled around. In fact, he’s addressed that fact in


some of his poems–Indians are everywhere. Ray Young Bear is very decidedly of one


particular tribal area and in fact has even expressed the feeling that he does not want to


deal with Indian people from other tribes, because he is concerned with people of


Mesquakie heritage. He considers his work to be an outgrowth of the Mesquakie heritage,


and to have nothing really to do with what the rest of us are doing. So there are


exceptions. But I think most Indian writers probably are more similar to each other than


they are to other members of their tribe who are not writers. I think, for example,


culturally I bear more similarity to someone like Maurice Kenny, a Mohawk from New York


City, or to James Welch for that matter, who of course is Blackfeet and Gros Ventre, than


I do to other Hopi women of my same age who are on the reservation. I have more


similarities with those other writers than with other Hopi or Miwok people.


LC: Do American Indian writers have a large audience among Indian


people?


ROSE: Increasingly so. The Indian communities are beginning again to


value those people who specialize in working with words. That of course was a traditional


value at one time. And as Indian people went to the boarding schools and were forced to


speak foreign languages and to worship foreign gods and so on, they also lost contact with


their own traditions involving the spoken or the written word. I think that’s being


rediscovered. Increasingly, I find, for example, that I probably give more poetry readings


as parts of powwows and tribal functions, grass-roots kind of functions, nonliterary


functions, for Indian people in a community now than I do for literary people. And I like


that. I enjoy giving poetry readings of course to literary people, too, and to urban


audiences and so on. But the feeling of being appreciated by that grass-roots community is


also very important to me. I think probably more important than the prestige or academic


part of it. And this is something that’s very important, I think–things like having poets


and novelists as keynote speakers at what had one time been strictly political and social


functions–at political rallies, at tribal chairmen banquets. At things of this nature,


which used to be completely nonliterary.


LC: Does literature develop a sense of Pan-Indianness?


ROSE: Possibly, yes. But it should be also made really clear that to


be Pan-Indian is not to become less tribal. To be tribal and to be Pan-Indian exist side


by side, and in fact Pan-Indianism is intended to protect those tribal identities, not to


replace them. So there is the Pan-Indian aspect to the literature, but with much of the


same excitement generated by the literature that is in the English language in the form of


the novel, or poetry. We then turn around in our own communities and can print things like


booklets for children of traditional stories; we can print things like language primers in


our own native languages, much of it with the impetus that originally came from writing


the poetry and the novels.


LC: In American universities there is an increasing number of American


Indian studies centers. What do you think of them?


ROSE: Well, I teach in one. It’s not in a university, but I have


taught in universities. I’m now at a city college, a two-year college. But I have taught


at the University of California at Berkeley, and I have taught at California State


University here in Fresno, in both instances in Native American studies, and now at Fresno


City College. I see it as something that at the moment is very necessary, as part of the


ethnic studies experience. It’s something that’s been left out of the curriculum, is still


left out of the curriculum, unless we go there and put it in. And the only way we can go


there and put it in is to concentrate on just those things. And if Indians are left out of


every other class on the university campus, even where they are pertinent–for example,


leaving Scott Momaday out of a class on twentieth-century American literature, something


like that–somewhere else there has to be a balance. There has to be someone somewhere


else who is going to emphasize Scott Momaday to the exclusion of the ones who are


emphasized in the other class. I hope that at some point that will become balanced. I hope


that pretty soon an American literature class will just automatically include someone like


Scott Momaday–and some of the other people: Charles Eastman, you know, the other writers


in our history. I also hope that there will continue to be some kind of program where


Indian people will be doing the teaching. If courses in Native American studies were to go


into the so-called mainstream departments, if Native American history were just taught


through the history department, it would not be an Indian person teaching it. Even if they


taught from the same cultural and political viewpoint, it would probably not be an Indian


teacher. So part of what we are doing in these ethnic-studies departments is building up a


core of professional academic people, a core of professional scholars.


LC: What’s the response you get from your students?


ROSE: Well, it ranges–I have very large classes for Native American


studies. Up at Berkeley you’re likely to have a class with ten people in it, but down here


it’s more likely to be fifty. It varies. At the two-year college I find that students are


much more receptive to the Native American studies than they were at the four-year


university in the same city, here in Fresno. At the four-year university I had students


who were calling me a squaw in class. I had students who, as I’d be walking across campus,


would yell rude things at me that would be racist in nature; I was told not to talk about


political controversy. They are among the reasons why I left the university, and I went to


the city college here. Where I am now, some of the students have difficulties with the


material primarily because they were brought up with a very narrow focus: if it isn’t in


the Bible it can’t be true. That is the major problem, which is not as much a problem as


just plain hostility.


LC: What do you think of non-Indian critics and


readers of your work?


ROSE: When non-Indian critics, generally speaking, criticize my work,


I find it useful. The critics that bother me are the ones who set out to review my work or


the work of some other Indian writer and state at the beginning of the review that they


can’t really do it justice because they haven’t taken enough anthropology. They drive me


bats, because when I write my books of poetry, they are in the English language. When I


use Hopi or other Native American terms, or Japanese terms, terms that are not in English,


I explain them. I use a footnote as a courtesy, with the assumption that most of the


readers of my work will be reading it in English. So with that assumption I use footnotes.


I wish that the academic poets I might be reading would have the same courtesy for me to


explain some of the culture-specific terms that they use. But they don’t.


LC: In Geary Hobson’s words the "white shaman" is a writer


who in his poems assumes the persona of a shaman, usually in the guise of an American


Indian medicine man. Would you like to add a few remarks on that?


ROSE: A few remarks. The term was coined by Geary Hobson. These are


not just people who take on the persona of the shaman in their poetry but are people who


actually even outside the realm of poetry take on a fabricated persona. The problem is one


of integrity, very simply. I have no difficulty with people taking on an Indian persona


and trying to imagine through their work what it would be like, for example, to be at the


Wounded Knee massacre, or to be a man or a woman in Indian society. Fine. As long as it’s


really clear that that’s what it is–an act of imagination. in my own work, if I put


myself into the shoes of Robert Oppenheimer, it clearly is an act of imagination. I’m not


going to pretend to people that I’m Robert Oppenheimer, or that I have some special


insight into Robert Oppenheimer’s mind. I’m going to imagine something about Robert


Oppenheimer and I’m going to express the imagination. It’s not an expression of him; it’s


an expression of me. If people who want to write about Native American spirituality or any


of those kinds of issues were to simply start it out by saying something like: this is an


act of my imagination; this is something I have been thinking about; this is something I


feel; this is how I see it. Fine. But what happens is, that we get people, and this is who


we call white shamans, people who say they have some special gift to be able to really see


how Indians think, how Indians feel; that when they do it, it’s real. One of them even had


the audacity one time to tell me that I could not write poems; in the particular instance


it was a poem about Tsu’hsi, the empress dowager of China; he told me I shouldn’t


write a poem about her because how could I understand the Chinese culture, but then he


said it would be okay for him to do it because it was easier for someone who was white to


put themselves into the shoes of other cultures, than it would be for other people.


LC: Can you see any evolution in your work?


ROSE: I hope it’s getting better. I don’t know. It isn’t really my job


to try to analyze my own work. I’m more comfortable analyzing someone else’s work. But I


try to improve. I hope that, like anyone else regardless of what they’re doing, I hope


that as I grow the work grows. I hope I am growing; I hope the work is growing.


LC: Could you describe your writing process?


ROSE: Well, I explained it one time, on radio, as the sensation of


being sick in your stomach, in that you suddenly have to throw up, suddenly, you have to


vomit. There is no way you can stop it. It has to happen. It’s a bodily process in which


the material is expelling itself from your body. That’s what it feels like to me in a


mental or emotional way. Suddenly it’s there and it has to be expelled. It’s going to come


out whether I want it to or not. If I don’t have something to write on, it comes out of my


mouth. It’s got to come out one way or another.


LC: Could you talk about your works in progress?


ROSE: There’s one book that is primarily political work, which is


looking back over the Indian movement for the twenty-five or so years that I’ve been


involved with it, which is going to be called "Going to War with All My


Relations." I don’t have a publisher for it yet, so there will be probably something


worked out about it pretty soon. There’s one book I have in mind that he (her husband]


doesn’t want me to do. That’s called, "How Come Arthur Isn’t a Cowboy?" A couple


of things like that are in progress.


From Winged


Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: Unviersity of Nebraska Press, 1990.


Copyright ? 1990 by University of Nebraska Press.


In Winged Words Laura Coltelli interviews some of America’s foremost Indian


poets and novelists, including Paula Gunn Allen, Michael Dorris, Louise Erdrich, Joy


Harjo, Linda Hogan, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald


Vizenor, and James Welch. They candidly discuss the debt to old and the creation of new


traditions, the proprieties of age and gender, and the relations between Indian writers


and non-Indian readers and critics, and between writers and anthropologists and


historians. In exploring a wide range of topics, each writer arrives at his or her own


moment of truth.


Available wherever books are sold or from the University of Nebraska Press


(1-800526-2617) or on the web at www.nebraskapress.unl.edu


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