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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