Contents Introduction Chapter I native American Renaissance, its beginning and main representatives of the period

Erdrich's The Crown of Columbus Erdrich The Crown of Columbus, by Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, depicts the adventures of a mixed-blood professor at an Ivy League university. The change from lumpen to haut-bourgeois protagonist represents a shift in focus of the Indian novel from depicting ethnic experience of the tribal group to dealing with problems of personal identity of Indians who have lost or weakened their ties to their tribe because they live their lives primarily among whites.
Early Native American Literature In the earlier novels the authors were chiefly concerned with depicting the Indian ethnic experience, the texture of tribal life. Although certainly there are many middle-class Indians, statistically most Indians on and off the reservation are working-class. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 1980--the most pertinent date for the novels under discussion--31 percent of Indians had finished high school, 17 percent had attended college (8 percent graduated), and 28 percent were living below the poverty line. So, an author concerned with depicting the Indian experience is not likely to make his protagonist a yuppie. Furthermore, ethnic characteristics are more obvious at the lower end of the social scale. Poor Indians, especially rural ones who live with their tribes, are more likely to retain traditional patterns of ethnic behavior, whereas generally speaking, an Indian banker living in the suburbs is likely to live pretty much as his white neighbor does. Also contributing to the depiction of the characters of the early novels is the archetype of the trickster, the most important culture hero to the Indians of North America. Trickster takes different forms in different tribes--Coyote, Raven, Hare, Old Man, Heyoka--but in all cases he plays tricks and is the victim of tricks, has prodigious appetites for food and sex and adventure, is always on the move, and is totally amoral, beyond good and evil. Modern Native American Literature In contemporary Indian literature this means that Trickster is more likely to be a bum than a businessman. He is found far more often in a bar than in an office; he is traditionally a drifter who is usually out of work and often in jail. He may be lovable, but he is rarely respectable. This is the Heyoka a character in Native American literature who is also called the “trickster.” In general, the first generation of novels of the Indian Renaissance is about tribal identity. The structure of Momaday's House Made of Dawn is based on Abel's quest to find his place in the tribal community in which he was raised, Walatowa Pueblo. That place is in question because, although his mother is a member of the tribe, Abel, as an illegitimate child, is an outsider; he does not know who his father is, or even what tribe his father belonged to. Throughout the book Abel is lost and disoriented. When he returns from World War II, he cannot adjust to tribal life. When an albino Indian named Fragua humiliates him at a tribal ceremony, Abel kills him and is sent to prison for eight years. When Abel finishes his term, the government relocates him in Los Angeles, where he attacks a policeman while drunk and suffers a terrible beating. Having lost his job in Los Angeles, Abel returns home, and the novel ends on a positive note with his reintegration into his mother's tribe. When his maternal grandfather dies, Abel buries him in the prescribed Walatowan fashion, then runs in the ritual race for good hunting and harvests that his grandfather had won decades before. He has discovered that his father was Navajo, and so as he runs he sings "House Made of Dawn," a Navajo prayer song, acknowledging the paternal side of his cultural identity.