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Welch's The Death of Jim Loney Welch There had been middle-class Indian characters in minor roles before: Kate Loney in Welch's novel The Death of Jim Loney (1979), for instance, has a prestigious job with the federal government, and Myron Pretty Weasel, in the same book, is a successful rancher.
Vizenor's The Griever Vizenor Albertine Johnson in Love Medicine, who seems like a young Erdrich, is in medical school. In fact, one might argue that Gerald Vizenor's Griever de Hocus, who appears in several novels and short stories, starting with "Luminous Thighs," is the first middle-class protagonist. Griever, who functions as Vizenor's alter ego, is a filmmaker who receives a grant from Robert Redford's Sundance Institute in "Luminous Thighs" and teaches English at Zhou Enlai University in Tianjin in Griever: A Monkey King in China. Griever is primarily a trickster, however, a protean character who evades easy classification and seems to strain the limits of the term middle-class.
Momaday's Ancient Child Momaday The first real, honest-to-God yuppie protagonist in Indian fiction is Locke Setman in Momaday's Ancient Child. "Set," as he calls himself, is a highly successful painter in San Francisco, counted "in the first rank of American artists." He exhibits in galleries in New York and Paris, and "it was fashionable--and expensive--to own one of his paintings". Although his father was Kiowa, Set has very little knowledge of his Indian cultural heritage. His parents died when he was a child, and after a few years in an orphanage he was adopted and raised in San Francisco by a white philosophy professor. He is in love with a beautiful and talented blonde woman, a pianist and archivist who graduated from Berkeley. On one level Set represents one side of Scott Momaday. The author is also Kiowa on his father's side but not on his mother's. Like Set, Scott was not raised among the Kiowas; he spent most of his youth in New Mexico at Jemez Pueblo, where his parents taught in the reservation school. Although there are pan-Indian movements, Indians generally identify themselves as members of a tribe; and so although Scott was an Indian, as he relates in The Names he was an outsider among the Jemez, not simply an Indian among Indians. From the time Scott went away to boarding school, he has lived mostly among whites. Much of the time, like Set, he lived in the Bay area. Although Scott is better known as a novelist and poet, like Set he is a painter of some renown. Still, The Ancient Child is very complex, and there is more than one side to Scott Momaday. Another side, what we might call his traditional, tribal side, is represented by the wild young medicine woman known only as Grey, who calls herself the "mayor of Bore, Oklahoma." Bore is the Kiowa word for cow (originally buffalo) innards, a dish the Kiowa eat raw. A taste for bote is a test of ethnic authenticity. Grey is Kiowa on her father's side and Navajo on her mother's. In his youth in the Southwest Momaday spent some time in the Dine (Navajo country) and became familiar with Navajo culture and language. His first love as a young man was riding his horse, and Grey is a wonderful rider, able to perform a trick that Scott himself used to do: picking up a dollar from the ground while riding at a gallop. Perhaps the strongest resemblance between Momaday and Grey lies in the fact that in The Ancient Child the latter is the author of a collection of essays and poems called "The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid." Momaday had published some of the essays in the Santa Fe New Mexican in the early 1970s and had added the poems shortly afterward, though he never published the work as a whole. He now makes a few minor changes (e.g., when Scott rode with Billy, he saved a young woman from the Indians, whereas Grey saves a young man) and works the whole piece into the novel as Grey's dream vision. The Ancient Child is more than a realistic novel; there is a strong mythical element to it. It may sound like belaboring the obvious to mention this, since the book begins with the Kiowa myth of the transformation of a boy into a bear and ends with the transformation of Locke into a bear. However, the way Momaday employs and blends myths is not at all obvious and can use some elucidation. For one thing, although the Kiowa myth is the most important, it is not the only one. Locke's childhood nickname is "Loki," the name of the Germanic god famous for his ability to change shapes. Locke calls himself "Set," which is not only the Kiowa word for "bear" but also the name of the Egyptian god of the desert often regarded as the embodiment of evil. Locke's transformation occurs in the desert near Lukachuki, New Mexico, and as Locke feels the power of the bear within him, he senses it as the power of evil. The primary myth, however, is the Kiowa story of the boy who is playing with his sisters when he turns into a bear. He chases them to the base of Tsoai, the rock tree, which they clamber up and escape as the stars of the Big Dipper. This myth is particularly important to Momaday, since his tribal name is Tsoai-talee, "Rock Tree Boy." Tsoai is a granite monolith in Wyoming that is sacred in Kiowa mythology; Momaday exercises poetic license in moving it to New Mexico for the novel. It is at the base of Tsoai, outside Lukachuki, that Locke turns into the boy and then into the bear. On one level it appears that Locke's transformation into a bear represents a form of wish fulfillment. Momaday, living in the tame, white world of academia--he has been a professor at Santa Barbara, Berkeley, Stanford, and now Arizona--perhaps feels cut off from his tribal culture and thus from a more feral sense of himself. To return to tribal culture is to move closer to nature, as the beautiful passages about the grasslands of western Oklahoma indicate; but to become a bear is to become part of nature, as revealed in the transformation passage, when Set as bear can hear the feathers of a hawk ruffling in the sky and smell rain in the mountains miles away.”
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