"For 500 years, others spoke for us": Reprint of An Interview with Native American author Craig Womack - Page 4

There's a lot of humour in Red on Red, and this also seems to flow through a great deal of Native writing. Would you say this is an integral part of the Native personality and literature?
Oh, yes. It comes from our culture. Very deep, fundamental part of our culture. Among us, whenever Indians meet, we always laugh a lot. We tell stories and it's always a lot of humour. That's something that's impossible to capture on the page, because it's such an oral tradition. We have a saying among my people: 'If it wasn't funny, it wouldn't be Creek'.

That's another unexplored side of the Native personality that 'white' literature never brought out. They only wrote about the violent, rebellious aspects. Probably it was easier to simplify than observe realistically?
Well, if you look at Native texts honestly, you'll find a lot of them are very funny. But here's a certain sense of guilt among White people that makes them want to focus on a tragic vision of our people and our past. When Thomas King's novel Green Grass, Running Water was published, there was a glowing full page review in Time magazine which said something to the effect that 'unlike other Native American novels, this one has humour'. But almost all Native stories have always had humour! This goes back to our tradition of telling stories orally. Creation stories, for instance, which are the essence of our narrative tradition, have so much humour in so many difference forms. That's why earlier Native writers kept trying to find ways to express this oral tradition in print, through the use of dialect, personal letters, Creek English, the politics of our community. I've talked about this in Red on Red.

To a reader who hasn't really discovered Native writing, what are the books you'd recommend as starters?
Some really important ones are God is Red by Vine Deloria, it's about comparitive religion, and compares Christian with Native philosophy. House Made of Dawn, of course, a superlative example of technique and modernism. Leslie Silko's Almanac of the Dead, because it's a very critical text that's completely non-assimilistic. Black Eagle Child by Ray Youngbear, which is a superb example of the tribal way to tell a tribal story.

What about older narrative works? Have any of the creation tales or epics been transcribed and published?
There's a lot recorded in books by both Native and non-Natives. But generally, the approach to oral tales has been the old-fashioned anthropological way: looking at the hero as a trickster or a monster. But in fact, some of the great stories are still waiting to be told, stories of how my people signed treaties with non-Natives without fully realizing what they were signing. The Indian point of view on so many important historic events and issues. But the non-Native critics look back at those texts and think they're just stories about talking animals!

Article Author: Ashok K. Banker

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