Megan Tusler's Reading List

"Waterlily can be called a historical novel . The book is written from a 19th century Native woman’s perspective. Deloria thinks of herself as being a woman writer in a much more explicit way than some other writers. This book follows a character called Waterlily from the moment of her birth through adulthood. It explores the patterns of parenthood, Waterlily’s marital arrangements and the importance of kinship ties. It’s a pretty straightforward bildungsroman , but beautifully done. Deloria was part of a group of women who were trained by Anthropologist Franz Boaz to do something like auto-ethnography or to be native informants. Zora Neale Hurston was the most famous alumna of that group. But Deloria is really important too. She brings the eye of an ethnologist to this novel. That is one of the most complicated questions in the field. Deloria goes to great pains to authentically represent tribal practices. Deloria is drawn to writing fiction , in part, so she can expose a wider audience to a picture of Native life. She’s invested in ‘tradition’ (I always put traditions in quotation marks because tradition is an ongoing project). Deloria’s depiction of Waterlily’s story aligns with a historical reconstruction of Dakota tribal life. It’s a story that is much closer to the closure of the frontier than any of the other books that we’ll be talking about."

"Momaday is cited as the writer who inaugurated the Native American Renaissance. House Made of Dawn is just wonderful. It made a huge splash, drawing more attention to Native writing in its wake. It’s about a character called Abel who at the beginning of the book is returning to his tribe’s reservation after serving as a soldier in World War II. It’s very much about his upbringing, his service, his reintegration after war, and his later life in Los Angeles. That description makes it sound like another classic bildungsroman but it’s not. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter House Made of Dawn makes a break from the normal bildungsroman and a breakthrough for Native American novels because the story does not privilege the human. Abel is the main character, but especially in the first half of this novel, it’s just as much about the natural world, the landscape, the animals, the water, the sky. The second part of the novel takes place in the built world of Los Angeles but Momaday maintains a focus on the environment. It’s a horizontal version of thinking about the world that’s really exciting. That kind of writing is part of what engaged the readers. He’s less committed to something like representation, although House Made of Dawn was definitely taken up as representation. And the story does concern itself with how tribal practices translate to the urban context in the latter half of the book. That is really important because indigenous stories are not bound to rural spaces. Momaday takes us to a reservation and then into urban life, showing us indigenous life in different contexts. It starts with Momaday in 1968. But a lot of fiction writers were part of the Native American Renaissance: James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko are two other famous examples. They were writing about native life. Anything that is bound by a category like Native American Renaissance is going to have books and authors that fall beyond its scope, to some degree. There are people who get canonized and others who get left out. What that has to do with the emergence of new left American Indian politics is a great question. At that time, there was a lot of organization against integrationist policies. In 1969, 89 American Indians began the occupation of Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay, to call attention to injustices against indigenous people. I think there was a back and forth relationship between the politics and the literature. It’s a moment when people are thinking about what makes identity and what “counts” as Native."

"Louise Erdrich is prolific. It was really hard to pick one novel by Erdrich. The Round House and The Antelope Wife and The Plague of Doves are all amazing. The reason I picked Love Medicine is because I think about it all the time. Its subject is love and the story, which follows the interwoven lives of three families, shows us so many genres of love and bonds and attachment. The intertwining of families is part of life on many reservations, where a lot of families know each other intimately generation after generation. Erdrich explores what this context and her characters reveal about love. The way that she conceives of love is so sensitive. This is not a conventional romance. Erdrich is sensitive about gender and about how loving relationships change over time. Love Medicine concerns so many categories of love, including paternal love and maternal love and illicit love. Erdrich rethinks love for us. There’s a moment in the middle of the book where one of the characters talks through her love for someone she had an affair with long ago. They talk about the staying power of love and how grief becomes entangled with love. Erdrich novels have big ensemble casts of rich characters that sound out the subjects she’s exploring in her work. Her novels work differently than more plotty fiction. It’s very effective. Native American novels don’t necessarily have to be about the past or about pastness. Native American novels are not just about experiences that are unique to indigenous people. A lot of critics put too much pressure on the literature to be “about” Indigeneity, indigenous traditions or tribal identity. To me, it is more interesting to think about how native epistemologies animate Native American novels."

"The Heirs of Columbus is so irreverent; I love it. Vizenor retells the story of Columbus but in Vizenor’s version Columbus is part Mayan and part Sephardic Jew. The plot of the novel involves attempts by several of Columbus’s descendants to reinter his remains. It has elements of a heist story. His alternative history of colonization undermines the narrative of victimization. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Vizenor is a very innovative writer. The way he tells his story puts pressure on the notion of a stable narrative. He’s also a scholar and a lot of his scholarship is in conversation with his fiction. So he is not just re-appropriating the story of Columbus, he is also reshaping the way stories are told. In an influential essay he wrote that we “need new pronouns that would misconstrue gender binaries, that would combine the want of a presence in the absence of the heard, a shadow pronoun to pronounce memories in silence, in the absence of cotribal names and nouns.” He’s really thinking about the trickster and the possibilities for play within the English language and ways to take on even the grammar of the literature of dominance. The trickster figure is all over, in the work of Leslie Marmon Silko and in Stephen Graham Jones. Anytime you see coyote in a native novel, that’s a trickster. In the literature, the trickster is deployed in different ways. So sometimes a trickster shows up to interrupt the narrative by breaking the fourth wall. Sometimes they show up in the work of somebody like Vizenor to ask us to rethink nativeness."

"Stephen Graham Jones is someone who crosses boundaries. He crosses genre boundaries. He writes horror fiction . He writes science fiction . His writing flies all over time periods. His work is vastly referential. The Fast Red Road is almost the opposite of the first novel we discussed. Unlike Waterlily , this is not a linear narrative. Stephen Graham Jones says really early on that his character is being broken out of time. It’s really an episodic book. Unlike Deloria, he is not aiming to introduce readers to authentic nativeness. He is undermining narratives about nativeness. The story is like a surreal Western. He has clearly read Vizenor. It’s a road novel. The primary character, Pidgin, whose mother died, is trying to find his father. But the plot is almost like a hallucination. This quest takes him to a rodeo, where he trips out on an anti-spongiform drug that they feed to the cows. The plot goes into these weird funhouse tunnels filled with strange twists and playful references. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Stephen Graham Jones is one of those people for whom authenticity is a dangerous category. In something else he wrote, what he calls “A Letter to a Just-Starting-Out Indian Writer– And Maybe to Myself” he says “be wary of ever allowing yourself to think that your ‘Indian experience’ matters any less than any other Indian’s experience, or any other model of ‘Indian experience.’ That creates hierarchies, which leads to the authenticity shuffle, which is an ugly, ugly dance to do for all the people who really want us to do it. Us doing that dance, it keeps us looking at each other, not the world.” Stephen Graham Jones clearly sees that the market wants American Indian writers to “do the authenticity shuffle.” He insists it’s not necessary. Not every American Indian novel needs to be a trauma drama. These five novels show that indigenous authors are telling all sorts of stories."