The Facts of Fictional Magic

The thing is, the events people pick out as magical don’t seem unreal to me. Unusual, yes, but I was raised believing in miracles and hearing of true events that may seem unbelievable.\n-Louise Erdrich\nOne of the curious problems facing contemporary Native American fiction writers is how they learn about their people’s history, and one of the curious solutions to this problem is that these writers turn to non-Indian authors to fill gaps in their knowledge about the history and traditions of early Indian peoples. It is ironic that the colonialist attitudes that ultimately led to the near obliteration of early Native ways of life and living oral traditions provide later Indians with written sources of information to which they would otherwise have no access. Thus we find N. Scott Momaday reading Elsie Clews Parsons’ ethnographic report The Pueblo of Jemez and using it in his novel House Made of Dawn. We find Leslie Marmon Silko reading the ethnographic reports of the mythical history of the Pueblo people and using them in her story ‘Yellow Woman” and her novel Ceremony. We find James Welch immersing himself in the historical records of the Blackfeet, many of them written by white historians, as he builds his novel Foots Crow. And we find Louise Erdrich reading the pages of an autobiographical narrative by John Tanner, a white captive of the Ottawa and Ojibwa at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, as she develops some of the scenes in her novel Tracks, published in 1988 and set between 1912 and 1924, and, more recently, in her juvenile novel The Birchbark House, published in 1999 and set between 1847 and 1848

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