Momaday, Welch, and Silko

The twentieth century accelerated the changes in American Indian life already begun several centuries before. Reflecting the colonial ideals of the hegemonic culture, these changes unceasingly assaulted tribal ties, reservation existence, and the identities of Indian people. The significance of these past eighty-eight years on the lives of Indian people cannot be overstated and within this social context Momaday, Welch, and Silko carefully construct their novels. Not surprisingly, Indian people's alienation, cultural conflicts, sense of loss, and the shame of losing are primary themes in House Made of Dawn, The Death of Jim Loney, and Ceremony. These themes are most fully and dramatically developed in the lives of the male protagonists, the central characters in all of the novels. That each novel has as its central character an Indian male experiencing a profound crisis of spirit is surely no accident. Rather, Momaday, Welch, and Silko have used the character of the alienated man for several reasons. First, given their primarily non-Indian readership, it is through isolated, alienated men that the authors are able to demonstrate the negative severity of the twentieth century on the lives of Indian people. Indian men are more suited than Indian women to the notion of the vanishing savage, exciting romantic nostalgia in the minds of readers. This is because of a prominent belief that the nature of women's work and women's place has permitted the cultural lives of Indian women to be sustained while the lives of men, in contrast, have been radically disrupted. This idea has most to do with an interpretation of the sexual division of labor, which suggests that women I s responsibilities for children and homemaking have continuity regardless of historical era, while the roles of Indian men, which were related to trade, hunting, and tribal warfare, have been extinguished. Consequently, Indian men more than Indian women can be seen as tragic figures who have clearly suffered the more severe losses, albeit inevitable and ultimately desirable losses in the assessment of the dominant society. Thus, while Indian

Alienation · Epistemology · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology

• "A Performance-Centered Approach to Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony

  Randall W Hill, Randall Hill•1993

  Add to list

• Writing Nature

  Lee Schweninger•MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of…•1993

  Add to list

• Methodological Approaches to Native American Narrative and the Role of Performance

  Randall T G Hill, Randall T Hill•The American Indian Quarterly•1997

  Add to list

• Cross-Cultural Mediation

  John Scenters‐zapico, John Scenters-Zapico•The American Indian Quarterly•1997

  Add to list

• Placing the Ancestors

  Sean Teuton•The American Indian Quarterly•2001

  Add to list