Abstract
This study new-historically explores the dialectics of time and space in
American Indian women’s writings to explain American Indians’ awareness
of and attachment to their surrounding nature and its expression in the
contemporary American Indian tribal life. With delimited focus on Louise
Erdrich’s Tracks (1988) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony(1977), this article analyzes American Indian approach to time and space
reflecting Natives’ awareness of their surrounding place. Mythical
stories of oral tradition inscribed in Tracks and Ceremonyrecreate American Indian timeless and macrocosmic realities. American
Indian women writers have been selected owing to the matriarchal nature
of American Indian social order wherein women have been the conscious
carriers of their timeless oral tradition. The two selected novels of
different settings express the cultural range of American Indian tribal
belt from Canadian border (Tracks’ setting) to Mexican border
(Ceremony’s setting). This range is evidence of the synchronic
and diachronic integrations and distinctions of American Indian past,
present and future.
Keywords : American Indians, macrocosmic space, microcosmic
place, oral tradition, timelessness
Introduction
“[I]t makes no sense to separate literary texts from the social
context around them because such texts are the product of complex social
‘exchanges’ or ‘negotiations”’ (Booker, 1996, p. 138). As writers think
and write in a given society, their creative imagination is social, not
personal – negotiations of creative imagination are social because they
build up their conceptions in the presence of already constructed
sources, materials and aspirations. American Indian literary texts,
likewise, tell the socio-cultural embedment of American Indian
contemporary societies that sustain the distinctness American Indian
oral tradition in modern cultures. These literary texts show
contemporary American Indian tribes’ awareness of their surrounding
place that is timeless and macrocosmic in nature. These literary texts
express that the macrocosmic places “are an intimate part of
[American Indian] ordinary daily activities because they tell of the
drama that gives meaning to the ordinary” (Jahner, 1983, p. 214). They
reflect that “[t]he
achronological time sense of tribal people results from tribal beliefs
about the nature of reality, beliefs based on ceremonial understandings
rather than on industrial, theological, or agricultural orderings”
(Allen, 1986, p. 150) of Eurocentric idea of time. Hence, American
Indian social order is ceremonial in contrast to the organized linear
system that isolated man from his surroundings and from God whereas the
cyclic motion of time allows man to flow in harmony with the rest of the
universe. The awareness of ceremonial time is, therefore, based on the
knowledge of the natural surroundings which, for Deloria (1973), an
American Indian historian, itself is cyclic. The study focuses on the
American Indian ceremonial societies set in Tracks andCeremony to figure out not only the American Indian attachment to
their timeless and macrocosmic surrounds but also the concept of
timelessness and macrocosm per se. Hence, to locate the oral tradition
cultural concept of timelessness and macrocosmic places set in American
Indian fiction, this article studies Native American textual retrieval
of the oral traditional culture and its spiritual world surviving in the
contemporary Euro-American material world.
Literature Review
American Indian literature and society, according to McMaster and
Trafzer (2004), are based on the idea of cyclic/ceremonial time that
makes them distinct from Eurocentric world that generally
“emphasize[s] a sequential presentation of events or ideas” (p.
116). Joseph Epes Brown (as cited in Krech III, 2006) defines this
‘polarization’: the American Indian traditional world is “qualitative,
sacred, and non-materialistic, and the modern scientific world of
non-indigenous people, which, in contrast, is quantitative, secular, and
materialistic” (p. 567). Brown’s description of the difference between
Native American and non-native world is calculated. This calculated
analysis not only makes the American Indian ceremonial world superior to
the modern materialistic world but also explains that the nature of
social or cultural issues of the two worlds is poles apart. However,
Shepard Krech III (2006), an anthropologist, affirms the presence of
both linear and cyclic time events in American Indian traditional world
and perceives that the native tribes of America also fix their social
and political affairs in a chronological sequence. This shows that there
are some scholars who argue the dual dimensions of time – linear and
cyclic/ceremonial – in American Indian culture. Deloria also, like
Krech III, describes the dual nature of American Indian time sequence.
According to him, a number of American Indian tribes, like the western
approach, follow the linear trend of historiography. He exemplifies the
Central American historiographical methods like ‘winter counts’,
‘calendar sticks’ and ‘Walum Olum’ practiced by North Dakota and Tohono
O’odhams and Pimas of Arizona and Delaware that explained the
chronological location of the numerous political proceedings. However,
he does not believe in the duality: he accepts that there is a duality
of time sequence, but, for him, this duality is singular in its nature.
He argues that the linear mode of American Indian social order is
interconnected with the ceremonial mode: the linear concept of time
regarding American Indian storytelling cannot be understood without
understanding the idea of ceremonial or cyclic time and without
this concept of ceremonial/cyclic
time sequence American Indian linear time presentation loses its worth
(Deloria, 1973).
Paula Gunn Allen (1986), the
American Indian theorist, argues that “[t]he basis of Indian time
is ceremonial while the basis of time in the industrialized west is
mechanical” (p. 150). Regarding the Eurocentric settings, for her, the
idea of time is systematized through the beginning and ending of a
particular thing, event and action. Defining the native viewpoint, she
argues that man and nature actually communicate internally but is
affected by external time. She argues that the linearity of any
organized system is propagated by the Eurocentric idea of chronology
that isolated men from his surroundings that itself is cyclic. This
cyclic motion of time for the native people of America is important
since it makes the man flow with the flowing actions and universe. This
American Indian viewpoint of time is perceived as timeless. This oral
traditional perspective of ceremonial-linear mode of time is the nature
of American Indian history and literature, which also describes the
history of its time and place, that is disregarded by the modern critics
and historians (Deloria, 1973).
Robert H. Lowie does not give any worth to the oral traditional concept
of time – whether linear or ceremonial – and considers it valueless.
He argues the lesser capability of the primitive people of America to
understand the concept of time, and criticizes the oral tradition’s
beliefs in timeless and macrocosmic realities and whips critics for
assigning “extraordinary importance … to trivial incidents”
(Lowie, 1917, p. 164). However, Lowie ignores the ideology that John
Leland, the English historian, calls “common voice” and “common
fame” – the common belief of a particular community about a specific
happening in the past, the standard of evaluating historic disposition
of American Indian time and place. Leland (as cited in Woolf & Woolf,
2003) claims that one must not ignore “what people who had lived in an
area all their lives agreed on, unless he had external evidence which
contradicted or clarified” (p. 358). An individual is influenced by the
tradition in which he is raised and that, ultimately, becomes his faith
or religion. So, a responsive individual “may come eventually to see
th[is civilized experience] as a kind of myth, essentially
fictitious in that it does not portray the whole of life, but also
undeniably impressive as a saga to live by” (West, 1960, p. 1).
Research Methodology
This qualitative analytical and descriptive research follows the
theorization of new historicism that literature “cannot be considered
apart from the society that produced it: a literary text is another form
of social significance which is produced by the society and in return is
active in reshaping the culture of that society” (Montrose, as cited in
Doğan, 2005, p. 80). In his “Introduction” to Representing the
English Renaissance Stephen Greenblatt (1988), the founder of new
historicism, argues that a literary text is written in a cultural
background; it is not an individual effort but a social practice with
its ‘negotiations and contests’
(p. viii). He argues that a
literary text not only defines the socially structured patterns but also
reshapes those patterns in which it was produced. Thus, literature is a
social production rather than the creation of an individual
consciousness, and thus, can be understood within a ‘larger frame’ of
historicity or social reality that is not “an indistinct background out
of which [literature] emerges or into which it blends” (Forgacs,
1986, p. 167). A literary text is an explicit image of a society in
which it was written, and one can know that society by the critical
reding of that text. To follow the argument the study focuses on theTracks and Ceremony which were produced in the societies
of oral tradition and thus reproduce those societies.
Dialectics of Time and Space in American Indian Women’s
Writings
Literature, Stephen Greenblatt argues (1980), in all its forms, is the
reflection of its contemporary social order and, therefore, becomes a
significant knowledge of the past in which it was produced. Hence, the
social and cultural truths of a society can be traced in its literature.
The study, therefore, retrieves the oral tradition’s concept of time and
place in American Indian societies from 1912 to 1954 set inTracks and Ceremony .
The delimitation of these two novels serves to cover the cultural range
of American territory as the settings of both the novels describe the
nature of the American Indian tribal belt from the Canadian border to
the Mexican border. This range shows the multi-ethnicity of American
Indian tribal world (Coltelli, 1990). This cultural belt fromCeremony to Tracks is twofold – Native and Western –
that shows on one hand the long trail of oral traditional beliefs and,
on the other, the western influence on American Indian indigenous
societies. The study, therefore, focuses on the dialectics of
storytelling in Tracks and Ceremony to explore the concept
of time and place in the oral tradition of American Indian ceremonial
social order from Anishinaabe (Canadian border) to Pueblo (Mexican
border).