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Nearly 400 years after Columbus opened the New World to European settlement, the military conquest of Native Americans was completed when Custer's old command, the seventh Calvary division, massacred Big Foot's surrendering band of Lakotahs at Wounded Knee. That slaughter forever ended Native American armed resistance in the United States and all surviving "hostiles" were located upon their respective reservations. Most observers predicted that Native Americans would soon vanish from the face of the earth, or completely assimilate into the white population of the United States.
For the next sixty years, the federal government did its best to exterminate remaining tribal culture, convinced that Native Americans had no future as traditionalists. During this time, Congress passed various laws with the intent of fragmenting tribally owned lands, fracturing tribal culture, and forcing assimilation.
Yet the process of extinguishing Native Americans failed. Instead, scattered and submerged resistance movements cohered and surfaced in the late 1960's. Native activists, often led by returned war veterans, exploded into uncharacteristic militancy that culminated in the occupation of Alcatraz, the fishing rights victory in Washington state, and the highly symbolic recapture of the village of Wounded Knee in 1973. These rebellions served notice that some Native Americans had neither disappeared nor assimilated. How this feat of cultural survival has been achieved despite overwhelming odds is still not well understood. Somehow reservation societies, which appeared to be assimilating, were instead taking over many Euro-American traits and institutions, but placing them into a tribal context while preserving a distinctly native personality and lifestyle. Although many Native Americans acculturated without assimilating, others did not. Thousands went to the cities, where some retained native identities, but others disappeared into the melting pot.
The Native American Literary Renaissance evolved from this history. In fact, it is only in the last three decades that a conscious effort to dispel the concept of the Native American as a vanishing race of people has been made by a growing number of diverse Native American authors and poets. N Scott Momaday's 1969 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House Made of Dawn opened the eyes of a new generation of Native American writers. House Made of Dawn served as a catalyst for Native American authors. Native people read the novel and received its powerful message: a person caught between two cultures can find a way to survive. In response to the destruction of both language and life, most Native American authors write within this context of survival. The more one reads native authored works, the more one realizes that in addition to survival, these authors also write about celebrating--the celebration of life.
Survival, I know this way.
This way, I know.
It rains.
Mountains and canyons and plants
Grow.
We travelled this way,
gauged our distance by stories
and loved our children.
We taught them
to love their births.
We told ourselves over and over
Again, "We shall survive
This way."
Simon Ortiz
