Enduring with/in the Stories: Native American Novel-Writing from the Assimilation Era to the Indian Renaissance (1920-1970)

The dissertation explores the development of the novel genre in 20th-century American Indian literature, particularly in the decades prior to the Native American Renaissance--whose critical fortune ended up obscuring the emergence of a novelistic tradition by earlier native writers in English. Authors like Mourning Dove, D'Arcy McNickle, John Joseph Mathews, John Milton Oskison, employed the novel form to tell about the Indian experience during a period in which the integrity and identity of native communities were repeatedly undermined, first through a number of assimilationist policies (from the turn of the century to the 1920s) and then through the termination legislation of the 1950s, despite the parenthesis of the Indian New Deal in the 1930s. Though mainly featuring the modes of realism and naturalism (also in the particular version of "ethnic modernism"), the novel proved to be a flexible genre that could accomodate elements of Indian culture, such as oral storytelling or the trickster figure. In this way, the genre could vehicle criticism against the representations of the Indian in the Anglo-American tradition, or simply give voice to the creative energies of the writers and their communities, which had been invariably silenced and forgotten after the completed political and military takeover of the previous century. In some cases, authors from this early generation managed to articulate viewpoints that were consistent with the ideas of Indian sovereignty and self-determination, thereby anticipating a crucial aspect of the literary politics expressed by the subsequent generation of Indian novelists, such as N. Scott Momaday, Leslie M. Silko, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor.