Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction

241 Pages·1998·12.05 MB·English

by  Catherine Rainwater

Dreams of Fiery Stars
Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction
Emory Elliot, Series Editor
A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.
Dreams of Fiery Stars
The Transformations of
Native American Fiction
Catherine Rainwater
PENN
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 1999 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rainwater, Catherine, 1953-
Dreams of fiery stars : the transformations of native American fiction / Catherine
Rainwater.
p. cm. — (Penn studies in contemporary American fiction)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3481-2 (cloth : alk. paper). - ISBN 0-8122-1682-2 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. American fiction — Indian authors — History and criticism. 2. American
fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Indians in literature. I. Title.
II. Series.
PS374.I49R35 1998
813'.540897-dc21 98-49977
CIP
For Bill Scheick
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Contents
Prologue: A Universe Perfused with Signs ix
1. Acts of Deliverance: Naration and Power 1
2. Imagining the Stories: Narrativity and Solidarity 36
3. Re-Signing the Self: Models of Identity and Community 65
4. They All Sang as One: Refiguring Space-Time 104
5. All the Stories Fit Together: Intertextual Medicine
Bundles and Twins 131
Epilogue: All We Have Are Stories:
Semiosis and Regeneration 155
Notes 169
Bibliography 197
Index 213
Acknowledgments 221
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Prologue
A Universe Perfused with Signs
Ruth Tate . . . had also visited Horse and said she remembered
a dream of fiery stars that fell to earth and when they landed,
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everything burned.
In Linda Hogan's novel, Mean Spirit (1990), a character dreams of
"fiery stars" that fall to earth and terminate more than five hundred
years of Euro-American domination. Other contemporary Indian
authors, perhaps most notably Leslie Marmon Silko in Almanac of
the Dead (1991), refer frequently to various tribal prophecies pre-
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dicting the restoration of the "old world." I borrow Hogan's phrase
for the title of this study—Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of
NativeAmericanFiction-becau.se it concerns the counter-colonial,
world-transformative efforts of writers such as Hogan. Over the
past three decades, an ever-increasing number of American Indian
authors have written themselves into the discourse of the dominant
society and encoded it with alternative notions of what it means to
inhabit the earth as human beings. These writers dream of noth-
ing less than revision of contemporary reality, beginning with its
representation in art. I will argue that in their semiotic re-creation
of the world, Native American artists are also "reinventing" tribal
people following their long consignment to silence and stereotypi-
cal representation within mainstream culture.
According to anthropologist Michael J. Fischer, "the newer
works" of American ethnic literature lead us to see that "ethnicity
is ... reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each in-
3
dividual." Likewise, in the introduction to a collection of essays on
ethnicity and identity, Werner Sollors notes the frequent use of the