Literary Violence

When the class split into pairs to discuss Allen and Snyder, Caleb and I talked for a while about western relationships between Native American culture and the natural world. We noticed that Snyder, a white man, uses language associated with Native Americans to talk about a more ecological way of writing. He writes that "New Nature Poetics" should "use Coyote as a totem," and goes on to breifly describe what Coyote signifies in a vague and unnamed native culture. Western culture (I'm using this here to describe the culture non-native Americans) is fascinated with Native ways of being and doing in nature but is significantly less interested in protecting the people who create these ideas. Caleb brought up the concept of the "noble savage" whose intentions are pure and who is knowlegeable through naivete and instinct rather than fact based knowlege that Western culture values. As non-native Americans, we take parts of Native culture that interest us and bend them, as John Gunn did in his translation of the story of Kochinnenako, to fit our understanding of the world. Instead of accepting different ways of knowing and relaying information, non-native Americans bend it to our will, change it, twist it, and use it to further own own agendas. When we do not truly value the work of Native Americans as they present it, we do not value Native Americans themselves. When Allen writes about different interpretations of the story of Kochinnenako, she discusses the fact that western translations and understandings of Native culture and stories are fed back to Natives. When a white man translates and effectively rewrites a native myth, he incorporates western ideas and systems of oppressions. When Native people read and hear their own story reworked, they then read it from a Western perspective, including accepting these added systems of opression. The use of small parts of Native ideas without taking time to understand the whole concept is an act of violence.