Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place Volume 26

by Louis Owens

Book Overview

In this challenging and often humorous book, Louis Owens examines issues of Indian identity and relationship to the environment as depicted in literature and film and as embodied in his own mixedblood roots in family and land. Powerful social and historical forces, he maintains, conspire to colonize literature and film by and about Native Americans into a safe "Indian Territory" that will contain and neutralize Indians. Countering this colonial "Territory" is what Owens defines as "Frontier," a dynamic, uncontainable, multi-directional space within which cultures meet and even merge.

Owens offers new insights into the works of Indian writers ranging from John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, and D'Arcy McNickle to N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Gerald Vizenor. In his analysis of Indians in film he scrutinizes distortions of Indians as victims or vanishing Americans in a series of John Wayne movies and in the politically correct but false gestures of the more recent Dances With Wolves. As Owens moves through his personal landscape in Oklahoma, Mississippi, California, and New Mexico, he questions how human beings collectively can alter their disastrous relationship with the natural world before they destroy it. He challenges all of us to articulate, through literature and other means, messages of personal and environmental -- as well as cultural--survival, and to explore and share these messages by writing and reading across cultural boundaries.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0806133813
• ISBN13: 9780806133812
• Release Date: October 2001
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Both texts and readers are examined in Mixedblood Messages.

In a book which many might initially expect to be acontinuation of his highly-regarded _Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel_, Owens takes a large step forward before turning to bring his gaze to bear on the readers of American Indian novels. What do we expect to find in "Indian Territory?" And are Indian writers promoting "literary tourism," or are they appropriating the colonizers' language and creating something that is both fresh and disturbing to Indian and mainstream readers? Who reads these books, anyway? Who gets to review them, and who publishes them? For scholars who have relied on Owens' steady voice, this book will be a wonderful gift. Several hard-to-find essays have been collected and reworked in this cornucopia of Owens material. While this is not a continuation of _Other Destinies,_ this text will most likely become its steady companion. Owens examines closely several critical issues particular to mixedblood writers, and pushes some politically hot buttons in the process. Who may speak as an Indian for Indians, for mixedbloods, for the environment, for those who live in urban areas or on reservations? What are "terminal creeds" and why do Owens and his friend Gerald Vizenor oppose this form of thinking and representation? Readers will no longer be confused regarding these questions when they turn the last page before tucking _Mixedblood Messages_ onto the shelf between _Other Destinies_ and _Bone Game_.