Is This the Third Wave of Native American Fiction?

There’s talk of a surge in Native American crime fiction in the last decade or two, meaning novels by, not just about, Native Americans. Earlier writers like Tony Hillerman, James Doss and Aimee and David Thurlo wrote mysteries set in native cultures, but they were outsiders. James Doss worked as an engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory while writing seventeen mysteries about the Ute rancher-detective Charlie Moon. Aimee Thurlo was born in Cuba and married co-writer David Thurlo who had spent time on the Navajo reservation as a kid but wasn’t Navajo. Hillerman wasn’t either, though he received the Navajo tribe’s Friend of the Dine Award. 

The new wave of indigenous voices are authoring crime fiction that gives readers a window into the real lived experience of native people. They’re reliable authentic narrators because they’ve lived the native life, right? Or because they carry indigenous DNA? In the context of today’s identity politics wars, it’s hard to define what [fill in the blank with a particular ethnic designation] writing means. How has indigenous writing evolved to where it is today?

One book launched the Native American Renaissance, an 80s term designating a surge in production of literary works by native authors in the 60s and on. That book was M. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer-prize-winning House Made of Dawn published in 1968. Momaday’s novel, first conceived as a series of poems and based on his personal experiences of life at Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico, follows Abel, a pueblo native and WWII veteran, returning to his village where he now feels misplaced and confused. Abel murders a native man and goes to jail. Upon release he spends time in Los Angeles having more troubles. After being beaten up, a friend sends him back to the reservation in New Mexico where he tends his dying grandfather and reconnects with tribal traditions. 

Momaday was born in Oklahoma and is of Kiowa and Cherokee descent, so he has the genes to qualify him as a native author. But the book is set in Jemez Pueblo. During his childhood he lived with his parents on Apache, Navajo and Pueblo Indian reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. They moved to Jemez Pueblo when he was twelve, so he wrote his novel using exposure to, rather than birth into, that culture. If genetic lineage is the driver’s license that permits a writer to travel in a particular cultural territory, would Momaday pass the driver’s test today? Poor Tony Hillerman, may he rest in peace, also born in Oklahoma, also schoolmate of native kids, has been posthumously criticized for writing about Navajos and Navajo culture. Of course, I’m not Native American (as far as I know) so I have no right to opine on these matters. Just saying, the idea of gaining the right to write on the basis of ‘ blood’ is a tricky one.

Despite receiving the Pulitzer Prize, critical reception of the novel was mixed. House Made of Dawn is not a straightforward narrative of events. Momaday tells stories about Abel’s life in the style of oral traditions of storytelling. He uses multiple narrators and includes different kinds of texts. His extensive descriptions may seem excessive or meaningless to people with no experience of the locale. Sometimes it’s hard to decipher the plot line. Critics have had a tough time figuring out if they should read the book as a narrative of events or a clever use of narrative techniques to help non-native readers understand an alien cultural world. 

After Momaday’s prestigious book launching the Native American Renaissance, literary writers like Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor and James Welch gained attention. Erdrich published Love Medicine in 1984 and added three novels to form a quartet exploring a fictional reservation universe in North Dakota using multiple narrators. Silko’s novel Ceremony, appearing in 1977, like Momaday, explored a returning veteran seeking healing by reconnecting to his pueblo’s sacred traditions. Vizenor’s novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles from 1978 is science fiction. All three were university professors and wrote technically complex fiction in the literary category. Welch’s Winter in the Blood follows a Blackfoot and Gros Ventre man who feels displaced between cultures. You can watch a 2012 film version on Amazon and YouTube.

Which brings us to the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit 1990, nominated for a Pulitzer, is set during the Osage oil murders of the 1920s. Martin Scorcese based Killers of the Flower Moon on the true crime account by David Gran, which uses a male outsider POV, rather than on Hogan’s book which recounts the story from the perspective of an Osage woman. Hogan is half Chickasaw.

Pawhuska OK during the oil boom

The Sharpest Sight by Louis Owens won the 1995 Roman Noir Award, France’s equivalent of an Edgar. Owens wrote five mystery novels. The main character of this one is a young man of Irish and Choctaw descent whose brother, a Vietnam war vet with PTSD, murders a young woman, is hospitalized with mental illness and then turns up dead with a bullet in his chest. Authorities write it off as suicide so the brother investigates. Louis Owens grew up in Mississippi and California, never lived on a reservation, was not an enrolled member of any tribe, but self-identified as having Choctaw and Cherokee descent. He was a professor of English and Native American studies.

Mardi Oakley Medawar wrote four historical mysteries set in the West after the Civil War featuring Kiowa Tay-Bodal, whose interest in anatomy and healing herbs contrasts tribal superstitions. Her fifth mystery, Murder on the Red Cliff Rez follows the investigation of a reservation police chief David Lamereau and Karen Charbonneau, a ceramicist who is also a tracker. This is a contemporary story set on the real-life reservation where Medawar lives.

So we’ve come to the aughts and teens and the boom in Native American crime fiction I mentioned at the beginning. Authors include Marcie R Rendon, David Heska Wanbi Weiden, Sara Sue Hoklotubbe and Stephen Graham Jones. I’ll look at these books in future posts.

Rattlesnakes Strike Twice is available to read and review on NetGalley and Reedsy Discovery. More info coming!