The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

I First Learned about Russia from Dostoievski. Literature as an Imaginary Way of Understanding Another Country.

Atilla Silkü (Ege University, Izmir, Turkey)
Understanding 'The Other': Representations of Native Americans in Mari Sandoz's The Story Catcher

Dani Cavallaro, in Critical and Cultural Theory, asserts, "in Western culture, dominant ideologies have time and again defined themselves in relation to a subordinated Other... [since] Self and Other are inextricably connected" (122). Throughout the US history, different marginal groups like women, African-Americans, and Native Americans have "recurringly been seen to deviate from the norms of patriarchal, heterosexual and white society" (Cavallaro 122). Cavallaro further states that the discourse of alterity "manifests itself... in the context of debates on colonialism and postcolonialism,... [the terms] historically associated with the politics of imperialism: a state's forceful extension of its powers through the conquest and exploitation of other territories" (124). Native Americans have also been subjected to acculturation, assimilation or misrepresentation, and they have been forced to live in Indian reservations by leaving their ancestral lands.

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, in The Post-colonial Studies Reader, define representation and resistance as "broad arenas within which much of the drama of colonialist relations and post-colonial examination and subversion of those relations has taken place... [and] these representations were [either] reprojected to the colonised... as authoritative pictures of themselves" or shaped prejudices and a sense of antagonism in the white audience (85).

Kathleen Mullen Sands, in "American Indian Autobiography," claims that, the image of the American Indian is "slightly exotic, sometimes fearsome, and highly fragmentary" (55). Sands further states, "Our comprehension of Indians... remains superficial, because our image is a composite of diverse and sometimes contradictory traits and stereotypes, selected from various cultures and isolated from the traditions, values, and life of those cultures" (55).

Being born on Mirage Flats, south of Hay Springs, Nebraska, in 1896, as the daughter of Swiss immigrants, and then settling in Greenwich Village, New York in 1943 as a writer, Mari Sandoz had a sense of double-consciousness between the white and the Indian cultures. However, she used such a hybrid experience to reconcile the dominant WASP culture with the marginalized Native American culture, through story-telling, in her social novels, Indian biographies and dramatized histories about the pioneering days of the American frontier.

In Sandoz's writing, the people of the Great Plains, Indians, farmers, ranchers, hunters and trappers found voice. As Helen W. Stauffer states, "[she] drew her sources [from] the trans-Missouri region, the Nebraska frontier, the sandhills in which she grew up, and Lincoln, where she moved in her early twenties" (765). Sandoz's observations and memories about the Native Americans were fictionalized in her novel The Story Catcher (1963) as an accurate depiction of the Indian culture which challenged the stereotypical representations of Amerindians as "savages" or "noble savages".

Thus, in the light of some postcolonial concepts like otherness, hybridity and cultural representation, this paper aims to discuss how Mari Sandoz, by using literature as a medium, tried to transgress the borders between the white and the Indian cultures, and paved the way for a multi-cultural America.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES