Role of Environment in Shaping American Indian Storytelling

Memory, a Voyage Into History

N. Scott Monday and Sherman Alexie are both story writers that focus on the environment. Storytelling is an important activity to the Native American culture that passes down information through each generation and imparts wisdom as it is retold. Although the stories told by N. Scott Monday and Sherman Alexie are 25 years apart, they share some similarities along with some differences. Every writer offers a unique spin on a story, and in this case, a setting. But along the way, one can see the nuances and realize the beauty they possess. Settings/environments don't solely have to be the terrain, the plants, the space around, it can include a multitude of things from animals, culture, beliefs, and so forth.

N. Scott Momaday split his book The Way to Rainy Mountain into three chapters. Each chapters consists of a dozen or so numbered sections. These sections are then divided into three parts. The first part of each numbered section is a legend or a story of the Kiowa culture. This changes as the book progresses along with the style and feel of each the stories.

The first passage in the first numbered section tells of the Kiowa creation myth. The story states they came into existence in this world through a hollow log. The second story shows an act of bravery by a dog to a man, as well as how Tai-me integrated into their culture, along with other stories. This section has stories that are timeless with events described to have taken place a long time ago. Each story had a "happy"/positive ending. Thusly, enabling the reader to discover the emergence of the Kiowa culture and their development within their environment.

Towards the end of the first part, the stories become less and longer with the story of the sun child who birthed two children and became sacred to the Kiowa people. The typical way Native peoples in the Southwestern part of the United States told their stories was during specific times of the year. For instance, the coyote myth is told during winter. The stories repeat throughout the life of someone, and told during certain times enabling them to take root within the listener's mind. The father of Scott Monday told his son of Kiowa tribe and their emergence from the mountains . This is where The Way to Rainy Mountain takes its influence from. The descriptions of the interactions with animals, like the dog saving the man, or the creation myth at the beginning, help show not only the environment, like which animals were domesticated, but also of the culture and their beliefs.

The last part of the book, the last third, is varies greatly from the first section in that it is mostly narrative. Instead of telling myths to analyze things, Momaday tells stories which relate events without any major ending. Different from the first part of the book, the outcomes are negative and truly examines the way people lived during the time of struggle with the Europeans. It is a gradual evolution. Scott Momaday begins the process of learning who the Kiowa are then relating them to himself and his family, and then finally being Kiowa himself, realizing the stories are about the tribe's past, not so much the morals and lessons.

The stories of the last part do not go into specifics of the Kiowa culture like: dogs or spiders talking to people, or the sun wedding a woman. The final stories explain the Kiowa's beliefs that would help a person ignorant of the culture to be educated in Kiowa history. His environment then becomes the same as Kiowa as evidenced in the first passage of the last numbered section "East of my grandmother's house." (Momaday, and Momaday 110) Momaday integrated into the Kiowa, telling common stories, rare stories, then personal stories that can connect himself with the past and present.

With Sherman Alexie and his novel, Reservation Blues the novel centers are characters from the 1990's whose interactions include a talking guitar, the living dead, and other cosmic happenings. Like with Momaday, historic memory as well as tribal and individual memory play prominent roles within the world of the novel and allow the environment to represent those memories. On the surface, Alexie's novel is a story of twentieth-century American Indian bildungsroman. Because the characters in the story are reservation Indians, their passage into adulthood is burdened by the question of what kind of "Indians" they will be and who they will inevitably be.

Reservation Blues struggles with major questions of community and identity, with a similar style to Momaday in rapid changes in narrative points-of-view and achronological temporal dimension similar to other Native American literature. The novel interconnects past and present so the reader is both places at once via memory, dreams, and reincarnated spirits like the shape-shifting Coyote the characters name their rock band after. Frederic Jameson explains pn page 304 of his book: "History's competing narrative, memory, is often an embedded critical paradigm in ethnic texts (Stein, and Lehu 40 ). Like with Momaday, Alexie uses his perspective to retell his stories and his focus on the events to shape the way the characters behave. The stories becomes one with the authors.

In the opening sentence of Reservation Blues, Alexie explains how memory and history will play amidst each other throughout the novel: "In the one hundred and eleven years since the creation of the Spokane Indian Reservation in 1881, not one person, Indian or otherwise, had ever appeared there by accident" (Alexie 3) . In Thomas-Builds-the-Fire's view (protagonist) nothing is by coincidence and keeping to memory the events assist in making sense of the past making it a significant way to heal the tribe's psychic well-being. "Five generations of Spokanes are buried on Thomas's reservation at Wellpinit, Washington, sixty-five miles from Spokane, and, although the weight of being the tribe's misfit storyteller, or cultural repository, has "bowed his legs and bent his spine" (Alexie 6). Herein lies the main difference between both books.