This paper examines the evolving expressive culture of Native American nations in the United States, tracing the effects of forced assimilation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through boarding schools and exploring the subsequent revival of indigenous creativity. The paper analyzes three primary modes of cultural transmission — oral/folkloric tradition, print and film media, and digital communication — using works such as Black Elk Speaks, Sherman Alexie's fiction and the film Smoke Signals, and N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain. A recurring theme throughout is individual and collective "vision" as a mechanism for preserving identity, interpreting change, and rebuilding cultural continuity across the diverse sovereign Native nations of the United States.
The paper demonstrates thematic synthesis across multiple primary sources and genres. Rather than treating each work in isolation, the author identifies a single recurring motif — vision — and traces it through oral tradition, written literature, film, and digital media. This cross-media thematic analysis is a sophisticated technique for literary and cultural studies essays, showing how a concept functions across different expressive contexts.
The paper opens with historical context (boarding schools and forced assimilation), establishes the three-mode framework (horizontal/oral, vertical/print-film, digital), then devotes a section to each major primary source: Black Elk Speaks, Sherman Alexie's short fiction, Smoke Signals, Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, and a Native American website on vision quests. It closes by returning to Black Elk Speaks and restating the central argument about cultural resilience through vision.
The Native American tradition can be seen as an evolving cultural tradition that encompasses countless expressions of creativity from many varied cultures. Native American cultural expression has been, at various times, subverted and reformed. During the 19th century and into the 20th century there was a large movement to force the assimilation of Native Americans into white, English-speaking culture (Scheckel).
The circumstances of this change were developed through a series of boarding schools, where children were taken from their homes and subjected to English-only learning environments, where they were barred from speaking their native languages and largely prevented from participating in Native American cultural expressions (Allison and Vining 193; Spack 120). This period had two — and possibly more — effects on the culture. First, an entire generation of Native American children was exposed to white society and forced to assimilate. Second, their elders at home, as well as the children themselves, became the subjects of a kind of cultural martyrdom that created within them the desire to rebuild and relearn the ways of their ancestors. This backlash to forced assimilation demonstrates the historical precedent for the revival and re-conceptualization of Native American culture across the many of the 500 sovereign nations that constitute the rich Native American landscape of the United States (Einhorn 6).
Holding on to old ways and old stories of heritage was exceedingly difficult during the period of forced assimilation, and many would argue that much tradition and culture was lost. From the late 19th century forward, Indians have been to some degree at the mercy of the dominant culture and have had to become dichotomous individuals, expressing cultural creativity in various ways while also attempting to build a new sense of self, culturally (Scheckel).
Some Indian nations retained their oral traditions and handed down the seeds of this information to later generations through traditional forms, while others lost much and had to regain such information through arduous searching and development. What has evolved is a Native American tradition expressed in many varied ways: horizontally, in the traditional folkloric style; vertically, in the form of print materials and even films; and through a conglomeration of mediated horizontal creative outlets utilizing global digital communication — that is, the internet. Against significant odds, the many nations have developed a manner of transmitting culture through any or all of these means, and through individual and group creativity. The thematic recurrence of individual and collective "vision" will be explored throughout this work, as it recurs continually in the Native American tradition of creativity and across media of expression (Einhorn 6).
Individual Indians seek to define who they are through culture in varied ways, and are frequently challenged by distance. The revival of culture is centered around reservation life. Reservation schools attempt to transmit the traditions of the past along with language through bilingual systems or submersion programs, and yet many Native Americans live far from home and family as a result of the pressures of modernization and the fact that economic and higher education opportunities are limited on many reservations. For many Indians it is a challenge to meet the goals of a highly connected social network of family and nation, as distance creates change that challenges their ability to meld their historical culture with the white culture they frequently live within. Yet individual definitions of self are strongly associated with family and cultural connections and traditions. It is for this reason that Native American creativity is expressed in novel ways through many avenues and media, and also why individual and collective vision becomes a constant recurring theme in many of these interpretations.
One of the most moving expressions of the changes undertaken by the Indian nations of America is the work Black Elk Speaks. Though the book can be identified with print material and might therefore be placed within the vertical model of expression, the intentions of the ghostwriter and interviewer were to create a print record of an oral tradition. For the purpose of this work, therefore, Black Elk Speaks will be viewed as an expression of horizontal creativity. Neihardt's interviews are faithful to their subject, and he functions as a transcriber more than a contributor, giving voice to the narrative oral tradition of the Native American experience. With only limited interjection — mainly footnote explanations — the author allows the Native speakers to utilize their own style of speech and explanation. Though it later became a product of print, the work assimilated the oral tradition almost completely through its flowing stories of triumph and tragedy.
The thematic resurgence of Black Elk's vision quest and subsequent later visions is foundational to the message of the stories as well as to the oral tradition itself, as culture is transmitted through the retelling of stories and the assimilation of individual and group vision of coming events. The translation of these visions is essential to the individual's ability to rebuild tradition and understand change. The following passage illustrates the power and imagery of Black Elk's visionary experience:
"As I stood there looking, a vision broke out of the shouting blackness torn with fire, and I saw the two men who had come to me first in my great vision. [likely his vision quest] They came head first like arrows slanting earthward from a long flight; and when they neared the ground, I could see a dust rising there and out of the dust the heads of dogs were peeping. Then suddenly I saw that the dust was the swarm of many-colored butterflies hovering all around and over the dogs. By now the two men were riding sorrel horses, streaked with black lightning, and they charged with bows and arrows down upon the dogs, while the thunder beings cheered for them with roaring voices. Then suddenly the butterflies changed, and were storm-driven swallows, swooping and whirling in a great cloud behind the charging riders. The first of these now plunged upon a dog's head and arose with it hanging bloody on his arrow point, while the whole west roared with cheering. The second did the same; and the black west flashed and cheered again. Then as the two arose together, I saw that the dogs' heads had changed to the heads of Wasichus; and as I saw, the vision went out and the storm was close upon me, terrible to see and roaring." (Neihardt 184–185)
The theme of the vision is one of great fear, interspersed with an understanding of the events that would transpire around the prophetic man. Vision is in many ways a thematic representation that transcends all media, as the vision of the individual is the manner in which many Native Americans interpret tradition and change. Throughout the work there is a clear sense that vision drives Black Elk to action and interpretation, and his remembrance of it brings him clarity as he is involved in the everyday and spiritual events of his life:
"Then he tied my hair up to look like bear's ears, and put some eagle feathers on my head. While he was doing this, I thought of my vision, and suddenly I seemed to be lifted clear off the ground; and while I was that way, I knew more things than I could tell, and I felt sure something terrible was going to happen in a short time. I was frightened. The other boys were painted all red and had real bear's ears on their heads. Hairy Chin, who wore a real bear skin with the head on it, began to sing a song that went like this: 'At the doorway the sacred herbs are rejoicing.' And while he sang, two girls came in and stood one on either side of the wounded man; one had a cup of water and one some kind of herb. I tried to see if the cup had all the sky in it, as it was in my vision, but I could not see it. They gave the cup and the herb to Rattling Hawk while Hairy Chin was singing. Then they gave him a red cane, and right away he stood up with it. The girls then started out of the tepee, and the wounded man followed, leaning on the sacred red stick; and we boys, who were the little bears, had to jump around him and make growling noises toward the man. And when we did this, you could see something like feathers of all colors coming out of our mouths." (Neihardt 107)
Black Elk, recounting both his boyhood and the monumental conflicts he was involved in — between nations as well as between his own people and white soldiers and settlers — peppers his narrative with remembrances of vision reinterpreted through current context. Black Elk utilizes his visions to create understanding of nearly all things he is later exposed to. The discussion in the conclusion will further illuminate his use of vision to ask for help for his people in a time of crisis.
To discuss the vertical model of artistic communication it is difficult to narrow the field to just one example, as Native American literature, and to a lesser degree film, have become somewhat prolific as genres. Two authors who build upon this tradition are N. Scott Momaday and Sherman Alexie, both significant and prolific writers of Indian tradition. Each has written and published several works across a variety of genres, all of which attempt to translate the oral traditions of their nations into written form while retaining the expression of the oral tradition.
In Sherman Alexie's collection of short stories The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, he offers a suggestion about the nature of reservation life and the necessity of expressive imagination. His equation is: "Survival = Anger x Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation" (150). For Alexie and many other Indians, the expression of imagination is achieved through variant writing that frequently challenges traditional English genres, melding in and out between poetry and prose and peppering phrases with oral tradition statements (McFarland 255; Wilson 34). Writing has therefore created a symbolic outlet for the traditional oral expressions of culture, and many Native Americans seek to write the stories of their people — not only to translate such vision to the broader culture, but to rebuild a lasting tradition of vision and assimilation.
In their interview for the Bloomsbury Review conducted in the fall of 1993, John and Carl Bellante questioned Sherman Alexie about that equation, and he responded: "Exactly what my attitude toward life is" (15). When the Bellantes asked what "precisely" about white culture so angered him, Alexie answered: "Pretty much everything patriarchal.... We've resisted assimilation in many ways, but I know we've assimilated into sexism and misogyny.... Women are the creators. We get into trouble when we try to deny that" (McFarland 253).
The value of this statement is significant in that anger and patriarchal systems of dominance are constant themes in Indian fiction and discussion regarding white culture and how to meld the two cultures in a single individual without losing sight of Indian heritage (Hollarh). Alexie also brings to mind a discussion of assimilation — a concept which was forced upon many Indians of his and previous generations, and to some degree still is today, as opportunity is limited on reservations and leaving to live in a white world is one of the few alternatives for achieving success inside or outside one's nation of origin.
An additional aspect of assimilation is the variance of culture within reservations, as many tribes were regionally grouped or moved great distances to share space with other nations, whose traditions they lived with as a dichotomous source of pride or conflict. The blending of these cultures, along with the necessary overgeneralization of Native beliefs — given that they constitute 500 independent and sovereign nations — can lead to the mistaken idea that modern Indians are a homogenous group all believing the same things and responding to change in the same ways. This is not the case at all (Einhorn 6).
Perhaps more than any other Native writer, Alexie is aware of the power of the media, understanding it as the new battlefield. His sophisticated internalization of films and television in his poems reveals the critical and cultural vision that would eventually push him to transform the written narratives of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven into the visual narrative Smoke Signals (Rader 147).
Retaining old ways and the old stories of heritage was exceedingly difficult during the period of forced assimilation, but has also been difficult since then, and many would argue that much tradition and culture was lost. Indians from the late 19th century forward have been to some degree at the mercy of the dominant culture and have had to become dichotomous individuals, expressing cultural creativity in various ways while also attempting to build a new sense of self, culturally. Many do this through creative expression of a constant theme: vision.
In the closing passages of Black Elk Speaks, the now-elderly medicine man Black Elk of the Sioux nation performs a ceremony he had first performed as a young man, in which he stood on the crest of a mountain and spoke to the grandfathers of the four winds, asking them to save his people from the trouble that had befallen them. The moment was prophetic — the old man was able to conjure a measure of rain during an extreme drought, a message from the ancestors that they had heard his call (Neihardt 271–274). The message of the ceremony is clear: he has asked the Six Grandfathers to let his people live, and they have heard his call. For many Native people this sentiment is a beginning — a revival of culture that will reinvigorate their people, and continue to allow them to define themselves as Indian (of whatever nation): a distinct people with a rich culture and social tradition built through resistance, turmoil, and growth (Churchill).
Some Indian nations retained oral traditions and were able to hand them down to later generations through traditional forms, while others lost much and had to regain such information through arduous searching and development — and, of course, through new expressions of creativity. What has evolved is a Native American tradition expressed in many varied ways: horizontally, in the traditional folkloric style; vertically, in the form of print materials and even films; and through a conglomeration of mediated horizontal creative outlets utilizing global digital communication. The theme of vision — individual and collective — remains the connective thread across all of these expressions (Bluestein).
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