Home > Growing Up Native American Summary & Study Guide

Growing Up Native American (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The short stories and excerpts from novels that make up GROWING UP NATIVE AMERICAN, which include both nineteenth and twentieth century works, provide various views of the many tribulations and the occasional triumphs that constitute the experience of growing up with one foot in traditional Native American society and another in European American society. Among the authors who are represented here are well-known figures such as Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as many other writers who deserve to be much better known.

The volume begins with a section entitled “Going Forward, Looking Back,” which includes an autobiographical essay by Simon Ortiz that discusses the author’s experience of learning English while retaining the rich linguistic heritage of his native Acoma. It is an ironic fact that Ortiz’s forced education in English is enhanced by the appreciation for words and their significance that is instilled in him by his traditional Acoma upbringing—an irony that is paralleled in the fact that many of the authors whose works are included in this anthology have used English, the language of their oppressors, as a tool with which to reaffirm their cultural roots and defy those forces that would strip them of their heritage. The second work in the section, Anna Lee Walters’ “The Warriors,” is the moving story of a Pawnee man who seeks to transmit the values and traditions of his people to his young nieces, even as he is losing a battle with alcoholism and is finding it ever more difficult to hold on to his own identity as a Pawnee and as a man.

The remainder of the volume is broken into two sections, works from the nineteenth century and works from the twentieth century. Among the many powerful selections are Basil Johnston’s “A Day in the Life of Spanish,” which describes the attempts of a group of young Native Canadians to retain their identity in the confines of a strict residential school run by Jesuits; a horrifying selection from poet Linda Hogan’s novel MEAN SPIRIT, which describes the savage and murderous efforts of white men to steal land from Osage Indians on whose lands oil had been discovered; and Eric L. Gansworth’s “The Ballad of Plastic Fred,” which explores debilitating stereotypes and their effects on Native American children.

It is to be hoped that GROWING UP NATIVE AMERICAN will expose readers to works with which they might not otherwise come into contact, but it is sometimes frustrating that so many of the selections are excerpted from longer works. Each piece is preceded by a brief discussion of its author and a description of the work.