SOURCE: "The Bones Are Alive," in Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets, Sun Tracks and The University of Arizona Press, 1987, pp. 249-69.

[In the following interview, Rose discusses her poetry, the influences of her mixed origins and the frustrations of being a Native American writer.]

[Bruchac]: In his preface to your collected poems—Lost Copper—N. Scott Momaday said that it was a book, "not made up of poems, I think, but of songs." Would you agree with that distinction of Momaday's?

[Rose]: In a subjective sense, yes. I don't think that the poems are literally songs the way that we usually understand the term. But I use them the way that many Indian people traditionally use songs. They, in a sense, mark the boundaries of my life.

So that would be one of the differences between your poetry and traditional English verse.

Yeah, I think so. My perception of them. The way that they function in my life.

Is there any other way in which they're song?

I think oftentimes that audiences feel them that way. People sometimes call them songs when they talk about them but, I don't know, I couldn't speak for what it is they are perceiving. I couldn't really put words in their mouths to try to clarify what they mean, but people call them songs and maybe they're feeling the internal parts of it the way that they have meaning for me.

In that same introduction Momaday also spoke of your language, saying "it has made a clear reflection of American Indian oral tradition." Do you perceive a relationship between your writing and that oral tradition?

I would like to but I would have to say probably not too much. I think that there are some important differences, and I think that my particular work probably leans more toward European-derived ideas of what poetry is and of who poets are than Native American in spite of the subjective feeling that I have of the way that the poems are used in my life. There are some important differences, one of which is the sense of self-expression. The need to express the self, the need to make one's own emotions special and to explain it to other people, I don't think really exists in most Native American cultures. And I think that is an important component in my work.

Are there any other distinctions that you'd see or any other things that you would use as definitions of the American Indian interpretation as opposed to the Western interpretation of the use of song or poetry?

One way that I think perhaps they do function, and I hope it doesn't sound like I'm contradicting myself too much, is that gradually the various Native American communities are re-establishing links with people using oral tradition. And sometimes this extends even to those of us who use the printed word and who publish. So in recent years I'm finding that the poet is right there with the orators and is speaking in council. I'm finding more and more that, when there are gatherings of Indian people, there will be poets who will contribute to what's happening. This was lost for a while because of the effect of the white man's education in that for a while Indian people were discounting the contribution that poets were making in the same way that the white man discounts the contributions of his own poets. But increasingly I think that contemporary poets in Native American communities are coming to be valued in a traditional sense even though the work itself might be different.

What are the roots of your poetry? How did you personally become a writer—and then a writer who identifies so strongly with your Native American roots?

That's a complex question. Influences as far as poetry are concerned—they're just so multiple. Perhaps the earliest one that I remember is Robinson Jeffers, who of course was not an Indian poet. But some of the first published poetry I was ever exposed to was his and that was important to me, and I think it was my first sense of being able to think in terms of putting a poet in a landscape that's familiar, because the area that he was writing about was where I grew up—the northern California and central California coast. That was an early influence. Other influences that were fairly early—I figured out that it was okay to be an Indian and a writer at the same time probably, as many of us did, through the influence of Scott Momaday. His getting a Pulitzer prize in fiction made a real difference to us because I think so many of us had assumed that no matter what our individual goals might be, we had to somehow choose between fulfilling the goal and having any degree of integrity as Indian people. Whatever influences there are from Native American culture—I'm being fairly careful not to cite tribe here because I was born and grew up at a distance from my tribe, so I'm trying to deliberately separate myself from saying Hopi literature or Miwok literature—my community is urban Indian and is pan tribal. But whatever Native American traditional influences that might be in my work, I don't know if I can pick them out individually. I missed out on a great deal by not being exposed to tribal traditions as a child. In the city I was exposed on the one hand to a great many traditions and on the other hand to nothing that was really complete. I don't know. Perhaps that's an unanswerable question. I know that there was also this: in terms of identifying as an Indian writer, that was partly and perhaps mostly a function of how literature is published and distributed in this country—which is that in this particular instance if you are of a minority group and you are a writer, you are simply not allowed to do anything other than be a minority writer.

I think this would be a good place to ask you this question. In your poem "Builder Kachina," you have these lines—"a half breed goes from one-half home to the other. " And of course The Halfbreed Chronicles is the name of the collection you just read that first poem from. That word "halfbreed" seems to be very important to you. What is it? What does that mean?

Well, again, I have to answer on at least two different levels. One is the obvious thing of being biologically halfbreed, being of mixed race. I was in a situation where I was physically separated from one-half of my family and rejected by the half that brought me up. And in this case it was because of what there is in me that belonged to the other half. The way that a lot of us put it is you're too dark to be white and you're too white to be Indian. James Welch expressed it well in The Death of Jim Loney where Jim Loney answers someone who says to him (to paraphrase), "oh, you're so lucky that you can have the best of both worlds and choose whether or not at a given moment you will be Indian or you will be white." And he says, "It's not that we have the best of both worlds, it's that we don't really have anything of either one." I think that's really a very true statement. You don't get to pick and choose but rather you're in a position where you have no choice whatsoever. I was in that situation where the white part of my family had absolutely no use for any other races that came into the family. The white part of the family had no use for it. The Indian half is in a situation where, among the Hopi, the clan and your identity comes through the mother, and without the Hopi mother it doesn't matter if your father was fullblooded or not, you can't be Hopi. So that left me in that situation. The first years of writing, perhaps, the motivation from the very beginning was to try to come to terms with being in that impossible situation. But then maturing as a person, halfbreed takes on a different connotation and that's where The Halfbreed Chronicles are coming from. Now The Halfbreed Chronicles depict a number of people, and genetics doesn't have a great deal to do with it. For instance, the poem "Georgeline" is relating to people who are a fullblood Lakota family. There are other people who are depicted in Halfbreed Chronicles who would not be identified as halfbreed. People who are Japanese-American. People who are Mexican-Indian but spent their lives as sideshow freaks. People like Robert Oppenheimer. You don't think of these people in the same sense as you usually think of halfbreeds. But my point is that, in an important way, the way that I grew up is symptomatic of something much larger than Indian-white relations. History and circumstances have made halfbreeds of all of us.

Then maybe you wouldn 't be offended by my bringing in something I just thought of…a quotation from Matthew Arnold. He described himself back in the Victorian era—"one half dead, the other powerless to be born." There seems to be, as you see it, a world dilemma not just of people of mixed Indian and white ancestry but of the modern culture that we find ourselves faced with.

Yeah, and I think that the point does come out in The Halfbreed Chronicles because one of the responses that I get is from people who are genetically all Caucasian, or all black, or all Indian; people who are genetically not of mixed race come up to me afterwards and say I know just what you mean by those poems. I feel like a halfbreed, too. So I know the message is getting through. We are now halfbreeds. We're Reagan's halfbreeds and Dukmejian's halfbreeds.

I find it interesting, too, that that poem, which I cited a quotation from, is called "Builder Kachina" and there is no Builder Kachina as I understand it.

No there isn't.

But you have imagined a Builder Kachina?

In a sense, yes, but based on things that my father really said to me. The poem is based on an actual conversation that I had with my biological father, which is the Hopi side of the family. And the conversation was basically my going down to the reservation and sitting down and talking to him and presenting the situation to him at a point where I was in crisis over it and saying what can I do because I can't be a member of a clan, because I can't have your clan? You're my father, not my mother, I'm not entitled to any land or any rights or any privileges on the reservation. Yet, at the same time, my mother's family doesn't accept me, never has, probably never will, because of the fact that you are my father. So what do I do? His answer to me was, "Well, sometimes it's difficult, sometimes people don't point out to you what your roots are but your roots are on this land, and you just have to stand here yourself on this Hopi land and build them," and from that came the imagined person of Builder Kachina. I've invented lots of Kachinas. I hope that it's not thought of as being too sacrilegious. But I've invented Kachinas that go into outer space. I've invented Kachinas that are in the ocean and a lot that have appeared in the visual arts. This particular one appeared in poetry.

Yes, the Kachinas are something I find occurring again and again in your writing. What are the Kachinas to you? How would you define them. I know there's a definition on strictly a tribal level…

Well, there's no real agreement even on that definition because they aren't any one thing. They're not strictly nature spirits and they're not strictly gods. They're not strictly ancestral spirits and yet they're all of that. They are spirit beings who grow and evolve and have families and live and possibly die. Humans have to communicate with them and have to relate to them. One way that they can be thought of is if you think of the entire earth as being one being and we as small beings living on that large being like fleas on a cat. The Kachinas in a sense are aspects of that cat that are communicating with us. This is one way to look at it.

I see then in your "Builder Kachina" a sort of balance emerging out of that duality and chaos caused by the conflict between two forces which seem to be mutually exclusive. The two worlds of the European Indian. The two worlds of the two parents that you describe in your own life.

Well, of course, one thing also is that the Hopis say that the Europeans being on this continent is something that isn't all that important in the long run, that eventually the continent will be purified. The evil parts of that influence will be gone, and things will eventually return as they were and the cycle will continue. This is really only a small thing that we inflate with our own self-importance into meaning more than it does. For those of us who are in my position, I don't know whether I'm supposed to be saved with the Hopi or wiped away with the whites.

Thinking of evils, I've seen several particular evils singled out numerous times in your writings. Let me give you some examples—the California missions, the attitude of anthropology toward Indian people in general, cities and the concept of modern cities. Why do you choose those particular targets?

I don't see cities as evil first off. I don't think there should ever be more than, at most, a couple of thousand people living in one unit. I think beyond that it's impossible to be governed with any sense of integrity when you don't recognize each other and have no obligation to each other. But in any case I don't see cities as evil per se. They're evil for me. I'm not able to adapt to living in cities even though I've tried. I become intensely uncomfortable in cities and I see cities destroy people that I love. As for the other things, the California missions, of course, were not a spiritual endeavor; they were an economic endeavor. They had more to do with the conquest of a new bunch of natural resources by the Spanish crown than they did with the saving of souls. The point behind incarcerating Indian people there was to have a cheap labor force, a slave force if you will, to make blankets and to make pots and pans and various kinds of things for the Spanish settlers, for the colonist. Also to have everybody in one place so there wouldn't be any Indian people to stop settlement and there wouldn't be any Indian people out there able to act on their own. So they were incarcerated. Reduced is the actual Spanish term, the reducciones. It killed off some incredible number, something like during just ten years alone, in the early nineteenth century, the California Indian population was reduced by some incredibly high number like 80 percent. It was because of a combination of disease, of unnatural living conditions, and the punishment for running away. What a lot of people don't realize is there were a number of revolts against the Spanish mission by the Indians. But they don't tell you this in the museums. In fact, the museum right here in Oakland paints a ridiculous picture of the missions with the happy little natives making baskets in the shade of the adobe with the benevolent padres walking around rattling their rosaries. That just is not the way that the missions were.

And then there is the attitude of anthropology toward the Indian people. It seems linked to what we were just talking about with the missions.

In fact there's a saying that—I've heard versions of this saying from people from Africa, from Australia, from New Zealand, various American Indian people—first comes the explorer, then comes the military, then comes the missionary, then comes the anthropologist, then comes the tourist. Actually, though, as you know, in one sense it's ironic that I should be so highly critical of the field since at the moment I am teaching lower division anthropology at a junior college. However, I'm teaching it in an unorthodox way, and I hope I don't get in too much trouble for it. But, yeah, anthropologists have certainly been one of the main targets of some of my anger, probably stemming from my intimate association with them as a Ph.D. student in anthropology at Berkeley which contains both the best and the worst. I've run into some incredible racism in that department and, as faculty now, I see my Indian students running into situations that are even more bizarre than things I had experienced because it's becoming increasingly okay among the general population to become racist again or to express the racism that was always there. It's no longer cool to try to be tolerant or understanding or liberal or even to recognize that America is a plural country. There are a number of anthropologists, however, who are very, very good people and are sensitive to these issues. Unfortunately, I think they are still in a minority probably because anthropology is part of a European-derived institution run by the white male power structure. So Indian people along with many other kinds of people—women, gay people, people from fourth world nations and from third world nations—all of these people are coming into anthropology now and changing the face of it. But it's very slow because that old guard of course is still there. A lot of Indian people are going into anthropology just to become super informants and don't realize it.

In part two of Lost Copper there are some poems that were originally published as a chapbook under the title Academic Squaw: Reports to the World From the Ivory Tower. I'm always interested in titles. What did you intend by it?

Well, obviously, it was intended as ironic. The publisher inadvertently left off a postscript that was supposed to be on the title page. I think in Lost Copper they did put the postscript in. In the chapbook it originally appeared in, it was inadvertently left off. It explained how the term "squaw" is used in a purely ironic sense. That was really an important thing for two reasons. One is because "squaw" is an offensive term, regardless of its origin. It is now and has been for many, many years an offensive term much like "nigger" or "spic" and has been degrading not only in a racist way but in sexual ways as well. Because the image of the so-called "squaw" is a racist and a sexist image. So, on the one hand, people who are aware of that might otherwise think that I was using it without any kind of clarification, that it was just as if it were part of my vocabulary. As if I really saw myself that way. And people who don't know any better might assume the same thing not realizing there's anything special about the word. I have run into people who simply think that that is a word for Indian women. Just like they think that "papoose" is a word for Indian children and so forth.

Or "pickaninny" is a word for a black child.

Yeah. I know a man who thought that Jewish men really were called Jewboys and would call people that to their faces in total innocence because that's the only way he had ever heard Jewish men referred to. Things like this. So there is an innocence there in one sense but there's also a maliciousness.

I meant the title, of course, in a completely ironic sense and the poems were written in that context because I had just spent two years as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley in anthropology and had just, in fact, by the time the book came out entered graduate school as a Ph.D. student. So the book encompasses experiences at both the graduate and undergraduate level as an anthropology major. And, as I was saying, there were some racist things that happened. There were a lot of things that happened that I had to come to terms with. There were many times when I almost dropped out. I spent the entire first year at Berkeley, in my junior year as a transfer student from a junior college, huddling in a corner in Native American Studies drinking tea and trembling. This is all coming from somebody who was raised in a relatively urban area right next to the university all her life, so I can't imagine what it must be like coming from a reservation, from someplace that's very different from Berkeley. The poems were written as a survival kit, really. And in fact one of the most pleasant things I have ever done was the day that the book came out from Brother Benet's press, I went and stuck copies of it in all my professors' mailboxes.

Why have you chosen to enter that Ivory Tower world? That world of the academic?

I'm not in the Ivory Tower. I'm a spy.

Okay, good. You say also in the poem "Handprints," "in this university I am a red ghost."

I'm a spy.

A spy. Great.

Don't blow my cover.

Oh, no. No, we'll never tell, (laughter) Let me move on to another area, Wendy. How has your art affected your writing? You now have a reputation both as an illustrator and as a writer. In fact, in some of your poems you speak directly of that world of art in rather magical terms. Sometimes you even speak as a mother speaks of her children. I'm thinking of the poem "Chasing the Paper Shaman," or the poem "Watercolors." How has your art affected your writing and how do they work together?

I can't imagine them really working apart. Nobody bothered to tell me until I was an adult that there was anything wrong with being both a visual and a verbal artist. I think that's the only reason why that isn't the case with more people, and I think that's the reason why it is the case for so many Native American people. Look at the number of Native American authors who illustrate their own work and who illustrate other people's work. There is a tremendous number. There is nothing unusual about it among Native American people at all. There's a tremendous percentage of writers who do so in contrast to the non-Indian writers, where it's very seldom the same person who does both. But the way I think of it—now I don't really know where the poems or where the art comes from, I don't know where the images come from—but however they come or wherever they come from is like communicating with a person. It's a whole person. That person shows you things and has a certain appearance but also tells you things. So as you receive images, they are either received through the ear or through the eye or through the tongue and that's just the way it feels.

Another thing that I find different about your work and also that of a number of American Indian writers (as compared to the typical writer of the traditional English mold) is your attitude toward death. Death seems to be very important in your work. Why is that so?

I don't know. I never really thought of it as being important to the work. I guess if I really think about it, yeah, I've got a lot of bones rattling around in there. I guess there's a sense of feeling—sometimes I feel like I'm dead. Like I'm a ghost. Similarly, sometimes I feel that I'm alive but there are ghosts all around me, so that's part of it. But as far as the symbols go, of things like the bones for instance, I think maybe it's argument against death. Maybe what I'm saying is that the bones are alive. They're not dead remnants but rather they're alive.

You have these images of returning to the earth and images of bones. These don't strike me as morbid images, as they would be in, say, a poem written in the eighteenth century in England.

Well, you know, the rocks are alive and all the components of a tree, for instance, live. A pine cone falls down from the tree and it's alive. It carries the life of the tree in the seeds that are in the pine cone. And I think the parts of the body must be the same way. The brain isn't all there is to human life. The consciousness that's inside the skull is not all there is.

There is a poem of yours in What Happened When the Hopi Hit New York—"Cemetery, Stratford, Connecticut"—with these lines: "I know that what ages earth has little to do with things we build to wrinkle her skin and fade her eyes. " You also say, "I have balanced my bones between the petroglyph and the mobile home. " These different things, balanced in some way, seem bound to lead in a different direction than just finality.

Well, that's really what we are, isn't it? We're bones that are just covered with flesh and muscle. The part of us that is spirit is just a component that is part of that entirety. We are parts of the earth that walk around and have individual consciousness for awhile and then go back.

I could see someone looking at your poems and saying these are evidences of bitterness, of hopelessness, of a very dark perception of life.

That's what a lot of white people see in them. Indian people almost never do.

As a matter of fact, I'm playing the devil's advocate because I think there is a question we may have to address. What do you think American Indian poems have to offer to non-Indians? Are there problems of perception like this which may make them inaccessible to the non-Indian reader?

I don't know. I want to say no, they're not inaccessible because it's a great frustration when people won't review our work, for example, in the usual professional way, saying that they don't have "the ethnographic knowledge" to do it or something. That's a frustration to me because some of us—people like Joy Harjo or any number of other people that actually have M.F.A.s from prestigious writing schools—come out and then find that they're being told that they're culturally too obscure to be reviewed as a real writer. That isn't true. I think that a person does need to stretch the imagination a little bit, perhaps, or to learn something about Native American cultures or Native American thought systems or religion, or philosophy. Just a little bit. But I don't think any more so than you need to become a Kabbalistic scholar in order to understand Jerry Rothenberg. This is a plural society and all of us have to work at it a little bit to get the full flavor of the society. I have to. Boy, do I have to work at trying to understand the Shakespearean stuff! I have students in my creative writing classes who are into Shakespeare and write tight verse and rhyme and do it very, very well. They're not doing it unsuccessfully, but I have to really work to understand where they're coming from. Just simply that what they're expressing is a dominant cultural mode in this particular country is not sufficient reason to say that that is the only way it should be. If I have to work at understanding that stuff, then I don't see why they shouldn't work a little bit to understand mine.

Hasn't it often been the other way? Literary critics have celebrated the greatness of someone like James Joyce because Finnegan's Wake and his other books are so complicated.

If they think the complication is individual rather than cultural, then they really love it, sure.

Good point.

But if they think it's cultural then they think that we're insulting them somehow by expecting them to understand it. That we're asking them to go out of their way. And of course, really, we're not asking any more of them than they ask of us when we pick up books in this society and read them.

What images, aside from those I've already mentioned, seem to be recurrent in your poetry?

I think I have a lot of female images. A lot of times I think that just talking about rocks or trees or spirits, where there's no real reason to put a gender on them, I automatically tend to make them female. I think that's something I've noticed more recently. Themes? I've been writing a little bit of science fiction poetry lately about colonizing other planets. But of course it's not from the colonizing viewpoint, it's from the viewpoint of the people on the planet. But that's sort of off the wall. I don't know, it's pretty hard to see the themes in your own work. I'm always amazed at what other people see in them. At first I don't believe them, and then I go back and I read it again and I realize they were right. Sometimes.

Which of your already published poems express most clearly for you what you want to say as a writer?

As a writer? Oh, boy! Of the published poems? I don't know. I guess the things that are most current in my mind or the things that I most want to say are what I've said most recently, which usually isn't published at that time. I guess what I want to say is bound up in The Halfbreed Chronicles, and as of now few of them have been published. One of the major focal points in The Halfbreed Chronicles section was published in Ms. Magazine in the June 1984 issue. That's kind of exciting to me to finally get a "pop" readership.

Is this the one about the woman who was…

The woman in the circus, about Julia Pastrana, yeah. They're publishing that one.

That's a particularly powerful poem, to me, for any number of reasons. I heard you read it about a year ago and was very moved by it.

Well, it's about a Mexican Indian woman who was born physically deformed. Her face was physically deformed to where her bone structure resembled the caricature of Neanderthal man that you sometimes see in museums. She had hair growing from all over her body including her face. So she was Neanderthal looking and hairy in visual appearance, but she was also a graceful dancer and a singer in the mid-nineteenth century. She was a very young woman. She was billed as the World's Ugliest Woman and put on exhibit, where she would sing for the sideshow. The poem is not just about the exploitation of her being in the circus but is like a step beyond that. It's an ultimate exploitation. Her manager married her and it was, presumably, in order to control her life in the circus. She believed that he loved her, though, and really, what choice did she have emotionally? When she finally had a baby, the baby looked just like her. The baby had all the same deformities, but also had a lethal deformity of some kind and died just shortly after birth. Then she died a day or two after that. And her husband—and here's where the real Halfbreed Chronicles come in—her husband had her and the baby stuffed and mounted in a wood and glass case and continued to exhibit them in the circus even though she couldn't sing anymore. There was just something about the horror of that which in The Halfbreed Chronicles is coupled with the poem called "Truganinny" about an Aborigine woman who happened to be the last living Tasmanian native.

Truganinny went through a similar situation. She had seen her husband stuffed and mounted by the British museum people as the last Tasmanian man. She asked her aboriginal friends to please make sure that when she died that didn't happen to her. She wanted to be buried way out someplace where they couldn't find her body or just be thrown into the sea or something. And they tried but they were caught, and so she was actually stuffed and put in a museum too. Just like her husband, as the last specimen of a Tasmanian human being. The two of them together, Julia and Truganinny, represent the ultimate colonization. They're not side by side in The Halfbreed Chronicles. They're separated slightly by a couple of other poems. But they're intended as a pair in a sense because of the similar fate and because the circus treatment of the socalled freaks is another kind of colonization. Then too, what is it that happens to the colonized if not being made into a sideshow? So that's basically the point behind the Julia Pastrana poem and also the Truganinny poem. We are all in that situation. We are all on display that way.

There seems to be a growing consciousness on the part of American Indian women, both as writers and as people speaking up. In the postscript poem in Lost Copper you say "Silko and Allen and Harjo and me—our teeth are hard from the rocks we eat. " What do you have in common and why choose those particular women?

This will sound sort of funny, I guess, but I could have gone on and named many, many more Indian women writers. I chose those particular ones because I felt that they were fairly well known, that a reader who has been reading very much contemporary Indian literature will immediately recognize the names. I feel that they have all made strong statements about being Indian writers, both in their creative work and peripheral statements in interviews or in articles that they have written. The actual fact of the matter is that I stopped after naming just those ones because that was the meter of the poem, (laughter) What I intend there is to go on with the list—and Hogan and northSun and Burns and Tapahonso and so on and so on. They're in there.

What is exciting about their work for you?

I know that when I read their work it makes chills go up and down my spine in a way that really most other people's work doesn't. It's not just Indian women's work, but work by minority American writers, by writers of color in general. It very often has that effect on me. When I read work that does have that effect on me, it is usually by such a writer. I tend to be terribly bored by the writing of white academic poets. Hopelessly bored. I really don't care how many sex fantasies they had watching a bird on a fence. If you'll pardon the phrase, I think in academia, in English departments, that the writers are just masturbating.

Of course there are also the writers who are putting on headdresses.

Yes. Yeah. There are those, but even they are not generally in the academic situation. Even they are a little too peripheral for academe.

Um. Those white poets who would be Indian as you title that one poem of yours.

Yeah. And of course that needs some clarification too because it's widely misunderstood—the whole thing about the "white shaman" controversy that Geary Hobson and Leslie Silko have addressed themselves to, that I have addressed myself to. It's widely misunderstood. It's assumed that what we're saying is that we don't want non-Indian people to write about Indians. That's not it. Many non-Indian people have written beautifully and sensitively about Indian people. Even in persona. The difference is that there are those who come out and say that they are Indian when they are not, in the case of some. There are those who come out and do not claim to be genetically Indian, but who do claim that what they write is somehow more Indian, or more legitimately Indian, than what real Indian people are writing. There are these people who claim to be what they're not. They claim to be shamans and it's impossible to be a selfdeclared shaman. Your community has to recognize you. And we know that the word is Siberian but we also know what is meant by it in popular usage. Yeah, it's directed toward these people and it's a matter not of subject matter but of integrity in the way in which the subject matter is approached.

You've been editor of The American Indian Quarterly, taught Native American Literature, worked on a major bibliography of Native American writing. What do you see happening with American Indian writing today?

Well, I think that there is a small nucleus of people who are primarily associated with the Modern Language Association who are acknowledging that it is a legitimate field of study. People like Karl Kroeber and LaVonne Ruoff and Andrew Wiget, Larry Evers. There's a whole crew there. These are people who have been interested in it all along. But through their influence and the influence of Indian writers who have become involved in that end of the writing business, the scholarship end of it, it's becoming better accepted in academe. But it's very slow as in the fact, for example, in the University where I taught (Berkeley), we were just recently told by the English Department that they would not hire people to teach anything about American Indian literature "because it's not part of American Literature." So, it's very slow. But it's gradually happening because of people like the scholars that I named … although it took a long time even to get to where Indian people could go speak for themselves, where Indian writers could go deal with their own work even in the Modern Language Association because the tradition for so many years was that the white scholars would sit around and talk about the work without having the writers there to deal with it themselves. That's changing.

You feel then that the current small popularity of American Indian contemporary writing is more than just a fad? That its message is large enough to go beyond this moment?

The message is large enough to go beyond the moment—whether anyone is listening or not, I'm not sure. I think that the way that a lot of us started, particularly those that are around my age in their thirties and forties, was on the basis of a fad. We were brought into it, many of us, before we were mature enough as writers, really, to do it. We were brought into anthologies and so forth, and our work was exposed to critical masses, so to speak. But I think that maybe if we work hard enough at it that we will somehow be able to make sure that it is incorporated into general American literature. And here I'm not just talking about Native American, I'm talking about Afro-American, I'm talking about Asian-American, I'm talking about Chicano and Puerto Rican, Indochinese. All of the various cultural elements have their literature that becomes modified and yet retains its cultural integrity as they come into America. Or as they leave the reservations and go into the cities that are in America. I think this is going to happen, whether anyone is out there listening or not, it's going to happen. And I know that the Indian communities respect their writers more now and that's the part that's really important to me. I would much rather be respected by the Indian community through my writing than to have my books reviewed in the New York Times. I really would.

Last question. What would you say to young American Indian writers now in the way of advice?

Like that old civil rights song says, don't let nobody turn you 'round. Although they probably never heard the song, (laughter)