[In the following excerpt, Rose comments on the experience of Native American writers in the literary world.]

I have a vivid memory of walking into a bookstore in San Francisco that is well known for small press books, especially poetry, in order to buy a copy of the then-new book The Names, a literary autobiography, by Kiowa author, N. Scott Momaday. Having no luck in locating it on the shelves, I asked the clerk. He suggested that I look in the anthropology section or perhaps in the section especially set aside for works by and about American Indians. Sure enough, a variety of novels and poetry collections could be found under "anthropology" in that store; a quick check in the "poetry" section revealed that they could be found only under "anthropology." When I returned to the clerk, I pointed out (with a smile) that the books were incorrectly shelved. No, I was told, they were placed where they were because the authors were Indian. Therefore, it must be anthropology. When I replied that these authors were not anthropologists and the works not anthropology, he simply said that it didn't matter because, after all, there was not enough literature by Indian writers to worry about where to shelve it and would I please leave the premises. I left. In answer to the man's statement on Indian literature, I began compiling a bibliography of book-length works by American Indian and Eskimo authors; today, less than three years later, I have over 3000 entries, some of them going back into the eighteenth century.

Another event, much more recent, is similar. I was asked, several months ago, to do a poetry reading at a Bay Area bookstore that also specialized in small press publications. I accepted and was then asked who I would like to read with. I gave the name of a young (non-Indian) woman whose work I admire and who needs the exposure and experience of reading in public. She was rejected as my co-reader because she is not Indian. A quick look over my reading schedule over the years confirmed that almost always I have read with other Indian poets or, sometimes, with other writers of another ethnic minority. Almost never with whites. When I told the organizers of this particular reading that I would prefer to choose my own co-reader and that I did not care if this person was Indian or not, they canceled my reading and replaced me with a white man. The message is clear: be the ethnic curio that we want you to be or else we will not let you in at all.

What does this mean? It means that the literary world is, like the "real" world, full of backlash (against apparent progress by minority writers), of colonial thinking, and of an imperialist mentality characterized by Cherokee writer, Geary Hobson, as "white-shamanism." The two examples cited above are simply from my personal "repertoire" and readers might be asking at this point why I objected to these situations. The segregation of Indian-authored literature in the bookstore is not only philosophical, but economic. If you are looking for poetry, you are not likely to look in the "anthropology" section. In the case of reading, it is perhaps more subtle. Most writers, I believe, would rather be judged on the quality of their work than on the set of attributes with which they were born. When I read a review of one of my books and find that the reviewer never gets past my ethnicity, I am offended even if what is said is "positive." I did not write that book in order to announce that I am Indian; I wrote it because I am a poet. Poetry is what I do. Indian is how I was born and how I see my world. I believe that my work is no more nor less "ethnic" than anyone else's. Everyone's work is saturated with ethnicity because our backgrounds are context for our works. All of us; not just the dark ones or the ones with funny names.

Let me use a few more examples from my personal experience. There was the large university press that turned down my manuscript (after saying that they were interested in it) because they had already contracted with an Indian writer that year (on another subject). And the journal that requested "Indian poems" but rejected all the work they received from Indian writers because it did not fit their idea of what "Indian poetry" should be; they ended up publishing work by non-Indians who thought they were using "Indian" styles. And the non-Indian poet who asked me to read with him because he was going to wear his paper-mache coyote mask and read his "Indian" poems and he appreciated the atmosphere of authenticity provided by having a living, breathing Indian on the same platform. And the editors who neglected to gain permission to use some of my work in a massive textbook. I found out about their copyright infringement when the book was in its third printing. When I asked for compensation, they wrote to an Indian newspaper attempting to "expose" me as one who was hurting the Indian movement by insisting on being treated as a professional. After all, how else would my work get published? The paper published my views alongside those of these editors and sided with me. If you are beginning to perceive a pattern, then you are quite right.

Between 1969 and 1976, Indian-authored work was (briefly) in fashion. Virtually every publisher in the country produced at least one anthology of Indian work. Many of us saw our first major exposure in such anthologies which was double-edged, both good and bad. It was good in that we were being published. Most of us were young and new at writing; we did not expect any publisher to roll out a red carpet. We knew that we would have to pay our dues like other writers. Yet the publishers were writing to us and asking for our work. What writer would not jump at the chance to be anthologized at the age of 18 or 20? It was bad in that many of us, myself included, were simply not ready for any kind of national exposure. The resulting anthologies were uneven in quality because so many of us were so young; some of us submitted poems written in high school which would then be used by critics around the country to evaluate us as writers. No one would take our age and lack of experience into consideration—after all, our work amounted to nothing more than curios. Few critics bothered to look at it at all. Further, once a publisher produced an "Indian" book, they would never again feel the "urge" to produce another one. Having once gotten into print, the circumstances made it much more difficult for us to publish again. Our general tendency at the time toward immature work (with some notable exceptions who, also, were older) coupled with the "timeliness" of the anthologies (it was, after all, a brief fad) ensured that critics would dismiss them. Now that we have grown up we are still dismissed—to an extent far exceeding other young writers. No manuscript by an Indian author was considered on strictly literary grounds. In the reviews of our work (both anthologies and books by single authors), if the review was negative it was because we were part of that inconsequential, low-quality flood of Indian writing that the readers were so tired of; if the review was positive, it was because we were spokespeople for an entire aboriginal population. Our work appeared analyzed in sociological and anthropological journals and was compared with other writers on the basis of tribe, or against oral literature from one's own tribe. We were categorized as thoroughly, measured as carefully, and put away as finally as any skeleton from an archaeological dig.

So who are we—really? What are we doing? What are we trying to achieve? Why do we write? We are all different. Being Hopi does not automatically give me anything in common with a Seminole. There is not and never has been an "Indian" culture; there have always been hundreds of them. What we are doing is we are writing because that is what we choose to do. We write for highly individualistic reasons. We are trying to achieve many kinds of things; again this is an individual matter. Some of us have altruistic kinds of goals about helping to continue a particular literary tradition in a tribal context. Others have selfish kinds of goals about being rich and famous. Most of us write because we have to—that is what we do. If you have an idea in mind of what "Indian literature" is, I suggest that you reconsider. If your idea is based on the Indian-authored works you have read, consider the fact that it is often chosen according to editors' stereotypes. If your idea is based on a solid academic background about tribal literatures, consider that many of us do not speak our native language, were not raised on our ancestral land, and have no literary tradition other than what we received in some classroom. If your idea is based on the observation of certain themes or images, consider that there is no genre of "Indian literature" because we are all different. There is only literature that is written by people who are Indian and who, therefore, infuse their work with their own lives the same way that you do.