Mixedbloods and Bloodlust in Cherokee Night
2002; Pittsburg State University; Volume: 43; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0026-3451
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
ResumoAS STUDENTS OF American history know, early twentieth century was a painful for native peoples in this country. Federal policies of assimilation and repression, coupled with high mortality and poverty, resulted in a pessimistic literature by writers that reflected social realities. The challenge for teachers and scholars, when introducing non-Indians to these early works, is to establish a context for them, emphasizing achievements of writers in tackling prejudices of their time, while at same examining writers' assumptions regarding native identity and cultures, assumptions which may since have proven erroneous. The establishment of context becomes especially crucial when early and contemporary works are offered side by side as in Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Plays. This anthology takes an important step in documenting American dramatic literature, but Night by Lynn Riggs should not be included here. This play has already generated its share of misconceptions, even in minds of fairly informed critics. As recently as 1981, writer Paul Horgan called Night the greatest of Riggs's many Oklahoma plays (Braunlich, Oklahoma, 9.15) while Riggs's biographer, Phyllis Cole Braunlich, has asserted unlike some of his dramas, this one becomes more contemporary with passage of time (218). The fact is Night distorts native cultures and perpetuates racist stereotypes, demonstrating how authors of minority ancestry, with no real connection to their culture, may inadvertently reinforce views of dominant society. Here then is context in which Night needs to be considered. American writers of 1920s and 30s, usually mixedbloods themselves, created some of first modern mixedblood protagonists in American literature. These mixedbloods are rounded and complex figures despite fact that their struggle to relate to both white and native worlds often ends tragically: At first glance, mixedblood characters in Night seem to belong to this more modern group simply because they dominate play. The one-sixteenth Riggs thought of himself as an Oklahoma writer, not a mixedblood one, but he approached Night, his first and only Indian play, with special passion. Native experience in Oklahoma had been especially traumatic. By 1904, thanks to allotment, Indian Territory had been carved into a state, tribal governments had been abolished, and practice of native languages and religions officially forbidden. Riggs wrote his melodrama (no pejorative meaning intended), hoping to capture darkness which has come upon and their descendants (Riggs, qtd. in Braunlich, Haunted, 80). Night consists of a series of related vignettes arranged to show wrenching effects of forced assimilation on Cherokee. Unfortunately, while structure of play is innovative, skipping back and forth between nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Riggs's treatment of fullbloods and mixedbloods is irrevocably dated. He manipulates some cliches about Indians in order to debunk them, but much of his material is hobbled by his own unconscious stereotypes. Two especially noxious stereotypes dominate Night: author's view of mixedblood condition as degenerate, and his belief in an innate Cherokee bloodlust. Riggs announces his focus on mixedblood identity in play's stage directions where principal characters are described as all part Indian--some a quarter, some a sixteenth or thirty-second (Riggs, 132). Physical descriptions of these part-Indians do not include skin color, except in ease of quarter or half-bloods, who are described as dark. The rest of characters are brown-haired or blond and are, we assume, white-skinned--hence, not subject to kinds of overt prejudice their darker-complexioned relatives might experience. …
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