Native Son
By R. D. Pohl
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Gansworth, an enrolled member of the Onondaga Nation who grew up on the Tuscarora Reservation in Lewiston, is the author of Indian Summers (1998), Smoke Dancing (2004) and the recently published Mending Skins (Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press). All three books are either set on the Tuscarora Reservation or involve characters, situations, and themes that link them to life in that community. Currently Professor of English and Lowery Writer-in-Residence at Canisius College, Gansworth began his creative work as a painter and visual artist. Eventually, his exploration of various representational and storytelling forms led him into narrative writing and fiction.
His first solo exhibit as a painter, Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon, opened at the Olean Public Library in 1999 and moved in expanded form to the Castellani Museum of Niagara University in the spring of 2000. That same year, Michigan State University Press published a collection of Gansworth’s poems and paintings under the same title.
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Eric Gansworth, Cross Pollination
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R. D. Pohl: Mending Skins opens with part of a keynote address on cultural stereotyping delivered by Native American scholar Dr. Anne Boans to the “Society for the Protection and Reclamation of Indian Images.” The validity of her critique notwithstanding, it does nothing to resolve the identity issues in her own life. As a novelist, do you feel the paradox of being a Native American storyteller with a career in the larger secular culture?
Eric Gansworth: While I sympathize with my character Annie, I do not believe I am in a paradoxical situation myself. I don’t see the world in the stratified way she does, forcing it into the “walking in two worlds” dichotomy that is so seductive a critical stance from which to view indigenous art. I’m also not sure that my work isn’t secular, in that I address the metaphysical only peripherally within the characters’ experiences and I avoid mysticism. Annie’s character is more confrontational than I am. Rather than making art, she perceives problems with others’ work and with Indian communities embracing that work. I explore the realities of current indigenous life and am as truthful to that experience as possible.
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Mending Skins.
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EG: Annie is caught in the bind of exploring contemporary Indian life as a legitimate subject for art, and acknowledging that many Indians like art celebrating stereotypes, rather than art confronting stereotypes. She marginalizes herself by choosing to discuss those gray areas of appreciation, believing irony is the only way to engage stereotypical images, and she does not want to see her culture embracing those images as a means of self-identification. A guy putting stylized feather or dreamcatcher decals on his SUV celebrates his culture as emphatically as she does, but in a way that speaks to him of their history, rather than acknowledging the viewpoint she attempts to prescribe. He asserts his identity using imagery that will clearly mark him as Indian to anyone who notices, even if his physical appearance does not necessarily accomplish that same goal. My novel is really antithetical to irony. Annie remains relatively humorless, all the while considering herself an authority on Indian humor. The characters most comfortable with themselves are those who adapt and those who maintain a sense of humor, rather than those who are unyielding. While having a mainstream audience is a goal, it can’t be at the cost of being read on one’s own terms. Neither Ted Williams’ The Reservation nor Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine wholly embraced irony in Indian life, but both celebrated humor as a means of survival, and I hope my work continues in the traditions of those landmark works.
RDP: All of your novels to date involve characters who are either physically or emotionally dislocated by the legacy of the New York State Power Authority’s expropriation of a sizable portion of the Tuscarora Reservation in order to build the reservoir for the Niagara Moses Power Generating Station in 1957. As a writer and artist, what is your sense of how this relatively recent violation of the Tuscaroras’ sovereignty changed the social dynamics and quality of life on the reservation?
EG: The history of the reservoir is inextricably linked with the personal histories of those residing within the reservation’s borders. For some, the connection is explicit, in that their lives were literally thrown into chaos by their physical removal from their homes, and by this revelation that the borders were indeed not defined in perpetuity. The idea that the full acreage of the reservation would continue to exist for all future generations was forever denied in the taking of the land by outside forces. Others are only aware of it after the fact, I suppose in the way that Americans born after 2001 will know of the World Trade Center—as abstraction alone, an icon that represents an entirely different idea than it had before that time.
The reservoir was complete by the time I was born, and as a child, I had only known it in positive contexts. It had a certain permanence; it had always been there and it always would be there. It was a place where we went to swim and party, though I understand that is generally no longer true. Perhaps the young people on the reservation are more politically aware than we had been as children.
It seems like three living generations on the reservation have viewed the reservoir in almost exclusively different ways. The first remembers the history of everything that has been lost, the second accepts what exists and makes the best of it, and the third confronts injustices of the past, infusing the collective memory with the warning that what has happened before could happen again if we do not remain vigilant. While out of sequence, I think that is what the three novels have explored, but I suspect I am not done with it as a landscape yet. The reservoir is the perfect metaphor for Indian life in America. It is a displacement device, with strictly defined yet permeable borders, where life thrives despite the artificiality—and what are Indians if not displaced peoples who have learned to thrive within the context of explicit permeable borders? The history of the water and organisms within the reservoir offers an amazing parallel to the history of reservation cultures.
RDP: Several of the characters in your previous novels reappear in this book. Do you see these three novels as part of a larger continuum focusing on the lives of contemporary Native Americans living in a single community? Are you planning to write any fiction that is not specifically set on the Tuscarora Reservation?
EG: My work is one large story, set in a fictional version of the environment where a significant part of my world view, for better or worse, was shaped. It is where I learned to dream, and as such, it is a frequent landscape of my imagination. The novels have been parts of a patchwork, standing alone in some ways, but informed by the other pieces, too. How large that patchwork is, I can’t say, but there is a progression. Indian Summers was a family novel, Smoke Dancing a community novel, and Mending Skins an exploration of community and the larger culture. The next novel is set on the reservation, in several different places across the United States, and in Vietnam. It continues the story of these characters, which brings the work back to the beginning.
R.D. Pohl is a poet and poetry critic, who also edits the poetry page for the Buffalo News.
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