Power: A Novel

The publication of Indigenous American author N. Scott Momaday’s novel The House Made of Dawn (1968) marks the beginning of a literary movement controversially called the “Native American Renaissance.” Before that time, there were a relatively small number of Indigenous American works published in English, and they did not reach a wide readership. It was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, during a period of growing activism surrounding Indigenous civil rights and voices, that there was a significant increase in the number and popularity of published, English-language Indigenous American novels and poetry. By the 1990s, Indigenous texts had become a mainstream part of the corporate publishing market, responding to a national educational demand for multicultural literature. Published in 1998, Power encapsulates one of the fundamental elements of Indigenous American literature: the reclamation of their cultural heritage through literary expression.

Indigenous perspectives and philosophy offer critical resistance to colonialist and capitalist modernity. In this way, they share a similar outlook to postmodern thinking, though Indigenous voices have long been missing from mainstream postmodern debate. Frankie Wilmer states the following:

[p]ostmodernism, in particular, not only attacks the foundations (and the very idea of foundations) of Western academic disciplines, particularly the social sciences, but also calls into question the relationship between power and knowledge, and consequently, power and educational processes as a means of perpetuating the privileging of culturally embedded ‘western ways of knowing’ (Wilmer, Franke. “Narratives of Resistance: Postmodernism and Indigenous Worldviews.” Race, Gender, & Class, vol. 3, no. 2, 1996, pp. 35-58).

Much 20th-century Indigenous literature can be classified as narratives of resistance to Western dogmatic education: Power approaches these ideas in Linda Hogan’s thematic exploration of Indigenous Knowledge Versus Western Scientific Knowledge. Omishto critiques and rejects the Western education system, which diminishes and excludes her tribal knowledge. She sees what she’s learned at school as violent and oppressive, “where we study war and numbers that combine to destroy life” (105). Omishto cannot find a way to fit the “distant worlds” of Indigenous and Western knowledge systems together, so she feels that she must choose one completely or risk not belonging anywhere.

Many Indigenous novels of the 1990s explore ambivalence toward the status of Indigenous identity and how to exist as both an American and Indigenous person concurrently. Omishto’s arc in the story from dislocation to relocation similarly highlights Cultural Identity as a Balance of Assimilation and Preservation. While Ama chooses the middle path, living between two worlds, Omishto chooses to remove herself from settler society and live traditionally on Indigenous land, while her sister and mother survive through complete assimilation. Each character is portrayed as having the burden of constructing their own cultural identity, which always entails loss. Members of the same family and origins are forced to discard parts of themselves, and at times even their relationships with each other.