[Editor's Note: The first part of this interview appeared in a previous issue as A Science Fiction Primer. The conversation below is a continuation of that interview.]

Randy Hoyt: What first got you involved in Native American studies?

Amy H. Sturgis: The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma is part of my family heritage on both sides, and my parents made sure that I was educated with that cultural awareness. I grew up in Tulsa and Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, and so from my earliest memories onward, I felt the influence of “Indian Country.” When I was at Vanderbilt University working on my Ph. D. in history (with an emphasis in intellectual history), I was particularly interested in constitutional studies. Most of the work in Native American studies at the time was related to social and cultural topics, not intellectual and constitutional ones. I ended up writing an in-depth analysis of the evolution of Cherokee constitutional thought for my dissertation. I found that taking these two disciplines (constitutional studies and intellectual history) and applying their analytical tools to the subject matter of Native American studies yielded some fruitful and fascinating results.

Of course, this put my work a bit outside of the mainstream work done by scholars in Native American studies and in constitutional studies: neither group seemed much interested in the work of the other, and I thought both had missed out on some valuable insights. That was the beginning step for me in bringing he Native American heritage that had always been a part of my personal life forward into my professional life in a conscious and intentional way. I ended up passing the foreign language competency exam for my Ph.D. not in French (which I’d studied in high school) or Russian (which I’d studied in college), but in Cherokee. I have since gone on to write investigative pieces and current policy work about Native America, as well, so my focus is no longer simply historical.

RH: The two books you have published in Native American studies both related to events from the first half of the nineteenth century, a biography of Tecumseh (who died in 1813) and a book on the forced removal of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia (the “Trail of Tears” in 1838-1839). I noticed that these dates correspond roughly to the beginning of modern science fiction we discussed previously. Is there any relationship or connection between these events?

AHS: Needless to say, this is an era that draws my attention and enthusiasm for many reasons. The connections between the two areas are interesting to consider. Tecumseh is a figure I find to be remarkable. He was the Shawnee leader responsible for the largest pan-tribal confederacy in the history of Native America, and he was one of the visionaries most responsible for challenging the peoples of the different Native nations to start thinking of themselves as American Indian instead of solely Osage or Potawatomi or Creek. Even before he was tragically killed in the War of 1812, he had become a figure of mythic proportions. He was described as a kind of King Arthur figure among his people, and their British allies drew on some very rich mythological language to describe him to their compatriots across the ocean. A number of Native American writers in the late twentieth century wrote alternate histories about what would have happened if Tecumseh had survived: it is interesting to see political scholars such as Vine Deloria writing essentially what is science fiction to talk about this great leader who was legendary even in his own age.

In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), perhaps the leading contender for being the first modern work of science fiction, Frankenstein’s creature is out in the wild, living on his own and educating himself by eavesdropping on a family living out in the woods. When he hears about the plight of the American Indians, Shelley emphasizes that Frankenstein’s shunned, isolated, and mistreated creature — surely miserable in his own right — weeps for them. So even at the very beginning of the genre, science-fiction authors commented on the state of Native America. Throughout the nineteenth century, starting with the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Trails, one Native American nation after another was displaced from their original lands. By the time of H.G. Wells’s work and the beginning of what would become a golden era in science fiction early in the twentieth century, there’s a period of tremendous upheaval as the Native American nations were managed — or, more to the point, manhandled — by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the United States Government.

As science fiction was coming into its own, Native America was being dismantled in a systematic, military fashion. Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950) reflects on those events, using Mars as a metaphor for North America. Some of the characters in the novel consciously identify what happened to the Martians with the de-population of Native America, and these characters begin to understand what is being lost only after it is too late for anything to be done. This has been an ongoing theme throughout science fiction, and a number of works engage it. One of my favorite contemporary science-fiction novels, Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996), also discusses these events using the metaphor of interspecies contact with life on another planet. It is a remarkable consideration of who is to blame when everything goes wrong and tragedy unfolds — as it did following the Columbian encounter with Native America.

RH: Do we have any evidence of how Native American myths and legends adapted or changed during this time?

AHS: It varies depending on the nation and the stories, but to a degree we can chart some differences and note how evolutions and adaptations unfolded in the act storytelling, especially across Native nations. There are surviving oral traditions that explain, for example, the genesis of the Great Law of Peace (which is essentially the Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy), which pre-dated contact with Europeans by quite a good margin; we can see how the origin stories explaining this remarkable compact evolved over time. New stories were told as a result of these events: new legends, for example, arose in the Cherokee Nation during the Trail of Tears. We can date the beginning of these stories and then see how they now permeate Native American literature. It is also interesting to observe how the stories and legends of these two drastically different cultures, Native American and European, in a sense cross-fertilized each other. Some of the Southwestern nations, for example, have Catholic symbolism informing their mythology after contact with the Spanish. Most of the stories were transmitted orally throughout this time period, but in the nations that adopted written languages, we even have a literary snapshot of stories, capturing them at the moment when they were first recorded, and we can track how they have changed — and how they have stayed the same — over the years.

RH: The Mythopoeic Press announced The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko, a book you co-edited with David Oberhelman from Oklahoma State University. What kind of material will readers find in that book?

AHS: I presented a paper in August 2006 as the scholar guest of honor at Mythcon 37 in Norman, Oklahoma. In that talk, I noted that taking the analytical tools from two disciplines (this time fantasy studies and Native American studies) could yield great results when each was applied to the other’s subject matter. Both sides I think are missing out on great opportunities to talk about and share the remarkable — and remarkably similar — literature in their respective fields. In my talk I recommended ways of bringing together those who love fantasy and those who love Native America. The Mythopoeic Press approached me about editing a volume on that topic, using my keynote speech as the first chapter, and the challenge I laid out in it as its guiding theme. We cast a wide net, finding an exciting international group of cross-disciplinary and multi-ethnic scholars to talk about three things:

1. Native American mythology in literature,
2. Native American authors writing works with fantasy elements, or
3. non-Native fantasy authors incorporating Native America into their own work.

The final product includes some fascinating contributions from a wide range of able and accessible scholars on authors from H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling to Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Gerald Vizenor, among others. I think it is a tremendous volume that shows how much scholars and readers in two different traditions can gain from expanding their horizons and bringing all of this rich material into one conversation.

RH: Let me ask about these points, starting with the last one. Many readers will be familiar with the use of other mythological material in works of fantasy. (Jason explored in a previous article, for example, material from Norse, Old English, and Welsh mythological traditions in Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.) What fantasy authors have done this same thing with Native American material?

AHS: Not enough have done this, but some have done it well. There’s Orson Scott Card; you have published a series of articles about his Alvin Maker series, in fact. His books take the reader on a journey through an alternate America — and what a place it is to visit with his kind of introspection! I think Card had real insight about how Tecumseh and his movement represented a kind of American myth that had reached legendary proportions in Tecumseh’s own lifetime.

Perhaps my favorite novel along these lines is Neil Gaiman’s American Gods: I think Gaiman did an elegant job of drawing on Native American mythology. Others like Charles de Lint and Michael Bishop also come to mind. One of my favorite authors of speculative fiction, H.P. Lovecraft, actually draws quite a bit on Native American mythology and settings. His short story “The Mound” (published posthumously in 1940) takes place at a real burial mound in Binger, Oklahoma, and a handful of his other stories draw on the richness of the Native American legends. His works are surprisingly well-researched for the amount of information that was available in the early twentieth century.

Many non-Native authors who have drawn on this material have done a spectacular job. Some others, of course, have failed to do justice to their subject matter.  But I think the number of authors who incorporate Native America into their fantasies is still too small. Many non-Native authors are simply not aware enough or comfortable enough with Native American mythology — or contemporary Native American ideas — to attempt it yet. Not only could these authors create great works in their own right using this material, but through them many more readers could be introduced to these great tales.

RH: What do you think it takes for non-Native authors to become aware enough and comfortable enough with the legends to be able to incorporate them into their fiction?

AHS: Tolkien’s use of other mythological traditions provides a good example: when he found himself interested in the stories from The Kalevala, he went and taught himself Finnish so he could read it in the original language. He did his homework before he incorporated other people’s myths into his own stories. If authors want to use Native American stories, I think they ought to research these tales to gain an understanding of their history, of their particular origins and context. This does not necessarily mean learning a Native American language (although that is an excellent place to start); there are fantastic oral history collections available for listening, and there are fantastic anthologies and collections of these stories available. It is not asking much for people today do the research to find accounts as close to the original as possible.

Moreover, Native America is alive and well today, and many of the contemporary settings and stories of modern American Indians provide rich sources for writers, regardless of their own ethnic backgrounds.

There is a great debate about who has the right to draw on Native American traditional material, about who is authentic and what is credible. These questions for the most part disturb me. We do see mythology incorporated into fiction badly and disrespectfully, but I do not believe the solution is to prevent non-Native authors from accessing and being inspired by this material. The authors who use Native American traditions without doing even the most basic research, drawing instead on inaccurate stereotypes, have failed as artists, I would say. It seems to work out that the non-Native authors who are sensitive, inquisitive, and respectful of these stories and traditions also end up creating beautiful and lasting art.

RH: You mentioned that the book also contains material on Native American authors incorporating their own mythological traditions into their fantasy stories.

AHS: Yes. Some of these Native authors produce works that are clearly fantasy by anyone’s definition: Drew Hayden Taylor and Daniel Heath Justice are two excellent (and recommended) examples. Others write books often considered to be “magical realism” or simply “Native American literature.” This again raises the discussion about how to classify works, which I mentioned last time regarding what counts as “science fiction”: these are games with which the critics and scholars are more concerned than the fans and the practitioners. My concern is that many readers who love fantasy literature never discover some of the great Native authors, because these writers’ publications are labeled and pigeonholed due to the artists’ ethnicity. It is my hope that our book will help to introduce fantasy lovers to great Native writers. Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Gerald Vizenor, for example, write works that incorporate elements of fantasy. (Gerald Vizenor, incidentally, also has written what I would consider a great work of Native American science fiction.) Some of these authors, such as Louise Erdrich, are gaining national and international reputations as “literary” authors: Silko’s works are taught in a number of universities and even high schools already, although usually in the context of Native American studies.

RH: After readers finish your book, what anthologies or sources would you recommend next for information about Native American myths and legends? Is there one particular book that provides a good overview of all the material available?

AHS: There’s not one perfect text out there as a good starting point. There are actually a lot of good collections, but none have put themselves head and shoulders above the others. I think anything by Joseph Bruchac would be a good first stop; he compiles and re-tells Native American myths in his books in a really compelling way. Another good source is the anthropologist James Mooney, who has a series of books written around the beginning of the twentieth century. He was compiling folklore from firsthand accounts, essentially writing down the oral history while it was still there. Mooney’s collections provide a great ethnographic perspective; I would recommend his work from a historical point of view and Bruchac’s work from a literary one. I like Lawana Trout’s Native American Literature: An Anthology as an introduction to Native stories both traditional and contemporary.

Recently I was pleased to be brought in as a scholarly consultant on Virginia Schomp’s 2008 book The Native Americans, which is part of the Marshall Cavendish Myths of the World series for younger readers. Schomp identifies the origin and context of each of the tales she relates and includes stories from the width and breadth of North America. Books such as this one give me hope that children of many backgrounds will be exposed to the delights and fascination of Native mythology; hopefully this first taste will lead to a lifelong appetite.

RH: What are your overall aspirations for the book? What do you hope the book will accomplish?

AHS: I hope that the book will help fantasy lovers to discover Native authors. I hope that it will help Native writers who write fantasy literature to be welcomed to the table of fantasy artists and studied by scholars of the genre. I also hope it will help non-Native American writers to feel invited to mine the wealth of Native American mythology to create new stories. But I suppose my main hope is that readers who love any of this material — whether it is Native American fiction or fantasy or mythology — will come away from the book with titles they want to read; I think it is a tragedy that works get pigeonholed in a certain genre or category in such a way that they do not reach readers who will appreciate them and benefit from their messages.

I have included links to all the books Amy recommended during the interview below. You can learn more about Amy’s work by visiting her web site, amyhsturgis.com. She is currently working on what sounds like an exciting new book, The Gothic Imaginations of J.R.R. Tolkien, Madeleine L’Engle, and J.K. Rowling, for publication with Zossima Press in 2010.

[Editor's Note: The first part of this interview appeared in a previous issue as A Science Fiction Primer. The conversation above is a continuation of that interview.]

Recommendations

• Oberhelman, David and Amy H. Sturgis, eds. The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America. Mythopoeic Press, 2009.

• Search at Amazon: Joseph Bruchac
  • Between Earth & Sky: Legends of Native American Sacred Places. 1999.
  • Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back. 1997.
  • View All »
• Author Page at Amazon: James Mooney
  • Myths of the Cherokee. 2009.
  • The Siouan Tribes of the East. 2008.
  • The Ghost Dance Religion And The Sioux Outbreak Of 1890. 2008.
  • View All »
• Schomp, Virginia. The Native Americans. 2007.

• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus. 1818.
• Bradbury, Ray. The Martian Chronicles. 1950.
• Russell, Mary Doria. The Sparrow. 1996.
• Card, Orson Scott. Red Prophet. 1988.
• Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. 2001.
• “The Mound.” 1940. The Horror in the Museum. Arkham House Publishers, 1989.

A good author with which to start would be J.R.R. Tolkien, arguably the most influential author of modern fantasy. Tolkien had written an extensive collection of myths and legends that he later incorporated into The Lord of the Rings as its mythological background. When seeking a publisher for both works together, he wrote a lengthy letter to one potential publisher, most likely late in 1951. (The Lord of the Rings was published separately in 1954, but the other material was not published until after his death as The Silmarillion in 1978.) In that letter, he included the following description of the earlier mythological material:

[The] stories […] arose in my mind as ‘given’ things. […] Always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’. (Letters #131)

In another article in this issue, Laura discusses science and religion in Madeleine L’Engle’s Many Waters. L’Engle, an American writer best known for her young-adult fantasy novels like A Wrinkle in Time (1962), L’Engle told an anecdote along similar lines about writing The Arm of the Starfish (1965). Her ten-year-old would listen to sections of the book as they were written, until one of the characters died.

He got very excited and upset. “Change it,” he demanded. […]

“I can’t. I didn’t want [that character] to get shot, either, but that’s what happened. I couldn’t stop it.”

“But you can. You’re the writer!” […]

He was so angry with me for allowing [that character] to die that he wouldn’t read anything else I wrote for several years. […] Now he has grown up and understands that the artist cannot change the work at a whim, but can only listen, look, wait, and set down what is revealed. (Walking On Water 185-186)

This moving and highly personal anecdote demonstrates to me in a powerful way that L’Engle took this aspect of her work quite seriously.

In a previous article, I discussed 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing’s book Shikasta in terms of mythical thinking. At the beginning of Shikasta, published in 1979, Lessing included some introductory remarks:

As I wrote [Shikasta] I was invaded with ideas for other books, other stories. […] It was clear that I had made — or found — a new world for myself. (Shikasta x)

Neil Gaiman, perhaps one of the best-known authors of speculative fiction writing today, expressed something similar regarding the title character of his popular comic book series The Sandman. The series, which ran from 1989 to 1996, has subsequently been published in eleven volumes. In an afterword to the first volume, written in 1991, Gaiman wrote:

Looking back, the process of coming up with the Lord of Dreams seems less like an act of creation than one of sculpture: as if he were already waiting, grave and patient, inside a block of white marble, and all I needed to do was chip away everything that wasn’t him. (Afterword 238)

I discussed the magnificent carved columns of the Pacific Northwest and their relationships to mythic narratives in a previous article on totem poles. Bill Reid, one of the great totem pole carvers of the twentieth century, described his art with these words:

With half my mind, I know I do believe that the figures on that totem pole I’m carving […] grew inside that tree as it was growing. And all I have to do is peel away the outer layers and there they’ll be. And the other half of my mind tells me that’s complete nonsense and romantic balderdash. I can live with both points of view — and enjoy them both, actually. (Bill Reid 4:50-5:30)

Reid’s first point of view — that the figures grow inside the cedar trees — resembles the other statements by the authors. These all reflect mythical thinking (mythos), which approaches the world through intuitive means and subjective insights. They all explain their art in terms of other worlds or hidden realms, which is a common element found in many products of mythical thinking. The land of the gods above the skies or faraway places over the seas are familiar expressions of this element, but mythical thinkers also often posit an invisible reality or hidden plane of  existence within our own world. I imagine that these authors and artists did not deduce the existence of their characters or their stories from objective experiments or impersonal proofs; rather, they posited these objects to describe the very subjective — but also very real — feelings they experienced while creating their art.

But do such invisible realities exist? Did the figures Reid carved actually grow inside the trees? Could L’Engle really not have changed the story to satisfy her son? Logical thinking (logos) might look for something more objective than hidden realms to explain these subjective feelings. A logos-only thinker might perform experiments on cedar trees, looking for the hidden figures. Such experiments would (presumably) produce no objective evidence for these figures, and their existence would then be rejected. Reid’s second point of view — that this is all “complete nonsense and romantic balderdash” — reflects the conclusions of such a logos-only approach. But Reid did not think that logos offered a superior or more satisfying way to think about his art, and I think all the authors I mentioned above would have agreed with him on the complementary nature of mythos and logos in this regard. Mythical thinking provided all these authors a method to make sense of their own work and to share that sense with others.

Works Cited

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
• L’Engle, Madeleine. Walking On Water. Bantam Books, 1982.
• Lessing, Doris. Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta. New York : Random House, 1979.
• Gaiman, Neil. “Afterword.” The Sandman, Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes. New York: DC Comics, 1991.
• Bill Reid. Directed by Jack Long. National Film Board of Canada, 1979. (Full documentary available online.)

These great columns are often referred to as “story-telling poles” (Malin 104) because the multiple figures depict or illustrate a narrative. These narratives might recount recent historical events involving members of a particular family or timeless legends involving mythological characters. The Raven pole belonging to a Tlingit tribe in Wrangell, Alaska, for example, depicts a story found among various tribes that explains the origins of the sun and moon. In addition to its aetiological components, the story includes many elements similar to those in narratives from various Western traditions — the theft of fire, the trickster who benefits mankind, and even the virgin birth — and more mundane themes like the danger of spoiling grandchildren.

Long ago, the world was covered with darkness. (This story appears with minor variations in many tribes; the summary here includes details from the Tlingit tradition.) Raven grew tired of stumbling around and went in search of light. As he came near the house of an old chief, he overheard the chief talking with his daughter. Raven learned that the chief kept all the light of the world locked away in a box; predictably, he promptly devised a plan to steal that box. He transformed himself into a hemlock needle and landed in the river; the chief’s daughter became pregnant after unknowingly drinking him and in time gave birth to a son — Raven in human form. The chief loved his new grandson greatly. Raven soon began begging for the box as a toy. When his grandfather refused, Raven began crying and screaming and throwing tantrums and pleading for the box. After many days of this, the chief reluctantly gave him the box. Raven immediately changed back to his bird form, carried the box through the smokehole of the house, and placed the light (in the forms of the sun, the moon, and the stars) in the sky.

The Raven pole shown in the three photographs above contains this story. It was carved in 1896 for Chief Shakes of a Tlingit tribe, and it stood for eighty-two years before collapsing in a windstorm. After that, a replica was built for a nearby park (Stewart 104). A detailed drawing of each figure on the pole is shown below.

The top figure in the pole is the old chief from the story, sitting atop the box containing the light. The combination of human and bird-like features indicates he is a being with supernatural powers. (In the Tlingit version of the story, the chief could take either human or raven form; the straight beak identifies the birdlike form as a raven.) The second figure is his grandson Raven who stole the box; the halo around his face references the sun, which connects him with the sun he placed in the sky. The daughter of the chief is either the human figure in front of Raven or the third raven below him. (The identity of the fourth figure is much less certain but is most likely a mythological character connected in some way to this raven family.)

Among all the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, the figures depicted on the carved columns follow highly formalized stylistic rules. These rules make the characters on the poles easy to identify. Birds have beaks of an identifiable shape: while carvers have much freedom in depicting these creatures, the raven must have a straight beak and the eagle must have a curved beak. Wolves and bears look similar but can be distinguished by the shape of their teeth and the length of their snouts. Beavers always sit upright, have two large front teeth, and hold a stick in their paws. Other symbols can be added to figures to communicate further details: multiple dorsal fins indicate that a whale is supernatural, and figures with features from two forms (for example, one set of human ears and one of birdlike ears) have the power to transform between those forms.

Though these great columns are undoubtedly related to narratives, the exact nature of that relationship is difficult to define. It provides an interesting dilemma for narratological studies. Though the columns are often referred to as “story-telling poles,” the poles do not really tell a story. Someone unfamiliar with the myth of Raven stealing the light, for example, would not learn it by studying the Raven pole in Wrangell. The figures are not arranged in any chronological order like panels in a comic book would be, nor does the pole as a whole depict one particular scene from the story like a painting world. Instead, the combination of characters together seems to suggest a particular narrative — more like a montage-style book cover or a movie poster would (see examples). The narratives related to a column were most likely recited at the ceremony in which it was raised, and even those well-versed in the myths of the culture might not be able to identify with certainty the story depicted without knowing the history of that ceremony.

We do not know how long the Native Americans in this region have made such carved columns. The tribes had developed no system of writing and thus kept no records, and the columns themselves (like all wooden objects) decompose and deteriorate. The earliest evidence comes from descriptions made by European and Russian explorers and traders in the eighteenth century. The stylistic rules for the figures appear to have been already established by that time. However, the columns themselves were much smaller and simpler than the familiar columns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of the columns stood inside the houses, decorative but also essential components of the houses’ structure. Only a small number of poles stood outside the houses, rarely more than one or two in any given village; these were erected as memorial poles to honor past leaders. The columns at that time do not appear to have been connected in any way to the mythological narratives of the tribe.

Contact with Europeans and Russians created conditions that radically changed the art of column carving. The introduction of iron tools and the increase in overall wealth caused by the fur trade increased the efficiency of the carvers, the detail and quality of their carvings, and the demand for their columns. With these changes, the so-called “golden age” of column carving began — roughly one hundred years from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. The columns began to display a much larger number of figures, which made them more apt for containing narratives. The Haida on Queen Charlotte Island first began carving these larger and more elaborate narrative poles; the practice then spread in varying degrees up and down the coast.

When commissioning a new pole, custom forbade the hiring of a carver from one’s own clan or tribal group. Preferably, the carver would come from another tribe altogether. Completing one of the larger columns of the nineteenth century could take as long as two years, during which time the carver and his immediate family would often live in the patron’s own house. The patron spent a great deal of time communicating to the carver the histories, the legends, and the myths belonging to his family. These carvers, with their many travels and exposure to stories from other clans and tribes, were perhaps the most culturally-aware members of their society. They would also compose songs, perform dances, and speak during important ceremonies. More than just carpenters or craftsmen, they had a rich understanding of the significant narratives of their culture and could then portray those narratives in their magnificent carvings in cedar.

References / Works Consulted

• Malin, Edward. Totem Poles of the Pacific Northwest Coast. 1994. Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 1986.
• Reid, Bill, and Robert Bringhurst. The Raven Steals the Light. University of Washington Press, 2003.
• Garfield, Viola E., and Linn A. Forrest. Wolf and the Raven : Totem Poles of Southeastern Alaska. University of Washington Press, 1961.
• “The Strange Stories the Totem Pole Tells.” New York Times. 26 September 1909. (Full article available online.)
• Stewart, Hilary. Looking at Totem Poles. University of Washington Press, 1993.
• Keithahn, Edward L. Monuments In Cedar. 1945. (Full text available online.)

Images

The four images of the Raven pole in Wrangell, Alaska, come from a variety of sources.

1. The first photograph comes from the 1909 New York Times article, which is available online. View article at NYTimes.com (PDF)
2. The second photograph, taken by Edward L. Keithahn, comes from his 1945 Monuments In Cedar (page 90). All of Keithahn’s photographs from the books are available online with the full text. View page at Alaskool.org | View image file (JPG)
3. The third photograph was taken by Flickr user “brewbrooks” during his August 2007 vacation to Alaska. He has graciously made these photographs available under a Creative Commons license. View photo at Flickr
4. The line drawing of the pole comes from Hillary Stewart’s 1993 Looking at Totem Poles. View sketch at Google Books

When Red Prophet begins, we find ourselves cast back in time, prior to the events of Seventh Son, as we meet the character who will become the Shining Man in Alvin’s vision, Tenskwa-Tawa. Tenskwa-Tawa is an actual historical figure, also known as “The Prophet” or “The Shawnee Prophet.” He was the brother of the famous Shawnee warrior Ta-Kumsaw (Tecumseh), and he founded the Native American settlement called “Prophetstown” at the juncture of the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers in Ohio territory (modern-day Indiana). This is where the so-called Battle of Tippecanoe took place in 1811, when troops led by William Henry Harrison, future President of the United States, burned Prophetstown to the ground in a bloody victory that earned him the nickname “Old Tippecanoe.”

As Card weaves the story of Alvin Maker into these historical events, Alvin learns from the Indians Tenskwa-Tawa and Ta-Kumsaw  that his knacks are not some kind of personal prowess, but instead derive from the powers of the living land itself. When the Europeans practice their knacks in ignorance of this fact, they are stumbling in the dark, not even aware of what they are doing. This makes the Europeans and their knacks contemptible in the eyes of someone like Ta-Kumsaw, who lives his life in full awareness of the natural order:

These White men with their weak little knacks. These White men with their hexes and their wardings. Didn’t they know their hexes only fended off unnatural things? If a thief comes, knowing he does wrong, then a good strong fending hex makes his fear grow till he cries out and runs away. But the Red man never is a thief. […] To the Red man a knack is like a fly, buzz buzz buzz. Far above this fly, the power of the living land is a hundred hawks, watching, circling. (Chapter 2)

With the help of Ta-Kumsaw, Alvin is able to deepen his understanding of his own powers, going far beyond the tricks he had learned to do with his knacks. As a result, Alvin is able to perceive the greensong and feel a connection with the land itself, much as Ta-Kumsaw and the Prophet are able to do.

At a certain point in the novel, Ta-Kumsaw and Alvin must make their way on foot to Fort Detroit, 200 miles, which Ta-Kumsaw planned to travel in a single day. How could that be possible? The Indians are able to travel that distance by calling on the power of the land itself:

The Red man called on the strength of the land to help him. The ground pushed back against his feet, adding to his strength. The bushes parted, making paths, space appeared where there was no space. […] Ta-Kumsaw’s hunger to arrive at Fort Detroit was so strong that the land answered by feeding him, giving him strength. (Chapter 11)

These are powers which Ta-Kumsaw has known all his life, but he did not expect that Alvin would be able to keep up with him, and he planned to carry the boy. Instead, much to Ta-Kumsaw’s surprise, Alvin was able to hear the greensong of the land and keep up with Ta-Kumsaw, pace for pace, in their 200-mile journey. Prior to this journey, Alvin did not know that he had this power, this connection to the land. It is the first of many lessons that he will learn in his journeys with Ta-Kumsaw.

These magical powers which Ta-Kumsaw and the Shawnees use are part of the natural order; they are what you could call perfectly natural powers, with nothing supernatural about them at all. To the White men, however, the Indians’ powers appear to be supernatural simply because the White men’s magic is itself an act against nature, something that stands outside the natural order and violates the limitations that keep that ecology in balance. Indeed, the entirety of White civilization is seen as an assault on the natural order of things, and Ta-Kumsaw and his brother Tenskwa-Tawa are struggling to drive the White men from the land before it is utterly destroyed:

Hack and cut and chop and burn, that was the White man’s way. Take from the forest, take from the land, take from the river, but put nothing back. The White man killed animals he didn’t need, animals that did him no harm; yet if a bear woke hungry in the winter and took so much as a single young pig, the White man hunted him down and killed him in revenge. He never felt the balance of the land at all. (Chapter 2)

The ecology of magic turns out to be about the ecology of nature itself, and the balance of the living ecosystem. When Alvin leaves Ta-Kumsaw and returns to his family’s home at the end of the novel, he still hears the greensong around him:

At night in his own bed, Alvin listened to the distant greensong, still warm and beautiful, still bright and hopeful, even though the forest was getting so sparse, even though the future was so dim. (Chapter 19)

Of course, this is just the end of Book 2 in what will be a seven-book series, with much opportunity still for Alvin to struggle towards a brighter future, even after the tragedy at Tippecanoe.

The themes of magic and environmentalism are beautifully entwined in this book, providing a new dimension to the ethical moralism of Alvin’s vow in Seventh Son. Alvin had recognized that there were moral limits which limited his magical knacks, but in Red Prophet he begins to learn how those magical powers are part of a larger natural order which depends not just on individual righteousness but on the principle of balance, and the limitations which are needed to sustain that balance. In my next article, I’ll turn to the third magical stream which flows through Card’s imaginary America — African magic — to see what it has to teach us about magical powers, and about their limits.

References

• Card, Orson Scott. Red Prophet. New York: Tor Books, 1988.