Transcripts

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SPEAKER 1: You were born in a town called Kansas City, Missouri. What was that like?

SPEAKER 2: I don't know, it was Middle America, I guess. Like it would be anywhere, I don't remember anything specific other than an ordinary neighborhood. My father worked for the stockyards.

SPEAKER 1: What about your mother?

SPEAKER 2: She was a housewife, as women were in those days. Her heritage was German and English, whereas my father was Cherokee. And they made a home and we had quite an ordinary life. And often, when I write, it is from that ordinariness of Middle America.

SPEAKER 1: When did you reach the point that you decided that you would be an author?

SPEAKER 2: I remember once I had a little book and I wrote in it along the margins, and I remember my mother telling me not to, but I always had a need for words. And I did not speak a lot, but it was the written word. As I would write, I just felt a foundation. I felt something solid.

And the written word was very important to me. It formed something that I needed in some way.

SPEAKER 1: Did you have anyone who inspired your writing style?

SPEAKER 2: No, I would say it was just the opposite. I don't remember reading much of anything as I was growing up. My Indian grandmother was illiterate. There was not a great love of books. There was kind of a silence, I would say, about many things, many intellectual things-- family history. And I wanted to know things. And I guess by writing, I felt that was one way to know things, to discover things, to find out things.

SPEAKER 1: Coming from a mixed background, was it very difficult to feel in touch with your heritage? Did the two cultures conflict in your household?

SPEAKER 2: Yes, very definitely. My mother was very organized and my father was not so much that way. But there was a freedom about him that I admired very much. And there was conflict because of these two different lifestyles. And even within the Native American heritage, it was also very confusing for a while because I would go to school and we would make teepees and feather bonnets on Thanksgiving.

And then when we went down to see my father's Cherokee people, there were not feather headdresses or teepees or Buffalo. And I thought, how can these two very different kinds of people be Indian? And of course, the stereotypical or the Plains Indians, which is really the normal Indian, I would say, was not what I saw at all in my Cherokee heritage, which is more sedentary. My grandmother had some pigs in a row of corn. Plains Indians don't do that at all.

And so I had to not only put the White and the Indian fragment together, but the fragments within the Indian heritage also was more complicated, I think, than I realized. So I still feel that division and feel that I walk in both worlds within the Indian tradition and then both worlds, you know, within the Indian and White.

SPEAKER 1: Has being a professor at a college enabled you to share your culture or do you feel sometimes challenged by what other people expect you to be?

SPEAKER 2: That's a good question. And the answer actually is both. First of all, it's easy because I teach Native American literature. The students come into class to hear that very subject. But then on the other hand, there are expectations of what Indians should be. And it's very different not only when I share my life, but when we get into the literature.

There is sort of a romantic idea of what the Native Americans should be like. And then we open up the books "House Made of Dawn," "Winter in the Blood, "Ceremony," "Love Medicine," and the others, and there are the problems of alcoholism and purposelessness and poverty, and rebuilding again a world that once was and no longer is and cannot really be rebuilt. And there's a hopelessness in a lot of the literature and a struggling to reconnect with ceremony. And the students often think, this isn't what I expected.

I just finished a new book called "The Only Piece of Furniture in the House," which is entirely different from anything I've done. It was about a young girl in Texas who has a close relationship to her mother and then, through marriage, has to leave her mother. And her mother had been the only piece of furniture in the house and now she faces emptiness and she has to rebuild again. I just felt one of those old themes of mine emerge in which you make something from nothing.

SPEAKER 1: A lot of your poems carry a lot of very simple, yet powerful imagery. Where do a lot of your inspirations for these images come from?

SPEAKER 2: Some of them are internal. I think even during the night, we work and I wake up sometimes in the morning with an image or a thought or an emotion or something that I want to start from. Other times, it is from out coming in. For instance, in my travels across the prairie, many years working for the State Arts Council of Oklahoma and even these seven years up here in Minnesota, once in a while I just have to get in the car and drive because images and ideas come to me that would not otherwise if I just stayed in the room. Often, it comes from reading.

I think literature is a long conversation. If you want to write, you have to read. People that I talk to. The crow I just heard out there. Things I hear on the news. There's a lot of stimulus from many different sources.