Transcripts

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SPEAKER 1: When you write your works, I notice that there is a shifting perspective inside of them, especially with your latest novel, Pushing the Bear, you write from the viewpoint of marital at one point, and then you write from the perspective of a white soldier, and then you write from another person's perspective. It's not just necessarily a single viewer describing the action. How did you come to use that shifting perspective technique.

SPEAKER 2: Well, I think when you tell the story of a whole nation, it takes many voices because we see from many different viewpoints. And to get that fullness, that many dimensional stance that I wanted in the book, because we do never really agree about anything. I mean, truth in the Native American perspective, everybody goes someplace, for instance, a powwow. Everybody comes home, you sit around the table, and everybody tells their version of the powwow. And in those movable opinions, that variable feast is actually the truth of what happened on many different levels, many different perspectives.

And as I wrote Pushing the Bear, which is the story of the forced removal of the Cherokee in 1838 to 1839 from the Southeast to Oklahoma, which was Indian territory at the time, it seemed to resist a single narrator. It was interesting that when I began the book, there seemed to be great spaces of silence because you don't really know what happened so long ago, and it happened in Cherokee. And how do you reconstruct in modern English what happened?

But after that initial silence, there was all this noise, all these voices not agreeing, fussing at one another sometimes. It was this way. No, it was that. And so to give each one of them a time to speak seemed to me, over the years as I worked on this book, the way that it should go. Finally a book dictates to you how it will be written.

There were several history books about the Trail of Tears, George Foreman, John Ely, more than just those, but they always seemed to deal a lot with the preliminary happenings before the trail and then after the people had reached Indian territory. And there was always a sentence that said, and they walked 900 miles. And I always wanted to say, whoa, what was that really like? To me, that's the whole story. And it was skimmed over by historian after historian.

And when I did my research, there were very few voices that I found. Remember, I mentioned the silence. It just was not written about. In fact, people in Oklahoma said, don't write about it because it was very sad. And you recreate when you write, you bring it back to life. And they did not want that to happen. And I would put the book away. But then after a while, I would begin to hear those voices again, not ever with my ear, but in my imagination. And I would get it out and add another voice.

SPEAKER 1: Were there times where it was particularly emotional, even painful, to write about the Trail of Tears?

SPEAKER 2: Well, I always felt the heaviness of it. From my very earliest research, the first thing I did was go back to New Echota, Georgia, which was the old Cherokee capital. They have a little museum built. And I stood there looking at the buttons and the shards and things that were left behind when the people left. And that's the first time I felt the heaviness.

And there are places in the book where the mother and baby die, the crossing of the Mississippi, when the ancestors come and hold the rafts steady between the ice chunks in the river that I had to read several times before I could read it in public without my voice cracking from the very sadness of it. And I just I hated a book that went on one heavy step after another. And I tried to find some funny happenings and I really could not. It's a very heavy book.

SPEAKER 1: Do you yourself have any ancestors who were on the Trail of Tears?

SPEAKER 2: My great grandfather was born in 1843, in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. I know nothing before that. So the trail ended in 1839 and he was born about four years later. So I assume that his parents crossed on the trail, although there were other trails. There was also a trail by water earlier. Well, even 10 years before this final march, the government had tried to get people to volunteer to move, and some of them did. All I know is that he was a full blood Cherokee and they got to Oklahoma by walking the trail.

SPEAKER 1: For a lot of people, writing about Native American history is filled with tragedy. Are there other elements that you think that people should be paying attention to, though, that there are also some other aspects, perhaps the humor or the singing, the storytelling?

SPEAKER 2: I think that's the new frontier in Native American writing. After all the grief and the loss, and the anger, and the hurt is out, I think, and I already see a little of this coming, a more positive outlook as success comes through writing, through education, I guess even through casino money.

I know I just finished another collection of short stories, and the last story in it is called America's First Parade. That was a title that came to me during the writing of Pushing the Bear. That was a parade of 13,000 people across five or six states, whatever.

And I was going to write again about a woman, a contemporary woman in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, thinking of the different aspects of the trail and America's First Parade looking at it over 150 years later. And she has a son and he gets married. And she goes to the wedding and she sees they have a backyard wedding and there's ribbons hanging in a tree and Cherokee ceremony. And there is a positiveness.

And all of a sudden, it's like she is awake from her bitterness and from her regret, and from her anger and she sees that people, especially the new generation, are bringing together, in very positive ways, old Indian ceremonies. And there were Cherokee hymns sung at the wedding and the flute music. And she feels this new awakening of meaning.