Discerning Connections, Revising the Master Narrative, and Interrogating Identity in Louis Owens's The Sharpest Sight

Abstract

Non-Native and Native scholars of Native American literature, many of the latter themselves contributors to the growing body of that literature, have consistently recognized the importance of stories and storytelling. For instance, James Ruppert takes one of Leslie Marmon Silko's comments on the power of storytelling to bring people together across time, space, and cultures as epigraph and point of departure for his introduction to Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction.' Anishinaabe writer and scholar Kimberly Blaeser opens Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition by stressing the importance of stories and storytelling to Vizenor and his people.2 Vizenor himself begins The People Named the Chippewa by recounting a storytelling session in which are told Anishinaabe stories of the trickster Naanabozho and the first earth's creation.' This gambit, shifting the frame and offering an alternative way of seeing, is part of his longstanding effort to educate his audience about Native peoples and their inventions by the dominant society. The recognition and emphasis in their works indicate that Vizenor, his contemporary Native American writers, and many of their predecessors know and have known that telling stories both orally and with and in writing can be an extremely powerful instrument with which to counteract the hegemonic, self-serving impulses of the dominant society.