the summer of 1890. A watershed date in Western history, 1890 marked not only the official closing of the frontier but also what Stegner has said, in his 'Wilderness Letter,' was the beginning of a decline in American optimism and idealism. In short, the forces at war within Lyman Ward's psyche are the same ones battling within the minds of most other Americans, especially those in the West.
Like Western American literature in general, as Forrest Robinson -452- has described it, Angle of Repose is 'characteristically American in its often complex, if frequently indirect, negotiations of difficult questions of value.' Recognized as a classic novel of the West and a masterpiece of American fiction, Angle of Repose appeared during the height of the Vietnam War. Many Westerners saw in that war parallels with our westering experience, marked as it was by our nearly genocidal treatment of Native Americans and by our oppression and exploitation of minorities and women, all of which are directly or indirectly present in Stegner's benchmark novel.
By the early 1970s, women and minorities increasingly spoke for themselves. Although Mexican Americans have a literary tradition that goes back to the colonial era, the first Chicano novel to gain much attention from Anglos — José Antonio Villarreal's Pocho — did not appear until 1959. Over the next two decades other writers helped to create a new subgenre: the Chicano novel. Portraits of migrant farmworkers or of barrio residents appear in Floyd Salas's Tattoo the Wicked Cross (1967), Richard Vasquez's Chicano (1969), Raymond Barrio's The Plum Plum Pickers (1969), and Tomás Rivera's '…y no se lo tragó la tierra' (1971).
Sometimes militant in espousing the cause of la Raza ('the people'), the Chicano novel helped inform Anglos about Mexican American culture at the same time that it instilled pride in and raised the consciousness of Chicanos. Rudolfo A. Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima (1972) does all that and more, and its use of some Spanish words and of narrative passages derived from Chicano cuentos and corridos shows readers the need for cultural relativism. Arturo Islas's The Rain God (1984) also uses the techniques employed by Anaya; and both novelists probe the tensions and divisions within the Mexican American family. Narrated from a woman's point of view, Lucha Corpi's Delia's Song (1989) tells the story of a Chicana who has to struggle against both her male-dominated family and the dominant Anglo culture in order to create her own identity.
Like Chicanos, Native Americans have had to struggle against an Anglo culture that tried to deny them a separate sense of identity. They have long been among those most alienated by modern urban life; nevertheless, extreme poverty and anomie have given members of many tribes no choice but to leave reservations for the cities. Parts of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn (1968, Pulitzer Prize) -453- take place in a Los Angeles that is representative of most urban centers. Not only Native Americans suffer from isolation in such an environment: one of Momaday's Euro-American characters 'had been in Los Angeles four years, and in all that time she had not talked to anyone…. No one knew what she thought or felt or who she was.' Although she meets Abel, the Indian protagonist, and their friendship seems to promise an end to their isolation, a brutal beating by a policeman sends Abel back to the Indian society from which he was outcast.
In his summary of House Made of Dawn, Momaday identifies its sociological and psychological levels of meaning:
The novel is about an Indian who returns from World War II and finds that he cannot recover his tribal identity; nor can he escape the cultural context in which he grew up. He is torn, as they say, between two worlds, neither of which he can enter and be a whole man. The story is that of his struggle to survive on the horns of a real and tragic dilemma in contemporary society.
The Indian world of Abel's childhood provides some of the other levels of meaning. A circular structure, reflective of the Native American's sense of time as cyclical, encloses the narrative units arranged in Euro-American linear chronology; and Indian mythology and ceremony influence Abel and other characters. Like other literary Western novels, House Made of Dawn uses irony to shape a new perception of reality. Momaday's irony, however, surpasses that of his contemporaries, for he creates a character who preaches an ironic sermon that includes verbatim passages from The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Momaday's moving account of the beliefs of his Kiowa ancestors.
Added to that complex self-reference is an even more provocative passage on language:
In the white man's world, language, too — and the way in which the white man thinks of it — has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions…. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in upon him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language — for the Word itself — as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word. -454-
Can we recapture the sacred power of language? Momaday offers no simple solution, offers instead in a variety of genres an oeuvre that weaves strands from the oral tradition of his ancestors into the fabric of contemporary literature. Although Momaday is not the first Native American novelist — precursors include Mourning Dove (Humishu-ma), John Joseph Mathews, and D'Arcy McNickle — House Made of Dawn certainly inspired the Native American Renaissance.
In 1970s novels about Native Americans, alternatives to the miseries of reservation life and urban alienation seem possible, if at all, only after great suffering. Of Anglos who wrote about Native Americans after House Made of Dawn, historical novelists Oakley Hall and Douglas C. Jones treated them sympathetically. Dee Brown had used the Native Americans' own words in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), his nonfiction account of the Old West's Indian wars; but his novel Creek Mary's Blood (1980) is not as successful at presenting the Native American point of view. Thomas Sanchez's Rabbit Boss (1973) shows the weaknesses of the Washo Indians and thereby, according to Sanford E. Marovitz, 'implies that with similar myopia America on the whole has abandoned its heritage and promise.' Frederick Manfred delighted readers with The Manly-Hearted Woman (1975), a hilarious mock epic that is, in Robert C. Wright's words, 'essentially religious in tone,' providing 'a kind of bible explaining the community life and mystical religion of the Indians.'
Foremost among contemporary Anglo interpreters of Native American life is Tony Hillerman, whose detective novels offer more than popular conventions. Born in Oklahoma, Hillerman moved to New Mexico in 1952 and wrote his first Navajo police procedural novel, The Blessing Way, in 1970. He has since written almost a dozen more detective novels, all with Navajos as protagonists. Hillerman's early reading of Arthur W. Upfield's Australian detective stories undoubtedly heightened his sensitivity to cultural differences, a sensitivity reflected in his fictional treatment of Native American cultures. In his latest novels — A Thief of Time (1988), Talking God (1989), and Coyote Waits (1990) — Hillerman has focused increasingly on the influence of the past. Of the rich texture of his recent novels, Fred Erisman says: 'Weaving myths of the past and problems of the present into police procedural novels, he dramatizes the intri-455- cate intermingling of cultures that shapes the region's life.' In enriching the mystery novel beyond the popular formula, many other contemporary Western novelists have joined Hillerman. Eminent among these are James Crumley, Ridley Pearson, and M. K. Wren (Martha Kay Renfroe).
Among 1970s novels by Native Americans, James Wetch's masterpiece, Winter in the Blood (1973), has comic elements but it also depicts Montana's reservation life with its drinking, fighting, death, pain of loss, and solitude. Although it deals with experiences so bleak and painful, 'Winter in the Blood challenges us,' Stephen Tatum says, 'to recognize how experience is defined, like language, as a system of relations of difference, and to recognize that the ambiguities, paradoxes, and contradictions inherent in both desire and language undo the promise of closure and the potential solace of transparent, self-evident, and final meanings.'
When Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) appeared four years after Winter in the Blood, those two novels along with Momaday's House Made of
