Dawn soon came to be viewed as the trio that established the renaissance of Native American literature, one of the most notable developments in the recent history of the American novel. Like Welch, Silko shows the poverty, drinking, violence, and heartache endemic on many reservations. Like Momaday, she creates a mixed-blood protagonist psychologically and emotionally wounded by his combat experience in World War II. Restored to sanity by native stories and ceremonies, Tayo, the combat veteran, realizes that 'he was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.'
Referring to Silko's use of native tradition to restore Tayo to harmony, Italian critic Laura Coltelli says: 'Myth and reality have a skillfully constructed interdependence and they interact in Silko's narrative very much in the same way as the oral transmission and the written act of storytelling: they form complementary, dynamic, dialogical connections which are a meeting ground for past and present, oral performance and fiction strategies, Western [European] aesthetics and Native mythopoesis, engaging the reader and the critic in a new way of reading and listening.'
Starting in the late 1970s, many new authors contributed to the -456- Native American Renaissance inaugurated by Momaday and sustained by Welch and Silko. Gerald Vizenor's Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978) employs irony in a self-reflexive novel that Paula Gunn Allen has said is 'one of the more adventurous excursions of modern Indian fiction writers into bicultural prose,' an assessment that applies as well to her own novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983). The new writers also include a pair whose novels have been highly praised by reviewers and critics and who happen to be husband and wife: Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich. Both create portraits of twentieth-century Native Americans, Dorris in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), Erdrich in Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and Tracks (1988). To these achievements have been added more works by the initiators of the renaissance. Silko has published a collection of stories and poems titled Storyteller (1981), and Momaday a second novel, The Ancient Child (1989). But the most remarkable of the first-rate Native American novels of the I98os is James Welch's Fools Crow (1986).
The story of a band of Blackfeet Indians in 1870, Fools Crow recounts the exploits of eighteen-year-old White Man's Dog as he joins a war party, receives his new name (Fools Crow), marries, and tries to help his people when they encounter the whites and are decimated by a smallpox epidemic. Welch's historical novel gives us a rich portrait of Native American life on the eve of its devastation by the encroaching Euro-American civilization. Moreover, Fools Crow has visions in which animals speak to him, and so skillfully does Welch weave these episodes into the narrative that the effect surpasses the achievement of Latin American 'magic realism,' a novelistic form of surrealism. Welch's 'magic realism' brings us so much closer to understanding Native American culture that his characters seem neither wild nor noble savages but believable human beings. In its fusion of the novel and Native American myth, Fools Crow satisfies the desire for a full, entertaining, and substantial narrative.
Like Native Americans and Chicanos in the late 1960s, women began expressing their concerns in the novel. In the process, they found many precursors. Feminists rediscovered Western women novelists such as California's Gertrude Atherton, Texas's Dorothy Scarborough, Idaho's Carol Ryrie Brink, Montana's Dorothy Johnson, Minnesota's Meridel Le Sueur, Nebraska's Mari Sandoz, Utah's Vir-457- Vir, Colorado's Jean Stafford, and Iowa's Ruth Suckow. Long ignored or marginalized, these authors faced formidable obstacles in their efforts to create a women's fiction, obstacles that are movingly described in Tillie Olsen's Silences (1978), a collection of essays and lectures. Olsen's own novel, Yonnondio (1974), stands as a classic example of the tradition she describes.
Begun in 1932, the novel could not be completed because Olsen lacked the necessary time and support. In the 1970s she chose to publish the unfinished manuscript from the thirties 'to tell what might have been, and never will be now.' Told from a woman's point of view, Yonnondio depicts Western life during the Great Depression; and along with Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and Frederick Manfred's The Golden Bowl, it helps convey the raw emotion of that era's human misery. Olsen's critique of capitalism in the American West also bears some resemblance to the earlier social protest novels of Upton Sinclair, Robert Cantwell, and James Stevens.
Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1981) is not a protest novel, but it ranks among the best works of contemporary women's fiction. The novel requires a new way of reading and listening, for it reshapes American literary tradition by presenting a female protagonist, Ruth, who lights out for the territory with the same autonomy and selfreliance usually reserved for male characters such as Cooper's Natty Bumppo, Twain's Huck Finn, and the eponymous hero of Jack Schaefer's Shane (1949). Not only does Housekeeping give to a woman the heroic role, but it also sustains a poetic lyricism within the novel's prose format, as though Emily Dickinson had been reborn a north Idaho novelist. With the kind of self-reliant spirit advocated by Dickinson and Emerson, Robinson's Ruth achieves an authentic selfhood but at the same time binds herself, in love, to her aunt Sylvie.
After the two women attempt to burn their family's home, they begin a life of riding the rails as transients. 'The frontier in this contemporary novel is not,' Martha Ravits says, 'a geographic or historic construct but the urge to move beyond conventional social patterns, beyond the dichotomy of urban and rural experience, beyond domestic concerns and physical boundaries into metaphysics.' Viewed from the metaphysics to which Housekeeping transports us, -458- buildings and social conventions seem less important than relationships forged from love.
Of great importance to many Westerners is wilderness, and efforts to save the remaining wilderness gave rise to a new form of protest in the West of the 1970s: environmental activism. Environmentalists found a spokesman in Edward Abbey. He had written several Western novels at the start of his career — Jonathan Troy (1954) and The Brave Cowboy (1956) — but by the early 1970s he was best known for Desert Solitaire (1968), usually classified as nature writing. Abbey scholar Ann Ronald has argued, however, that 'in many ways Desert Solitaire is more a work of fiction than of nonfiction'; and she maintains that Abbey designed each of his major books 'not like a romantic Western but like a formal romance.'
However classified, Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) changed the course of Western American history. A 'mock-heroic' late twentieth-century picaresque tale that borrows some elements from the popular Western, The Monkey Wrench Gang recounts the exploits of four characters: Doc Sarvis, an Albuquerque surgeon; Bonnie Abbzug, his receptionist; Seldom Seen Smith, a jack Mormon river-runner; and George Washington Hayduke, an ex-Green Beret. Uniting to stop the destruction of the Western environment, this unlikely quartet uses ecotage, the sabotage of any machine that damages ecology. The four ecological anarchists do nothing that would endanger human life, but they use any other form of outlawry that will help them save the natural world. Often hilarious, sometimes ironic, occasionally philosophic, The Monkey Wrench Gang divided opinion among those in the West's environmental groups and inspired a new movement that calls itself Earth First!
Abbey and other nature writers would continue to warn about imminent ecocide, and Abbey gave The Monkey Wrench Gang a sequel: Hayduke Lives (1989). Despite its flaws, which are 'those of exuberance,' The Monkey Wrench Gang remains the classic environmental protection novel — in Ronald's words, 'a rollicking testimony to non-violent violence.' Most other Western novelists have also been outspoken in opposing the destruction of the environment, and some of them have been especially ingenious in imagining alternatives to our present ecocidal course, most notably Ernest Callen-459- Ernest Callen- with Ecotopia (1976) and Ursula Le Guin with Always Coming Home (1984).
While Abbey and other novelists imagined alternatives to our ruinous lifestyle, Larry McMurtry focused on the Western myth's destructive effects on personal relationships. Acclaimed for his early novels — Horseman, Pass By (1961), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), and The Last Picture Show (1966) — McMurtry expressed his ambivalence about rural and small-town Texas, hating its crudity, violence, and bigotry, wistfully eulogizing the free spirit and self-reliance of the cowboys who had been crude, violent, and bigoted. With Moving On (1970), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972), and Terms of
