, Research Paper
LC: In The Third Woman, you have written, ‘It is my greatest
but probably futile hope that someday those of us who are ethnic minorities will not be
segregated in the literature of America." Will you elaborate on that?
ROSE: Well, anywhere in America, if you take a university-level course
on American history or American literature, particularly in literature and the arts, it
only has the literature and the arts that are produced by Americans of European heritage,
even then largely Northern European. We are left out of the books. Black people are left
out; brown people are left out; Indian people are left out. So you get the impression,
going through the American education system, that the only people here are white people.
It’s not just a cultural matter, but it’s a political matter. There is a reason for a
society to be that way, that has the literary capacity and the technological capacity that
America has; there’s no excuse for the people being so blind, for the people to be wearing
a blindfold that way. The only possible reason it could happen is because it’s not an
accident; that it’s planned. Somebody is benefiting by having Americans ignorant about
what non-European Americans are doing and what they have done; what European Americans
have done to them. Somebody is benefiting by keeping people ignorant.
LC: Describing one of your trips, from California to Arizona, you
write that "a half-breed goes from one half-home to the other." Could you talk
on your "half-breed" identity?
ROSE: My father is a full-blood Hopi from Arizona. He lives on the
reservation. My mother is mostly Scots and Irish, but also Miwok, which is an Indian tribe
from the area near Yosemite National Park here in California. I’ve always thought in terms
of being a half-breed because that is the way that both sides of the family treated me.
The white part of the family wanted nothing to do, not only with me, but they were even
angry that at one point my mother married a man who was Welsh. Even being Welsh was too
exotic for their taste.
The Hopi side of my family is more sympathetic to my situation, but our lineage is
through the mother, and because of that, having a Hopi father means that I have no real
legitimate place in Hopi society, I am someone who is from that society in a biological
sense, in what I like to think is a spiritual sense, and certainly in an emotional sense,
but culturally I would have to say I’m pretty urbanized: an urban, Pan-Indian kind of
person. I grew up with Indian people from all over the country, all different tribes. Some
of them had lived on reservations and some of them had spent their whole lives in the
city. I was born in Oakland, which is of course a big city. So there was always the sense
of not really being connected enough to any one group. A lot of Indian writers have
written about that. I think in fact it was James Welch who put it in one of his novels; at
one point the protagonist is asked if being a half-breed meant that he had special
insights and special privilege into both groups, and in fact to paraphrase his answer, he
said what it actually means is you don’t have enough of either group. I can understand
that; I know what he means.
LC: Is your most recent book, The Halfbreed Chronicles and Other
Poems, a new image of the "half-breed"?
ROSE: In The Halfbreed Chronicles I come to terms with that
halfbreededness I was talking about earlier. Half-breed is not just a biological thing.
it’s not just a matter of having one parent from one race and the other parent from
another race, or culture, or religion, or anything of that nature. But rather it’s a
condition of history, a condition of context, a condition of circumstance. It’s a
political fact. it’s a situation that people who would not normally be thought of as
half-breed in a biological sense, might be thought of this way in another sense. For
example, some poems that are in The Halfbreed Chronicles are addressed to people
like Robert Oppenheimer. Nobody would ever look at him in a racial sense as a half-breed
person, yet at the same time he was in a context and at a time, and made choices in his
life, that for me apply the metaphor of half-breed to him. And when people hear the poems
from The Halfbreed Chronicles, very often people of all races and of all
backgrounds, come up to me afterward and say that they can identify with The Halfbreed
Chronicles. To me that means it worked, because that’s the intention. We are in fact
all half-breed in this world today.
LC: What Happened When the Hopi Hit New York is
a kind of journal of your trips to various states. What’s the "Indian
invisibility" you talk about?
ROSE: There are two ways to look at that. One way is the invisibility
that is imposed on Indian people, and that gets back to talking about the American system
of education, in which Indians are deliberately made invisible, in which people can grow
up in an area surrounded by Indian people who have maintained their culture, who still
practice their religion, who live on federally administrated reservation land, and the
non-Indians do not know it. That non-Indian people there can be unaware of that is one
form of invisibility. Another form of invisibility is that which is self-imposed by the
Indian person: in a context of conflict especially, very often in a confrontational or in
an uncomfortable situation, an Indian will turn into a potted plant, if you know what I
mean. An Indian person may withdraw and become part of the furniture or part of the wall.
That’s also another form of invisibility. It’s protective coloration, like camouflage.
It’s a survival trait.
LC: Could you talk about your work as an anthropologist?
ROSE: I told Joe Bruchac when he was asking the same question about
that in another interview–I told him I was a spy. He thought I was kidding and he
repeated the question, and I repeated, "I am a spy." He laughed and figured,
okay, that’s all he was going to get. But I don’t think he realizes to this day that I
literally meant, I am a spy. But not in any cloak-and-dagger kind of way; I’m not out to
hurt anthropologists. But the fact is that the only academic department at Berkeley that
would deal with my dissertation, which involves Indian literature, is the anthropology
department. Comparative literature didn’t want to deal with it; the English department
didn’t want to deal with it, in fact the English department told me that American
Indian literature was not part of American literature and therefore did not fit into their
department.
LC: You talked in the interview with Carol Hunter about your struggle
to protect the burial grounds. You said that you acted as a kind of mediator between AIM
[American Indian Movement] and the archaeologists, who didn’t accept your training as an
anthropologist as valid, since you aligned yourself with AIM.
ROSE: They didn’t really believe that an Indian person would have
studied archaeology. They didn’t take seriously the fact that I had actually trained in
it. I spent five years doing that kind of work, partly to experiment with the idea that if
Indian people go into it maybe there will be some control. If, for example, you found a
human burial in an archaeological site, if there were an Indian archaeologist there it
would be handled differently. People wouldn’t just bring up the remains, and so on. It
didn’t work; I realized after being there for years that archaeologists are just as
capable of lying to Indian people as anyone else. There were some very ugly situations
where archaeologists were calling up Indian activists and making threats on their lives at
one point, in the Bay area, in San Francisco, in Marin County, in particular. When I talk
about protecting the burial grounds, it is both a literal fact and a metaphor. The
metaphor is to protect Indian people through, in some instances, trying to neutralize the
very weapons that are being used against Indians, by mastering those weapons and then in a
sense breaking them from within. it is also a literal fact in the poem by that name,
"Protecting the Burial Grounds." That poem was in fact written in front of a
bulldozer, on top of an Indian cemetery, where we were sitting to prevent the bulldozer
from just going through and ripping up the Indian graves. The mayor of San Jose, which is
the city this occurred in, actually called out a swAT team, which is the Special Weapons
and Tactical squad, the people with the big guns, who wear the army-type uniforms and are
associated with the city police departments. They all came out and they had been told that
there was an Indian riot, that Aim was rioting out there in the cemetery. So they came
with their m i 6s or ml 5 s or whatever, those big rifles-they came nmning out past where
we were. They were looking for the riot. We were the riot and we were just sitting there.
So then finally they left, and we succeeded. We did manage to save that burial ground. It
was in fact preserved.
LC: Does it happen very often?
ROSE: Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Unfortunately we usually don’t find
out that a burial ground has been desecrated until after the fact, because developers know
that if the Indian people are in an area, and non-Indian people who sympathize with these
concerns know that a burial ground is to be dug up or something like that, they will
protest. So they go in, in the middle of the night, and the next morning everybody gets up
and it’s already done.
LC: Speaking about the "system," graduate schools, academia,
do you feel that "there is a line which cultures do not cross," and that every
day "you are bumping into that line," as you once said? Is there any way to
bridge that gap? Can you see the mixed-blood as a mediator between two cultures?
ROSE: I think there is a way. Certainly individuals can cross the
line, or can live on the line. I guess what happens is they live on the line, rather than
trying to cross from one into another culture territory. When I said that, I was feeling
betrayed because of friendships that I had for many years with a number of non-Indian
people; all of a sudden the fact of my being Indian became too much for them to bear, and
suddenly it just became a big issue with them. And similarly with Arthur, my husband, who
is Japanese-American, same thing. His being Japanese-American suddenly became too much for
them and they began acting in a racist way toward us, and we thought they were our
friends. And it happened that that quotation was about that time, and we were both feeling
pretty bitter about what had happened at that point. Sometimes I do feel pretty
pessimistic about it like that, but I also think that even though nobody can ever
completely cross over into another person’s culture, no matter how big a barrier there
seems to be or how different the cultures seem to be, there is a way that some people can
transcend that, just as human beings–as long as they don’t try to ignore the fact of the
culture, as long as they respect the fact that those cultures are different and that
they’re there and that they’re important, that they are important parts of the identities
of both those people, no matter how different they are. If they can meet on that ground,
then I think there is a way to cross that barrier.
LC: You are a poet and an accomplished painter as well. Is there a
kind of interrelated technique between the two media that you use in your poetry and in
your painting?
ROSE: It feels the same doing them. It feels the same way
inside—to do a painting as to write a poem. It feels like the same impulse. The main
difference is, and I don’t know how to explain this, the main difference is that with
poetry I feel like I am tough enough to take the criticism, but if someone doesn’t like my
paintings, I just fall to pieces. I’m more professional about poetry, and less so about
the paintings I think.
LC: American Indian writers and publishing–you have written an
article on that and about the difficulty in locating Native American literature in
bookshops, which, by the way, is also my own frustrating experience. It’s shelved under
"Anthropology," and as you said this segregation is not only philosophical but
economic, not to say political. Quoting Vine Deloria, as you did in the Coyote Was Here
interview, "the fact is that the interest in American Indians is a fad that comes
around every twenty years." Actually, in 1969, Momaday’s House Made of Dawn won
the Pulitzer Prize. In 1985, Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich, won the National
Book Critic’s Circle Award–and deservedly so. Of course, in between, scholars and writers
have been recipients of awards and fellowships, but I am just speaking about awards which
can appeal to a more general and wider audience. Can you see any significant, important
change having taken place in the past few years?
ROSE: As you can see, House Made of Dawn and Love Medicine are
approximately twenty years apart. The way a lot of us are looking at it now, Louise has it
now, we have to wait another twenty years. And she deserves it; both Scott Momaday and
Louise Erdrich certainly are accomplished writers who deserve it. But so is Leslie Silko,
so is James Welch, but their timing was wrong. They came in between fads.
LC: Considering the importance of women in many Indian societies, is
feminism synonymous with heritage for American Indian women?
ROSE: I would say not. There are a lot of Indian women, myself included, who
consider ourselves to be feminist, but we’re not feminist like non-Indian women are. We
come from a different base; we have a different history. If I’m on the Hopi reservation I
am not a feminist; if I’m in Fresno, California, I’m a feminist.
LC: Native Americans come from different tribal and cultural
backgrounds. Do you see, then, Native American literature as multiethnic as a result of
this?
ROSE: It is of course in fact a multiethnic literature. And there are
certain tribal differences that scholars could pick out if they applied themselves to it.
The further back you go the more evident this is. If you go back to the 1930s, for
instance, you can see very profound differences between what a Pueblo person would be
writing and what someone who is Sioux would be writing. It’s not very new of course to
have all this published literature by American Indian people around. It’s not a brand new
thing; it didn’t just suddenly pop up with Scott Momaday. The Pan-Indian part of it, where
it is not exactly a multiethnic literature, is in the fact that–and this is speculation
on my part; I guess this is part of what I am looking at in my own doctoral
dissertation–most of the people that I perceive who become writers and who are thinking
in terms of actually publishing, and thinking of themselves as writers in the European
sense of a writer and a published work, are people who are in that Pan-Indian world. They
are people who are familiar with Indian people from various tribes. Now there are some
exceptions. Simon Ortiz is an exception. He has a distinctly Pueblo background, but as an
adult has become Pan-Indian, has traveled around. In fact, he’s addressed that fact in
some of his poems–Indians are everywhere. Ray Young Bear is very decidedly of one
particular tribal area and in fact has even expressed the feeling that he does not want to
deal with Indian people from other tribes, because he is concerned with people of
Mesquakie heritage. He considers his work to be an outgrowth of the Mesquakie heritage,
and to have nothing really to do with what the rest of us are doing. So there are
exceptions. But I think most Indian writers probably are more similar to each other than
they are to other members of their tribe who are not writers. I think, for example,
culturally I bear more similarity to someone like Maurice Kenny, a Mohawk from New York
City, or to James Welch for that matter, who of course is Blackfeet and Gros Ventre, than
I do to other Hopi women of my same age who are on the reservation. I have more
similarities with those other writers than with other Hopi or Miwok people.
LC: Do American Indian writers have a large audience among Indian
people?
ROSE: Increasingly so. The Indian communities are beginning again to
value those people who specialize in working with words. That of course was a traditional
value at one time. And as Indian people went to the boarding schools and were forced to