Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was covered with fur. There was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified; they ran, and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were just beyond its reach. It reared against the tree and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper.27
Momaday tells interviewers that he imagines himself to be the reincarnation of that boy and uses storytelling to enable himself to explore what it means to live under the sway of a legend: “All things can be accepted, if not understood, if you put them into a story. It is exactly what the Kiowas did when they encountered that mysterious rock formation. They incorporated it into their experience by telling a story about it. And that is what I feel that I must do about the boy bear.”28 Momaday’s writing re-enacts the story-making that loomed so large in the lives of his ancestors; its very existence represents a way of resisting both the cultural eradication pursued by the U.S. government in the nineteenth century and the cultural mummification wrought by those whose images of the Native American remain rooted in nineteenth-century stereotypes.
Other emergent ethnic writers give prominence within their fictions to figures or places that embody the ideas of subversion and resistance. One such figure is the trickster, who appears throughout Native American tribal mythologies in such manifestations as Coyote, Crow, Jay, Hare, Loon, Raven, Spider, Wolverine, and Old Man. Sometimes a heroic, even god-like figure, the trickster can also be a liar and a cheater, a fool and a bungler, but he is almost always connected to the telling of stories. In Love Medicine (1984; expanded edition, 1993) and The Bingo Palace (1994), Louise Erdrich draws on Chippewa tales of the trickster Nanabozho to create figures of both comedy and subversion in Gerry Nanapush, a member of the radical American Indian Movement, who has a knack for escaping from prison by squeezing into unimaginably small spaces, and his son, Lipsha Morissey, who embarks on a vision-quest for three days and ends up having visions of American fast food. Maxine Hong Kingston sets a trickster figure at the heart of Tripmaster Monkey: alluding to Wu-Cheng-en’s sixteenth-century Chinese folk novel Hsi Yu Chi (translated into English as The Journey to the West), Wittman Ah Sing calls himself “the present-day U.S.A. incarnation of the King of the Monkeys.” Wu-Cheng-en’s Monkey King, Sun Wu Kong, is a master of transformation, undergoing seventy-two of them in the course of his story, and Wittman seeks to revolutionize American literature by tapping into Sun Wu Kong’s transformative powers, particularly those that arise from his ability to tell tales. The Native American writer Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa) draws attention to the parallels between the Native American and Chinese trickster traditions in his novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987), whose protagonist, Griever de Hocus, a visiting professor at Zhou Enlai University in Tianjin, is described as a “mixedblood tribal trickster, a close relative to the oldmind monkeys.”29 Elsewhere, Vizenor has argued that the trickster is a natural resource for both Native American tribal narratives and for postmodernism because he is the embodiment of deconstructive strategies—“chance and freedom in a comic sign”—and thus disrupts and resists institutionally sanctioned ways of reading.30
For Chicano writers, the most potent deployment of mythical belief has been the collective re-imagining of Aztlán, the Chicano homeland. In the Nahuatl language of ancient Mexico, “Aztlán” means “the lands to the north,” and Chicanos use it today to refer to what is now the Southwestern United States. “The ancestors of the Aztecs named their homeland Aztlán,” writes the novelist Rudolfo Anaya, “and legend placed it north of Mexico. Aztlán was the place of origin, the sipapu, the Eden of those tribes. There they came to a new relationship with their god of war, Huitzilopochtli, and he promised to lead them in their migration out of Aztlán.”31 That migration southward led to the establishment of the new Aztec nation of Tenochtitlán, which would eventually be conquered by Cortés in 1521. For all of its bloodthirstiness, the Spanish conquest of Mexico ironically resulted in a true melting pot, a nation less obsessed than its northern neighbor with ideas of blood purity, and thus most Mexicans and Chicanos are products of the fusion of both Native American and Spanish bloodlines and cultures.
It is no accident that the rebirth of interest in Aztlán occurred in tandem with the rise of the Chicano Movement during the 1960s, a time when, according to Anaya, the “absorption of the Chicano into the mainstream American culture was occurring so quickly that unless we re-established the covenants of our ancestors our culture was threatened with extinction.”32 Seeking Chicano origins in Aztlán was a way of emphasizing the Native American roots of Chicano identity and thus of de-emphasizing its roots in the Spanish conquistadors, the first invaders and occupiers of America and forerunners in that sense of the U.S. government. “The naming of Aztlán,” writes Anaya, “was a spontaneous act which took place throughout the Southwest” and was codified at the Chicano Youth Conference held in Denver, Colorado, in March 1969. The document adopted at the conference—“El Plan Espiritual de Aztlána”—concluded with this declaration:
Brotherhood unites us and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggle against the foreigner “Gabacho,” who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our hurt in our hands and our hands in the soil, We Declare the Independence of our Mestizo Nation. We are a Bronze People with a Bronze Culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the Bronze Continent, We are a Nation, We are a Union of free pueblos, We are Aztlán.33
The modern invocation of the myth of Aztlán represents the conscious deployment of an ancient myth of origin for the purpose of political and cultural resistance. In 1972, the radical dramatist Luis Valdez co-edited an activist anthology of Mexican American literature entitled Aztlán; Anaya entitled his second novel Heart of Aztlán (1976) and pushed the mythopoetic techniques used in his prize-winning debut, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), even further: in Heart of Aztlán, myth becomes not just a way of interpreting the world but a way of revolutionizing it.
Emergent ethnic writers, however, often find themselves forced to do violence not only to the tradition of canonical American texts but also to the literary, mythological, and cultural traditions that have given them the opportunity to be “emergent” in the first place. Thus, for example, Frank Chin accuses Kingston of attacking Chinese civilization by rewriting some of its fairy tales and myths.34 The novelist and critic Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna) accuses Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna) of violating Native American religious and ethical traditions by transcribing and interpolating into her written texts stories that are meant to be spoken—and spoken only within a clan for specific purposes.35
Writers like Kingston and Silko, however, take a dynamic view of traditional myth, believing it to be not a static relic of the past but an ongoing process in the present. So Kingston declares, in a personal statement included in a volume of essays about her first book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976): “Sinologists have criticized me for not knowing myths and for distorting them; pirates correct my myths, revising them to make them conform to some traditional Chinese version. They don’t understand that myths have to change, be useful or be forgotten. Like the people who carry them across oceans, the myths become American. The myths I write are new, American.”36 Silko provides a similar answer to critics like Allen, an answer