Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature; Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico
American Literature, 2010
starkly with the characters’ internal struggle to reconcile a Christian God with the violent inju... more starkly with the characters’ internal struggle to reconcile a Christian God with the violent injustice of their removal and the inhospitable land they are now forced to farm (71). Glancy explains in the afterword that the original Pushing the Bear was meant to fill a historical gap—an absence she felt in the US historical narrative about what happened between the Cherokees’ lives in the Southeast and in Indian Territory/Oklahoma. In contrast, the new novel works not so much to fill a gap, but to supplement a faulty archive. The fictional characters present a historical truth about Indian removal that is absent in the record of Evan Jones’s letters. Along with the letters, the novel contains lists of Cherokee reclamation and spoliation claims and fragments of Cherokee language with accompanying “literal” English translations such as “someone / which died, they / if someone is thinking about you” (139). Glancy’s juxtaposition of these “real” historical texts with her fictional narrative highlights the absence of Native personal experience within the archival record of Cherokee lives in Indian Territory. Rev. Bushyhead, through his work translating the Bible into Cherokee, recording reclamation lists for members of the tribe, and listing the supplies they need, becomes obsessed with words and with list making. His thoughts devolve into lists of names, items, and phrases. Bushyhead and the historical items that Glancy includes in the novel demonstrate the impossibility of translation, the inadequacy of historical archives, and the necessity of stories— even fragmented stories—for helping us understand the past.
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