http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ Diane Glancy, professor of English at Macalester College, crafts boundary-crossing literature.

The next few installments of “In the World” will look at some artists scheduled to participate in the upcoming Festival of Faith and Writing. In these pieces we’ll try to introduce a few artists while sketching the larger contexts in which they work. For each artist we’ll attempt brief treatments of representative works, attending to genre, style, cultural and literary positionality. We’ll also try to link each to our larger “In the World” theme, asking, “How do we see the Christ (or religious faith) and culture tension held here?”

Diane Glancy places herself in a textual tradition at once ancient and new, oral and written, a tradition we’ll call Native American Literature (NAL). Following anishinaabe (Chippewa) author Gerald Vizenor, NAL is something like an ironic transformation, a deft adaptation of tribal experience to the stultifying influences of Anglo-European dominance. Its roots are deep in living — still living — oral traditions, traditions that have been subjected again and again to inept attempts at codification by misguided anthropology.

These attempts, often viewed as preservations, have embodied the stereotype of the “noble savage” common in popular lore (“How. Me Chief Wampum. Smoke’um peace pipe with John Wayne”). Any attempt to translate a dynamic oral event into a static written text or set of artifacts, however, ends in irreparable loss of context and cultural significance.

According to Larzer Ziff in “Writing the New Nation,” this “process of literary annihilation would be checked only when Indian writers began representing their own culture.”

Native writers began representing their own culture, ironically, after being educated in federal (and missionary) boarding schools that intended to strip them of tribal identities. According to Vizenor, these writers were “educated in a new tribal enlightenment that would outbrave dominance.” This ironic resurgence, beginning first with autobiographical accounts by authors like Luther Standing Bear (“My People the Sioux,” 1928) was continued by author-scholars like D’Arcy McKnickle, whose tragic novel “The Surrounded” was published in 1936.

In 1969 new pathways opened for Native writers when Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday’s novel “House Made of Dawn” won the Pulitzer. Since then there’s been a wealth of literature from a variety of tribal perspectives. Authors like Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens and, yes, Diane Glancy, are exploring the full range and complexity of tribal experiences.

Glancy finds herself in what is perhaps the backbone of the NAL tradition — the exploration of what it’s like to be, to use Vizenor’s term, a “mixedblood,” someone who lives between two worlds, between ways of knowing: in Glancy’s case, Cherokee and Anglo-European.

Glancy’s work to reclaim her Cherokee connection is integral to her writing. Her father, under the influence of 1950s-era U.S. government programs aimed at relocating tribal people to urban jobs, distanced himself from his Cherokee heritage, and this distancing was only reinforced by Glancy’s English-German mother.

Further, as one of the few explicitly Christian voices in NAL, Glancy is in a unique position to explore the layers of cross-cultural tensions.

Glancy’s between-two-worlds struggle is central content in “Claiming Breath,” her collection of prose poems/essays that won the Native American Indian Prose Award in 1991. In her proem to the collection Glancy writes, “I often write about/ being in the middle/ ground between/ two cultures, not/ fully a part of/ either. I write with/ a split voice.”

“Claiming Breath” traces throughout a calendar year Glancy’s effort to glue together the fragments of her day-to-day living. In her entry for Dec. 1, titled “Fragments \ Shards,” she traces her struggle toward identity from the end of an oppressive marriage to the rediscovery of her Cherokee heritage to a new sense of her own voice — what she calls elsewhere, “myself as a friend” and “SHEdonism,” “the enjoyment of oneself as a woman.”

“Claiming Breath” reads often like a discursive, episodic philosophy of composition. Glancy calls the purpose of creative writing “externalizing the thought process”; kind of like Ginsberg, who said once, “The subject matter is the action of my mind.” When it comes to large-scale revision, Glancy says, “Let it be. It says what I felt when I wrote it.”

But whereas Ginsberg strives to avoid “the dross of self-consciousness,” Glancy’s subject matter in “Claiming Breath” very often is self-consciousness, or perhaps the rough-and-tumble construction of a self-made consciousness.

Glancy’s style is conversational. Through use of simple sentences, ampersands and lots of rhetorical fragments, she comes off as down-to-earth without seeming bumpkinish. And her content lends itself to an almost bleak realism that balances out her overtones of naivete. Her tone carries a palpable glumness that reminds me of the onset of the flu, yet she consistently posits affirmations — like “SHEdonism” and “Fragments \ Shards.”

At the same time, though, Glancy, in her use of “Native American” images, I have to say, comes off as perhaps more Pan-Indian than anything else. She seems to conceive of an amorphous body of “Native imagery,” and she evinces this seeming supposition by tossing out references to coyote, vision quest, sacred hoop, hogan, Wovoka — all scattered references that all too easily give way to stereotyping.

Of course, since the advent of the Native American Church and other cross-tribal movements, Pan-Indianism is a reality. All-too-often, though, it’s a product of tourism and a blithe exploitation of “the Indian mystique.”

A recent piece of hers in Modern Fiction Studies (Spring ’99), however, makes me think that Glancy must be wise to all of this. She calls cross-cultural blurring an unavoidable occurrence.

She calls it “transveillance,” “the crossing of cultures. Passages not necessarily of choice but necessity.” And it’s true that one of the central themes of NAL is that Native cultures are alive, metamorphosing, anything but static.

Another Glancy work, “Pushing the Bear,” a historical novel that traces the 900- mile path that 11 to 13,000 Cherokees were forced to march between Oct. 1838 and Feb. 1839, is something like a tour de force. “Pushing the Bear” (re)constructs a collage of first-person voices. Twenty years in the writing, it’s described by Glancy as “a pottery bowl, broken and glued together with some parts missing and the cracks still showing.” She includes in the novel words, phrases, poems in Cherokee syllabary “to be viewed as holes in the text so the original can show through.”

The novel traces the removal from its genesis in Cherokeeland (specifically North Carolina) to its termination in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Glancy conjures a convincing cast of characters who pass the narrative thread back and forth. She weaves in with their accounts historical documents, letters, even grocery lists. The principle voice, though, the one the story begins and ends with, is that of Maritole, a Cherokee woman.

Maritole’s story is tragic, but it’s not simply a story of victimization; rather, it’s a story of survivance. One-fourth of her tribe dies or disappears along the trail, her husband deserts her and her family nearly disowns her after she gains the favor of a mysterious white soldier.

Maritole, as a representative of her tribe, pushes the bear that is chaos, upheaval and forced removal from ancestral lands; for her own sake, for her tribe’s sake, for her ancestors’ sakes, she pushes the bear to the end.

“Pushing the Bear” admits no mere bemoaning of victimization; rather, it celebrates survivance without glossing over tragedy. It goes a long way toward reconstructing the authentic reality of a tragic history, and it conjures tragic wisdom. According to Gerald Vizenor, “Tragic wisdom is the source of native reason, the common sense gained from the adverse experiences of discovery, colonialism and cultural domination.”

Also, “Pushing the Bear” offers a no-bones picture of the tension between Christian and traditional Cherokee values, without positing easy answers.

Diane Glancy is a unique voice in American Lit, period. Even if she’s a bit “transveillance”-happy at some points, most of the time she creates real portraits of what it’s like to span the gaps between concurrent ways of knowing.