E3W Literature | University of Texas

Interview with Dr. Frances Washburn (Lakota), University of Arizona, by Miriam Schacht

In January 2006, Miriam Schacht interviewed Indigenous scholar and novelist Frances Washburn via e-mail.

Miriam Schacht: One of the striking things about your book, Elsie’s Business, is the mingling of different kinds of storytelling, like traditional stories, interviews, and gossip. Could you talk about how those affected the structure of the book, or your view of the plot as a whole?

Frances Washburn: I wanted this story to reflect the way we tell stories in real life, which is not linear or neatly organized. Those are expectations that readers have of printed material. I wanted to shake readers up, make them think in different ways, complicate the story. And I wanted to use stories from Lakota oral tradition. When mainstream America imagines Indians, the image they have is usually the Indian as portrayed in popular culture. Using Lakota stories will, I hope, broaden the “picture” that mainstream people see of their imagined Indian—add depth and character and nuance. As for the gossip—well, no matter how much our mothers told us that gossip is bad, it is a fact of life, pervasive and possibly even necessary. Whether a person is the gossiper or the object of gossip, it serves a useful purpose. It connects us with each other, in both negative and positive ways, but the more memorable gossip stories put living people into stories that have the potential to become legend. It is a way of becoming part of a community, and possibly even immortal.

MS: In his review of your book in this issue, James Cox suggests that “By appearing to address readers directly in the opening paragraph of her first novel...Washburn blurs the distinction between reading a story and listening to a story.” How did you envision your audience as you were writing?

FW: I chose to write some of this book in second person because I wanted the reader to get inside the character who is being addressed as “you.” Also, when a reader reads the word “you” something happens inside the reader’s head—it feels as if the writer is addressing that reader personally, and makes the reading experience much more like a live storytelling experience. I want my audience to feel that I care about them, that I am having a comfortable conversation with them over a cup of Oscar’s awful coffee.

MS: You spoke at the MLA about recognizing Native American Studies as a field with its own theories and methodologies. What are your thoughts on the state of American Indian Studies or Indigenous Studies at the moment, and its relation to other fields?

FW: Just this week I was talking to a student whose Ph.D. committee I serve on. As part of his dissertation, he interviewed 240 influential American Indian writers, academics, politicians, business men and women, and so on. We were shocked by the answers to the question: What is the future of American Indian Studies programs at universities in the United States?

What was shocking was that the respondents had come to the same pessimistic conclusion that my student and I had. They (and we) believe that American Indian Studies programs (and other ethnic studies programs) will fade into homo-genized versions within the next ten to twenty years. Now, many American Indian Studies programs are separate entities with university status, with centralized physical locations, staff, and funding. They enroll a decent number of students in B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. programs and have a respectable graduation rate. Students and faculty turn out research work in a broad interdisciplinary range. BUT.

We, and the respondents to the survey question, see the financial woes of most universities. Whenever budget cuts come down, universities pull back to funding the “basics” – math, the hard sciences, English, and yes, sports! The so-called humanities and “non-essential” programs are cut.

We believe that universities will cut ethnic studies (American Indian Studies) as departments or programs and disperse the faculty among the existing departments. For instance, I have a specialization in literature, so I would be shunted off to English. Other professors might be shunted off to history or sociology or anthropology or business or law or whatever. This dispersal of faculty would allow the universities to claim that they are still honoring their commitments to “diversity”—after all, they would still have x number of Indians on the faculty—but it effectively prevents any centralized planning, inhibits outreach efforts to any Native American tribes in the area, and ensures that Indian points of view will be moderated by whatever point of view is prevalent in the department to which the faculty member has been shunted. But the university saves tons of money. (I should note here that some universities already have American Indian Studies programs that follow this model, which I call NDN Studies Lite.)

Can we do anything about the loss of centralized American Indian Studies programs and departments in mainstream universities? Short of burning the wagon train, probably not. Our demographics, our financial clout, our power is simply not enough to prevent this. The future of American Indian Studies is going to be up to tribal colleges and individual tribes to fund, to keep alive our own cultures and languages, and to convey that information to the larger dominant society.

MS: Could you tell us about your other projects?

FW: There are three books in the works. One is a book of poetry entitled Unci, Bead Me A River. The second is another novel where some of the characters from Elsie’s Business will reappear in a story about a mysterious white turkey who appears, not on Thanksgiving day, but on Good Friday as a live bird—and disappears five years later as mysteriously as it appeared, and how this event has spiritual and cultural and economic repercussions for the characters in the book.

The non-fiction book has a working title of James Walker and the Lakota Creation Story. Walker was a physician on the Pine Ridge Reservation between about 1894 and 1920. He did a lot to improve the health situation of the Oglala Lakota, but as he went about his practice he found himself deeply resentful that Lakota medicine men—holy men and healers—were usually called in before he, Walker, was. Wisely, however, he decided that he could turn their presence to his advantage, so he asked to be trained as a medicine man himself. After much thought and seeking of visions, the medicine men admitted him to their society to study. For many years he met with the old medicine men and learned their craft, their stories, and the specialized language that they used in healing ceremonies. He employed educated Lakotas to help him record the information, particularly the sacred stories. And then, he took all those stories and wrote his own version, which is a Christianized perversion of the original Lakota creation stories. Further, Walker cast himself in a Jesus-like role in his own version, as the “savior” of the Lakota people!

My book analyzes Walker’s life and motivations and the story he wrote, which has, now that the old medicine men are long dead, become the most used and repeated creation story among the Oglala Lakota, thanks to the influence of non-Native scholars and the Christian churches on the Pine Ridge. I try to give a balanced account, but I am certainly critical of Walker’s final story and the use to which it has been put—to further the Christianization and colonization of the Lakota people.

I am getting resistance to publication from other scholars in the field who do not like my criticism of Walker, and am now in the process of rewriting the book to make my position clearer, and, hopefully, to include comments from other Lakota people about Walker’s story.

MS: How have readers responded to your work thus far? I recall that when you came to talk to my class, students were very interested in your approach.

FW: Some early readers of Elsie’s Business have asked why I would want to write such a violent, grim story that doesn’t have a happy ending. My response is that life rarely has happy endings; that this book is about reality. Further, violence is endemic among Native people, particularly violence against women. Elsie is representative of many Indian women who were murdered and whose murders have never been solved. They are pushed to the back of the shelf and forgotten. The story of Elsie is my way of saying, look at this! I am not able to solve those murders, but by telling Elsie’s story, I can remind the reader that this happens, and these women deserve justice, even if it all we can do is to remember them.

As far as telling a grim story—well, Shakespeare wrote tragedies—Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear and so on, and four hundred years later, we still read them. Why? We read them not because we enjoy the inevitable horrible ending, but as an examination of the situations and human decisions that lead up to tragedies. We read them because all humans make similar mistakes that result in tragedies. We read them to better know ourselves.