This essay is part of a larger research project called Side by Side: Reading Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Literature. In this research, I ask how Euro-Western scholars like me can establish a respectful and informed relationship with Indigenous intellectual traditions and inventions if they come from a culture in which stereotypical ideas about Indigenous peoples have been pervasive. To answer this question, I follow the lead of Cree scholar Willie Ermine who has argued that it is necessary to establish “rules of engagement” in trans-cultural, settler-colonial contact zones to restore the autonomy of Indigenous peoples and their knowledges. Global imbalances of power and the legacy of colonialism work in favor of Euro-Western hegemony, and are inherent in the Euro-Western steadfast belief that its knowledge, systems, rules and values are universally applicable, with the result that “the experience and reality” of non-Western peoples are excluded from them. To reconcile world-views, it is paramount to find a level, inter-active and cooperative playing field in which diverse perspectives are articulated that are, according to Ermine, informed by “language, distinct histories, knowledge traditions, values, interests, social, economic and political realities.”[1] I strive to put Ermine’s suggestions on how to create an ethical space of engagement into an analytical and methodological practice by reading Indigenous and non-Indigenous literature on Native North America “side by side.” This means that, when I analyze literary works, I intend to proceed in a manner that respects distinct ways of understanding and being in the world, and distinct ways of narrating experiences. The idea is to embed the chosen works within their specific cultural, historical, socio-political contexts and narrative traditions, and to see how the selected ideas are stylistically and narratively expressed. Because my own knowledge is culturally specific, as it is shaped by my Central European upbringing in the late 20^th century, it is essential that I  be highly self-analytical, that I give space to uncertainties and room for discussion, and that I remain humble and eager to learn. Reading side-by-side enables heterogeneity, and builds a relational framework. By putting different narratives of seeing and being in the world alongside each other, as expressed in literature on Native North America from both sides of the Atlantic, reading side-by-side pluralizes world-views. It also creates an analytical space that attempts to pay equal attention to “the local,” that is cultural, socio-historical, political particularities, and to influences that are shared transnationally as well as to their interactions, without attempting to gloss over differences, opacities, or things that are untranslatable or incommensurable. Reading side-by-side contributes to greater epistemological justice, because it opens up the possibility for reading literature cross-culturally. It does not aim to transfer distinct forms of knowledge from one culture to the next, but explores the consequences of a relational reading.

To demonstrate how to read side-by-side, I will analyze the acclaimed novel House Made of Dawn by Kiowa writer, painter, and scholar Navarre Scott Momaday alongside the East German writer and scholar Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich’s sexology Söhne der großen Bärin [Sons of the Great Bear], a text corpus that focusses on Native North America.[2] In 1969, Momaday won the Pulitzer Prize with House Made of Dawn.[3] As Jace Weaver discusses in “The Mysteries of Language. N. Scott Momaday — an Appreciation,” many scholars agree that Momaday’s achievements have paved the way for a new generation of highly successful Native American writers, alongside the social movements prominent at the outset of Momaday’s career in the late 1960s.[4] Similarly, the first wave of scholars who focused on Indigenous writing have honed their critical understanding of Indigenous narrative traditions by analyzing Momaday’s texts, as Weaver points out, too.[5] These critical insights are fundamental for my analysis of spatialization in the novel, but more precisely, I will scrutinize how and to what effect the chosen texts achieve vivacity, a term for “a detailed verbal description that is intended to create a picture of a place, person or action in the mind of the listener.”[6] In a second step, I will align insights on vivacity with Momaday’s ideas about the creative power of language, demonstrating how Momaday aims for epistemic justice by decentering Eurocentric epistemologies that readers might rely on. By contrast, Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich asks for historical justice when she describes the plight of the Lakota-boy Harka and his tribe. While her novels are written to incite her readers’ feelings of solidarity with the plight and fight of Indigenous peoples, she does not tackle the hegemony and dominance of European knowledge-formations. Welskopf-Henrich, who is a contemporary of Momaday, had a great impact on her Central European readers. Her books on Native North America have been read in the millions, circulating in German-speaking countries as well as in Dutch, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Rumanian, Russian, and Ukrainian translations. There are thousands of readers’ letters to be found in the archives of the Academy of Science Berlin-Brandenburg, evidencing a profound impact on her readership.[7] I am well aware that fictional books about Indigenous peoples by non-Indigenous writers, like the ones written by Welskopf-Henrich, should nowadays be considered ethnographic drag and cultural appropriation. However, I find it nevertheless important to analyze them in more depth, given the enormous influence Welskopf-Henrich exercised on the minds of her Central-European readers. Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere, a side-by-side reading of Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers can help to make a hegemonic Euro-Western readership aware of the distortions and appropriations in the works of writers like Welskopf-Henrich, to learn more about their causes, form and tropes, as well as consequences. This can foster a greater awareness and lead to a working-through of the highly problematic ways in which Western Europeans imagine Indigenous peoples. Additionally, Welskopf-Henrich’s relationship to Indigenous peoples of North America is an interesting case precisely because she is not a clear-cut example of someone who simply exploits known tropes like the noble and ignoble savage about Indigenous peoples. She travelled multiple times to the United States and Canada to visit different tribes, and had friendships with important protagonists of the Red Power movement like Russell Means (Oglala Dakota), and artists like Arthur Amiotte (Oglala Dakota) and Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Lakota), all of whom she supported, on the one hand financially, and on the other hand by hosting them for talks or exhibitions in her native GDR, thereby helping them to find an international audience for the cause of Indigenous liberation.[8] Welskopf-Henrich is thus an example of a lived relationship with Indigenous peoples, and looking at her work and its cultural origins helps to scrutinize the origins, possibilities, consequences, and most crucially limitations of her textual and political stances. By reading Momaday and Welskopf-Henrich side by side, I hope to sound out what enables or inhibits the ethical space of engagement that Ermine envisioned, and demonstrate the importance of an epistemic justice as called forth by Momaday’s writing.

In Man Made of Words, Kiowa writer, painter and scholar Navarre Scott Momaday encircles the indivisible relationship of Indigenous peoples to the land they inhabit.[9] As much as a particular landscape gives rise to perceptions, traditional stories and songs shape perception to include the smallest creature as much as monumental spaces. Words and names anchor experiences in place, storytelling adds a timeless, mythical dimension which connects tribal belonging to past and future generations. Words, names, and stories therefore have a spiritual dimension, too, as they lift the perception beyond actuality and can call forth “a holy regard.”[10] As Lee Schweninger explains in Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape, “to contemplate or think about the land one lives on is to imagine it, to know the history of it, and ultimately to have a spiritual and therefore moral sense of it.”[11]

In his landmark novel House Made of Dawn, Momaday explores the interplay between human perception and natural forces like wind, rain, thunder, sun and moon. One of the prime examples of this interplay is the interaction between sun and earth as mediated by light. Light is of particular importance in House Made of Dawn, as it is reflected by everything that one can find and perceive in a particular landscape. Even the title of the novel hints at the interaction between sun and earth. Dawn marks the rising of the sun in the morning, when the rays of the sun bring light to the world, a light that is part of the objects we see so that the sun partakes in terrestrial life. Through the interplay with objects that it falls upon, light also creates  color. While light itself is invisible, we can learn about its existence because objects reflect it, a reflection that our sensory experience translates into specific colors. The effect of light’s transformations is mimicked in House Made of Dawn; Barbara K. Robins points out the specific visual qualities of the novel.[12] The “Prologue,” whose motifs are repeated at the end of the novel, switches between colorful descriptions of the land from an omniscient and a limited point of view. It firstly evokes “many colors on the hills (…) bright with different-colored clays and sands. Red and blue and spotted horses,” followed by a description of the protagonist Abel’s perception of the landscape.[13] Further on, readers are granted a glimpse of Abel running across the countryside. Light shines simultaneously on the hills and plains, the horses and Abel, creating a vividly rendered palette of colors.

Similarly, sound is explored at length in the novel, for instance as an interaction between rain, thunder, and wind with trees, fruits in the fields, or physical dwellings as well as human perceptions and reactions. When Angela, one of the characters and focalizers, experiences a thunderstorm, her bodily responses are detailed. Her reactions to the sudden sounds of the descending storm are described as an instinctive attempt to protect herself against harm by “cowering” and by taming her instinct to fight or flight by digging her nails into her skin. Her effort to gain an overview of the situation by opening the door and looking outside is only partly successful, since her perception is delimited by thunder, lightning, rain, and darkness. These forces overwhelm her senses, and there seems to be no room for any thoughts, which consequently play no part in the description. The privileging of sensual responses—kinetic, visual, aural—vis-à-vis forces of nature is another instance of the text’s vivacity.

These are just two examples from a novel that, to me, is first and foremost about characters being in, of, and from the land. The characters’ present and their past always take place, their actions are located, their perceptions of and in places are described, in the moment of action or in a remembered past. Characters like Abel or Angela are hardly ever characterized through others, nor are their feelings for large parts of the novel named or explained, given a history through an unfolding narrative, or embedded within a personal development. The narrative remains at and with bodies, whose perceptions are rendered as past memories or present experiences. Interactions with other characters form no exception, because direct speech, Momaday’s preferred way of having characters exchange ideas or socialize with each other, can be seen as a bodily activity, too: speech is an action in which thoughts are articulated that come alive by breath and sound. In short: the characters’ bodily and perceptual interactions with their surroundings stand central in the novel, yet language and storytelling traditions are needed as well. The first part of the novel, for instance, depicts the main protagonist Abel’s experiences during the first days that he is back in Walatowa, a Jemez Pueblo village in the Cañon de San Diego, after he served as a soldier in World War II. During the war he lost his ability to communicate in his tribal language, becoming “inarticulate,” and he also arrived heavily drunk.[14] Yet when he walks into the canyon, he almost finds peace of mind, and it is said that “he wanted to make a song out of the colored canyon, the way the women of Torreón made songs upon their looms of colored yarn, but he had not got the right words together. It would have been a creation song; he would have sung lowly of the first world, of fire and flood, and of the emergence of dawn on the hill.”[15] Abel knows what he needs, namely a creation song, but he is not able to find the right words.

A closer look at the wording of this incident clarifies that making a song means to directly interact with a place, very similar to the interactions between the sun and the objects it shines upon. The very material of the song that Abel wants to make is “the colored canyon,” just as the women of Torreón are weaving their songs “of colored yarn.”[16] We could possibly understand the passage as a metaphorical description of a certain “text,” namely a song, as a fabrication from word components that give a detailed description of a location. A closer look at Momaday’s vision, expressed in The Man Made of Words, on the creative power of linguistic expressions, leads us to a different understanding. As I have explained elsewhere, Momaday makes it “abundantly clear that words and storytelling have a direct relation to being alive in, on, and with the land.”[17] In Man Made of Words, he writes: “Inasmuch as I am in the land, it is appropriate that I should affirm myself in the spirit of the land. I shall celebrate my life in the world and the world in my life.”[18] Making a song of the colored canyon celebrates “life in the world” and “world in … life.”  Making a song is an expression, a metamorphosis, a transformation of what the world means to life, and this verbally expressed world is alive, spirited by the imagination as well as language and embodied by singing so that life and world become inseparably intertwined. And while the tribally-specific origin stories that Abel has on the tip of his tongue are not available to everyone, the vivacity through which the world in words is transmitted is available to all readers who dare to relate their own sensual and bodily experiences to the depicted inner and outer worlds. In House Made of Dawn, Momaday seeks closure for Abel by bringing his inner and outer worlds into an intertwined unity, as expressed in song – which Abel will achieve at the ending of the novel. There, it seems as if Abel has learned to articulate the song of creation that he had almost lost “and he went running on its rise,” his balance seemingly restored.[19]

Momaday’s sense of place in House Made of Dawn and the one displayed in East-German writer and scholar Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich’s work are different, because the latter does not strive to intertwine inner and outer worlds. Consider, for example, the Söhne der grossen Bärin-sexology’s beginning:[20]

The night was windless. Not a single leaf, not one of the pinned twigs moved. The bark of the trunks was still moist, almost wet, on the side of the mountain slope open to the northeast; the snow had melted under the first warmth of spring. (...) High on the slope, by a wooden root, an Indian boy crouched. He did not move, so that the creatures of the night only noticed him by smell. (...) The eyes of the boy were directed at a spot of light. Many boys would have sought consolation in the darkness and loneliness of the mountain forest in that glimmer of light. But Harka Steinhart Nachtauge [Harka, hard as stone, night eye], the Dakota boy, knew nothing of fear in the night between trees, rocks and animals.[21]

The landscape literarily serves as the setting for its main protagonist, Harka, the eleven-year-old son of a Dakota chief named Mattotaupa. The landscape is motionless and reveals itself to the penetrating gaze of the protagonist, who is able to read it signs and traces. Moreover, the description of the place—it is dark, windless, wet, rocky, and lonely, and there are animals—leads to a characterization of Harka as adapted to his surroundings. His name, "Night Eye," refers to his ability to see in the darkness that surrounds him; and while the area is rocky, he himself is "hard as stone," as his name also implies.

Harka thus fits into the landscape without any mediation, whereas alienation from his environment is essential in Momaday’s description of Abel’s relationship to his surroundings. For my side-by-side reading, this difference is crucial. It gives away that Welskopf-Henrich, despite her life-long study of Plain Indians’ different cultures and histories, still has the romanticized view of Indigenous peoples as being closer to nature. This is an idea of Indigenous peoples as noble savages that has circulated in Europe since the beginning of colonialism, for instance in the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.[22] Sandra Kumamoto Stanley explains the tropes of the noble/ignoble savage as follows:

Historically, European colonizers have tended to mythologize the indigenous peoples they conquer—appropriating not only their land, but their voice. Typically, the colonizers rely upon two generic paradigms, envisioning the "native" as either an innocent Noble Savage inhabitant of a prelapsarian Eden, or as a demonic savage, living in an unregenerate hell. Such colonizers can find various justifications for their dealings with the native inhabitants: seizing the policy of extermination as a rite of purgation, transforming the savage into a tolerable reflection of the European self, or mourning the Noble Savages as the last of their pure, unfallen—but definitely dying—race. [23]

It is noteworthy that such a depiction exists although Welskopf-Henrich explicitly reprobated any romanticizing of Indigenous peoples. In an unpublished essay called “Indians and Us,” she writes:

The overwhelming abundance of literature on so-called Indians in Germany carries the danger that the ‘Indian’ is seen as standing outside of human reality. This is similar to dressing up for an adventure in one’s leisure hours, and taking the dress off when the seriousness of real life approaches. (...) The Indian can only win when he is lifted off his pedestal and can appear as our brother.”[24]

The formulation “can appear as our brother” gives away what motivates Welskopf-Henrich’s writing. Her enduring engagement with Indigenous peoples, which led her to join and support the Red Power Movements in the 1960s and 1970s stemmed from a strong belief in international solidarity and brotherhood. These discursive tropes were prominent in the social movements of that era as well as in the public discourse of socialist states like the GDR, where Welskopf-Henrich lived after World War II.[25] This internationalist outlook finds its expression in numerous passages of her archived correspondences and interviews, too, as well as in the reactions of her readers. The archival holdings on Welskopf-Henrich in Berlin record a lively international exchange between members of the AIM, young East and West Germans, and Welskopf-Henrich herself.[26] Welskopf-Henrich’s depiction of land is thereby equally influenced by the Red Power Movements’ discourse on the retrieval of land and spirituality. The Movement’s demands circulated well beyond North America, as demonstrated by archival records and in Welskopf-Henrich’s novels, especially when she later started to write about contemporaneous Indigenous social struggles.

In Momaday’s writing, the retrieval of Indigenous land as well as ways of being in, on and with the land stand central. For him, storytelling is one of the most important ways of transmitting understanding about one’s origin and place in the world in relation to others. His work therefore unsettles Euro-Western understandings of land as property, and (re)covers epistemological visions of the Kiowa, Pueblo, and Navajo people. He honors these intellectual traditions of knowing land and making sense of it, thereby establishing greater epistemic justice. In the case of House Made of Dawn, when the sensual experience of colorful landscapes, bodily actions and reactions, or sounds are described, readers are led to imagine how they would perceive them in the real world, becoming co-creators of the story. It is this semiotic activity of readers that Momaday aims for as a storyteller. His vivid descriptions perform what Catherine Rainwater has called a “semiotic counter-conquest” whose aim is, according to her, “not domination and empire, but social reform through relocation of non-Indian people from positions of authority to positions of listeners and receivers of knowledge.”[27] Momaday counteracts the Euro-Western imagination, gifting his readers with the beauty of words, and giving rise to an acknowledgement of Indigenous ways of perceiving and narrating, all of which create a greater epistemic justice through the acknowledgement of Indigenous ways of perceiving the world.   

Notes

[1] Ermine, Willie, “The Ethical Space of Engagement,”Indigenous Law Journal 6, no. 1 (2007): 202.

[2] Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte. Die Söhne der großen Bärin. Vol. 1, Harka, 4th ed.(Berlin: Altberliner Verlag, 1962). Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte. Die Söhne der großen Bärin. Vol. 2, Top Und Harry, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Altberliner Verlag , 1963); Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte. Die Söhne der großen Bärin. Vol. 3, Der Häuptling, 13th ed. (Berlin: Altberliner Verlag, 1967); Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte. Die Söhne der großen Bärin. Vol. 4, Heimkehr zu den Dakota, 4th ed. (Berlin: Altberliner Verlag, 1963); Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte. Die Söhne der großen Bärin. Vol. 5, Der junge Häuptling, 5th ed. (Berlin: Altberliner Verlag, 1983); Welskopf-Henrich, Liselotte. Die Söhne der großen Bärin. Vol. 6, Über den Missouri, 8th ed. (Berlin: Altberliner Verlag, 1987).

[3] Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. First ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).

[4] Weaver, Jace, “The Mysteries of Language. N. Scott Momaday — an Appreciation,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 20, no. 4 (2008): 81-82.

[5] Weaver refers, among others, to works on Momaday’s writings by Chadwick Allen, Paula Gunn Allen, Louis Owens, and Robert Warrior whose work gained public recognition from the early 1990s on. See Weaver, “The Mysteries.”

[6] Walzer, Arthur E. “On Reading George Campbell: ‘Resemblance’ and ‘Vivacity’ in the Philosophy of Rhetoric.” Rhetorica 18, no. 3 (2000): 325.

[7] For a detailed account, see Penny, H. Glenn, “Red Power: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and Indian Activist Networks in East and West Germany,” Central European History 41 (2008), 447–476.

[8] Penny, “Red Power,” passim.

[9] Momaday, N. Scott. The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. 1st ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997).

[10] Momaday, N. Scott, and Al Momaday. The Way to Rainy Mountain. [Repr.]ed. (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 8.

[11] Schweninger, Lee. Listening to the Land: Native American Literary Responses to the Landscape. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 136.

[12] Robins, Barbara K. “Word Painter Visual Tropes of Enlightenment in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,” in Painting Words: Aesthetics and the Relationship between Image and Text, eds González-Moreno Beatriz, and González Moreno Fernando. (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020), 129-142.

[13] Momaday, House, 1.

[14] Momaday, House, 53 (highlighted in original).

[15] Momaday, House, 54.

[16] Momaday, House, 54.

[17] Wiese, Doro, “Intertwined in Time: Land and Life in N. Scott Momaday’s Earth Keeper,” in Indigenous North American Futurities in Literature, Media, and Museums, eds. Birgit Däwes and Bethany Webster-Parmentier, forthcoming.

[18] Momaday, Words, 39.

[19] Momaday, House, 185.

[20] The word “text” itself is derived from the Latin textus which means “things woven,” from the Latin verb texere, to weave, fabricate, to make (see “text”, Etymonline, accessed July 2, 2023, https://www.etymonline.com/word/text).

[21] Welskopf-Henrich, Harka, 5.

[22] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, Ou De L'éducation: Par J.j. Rousseau, Citoyen De Géneve. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. A Londres: publisher not identified, 1780. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5586980d; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions: De J.j. Rousseau. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Londres i.e. Neuchâtel, 1782. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5814003p. 

[23] Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. ”Claiming a Native American Identity: Zitkala-Sa and Autobiographical Strategies,” Pacific Coast Philology 29, No. 1 (1994):65/66.

[24] ABBAW [Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften] Nachlass Welskopf-Henrich, Folder 148, Indians and Us, n.d., 6.

[25] Agocs, Andreas. Antifascist Humanism and the Politics of Cultural Renewal in Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

[26] See Penny, “Red Power.”

[27] Rainwater, Catherine. Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 9.