https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.117
Native Survivance against Identity Obliteration: A Study of Sherman Alexie’s “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City” and “Evolution”
ANN MARY RAJU
Research Scholar, Baselius College, Kottayam
&
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Mar Thoma College, Tiruvalla
PROF. (DR) LATA MARINA VARGHESE
Research Guide, Baselius College, Kottayam
Former Principal, St. Thomas College, Ranni
Abstract: Being forced to endure terrible oppression and subjugation under settler colonialism for centuries, Native Americans had their land seized, culture erased, and Native identity threatened. The power structure established by the Euro-American settler propagated the ‘truth’ of their dominant status and made Native Americans feel inferior and subservient to the white settler. The present paper takes for its study two poems of the Spokane/Coeur d’Alene poet Sherman Alexie to explicate how Native American writers display literary and intellectual resistance to the white coloniser. While the first poem, “On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City,” explores the distortion of Native American history and the forceful erasure of Native Americans from the American land, the second poem, titled “Evolution”, exposes the cultural erasure and misappropriation of Native culture by the European settler. Both these poems display Native survivance, a term coined by the Anishinaabe writer and scholar, Gerald Robert Vizenor, which incorporates both survivance and resistance.
Keywords: Native American Survivance, Native victimry, Resistance, Resilience
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