Red and white and blue: Whiteness and identity in American Indian fiction

My dissertation examines constructions of whiteness that are, in turn, used to construct Indian identities in six works of fiction by American Indian authors: D'Arcy McNickle's Wind from an Enemy Sky; John Joseph Mathews Sundown; Loise Erdrich's Tracks and Love Medicine; Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Philip H. Red Eagle's Red Earth.; I focus the first two chapters on the opposition between "an earth sense of self" and machine culture, stating that machine culture (whiteness) is used to evoke an Indian identity through the contrast between them. An earth sense of self locates Indian identity in an individual's relationship to his tribal community, to the landscape of that tribe's home, and to the plants and animals that inhabit that landscape. This identity is built on an ethos of reciprocity, a sense of respect for all of these elements as deserving of respect and giving respect. I contrast this with a machine sense of self, an extension of the Enlightenment project that understands the world and mankind as analogous to machinery. This notion dispenses with the idea of reciprocating respect and responsibility. The land, natural resources, and even people can be manipulated and exploited as if they were machines to be adjusted and operated to increase their efficiency.; In the third chapter, I examine ways that Indian characters seek to integrate these two identities. The characters deploy elements of both identities in their narratives, but they must seek the appropriate balance between them. Although they find elements of machine culture useful, they ultimately resolve their dilemmas by relying upon their tribal identities and elements of an earth sense of self.; In the fourth chapter, I depart from the contrast of tribal and machine cultures and examine the way an Indian identity is constructed in fiction concerning American wars of the 20th century. The novels construct whiteness as racially motivated in its warfare and dependent upon the opposed binaries of a Manichean allegory. Against this, the novels construct an Indian identity that attempts to break out of those binaries through strategies of cross-racial alliances rather than racial oppositions.