Homing Plots and Trickster Characters in Native American Stories and Novels

Abstract

Homing Plots and Trickster Characters in Native American Stories and NovelsCha, Hee-Jung As part of postcolonial or minority literature, the current academy has paid attention to and welcomed the diverse voices of Native Americans as counter-narratives of institutional discourses. By integrating oral tradition to artistic imagination, Native American writers have focused on critiquing the stereotyping process of ‘Indian-ness’ and investigated the lost roots of their identity and celebrate their pre-colonial histories. Within a homing framework and with trickster characters, they have (re)narrated historically and institutionally ignored, destroyed, and silenced stories about being tribal and presented different ways of seeing the world and cultural discrepancy between tribal justice and white law. From a historical or mythical perspective, by recovering the lost histories and (re)telling the old stories with ritual narratives and oral tradition, they address the problems afflicting their communities and a tribal dilemma in reality. Consequently, in Native American novels and stories, more often, young protagonists are in endless tension between the inescapable past and the unyielding present and between traditional tribal obligation and modern civilizing irresistibility. Interestingly, mythical tricksters are recreated as sacrificial or resistant figures in cultural shifts and political conflicts. With the help of modern tricksters, young protagonists are coming home to learn tribal traditions and heal their psychologically scarred self formed on a split ground of tradition-bound and colonial capital social structures in the end of their long journeys.