Decolonizing Native American Identities A Chronotopic Reading of N Scott Momadays House Made of Dawn 1968 Leslie Marmon Silko s Ceremony 1977 and Louise Erdrichs The Round House 2012

Abstract

Deeply conscious of its long history of colonial marginalization, Native American literature explores discourses of settler oppression and emphasizes Indigenous resilience. The relationship between Natives and settlers are replete with conflict, defined by a struggle for land, and has accentuated over five hundred years. This desire for land resulted in the decimation of Native culture, as they were projected in through tropes of Vanishing Indians 1in colonial Master Narratives.2As a decolonizing3 avenue, Native American Literature particularly dissects the colonial sign indian4 and asserts voices of survivance5. The present research attempts to uncover how authentic Native American lives are represented in the N. Scott Momaday s House Made of Dawn (1968), Leslie Marmon Silko s Ceremony (1977) and Louise Erdrich s The Round House (2012). The conceptual framework that aids in the analysis of these texts is Chronotope, a theory initially formulated by Russian thinker and literary critic Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895-1975), now applied across literary analysis, film and social studies by various scholars6. By Chronotope, Bakhtin referred to the inseparability of space and time in representing human experiences in the narrative. The thesis identifies dominant Chronotopes7 in individual primary texts: Chronotope of Place, Chronotopic Unconscious and Chronotope of Reservation respectively, which emerge as centre for concretizing representation (Bakhtin 84). It is only within these time-space structures that the life of mixed-blood protagonists 8 navigating through the impositions of contemporary settler society in terms of colonial spaces, racial identity and gendered and sexual violence takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible (84). Native characters become whole and visible within these Chronotopes, as they not only tell stories of confusion, loss and grief but also of cultural survival and renewal. Through a Chronotopic reading of primary texts, the thesis aims to prove that in Native literary texts.