D’Arcy McNickle
b. 1904 d. 1977

“Hard Riding”

Please consider this series of questions:

Please analyze the incidences of trickery that pervade the story.

Examine the themes of capitalism and dispossession (of land, of property, of traditional means of justice) as they exist in the story.

What strategies for asserting, and capturing, power – particularly when the pathways to this power seem blocked – does McNickle examine?

What is Brinder’s attitude towards Natives? What is his job? How long has he had it?

What is Brinder attempting to accomplish at his meeting at the schoolhouse?

How does Brinder equate Natives to horses?

What stereotypes of Natives does Brinder employ to attempt to convince the Natives to adopt his proposed court system? How do the tribal elders subvert his proposal by accepting it and effacing it? How do they retaliate by naming their judges? What is the “value” to the community of the judges Big Face names?

Consider the notion of perfection as a prerequisite for “judging.” Does this make sense to Brinder or does he interpret it as a tactic of distraction, disobedience, and stubbornness?

Reflect on the Trickster narratives we read earlier in the term. How does tricksterism inhabit this story? Or, a trickster mentality?

What vestiges (or continguing realities) of American assimilationist policies are evident in McNickel’s story? What do you learn of the bifurcation of power in the reservation system from this story? With whom does the power lie, according to McNickle?

Carlos Bulosan
b. 1911 d. 1956

As we revisit themes of “becoming American,” which have shaped our course, how might you examine Bulosan’s story “Be American” as the quintessential narrative of the fraught nature of Americanization in the mid-twentieth century? How does Bulosan conceive of the gap between legal American identity and, as it were, spiritual or ideological American identity?

In the narrator’s estimation, what is required for his cousin to “be American”? Is it education? Work? A poetic understanding of the struggles of America? A knowledge of the codes of behavior of those who travel the land? How do land, work, language, education, and national identity intermix with each other in this story to create a composite American self for Consorcio?

When the narrator explains to Consorcio that if he “waits fives years,” Consorcio will know what it takes to “be American.” Why five years? What does identity have to do with time?

What do you make of Consorcio’s activism for workers, “his crusade for a better America,” as the narrator puts it? Is this the American dream that the narrator knows Consorcio can find on his own, but does not reveal to him at the start? Only though experiencing the struggles and freedoms of America can one become American and help to create these freedoms for others, perhaps?

What is Consorcio’s “most cherished dream”? “He did realize later that he had become an American,” writes Bulosan, “ before he received his papers, when he began to think and write lovingly about our America” (2271). Describe how thinking and writing “lovingly” enables one to join a “national people.”

We discussed the issue of “access” in America as crucial to the achievement of “American identity.” What are the various dimensions of “access”? Access to what? In this story in particular?



Gloria Anzaldúa
b. 1942

As we come to our last writer, consider the ways in which American identity, and the quest for it, has informed the textual accounts of the last four hundred years that we have read. Anzaldúa considers the interstices between land, language, selfhood, race, and gender in her writing. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” she focuses on language, and draws upon examples of her own life and her experiences in/with language. Her text is at once many kinds of texts – it cannot be identified as belonging to a particular genre. How is this a fitting conclusion to our experience as readers of the American literature, literature written over the last five-hundred years? Anzaldúa makes manifest this issue of borders and borderlands in the very construction of her text and the “kind” of text it is.

Consider the quote she uses by Ray Gwyn Smith: “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” (2567). This is a powerful indictment. Of what? Who is implicated in this question?

Anzaldúa links identity to language. How does she construct this relationship? Power comes from where? Alienation comes from where?

Anzaldúa uses images of cutting: “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut” (2567). What does she mean here? Recall Zitkala-Sa’s experiences at boarding school (which I described to you). Like her long hair, Zitkala-Sa’s language was shorn from her, in an effectively violent manner. What are the consequences of forbidding an individual from speaking, or simply of devaluing, his or her “native tongue”?

We begin to see here the relationships between national selfhood – and its possibility or impossibility – and the points of contact with language and ability to express oneself and ones experiences, honestly and without translation.

How are the accounts we’ve read this term, many of which make inroads into the construction and re-articulation of a myth (or reality) or American national identity in text, meditations on language and selfhood – implicitly and/or explicitly? How does language make a person a native of a place? Or, allow a person to belong as American? What would Anzaldúa say about this?

In what ways are all borders/borderlands artificial? Think of her examples of eagles and serpents. These animals “do not respect borders” (2574).