| Healing through traditional stories and storytelling is a consistent theme in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, James Welch's Winter in the Blood, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows.; By the end of these novels the protagonists are healed of the sickness caused by their alienation, and they all join their people and tell their own stories. At the end of the healing process, Momaday's Abel begins to sing a traditional song, Welch's narrator tells his own story as well as his grandparents' stories, Silko's Tayo recounts his ceremonial adventures, and Allen's Ephanie passes down her new understanding and interpretation of the traditional women's stories to her children and her white woman friend.(DIAGRAM, TABLE OR GRAPHIC OMITTED...PLEASE SEE DAI) Storytelling has a medicinal power in these four contemporary Native American novels. Talking and storytelling become for the characters a proof of healing. Common topics include traditional stories, oral narration, land, vision, language ability, and ability to hear. These elements, with native land as the center, work to bring about healing.; Although Momaday and Welch tend to look to the past for solutions to Indian problems, Silko and Allen look rather to the future. They project stories forward as a way of bringing Indians to a progressive, rather than a retrogressive, solution to their problems.; Native American traditional stories are remedies in the healing of sick young Indians in this modern world. Storytelling is evidence of the characters' being healthy, both physically and psychologically. Healing through traditional stories and storytelling is a consistent theme in the novels of these four Native American writers. |
