INVENTING THE INDIAN: WHITE IMAGES, NATIVE ORAL LITERATURE, AND CONTEMPORARY NATIVE WRITERS

European/American literature developed two major images of the Indians of the Americas. The first image imagined that Indians were inferior while the second imagined that they were dying. The first image was struck immediately, appearing in the journals and letters of the early explorers. The second emerged during the American Romantic period. As Native writers began to work in fiction, these were the images they used.;This dissertation examines the development of the image of the Indian as inferior and the Indian as dying and the legacy both of these images left for Native writers. It looks at the view of the world contained in oral creation stories and examines how this view differs from that of the non-Native. The main part of the dissertation deals with the ways in which contemporary Native novelists have avoided the first two images of the Indian and constructed one of their own which comes, in large part, from a particularly Native view of the way in which the world works and a particularly Native sense of the place of human beings within that world.;However, in the second half of the twentieth century, Native writers began going to Native culture, particularly oral literature for inspiration, drawing from the vast body of oral stories relationships that described the world as many tribes understood it. Within oral creation stories, in particular, the relationships between the deity and humans, between humans and animals, between humans and the land, and the relationship of good to evil provided writers such as N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Leslie Silko with elements and structures that they used in their fiction. Starting with N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, one can see the growing awareness of the potential of oral literature in fiction and the increasing use that Native writers have made of this body of literature in their novels.