| This thesis will investigate subversions of the dominant culture's attempts to define race for the mixed-blood in novels by two Native American women writers, Mourning Dove and Leslie Silko, by setting them up in a dialogue with novels by Willa Cather and Toni Morrison which confront mixed-identity in a more fixed fashion, showing how Native women writers have resisted oppression by defying imposed racial-identity and by addressing what means to be an Indian of mixed-descent. In doing so, they fulfill their traditional role of being mothers to their people, even while changing, perhaps, how that group is defined, recognizing that cultural rigidity is cultural death, that continued existence under colonial and postcolonial circumstances necessitates change, but that change does not mean abandoning heritage. Rather it makes heritage and memory of paramount importance and forces imposed history to give way to personal and communal experience. |
