Communication as a Means of Stability

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Communication as a Means of Stability As demonstrated throughout various Native American texts, communication tends to be the Native’s greatest challenge in that they are unable to develop successful relationships with the outside world. Ultimately, broken treaties have become the unfortunate model for miscommunication between the European Americans and the Natives. Granted the white culture and the Natives share very few of the same beliefs or traditions, neither culture has yet to successfully compromise and broken through the barrier that so obviously separates them. Therefore it remains crucial that these very different cultures develop a good enough rapport with one another that would allow either culture the freedom to practice and express their beliefs non offensively, and prevent future communication from being null. From these Native novels, in particular Louis Owen’s Bone Game and Henry Gordon’s The Light People, we learn that communication and compromise are key to the success between these cultures, and lack of it will result in feud and confusion. The plot unfolds in Bone Game as a Native American professor Alex Yazzie unleashes a large cultural discrepancy between Natives and the white people as he skins a deer at his Santa Cruz residence for faculty housing. Since this act is atypical and shunned by the white community by which Alex is surrounded, tensions rise as his actions are perceived as barbaric. It is Cole, the story’s protagonist and a fellow Native, whom the university calls upon to mediate and resolve this disturbing “Indian Emergency” (Owens 23). Contrary to the school’s understanding and the laws that govern the county, this native is simply partaking in traditional Indian practices and u... ... middle of paper ... ...ion aspect of it, but more importantly the “potential” it had as a future tourist location (Henry 101). According to Webster’s Dictionary, an agreement is defined as an arrangement made by negotiation between two parties. The word negotiation infers somewhat of a compromise or acceptance through successful communication by both parties. Yet through historical events, especially those pertaining to Native American’s, society has developed an understanding that language tends to often be dishonest. As Owens puts it, “The realization that words can say what they don’t mean and mean what they don’t say…[indicates] to an Indian [that] every sentence in English may be a broken treaty” (Owens 43). Works Cited Henry, Gordon Jr. The Light People. University of Oklahoma Press: Oklahoma, 1994. Owens, Louis. Bone Game. University of Oklahoma Press: Oklahoma, 1994.

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