Re-inscribing Ancient Connections, Following New Trajectories in Native American Literature: William Sanders’ The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan

Year 2007, Issue: 26, 35 - 49, 01.10.2007

John Donaldson

Abstract

From the outset, the modern Native American novel has attempted to demolish the stereotypical representations constructed in mainstream literature—whether negative or positive—and substitute more authentically drawn portraits of American Indians. Those one-dimensional creations of European and Euro-American literature, “the noble savage” and “the bloodthirsty savage,” have been replaced with complex characters who commingle flaws and virtues, who experience the full range of human thought and emotions, but who express those ideas and feelings, as we all do, in ways shaped by their particular culture, social context, and historical experience. Above all, the stereotype of “the vanishing Indian” has itself vanished to be superceded by characters who survive and adapt to modernity and westernization utilizing an array of strategies that enable them to retain as much of their traditional value systems as possible.2 This is what the Anishnaabe writer Gerald Vizenor has called “survivance,” i.e., not mere survival, not just staying alive but, rather, actively coping, persistently denying the objectification imposed by the dominant society, continually refusing to be passive victims.

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