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On Writing About Native American Culture:
Q&A With Kathleen O'Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear
Excerpted from www.authorsontheweb.com
1) Do you have a Native American background? If so, when did you become
interested in writing about your culture? If you do not have a non-Native
American background, what fueled your interest to write about Native
American culture?
Kathleen:
I am a matrilineal descendant of Cherokee ancestors. Both my mother
and my father had a passion for archaeology and Native American
history. When I was young, they spent a great deal of time teaching
me about native American cultures, so I suppose I just grew up with
a strong sense of that heritage. In addition, we spent every family
vacation driving around the United States, visiting historical or
archaeological sites. The first professional paper I ever presented
was on the Anasazi in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and the sites that
play such important roles in our Anasazi Mystery series, THE
VISITANT, THE SUMMONING GOD, and BONE
WALKER. But, oddly enough, I actually decided to dedicate
my life to the study of America's native peoples when I was working
on an archaeological excavation in Israel.
 Strange
how things work out. I was watching the mortar fire on the Golan
Heights and suddenly longed to be home digging an Anasazi site so
badly I could barely stand it. I guess you really do have to get
away to see your life clearly. That led me to UCLA to work on my
Ph.D. in American Indian History, and later to Wyoming where I landed
a job with the U.S. Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management,
as the state historian and, later, archaeologist in the Casper District.
I fought battle after battle to help save sites that documented
our extraordinary national heritage—native American as well
as Euro-American. All of these things led to my career as a fiction
author. Fiction is a very powerful educational tool. Instead of
reaching a few thousand people, a novel can touch millions.
Michael:
My story is somewhat similar to Kathleen's. My parents also believed
in travel as a means of education. A fourth generation Coloradoan,
I climbed through Mesa Verde almost before I could walk. Half of
my family were hard rock miners, the other half, frontier ranchers.
I grew up on the stories of hardship and heritage. At the age of
nine, a National Geographic TV special changed my life. I watched
the facial reconstruction of Leakey's Zinjanthropus bosiei. When
those eyes stared out from the past, I was destined to be an anthropologist.
My fascination with what it means to be human carried me right into
the anthropology department at Colorado State University. By the
time I completed my M.A., I was dead broke. In Wyoming they were
hiring archaeologists at the unbelievable rate of four bucks an
hour—all the money in the world in 1978! For the next six years
I worked as a professional archaeologist in the Rocky Mountain region,
and wrote during the winter when the field season slowed down. Kathy
and I discussed writing full time on our first date, and by 1985,
I had sold my business and was working feverishly to make our dreams
come true. In the beginning, no one was interested in Native American
prehistory. We sold historical and science fiction based on Native
American culture instead. It was only when we discussed some of
the things we found on the I-70 expansion project, that an editor
finally became interested.
2) Which Native American groups and geographical regions are
the focus of your books?
Kathleen and Michael:
Our books are set all over North America during the last fifteen
thousand years and some even are set a thousand years in the future.
That's a huge canvas upon which to paint. Not only do our co-authored
books deal with Native American themes, so do our individual works.
Michael began with a science fiction series—the SPIDER trilogy—that
dealt with Arapaho prophets who could see the future. In his historical
work BIGHORN LEGACY Cheyenne mysticism plays a central
role in defining Wasatch's character. His polemic, however, is in
MORNING RIVER and COYOTE SUMMER, novels
that deal with the remarkable diversity of the Native American Plains
and Rocky Mountain cultures that existed at the time of white contact.
Kathleen's THIS WIDOWED LAND was a novel of the conflict
between the Jesuits and Huron in seventeenth century America.
SAND IN THE WIND came directly out of her work as a federal
archaeologist. She was documenting the historic Sawyer's Expedition
trail across Wyoming, and became fascinated with the nineteenth
century plight of the Cheyenne tribe. The heroine in THIN
MOON COLD MIST is part Cherokee and documents women's participation
as soliders in the Civil War.
 The
PEOPLE series, of course, provides only the most cursory coverage
of the development of North America's pre-contact cultural heritage.
People have been living in the Western Hemisphere for at least the
last fifteen thousand years. Hundreds of different cultures have
developed, thrived, and vanished. But the breadth and wealth of
that cultural diversity, when the Society for American Archaeology
conducted a survey last year asking Americans to name an American
archaeological site, ninety-six percent couldn't. Americans know
more about the archaeology of France, Egypt, Iraq, or Mexico, than
they do about the rich cultural legacy right beneath their feet.
By writing the PEOPLE series, we can address a small part of this
subject and make it come alive. We always hope that a few of our
readers will delve into the bibliographies at the end of each of
our novels and start reading more of the nonfiction studies. Writing
about North America's rich prehistoric heritage is a monumental
undertaking, one that we expect to work on for the rest of our lives.
The Anasazi books, THE VISITANT, THE SUMMONING
GOD, and BONE WALKER, were written as a result
of a deluge of fan mail asking us to include more scenes about the
modern archaeologists who begin each of our PEOPLE novels. Our goal
with these mysteries is to document the religious and social upheavals
after the fall of the Chacoan world, around A.D. 1150. Dr. Maureen
Cole, a Canadian Seneca physical anthropologist, is one of the leading
characters. Maureen gives us a chance to contrast her Canadian Woodland
ancestry with that of the cultures in American Southwest.
3) How has writing about Native American culture impacted you
personally? What have you learned along the way?
Kathleen:
Hmm. Everything. Native American history and culture permeate every
facet of my life, stretching from my personal religious beliefs
and my relationship with the natural world, to the types of stone
I use to scrape and tan buffalo hides.
Michael:
You've got to be kidding! How can I answer this without filling
thousands upon thousands of pages? Instead, I am going to respond
this way: Archaeology must be the anthropology of the past—meaning
it must be a holistic reconstruction of the culture in its entirety.
At least so far as is possible. I continue to be stunned by the
depth and complexity of prehistoric North American culture.
4) Can you give us a brief description of the particular Native
American custom or ceremony that you found most fascinating to write
about?
Michael:
 I
would have to say it was writing about the Contrary, Green Spider,
who plays such an important role in PEOPLE OF THE LAKES.
Green Spider is the young man touched by Power who does everything
backward. He is a "Sacred Clown," a uniquely Native American
character. Other writers, notably Thomas Berger, have written about
the Contrary before, but none of them managed to catch the deeply
holy aspect of the Contrary.
Kathleen:
For me, the most fascinating and difficult thing to write about
is the vision quest. Seeking a vision is a solitary spiritual struggle
to touch the divine, and very few people who have undertaken such
a quest can put the experience into words. How does anyone adequately
describe the sound of Buffalo Above's hooves thundering against
his soul? We do the best we can, but our descriptions are always
inadequate.
5) Tell us how you conduct research when writing about Native
American customs, language, and spiritual beliefs.
Michael and Kathleen:
Research comes in many forms. Sometimes it's a story told by an
elder, often it's the excavation of an archaeological site, or it
may be a paper presented at the meetings of the Society for American
Archaeology or the American Association of Physical Anthropologists'
conference. We attend numerous research conferences because we owe
it to our readers to be as accurate as we can, and we owe it to
our professional colleagues to get out the most recent information—information
they have labored for years to uncover.
The hardest part of the research process involves an exhaustive
canvassing of the professional literature. We read "pounds"
of unpublished archaeological reports, talk with the archaeologists,
visits the sites, talk with the descendants of the prehistoric peoples.
Next we turn to the ethnographic sources, the dusty monographs hidden
in the basements of museums, libraries, and government office buildings.
This is tricky because the arrival of Europeans dramatically changed
the cultures in North America, and much of the information reported
by early explorers and ethnographers is biased. We have to try to
see through the chaff to the core cultural ideals. Critical in this
process is our reliance on the oral traditions of the people. Their
stories flesh out the skeletal picture etched by the archaeological
record and the written resources.
We also rely on the professional journals, such as AMERICAN
ANTIQUITY and the AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
 Finally
we have to make a prehistoric society functional; that is, we must
explain what the people were doing and why. More, we have to do
it in a manner that we can defend to our peers in the academic as
well as the real world. We have to get the environmental data correct,
including the plants, animals, and soils, which is why our bibliography
is loaded with ethnobotanical, climatic, and faunal sources. It's
kind of like writing a dissertation within a fictional story. We
don't make this stuff up. For example, in PEOPLE OF THE MIST
the prehistoric peoples of the Chesapeake Bay really did treat their
dead that way, and yes, some ants are hallucinogenic, as we describe
in PEOPLE OF THE SEA. Please don't try this, however.
Some ants are also deadly poisonous.
 Even
with all the information described above, we still must take risks
when we write a novel. When we penned PEOPLE OF THE WOLF
in 1988, the best information suggested that only peoples of "Indian"
appearance had originally migrated into the Americas. Another decade
of archaeological research has proven that assumption wrong. The
discoveries of "Kennewick Man" in Washington, and "Luzia"
in Brazil, have turned the entire study of the peopling of the Americas
on its head. We now know there were at least three separate racial
groups present in the Americas around 12,000 years ago. Archaeology
changes with each dig, each new technological breakthrough, and
each review of the data using new analytical tools.
6) What are some of the key issues for Native Americans that
you hope to convey through your books?
Michael and Kathleen:
First, we hope to drive home that we have over fifteen thousand
years of complex, sophisticated, and fascinating cultures in the
United States and Canada. For the most part, we do not teach this
history in our schools. More Americans have heard of Ankor Wat in
Cambodia than have heard of Cahokia in the United States. That,
in our opinion, is a crime. Ours is the forgotten heritage, and
we pay a price for that. If you don't know where you've been as
a nation, you can't hope to chart a reasonable future for your diverse
peoples.
Second, let's face it, science can be scary. Sometimes facts coming
out of the ground conflict with traditional teachings, stories,
and oral traditions. We all build myths about our distant past.
The lessons of history and prehistory are often painful. We stumble
over literal skeletons in our human closet. We hope our books help
people to understand that Truth and Fact can stand side by side
and people can be made stronger when they live in the shadow of
both.
 Additionally,
we want people to understand that American culture is unique. Our
concepts, philosophies, and government were formed as an amalgam
of European and Native American ideologies—most particularly
from the marriage of English common law with Iroquoisan political
philosophy. The concepts of one person, one vote, referendum and
recall, are no more European than the concept of political equality.
Those ideas were sucked up from the soil of Virginia, New York,
North Carolina, and Ontario, where they had been planted and nurtured
by the Algonquians, Iroquois, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole
and Creek.
Once, at a book signing, a Native American lawyer took us to task.
He repeated the common—and false—myth that before the
arrival of the Europeans, life in North America was idyllic, without
war or disease. We want people to walk away from our books with
the understanding that prehistoric peoples were no better or worse
than anyone else. Know what? They were just plain old garden variety
human beings. They made war, got sick, committed atrocities, loved
their families, searched for God, sacrificed for the common good,
helped the poor and disabled, and aspired to a greater good, just
like the rest of humanity the world over.
7) How do you combat "Indian" stereotypes in your
writing? Do you feel that most writers adequately portray the cultural
diversity among Native Americans?
Michael and Kathleen:
Continuing from the last question, we write from the understanding
that people—even if they be prehistoric—are all the same
under the skin. There is more genetic diversity within a single
band of West African chimpanzees than there is in the entire human
race. Anthropologists have compiled entire lists of how many traits
we share in common. It's an incredibly long list. We are them, they
are us.
A novelist's charge, as Win Blevins would say, is to tell the "Truth".
We take real human beings and do our best to place them within a
different cultural framework. Human behavior is patterned. For example,
we can make the assumption that as the PaleoIndians were hunting
mammoth to extinction, they, too, engaged in revitalization movements
like the Plains Indians did with the Ghost Dance during the near
extinction of bison in the 1880s.
As to other writers, we often cringe. With some notable exceptions
they tend to write modern patrilineal American values into prehistory.
It's deadly difficult to write from within a matrilineage when you
weren't raised with that world view. Kinship systems are our constant
bane. We have to make complex kinships intelligible to modern Americans.
If we tried to use Omaha kinship terms, only people familiar with
those kin rules would understand. The worst offenders tend to be
the writers who do "Indian Romance" novels. Western authors
aren't much better. In their books, all Plains Indians tend to be
written as Sioux—even if they happen to be Mandan, Blackfoot,
Shoshoni, or Pawnee. Tribes all had very different origins, histories,
and cultures. Michael was so incensed by that stereotyping he penned
MORNING RIVER and COYOTE SUMMER in sheer
revolt.
Writing from within another culture isn't impossible. Oliver La
Farge did it. So too have authors like Ruth Bebe Hill, Sue Harrison,
Don Coldsmith, Pax Riddle, Win Blevins, and Lucia St. Clair Robson.
These are people who go into the Native community, listen, learn,
and do the research. Most authors, however, refuse to because it's
just plain hard work.
8) What are the unique challenges you face in writing about
the Native American culture? What do you find most rewarding?
Kathleen and Michael:
The biggest challenge is always getting the facts right. As hard
as we try, we still make little irritating errors. As an example,
we got an E-mail from a textile specialist on a mistake we made
about Z-twist vs. S-twist cordage—two different methods of
twisting fibers to make string. Sure enough, we looked it up and
we'd goofed. Of all the millions of readers we have, we're sure
he was one of a handful of people who caught that, but he was right,
and we should have done better. That's the kind of accuracy we strive
for. It's unattainable, but that's part of the challenge.
Another challenge we face is that cultures change over time. When
we're talking with modern tribes about their cultures so that we
can fill in the gaps for a prehistoric culture, we always have to
ask, "How much have they changed?"
For example, if you study the archaeology, then read the early
ethnographic accounts of the Sioux by Louis and Clark, you'll find
two very different peoples—and different again from the Sioux
who were Ghost Dancing in 1891, or the Sioux at Pow Wow today. There
have been a great many changes in their cosmology, world view, kinship,
religion, etc.
9) Tell us about your current projects.
Kathleen and Michael:
The next book in the PEOPLE series will be PEOPLE OF THE RAVEN,
which will be set in Washington and British Columbia during a time
of environmental upheaval at the end of the last Ice Age.
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