If They're Lost, Who Are We?

Perhaps we protect and even beatify stories because we have no real presence in film or popular music, because we have no stand-up comics with their own TV shows, because not one of us is a host on "The View," because there is no Indian Oprah and no Indian Denzel and no Indian on "Lost." Stories are all we've got. So when an Indian holds a copy of N. Scott Momaday's groundbreaking novel "House Made of Dawn," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, or Louise Erdrich's widely popular "Love Medicine," they hold it gingerly, as though carrying the ashes of a recently deceased grandparent.

Our cultures and our languages -- as unique, identifiable and particular entities -- are linked to our sovereignty. If we allow our own wishful thinking and complacency to finish what George Armstrong Custer began, we will lose what we've managed to retain: our languages, land, laws, institutions, ceremonies and, finally, ourselves. And to claim that Indian cultures can continue without Indian languages only hastens our end, even if it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Cultural death matters because if the culture dies, we will have lost the chance not only to live on our own terms (something for which our ancestors fought long and hard) but also to live in our own terms. That Native American cultures are imperiled is not just important to Indians. It is important to everyone, or should be. Because when we lose cultures, we lose American plurality -- the productive and lovely discomfort that true difference brings.

david@davidtreuer.com

David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota and a translator of Ojibwe texts. His most recent novel is "The Translation of Dr. Apelles: A Love Story."