A Shark-tooth Necklace: The Indian Corner of Oklahoma in the Stories of Eddie Chuculate

Abstract

Cheyenne Madonna (2010), seven short stories written by Eddie Chuculate, a Creek-Cherokee writer from Oklahoma, and his autobiographical novel This Indian Kid (2023) are seemingly firmly rooted in the Indigenous world of Oklahoma and the Southwest. However, they are not a paean to Native American communities. These are virtually non-existent in Chuculate’s world; rather, his Indian characters inhabit a small-town and suburban variant of the American Dream. There is neither unraveling of the wrongs of colonization, nor immersion in “Indigenous trauma,” nor dilemmas about the identity of Native American characters, their suspension between the world of Native Americans and that of the white people. Chuculate shows that it is possible to narrate contemporary Indians with fresh language, avoiding the ballast of “history,” “heritage” and “tradition”. Hallmarks of his writing are irony and distance (although bitter reverie does occur sometimes), rather than suffering, heroism and mythologizing the past. If he tries to reckon with the past, it is the past of his own family, not the Indigenous nation to which he belongs. It is the attempt to understand the relationship with those closest to him and to preserve the memory of them that is the essence of Chuculate’s work to date, rooted in the traditions of both Native American and American prose. Above all, Chuculate is an excellent, engaging storyteller who upholds the fine tradition of Oklahoma Native American prose, to mention N. Scott Momaday and Brandon Hobson, already known to Polish readers.