Without Greg Sarris’s 1994 “novel in stories,” Grand Avenue, recent Native American literature would have a very different look. Sarris, after all, was among the first writers to turn their attention to the lives of so-called urban Indians, who lived not on rural reservations but in city neighborhoods. “Twenty years ago, when Grand Avenue was first published,” he wrote in 2015, “critics and other readers took note of the fact that never before had American Indians been portrayed in an urban setting.… Nor had contemporary American Indian literature had as its subject California Indians, in this case, a tribe of southern Pomo from northern California.”
Grand Avenue unfolds in Santa Rosa’s South Park neighborhood and revolves around multiple generations that share a tribal heritage. Its 10 stories take us through an array of narrators and points of view. “My name is Jasmine,” the collection opener, “The Magic Pony,” begins, “but I’m no sweet-smelling flower. Names are just parents’ dreams, after all.” Not only that, but dreams can easily morph into nightmares, as every character here understands. For Jasmine and the others who populate Grand Avenue, the line between what they have and what they wish for is more barrier than boundary. Their reality is stark and sometimes violent and often tinged with loss. Yet somehow the book moves toward a tenuous reconciliation, finding connection in tradition, with its insistence that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
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The idea is that stories will redeem us. Or maybe faith is a better word. Throughout Sarris’s career, that has become an operating principle. I think of his nonfiction book Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream, an impressionistic portrait of the legendary Pomo basket weaver, which also appeared in 1994. At its center are complicated questions: How does one use narrative to tell a story that resists it? How do we create a place for magic in our work?
With Grand Avenue, Sarris has imagined his own vivid dream space, a territory between thinking and feeling, out of the lives of urban Indians.•
