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.”
Among Sarris’s peers were Sherman Alexie, whose early work began to appear around the same time and portrays Native American characters in the Seattle area, and David Treuer, whose 1999 novel, The Hiawatha, depicts Native characters in Minneapolis. There’s a direct linkage between these writers and, say, someone like Tommy Orange, whose 2018 debut, There There, operates in a similar register. And why not? As Sarris reminds us, “the truth is, then and now, a majority of American Indians—more than 60 percent—lives in cities.… Many Indian people relocated to these large urban cities during World War II, finding work supporting the war effort, and then stayed.”
This article appears in Issue 34 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
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.
Something similar might be said of Sarris; Grand Avenue comes out of his experience. Currently chair of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria—a tribe once known as the Federated Coast Miwok—he was adopted at birth by a white family in Santa Rosa and grew up knowing nothing of his Native roots. After a difficult adolescence, part of it spent living amid the community that occupies the center of Grand Avenue, he turned toward education and literature.
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? “It’s no such thing, art,” McKay explains when asked about her weaving. “It’s spirit.… I only follow my Dream. That’s how I learn.”
There it is, that word again, as if Jasmine had reasserted herself. But that’s only as it should be. With Grand Avenue, Sarris has imagined his own vivid dream space, a territory between thinking and feeling, out of the lives of urban Indians.•
Join us on February 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Sarris will sit down with a special guest and host John Freeman to discuss Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
