For much of the last six months, a significant amount of my mind has gone to dealing with turbulence in our family, and more specifically, to coping with an illness and infirmities that threatened the life of my mother. In no grand and exceptional ways, this misfortune was a small gift, in that it took my mind off of myself and my issues in life. Gratefully, my mom has returned from the brink and is doing relatively well after a hard medical journey- and with that rebound, my anxieties about her have significantly abated, but consequently, they have, like my overactive immune system, turned to needle me about my existence.

I turn 55 in a little over a month, and with the notable passing of some former athletes and business executives- and even former classmates- recently at or around that age, I feel I have become a big question mark. Like in my prior post, an inquiry about the value of romance in the later years, other questions about where I am at in life circulate. And because I am me, the questions compound, clanging inside an echo chamber, as I have few to hear or to answer them. They rotate and cycle through my mind, and I am stalled. There are many questions, and few answers.

And so I have tried in the last month to find something fruitful to do with my cogitations, deciding to read more and try to find cues or tips in whatever I dive into. At least by entering into another consciousness, I suspend my own for a period.

Curiously, my interest in Southwestern experiences brought me to revisit several of my beloved Hillerman novels, and then I found myself back into another book about the Native experience in European America with David Grann’s astounding “Killers of the Flower Moon”, which found extra home with me because the Osage once lived in the area my folks grew up in in Kansas. I then read “Winter of the Blood” by James Welch, which was a gift to me from a friend back east, to whom, ironically enough, I had sent “House Made of Dawn” by N. Scott Momaday in a parallel exchange at Christmas, and in which each mirrored a similar disjuncted Native experience. I told Bob Gish, a lit prof who has befriended me, that I enjoyed the Winter book, and he suggested I round things out with Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony”- another book I had whitelisted at some time, but never got around to reading until this last week. And then talking to Gish about Ceremony after finishing it, I reflected on my mini journey into these three authors – Momaday, Welch, Silko- of the Native American Renaissance.

Each of these key Native American books were written by authors from different tribes (Kiowa, Blackfeet/Gors Ventre, Laguna), but they were all published within a decade of one another (1968, 1974, 1977), and their formulas are similar. Their protagonists, caught between the march of modernity, progress, and the capitalist ethos of a monolithic “white” American culture, and a call to remain in the cultures and customs of their traditional tribal lives, leads each of them on a journey, which is in each case a quest for healing and identity after bouts of trying to live in the “white man’s” world. Key in each of the books is the significance of land and location to each character and his people. Their land, which has been a major source of their lives and identities in the past, is not what it used to be in modern times, as settlers, ranchers, barons, and governments have come to claim parts and portions of these places for themselves.

Such is much of the Native experience in the United States, as it has been felt elsewhere. In successionism, the empowered supplants the diminished, and an ensuing collapse of culture and a consequential scramble for identity and for communal memory seizes the supplanted.

Interestingly enough, two of the three books, “House” and “Ceremony”, take place in part within 100 miles of each other in western New Mexico, between Albuquerque and Grants, on Jemez and Laguna pueblo lands, which, while remarkable for high desert beauty, are simple and vulnerable, and at times bleak. The protagonist experiences are riddled with anxieties, dysfunction, and confusions. They wrangle with isolation, dislocation, alienation, and ghosts. And inevitably, a tribal or cultural element- still conveyed through the medicine man- brings them back into identity, recovery, and harmony.

Still, it is the outsider experiences of these tales that pulls me in, because they are variations on a theme that most undoubtedly remains present in this state where I dwell, with its rich Native American heritage.

I call it successionism, my own term for it, which is that intermediate state where one culture largely supplants another, and those who belong to the lapsing quarter are thrown into a struggle for survival, for definition, for reinvention, for reclamation. And within that struggle there develops cultural confusion, fragmentation, disorientation, and loss.

This reading has taken my mind off of the living, and management, of my own life, to some extent, which I have welcomed as needed escape at the moment.

But in some ways, these books also echo to me, in these dry and desolate landscapes, and in these fragile characters, a winter of my own experience in life. While it is now summer and warm and verdant out, my inner vision is unsettled and less clear. My movements small and guarded. I wander a rocky periphery. I feel the weight of my past and see the consequences of some of my life decisions, and, at times, hear ghosts.

And I am unsettled.

I hope there is time for revival yet. For maybe one more new start for me. A remaking, perhaps. A recovery of sorts, in the coming years.

That I am in a winter of the renaissance.