Re/Mapping of West American Historical Subjecturties in Mari Sandoz's Cheyenne Autumn

Abstract

Literature has long intersected with history, reflecting and helping to record the past of humanity. It is supposed to tell the societal unsaid and completes what history neglects. Across genres, writers use literary works to criticize, entertain, and document the times and spaces in which they are set. Sandoz investigates some of these themes and addresses issues that will resurface over the length of this study. More precisely, Sandoz’s literary piece portrays events that happened during the era when more forceful and continual push of white expansionists into the American Great Plains region and when the Cheyennes’ resistance reached its apex yet; brutally crushed. Responsively, their diasporic trek was the ultimate attempt to consolidate their way of life, dignity, and recover their homeland. Without doubt, their endeavor enhanced and inspired Sandoz’s artistic and loyal commitment. Despite being a White writer, and a presumed product of Westward expansion, she boldly and frankly transgresses the academic, social and political White-Indian bias. The author tries to report realities by transliterating them into literary narratives to voice a people and a culture, which have long been silenced by Whites’ misrepresentations and marginalization. From the American margin, she betrays the literary generic distinctions and adopts a new style, language, and discourse to produce Sandoz’s Indian text. Her positive and admirable look at the Cheyennes led her to demystify, recreate and remap, from a close stance, the plight of this minority. Using new literarymechanisms and various perspectives, she critically reviews the history of the conquest, and, then interrogates the “civilized” conquerorthroughherpersonalconquest of love, love of the so-called “savage”; because the Cheyennes are a people to love.