Pop Culture in Native American Literature Sara Miner College

American popular culture pervades not only America itself, but many other cultures as well, and it says so much about the people and society as a whole that it attempts to define. American Indians are a group not usually connected with the network of popular culture in the way many other American ethnic groups are included, but Native American authors of many affiliations attempt to bridge this distinction and show how they are just as much a part of the global society as everyone else is. In works such as Truth and Bright Water by Thomas King and Storyteller by Leslie Marmon Silko, specific scenes reveal the ways in which pop culture is highly important in defining native cultures.

In King’s Truth and Bright Water, many references are made to the strangeness of an outsider looking in on Indian Country. Tecumseh comments on the look of Monroe’s hair when the two first meet; like it looks too typically Indian to be normal. Tecumseh also seems to have the idea of cars and driving in his head constantly, a conception that is not typically or traditionally “Native American,” as many who mentally (and inaccurately) antiquate Indian culture might consider the primary mode of transportation to be bareback on horses rather than buckled...