For a couple of years, Adrian Jawort had been thinking about what he could do to promote contemporary Native American fiction writers.
He is a Northern Cheyenne who grew up in Lockwood and Billings, a successful freelance journalist who has been interested in writing fiction since he was a young boy. He knew there was hardly any market for native writers.
“Even if they do get published,” he said, “it’s in some literary journal that no one on the rez is ever going to see.”
Adrian Jawort
This fall, he finally decided to do something about it. He was inspired by two things: a controversy over a Sherman Alexie novel that was on a required-reading list at Skyview High School in Billings, and a conversation with a young Northern Cheyenne woman who had graduated from Dartmouth College with a master’s degree in creative writing.
The Alexie novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” was on the 10th-grade required reading list at Skyview. A parent formally objected, asking to have the book removed from the list because of obscenities and sexual matter. A subcommittee of the District 2 School Board decided in November to keep the book on the reading list but to formalize a policy allowing parents to opt their children out of reading books they considered objectionable.
What caught Jawort’s attention was the passionate testimony of dozens of students who spoke of the power of Alexie’s novel. That told Jawort there was a hunger for realistic accounts of contemporary native culture.
"Off the Pass" is an anthology of Montana American Indian Writers.
Then there was his conversation with Cinnamon Spear, also a Northern Cheyenne, who grew up amid alcoholism and abuse and went on to become the first graduate of Lame Deer High School to earn a degree from an Ivy League school. Jawort was writing a story for Indian Country Today about a documentary film Spear had directed and produced, which detailed the role of basketball in her tribal community.
They started talking about fiction and she sent him three of her short stories. Spear, who now lives in Washington, D.C., said Jawort was impressed.
“He wrote back and said, ‘Oh, my God. Between your writing and mine we could totally do a book, with just a few other people.”
And that’s what he did. Jawort started his own company, Off the Pass Press, and recently published “Off the Path,” subtitled “An Anthology of 21st Century Montana American Indian Writers, Vol. 1.”
The “Vol. 1” is a signal of Jawort’s ambition. He’s already looking at a volume focusing on Indians from the Southwest and another anthology of writings by Native American women. He even speaks of publishing anthologies of fiction by natives of Australia and New Zealand.
“Off the Path” consists of nine stories — three of his own, three from Spear and one each from Luella Brien and Eric BigMan Brien, both Crow Indians, and Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation. Jawort is 34, Spear 26; the oldest contributor is 35.
“We’re not trying to discriminate, but we are looking for younger writers,” Jawort said.
Likewise, there were no guidelines regarding content, but all the stories that ultimately made it into the book are “pretty bleak,” he said.
Spear will vouch for that. Although she is a happy person, she said, when she writes she can’t help, at least for now, focusing on the violence, dysfunction and substance abuse she knew growing up in Lame Deer. Of her three stories, one centers on physical abuse, one on abortion and the other on a woman falling in love with a man in prison.
She might move on to lighter subjects someday, she said, but for now she wants to tell people the hard truth about life on the reservation as she knew it.
“There’s a lot of people in my life who when they met me had little to no knowledge of contemporary Native American culture, or even Native American history,” she said.
Jawort had something similar to say. He was inspired by the words of the director of “Winter in the Blood,” the recently released film based on the James Welch novel, set among the Blackfeet of Montana’s Hi-Line. Jawort said he advised people to “pursue the thing that haunts you.”
A more recent inspiration came from a woman who has already read the anthology. She told Jawort it was so sad that she broke into tears and had to quit reading. But only for a time. She also had to start again, and push through to the end.
Jawort thinks the time is ripe to bring Native American fiction to the masses, and he thinks he might be the person to do it.
“It’s got to start somewhere,” he said.
Details: “Off the Path” is priced at $12.95. To order a copy, go to Jawort’s website.
