SOURCE: "Liminality and Myth in Native American Fiction: Ceremony and The Ancient Child," in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Vol. 20, No. 4, 1996, pp. 91-119.

In the following essay, Wallace discusses Silko's Ceremony and N. Scott Momaday's The Ancient Child and states that the novels "are attempts to articulate the survival of those people who are known as indians."

An indian [Wallace explains in a footnote that "For the purposes of this paper, I will use indian rather than Indian to defamiliarize the term and to refocus attention on the history on which its significance depends"] identity is a tricky thing to define. It is perhaps debatable whether it should be defined at all. As a construct imposed on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the conceptualization of the indian is fraught with problems. How does one determine who exactly is indian and, perhaps more importantly, who is responsible...