Wee People, Red Devils, and the Old Women Back Home: Representations of Native Americans in Micí Mac Gabhann’s Rotha Mór an tSaoil and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s “The Pale Gold of Alaska”

Abstract

In Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions, James Cox argues that

Native authors such as [Thomas] King, [Gerald] Vizenor, and [Sherman] Alexie show that the many non-Native efforts to write about colonialism are all part of a broad non-Native storytelling tradition. Whether non-Natives call this writing literature, history, ethnography, anthropology, travel narrative, or journalism, the Truth of these stories is inevitable Native absence. This failure, inability, or unwillingness of Eurowestern story-tellers to narrate a story other than Native absence is also a key component of colonialism.¹