Becoming Bear: Transposing the Animal Other in N. Scott Momaday and Joy Harjo

This paper studies the intertextual, multivalent significance of the traditional motif of human-to-bear transformation as it is reinscribed in ”The Ancient Child” and ”In the Bear's House” by N. Scott Momaday and in the poems ”The Place the Musician Became a Bear,” ”White Bear,” and ”Transformations,” anthologized in Joy Harjo's ”How We Became Human”. The bear in the motif of transformation created by these contemporary writers reinforces the animal's role as mediator between man and other animals and interrogates the subjection of animals in evolutionary thought. Transposing the bear from the position of being an ”other” to human beings, Momaday and Harjo re-align the bear with Native American identity in a palimpsest figure that stands in a place of resistance to assimilation and beyond reservation captivity. They follow the bear of myth to a position of astral superiority in a cosmological order transcending earthbound histories and endangered cultural spaces.