Employing the mimetic theory of René Girard as its heuristic, Peacemakers offers a unique analysis of Native American myth and fiction. It explores two important founding myths (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe and Acoma Pueblo) and analyzes four modern novels: three from the Native American Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s (N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony) and the fourth from the twenty-first century (Sherman Alexie’s Flight). While Native American literary criticism typically points to continuities across the traditional-modern divide, Scott Richard Lyons emphasizes a decisive break happening in the progressive era. Following Girard’s theory, Lyons finds that the Indigenous worlds of sacred tradition and secular modernity confront situations of mimetic desire and violence in significantly different ways, given their different cultural resources. Ultimately problems of violence and desire come down to questions of how people can live together peacefully with a sense of meaning and transcendence, questions that are more “religious” than “political.” Thus, the outlook of Peacemakers is more Shakespearian than Marxian.
