Motorcycles and Sweetgrass

Though a comic novel, Motorcycles and Sweetgrass deals with some serious issues: the difficulties of tribal governance, the loss of culture and language, forced assimilation, and the devastating impact of the boarding school era, for instance. How does Taylor manage to convey these serious ideas through comedy? What choices does he make in characterization, plot detail, and language that allow him to keep the narrative tone light without trivializing the issues that surface in the novel?

Teaching Suggestion: Students may tend to focus exclusively on what makes the novel amusing—they may, for instance, quickly point to eccentric characters like Wayne and Nanabush and to comic incidents like Virgil and Wayne’s repeatedly frustrated foot-chase in Chapter 17. But the intent of this question is to get students to think critically about how the novel manages to be respectful of serious issues despite its comic intent.

If students are overly focused on the humor of the novel, you might offer them a hint: Taylor is engaged in a careful balancing act, providing enough detail to create empathy for characters and the serious issues they face without dwelling overmuch on the darkness of these issues. Taylor’s characters are engaging, yet their interior worlds are not as fully realized as some in other novels, for instance, and though Taylor shows the impact of the boarding school experience on two characters, he omits or elides some of the more graphic and horrifying aspects of this era.

After students have responded to this prompt, you might use it as a springboard into evaluation of the balance Taylor achieves: Is the experience of reading the novel shallow because the novel tries to do too many things in a short space, or do the less detailed characterizations and depictions of plot events actually create a “mythic” atmosphere that adds to the reader’s enjoyment?

Differentiation Suggestion: Students with attentional or executive function issues may benefit from using a graphic organizer to list elements of characterization, plot detail, and language that create a light narrative tone versus those that convey serious social issues. This visual representation may suggest the idea of “balance” to them even without additional instructor input. English language learners and those who struggle with written expression might be allowed to simply turn in a graphic organizer like this, perhaps with a sentence or two explaining the conclusions the organizer has led them to.