Acorn Soup Is Good Food: L. Frank, <em>News from Native California</em>, and the Intersections of Literary and Visual Arts

Abstract

Acorn Soup Is Good FoodL. Frank, News from Native California, and the Intersections of Literary and Visual Arts Susan Bernardin (bio) collaborative indigenous aesthetics N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. Leslie Silko’s Storyteller. Nora Naranjo-Morse’s Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay. Eric Gansworth’s A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function. Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. The collaborative interplay of literary and visual genres enacted by these diverse works posits that relationships are at the heart of Native aesthetics. These relationships extend from the mixed-genre form so common in contemporary Native literature to the dexterity of many Native artists who move among multiple creative forms: writing, painting, photography, performance and film work. Yet, this constitutive facet of contemporary Native literary arts remains undernoted. The most consistent scholar to do so, Chadwick Allen, has repeatedly called for a more capacious framework for Native literary studies that proceeds from the recognition that many Native artists work in “multiple media, and . . . often juxtapose genres and forms” (xxii). From Blood Narrative to Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, Allen has made the case that “when we conceive written literatures within a more expansive, inclusive context of Indigenous arts, the alphabetic text becomes simply one option within a larger field of self-representation. Literary scholars, I argue, ought to join writers, artists, and arts scholars to engage in Indigenous-centered conversations across the boundaries of traditional disciplines” (xxii– xxiii). Similarly, in Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the nmai, Dean Rader places “Native art, literature, and film in context and in conversation with one another to create a cross-genre discourse of resistance” that models what he aptly terms “indigenous interdisciplinarity” (1–2). While it should surprise no one in the field that [End Page 1] Native writers are also visual artists or saxophone players or that Native poets also create poem-films, how do we continue to translate that multiplicity into our interpretive practices?1 To use Allen’s and Rader’s terms, how do we extend the “conversation” these works compel, both internally, with the new forms forged from the interplay of genres, and externally, with affiliated Indigenous arts practices? At the same time, how do we pay closer attention to the multiple “lives” of Native literary and visual arts as they are produced and experienced at various sites for diverse audiences? As we know, location—where a work is presented, published, exhibited, or disseminated—matters. Consider the case of News from Native California, a Berkeley-based quarterly magazine, and its signature artist, L. Frank Manriquez (Tongva/Raramuri/Ajachemem).2 Both separately and together, the magazine and L. Frank’s cartoons and mixed-media work, Acorn Soup and Second Serving, exemplify what one might call the moving practice of Native literary studies. When L. Frank published Acorn Soup: Drawings and Commentary in 1999, her single-panel cartoon of the same name was already a long-term, highly popular staple of the magazine. This essay locates L. Frank’s work within the multiple contexts of News from Native California, The Dirt Is Red Here (an anthology of California Indian visual and literary arts), and the book Acorn Soup—all three of which are published by the nonprofit Heyday Books. How does L. Frank’s Acorn Soup work as a form of local aesthetics within the California Indian–centered venue of News? How does the complex interplay of text and image in her work differently engage local and larger audiences? How do the shifting, collaborative relationships between form and format in Acorn Soup help us adjust the frames of Native literary studies? Since 1987 News from Native California has documented contemporary Indigenous activism in California alongside the ongoing recovery of land, languages, foods, and customary arts. Its cofounders—writer-publisher Malcolm Margolin, anthropologist Vera Mae Frederickson, and anthropologist-filmmaker David W. Peri (Coast Miwok)—started the magazine to counter legacies of genocide, historical trauma, and intergenerational loss for Indigenous peoples in California. Those legacies unfold from Spanish military occupation, enslavement, sexual terrorism, and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in coastal regions from 1769 to 1834; state-sponsored extermination...