American Indian Literary Nationalism by Jace Weaver et al

Abstract

1 8 3 R E V I E W S the language games with which he familiarized the formally educated, my own bilingual language games, such as tliey are, did not come to me by way of Wittgenstein, but from schoolyard play and the push and pull of my rela¬ tions with others. How much more interesting would it be to consider this “natural” phenomenon from the bottom up, or as Sommer ultimately does, as alesson lost on amaster who himself was ambiguous about the practice.^ Bilingual Aesthetics is less abook on aesthetics in arestrictive literary or artistic sense than an appeal to the citizens of “post-national” states to open up to amultilingual existence, and embrace the free play and multilayering ofmeaningthatresultswhenpeopleandcommunitiesareconversant morethanonelanguage.Inordertogainthisacceptanceofmultilingualism, whichtheauthortakespainstoillustrateisnotgoodjustfortheindividual, butequallyormoresoforthepolity,sheproposesa“newsentimentaledu¬ cation,”onewherenotonlytheharmoniouslybeautifulisappreciated,but where dissonance and complexity are given positive value, in recognition of their constructive role in democratic societies. m B l a s H e r n a n d e z TexasTechUniversity Weaver, Jace, Craig S. Womack, Robert Warrior. American Indiati Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque: UNew Mexico P, 2006. xxii +272 pp. Intheprefacetothiscoauthoredtext.NativescholarsJaceWeaver,Craig Womack,andRobertWarrior(oftencalled“thethreeW’s”ofNativeliterary criticism)setoutnationalism,sovereignty,culture,self-determination, rience, and history as central issues in understanding the relations ip between NativeAmerican literature and the social and historical realities that underlietheliterature.Havingeachproducedimportantbooksoftheirown inthelate1990s(Warrior’sTnia/[1995],Weaver’sThatthePeople MipfhtLive[1997],andWomack’sRedonRed[1999]),theycometogether inthistext“committedtoanoldandpersistingdreaminwhichindigenous groups in theAmericas author their own destinies as distinct peoples wi a discrete political status in this world” (xxi). Weaver,Womack,andWarriorareallscholarscommittedtodeveop ing Native criticism in conversation with both historical and contemporary Nativeintellectualwork”(xvi).Weaverremindsreadersinchapter1that“As Nativecritics,weallhaveanobligationtoknoweachother’sworkandtobe inconversationwitheachother”(5).Theircommitmenttointellectualcon¬ versationisevidentnotonlyintheirowncollaborationinthistext,butalso in their inclusion of aforeword by Simon Ortiz and an afterword by Lisa Brooks, as well as the addition, as an appendix, of Ortiz’s 1981 essay “Towards aNational Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in National¬ ism.” In this way, they strategically place their own conversation in between 1 8 4 I N T E R T E X T S the opening words of Ortiz, “one of our major statesmen” (xvi), and the closing words of Brooks, one of the “rising class” of Native scholars interest¬ ed in Native nationalist literature and criticism (xx). They thus implement in their own text the type of conversation they would like to see carried out in the discipline of Native Studies. Their preface, indeed their work overall, is a call “for more Native voices articulating literary criticism and for better, clearer thinking about what links that literature to communities” (xxi). In achapter titled “Splitting the Earth; First Utterances and Plural Sep¬ aratism,” Weaver argues that just as Native American literature has to be by definition literature produced by Native Americans, “so Native American lit¬ erary criticism (in contrast to criticism of Native American literature) must be in the hands of Native critics to define and articulate, from resources we choose” (17). Echoing Virginia Woolf, he affirms that “[i]t must be simply a criticism of our own” (17). Weaver powerfully posits this issue as one of intellectual sovereignty, using Gerald TaiaiakeAlfred’s words to remind us that “Our deference to other people’s solutions has taken aterrible toll on indigenous peoples” (17). In each term, text, scholar, or perspective he dis¬ cusses, Weaver wants to know “what is at stake—what is gained and what is lost—by any given category, not only intellectually and pedagogically, but politically and ideologically as well” (41). For the authors ofAmerican Indi¬ an Literary Nationalism, what is at stake in literary nationalism is “nothing lessthanNativeidentity,definitionalandactualsovereignty....Itistheabil¬ ity of Natives and their communities to be self-determining rather than selves determined” (41). Weaver forcefully reminds readers of how from “thereduccionesofmissionariesin‘LatinAmerica’totheircounterpartsin the north, from allotment to boarding schools, from the Curtis Act’s aboli¬ tion of tribal courts and governments to the twin-headed policy of Termina¬ tion and Relocation,” the dominant culture has worked to determine the selves of Native peoples (71). Lamenting that traditional literary scholarship has too often been complicit in this enterprise. Weaver and his coauthors insist on Native people’s right “to think sovereign and act sovereign” (71). Womack begins his chapter...