Decolonizing Pedagogy: Teaching Louise Erdrich's The Bingo Palace

Abstract

In the October 2005 issue of PMLA, Shari Huhndorf provides a brief survey of the primary challenges facing American Indian studies at the start of the twenty-first century. While she raises a number of significant issues in the article, Literature and the Politics of Native American Studies, Huhndorf underscores the question of control over representation: who holds?and who in the future will hold? the power to speak about, publish on, and teach in the discipline? As Huhndorf suggests, ongoing colonization is an essential frame work for understanding Native texts (1619). Moreover, a dichoto mous bind exists in the academic setting: the struggle for intellec tual sovereignty, as Robert Warrior puts it (qtd. in Huhndorf 1618), consistently comes up against the threat of intellectual imperialism (Philip Deloria qtd. in Huhndorf 1619). Certainly this is not a new issue, especially in the field of American Indian literary studies. For instance, many scholars have argued that the best way for nonindig enous literary critics to be allies is to approach the study of American Indian literature?if they approach it at all?with caution and humil ity. Otherwise, they risk committing a form of critical violence that perpetuates colonialist ideology. The study of American Indian lit erature, then, effectively demands a new, non-Eurocentric model. But this concern about colonialist academia extends beyond the publishing world to the classroom as well. What sorts of problems arise when the nonindigenous educator teaches indigenous-authored texts? How can we teach American Indian literature without colo nizing it? How might we, in other words, develop and apply an ethi