How Scholarship Defames the Native Voice. .. and Why

Abstract

he examination of Indian-white relations in America by academics in the disciplines has always been a contentious matter. But for a few brief decades of this century, from 1960 to 1990, there seemed to be an empathetic and mutually supporting relationship between publishers and scholars and Indians who had begun to provoke reassessments in the emerging postcolonial debates. In the midsixties, as an early example of mutual interest and respect, Black Elk Speaks, the story of an Oglala holy man told by a University of Nebraska poet, John Niehardt, became an international bestseller. In the early eighties, I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (London: Verso, 1984), a life story translated by Ann Wright and edited by Elisabeth Burgos (an anthropologist in Paris and the wife of Regis Debray, the French philosopher who popularized Cuban theories of guerilla warfare), also became a best-seller and won a Nobel Peace Prize for its Guatemalan Indian subject. In these years also, a young Kiowa professor of literature from Oklahoma, N. Scott Momaday, won a Pulitzer for his novel about the relocation period of contemporary s 79 American Indian history, House Made of Dawn, and he has been acclaimed ever since as the preeminent literary voice of Native America. These are just a few of the examples of postcolonial work by Indian scholars who during those years began to wage a battle against what they alleged was a practice in academia to disbelieve or to blame or to damage their efforts to become a part of the American intellectual voice.