LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature by Kirstin L. Squint

Abstract

Reviewed by: LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature by Kirstin L. Squint Alanna Hickey SQUINT, KIRSTIN L. LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. 179 pp. $40.00 hardcover; $42.00 e-book. In her frequently taught and cited 2008 essay “Blind Bread and the Business of Theory Making, by Embarrassed Grief,” the prolific Choctaw performer, artist, and academic LeAnne Howe pronounces of her tribal community, “We are people of specific landscapes, and our specific stories are told about our emergence from a specific place” (333). For Howe, the past, present, and future of Choctaw stories converge on the land, and particular sites are forever marked by Choctaw narrative presence. Kirstin L. Squint draws that specificity of place and story to the fore in the first monograph devoted to Howe’s expansive and field-defining work. Deftly bridging critical conversations in Native American literary studies (especially those among Native American literary nationalists) with literary scholarship on the American South, Squint aims to “destabilize the center of southern literary studies” which might otherwise exclude serious consideration of Native authors (16). As Squint’s careful prose attests, recent work in southern studies has tended to supplant the familiar black/white racial binary with a southern multiculturalism that still cannot account for Native peoples’ continual and persistent claims to those territories. In the absence of an account of the complex history of settler colonial violence, regional scholarship inevitably presumes Native exclusion from the post-Removal South. Through a series of thoughtful and convincing readings across Howe’s growing body of work, LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature proposes that we reimagine this place as “the Interstate South”: a network of tribal national relationships that refuse to adhere to regional, state, or federal border configurations. Squint’s concept is perhaps best illustrated in an important story of the Nanih Waiya, the sacred mound of Choctaw emergence stories, located in present-day Mississippi. As Howe explains, the Choctaws carried handfuls of earth from Nanih Waiya with them on the Trail of Tears, transporting southeastern land to Indian Territory during one of many federal campaigns aimed at the elimination of Native land and life. To insist that such sacred land is fundamentally Choctaw, and that territories’ ties to its Indigenous peoples are such that they persist across state and regional boundary lines, upsets our assumed geographies and their attendant methods. [End Page 610] Those ties become differently literalized in the shared names between important Choctaw sites in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma: “Just about every place name in Louisiana and Mississippi was transferred and then renamed in our new homelands, now the state of Oklahoma,” Howe explains in conversation with Squint (34). Such transferences of place between Choctaw homelands in the Southeast and the West call into question the relevance of regional markings for each. For Howe and Squint both, these spaces are Choctaw first and foremost, alive with relational engagements irreducible to southernness as we tend to think of it. Squint’s introduction centers on the term “Choctalking,” a portmanteau coined by Howe to describe a cultural-coding technique that privileges tribal specificity in both literary expression and interpretation. For Squint, Howe’s novels, plays, essays, and poetry all promote a specifically Choctaw epistemology that is fundamentally based in a relationship to land. In their capacity to “Choctalk,” Howe’s works require literary scholars to attend to an articulation of the “South before the South,” as Eric Gary Anderson names it, in their prioritization of Choctaw linguistic, cultural, and historical codes. And yet, as Squint explains, the “Interstate South” of Howe’s writings never belongs to a static past, at times moving across periods of centuries to establish a regional portrait that is strikingly cosmopolitan in its movements and connections. Throughout Howe’s work, characters and poetic speakers Choctalk in moments of intimacy, humor, diplomacy, and (as in the Native American Code Talkers of the two World Wars) literal warfare. Squint understands that this code talking operates as either a challenge or an invitation to Howe’s readers, and her four chapters work to contextualize...