Sephardism and Marranism in Native American Fiction of the Quincentenary

Abstract

So then, after having expelled all Jews from all your kingdoms and domains, in same month of January, Your Highnesses commanded me to take sufficient ships and sail to said regions of India. And in consideration you granted me great favours and honoured me thenceforth with title 'Don' and rank of Admiral of Ocean Sea and Viceroy and Governor in perpetuity of all islands and mainland that I should discover and take possession of. --Christopher Columbus, Journal of First Voyage, 1492 (3) Columbus, marrano in search of an eternal haven, landed five centuries later in hundreds of historical studies. That a marrano would be celebrated as discoverer of this nation, and, in words of President Ronald Reagan, inventor of American Dream, is an ironic weave of narrative histories; alas, marrano must be an onerous signature to antisemites. --Gerald Vizenor, Eternal Havens (113) In their reflections on quincentenary commemorations of Columbus's discovery of America, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam observe, For many Native Americans, to be asked to celebrate is equivalent of asking Jews to celebrate (66). Accordingly, a number of Native American activists, artists, and scholars have employed analogies to advance their critiques of myth. Contributors to The Submuloc Show/Columbus Wohs, a 1992 exhibit that explored Native American responses to quincentenary, refer in catalogue to Hitlerian facts (Smith 9) of the Holocaust (62). In her curator's statement for The Submuloc Show (the title of which reverses spelling of explorer's name), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith identifies as responsible for beginning of world's major holocausts and characterizes US government's Quincentennial Jubilee as the celebration of holocaust of Americas (iii). Controversial Native American studies scholar Ward Churchill also relies heavily on analogies in his A Little Matter of Genocide: and Denial in Americas, 1492 to Present (1997). Churchill includes as a frontispiece to his book Pam Colorado's poem What Every Indian Knows, which opens with lines Auschwitz ovens / burn bright / in America (xi, lines 1-3). Like highly charged discussions surrounding United States Memorial Museum's relationship to National Museum of American Indian, these assertions of a Columbus Holocaust are informed by a logic that Michael Rothberg terms competitive memory, in which the interaction of different collective memories ... takes form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence (3). (1) Two Native American novels that were published in 1991 to coincide with quincentenary, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich's The Crown of and Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus, distinguish themselves from such contestations by advancing an identificatory reading of Columbus. Moreover, in an inversion of Shohat and Stare formulation, this identificatory reading is made possible by their presentation of explorer not as a Hitler figure but as a crypto-Jew--a Marrano or secret Jew who preserved a connection to Judaism after forced conversions in Spain and Portugal. Indeed, while Crown and Heirs diverge significantly from one another in formal and thematic terms, they share an unusually sympathetic reading of that is enabled by distinctive manner in which they bring Native American and Jewish cultural narratives into relation. Crown and Heirs each feature prominent Jewish characters who serve as allies, facilitators, and mentors for Native American protagonists in their quests for political and imaginative sovereignty. It is striking that in both novels, majority of non-Native characters are Jewish. Both novels also incorporate a retelling of expulsion of Jews from Spain, thereby resituating landfall and its aftermath for indigenous peoples in context of Europe's relations with its internal Jewish Others. …