The Presence of Early Native Studies: A Response to Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary E. Wyss

Abstract

As this informative essay by Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary E. Wyss makes clear, Native American literatures and textualities have, like Native tribal nations, long been plural, multilingual, grounded in home places, deeply invested in land, and shared across networks of relations. Native people have for centuries been literate in earthworks, baskets, trade routes, petroglyphs, ecosystems, rhetorical performances, newspapers, treaties, books, and many other kinds of legible texts that they have created as well as, in some instances, received; Native knowledge has for centuries traversed space as well as time. Contemporary Native writers such as LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Simon Ortiz (Acoma), and Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe) detail the ways in which the multiple archives of the past—early and recent, oral and written, accessible and inaccessible—inform and challenge the present. Storytellers such as the western Apache in Keith Basso's landmark study Wisdom Sits in Places (1996) know that “the country of the past … is never more than a narrated place-world away. It is thus very near, as near as the workings of their own imaginations, and can be easily brought to life at almost any time” (32). From Abenaki space on the other side of the continent, Lisa Brooks expresses a similar perception in the opening sentence of her important book The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008), writing that she and her friend Natalie “are sitting on the grass, stretching our legs, beside this old riverside trail, which I know her ancestors walked, and probably mine, too” (xix). The early and the contemporary are close enough to touch and are powerfully intertwined in such shared, narrated places.