Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte by Christopher Pexa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte by Christopher Pexa David J. Carlson (bio) Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte by Christopher Pexa University of Minnesota Press, 2019 IN TRANSLATED NATION, Christopher Pexa makes a substantial contribution to the growing body of scholarship focused on the work of Indigenous intellectuals active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period when tribal communities were under extraordinary pressure from the settler-colonial state and consequently framed by many as the nadir of tribal nationhood in the United States. While certainly acknowledging the potency of U.S. colonial discourse and institutions at this time, Pexa's tribal-centric study instead emphasizes Dakhóta resistance, highlighting forms of that resistance generally overlooked by previous scholars. Pexa's specific focus is on the ethos of thióšpaye (extended family), the "core relational [philosophy]" that shapes Dakhóta life (xi). He explores the ways that figures ranging from Charles Eastman to Ella Deloria encoded and bore subtle witness to that ethos within works that might first seem (especially to non-Indigenous readers) to be essentially assimilationist. And while other scholars have emphasized the existence of various rhetorics of resistance in Indigenous writing from this period (including in the work of some of the authors treated here), Pexa's deeply informed readings and his explorations of a rich and coherent tradition of Dakhóta survivance set Translated Nation apart as an exceptionally valuable study in the field. Pexa dialogically structures his exploration of what he variously refers to as "cultural camouflage" or "rusing accommodation," weaving together literary analysis, autobiographical reflection, and conversational interludes with his own Dakhóta relations (1, 4). Perhaps it would be better to say that he organizes Translated Nation relationally, highlighting how Indigenous peoplehood, in a Dakhóta context, challenges artificial, colonial boundaries between ways of knowing, discursive contexts, periods, and physical space. Pexa finds evidence of the persistent assertion of thióšpaye ethics in such diverse locations as the carceral writings of Dakhóta citizens held at Fort Snelling after the 1862 U.S.-Dakhóta War, Charles Eastman's retellings of traditional stories in Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), the horse [End Page 160] dance portion of Black Elk's great vision (as recorded in the original transcripts), Ella Deloria's ethnographic novel Waterlily (written in the 1940s), and contemporary family reflections on the deep links between place, narrative, and identity. In each of these examples, Pexa develops his central claim: while Dakhóta expression may at first seem co-opted and fully legible from a colonial perspective, it is in fact dual voiced, "translat[ing] and re-working settler state mandates" into Indigenous understandings of kinship and relation (148). Translated Nation thus becomes a chronicle of what Pexa calls "unheroic decolonialisms," a term intended not to diminish the significance of these subtle forms of resistance but rather to highlight the importance of appreciating nonindividualistic forms of revolt not typically privileged in the settler-colonial worldview (147). In his account, the endurance of the Dakhóta people becomes a function less of periodic instances of exceptional activism (valuable as those may be) but rather of steady and persistent "caretaking" (235). In summarizing Pexa's core argument as I have here, it is not my intention to imply that Translated Nation overlooks the more equivocal aspects of some of the performances of personal and collective identity by its principal objects of study. Pexa's readings are never one-sided, and his critical discussions are always well grounded in current Indigenous studies scholarship. There are many examples of this care throughout the book. Pexa thoughtfully marks places where the conventionality of Ella Deloria's gender politics potentially conflicts with other aspects of her encoding of thióšpaye ethics. Elsewhere, he engages with some of the problematic elements of Black Elk's iconicity and popular reception. Perhaps considering the tremendous scope (and tonal variation) of Eastman's writings, one might have hoped that Pexa would consider a broader range of texts in that particular chapter (though it seems clear why, in the context of his argument, he made his specific selections). Pushing such a quibble...