American Indian Texts Research Articles

Archival Sovereignty in LeAnne Howe's <em>Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story</em>

Archival Sovereignty in LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings:An Indian Baseball Story Emily Lederman (bio) Ezol smoothes the hem of her dress. "Documents lie," she says casually. —Miko Kings 28 Contemporary American Indian texts engage with the materials of colonial US archives to highlight their complicity in the genocide and oppression of Indigenous peoples. Archival practices of documentation, including missionary records, the mapping of land, and the collecting or theft of artifacts and stories, are revealed as tools of settler colonialism mobilized to justify genocidal state practices. Yet these colonial archival materials may also serve as entry points to tribally specific histories. Since American Indians are both silenced and hypervisible within the colonial archive, working with the colonial archive's misrepresentations is an important part of destabilizing that archive. Well-read authors of the Native American Literary Renaissance, including N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), confront the limitations of the colonial archive and emphasize Indigenous modes of accessing, organizing, and preserving histories in their fictional texts. Contemporary American Indian novels continue to chart the violences of US colonial archives and offer a way out of a narrow historical lens. These novels open up historical possibilities and deepen historical understanding in part by repurposing colonial archival documents within Indigenous narratives and epistemologies. I focus on LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007) in this article because the text explicitly theorizes and models the construction of a decolonial archive using real and fictionalized documents. [End Page 64] Placing work of the interdisciplinary "archival turn" in conversation with the tribally specific, I call collections of document, story, object, and ephemera "archives" throughout this article in order to legitimize them as sources of historical knowledge and sites of knowledge production. Such collections are uniquely powerful because they occur outside of institutions; as feminist and queer archivists have demonstrated, calling personal collections and ephemera "archives" "remains a powerful authorizing act" (Eichhorn 15). Decolonial archives are mediums for preserving and accessing history that privilege Indigenous epistemologies and deauthorize the written document as the definitive record of what has past. The devaluation of American Indian forms of archiving was integral to the colonial project; as Diana Taylor has explained, "[P]art of the colonizing project throughout the Americas consisted in discrediting autochthonous ways of preserving and communicating historical understanding" (34). Therefore, to decolonize the archive requires both revealing the destructive nature of the colonial archive that continues to be employed to justify state violence (such as land and resource acquisition and a militarized US-Mexico border) and privileging Indigenous modes of preserving and accessing historical knowledge. Decolonial archives both enact Indigenous epistemologies and dismantle a narrow colonial historical lens characterized by Manifest Destiny and the erasure of Indigenous cultures and political systems. Formed outside of institutions, they redefine archival possibilities. The intentional inclusion of Indigenous narratives and epistemologies within institutions can also produce decolonial archives.1 My focus here is how literature creates decolonial archives by positioning the US colonial record within an Indigenous frame. Revealing the constructed nature of colonial historical narratives, American Indian contemporary texts tell tribally specific histories with the help of materials from the colonial archive. Both decentering and repurposing the materials of the colonial archive is a decolonizing archival practice, an act of what I call "archival sovereignty." Archival sovereignty is achieved in literature that takes control of both Indigenous histories and the colonial historical record. In addition to providing an alternative Indigenous archive, these texts decolonize the archive by intimately engaging with the colonial record. I choose the term "sovereignty" because of the work it does in marking the complex politics [End Page 65] of tribal struggles for self-determination within the context of US colonialism. Sovereignty points both to a history of tribal autonomy longer than the colonial gaze and to the necessity of working across borders, including with European American structures of power.2 I follow Jace Weaver's (Cherokee) formulation of sovereignty as both useful within colonial power structures and independent of their powers of bestowal. The archives I describe in this article are at once autonomous and in negotiation with the colonial archive. My use...

"Counting Coup" on Children's Literature about American Indians: Louise Erdrich's Historical Fiction

Louise Erdrich's children's novels "count coup" on previous attempts to render American Indian life, especially those found in beloved books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and others. Through intertextual connections, she revisions stereotypical images of American Indians that have, until more recently, pervaded children's literature. Analyzing Erdrich's novels within the framework of Catherine Rainwater's counting coup paradigm suggests a way to negotiate the problems posed by classic texts rather than eradicate them altogether, allowing American Indian texts to triumph over the problematic images while celebrating more culturally-sensitive depictions, thus finding a place alongside of, not just in response to, canonical children's texts.

Bibliography and the Sociology of American Indian Texts

The recovery of American Indian texts demands that editors attend to those specific contexts of textual production that make many Native texts unique and sometimes resistant to traditional bibliographic techniques. Such an approach involves recognizing the fundamentally “landed” nature of indigenous writing and coming to terms with the distinctive aspects of Native textual circulation that involve both colonial power structures and familial, clan, and tribal social relationships. Moreover, any bibliographic description of Native texts must acknowledge their “preoccupation with juxtaposing oral and graphic forms of expression” (Teuton) and explore how Native writers manipulate both traditional tribal semiotics and those of the codex to inaugurate a new material practice from within their own national literary traditions.

Born Out of the Creek Landscape: Reconstructing Community and Continuance in Craig Womack’s <i>Drowning in Fire</i>

What identifies a Creek work, in my mind, in addition to its authorship by a Creek person, is the depiction of geographically specific landscape and the language and stories that are born out of that landscape. --Craig Womack, Red on Red (20) In his 1999 monograph, Red on Red. Native American Literary Separatism, Craig S. Womack (Creek) explains the importance of understanding Native texts within their specific frameworks and traditions. He offers this approach as an alternative to reading American Indian texts within or in relation to pan-Indian or European/American canons. For Womack, this reading strategy must further engage the specific geographies of the lands in question. This tribally-specific approach is generally labeled tribal nationalism, though Womack opts for separatism as the subtitle to his text. (1) However, Womack is not solely a literary critic but also a novelist, and he offers Drowning in Fire (2001) as an example of the goals he lays out for tribal, and specifically Creek, authors. (2) This article analyzes Drowning in Fire, focusing on the reconstruction of Creek/ Muskogee identity in the specific landscapes of Oklahoma. (3) By reconstruction, I do not mean to imply artificiality or to foster an image of a lost culture attempting to define itself despite historical discontinuity. Rather, using Womack's own critical lens as offered in Red on Red, this essay examines his novel in terms of the way Creek identity, like all identities, is constantly produced and reproduced by its own cultural agents; at the same time, it is also constantly producing and reproducing its own cultural subjects. These reconstructions are always in-process, resilient, and adaptable practices that oppose images of vanishing or extinct Native communities. I also wish to recognize Womack's remarkably fluid reconstruction of culture and how it is affected by human connections to place. Because Oklahoma is the site of Creek relocation (from Georgia and Alabama, in particular) following the 1830 Indian Removal Act (a history I address in more detail later), one might expect it to serve as the site of exile, the temporary locus of an ongoing diaspora. However, for the characters in Drowning in Fire, as for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Oklahoma becomes a sovereign home. Muskogee connections to place and other species are integral parts of these open-ended reconstructions, core values that are reinforced through family stories that serve as lessons about how to dwell in place and in motion. These elements bear particular relevance to recent ecocritical moves to understand and articulate human and other-than-human migrations and diasporas. Reflecting the fact that the Creek Nation has historically been a confederated one--that is, it has included and welcomed individuals, families, and even whole communities from other tribal, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds in a broad-reaching alliance--the Creek community presented in Drowning in Fire is racially inclusive. It is also notable that Womack imagines this community to have been historically welcoming and accepting of what would today be termed queer relationships. Womack's work, then, further informs ecocritical studies of naturalized concepts of gender and sexuality. Throughout Drowning in Fire, contemporary Creek identities are understood through Creek stories, especially those describing human relationships to land and water and to plant and animal species. In Red on Red, Womack explains: [T]his study will employ the term traditional Creek life rather than precontact and postcontact culture. I acknowledge that the very term is problematic, especially in the way it is sometimes perceived as dealing only with the past. I wish to posit an alternative definition of traditionalism as anything that is useful to Indian people in retaining their values and worldviews, no matter how much it deviates from what people did one or two hundred years ago. …

Against Separatism: Jace Weaver and the Call for Community

When I began graduate school, I was a bit of a scourge at graduate student parties, because I was perennially asking others what exactly the utility of their research interests was to their larger community outside of academia. In a way this question could be construed as naive, as a misapplication of one discursive space upon another, or as just plain rude. Certainly in a room full of graduate students, not always the most self-assured people in the world, the question was considered hostile, so I began to keep it to myself, although it is a natural curiosity for Native American scholars, and indeed animates most of our work, despite heavy resistance from scholars based more in literary studies than in American Indian studies. Jace Weaver writes for most of us in noting that “when it comes to scholarship on indigenous cultures, there is no such thing ultimately as ‘knowledge for knowledge’s sake’” (“Indigenousness” 230). In reviewing Weaver’s work, I wish not only to articulate why that is very much the case, but also to exhort my colleagues in the broader American studies to take up this question when bringing in indigenous materials, as well as to propagate attention toward the truly interdisciplinary work that Weaver has generated thus far. Instead of asking what a text does within its particular language game, Native scholars such as Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior are deploying methods from broader cultural studies and indigenous philosophies to place American Indian literary texts

The Risk of Misunderstanding in Greg Sarris's Keeping Slug Woman Alive

Greg Sarris's book Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts is a groundbreaking text in that it is, in part, an attempt to incorporate aspects of oral tradition within the written word and to make the tradition and lessons of storytelling understandable for a Euroamerican audience. However, because Sarris does not clearly explain what he is trying to say, there is a risk, perhaps a certainty, that many readers will misunderstand or misinterpret the meaning of the stories that he tells and the points that he attempts to make. Instead of explaining what he means, Sarris follows Mabel MacKay's example of enigmatically answer ing a story with another story or ignoring the question until a later related event recalls the original story, and even then he allows the second event to stand as an explanation for the first story or event.1 It would seem that his point is to invite readers to participate in his narration and storytelling by allowing them to interpret the mate rial through the readers' own reality filter of experience, knowledge, and emotion. This approach might be appropriate and work well for an audience steeped in oral tradition, particularly the oral tradition of the Porno people, of whom Sarris is a member, but for the more usual Euroamerican reader, Sarris's approach does not explicate but only serves to confuse and complicate. Still, most other writers who have attempted to translate oral tradition into literary form have not done much better in accurately recording, translating, and explain ing stories from oral tradition. Is such accuracy important? Why? Stories?spoken or written?are important for two reasons: they

In Praise of Old Friendships

In Praise of Old Friendships Kathryn W. Shanley (bio) They say a true friend is a great gift, and that an old friend makes the best mirror. LaVonne Ruoff is both to me—we have known one another for over twenty years. What more could one want from a friend but someone who belongs to you in a kinship way, and at the same time knows how to hold up a mirror when you need to look upon yourself through someone else's eyes. LaVonne is the person to whom I have turned what seems like a million times for a kind word, for help, for letters of support, for a textual reference, for news, even for a phone number (I swear she has everyone's phone number!). I must say that LaVonne has mentored, in one way or another, every up-and-coming scholar in our field. She has always spoken with great enthusiasm as she has seen new scholars finishing up their work in graduate studies. I cannot imagine a more generous scholar, mentor, or friend—she is all those things to and for us all. And she relates to others with the sort of kindness that only comes from great wisdom. Despite the valuable role she has played in so many people's lives, LaVonne remains humble about her service to individuals and to the field of Native American literature. As the recipient of the Modern Language Association's Lifetime Achievement Award, LaVonne rightly stands tallest, heads and shoulders above the rest of us, as someone who has devoted her career to doing the next thing that needs doing to assure that native voices will be heard. She will long be known as the person who kept banging her drum slowly until Native American literature and literary study became institutionalized in mla and recognized and respected as on a par with other literatures [End Page 108] and literary studies. Along with others in her generation such as Karl Kroeber, Dan Littlefield, and James Parins, LaVonne set about to document all that could be found, to foster growth in the critical examination of those early works, and to develop institutional homes, such as ASAIL and the MLA Division of American Indian Literatures. LaVonne has done more to recover American Indian texts, to reinterpret old texts, to promote the growth of an American Indian professoriate, to support all scholars in the field of American Indian literatures, to institutionalize the Weld, and to foster a new generation of scholars in American Indian studies at the Newberry Library than anyone else. (I have elsewhere referred to her as the Willie Nelson of native literary study—she's sung with anyone, because she loves the song [the literature] so much!) I would dare to say that there is no one in the field who does not possess a copy of American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. That text has become the veritable bible of American Indian literary study. I always recommend it as the first text new teachers of native literature ought to own. LaVonne's work on Charles Eastman, Alice Callahan, George Copway, and Pauline Johnson creates the foundation we all need for more deeply understanding those authors' lives, times, and works. Her work enables us to pick up such authors with authority, knowing the information we use to introduce those works to students will be sound and deep. The editing role LaVonne has played also enhances greatly the books available to us for our work; I am particularly grateful for the Life Studies series LaVonne edits with the University of Nebraska Press, because those books are essential to the study of American Indian autobiography. I stand in awe of LaVonne for all that she has accomplished, yet I'm also so very fond of her, because she gives to her friends from her heart. She has offered true friendship to me over the years, even when I was so ornery it's a wonder anyone could put up with me—I love her crackling laugh and all those wonderful times we've shared. What more can I say, but that she's a gift to us...

The Risk of Misunderstanding in Greg Sarris's Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts

The Risk of Misunderstanding inGreg Sarris's Keeping Slug Woman Alive:A Holistic Approach to American IndianTexts Franci Washburn (bio) Greg Sarris's book, Keeping Slug Woman Alive, is a groundbreaking text in that it is, in part, an attempt to incorporate aspects of oral tradition within the written word, and an attempt to make the tradition and lessons of story-telling understandable for a Eurowestern audience. However, because Sarris does not clearly explain what he is trying to say, there is a risk, perhaps a certainty, that many readers will misunderstand or misinterpret the meaning of the stories that he tells and the points he attempts to make. Instead of explaining what he means, Sarris follows Mabel MacKay's example of enigmatically answering a story with another story, or ignoring the question until a later related event recalls the original story, and even then he allows the second event to stand as an explanation for the first story or event.1 It would seem that his point is to invite the reader to participate in his narration and storytelling by allowing them to interpret the material through the reader's own reality filter of experience, knowledge, and emotion. This approach might be appropriate and work well for an audience steeped in oral tradition, particularly the oral tradition of the Pomo people, of whom Sarris is a member, but for the more usual Eurowestern reader, Sarris's approach does not explicate but serves only to confuse and complicate. Still, most other writers who have attempted to translate oral tradition into literary form have not done much better in accurately recording, translating, and explaining stories from oral tradition. Is such accuracy important? Why? Stories—spoken or written—are important for two reasons: they [End Page 70] are the means of transferring information, and/or they are valuable for the aesthetics contained within them that are intended to evoke an emotional response. Both information and aesthetic meaning carry the very essence of any group of people: what is necessary for survival, what they value, what they consider as simply beautiful, or, perhaps, what is necessary for the survival of the soul. Cultural groups, of course, vary widely from those that are strikingly similar to those who have almost no common ground, but all groups share this increasingly smaller world, and some basic level of understanding is necessary for all groups to share the space with some degree of peace and cooperation. The risk of misunderstanding can be catastrophic. Misunderstood words have been the cause of problems ranging from minor rifts between friends on up the scale to devastating wars. And usually the groups that have been decimated, if not completely eliminated by such misunderstandings, have been the indigenous populations of the world. The indigenous groups that have survived have done so by achieving, either by choice or force, at least a minimal understanding of the dominant culture through that culture's spoken and written words. However, the efforts of dominant cultures to understand colonized peoples have been desultory. For the most part, their survival has not been in question; they have studied indigenous people primarily for entertainment or curiosity value. Indigenous peoples cannot force dominant cultures into understanding, but writers, both indigenous and non-indigenous, must make every effort to foster cultural understanding in order for indigenous groups to not only survive in the world, but to prosper. Because oral tradition, story, is the basic means of communicating information in traditional societies, it is important that stories be recorded, transmitted, and explained as accurately as possible. While Sarris's text is interesting and thought provoking, he does not explicate clearly, but seems to invite the reader to interpret the information for her/himself. The invitation without guidelines invites misunderstandings. Further, many readers are not motivated to seek any understanding beyond the superficial, particularly when the text is not read by choice but is only part of a required course in Native American literature. While it is difficult to translate the spoken story [End Page 71] into the written text and to explain the material so that it is understandable by a general audience, it is possible. Orality and literacy are not mutually...

"EnCountering" Colonial Latin American Indian Chronicles: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's History of the "New" World

"EnCountering" Colonial Latin American Indian Chronicles:Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's History of the "New" World Ralph Bauer (bio) If Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are waiting for me on that nearby beach, I'm screwed. Christopher Columbus, in Alejo Carpentier's El arpa y la sombra Encountering Guaman Poma: A Critical Perspective In 1908, the German anthropologist Richard Pietschmann discovered in an archive in Copenhagen an early-seventeenth-century manuscript consisting of nearly 1,200 pages of narrative written in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, as well as nearly 400 drawings. The author identified himself as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (b. around 1535), son of Guaman Mallqui de Ayala, a person of prominence in the provincial Peruvian Yarovilca culture, and Curi Ocllo, the daughter of Tupac Inka Yupanqui, the tenth of the twelve rulers of the Inka dynasty. The text is entitled El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno [First new chronicle and good government] (see figure 1) and had apparently been written between 1587 and 1613. It is a history of pre-Columbian Peru, the Spanish conquest, and the subsequent colonial regime, presented in the Spanish tradition of the crónicas de indias (histories of America). Unlike most writers of Spanish chronicles about the conquest, however, the author indicts the abuses of the colonial regime and insists that America had a legitimate history before the conquest, only recorded, as it were, in another language. The author therefore announces that his sources were the quipos, the colored knotted chords with which the Inkas had recorded important events, as well as the contents of Andean oral traditions—the "memories and accounts of the old Indians" (I: viii).1 Pietschmann, aware of the significance of the manuscript, immediately began a modern edition of the text but unfortunately died before its completion. Nevertheless, Guaman Poma's "First New History" of Peru was subsequently published as a facsimile edition in Paris by the Institut d'Ethnologie in 1936 and has since been republished four times—in 1944 (La Paz), in two separate editions in 1980 (Caracas and Mexico), and in Lima (1993).2 [End Page 274] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Title page, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno. Unlike Anglo Americans, Spanish American literary historians have long counted texts written by Indians (or mestizos) among their national "classics," such as those of the Inka Garcilaso de la Vega, the mestizo son of a Spanish conqueror and an Inka princess, whose early-seventeenth-century works were [End Page 275] published during his lifetime in Spain and have since been regarded as pivotal texts in the emergence of a Latin American literary expression.3 Guaman Poma's chronicle, by contrast, which was not published during his lifetime despite the author's apparent wish to do so, was lost in the oblivion of the archive for nearly 300 years.4 Since its discovery in the twentieth century, however, this fascinating text has excited an enormous amount of attention from Spanish American literary historians, who have grown increasingly aware of Latin America's "postcolonial" and "subaltern" cultural heritage.5 In the United States, of course, students of Native American literature have hitherto altogether ignored Guaman Poma's counterhistory because of cultural, institutional, and ideological reasons. Thus, there had not been any English translations of Guaman Poma's chronicle until Christopher Dilke's drastically abbreviated edition published as Letter to a King: A Picture-History of the Inca Civilization in 1978, and it still awaits a complete scholarly translation to this day. Although Native Americanists have frequently been interested in texts that originated outside the national borders of the United States (mostly Canada) but were written in what today constitutes the anglophone world, we have generally not been very attentive to American Indian texts outside anglophone culture.6 This is partially due, of course, to the fact that most of us interested in Native American literature today have our institutional affiliations in English or American studies departments. Perhaps more importantly, however, there has been a lingering U.S. (proto)nationalist bias in our understanding of the idea of "America" when we are talking about "Native American literature."7 While...

Prayers Shrieked to Heaven: Humor and Folklore in Contemporary American Indian Literature

Contemporary Native American writers have task quite different from that of other writers. In the light of enormous loss, they must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe. Louise Erdrich (1985) In the course of my folklore studies I had the opportunity to survey the literature of cultures distant in time and geography from those of the twentieth-century Western world. In particular, I read many of the stories and poems that survive from Medieval Ireland and Wales. This literature describes way of life and system of beliefs I found puzzling and sometimes utterly incomprehensible. Similarly, when I first studied materials from African oral tradition, I found much that mystified me. Both bodies of oral tradition are parts of complex and vital cultural systems, but my personal life experiences and cultural expectations, joined with my ignorance of the history and beliefs of the producers of these works, sometimes obscured their meaning for me. conclusions I have been able to draw from encountering these materials have been provisional and tenuous. Indeed, as Roy Wagner reminds us about the ethnographer's understanding of other cultures, Whatever he 'learns' from his subjects will therefore take the form of an extension or superstructure, built upon that which he already knows, and built of that which he already knows (Wagner 1981:8). Thus, the fact that I am late twentieth-century, middle-class white American male plays significant role in determining the meaning I am able to extract from material originating in other cultures. To break out of the prison of my own cultural assumptions, I must make what Michael M. J. Fischer describes as a dialectical or two-directional journey examining the realities of both sides of cultural differences so that they may mutually question each other, and thereby generate realistic image of human possibilities and self-confidence for the explorer grounded in comparative understanding rather than ethnocentrism (Fischer 1986:217). When I came to study the works of contemporary Native American novelists I was prepared once again to face measure of culture shock. The reality proved to be somewhat more complex. Novels by James Welch and Louise Erdrich, for instance, contain material that is often fantastic and highly imaginative, but, unlike my experience with Celtic and African stories, I find the worlds that Welch and Erdrich describe all too familiar. Their stories deal with poverty and despair, family love and family breakup, and frequent sense of longing for what has been lost. They tell of people near the bottom of the American ladder, whose dreams are fashioned by television and often soaked in alcohol. The stories depict an America I see all around me, told in the voice of mainstream American fiction. This comes as no surprise, since their authors have been educated in American universities and are well read in Western literature (Coltelli 1990:41,185). What, then, makes this American Indian literature? Is it enough that the authors and the protagonists of their stories have Native American ancestors, or is Indianness peripheral in stories whose themes are more properly described as American? I am not here concerned with discussing authenticity in American Indian art, an issue taken up by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1991) and Deirdre Evans-Pritchard (1987), among others. The authors discussed in this paper have more or less Indian blood, grew up on or off reservations, may or may not be registered with the BIA. Most of the characters in their stories are Native Americans, but might they notjust as well be poor African Americans or Irish Americans or Korean Americans? What I am looking for is strategy for reading American Indian texts that helps me understand what is uniquely Native American about them. I need somehow to be sensitive to those elements of the their experience-language, worldview, history-that can take me beyond my own received ideas about what it means to be Native American. …

Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts. GREG SARRIS

<i>Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts.</i> GREG SARRIS

Euro-American Realism versus Native Authenticity: Two Novels by Craig Lesley

Euro-American Realism versus Native Authenticity:Two Novels by Craig Lesley J. C. Davies J. C. Davies University of Hull Notes 1. The particular problem of Indian autobiography in having "two voices" while purporting to be singly authored is examined by David Murray in Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts (London: Pinter Publishers, 1991), pp. 65-97. 2. Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry In the Age of Media (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 11. 3. Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), p. 15. 4. Craig Lesley, Winterkill (New York: Dell, 1984), p. 19; hereafter cited parenthetically. 5. The Nez Perce veteran of the 1877 war, Wottolen, told L.V. McWhorter of a comrade in the campaign named Left Hand. See L.V. McWhorter, Hear Me, My Chiefs: Nez Perce History and Legend, ed. Ruth Bordin (Caldwell: Caxton Press, 1952), p. 419. Lesley's account of the death of Left Hand's first wife, Swan Lighting, at the battle of Big Hole is based on White Bird's description of the death of a Nez Perce woman at that battle. See Hear Me, My Chiefs, pp. 376-377, and Craig Lesley, River Song (New York: Dell, 1990), p. 132; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 6. "Chief Joseph's following . . . was reckoned the largest of the five bands constituting the Nez Perce malcontents." McWhorter, p. 177. 7. This is accomplished at the Medicine Tree in the Bitter Root Valley, an intertribal center of reverence and worship visited by the non-treaty Nez Perce during their campaign of 1877 and still used by modern Native Americans. After carrying out ritual actions here, Danny sees his dead ex-wife across a gully near the Big Hole battle site. 8. Lesley's fictional encounter tends to contradict Deward E. Walker's conclusion that "schismatic factionalism ... has served to bring about and even accelerate Nez Perce acculturation." Deward E. Walker, Conflict and Schism in Nez Perce Acculturation: A Study of Religion and Politics (Pullman: Washington State Univ. Press, 1968), p. 133. The wise woman, Wauna, from the ostensibly Christian reservation faction, has received her calling as result of her participation in pan-Indian political action on Alcatraz Island in 1969. See River Song, pp. 95-96, and D'Arcy McNickle, Native American Tribalism: Indian Survivals and Renewals (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. viii. Thus Lesley's narrative dramatizes both renewal and conservation of the old ways at the Lapwai reservation. The actions of the missionaries from 1833 onwards initiated the rift which the 1863 treaty made permanent. See Alvin Josephy, The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 70, 101-103. 9. For the status of The Dalles, before the advent of whites, as "a great intertribal fishing and trading center," see Josephy, p. 10, and Gordon B. Dodds, The American Northwest: A History of Oregon and Washington (Arlington Heights: Forum Press, 1986), p. 10. The dam was completed in 1957 (Dodds, p. 348). 10. See River Song, p. 203. Dodds (p. 277) gives a brief account of the secret development of a plutonium factory for the first atomic bombs in World War II at Hanford. 11. As Stephen Cornell puts it, "other groups in American life . . . may have a sense of history matching [that of Indians] in scope and in the immediacy with which it informs their daily lives. Uniquely for Indians . . . that sense of history is rooted here, in this land, in the geography of their present. Most forms of Indian political action are explicitly grounded in a consciousness of their history." The Return of the Native: American Indian Resurgence (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), p. 217. 12. Josephy, pp. 438, 362. 13. "This land here is sacred land—holy land for us. . . . The salmon here were given to us by the Creator, along with venison and roots" (River Song, p. 299). 14. See Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), p. 119. 15. See Merrill D. Beal, Fight No More Forever: Chief Joseph and the Nez...

Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts.

Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts.

A Coyote Reader

Wily, raunchy, and heroic. A trickster, lecher, and supreme survivor. Such is the magical Coyote, that mythic Native American figure whose various roles are recounted here in a wonderful selection of poetry and stories. Anthropological linguist William Bright brings together diverse portraits of Coyote from American Indian texts and modern American writing. Because Native American myths have been recited and transmitted orally, Bright addresses the special problem of converting them into written stories. His familiarity with the native languages gives his retranslations a liveliness that conveys their original vitality. The collection also includes poetic translations and original works by important contemporary writers Leslie Silko, Gary Snyder, Wendy Rose, Peter Blue Cloud, and Simon Ortiz, along with the voice of an earlier American author--Mark Twain. We see how the figure of Coyote serves both to entertain and to instruct and, by his similarities to the actual biological coyote, provides a link between culture and nature. At the same time, since he embodies distinctive characteristics of Homo sapiens, Coyote also reflects many aspects of human nature. Bright places each tale in relation to the larger Native American context and shows Coyote's affinities with classic mythological figures and popular cultural images such as Bugs Bunny. Filled with humor and at times disturbing, Coyote's tales mirror the human condition across time and cultures.

Keeping slug woman alive: a holistic approach to American Indian texts

This remarkable collection of eight essays offers a rare perspective on the issue of cross-cultural communication. Greg Sarris is concerned with American Indian texts, both oral and written, as well as with other American Indian cultural phenomena such as basketry and religion. His essays cover a range of topics that include orality, art, literary criticism, and pedagogy, and demonstrate that people can see more than just 'what things seem to be'. Throughout, he asks: How can we read across cultures so as to encourage communication rather than to close it down? Sarris maintains that cultural practices can be understood only in their living, changing contexts. Central to his approach is an understanding of storytelling, a practice that embodies all the indeterminateness, structural looseness, multi valence, and richness of culture itself. He describes encounters between his Indian aunts and Euro-American students and the challenge of reading in a reservation classroom; he brings the reports of earlier ethnographers out of museums into the light of contemporary literary and anthropological theory. Sarris' perspective is exceptional: son of a Coast Miwok/Pomo father and a Jewish mother, he was raised by Mabel McKay - a renowned Cache Creek Pomo basket weaver and medicine woman - and by others, Indian and non-Indian, in Santa Rosa, California. Educated at Stanford, he is now a university professor and recently became Chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok tribe. His own story is woven into these essays and provides valuable insights for anyone interested in cross-cultural communication, including educators, theorists of language and culture, and general readers.

Forked tongues: speech, writing, and representation in North American Indian texts

... creates a new definition of American Indian literary texts as a self-representational genre. This is an intelligent and insightful application of post-modern critical methods to American Indian texts. The scope of the study is broad and ambitious, and the attempt to define Indian self-representations from colonial times to the present is innovative and instructive. Raymond J. DeMallie... very suggestive, provocative, engaging... Studies in American Indian Literatures... Murray's book establishes itself as the single best introduction to Native American text-making in particular and the betrayals of the translation in general. An essential acquisition for all college and university libraries, and highly recommended for larger public libraries. ChoiceIt is a pleasure to recommend with wholehearted enthusiasm David Murray's Forked Tongues. Western American Literature

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts.

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts.

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts.

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts.

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts

Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing and Representation in North American Indian Texts