Native American Literary Studies Research Articles

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

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...

" 민족에서 세계로: 네이티브 아메리칸 문학 연구의 어제와 오늘"

" 민족에서 세계로: 네이티브 아메리칸 문학 연구의 어제와 오늘"

Legible Natives: Making Native Women Visible in the Literary Arts

Legible Natives:Making Native Women Visible in the Literary Arts Penelope M. Kelsey This essay holds integral the assumption that any analysis of Native American women's literary traditions must consider intersections of the political and the literary, as before and since contact, stories have been the primary means of knowledge keeping and an important mode for asserting sovereignty. By itself the seemingly simple act of Native people telling stories, with its implicit insistence that those truths obtain, is political, because Native stories refuse to conform to benign narratives of settler colonialism that safely situate Natives in the past. In fact, Native people, especially Native women, must work continually to resist what Lisa Kahaleole Hall has termed "strategies of erasure" that work to conceal the Native and the female in imperial optics. This essay considers past and present Native women authors and storytellers who told their stories, insisted upon being made visible on the page, and made the Indigenous origins and underpinnings of those stories plainly evident. Following current practice in Native American and Indigenous studies, I use the term Native to include all indigenous peoples, whom I define as those whose traditional territories have been usurped by settler populations and who have remained disempowered, antagonistically educated, underfed, and pauperized in their own land via settler colonialisms that Patrick Wolfe has rightly identified as "structure" and not "event" (388). Throughout this essay, I will make conscious connections to important trends in areas not traditionally understood in American literary critical circles to be germane to American Indian studies scholarship; as I do, I will explain their relationships to the field and how their contributions apply to the literatures studied by readers of Legacy. Thus, while acknowledging the sovereigntist roots of many of these texts, [End Page 198] this essay engages the strategies of a transnational Native American studies, as defined by Hsinya Huang, Philip Deloria, Laura Furlan, and John Gamber, by connecting the Native American to the Native Hawaiian to the Alaska Native and so on (1–3). The term sovereigntist denotes those scholars (and their texts) who self-identify as nationalist with a core emphasis upon advancing Native sovereignty (that is, self-determination); this impulse constitutes a distinct and predominant strand in Native American literary criticism at present, as evident in work by Lisa Brooks, Daniel Justice, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and many others. I am also alive to the fact that my translation of my field to Legacy readers reiterates a pattern, from contact to the present, of Native women writers and storytellers making legible their unique experiences and histories to non-Natives; these educative moments of translation are important for continually rendering the Native visible in a nation that imagines itself as possible only via Natives' disappearance. kellogg and bonnin: politics, networks, letters, and literature Literature shall be my life work, and its aim shall be to benefit my people. Laura Cornelius Kellogg, "One Indian Maiden: Her Literary Plans for the Uplifting of Her Race" (1903) As scholars have made clear since Native American literary studies emerged as a distinct field in the 1970s and 1980s, Native American women's writing is often inherently political, and attempts to enforce apoliticism would render it meaningless and extraneous. Native women write with a keen awareness of the unique history of Native American political structures of governance, the obfuscation of deep and rich intellectual traditions, the erasure of histories acknowledging the sacrifice of the indigene upon which the settler colonial state is predicated, and the necessity of organizing and speaking from the space of Indigenous political consciousness (that is, sovereignty and resurgence), whether based in traditional governance structures or in the non-Native governmental forms intentionally imposed upon Native peoples via and through the treaty and reservation confinement periods. A range of recently published works on Native American women writers highlights exactly these thematics of the political and the literary. Kristina Ackley and Cristina Stanciu's scholarly edition of Laura Cornelius Kellogg's Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Works is one such volume, exploring an oft-overlooked but integral and arguably paramount figure in pre-1930 American Indian literary and political [End Page 199] circles. Born in 1880...

Reviews/Interviews

Adam Sumera: Capital Ellowen Deeowen: A Review of The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature by Sebastian Groes (Houndsmills: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2011) Wit Pietrzak: Deconstruction and Liberation: A Review of Simon Glendinning’s Derrida (New York: Oxford UP, 2011) Monika Kocot: Authenticity, Transdifference, Survivance: Native American Identity (Un)Masked: A Review of Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies, ed. Deborah L. Madsen (Albany: State U of New York P, 2010) Fadia Faqir Speaks with Maria Assif: Literature, the Arab Diaspora, Gender and Politics Norman Ravvin Talks to Krzysztof Majer: Absent Fathers, Outsider Perspectives and Yiddish Typewriters

New Indians and Indigenous Archives

Native americans have long been the missing subjects of american literature, either excised from narratives of nation through colonial erasure or limited to the discourse of the “vanishing Indian.” Such marginalization is no longer the case, or at least not to the same extent, particularly for literary studies of national, transnational, and hemispheric constructions of race and citizenship. As critics from Vine Deloria to Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Craig Womack have demonstrated, a wide range of indigenous practices and forms of knowledge must be reclaimed within academic forms of inquiry, representation, and circulation. One strategy for Native American literary studies has been to expand notions of text to include winter counts, wampum, and other forms of material culture. Even with a narrower definition of text, however, the current archive of American Indian literature encompasses such diverse works as early songs and oratory, nineteenth-century poems in Ojibwe and English by Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, a range of boarding school narratives, contemporary graphic novels, and the amplified (digital) poetry of Brandy Nalani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez.

Out of the Melting Pot, into the Nationalist Fires: Native American Literary Studies in Europe

Out of the Melting Pot, into the Nationalist Fires:Native American Literary Studies in Europe Deborah Madsen (bio) It is difficult to overestimate the differences between Native American studies in Europe and the United States. In Europe there are no dedicated university programs in Native American studies; instead, disciplinary units such as American studies or departments such as English, history, development studies, and anthropology house teaching and research programs in Native studies. The institutional conditions under which Native literary studies takes place in a European context give rise to four primary methodological approaches, which I address below: national (though not necessarily tribal nationalist), multiethnic, universal, and postcolonial. European scholars of Native American literary studies often find themselves grappling with methodological issues that lie between the twin nationalist claims of a generalizing and potentially assimilative "American studies" approach and a Native American literary nationalist approach, like that outlined by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack in their groundbreaking book American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006). It is to these claims that my title gestures while referencing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's important observation that frequently representations of Native Americans in the literary canon, in the teaching of Native American literature, and in scholarly publications are used as "the basis for the cynical absorption into the 'melting pot,' pragmatic inclusion in the canon, and involuntary unification of an American literary voice" (Why I Can't 96). 1 The category of "Native" is effectively "melted" into another category of cultural experience (with the attendant loss of Indigenous identities, historical experiences, and claims to justice), whether this is the universalizing canon of "literature" per se or, more specifically, a national American (settler) literature, a national [End Page 353] canon of minority "multiethnic" literature that fails to distinguish adequately between Indigenous and migrant literary production, or a transnational "postcolonial" canon. As Wolfgang Hochbruck predicted back in 1991, "creating new reservations for minority literatures would eventually create new problems" (51). It would seem that this problematic time has come. Consequently, Cook-Lynn's insight guides my critique here of some of the directions in which Native American literary studies is currently moving in Europe. If the term "Native" is a simulated category that brings together under a homogenizing banner the rich diversity of Native tribal cultures, so too is the term "Europe." Much of what I have to say about the current state of Native American studies in Europe is focused upon the United Kingdom and on scholarship written in English. Dynamic research cultures in the field of Native studies flourish across continental Europe in very different institutional and nonacademic contexts. A long history of "Indianism" or Native American "hobbyism," for example, helps to promote Native American studies in countries like Germany, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Russia, Scandinavia, and Finland. Additionally, Europe is, and has been, an important international forum for Native artists, scholars, and activists. Native people have, of course, been visiting Europe since the sixteenth century. As Naila Clerici reminds us, "Native Peoples know the importance of being heard abroad: in Europe they find an audience fascinated by their cultures and rarely biased for economic or political reasons" (7). Clerici may be overstating the claim to political acceptance; Joëlle Rostkowski, in her account of the failure of Deskaheh, the Cayuga chief of the Iroquois Confederacy, to garner international recognition of the conflict between his community and the Canadian nation-state, underlines the refusal of the League of Nations to acknowledge his tribal nation as a sovereign state engaged in an international conflict with another sovereign state (Canada). However, Rostkowski concludes her account with the reminder: Deskaheh paved the way for future generations. The interest in international organizations that Native Americans have demonstrated goes back to the first contacts he established within the League of Nations. In the 1930s, an Iroquois delegation went back to Geneva and was again disappointed by the result of its visit. But some Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee remained convinced that international [End Page 354] organizations could be of some assistance to Indians. The Iroquois were among the first tribes who expressed an interest in the United Nations and, in 1949, they sent a delegation to the opening of...

Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies

In her article Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies Hsinya Huang discusses how Native American literature can be adapted, translated, articulated, and interpreted in a transnational/trans-Pacific context using emerging Native American scholarship in Taiwan as a point of departure. Through collaboration across institutional lines, exploration of the community production of local knowledge and our obligation and desire to participate meaningfully as intellectuals in the international initiatives in Native Studies, can we conceive of an expansive indigenous region across the Pacific? How can indigeneity be both rooted in and routed through particular places and articulated? Through envisioning an expanding network of indigenous coalition, Huang's objective is to formulate notions of a transnational indigeneity, which in turn feed back into local Native traditions. Hsinya Huang, Towards Transnational Native American Literary Studies page 2 of 9 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.2 (2011): Thematic Issue About Indigenous Literature. Ed. Angeline O'Neill and Albert Braz

Out of the Melting Pot, into the Nationalist Fires: Native American Literary Studies in Europe

This essay addresses four methodological approaches to Native Literary Studies that dominate in the European academic context: national (though not tribal nationalist), multi-ethnic, universal, and postcolonial. European scholars of Native American Literary Studies often find themselves grappling with methodological issues that lie between the twin nationalist claims of a generalizing and potentially assimilative “American Studies” approach and a Native American literary nationalist approach, like that outlined by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack in their ground-breaking book American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006). It is to these claims that my title gestures, while referencing Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's important observation that frequently representations of Native Americans in the literary canon, in the teaching of Native American Literature, and in scholarly publications, are used as “the basis for the cynical absorption into the 'melting pot', pragmatic inclusion in the canon, and involuntary unification of an American literary voice” (Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays, 96). The category of “Native” is effectively “melted” into another category of cultural experience – with the attendant loss of indigenous identities, historical experiences, and claims to justice -- whether this is the universalizing canon of “Literature” per se, or more specifically a national American (settler) Literature; a national canon of minority “multi-ethnic” Literature that fails to distinguish adequately between indigenous and migrant literary production; or a transnational “postcolonial” canon. As Wolfgang Hochbruck predicted in his “Survey of Recent German Research in American Indian Literature,” back in 1991, “creating new reservations for minority literatures would eventually create new problems” (51). It would seem that this problematic time has come. Consequently, Cook-Lynn's insight guides my critique here of some of the directions in which Native American Literary Studies is currently moving in Europe.

Native American Literary Studies

Native American Literary Studies

Native authenticity: transnational perspectives on Native American literary studies

Native authenticity: transnational perspectives on Native American literary studies

‘To the Indian Names are Subjoined a Mark and Seal’: Tracing the Terrain of Ojibwe Literature

In Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, the Ojibwe boast the first Native American literary writer in print circulation – through her husband Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s The Literary Voyager (1826–1827). While the Tsalagi (Cherokee) probably boast more individual writers in the 19th-century with the prevalence of journalism from the late 1820s onwards; and while numerous epistolary and conversion narratives, not to mention the transcriptions of traditional songs and stories, precede Schoolcraft’s publication, Ojibwe writing in all forms has proliferated. Gerald Vizenor, among others, has claimed that by the late 20th-century the Ojibwe ‘claim more published writers than any other tribe on [the North American] continent’. This essay summarises the growth of that literary archive, considering a variety of relationships to two kinds of ‘text’, the pictographic legacy of rock art and birchbark scrolls, and the littoral legacy of treaties and federal documentation, that leave their mark across a range of Ojibwe writing. It seeks to briefly outline the changing nature of Literary Criticism as it pertains to Native American literatures, while considering claims to continuity between literary culture and earlier forms of ‘textual’ record common to the Ojibwe. Looking, ultimately, at some of the ways in which the thematisation of resistance and endurance, and the prevalence of the image of the document, and the self-conscious reflection on text and textuality, characterise aesthetic and formal choices in a number of Ojibwe texts, the essay proposes several points of contact between the historical, political, and literary claims of contemporary Native American Literary studies.

“All This / Is Abenaki Country”: Cheryl Savageau’s Poetic <em>Awikhiganak</em>

“All This / Is Abenaki Country”Cheryl Savageau’s Poetic Awikhiganak Siobhan Senier (bio) Abenaki poet Cheryl Savageau has received considerable critical acclaim for her work. She published her first book, Home Country, with Alice James Books in 1992. Her 1995 volume, Dirt Road Home, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the prestigious Poetry Prize. Individual poems have appeared in such literary magazines as The Boston Review and in anthologies including those widely circulated among Native-studies teachers, Carolyn Dunn and Carol Comfort’s Through the Eye of the Deer and Joseph Bruchac’s Returning the Gift. Savageau’s newest book, Mother/Land, appeared in 2006 in Salt Publishing’s Earthworks series, edited by Janet McAdams; this will put her even more visibly in the company of such esteemed poets as Carter Revard, Diane Glancy, and Heid Erdrich. This is, then, a good time for a scholarly and pedagogical consideration of Savageau’s work, which, to date, it has not received. The marginalization of Savageau’s poetry is part and parcel of the marginalization of Indigenous New England writers within Native American literary studies as a whole—and therefore in the broader field of American literature. Two other northeastern writers—the late-eighteenth-century Mohegan minister Samson Occom and the early-nineteenth-century Pequot minister William Apess—have achieved more visibility, thanks to LaVonne Ruoff, Barry O’Connell, and the popular Heath anthology of American Literature (edited by Paul Lauter et al.). And thanks largely to his own voluminous output, many people have at least heard of Joseph Bruchac’s poetry and [End Page 1] fiction, although, like Savageau and many other talented Abenaki writers, he receives next to no scholarly attention.1 But the Occom-Apess-Bruchac triumvirate still leaves a gaping, nearly two-centuries-long hole in literary history that, in turn, replicates some common misconceptions about Indigenous people in New England—namely, that they vanished from the region early on (either outright, as the result of disease and warfare, or more inexorably, through assimilation) and that, when they are visible nowadays, they are somehow “reconstituting” themselves after a long dormancy. As the Missisquoi band of Abenakis in Vermont know all too well, having been continually frustrated in their efforts to gain federal recognition, the United States has a vested interested in maintaining definitions of Indian-ness predicated on particular phenotypes, land bases confined to reservations, and governance structures (such as those organized around unified tribal councils, tribal courts, and tribal police) that are politically registered—and manageable—by U.S. federal and state governments.2 Abenaki writers, of whom Joseph Bruchac and Cheryl Savageau are only two, unsettle those definitions. As I will illustrate below, Savageau’s poetry comes out of a long line of Abenaki writing traceable all the way back to the precontact birchbark maps called awikhiganak. Thus her poetry challenges readers to see all of New England as fundamentally Indigenous space, and it furthers an ongoing, nation-building literary project. Looking for Indians . . . Who Are There in Plain Sight Anglo-New Englanders have religiously (in multiple senses of that word) installed themselves as the “first” Americans, as the originators of the nation. The myth of the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” has always been underwritten by the myth of Native disappearance. Colonial administrators began institutionalizing this myth early on—outlawing, for instance, the very name of the Pequots in 1638.3 Meanwhile, a range of literary, artistic, and historical genres rehearsed King Philip’s War (1675–76) as the official [End Page 2] “end” of Indigenous presence in New England—whether representing that end as the workings of Divine Providence, as in Mary Rowlandson’s famous captivity narrative (1682), or as a gruesome spectacle to be mourned, as in John Augustus Stone’s popular melodrama Metamora (1819). Non-Native local historians, for their part, favored what Ojibwe historian Jean O’Brien calls “the ‘Last of the _______’ genre.” Racing to eulogize particular “full-blood” or “pure Indian” individuals (while neatly sidestepping the continued presence of these individuals’ sons and daughters), these writers ironically “reveal[ed] a New England thickly populated by ‘last’ Indians throughout the nineteenth century” (419). The Abenakis...

North America as Contact Zone: Native American Literary Nationalism and the Cross-Cultural Dilemma

North America as Contact ZoneNative American Literary Nationalism and the Cross-Cultural Dilemma Christopher Taylor (bio) In Native American literary studies today there is a gap between the variety of criticism being produced and the metacritical debate about what Native literary criticism should look like. A review of recent issues of Studies in American Indian Literatures, for example, will discover a wide of variety of approaches, some relating literary works to tribally specific contexts, others demonstrating the utility of pan-Indian or pan-Indigenous approaches, and others suggesting a variety of ways in which Native literatures might be simultaneously related to both Native and non-Native contexts—or, indeed, suggesting that these contexts are themselves deeply connected. All of these approaches are, of course, joined by still other modes of criticism that make no overt claim about the relationship between a text and the cultures that produced it. At the same time, however, the metacritical debate about what Native literary study should look like has become polarized between theorists favoring an inward-facing nationalism and those insisting on an outward-facing cosmopolitanism. My aim in this article is to survey this polarization of the theoretical debate and, in so doing, to suggest a route toward a middle ground. Finding a theoretical justification for such a middle ground will help to provide a firmer grounding for criticism that sees modern Native and non-Native cultures as both distinguishable and historically entangled and that therefore rejects the unnecessary polarity of much of the metacritical debate in recent years. As I suggest through a reading of Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues (1995), a critical approach that sees North America as a field of overlapping sovereignties represents [End Page 26] the best method of connecting Native American literary texts to the cultural contexts from which they emerge. In some respects, the state of Native American literary theory today can be traced back to the identity politics of the early 1990s. In his 1992 presidential address to the Mid-America American Studies Association (later published in American Studies), Daniel Littlefield Jr. offered a tentative but largely positive evaluation of what he saw as a variety of movements seeking to restrict outside access to Native American cultural artifacts and to promote the training of Indigenous scholars (Littlefield 99). For Littlefield, this burgeoning nationalism posed obstacles for those studying Native cultures, but it also signaled a growth in the vitality of scholarship on and by Native peoples. In the following year’s volume of American Studies, Arnold Krupat responded to Littlefield, denouncing most restrictions on free inquiry and arguing that a scholar’s race and ethnicity have no bearing on the quality of her work. In prose that is at times quite heated, Krupat insists that Littlefield’s division of those studying Native literature into Native and non-Native groups represents an unnecessary and potentially harmful distraction from the ultimate goal of producing insightful work. Much of Littlefield and Krupat’s exchange focuses on the use of the pronouns we, us, and them, and to this extent the debate seems somewhat dated, marked by the identity politics of its time. This is not to suggest that the issues of race, identity, and culture they raise have been solved. However, in the years since this exchange was published, the terms of the debate have shifted from identity to methodology. The metacritical debate in Native American literary studies today does not focus so much on who is doing the studying as on the methods and skills that person brings to the study. Thus, for example, a Native American literary nationalist like Craig Womack is unlikely to declare that only Creek people should be allowed to study Creek culture; he is likely, however, to argue that a person studying Creek culture should take the time to learn the Creek language, and this requirement may impose a de facto barrier to non- Creek participation in Creek literature. Nonetheless, the emphasis in the debate has shifted away from identity and toward methods. [End Page 27] These methodological disputes are apparent in several recent attempts to map the field of Native American literary criticism. In Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism...

Language and Signs: An Interview with Ojibwe Novelist David Treuer

The publication of David Treuer's (Ojibwe) Native American Fiction: A User's Manual (2006) initiated something of a controversy within Native American Literary Studies. Interpreted as an assault on the political and cultural meaning of tribal fiction, the collection has been critiqued by those who argue that indigenous specificity is reflected by a distinct, and specific, Native American literary aesthetic. In this interview Treuer clarifies his position, explains his dual concern for Ojibwe traditions and tribal fiction, and discusses the genesis of his novels Little (1995), The Hiawatha (1999), and The Translation of Dr Apelles (2007).

Organizing Native American and Indigenous Studies

For me, entering this profession involved the broader context of native american and indigenous studies as well as native American literary studies. My scholarship, pedagogy, and professional connections have relied on a synergy between texts as Native authors have crafted them and the social, political, and experiential contexts from which those authors and their texts emerged. Though plenty of work in Native literary studies does not draw on the broader field of Native studies, my own approach has most often placed me firmly in the overlapping space between the two.

The Role of Native American Voices in Rethinking Early American Literary Studies

The Role of Native American Voices in Rethinking Early American Literary Studies Robert Warrior (bio) Sovereign Selves: American Indian Autobiography and the Law. David J. Carlson. University of Illinois Press, 2006. 217 pp. The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh. Gordon M. Sayre. University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 341 pp. In his study of Native American autobiography and law, David Carlson seeks to take part in "critical conversations" about the generic definition of autobiography, methodology in scholarship on law and literature, and "the viability of 'authenticity' as a critical term in the study of Native American literatures" (2). Gordon Sayre's book, which seeks an answer to his question as to how Native American military leaders sometimes became beloved heroes within early American literary texts, is similarly ambitious. Sayre focuses on "the entire phenomenon of North American native resistance struggles and the leaders who organized them as represented not only in dramas, epic poems, and historical novels but also in popular histories such as Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), in the transcribed speeches by these native leaders, and in the documents created by soldiers, traders, and missionaries directly involved in these conflicts from the conquest of New Spain through the War of 1812" (3). Both of these books are meticulously researched, clearly written, and deeply engaged in the currents of American literary studies. As I will detail, each provokes different questions as to where early Americanists [End Page 369] might seem to be headed vis à vis the role of Indigenous voices in future reconceptualizations of basic issues of their field. Before discussing some of those issues, though, I want to say clearly that both books share an importance to the field that makes them deserving of wide readership. Carlson organizes his study primarily around a discussion of Pequot writer William Apess and Dakota author Charles Alexander Eastman. These important figures are treated in two chapters each of Sovereign Selves, and Carlson also includes two introductory chapters that discuss the importance of legal discourse to Native American literature and history and an analysis of the ways in which one specific treaty, the 1784 Treaty of Fort Stanwix between the United States and the Senecas, provides an important basis for Seneca rhetorical responses to American colonialism. Through all of these chapters, Carlson both advances a set of ideas that have been expressed in Native American literary studies and makes a provocative and persuasive point about the legal basis of identity formation for American Indians. That is, Carlson extends a discussion that runs through the work of various scholars, including Jace Weaver, Maureen Konkle, and others, about the centrality of legal and policy issues to Native American literary and rhetorical production. In focusing on autobiography, though, Carlson pursues these ideas to the point of making a case that the formation of ideas of the self that occurs among Native Americans in various eras also derives from legal discourse. In other words, legal ideas constitute the parameters in which the new sorts of Native identity play out in the unfolding of colonialism among American Indian nations. In a previous generation of scholarship, as most of those with even a nodding acquaintance I hope will agree, deployments of new ways of being Native American have been seen as coming from much more vaguely rendered notions of acculturation or assimilation. Some of the more interesting work in recent years has specified these processes to a greater extent, but has looked to educational and religious institutions for the locations from which these new ideas regarding identity have derived. Carlson's argument has the benefit not only of holding up across a wide swath of time (the distance, after all, between Apess in New England and New York in the 1820s and 1830s to Charles Eastman across the twists and turns of the Progressive era is vast) but also of locating the shifting geography of Native ways of self-understanding in the middle of processes of colonial domination rather than in secondary or tertiary places. Apess, as [End Page 370] a figure responding as someone whose history is deeply marked by near-annihilation during...

Remapping Place and Narrative in Native American Literature: David Treuer’s The Hiawatha

David Treuer's 1997 novel, The Hiawatha, engages the traditional literary strategies employed by Native American writing, compares those strategies to earlier narratives (Native American and canonically American), offers a reassessment of indigenous novelistic structures, engages critical responses to tribal fiction, and does so in response to current discursive debate within the field of Native American literary studies. In this essay, the author aims to explicate Treuer's use of that style and how this usage facilitates a fresh sense of space within Native American fiction. Most particularly, this essay will examine a sense of space that makes palpable the potential directions open to tribal literatures and attendant criticism while remapping existing images of place and subverting notions of homecoming.

Native American Oral Practice and the Popular Novel; Or, Why Mourning Dove Wrote A Western

Na t iv e A m e r ic a n O r a l Pr a c t ic e a n d t h e Po p u l a r No v e l ; Or , Wh y Mourn ing Do ve Wro te a Wester n V i c t o r i a L a m o n t Wrongly assuming that the death of Native American oral cul­ ture was immanent and inevitable, ethnographic researchers at the turn of the twentieth century attempted to preserve it in print before it disappeared forever, an approach James Clifford has termed ‘“sal­ vage ethnography’” (112). It was in this context that Mourning Dove (Okanogan) wrote her novel Cogewea, The Half'Blood (1927).1 Its editor, Lucullus McWhorter, considered Cogewea an important work because, as he writes in his preface to the first edition, he believed it Susan Point. SALISH REVIVAL. 2000. Acrylic paint, polymer, oil on canvas. 6' x 6' x 6". Courtesy of the artist. V ic t o r ia L a m o n t 3 6 9 the first novel written by a Native American woman (9), but he also felt that one novel was enough and discouraged Mourning Dove from writing another one. Instead, he convinced her to devote her energy to the ethnographic “fieldwork” that resulted in the 1933 collection Coyote Stories (Brown, “Evolution” 162-65; Bemardin 490— 91). In her original draft of the preface to Coyote Stories, Mourning Dove writes, “I first wrote my lines of these stories much against my will” (qtd. in Brown, “Evolution” 173). Clearly, Mourning Dove began writing with intentions that were set aside for the sake of ethnographic fieldwork. Scholars of the text have been trying to recover these intentions ever since, collectively demonstrating how Cogewea highlights crucial issues in Native American literary studies. Paula Gunn Allen considers it a foundational text in twentieth-century Native American literature because of its resolution, in which the main character, a mixed-blood woman, realizes that ritual tradition has relevance in her life (83-85), a theme taken up by later writers including N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa). In different ways, Louis Owens and Susan Bemardin interpret Cogewea's subversive appropriations of Euramerican literary forms— the popular Western, the sentimental novel— as a historically important moment in the development of a Native American literary tradition (Owens, Mixedblood Messages 28-34; Bemardin 495-504). Debates about the authenticity of Cogewea, arising from the heavy-handedness of its nonN adve editor, speak to the complex and difficult questions about the politics of Native American representation recently highlighted in an essay collection edited by Gretchen M. Bataille.2 In this essay I would like to add yet another dimension to our understanding of this text’s importance by situating it in the context of the literary history of Native American oral writing. The focus on the crucial relationship between oral and literary storytelling practice in recent scholarship on contemporary Native American literature overturns the assumptions of early twentieth-century Euramerican ethnographers, who regarded writing as both a vehicle for assimilating Native Americans into the American melting pot and a medium for preserving their supposedly dying oral traditions. Both assumptions were based on the view that oral storytelling was a primitive form of culture that would die out as Native American people “progressed” toward literacy. Cogewea is a groundbreaking novel created as an act of resis­ tance against precisely this model of the relationship between oral and literary practice. Rejecting the belief underlying ethnographic narrative that the death of Native American nations and cultures was inevitable, 3 7 0 W ESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE W in t e r 2 0 0 5 Mourning Dove gravitated toward the popular Western as an unlikely, yet effective, vehicle for inscribing a living oral culture in print. Early ethnographers did not imagine that oral practice would sur­ vive, let alone become the basis for the highly regarded oral writing epitomized by Leslie Silko’s Storyteller (1981), which combines poetry, prose, photography, autobiography, fiction, and traditional Pueblo narratives . Not only an important literary innovation, oral writing has political significance because...

"The literature of this nation": LaVonne Ruoff and the Redefinition of American Literary Studies

LaVonne neither asks for nor needs adulation in this volume, and whatever words I may provide could hardly add luster to her already luminous reputation in the history of Native American literary studies. I don't even feel that she would want us to claim that she, as much as or more than any other scholar, helped to establish the field. Native voices established the field. "The literature of this nation originated with the native peoples," as she wrote in the opening of her landmark work, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography. They called for readers, and a global readership responded—with her tutorship. That's what I'd like to address here briefly. LaVonne's immense service to Indian country and to the non-Indian world, in bibliography, in editing and publishing, in institution-building, and in community-building, has been to listen to Indian voices, directing others how and where to listen as well. How and where or who to listen to—those are fundamental questions of native literary studies to which LaVonne has devoted her life's work. I'd like to put those questions into perspective from my personal experience that links to the work of this profession. My master's degree from the University of South Dakota (USD) served well as an entrée for teaching English in higher education for American Indian students at USD, then at the University of Montana, and eventually at Salish Kootenai College (SKC) on the Flathead Reservation. That work brought me further into Indian communities where the stories that are Native American literature live. In the 1980s at SKC as I began to read early native literary studies to strengthen my teaching, studies by scholars [End Page 63] such as LaVonne Ruoff, Kathryn (Vangen) Shanley, Arnold Krupat, and others. I felt challenged by what I read that did and did not make that link between the literature and the communities I was a part of. So I thought about doctoral work, and because my godfather (in the self-proclaimed Church of the Lesser Known Saints), Thomas Parkinson, was a professor of English at Berkeley, I sought him out for advice on returning to graduate school. Sitting in his living room in the Berkeley hills, he fixed me with his earnest and ironic stare, looming from above his beard and his six-foot-nine-inch frame, and he pronounced the following dictum: "You have to understand, David, that the heart of this profession is bibliography!" I think he was trying to dissuade me. Indeed, it gave me pause. At the time, it sounded terribly dry. I was full of questions about native literature and native communities, and he wanted me to think of dusty libraries and archives as where the action is. Certainly, my love for libraries and books themselves carried me on his grim advice into an exciting crossroads between text and context, story and community. But it was LaVonne who made me really understand the significance of Tom's words. Bibliography, simply listing books, is indeed the scholar's fundamental service to both readers and writers. Everything textual spins from that scholarly act across the generations. How many lost or neglected writers, how many lost manuscripts, how many lost voices have been brought to light by devotion to bibliography? (LaVonne herself, working from Daniel Littlefield's and James Parins's 1981 bibliography and Annette Van Dyke's 1992 recovery article in SAIL, is largely responsible for, among many other firsts, editing and bringing (back) to light the 1891 first novel by an American Indian, Wynema: A Child of the Forest, by the Creek writer S. Alice Callahan.) Stories in the blood may be resurrected from stories on the shelves. On a less dramatic level, the dissemination of collected bibliographic information in classrooms and journals serves the basic tasks of...

To LaVonne -- With Good Thoughts

To LaVonne-With Good Thoughts Geary Hobson (bio) I have very good thoughts of LaVonne Ruoff and all that she has accomplished within the field of Native American literary studies as we view it today. Almost thirty years ago, when I went to the MLA conference for the first time, I remember being turned off by the condescension and "brush-offs," as I saw them at the time, by most of the non-Indian scholars there in the Indian lit sessions, toward me. And as I remember that time in 1976, there were no other Indians at the gathering, and all the academics who were there were seemed more hung up on "identity" issues than the Indian writers I knew. I was bothered also by the surety (as it seemed then) that the only Indian literature around was either from the trinity of Momaday, Welch, and Silko or a version or rehashing of the old Schoolcraft renditions. I very naively had a paper to present (it was my "Rise of the White Shaman" paper, which brought me some degree of fame and infamy a little later on), but imagine my surprise when I learned that not only had no one read it beforehand, but also that I was only to give a five-minute summary of it, after which there were no questions about it all. No one seemed at all interested in the issues I felt I had raised. LaVonne Ruoff was the one exception among the crowd. She was extremely gracious and pleasant and very interested in hearing about "that whole bunch of other Indian writers who were around the University of New Mexico (Simon Ortiz, Bill Oandasan, Joy Harjo, Luci Tapahonso, etc.)," where I was coming from at the time. Afterward, she tried very hard to involve me in future MLA Indian lit matters. I [End Page 85] have nothing but praise for her and her continual efforts to bring in the Indian writers and scholars. Always able to see beyond the very narrow definitions, LaVonne has been a very welcomed presence in the area of Native American literary studies. May her contributions continue. Geary Hobson Geary Hobson serves as project historian of the University of Oklahoma's Native Writers Circle of the Americas. He has published both poetry and academic writings on Native Americans. His latest book is The Last of the Ofos (U of Arizona P, 2000). He is Cherokee, Quapaw, and Chickasaw. Copyright © 2005 Individual Contributors