Native American Literature Research Articles

Chance, Positivism, and the Arctic in Frank Norris’s A Man’s Woman

Chance, Positivism, and the Arctic in Frank Norris’s A Man’s Woman Patti Luedecke (bio) Introduction While scholars of American literary naturalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have successfully broadened readers’ understanding of the role of determinism in naturalist works, lists of naturalism’s definitional traits often pool together three determinisms: environment, heredity/instinct, and chance. For example, Donald Pizer suggests that characters in naturalist works often appear “as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance” (“Nineteenth” 3). Donna Campbell notes that naturalist characters’ “fates were the product of their heredity, their environment, and chance circumstances” (499). Mary E. Papke summarizes naturalism as having “characters whose acts were profoundly conditioned by environment, heredity, biological drives, and chance” (299). Richard Lehan also acknowledges what Joseph R. McElrath and Jesse S. Crisler call this “triumvirate of determinisms” (24): “The naturalistic hero is usually . . . the product of his biological makeup and immediate environment, and the victim of . . . mechanistic forms of chance” (66). In this environment-heredity-chance formula, chance tends to trail behind the other determinisms, falling on the far side of the “and,” or on the other side of the “or.” Perhaps this is because—while environment, heredity, and chance all limit choices and are each variables in Darwin’s theory of natural selection—chance doesn’t quite share the same degree of affinity with heredity and environment as those two determinisms do with each other.1 Environment and heredity are more frequently concrete and readily recognizable in naturalist works, while chance, on the other hand, can be difficult to locate; environment and heredity are more discernably deterministic, while what Jason Puskar calls “the nonnecessity of chance” can at times make it appear antithetical to mechanistic determinism (41). [End Page 111] In short, chance can resist inevitability while environment and heredity seem to assure it. The first aim of this essay is to investigate the relation of chance to the other two determinisms that commonly define naturalism. I read the Arctic scenes of Frank Norris’s novel, A Man’s Woman (1900), for their illustration of the ways in which chance can both produce and distort environment in a naturalist work.2 A Man’s Woman is Norris’s least read and least loved novel, and Norris himself didn’t like it (McElrath and Crisler 332). But Norris must have found its theme of Arctic exploration compelling since he rewrote his short story of polar peril, “The End of the Beginning” (1897), as the first two chapters of the novel.3 As Pizer noted in 1966—a year that saw the Space Race at fever pitch with the last of the Gemini missions and with just one year until the start of the Apollo missions—“Norris could not help being aware of Arctic exploration, which was as much a matter of public interest in the late nineteenth century as space exploration is today, and which involved much the same combination of national rivalry and personal heroism” (Novels 103; see also Mansfield). For A Man’s Woman, Norris borrowed heavily from Arctic expedition accounts he read, including George Washington De Long’s The Voyage of the Jeannette (1884), Adolphus Greely’s Three Years of Arctic Service (1886), and Fridtjof Nansen’s Farthest North (1897) (Sherwood 248; Oehlschlaeger 93). Closely mimicking the fate of the USS Jeannette, A Man’s Woman opens just after the Arctic expedition vessel, Freja, has been crushed by ice and sunk, at 76° 10′ North latitude, stranding Captain Ward Bennett and his crew on an ice floe. Norris portrays the Freja expedition’s grueling retreat south across hundreds of miles of shifting ice floes to escape the Arctic’s double threat of starvation and exposure, all the while being carried farther northward by the current, the same circumstances which the Jeannette’s crew endured. In the first part of this essay, I suggest that Norris’s image of the Arctic sea-ice as a chaotic environment constitutes what Eric Carl Link calls a “romantic symbol” for the way that environment, and even heredity, are rooted in chance. Romantic symbols, Link has argued, can help identify a text as being a...

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form by Christopher Laing Hill

Reviewed by: Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form by Christopher Laing Hill Patti Luedecke (bio) Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form, by Christopher Laing Hill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Cloth, $99.95; Paper, $34.94; Ebook $34.95. While scholars of American literary naturalism acknowledge the precedent of French naturalists, especially Émile Zola, they also differentiate American naturalists from their French forebears. Christopher Laing Hill contributes to this distancing work in his comparative literature study of naturalism, Figures of the World, by arguing that literary “genealogy does not equal servility” (xx). Hill’s study uncouples naturalism from Zola as it expands the field by suggesting that the transnational history of naturalism is one of proliferation into naturalisms in the many parts of the world that adapted it, instead of adopting it wholesale after its inception in 1860s France. Hill’s first chapter charts the transnational “travels” of naturalism— a metaphor that Hill creates to avoid the concept of French naturalism having [End Page 257] a one-way impact or influence (13). Hill shows that naturalism as a method or a set of techniques, rather than a fixed form, lent itself to divergent ends across the planet: from anti-capitalism in the U.S. and Peru, to anti-colonialism in Korea. Hill rejects world literature criticism that would portray naturalism as radiating from a central French “‘Literary Mean Time’” with peripheral provinces lagging chronologically (15). Rather, Hill argues that what may appear to be false starts at naturalism in different parts of the world are, instead, proofs that writers retooled naturalism to suit literary conditions on the ground. For example, Hill demonstrates how naturalism in Brazil and Argentina mixed with both romanticism and realism, suggesting that these “seemingly strange hybrids of romantic naturalism and naturalistic modernism were not temporal aberrations, . . . but a common consequence of the travel of forms” (24). There was no direct route from romantic to realist, from naturalist to modernist texts, he says (27). Hill resists such an “evolutionary teleolog[y]” of genres by constructing an image of naturalism as a geographical field (48). Hill’s image of naturalism as a field is productively capacious. It allows us to imagine naturalism as thicker where thematic and formal trends were most utilized and as thinner where the plurality of naturalisms generated outlier elements no less integral to the field, if localized. Because Hill’s transnational definition of naturalism embraces amalgams and aberrations, I believe that it has the potential to provide scholars with new insights into naturalism’s defining contradictions: its simultaneous biological determinism and social reformism, its equal interest in untamed and urban environments, its elision of political economy with both nature and the monstrously unnatural, and its juxtaposition of meticulous documentary details with outsized metaphors. To attend to naturalism’s multifariousness, Hill advocates a method that foregrounds close reading (xv). While Hill developed this “inductive approach” (xvii) in response to the reductive methods of world literature criticism, it nonetheless mirrors Donald Pizer’s advice. Pizer urges readers of naturalism to attempt, not “to find a universal element in significantly different works but to read each work for what it expresses and then to build synthetic constructions” (Pizer 225). Hill coins three such synthetic constructions: the “body figure,” the “Nana figure,” and the “social figure” (xv). Hill’s attentive close readings trace how each of these figures was forged by Zola and formed by nineteenth-century French culture but recast by American and Japanese naturalist authors. By suggesting that these authors remolded these figures to critique their respective culture’s political [End Page 258] and literary authorities, Hill distances their works from both Zola and determinism. Hill examines how Zola created the “body figure” as a naturalist technique by employing contemporary medical models of the nerve as a housing for both physiological and psychological processes. The nerve’s mind-body bridge created a spillover that enabled “body figures” of all kinds to represent physical, behavioral, and, ultimately, social phenomena. For example, Hill reads Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877) as a competition between bodily synecdoches, with Gervaise’s arm symbolizing her hardworking behavior, which prevails for a time...

Pretty Shield's Thumbprint: Body Politics in Paratextual Territory

Pretty Shield's ThumbprintBody Politics in Paratextual Territory Amy Gore (bio) Over several cold March days in Montana, three friends gathered around a wood stove in an unused building on the Crow reservation. They met for more than pleasant reminiscing: from the start all three considered their conversation as an important means of cultural preservation for the Crow Nation. Frank B. Linderman, who had spent the last forty-six years of his life living in Montana and building relationships with Native peoples, took careful notes while he watched the hands of a Crow elder, Pretty Shield, as she shared her life's story through sign language.1 Linderman conversed fluently with Pretty Shield in Plains Indian sign language, yet to ward off any misinterpretation, Pretty Shield also spoke simultaneously in the Crow language while another Crow woman, Goes Together, translated into English for Linderman's added benefit. Although Linderman had spent a lifetime in Montana and had just published the memoir of another important Crow leader, Plenty Coups, he records this as the first extended conversation he had ever had with Native women. In the resulting text, Red Mother (1932), later renamed as Pretty-shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows, he writes of his desire to document "a woman's story" (16), a perspective that he regarded as underrepresented and undervalued in Native American autobiography.2 To correct the trend, Linderman directly and repeatedly requests a Native woman's perspective in his interview questions. As a result the book draws continual attention to the race and gender of Pretty Shield, not only throughout the text but also throughout the book's many paratextual elements, such as its cover images, illustrations, dedication, foreword, and title page. [End Page 167] As an ethnographic collaboration, Pretty-shield presents a two-body problem: as the non-Native recorder of a Native informant, to what extent did Linderman control, limit, or misrepresent Pretty Shield's life narrative? On the one hand, critics such as Stephanie Sellers question Linderman's qualifications, as a privileged white man immersed in Western culture, to chronicle the life of a Crow woman (79). Sellers devotes a chapter of her book to addressing her numerous critiques of the text, including instances of Linderman's ethnocentrism, his qualifications to write Pretty Shield's story as a cultural outsider, the absence of the Crow creation story, and Linderman's missed opportunities to "ask the right questions" about Crow culture (78–82). On the other hand, Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Sands compliment Linderman for embedding explanatory notes within the text rather than marginalizing them in an appendix, for maintaining Pretty Shield's achronological narrative of her life, and for recording her story with "sensitivity and insight" (45–46). As such debates demonstrate, the body politics of racial and gender identity and the role they play in Native autobiography lead one into a contentious intellectual hot spot in Native studies. Yet a recent shift in the field proposes a reexamination of Native American autobiography that restores attention to the Native subject as well as the non-Native ethnographer. As Michelle Raheja and Stephanie Fitzgerald argue, previous focus on the ethnographer's mediation "often obscured the Indian voice of the text and shifted the focus of the scholarship away from indigenous lived experience to that of the non-Indian editor" (1). Similarly, David Carlson protests readings of Native American autobiography for how "authentic" they may or may not be. He calls such approaches, following Robert Warrior, a "critical dead-end" and instead suggests readings of "how individual autobiographical acts can reveal a process of self-definition whose engine was engagement with legal models of Indianness in a highly charged communicative context" (14). Such a reframing, he suggests, considers Native autobiographies as "something more complex than capitulation to colonial power; they produced a vibrant tradition of Native American literary and political discourse that should be better appreciated today" (14). In all, their [End Page 168] scholarship advocates for a revisiting of as-told-to narratives and, rather than debate "whose text" we are reading, how "authentic" it may be, or in what ways the recorder falls short, that we more productively reconsider the complex instances of...

Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God: Uncertainty, Proleptic Mourning and Relationality in Native Dystopia

This article examines Louise Erdrich’s latest novel Future Home of the Living God (2017) in the light of the current conversation about the attacks on women’s reproductive rights and the devastating effects of climate change. Erdrich’s speculative novel describes an unspecified future where evolution has reversed itself and human reproduction is under threat, as a response to which a Puritan authoritarian government takes control of women of childbearing age to try to sustain procreation. The article contends that, using the dystopian mode—and more specifically, a theorization of uncertainty as characteristic of the present situation of many people—Erdrich addresses persisting, historical unresolved grief, making current feminist and Native vindications visible. She also continues the challenging of the whitestream idea of progress and the subversion of stereotypes that characterize her oeuvre. Most significantly, the article reads the novel as representative of both Indigenous resurgence and the global transmodern paradigm insofar as it articulates a relational understanding of language and identity as our best hope for the future. The article concludes that Erdrich’s use of the future perfect tense is best interpreted as a ritual of proleptic mourning that connects this novel to Native American literary activism. Keywords: Louise Erdrich; Native dystopia; Native American resurgence; transmodernity; relationality; proleptic mourning

Martha Graham, ‘An American, A kosmos’: Border-crossing in Martha Graham’s early works

This paper examines the connection between crossing borders (state limits, borders between America and Mexico or America and Europe, and temporal borders) and pushing choreographical boundaries in dance pioneer Martha Graham’s ballets created in the 1930’s and the early 1940’s.Danced only by women, Primitive Mysteries (1931) was inspired by Graham’s travels in New Mexico, and explores the rituals of the Native Americans of the Southern States of the United States; nine years later, Graham would explore this theme further with El Penitente, which also draws from the Medieval tradition of mystery plays. Frontier (1935), one of Graham’s most famous soli, clearly connects the American Frontier to the construction of female identity, as do American Document (1938) and Appalachian Spring (1944). Graham pioneered a new way for women to dance, to express their femininity and their power: her works, inspired by Native American traditions, Mexican folklore, Greek mythology and literature from both sides of the Atlantic, depict strong women who are not afraid of pushing boundaries.Creating an American choreographic tradition also meant exploring its literary legacy for Martha Graham: this paper therefore also delves into the way the Whitmanian intertext emerges in Graham’s choreographic writing, in her conception of Americanness, modernity, the body and gender.

Dialogism and Native American Literature in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes

Leslie Marmon Silko was born in Albuquerque in 1948 and grew up at the Pueblo of Laguna. As a person of mixed ancestry and heritage, she felt a sense of strangeness to both the Laguna community as well as to the outside world. Profiting from her internal cultural differences and calling up the richness of her mixed heritage, Silko forges a meeting point between very different cultural traditions. Exploring the differences and similarities between Native and non-Native ways of being in the world, Silko's work can be said to enter a dialogue between cultures, in which cultural exchange as well as resistance against cultural hegemony are equally appreciated. The ongoing negotiation and communication of cultural difference that is mirrored in Silko's writings will be investigated in her lyrical historical novel Gardens in the Dunes (1999). To help focus my discussion, I will mainly concentrate on the religious aspect of cultural difference negotiated in her novel. In the theoretical section, two ways of thinking about cultural difference will first be contrasted: Structuralist Ferdinand de Saussure's theory on language, according to which meaning arises through binary oppositions and which can be said to have laid the foundation for the binary classificatory system in cultural studies, versus Mikhail Bakhtin's theory on cultural identity formation as a dialogic exchange. Various literary critic's application of Bakhtin's cultural model on Native American literature will then be discussed. The second part of this paper will be fully dedicated to the analysis of Silko's novel. With the example of the Ghost Dance, Silko's ambivalence between dialogic exchange and Native resistancewill be introduced. After a brief description of the historical ceremony, Silko's use of the Ghost Dance motif in Gardens will be investigated. Moreover, the Ghost Dance's dialogic function of uniting people across cultural boundaries and the retaking of the land and the peaceful nature of the struggle against Euro-American dominance will then be highlighted and parallels between American Indian and old European traditions will be established. For the close reading of Gardens, Edward Huffstetler's stimulating essay on “Spirit Armies and Ghost Dancers: The Dialogic Nature of American Indian Resistance” will serve as a starting point. As there have been very few published critical essays on Gardens, I will mainly rely on the text itself as well as on Ellen L. Arnold's excellent interview collection Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. Moreover, Silko's collected essays in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit will also be consulted at times.

The Popol Vuh: A New English Version, translated from K’iche’ by Michael Bazzett

Popol Vuh (Popol Wuj), a K’iche’ Maya epic, is widely judged as the finest piece of native American literature. Written between 1554 and 1558 in the Spanish-introduced alphabet, it recounts in vivid detail the origins of the cosmos and the history of the K’iche’ people of highland Guatemala. The story opens with the lifting of the earth out of the sea, followed by several attempts by primordial gods to generate creatures to venerate them. The first three tries are failures, including making humans out of mud and wood. Then monstrous beings introduce chaos and are destroyed at the hands of two young tricksters named Hunahpu and Xbalanque. Their exploits comprise much of the narrative, including a trip to the Underworld (Xibalba) to play ball with the Lords of Death. The boys’ defeat of Xibalba allows for the creation of true humans out of maize, after which they ascend into the sky as sun and moon. Popularly referred to as Hero Twins, they are comparable to similar characters in North and South American folklore.

A Concise Overview of Native American Written Literature: Early Beginnings to 1968

A Concise Overview of Native American Written Literature: Early Beginnings to 1968

Complementarity of Gendered Spaces in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

Gendered concepts arise out of reflections on the experiences, prejudices or orientations of one sex over the other. There are stereotyped gender roles in every society for both male and female, which could differ according to societal norms. However, regarding gender aspects, there is no commonality among cultures. It is said that women were always considered inferior to men from days of yore. This generalisation may hold good for Western patriarchal societies where women were restricted to private spheres, but it does not essentially apply to women in Native American communities. Laguna Pueblo, a Native American community, for instance, is a matrilineal society whose cultural and religious traditions are strongly influenced by female figures and deities. Leslie Marmon Silko, one of the distinguished Native American writers instrumental in the revival of Native American literature, writes with a strong sense of affiliation with and allegiance to her native land and culture. Her novel Ceremony illustrates how native ideologies seek to balance a more nuanced relationship or complementarity of genders. There is even a persistent impulse to romanticize the feminine in opposition to the masculine. This paper explores the gendered spaces in the matrilineal society of Laguna as depicted in Silko’s Ceremony.

Occasionally, He’s a Somniaticidal Maniac: Stephen Graham Jones Reclaims Home and History

Environmental activism and preservation of the land, acknowledgement of our shared responsibilities to the planet, to unci maka, to Mother Earth, to our home; these are obligations of love we as human beings embrace with devoted regularity. But what happens when we look at stories that might destroy the world entirely, might remold, reshape, reclaim and remake (or perhaps even “rename” in a restorative move) our histories and homes? What is the reception for works that defy the expectations of devotion to the environment in Native American literature one genre at a time? That address historic erasure by reshaping the future? This paper will examine some of Stephen Graham Jones’s prolific works, including Sterling City, “How Billy Hanson Destroyed the Earth, and Everyone on It,” as well as Chapter Six, all published in a variety of platforms and collections. In each instance, the worlds as home and future history described are decidedly reclaimed, perhaps for good reasons, and perhaps for not so good reasons. The worlds offered to choose from, however, are ones that will likely give you nightmares, or at least pause, even in the daylight.

Elaine Goodale Eastman, Modernist Author? Re-visiting a Border-crossing Woman Writer’s Place in Literary History

Elaine Goodale Eastman is not a name generally associated with transnational literary modernism. Yet, a review of her extensive oeuvre demonstrates that her writings interacted in diverse complex ways with that cultural movement. She wrote in a range of genres, including lyric poetry, journalism, didactic children’s books and what she herself termed “potboilers” aimed primarily at supporting her family’s finances. As an editor and co-author with her husband Charles, she contributed to the development of Native American literatures in an intense period of U.S. suppression of indigenous culture—a process in which she played conflicting roles. Through autobiographical texts published late in her life, we see that Eastman continued to have aspirations consistent with a number of modernism’s familiar tenets, even as she also struggled to reconcile the intersectional elements in her gendered personal history with both the successes and the limitations of her multi-faceted publishing career.

Environment and Literary Landscape: An Ecological Criticism of Louise Erdrich’s Novel Tracks

Connecting the environment with societies’ cultures through literature has created a new awareness of environmental issues. The current environmental crisis is a product of modern human culture. The thought of using land as a commodity and disregard for environmental ethics has worsened the ecological crisis. The paper focuses issues of environment highlighted in Native American literature. The anthropocentric behavior of Euro-Americans is contrary to Native American idea of biocentrism. For American Indians, land is considered not merely a stage on which the act is played but also as an active participant in the drama with major role to play in the lives of the characters. This article applies Ecocriticism theory on Louise Erdrich’s fiction Tracks to generate an ecological criticism of the text. This paper highlights new ways of treating the natural world, putting responsibility on humans to see how their cultures are affecting environment.

Wordarrows: The performative power of language in N. Scott Momaday’s non-fiction work

Author/s
 Anna M. Brígido-CorachánIULMA - Universitat de València, Spain
 
 ABSTRACT
 This article focuses on two non-fiction works by Native American author N. Scott Momaday: his 1969 historical memoir The Way to Rainy Mountain and his essay collection The Man Made of Words It specifically tackles performative conceptions of language in the Kiowa storytelling tradition, where words are experienced as speech acts that have the power to intervene in surrounding realities. Taking into account 20th century ethno-cultural and linguistic policies in the United States, the article also reflects on the role indigenous languages may play in contemporary Native American Literature, which has most often been written in English.

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...

The Multiple Narrative Traditions in Native American Literature

The Multiple Narrative Traditions in Native American Literature

Image and Textual Design Strategies in Native American Literature

The article deals with the creative ways in which a number of Native American authors offer characters and various approaches of readers to discovering "the center", which becomes a rich and diverse experience that can also reveal the writer's deep self-awareness as a storyteller. These centers, which are critical to the development of the character, image, and plot, can also determine the overall structure and concept of the story. Being the result of the self-reflectiveness of the narrators and controlling the whole narrative concept, such centers have precedents in the traditional Native systems of poetics.

The Secret of the Twig: Salish Adaptation, Jesuit Inculturation, and Spirit-Matter Relation in D'Arcy McNickle's <em>The Surrounded</em>

The Secret of the TwigSalish Adaptation, Jesuit Inculturation, and Spirit-Matter Relation in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded April Middeljans (bio) Early in The Surrounded (1936), the character of Faithful Catharine—an old Salish woman who was converted by Jesuits in her childhood—raises a question that haunts the rest of the narrative: “What had come about since that day of the planting of the cross? How was it that when one day was like another there should be, at the end of many days, a world of confusion and dread and emptiness?” (22). Life on Montana’s Flathead reservation has become a “chaotic world” full of disrespect, “distrust” and “warfare” (22, 11), blighted with poverty, hunger, “misery and hopelessness” (232). While Catharine declares that “the Fathers had not done it” (131), critics have disagreed; many read the novel as an unequivocal indictment of Christianity, its spiritual and cultural assumptions depicted as fundamentally opposed to—and ignorant of—a Salish worldview and lifeway. According to these scholars, this “anti-Catholic novel” (R. D. Parker 64) portrays Christianity as a “radically alien cosmology” that “forces the Salish out of traditional patterns of relating to family, society,” nature, and the supernatural (Christensen 2–3); the Jesuit priests “doom the people [they hope] to save” (Purdy 47) as they “eradicate the Indian reality and replace it with a completely foreign conception of the world” (Owens 67). For several critics, the novel’s moral is that “Indian people know what is best for themselves and should be left alone to determine their own fates” (Lima 292). The eventual reversion of some Salish characters to paganism is read as a reassertion of lost autonomy and a resurrection of precolonial Salish identity (Purdy 77; Lima 298; Prampolini 75). The condemnation of the Jesuits echoes a general tendency in Native American literature and scholarship to figure Christianity as an “unbidden and oblivious” vehicle of white oppression (Hoefel 52). Its missionaries and rituals are portrayed as agents of a “theological imperialism” [End Page 84] that, confident in its own superiority, aggressively colonizes Indian identities, cultures, and ecology (Christensen). Christian and Native religions are typified as “mutually exclusive” (Deloria 237), and some hold Christian missionaries complicit—however unwittingly or unintentionally—in the genocide of Native peoples (Tinker 4). Plenty of historical evidence justifies such accusations against Christian evangelists, including many Jesuit missionaries. Yet McNickle’s novel and the history of Salish-Jesuit relations strangely resist the invader/invaded dichotomy that structures so much scholarship. By acknowledging the Salish initiative in summoning priests for themselves and by portraying in Father Grepilloux the Jesuit principle of inculturation (adapting to Indigenous culture), The Surrounded suggests that the Jesuit worldview was not in fact “radically alien” or “completely foreign” to the Salish, nor did it, as some claim, “impose” itself “with no consideration” for the Salish view (Prampolini 74). The novel’s ambivalent narrative mode makes its assessment of the priests—and of the Salish’s self-determinative agency—significantly more complex than critics have allowed. Indeed, the novel incessantly struggles to define the protean relation between cultural adaptation and cultural persistence, between one’s spiritual identity and its material incarnations. While The Surrounded exposes the inability of Jesuit inculturation to guarantee Salish material prosperity and cultural endurance, the novel also suggests that cultural isolationism and a reversion to precontact Salish attitudes and lifeways (were this even possible) cannot adequately ensure Salish persistence postcontact. Like McNickle’s early theories of cultural adaptation, the novel obliquely suggests by its end that the Salish identity of the future need not (and perhaps cannot) be exclusively “tribal,” that it must be open to some kind of adaptation that eschews dichotomous identity categories and cultural divisions. The novel does not yet imagine for us what that might look like, but it does not appear to consider such an adaptation incompatible with authentic and persistent Salish identity. “how it was i cannot say”: narrative ambivalence in the surrounded The Surrounded’s irresolution about how to define the relation between Salish identity and cultural change is embodied in its young “mixed-blood” [End Page 85] protagonist, Archilde. Having spent a year playing fiddle in Portland, Archilde returns...

At the Intersections of Empire: <em>Ceremony</em>, Transnationalism, and American Indian–Filipino Exchange

At the Intersections of EmpireCeremony, Transnationalism, and American Indian–Filipino Exchange Alyssa A. Hunziker (bio) Native American and Indigenous studies has increasingly questioned how it might incorporate transnational analyses while adhering to calls for literary nationalism. Scholars including Shari M. Huhndorf, Jace Weaver, Chadwick Allen, and Steven Salaita have argued that transnational approaches to Indigenous literatures helpfully expand the territories of Indigenous critique while nonetheless highlighting nation-specific literatures. Building on this approach, this article uses a transnational framework to revisit Leslie Marmon Silko’s first novel, Ceremony (1977). The novel itself is both located and situated, as it recounts the postwar experience of Laguna Pueblo World War II veteran Tayo as he recovers from the traumas of war, the Bataan Death March, and his subsequent detention in a prisoner of war camp. However, as I argue, despite its located context, the novel is also inherently transnational, as the protagonist frequently contemplates his service as a US soldier in the Philippines. By focusing on the Philippine context of the novel, I argue that Silko reveals overlapping histories between Indigenous peoples in North America and other colonized peoples abroad. This framework allows for comparative studies between settler colonial and colonial contexts to better link US empire as it occurs globally and to highlight historic overlaps in differently colonized spaces. By reading Silko’s novel as inherently transnational, I hope not only to contribute to Silko scholarship as a whole but also to read across settler colonial, colonial, and what Allen has called trans-Indigenous, contexts in an effort to reassess Silko’s overlapping depiction of multiple forms of empire. Similarly, I suggest that Silko uses the memories of her Native World War II veterans, Tayo, Harley, Leroy, Pinkie, and Emo, as a means of [End Page 116] complicating previous narratives of war, colonial difference, national boundaries, and battle lines. Because of the historical realities of the Bataan Death March, readers can imagine that Native American soldiers would undoubtedly have had some exchange with the Filipino servicemen with whom they fought, despite the fact that we never see Filipino characters within the text itself.1 By situating Tayo at the intersections of multiple empires—both US and Japanese—in the midst of occupied territory in the Philippines, I suggest that his experience of settler colonialism in the United States and witnessing of colonialism in the Philippines lead to a flagrant rejection of colonial rule in all of its forms. Tayo, then, becomes an international, but no less traditional, figure who mirrors Silko’s later “tribal internationalists” in Almanac of the Dead (1991), whom scholars like Malini Johar Schueller and Channette Romero argue make up “cross-cultural spiritual coalitions . . . [that] provide a more powerful means of combating the social, political, and economic injustice faced by Native Americans (and many oppressed peoples around the world) than secular politics based on ethnicity and race alone” (Romero 623). I argue that Ceremony’s Filipino context prefigures the overtly transnational politics of Silko’s later novels, Almanac of the Dead and Gardens in the Dunes (2000). To frame my reading of Silko’s novel, I follow Salaita, Allen, and Weaver, who have argued for the importance of reading Native American and Indigenous literatures in a global context. Second, I follow settler colonial studies scholars Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe, who argue that settler colonial systems are explicitly different from colonial and imperial systems. This distinction helps to more accurately differentiate between settler colonialism in the continent and US colonialism in the Pacific. As Veracini explains, while settler colonialism and colonialism may produce similar conditions and use similar tactics, the two systems ultimately have different aims, as settler colonialism aims to erase and remove Indigenous populations, while colonialism aims to subjugate Indigenous populations as a source of labor. Put more succinctly, Wolfe writes that “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event” (388). The contexts for US occupation of Indigenous lands in North America and US colonialism in the Philippines are marked by difference even as they carry historical parallels and overlaps. Finally, I follow scholars like Jodi Byrd and Iyko Day, who have each discussed the [End Page 117] ways Asian American...

Civilization and sexual abuse: selected Indian captivity narratives and the Native American boarding-school experience

Ewa Skał is a PhD student at the Institute of English, Opole University, Poland. Her current research interests include Native American Literature as well as British and American Culture. She received an MA in English Philology (Literary Studies) in 2018, and a BA in English Philology (Business English) in 2016. Her other academic interests include feminist literature and psychological novels.

Black Hawk in Translation: Indigenous Critique and Liberal Guilt in the 1847 Dutch Edition of <em>Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak</em>

Black Hawk in TranslationIndigenous Critique and Liberal Guilt in the 1847 Dutch Edition of Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak Frank Kelderman (bio) In 1846 Rinse Posthumus, a Protestant country pastor in the north of the Netherlands, received from a friend a copy of Life of Ma-ka-tai-me-shekia-kiak, the as-told-to autobiography of the Sauk military leader Black Hawk. First published in Cincinnati in 1833, the Life was a best seller in the United States, but it was unfamiliar to Posthumus, who lived in a small village near the North Sea in the province of Friesland (Frisia). Over the course of the year, he studied Back Hawk’s life story and began a translation of the text for Dutch readers, which he published in the city of Leeuwarden in 1847 as Levensgeschiedenis van Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kiakiak, of Zwarte Havik. If Black Hawk can be regarded as the author of his autobiography, this makes Posthumus’s text the first foreign translation of a book-length work of Native American literature.1 Posthumus’s edition did not cause much of a stir. Years later, the Dutch anticolonial writer Eduard Douwes Dekker mentioned the book as an “important” work (Multatuli 50), but no subsequent editions of the translation were published, nor has there been any commentary on the text by literary historians. Nevertheless, Levensgeschiedenis van Zwarte Havik sheds new light on the role of Indigenous writing in a transatlantic print culture in which the representation of American Indians generated popular entertainment, theories of government, and philosophies of universal history. In Britain, the circulation of American Indian literature came on the heels of a wealth of writings about Indigenous people in periodicals and newspapers, as well as “anthropological studies, works of racial science, and missionary narratives” (Flint 3). There was a continental European dimension to this story as well, and since the early nineteenth century the representation of Indianer held a prominent place especially in the German cultural imagination [End Page 58] (Bolz; Zantop; Penny; King). But as a growing number of studies has shown, the role of Indigenous people in what Jace Weaver terms “the Red Atlantic” was not merely to provide symbolic representations of Native presence: their writings, performances, diplomacy, and protests inflected the very currents of modern political and intellectual thought (Weaver; Flint; Lyons). Extending these transatlantic dialogues to a Frisian-Dutch print culture, Rinse Posthumus’s translation of the Life not only catered to a widespread ethnological interest in Native American culture in Europe but also brought Black Hawk’s critique of settler expansion into political debates about state power that had local and transnational implications. This essay is about what happened to Black Hawk’s story in translation. Annotated by a rural pastor in the province of Friesland, Levensgeschiedenis connects Black Hawk’s account of Indian removal in the American Midwest to a region that has been marginal to the history of cultural exchange in the Atlantic world. In what follows, I consider Rinse Posthumus’s role as translator and editor, tracing how his theological commentary builds on Enlightenment assumptions about race and linguistic difference even as it carries out a universalism that validates Indigenous cultural traditions. But I also argue that his editorial work amplifies a critical current in Black Hawk’s text about the relation between settler colonialism and the role of government, which intersected with nineteenth-century debates about political liberalism and immigration to North America. Posthumus witnessed the economic decline in the northern Netherlands in the 1840s, and his edition of the Life resonates with concerns about agricultural crises in Europe and the population movements of the mid-nineteenth century. By annotating Black Hawk’s account of Sauk traditions and Indigenous dispossession, Posthumus gives voice to his political commitment to liberalism during a time of economic depression and revolutionary energy in the Netherlands. Since these pressures gave rise to a peak in Dutch immigration to the American Midwest—including the very lands that were opened up for settlement after the Black Hawk War (1832)—his commentary in Levensgeschiedenis negotiates a politics of liberal guilt over the intertwined histories of European migration and Sauk...