Reasoning Together, The Native Critics Collective

[sanguinity]

Both these selections are collected in Reasoning Together, by The Native Critics Collective, editors Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton.

nb: I have a STEM background, not a lit-crit background, which means that there are significant parts of these essays that went whoosh, right past my head. Someone with a lit-crit background may pull very different things from these essays.


21. Tol Foster (Anglo-Creek), "Of One Blood: An Argument for Relations and Regionality in Native American Literary Studies."

After a brief history of the classic biases coming out of the academy about Native Americans (not the least of which is casting Native people as "the Other" with a legitimate identity and existence only to the extent that they are unlike the "Americans" that they allegedly exist in opposition to -- a conceptualization, btw, which tends to cast contemporary Indians as not being "real" Indians), he instead looks to Native cultures as their own sources of critical theory:

Instead of looking for some theory to import into indigenous communities, we yield a far more rigorous understanding by both valuing and critiquing the historical and cultural archive as a theoretically sophisticated site of its own. One's history and experience can provide a testable and portable framework for understanding relations between individuals, institutions, and historical forces. Given these claims, I argue here that tribal figures like the Cherokee writer Will Rogers are historically suited actors who utilize the counternarratives of their communities as a theoretical base from which to conduct anticolonialist and cosmopolitan critique.

One of the key points of this essay comes back to "regionality": Will Rogers is a Cherokee writer, and one can and should go to Cherokee history, culture, and literature for context and insights to his work. To that end, Foster gives a capsule political and social history of the Cherokee and Creeks in Indian Territory, from Removal through the Civil War and Reconstruction and on to Oklahoma statehood, with special attention to issues of political alliances, sovereignty, and differing responses of the two tribes to incursions by non-Native African Americans and whites. (That history alone is worth the price of admission.) Within that context, there's then a discussion of the racial politics in Will Rogers' writing -- a discussion that highlighted for me a number of issues I've been poking at for a while now.

There's more good stuff in there, too -- including a discussion of the potential pitfalls of regional literary criticism (f'rex, overlooking members of the community that are commonly labeled as being outside of the community -- Afro-Creek writer Melvin Tolson -- or giving too much weight to the most culturally conservative parts of the community) but I want to emphasize that even people who don't "do" lit-crit can still get good stuff out of this article.

22. Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee), "'Go Away Water!' : Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative."

Tol Foster referred a few times to Daniel Heath Justice's essay, so I turned to that next. (And it's likely the only other essay I'll be reading from the volume for the forseeable future, because it was a weekend-loaner.)

Justice places discusses some of the problems of developing an ethical Native literary criticism, especially around peoplehood and decolonization. Again, there's the note that mainstream American definitions of Indians is centered around Indians being "the Other" -- a definition that disenfranchises Indians who are not Other enough -- while Native conceptions tend to center around peoplehood and community identity. Justice then illustrates these ideas with two intra-Native disputes about Native identity: Delphine Redshirt's (Oglala Sioux) charge that the Connecticut Pequot aren't "real" Indians, and the question of whether mixed-blood, urban Indians can be "real" Indians, especially if they're disconnected from land and community.

...and if you don't think that both of those discussions pushed my buttons hard, then you don't know me. However, Justice did a really nice job teasing out and clarifying a lot of my thoughts on both those issues, and both those critiques. And he did a nice job negotiating the ethical issues, in my opinion. There are big honkin' huge issues of context and regionality there -- it is not random that the first critique came from an Oglala full-blood -- and in my opinion, Justice did a nice job of honoring that while still centering the ethics of the situation.


...like I said, I'm not sure I'm going to make it through the rest of the anthology. Lit-crit is a seriously uphill battle for me, and I have to give this anthology back in a few hours. But these two essays alone were more than worth my time, and did a lot to clarify my thinking about certain thorny intra-Indian and intra-POC issues. If you "do" lit-crit, and if you're looking for insights into approaching Native writings, I recommend the anthology.

(additional tags: Creek; Cherokee)

Comments

[egretplume.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this review; this book sounds great!

[sanguinity]

Like I said, dense going (at least for the likes of me), but the payoff was really good in both essays. And several other essays in the book looked intriguing, too. :-)

[bloodcult.livejournal.com]

For me, as an enrolled Comanche who happens to have a non-American white Jewish father, the questions raised by these books seem interesting but I wonder to what extent do they discuss the incredible differences between tribes and while "blood" may be enough, or indeed all, necessary to make a person "Indian" in some cultures in other, more matriarchal, groups up-bringing plays a far more crucial role in the question of identity.

[sanguinity]

These are just essays, so there's not much space to go into the breadth of differences between Native cultures, other than to point out that those differences are big enough that one can't, and shouldn't, gloss over them. Tol Foster, as I understand him, would go on to say that the breadth of differences is one of the reasons that Native lit-crit should avail itself of regional perspectives. Daniel Heath Justice illustrates the importance of that breadth in his discussion of how the differences between Oglala and Pequot experience and history lead to a situation where Delphine Redshirt was claiming that the Pequot weren't "real" Indians. In both cases, the authors are discussing issues and strategies for approaching works by Native authors; neither are even attempting to lay out all the knowledge that one would need to be able to apply those strategies.