A Response to Sam McKegney's "Strategies for Ethical Engagement: An Open Letter Concerning Non-Native Scholars of Native Literatures"

You fight me, you fight the Mission!

Common Anishnaabe/Ojibwa battle cry in Thunder Bay, Ontario

First off, I would like to thank both the editors of SAIL and literary critic Sam McKegney for asking questions about ethical engagement with Aboriginal literature that are both profoundly and historically vital. That said, my response to Sam's diagnosis of the malaise currently afflicting non-Aboriginal critics of this literature is an attempt to consider the "cure" Sam offers (albeit provisionally) for this malaise in relation to the symptoms he diagnoses. But I will put aside my medical metaphors for now and take up the more exciting—and apt, I think—"sporting" metaphorical register that Sam uses. My gloves are on, and I hear the bell!

In both his articulate identification of what prevents non-Aboriginal critics from engaging robustly and ethically with Aboriginal literary texts and his suggestion as to why these critics might migrate to other texts, Sam contrasts the internally or externally directed non-Aboriginal critics with Aboriginal critics who advocate a communally responsible literary criticism. While the current trends in Aboriginal literary/cultural studies are not the focus of Sam's discussion, I do think it is important to spell out certain premises that are currently being buttressed or challenged by Aboriginal critics in order to give context to my own concerns as a non-Aboriginal critic. I will borrow and adapt Sam's sporting analogy here and push it, if that is okay. When one considers the current state of the field of North American Indigenous literary criticism, many colorful euphemisms spring to mind. Dance marathon, king-of-the-mountain push-fest, arm wrestling. Knife fight. But one would be hard pressed to apply a descriptor that did not carry with it a sense of combat, a squaring off of opponents determined to hold fast to an interpretative turf and thus establish this turf as a recognized higher ground. The two camps currently in melee in the United States (as many readers of SAIL will know, of course) have been called the "nationalist," "tribalist," "nativist," or "separatist" critics on one side and the "cosmopolitanist" or "hybridist" critics on the other. This conflict, while still evolving and fought on several fronts at once, can be summarized broadly as the struggle to establish Indigenous literature's relation to what both camps have variously (and differently) described as the "real world." For critics like the late Paula Gunn Allen, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Jace Weaver, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and Daniel Heath Justice, literary criticism of Native American writers must first and foremost concern itself, as Womack has succinctly put it, "with the ethics of the relationship between a text and the community it claims to represent" (149). By emphasizing the authored text as a record of lived Indigenous experience, however imaginative and idiosyncratic, these critics assert the necessity of reading these texts as responses to and reflections of particular tribal histories and struggles for political and intellectual sovereignty (for example, Creek sovereignty in the case of Womack, or Cherokee sovereignty in the case of Justice). The critics I have mentioned can and do disagree with each other about how tribal-centered reading practices can and should be developed and critiqued. But these critics share a commitment to expose and counter what they see to be the Euroamerican three-pronged strategy of co-opting these texts as part of the metropolitan canon, effacing the ethical imperative of these texts as communal documents of struggle, and diluting this ethical imperative as a generally postcolonial or pan-tribal call for justice that is nonlocatable and therefore enervating as a resistance strategy.

In the other scrum, ready to scrap, are the so-called cosmopolitan or hybridist critics. These critics include non-Native scholars such as Arnold Krupat and Elvira Pulitano and Indigenous scholars such as Gerald Vizenor and the late critic Louis Owens. Like their opponents, they make up a highly diverse and multivocal group, but they do take a particularly concerted aim at the...