The Red Power Novel: Revisiting Concepts of Knowledge, Identity, and Experience in American Indian Literature and Studies

Sean Kicummah Teuton’s Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel is a rich call to reevaluate the theoretical claims, ethics, and practices that Teuton sees as the driving forces of Native studies over the last two decades. Teuton offers a new method of approaching American Indian studies—one that highlights the political need to bring an intellectual world of scholarship into contact with a material world of lived reality. In his critique of long-standing modes of theorizing in Native studies, Teuton takes on concepts of essentialism and constructivism, and in particular the sticky categories of knowledge, identity, and experience. The book resurrects these terms (from what its author sees as their burial beneath poststructuralism) with a broad argument that denying Native people access to these categories strips them of resources through which they can produce “legitimate cultural or political growth in relation to community and land,” ultimately restricting the potential for “decolonizing Native America” (xvi).

Teuton uses the Red Power era (1969 through the 1970s) as his foundational moment because he understands it as a convergence of material realities, political resistance, and artistic vision, a synthesis that gave rise to a new theory of justice for Native peoples. While the American Indian Movement (AIM) was organized in 1968, the beginning of the Red Power era was marked by the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay in 1969 by the group Indians of All Tribes. This sense of political assertiveness continued with the Trail of Broken Treaties in 1972, when protesters traveled from the West Coast to Washington, D.C., where they occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs building. In 1973, AIM supporters took over the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre. Along with the political awakening of this moment, Teuton argues, came a literature that embodied the vision being generated by Red Power. Through Red Power, “Native writers imagined a new narrative for Indian Country,” without recourse to a romanticized past (2). Red Power and the Red Power novel dramatize for Teuton how politics, literature, and scholarship must be brought together in critical literary studies—on and off the page, in and out of the classroom—to enact fruitful, socially responsible, politically tangible, and justice-centered methods of theorizing.

Red Land, Red Power proposes a concept of “tribal realism” to counter what Teuton persuasively argues are restrictions placed on Native peoples by essentialist and constructivist modes of theorizing. Tribal realism, a communally conferred source of objectivity, brings together Indigenous and Western modes of evaluating the world and knowledge. Teuton contextualizes tribal realism in many areas of critical theory, both within Native studies and beyond. Pointing to the work of American Indian scholars Elizabeth Cook- Lynn, Jace Weaver, and Robert Allen Warrior (particularly Warrior’s concept of “intellectual sovereignty”), Teuton argues for a Native studies that is rooted in land, community, and the past—an empowering shift that allows scholars “to make evaluative claims to normative knowledge” and to “better support the philosophical and actual recovery of Indian lands, histories, and identities” (15). Teuton defines Native identity as “the central site for the preservation of tribal culture, history, and nationhood” (17). Although mediated and constructed to some extent, Native identities (and lands) have been and continue to be “policed” by the U.S. government, making identity a vital part of the intellectual inquiries and politics in which Teuton is invested. He draws on numerous scholars— Simon Ortiz, Michael Wilson, Neal McLeod, Karl Kroeber, Paul Tidwell—who point to the significance of Indigenous oral philosophy as part of an artistic and political adaptive process in which Native peoples both connect with and challenge a traditional tribal culture. Oral tradition (which can be written as well) was central to producing knowledge and imagining an Indigenous future during the Red Power era, indicating that it is...