Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (review)

Six years in the making, this “co-authored book” is grounded on and guided by the ethical principle that Native literary criticism and theory is work undertaken by Native people (3). “We hoped to create Native knowledge,” says Craig Womack (Oklahoma Creek-Cherokee) (95). To help get this necessary and complicated work going, each of the twelve contributors to this book was given the same point of departure: “Describe an ethical Native literary criticism” (95). The editors also provide a list of the various follow-up questions that this prompt generated as authors developed their ideas; this list provides an invaluable overview of the current state of Native literary studies. At the same time, the shared prompt enables the twelve authors to work out a vibrant common ground that openly encourages continued conversations about the ethics of meshing theory and activism.

In one of Reasoning Together’s most important moves, the authors, well, reason together, calling each other by name and talking directly about each other’s essays. As Womack explains, “the subject matter of [our] … essays was the book itself as [we] cited and discussed the ideas in other contributions. We wanted to get beyond essentialized abstractions about community and try our hand at performing community” (96). This is a large goal; “performance” is, like “community,” a critical concept not always as precisely defined as it might be. But to a larger extent than I have ever seen before in a collection of essays, Reasoning Together realizes its ambitions, which is to say that this book not only enacts community within its pages but also reaffirms and encourages the continuance of responsible relations with Native communities outside its covers.

Reasoning Together begins with a 100-page introductory essay by Womack that doubles as a primer on Native and non-Native critical theory and a discussion of book-length Indian-authored literary criticism published between 1986 and 1997. More than that, this piece makes it possible for us to see where the field of Native literary studies is now and where it might go next; Womack offers his essay as a “baby step,” but that baby has a long stride (93).

Every single essay in Reasoning Together is valuable. That said, I only have space to acknowledge Sean Teuton’s strong commitment to teaching Native prisoners and writing a historically grounded American Indian politics, Daniel Heath Justice’s compassionate and helpful reflections on kinship criticism and continuance, Cheryl Suzack’s cogently argued discussion of indigenous feminism and Winona LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman, Christopher Teuton’s elegant map of the continuities between oral articulations and American Indian literary criticism and theory, Lisa Brooks’s fresh and exciting work with Natives in and of the Northeast, and LeAnne Howe’s standout “Blind Bread and the Business of Theory Making, by Embarrassed Grief,” one of my all-time favorite pieces by her, and that’s saying something.

Reading this book, you have to look past some copy-editing problems, but that’s my only qualm. Reasoning Together does a terrific collaborative job of saying what it does and doing what it says. It will be of enormous value to teachers in college and university Native studies and Native literary studies courses as well as in a host of other communities who stand in indigenous ethical relation to this book and who are themselves integral parts of the Native Critics Collective.