Land and Literacy: The Textualities of Native Studies

The title of this jointly authored essay is meant to evoke new strategies in Native literary studies: the reaching back across time from the contemporary present to the historical past, the examination of the relationship between the academic fields of early and contemporary Native literature, and the growing recognition of the importance of alternative textualities. These strategies are joined by a network of relationships: intellectual, geographical, and textual, all of which gesture toward land as the glue that binds Native communities. Our collaboration is similarly linked. As scholars, we are situated at opposite ends of the field of Native studies: temporally, Fitzgerald in the present, reaching back through the centuries to uncover Native voices and communities; Wyss situated in the early American period, recovering Native voices that for too long have been left out of contemporary literary histories. Spatially, we are situated differently as well, with Wyss working on New England material culture and Fitzgerald working on fiction from Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy, and Sophia Alice Callahan. In this essay, we raise the following questions: How do we see each other at the edges of Native literary studies? Perhaps more importantly, where do we meet? How do these two subfields, early and contemporary, intersect, even while recognizing that increasingly, they are part and parcel of the same intellectual and textual moment? How do they inform each other, and what are the implications of this for the broader field and beyond?

Scholars in contemporary Native studies draw a number of important connections between the past and the present through ongoing oral traditions, the endurance of native languages and traditions, and genealogies of ancestry, removals, and landscape. While in academia fields of study are neatly sectioned off into linear periods, in many Native communities time is viewed differently. It can best be described as forming a spiral that weaves past and present together in such a way that "history is never simply the past," but resides in the present as well (Walker 113). Stories, songs, and even words attach themselves to landscape features, recounting their narratives to those who are able to "hear" or "read" them.¹ The literary concerns of Native studies thus are profoundly political—as land and language intersect, the exercise of political, intellectual, and cultural sovereignties as well as tribal nations' relationships with settler governments are all to be understood through a careful and nuanced reading of a variety of textualities. This understanding of the interrelations between the literary and the political, the past and the present, and the varieties of expression have now become central and foundational to Native studies methodologies, making the early period perhaps more vital to contemporary Native communities today than it ever was, in turn making our scholarly charge all the more important.

Contemporary Native literature has largely focused on fiction, whereas early American literature is dominated by nonfictional texts. While scholars such as Robert Warrior and Jace Weaver have long called for Native studies scholars to look at early works, scant attention was paid to Native writing before the twentieth century until a little over a decade ago. With the exception of critical work on Native American autobiography by Arnold Krupat, David Brumble, David Murray, and Hertha Wong, work in English departments through the 1990s was focused almost exclusively on contemporary Native novels, poetry, and literary translations of Native oratory.² As scholar Craig Womack has recently pointed out, this was a literary and cultural moment in which it seemed that nobody was interested in discussing the writing of Natives from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.³ For scholars, then, drawing connections between a historical past and a contemporary present is a relatively new exercise. A promising overlap between the early and contemporary periods comes in the form of what Robert Warrior has termed "intellectual trade routes" (People 181), ideas and knowledge that traverse time and space to create moments of "synchronicity" (185-86). This synchronicity highlights "the benefits that come from reading across American Indian writings" (Warrior, Tribal Secrets xxi). Reading texts across the centuries creates a space from which...