Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture (review)

What happens to American studies when you put Native American studies at the center? This is one question posed within the latest book by Going Native author Shari Huhndorf. Mapping the Americas is scholarship at the very crossroads of Native studies and American studies. It raises the provocative issue of European expansion and colonialism and what it meant for indigenous populations on the continents now known as the Americas. It further delves into how this knowledge potentially alters the master narratives of European superiority that have historically justifi ed the formation of the United States. In her current book Huhndorf stays true to form as she expands on Going Native, tackling the thorny issue of the legitimacy of the U.S. nation-state as a colonial power, a topic American studies is all too often criticized for failing to address. If American studies is in part defi ned by its use of critical analysis that relies heavily on cultural and ethnic studies, then this book is solidly an American studies book, helping to fi ll a gaping hole where Native studies is consistently overlooked.

As it explores Native American cultural production, ranging from the visual arts to theater and multimedia to literature, Mapping the Americas not only unpacks and inspects the ways indigenous nationalism fi nds expression on the transnational level but also exposes how processes of American domination are repudiated. This obvious challenge to the conventional viewpoint that Native American tribes are subnational groups whose lives, lands, and resources are subject to American political control is also one of the interventions the book makes in American studies literature. By revealing how Native artists, writers, and activists transcend imposed colonial borders, metaphorically and literally, Huhndorf demonstrates how indigenous people have countered the prevailing myth of American national origins in vast expanses of "uninhabited" land. In one illustration of this the book examines drawings by Yup'ik and Inupiaq students in government and mission schools in the 1890s, unearthed in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in 1967, which spoke to the ways precolonized indigenous Alaskans conceived of their relationship to place and space. The entire fi rst chapter is a deep interrogation of the colonizing of Alaska and the ways in which it was marketed to the American public through popular literature and the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacifi c Exposition. In a further examination of Alaska and the Canadian Arctic, chapter 2 investigates the ways in which an Inuit production company utilizes the tools of fi lmmaking to engage the claims for political autonomy in emergent Inuit nationalism.

Huhndorf's most important methodological intervention, however, may be her development of a Native feminist framework, which she accomplishes in multiple ways and uses as a recurring theme throughout the book. For example, through an analysis of the 1991 radio play Birdwoman and the Suffragettes: A Story of Sacajewa, the trope of the indigenous woman as sexualized traitor is identifi ed as a locus of gendered colonial power and violence. Birdwoman is just one work from the genre of indigenous feminist performance art, which began emerging in the 1980s and 1990s and recognized and challenged the order of patriarchal colonialism. This genre raises issues of the shared struggles of indigenous women "across boundaries of nation, language, and culture" (108) and explores the nature of sovereignty and nationalism as male-articulated processes.

Surprisingly without much reference to Benedict Arnold's model of nationalism, Mapping the Americas nevertheless draws on it implicitly. Anderson's classic Imagined Communities, which illustrates the various ways in which the modern nation-state is constituted, notes that one of the defi ning characteristics of a nation is mapping, including the processes of drawing boundaries and naming places. Huhndorf acknowledges this not just in the title of her book but with a deep analysis in chapter 4 of Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, which opens, as she notes, with a map of...