Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts by Chadwick Allen (review)

3 1 2 WAL 3 8 . 3 FA LL 2 0 0 3 mother, Mina, pronounces judgment on her unsatisfactory relationship with the Anglo rancher LuAnne, a requiem that resonates far beyond Fort Peck, Montana, and the American West: “We’ve both grown old and pitiful,... piti­ ful because we’ve been here for so long and still don’t know anything about one another” (41). Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts. By Chadwick Allen. Durham , N .C .: D uke U n iversity Press, 2002. 308 pages, $59.95/$ 19.95. Reviewed by Stephen Tatum U niversity of U tah, Salt Lake City As its title suggests, Blood Narrative is a comparative literary and cultural study of American Indian and New Zealand Maori literary and cultural dis­ course. Allen’s aim in this exemplary transnational project is twofold: to show more thoroughly the “rhetorical complexity” of indigenous texts and to offer a more sophisticated understanding of “the distinct dynamics of the particu­ lar form of (post)coloniality experienced by indigenous minorities like Ameri­ can Indians and New Zealand Maori in the post-World War II era” (2). For Allen, “rhetorical complexity” emerges in indigenous literary and activist texts because of their distinctive rhetorical tactics, complicated authorial motives, and multiple audiences. And in terms of rhetorical tactics, Allen traces how a succession of writers and activists (in the American Indian tradition, from D’Arcy McNickle and John Joseph Mathews through N. Scott Momaday and James Welch) forge nonessentialist ethnic or racial identities in opposition to a dominant culture’s assimilationist paradigm either by reviving features of “treaty discourse” or by revising the “blood/land/memory” trope familiar to readers of this journal through the works of N. Scott Momaday. With regard to his second aim, to explore “the distinct dynamics of the particular form of (post)coloniality,” Allen’s study deftly conjoins discourse theory and theories of subaltern resistance influenced by Michel deCerteau and Gerald Vizenor with an attentiveness to specific historical and tribal contexts in the United States and New Zealand. In the end, the originality and importance of his study follow from his pairing of indigenous traditions of discursive resistance; his interpretive application of what he calls “treaty discourse” and the “blood/land/memory” triad; and his conceptualization of indigenous texts as including writings, material culture artifacts and the built environment, and occasions or events such as the occupation of Alcatraz and meetings of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. Allen organizes his genealogy of indigenous literary and activist texts as a progression from the “indirect” or symbolic political opposition of writers and activists in the first decades after entry into World War II to “a more direct indigenous minority opposition to continuing colonialism” that emerged in BOOK REVIEWS 3 1 3 the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. For McNickle, Mathews, and Ella Deloria, for instance, the rhetorical problem after the successful record of minority war service becomes how tactically to “balance arguments for build­ ing an inclusive national citizenship (that is, for becoming full-fledged citizens of their contemporary nations) with arguments for maintaining distinct indige­ nous identities” (28). For later writers and activists during the Indigenous Renaissance— writers, Allen adds, less inclined than their predecessors either to align with tribal or national governments or to provide “representative” voices— the transition to a more “direct” resistance to colonialism “can be understood through the lens of the blood/land/memory complex and treaty discourse” (109). Allen’s “blood/land/memory complex” represents his elabo­ ration of Momaday’s trope of “blood memory,” and the variety of rhetorical uses writers and activists make of each of these interrelated terms reveals, among other things, how indigenous writers have sought to construct indige­ nous minority identities (personal, familial, communal) apart from the defini­ tion of authenticity imposed by dominant settler cultures. In Momaday’s work, for instance, Allen argues that manifestations of this triad “[liberate] Momaday’s own and other Indians’ identities from imposed definitions of indigenous authenticity, including standards of blood quantum and/or stan­ dards that demand uninterrupted and uncontaminated inheritance of indige­ nous languages, lifeways, or habits of art” (179...