Tribal 2.0: Digital Natives, Political Players, and the Power of Stories

“Native stories are power. They create people. They author tribes. America is a tribal creation story, a tribalography,” writes LeAnne Howe as the beginning call-out to her methodology that forms the intellectual center of this special issue for sail (Howe, “Story” 29). While Howe seeks to draw new lines within old traditions and along the way remind us that Native peoples are nothing without the families and communities, the stories and the histories, and the jokes and shared grief that hold us together, she also binds America in its totality to that process of creation. “Our stories,” Howe reminds us, “created the immigrants who landed on our shores” (29). And whether it was corn to sustain them, structures to govern them, or kin to remind them how they are all connected, America was, finally and in the beginning, “created from a story” (29). Settlers and arrivants themselves have also told stories in order to create these lands in their image, and their politics continually return to the scene of the narrative in order to recast themselves as part of the story. And not just in a supporting role, but rather as the central first-person narrator in the story of America that depends upon vanishing the Indian as part of its denouement.

Within the context of such well-honed processes of replacing Indians by becoming Indian that Jean M. O’Brien has described as “firsting and lasting” and Philip J. Deloria has critiqued as “playing Indian,” the notion of tribalography becomes not just a method, but a powerful theoretical tool in reading counter against the stories the United States likes to tell about itself and others. It raises deep implications about how, when, and for whom stories are told. If we take Howe at her word that tribalography might best be understood as a “basis for critique, interpretation, a moment in time” that is tied to “the greater community of chafachúka (‘family’) and iksa (adopted group or ‘clan’),” then tribalography is first and foremost a way of thinking through and with Indigenous presences and knowledges in order to “inform ourselves, and the non-Indian world, about who we are” (Howe, Choctalking 3). But it might also be a way of thinking against and contrary to accepted modes of knowledge production within the context of an ongoing occupation of Indigenous lands.

As with anything that involves Indians, however, tribalography does not come to us uninflected; even its Latinate construction is marked by a primordial struggle for ontological control over origins, power, and meaning: tribal as ancient precursor, -graphy as a means to write or to delineate. Its haunted portmanteau bears Grecian antagonisms to Latin prefixing appropriations, and in such enjambed tensions, tribalography provokes a discursive pause and signals a turn away from the self (auto) to locate life (bios) in relation to a form that refuses states and nations as its raison d’être. In a contest of stories, tribalography teaches us that referents matter as much as the author. LeAnne Howe’s contribution to the field of American Indian literary study is methodological, certainly, but it is also philosophical and theoretical. Tribalography locates itself initially within the particularities of Chickasaw and Choctaw structures of relationality and governance, and from there it looks out toward a region, a hemisphere, to a world. It serves an individual, or it might just tell the story of the Anishinaabeg as they struggled with identity, blood quantum, and allotment. As Jill Doerfler explains, tribalography is “not completely fiction or history but a story that draws on the past, present and future; documents and imagination; the spaces between reality and rumors of memory” (295).

Given such trajectories, from the spaces between reality to the rumors of memory of the past, present, and future, tribalography is an additive and expansive concept within the critical toolbox that scholars can now use to engage in and produce indigenized critical scholarship. It is an invitation to improvise and connect. Toward that end, I would like to take up tribalography as a gesture of critique to see how it might...