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CHAPTER 4. (Post) Colonial Plainsongs: Toward Native Literary Worldings (Jodi A. Byrd)
- University of Texas Press
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Chapter 4 (post) colonial plainsongs: toward native literary worldings Jodi A. Byrd In this chapter, Jodi Byrd extends the discussion of hegemonic literature like Little House on the Prairie, explaining the importance of “reworlding” literary assumptions and definitions so that they can finally speak to the true histories of Indigenous peoples. She tells us that this “worlding of a world” is the work of the settler whose “discursive colonization naturalizes the European order as dominant in the land by imaginatively transforming the Native Other into an empty referent.” She reminds us that the problem with hegemony is that “one never does have to think about it, and all too often, Native scholars and authors are left with the task of confronting the unthinking hegemonies” that continue to shape academic knowledge about Indigenous People in ways that support their own dominant desires and assumptions. In recent years, more and more authors are attempting to record history truthfully. Documentary films like The Invasion of Panama or Farenheit 911 and books like Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, The Pinochet Files, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, or my own, American Assassination: On the Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone, are growing in number as a way to deconstruct relatively recent deceptions about official U.S. policies and practices. Such books are beginning to awaken millions of Americans to difficult truths about American leadership and are serving to begin new conversations. Still, authentic conversations about Indigenous People, their history, contributions, perspectives, and desires are desperately lacking. Books like Chrisjohn and Young’s Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada may reveal hard-to-imagine atrocities against Indian people—but contributions from contemporary Indigenous voices that could guide us into the future are largely unheeded. Jodi A. Byrd’s is one of these voices and her call for those in charge of literary offerings to allow them to emerge will serve readers who are interested in understanding how the lived experiences expressed by Indigenous writers must inform postcolonial theorizing. Jodi Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. She received her PhD in English from the University of Iowa, focusing on ideological formations of Indigenous People with current postcolonial discourses. She currently teaches jodi a. byrd 8 2 courses on American Indians in film for the University of Iowa’s American Indian Native Studies Program. *** Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has recently identified anti-Indianism as “probably the foremost challenge to U.S. history and art.”1 A discursive and imaginative violence that continues to shape U.S. intellectual and artistic expressions, anti-Indianism functions as a deep-seated colonial hegemony that vilifies and dehumanizes Indigenous People as a means to justify genocide and support imperialism. In Anti-Indianism in Modern America, Cook-Lynn suggests that a critical analysis of anti-Indianism within the field of literary studies is long overdue and provides a substantial starting point for scholars to engage those colonialist discourses informing works by Native and non-Native writers alike. By marking the hegemonic influences and lineages of contemporary literature about American Indians, Cook-Lynn reveals the propagandistic nature of anti-Indianism in stark detail. Anti-Indianism is a process by which our cultures, histories, and knowledges are transformed into a U.S. national patrimony where our very presence speaks to some essential “American-ness” that each citizen regardless of ethnic or racial origins may claim. It is not a stretch then that Cook-Lynn argues in her book that the narratives of James Fennimore Cooper’s and Louis L’Amour’s vanishing Americans are the direct ancestors of more recent contributions to the genre that include Ian Frazier’s laissez-faire and voyeuristic forays to Pine Ridge in his 2000 memoir On the Rez. Frazier’s book, which has been roundly critiqued by Sherman Alexie and other Native reviewers, remains popular because of its nonthreatening accessibility and its assured entitlement and access to “Sioux” culture and history. Writing of his own interest in Pine Ridge and providing his credentials for observing life on the reservation, he invites his readers to identify affinities they might have for particular tribes, as if Native cultures were a veritable buffet line of choices for the discriminating consumer. “Indeed,” he writes, the Indians of America are so varied that I think you could find an appropriate tribe for almost anyone . . . As we get older, we learn our...