Toward a Native American Critical Theory

Conclusion

In Louis Owens’s The Sharpest Sight, Uncle Luther warns the protagonist about the risks, for an individual, of forgetting his stories: “You see, a man’s got to know the stories of his people, and then he’s got to make his own story too” (91). At the same time, he continues, “We got to be aware of the stories they’re making about us, and the way they change the stories we already know” (91). This study began with the question of whether there is such a thing as Native American critical theory and what fundamental assumptions characterize it. As Uncle Luther (or Owens) suggests, Western representations and constructions of Native American people and cultures have become part of the mainstream discourse; those are “the stories” that Europeans make about Natives and Native cultures. Yet it is also crucial for Native people to make their own stories since, as Luther/Owens posits, stories have the power to change the world: “They’re always making up stories, and that’s how they make the world the way they want it” (91). Kimberley Blaeser uses Uncle Luther’s warning to argue for the necessity of a tribal-centered criticism. Although not completely dismissing Western interpretations of Native literature, Blaeser does hope for a (Native) criticism arising from an indigenous cultural context or, as she puts it, “a critical voice and method which moves from the culturally-centered text outward toward the frontier of ‘border’ studies” (“Native Literature” 53). I would like to think that the strategies and discursive modes articulated by the authors under analysis in my study have begun to provide the critical center that Blaeser has been looking for. Conclusion Despite a general assumption that a “resistance to theory” characterizes the field of Native American studies – the result of a mentality that aligns theory with the privileged terrain of Western discourse – Allen, Warrior, Womack , Sarris, Owens, and Vizenor clearly demonstrate otherwise. As my discussion has indicated, these authors have produced and keep producing discursive strategies and theoretical interpretations of Native American literature and culture that could, indeed, represent the beginning of a Native American critical theory. Unlike critics who approach Native literature from a Western standpoint, imposing external critical voices and methods on Native texts, Allen, Warrior, Womack, Sarris, Owens, and Vizenor have developed hybridized interpretative tools originating largely, if not exclusively, from indigenous rhetoric(s) and worldviews and incorporated into the strategies of Western critical discourse. The diversity of positions taken by each clearly shows that there is no such thing as a monolithic, unified form of discourse for Native theory, only a variety of approaches that, within their differences , still find some common ground. A first, primary assumption is the idea of inscribing the functions and nature of the oral tradition onto the written page, revitalizing and reimagining a tradition too often reduced, in the Euramerican imagination, to merely cultural artifact and too often theorized as a symbol of the predicted vanishing race. From Allen’s gynocentrism to Womack’s “Red Stick theory,” from Warrior ’s notion of tradition (closely modeled on Deloria’s views) to Sarris’s accountofMabelMcKay ’sstories,fromOwens’sdialogicapproachtoVizenor’s trickster hermeneutics, these authors suggest meaningful ways in which Native American rhetoric and epistemology can enter the discourse of First World ideology while inevitably remapping the boundaries of the contemporary critical debate. A second assumption, clearly related to the first, is the idea of conveying in writing the dynamic quality of the oral exchange so that, despitetheconfinementoftheprintedtext,thevitalityandpoweroflanguage are still maintained. The most significant result of this crosscultural “translation ,” which might constitute a further point of encounter among all the writers discussed, is the multigeneric, heteroglot, and border quality of their texts, texts in which the traditionally objective, authoritative stance of the Western critic is significantly dismantled and the text itself becomes, much like a story, an open form, one involving the direct participation of the reader (listener). Shifting between third and first person, scholarly argument and personal narrative, weaving together bits and pieces of various discourses, Allen, Warrior, Womack, Sarris, Owens, and Vizenor devise new, creative ways of doing theory and, ultimately, challenge the West to reconsider the meanings and values of its own cultural traditions. 188 conclusion Given the cultural and ideological diversity of the authors selected, my study has called attention to the different approaches and methodologies envisioned from within the above-mentioned commonalities. One of the main goals of this discussion has been to point...