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At the “Translating Native Cultures” conference, held at Yale University in February 1998, the Santee Sioux writer and critic Elizabeth Cook-Lynn delivered a passionate keynote address significantly drawing a line between those whom she described as being on the right and the wrong sides of American Indian studies. Referring to concepts such as multiculturalism, postmodernism , and postcolonialism, she asked: “What do these terms mean in terms of sovereignty, land, and the revitalization of our languages?” She ended with the rhetorical question (which she answered herself, in the negative ): “Are we satisfied to be ‘post’ – colonial, modern, Indian?” (Cook-Lynn qtd. in Lee, Loosening the Seams 280). Cook-Lynn’s position in the field of Native American studies has been long known to writers and critics in the field. As Arnold Krupat points out, her 1993 essay “Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, the Third World, and Tribal Sovereignty” remains perhaps “the strongest and best account of the ‘nationalist ,’ ‘nativist,’ and ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ position” in evaluating Native American literatures today (The Turn to the Native 4). In the essay, Cook-Lynn argues that what among Third Word literary decolonization theoreticians (i.e., Bhabha et al.) is usually referred to as cosmopolitanism ironically erases the search for sovereignty and tribalism that legitimates First Nation status: “Yet the American Indian writers who have achieved successful readership in mainstream America seem to avoid that struggle in their work and present Indian populations as simply gatherings of exiles, emigrants, and refugees, strangers to themselves and their lands, pawns in the control of white manip2 Intellectual Sovereignty and Red Stick Theory The Nativist Approach of Robert Allen Warrior and Craig S. Womack A world in which knowledge of each people was owned exclusively by that people itself would be culturally totalitarian. Just as it is indefensible to have an anthropology in which only outsiders know, and insiders are only known, so it is simply to reverse that inequity. None of us is able to stand outside ourselves sufficiently to know ourselves comprehensively. Dell Hymes ulators, mixed-bloods searching for identity, giving support, finally, to the idea of nationalistic/tribal culture as a contradiction in terms” (“Cosmopolitanism ” [in Purdy and Ruppert] 29–30). The term nationalism itself, CookLynn suggests, takes on a pejorative connotation when it is used by the representatives of cosmopolitanism and the work of traditional Native thinkers usually dismissed as “mere political action for political gain and dangerous authoritarianism” (30). By accepting the notions of hybridity, cosmopolitanism , and cultural translation, American Indian writers legitimate, according to Cook-Lynn, an unhealthy determinism that will, eventually, lead them away from discussions of decolonization in contemporary America. The critical perspectives of Robert Allen Warrior and Craig S. Womack closely resemble Cook-Lynn’s position insofar as both authors are highly suspicious of discursive modes that embrace Western theoretical paradigms or notions of cultural hybridity. Arguing for the necessity of creating a mature Native cultural and literary criticism, Warrior and Womack envision this criticism as being rooted in the land and culture of American Indian communities , focusing on issues of Native sovereignty and nationalism, discussing concepts such as autonomy and self-determination, and, ultimately, emphasizing a Native resistance movement against colonialism. In Tribal Secrets, Warrior turns to Vine Deloria Jr. and John Joseph Mathews as the internal historical voices from which to promote what he terms “intellectual sovereignty ” (xxiii). In Red on Red, Womack takes a “Red Stick” approach and turns to Creek history, oral tradition, and literature in order to construct a literary criticism presented as an alternative to the Western literary establishment .1 Whereas Warrior at times seems, within his separatist stance, to be more open, envisioning a moment in which a non-Native critical discourse will be engaged in his intellectual tribalism, Womack categorically dismisses any possibility of dialogue with the Western academy and forcefully endorses the necessity of a “Native American literary separatism” (as he subtitles Red on Red). This chapter examines Warrior and Womack’s “tribalcentric” approach to a Native American critical theory and interrogates the significance of such an approach in the context of a Native American discourse that intends to challenge the parameters of Western, Eurocentric hermeneutics. Like Allen, Sarris , Owens, and Vizenor, Warrior and Womack acknowledge the necessity of generating discursive modes originating primarily from the Native or indigenous cultural context, as it informs Native American literary texts, and suggest ways in which such discursive strategies can be articulated. While their work makes an interesting contribution to the overall...

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