That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America

4. The Creative Ability of Indian People

4 THE CREATIVE ABILITY OF INDIAN PEOPLE Authenticity as Translation Understanding authenticity as translation is key to all the retranslated terms of this study and to the underlying irony of these slippery signifiers. A fundamental redefinition of authenticity as dynamic translation underlines the transformative dynamic of each of the other redefinitions. To negotiate identities between and within sovereign communities requires the authority to translate and register historical and existential ironies. Instead of a dull and tiresome topic, authenticity—as it actually functions in many Indigenous narratives—works toward a summary of the discussion. It goes to the heart of America’s binary thinking in space (manifest) and time (destiny), which would set “authentic Indians” as past and vanished from the land. Instead they remain present in America, with the authority to tell their own stories and to retell America’s story. As Native writers work against the atavistic equation of authenticity with past history, they translate identity into systems of relations that become community. Rather than a static state, authenticity becomes a verb of motion in doing translation between various positions that imagine themselves to be immobile. Authenticity becomes the verb that moves in identity as the very process of change on an animistic ground of community, each stage serving, sacrificing for, sovereignty.1 226 The Creative Ability of Indian People “How Indian Are You?” As I read active redefinitions of authenticity through Simon Ortiz in these five Native writers, I am not trying to redeem the term, much less advocate for “authenticity” to remain in the discourse of Indigenous studies. Instead I am trying to get at the way Native voices move cross-culturally inside and outside dominant discourse. Thus I aim to contextualize the term because of its persistent usage. It won’t go away. Like the frontier and other dominant terms, authenticity might be so layered with colonial misreading that it becomes ultimately unredeemable. However, because of its persistence and dominance, it calls for attention and redefinition. The fact is, readers from many backgrounds read Indian literatures for authenticity—sometimes only for authenticity—asking, quite sensibly, “What is Indian about this text?” The author? The narrator? The setting? The characters ? Plot? Symbolism? Themes? The simple question quickly becomes complicated by contested definitions of the term Indian itself. As Jack Utter writes, “Before first European contact, the answer to ‘Who is an Indian?’ was easy. Nobody was. ‘Indian’ is a European-derived word and concept” (American Indians 25). Euro-American projections continue to burden the word. Utter goes on to describe dozens of competing definitions among tribal, state, and federal agencies. Beneath those definitions lie battlefields of Indigenous experience fighting against colonial ideology to establish the term authenticity itself. Who is to decide, declare, delineate what is authentically “Indian”? The self or the community? The text or the context? The colonized or the colonizer? The performer or the spectator? Such questions become a matter of survival when the dominant definition of authenticity is temporal, placing Native Americans in the past and eclipsing their presence by eclipsing their present in American public life. In artistic contexts it is the performative character of authenticity that generates the problem. The puzzle lies in the audience, or more precisely in the disconnect between audience and performer. This disjunction is especially complicated by colonial relations, when dominant texts by non-Natives represent the “authentic” performer as an “object” and the observer as a “subject.” Because of the performative nature of authenticity, where the audience, a reader, an ethnographer, or a critic plays a key role in defining what authentic is, that interactive dynamic leaves authenticity open to infi- The Creative Ability of Indian People 227 nite misreadings, fluctuations, projections, arrogations, oppressions. As usual, it comes down to power, particularly the power to perform, to represent or misrepresent. This question of authenticity has long felt tiresome to Native writers weary of performing for audiences ignorant of Indigenous realities. By standard , still colonial definitions, authenticity becomes an irritation, a nonquestion that keeps insisting on itself. Some, not all, non-Native critics of Native literatures have recognized an essentialist, static, past- oriented formulation in the authenticity question as a dead end. The Choctaw scholar Michael D. Wilson offers the useful term strategic authenticity (rephrasing Gayatri Spivak) to describe a dynamic in Native literary voices that attempts “to respond to destructive public policies.” Wilson warns, “As a practical matter, however, such an approach is as...