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115  Dreaming Charles Eastman Cultural Memory, Autobiography, and Geography in Indigenous Rhetorical Histories Malea Powell This is a story.1 The version of the story you’re reading began as a ghost story told out loud around kitchen tables, on porches, at powwows, in archives. It’s important to begin with this bit of knowledge, I think, because when talk turns into text, something happens to it—something else arises as the words get inscribed, revised, polished, distressed, and re-presented. Some meanings open and flower; other meanings die the quiet death of alphabet, of print. So in retelling this story this way, I will struggle with the meaning of things, with what we would call in our scholarly way the epistemology of the letter, literally, of the alphabet of the language in which I write, or with what we could also call the thingness of meaning—the effects of the marks (on computer now but eventually on paper) made, and their making, on meaning. All of which is, at best, an odd way to say that this is a text best read out loud. This story comes, as all stories do, from a much larger, more complicated accumulation of stories. While some of you, dear readers, may be familiar with my persistent scholarly desires to listen to late-nineteenth-century American Indian intellectuals like Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Northern Paiute), Charles Alexander Eastman (Santee Dakota), Susan LaFlesche Picotte (Omaha), and Andrew Blackbird (Harbor Springs Ojibwe/Odawa), what I have been charged to do here is to look critically at my experiences as archivist and composer of these rhetorical histories. When I accepted that charge, I promised that I’d do so by looking through the constellated lenses of cultural memory, autobiography , and geography and that I would work through this aporia in the imagined presence of my own esteemed teachers, mentors, colleagues, and students. I am going to try to fulfill those promises, then, through a series of scenes. Each scene arises from the physical space of an archive, a location of Malea Powell 116 deliberate institutional cataloging of memory. Each scene is a story, a narrative strand in the braid of “how to do” indigenous rhetorical history, how to live with the ghosts of that doing. Each scene is both the beginning and the end of a methodology, a remembered fragment of a battle in what Gerald Vizenor has called “the Word Wars.”2 While many scholars in Native studies take for granted the meaning of that phrase “the Word Wars,” others may have less access to the complexities of meaning caught in its figurative jaws. What we are talking about is a collusion of events during colonization—the documents and histories written about Native peoples by folks who had something to lose if Indians were seen as fully human, the laws and treaties that authorized brutality and genocide in all of the Americas, the forced learning of English at the hands of missionaries and in boarding schools, the continuing devaluement of the oral for the written (or the virtual), and the continuing ignorance of most U.S. citizens about the story of colonization and of imperialism and its continuing consequences. We are still in the midst of this war, still living through a paracolonial occupation, and the damage done by documents, by words, has been at least as great as that done by weapons. This is why I have spent many years collecting documents by, about, for, and from American Indians. My own particular obsession (my, er, scholarly focus) is with documents from a time period that would conventionally be described as beginning with the Civil War until the New Deal (about 1861 until about 1934). For Native peoples, and certainly for Native scholars, this same time period can be thought of as beginning shortly after Removal, encompassing much of the spectacular brutality of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars and the Allotment Era, including the Boarding School Era, and ending with the Indian Reorganization Act (the Indian New Deal). But ways of naming/marking “history” aren’t what I want to talk about here in this story about being an archivist and composer of indigenous rhetorical histories.3 What it all comes down to is that like many students of history, I’ve spent time in a lot of libraries, a lot of archives. Besides their participation in the larger imperial project of “collecting knowledge,” many of these spaces had some mundane things in common—the way...

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