Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction

1. Acts of Deliverance: Narration and Power

Chapter One Acts of Deliverance: Narration and Power He was writing for those who would come later, for the next generations and the next, as if the act of writing was itself part of divination and prophecy, an act of deliverance.1 In his study of the European conquest of America,Tzvetan Todorov asks how we are "to account for the fact that Cortes, leading a few hundred men, managed to seize the kingdom of Montezuma, who commanded several hundred thousand."2 According to Todorov, a sizeable European advantage layin their ability to impose their own versions of truth on people who were epistemologically naive and who thus quickly "lost control of communication" to the invaders (61). Whereas indigenous Americans understood primarily a ritual use of language to maintain the status quo within a cyclic cosmological order, the European invaders were imperialists and millennialists , enlisting language in their own world-transformative purposes (87). European semiotic practice proved devastating to the American Indians, says Todorov. It disrupted their world view and implied godlike, prophetic powers beyond the sixteenth-century Indian's comprehension. "Power," according to social semioticians Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress, may derive from the "non-reciprocal use of direct speech."3 The "superiority" and preeminence of a speaker are established partly by the listener's inability to respond, usually owing to lack of access to the meanings and frames of reference of the speaker, or to an insufficient grasp of the speaker's rhetori- cal moves. Such a speaker makes little or no effort to "instruct" the listener, who struggles internally for semiotic bearings. Nonreciprocal , direct speech asserts and imposes the "reality" of the speaker over that of the comparativelysilenced Other.Todorov suggests that Cortes exercised just this kind of power over the Aztecs through a variety of semiotic maneuvers rivaling those of Milton's Satan. For instance, Cortes quickly turned Aztec prophecy to his own advantage, encouraging the Indians to see him as Quetzalcoatl and his actions as fulfillment of prophesied events. Montezuma fell silent and even became socially withdrawn in response to rhetorical strategies that both exploited and undermined Indian reality. Likewise, in North America, the fact that tribal prophecies apparently predicted the arrival of white people had a similarparalyzing effect on Nativepeoples. Seeing the invaders as a part of the cosmic design amounted to an Indian "reading" of events deemphasizing the threat to Indian reality. Todorov hardly minimizes the actual physical violence of the Europeans against the Indians, nor does he underestimate the economic and political forces empowering the conquistadors; nonetheless , he claims that the material conquest of America was predicated on a semiotic conquest. And though Todorov asserts no inherent European cultural superiority to the American Indians who fell victim to European ways with words, he explains that, in privileging very different kinds of semiotic practice, Europeans and Native Americans did not meet as equals in power.4 The Indians had never subjected their own ontological and epistemological assumptions to the self-reflexive, critical scrutiny typical of the invaders . Because they had neverjustified their beliefs tothemselves, they were unable to defend those beliefs when challenged. (Such "justification" and "defense" are, in the first place, basicallywestern philosophical practices.) Todorov's analysis of "conquest" treats only South American Indians, but his general conclusions may reasonably be applied to North American tribes. Particularly through the Christianizing efforts of missionaries, a comparable semiotic assault on North American indigenous peoples occurred (along with the obvious physical one). Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries alike mystified the Indians with their apparently miraculous powers of divination connected with reading and writing.Though some tribes were willingto learn the strangers' ways, their acquired knowledge 2 Chapter 1 did not lead to equality of power between social groups. Literate, acculturated Cherokees followed the Trail of Tears, for example, and the Navajo began the Long Walk after centuries of coping more or less successfully with the presence of strangers. North and South American Indian cultures were eventually decimated both despite and partly owing to their receptivityto western ways.5 Profound loss was not all on the Indians' side, however, as Todorov insists.Though European rhetorical practices, including writing , mystified the Indians and militated against their ritual use of language, Native Americans eventually "learned paper."6 They learned the language and ways of the Other and how to survive in two worlds—Euro-American and tribal—whereas very few EuroAmericans learned Indian languages. Most could...