Red Matters: Native American Studies

1. Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism: Three Perspectives on Native American Literatures

Chapter 1 Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism For David Murray and Shamoon Zamir Criticism of Native American literatures today proceeds from one or another of the critical perspectives I call nationalist, indigenist, and cosmopolitan . The nationalist and indigenist positions sometimes overlap, and both nationalistsand indigenists tend to see themselvesasapart from and in opposition to the cosmopolitans. Nonetheless, as I will try toshow, nationalist, indigenist, and cosmopolitan positions are all overlapping and interlinked so that each can onlyachieve itsfull coherence and effectiveness in relation to the others. All three positions may be enlisted for the project of an anticolonial criticism, as all three may also operate to reproduce colonial dominance under other names. I am concerned with nationalism,indigenism, and cosmopolitanism as critical perspectives. But it would be foolish not to acknowledge that they have been taken as perspectives undergirding identity rather than criticism . One might think that identitiesand criticalperspectivesare related as cause to effect; itwould therefore come asno surprise to discover that a non-Native person like myself would occupy a cosmopolitan critical position : I am a cosmopolitan critic becauseof "who I am." But this would be a grossoversimplification. Neither identities nor critical perspectives are given by birth; neither identities nor critical perspectives are "in the blood" or produced by descent alone. This is not quite to say—as Werner Sollors once seemed to say—that identities are entirely a matter of consent. We knowperfectly well that non-whiteness in the United States disqualifiesor severelyconThree Perspectives on Native American Literatures strains certain choices of identity. And it is most certainly not to say, as Scott Michaelsen recently has said, that there can be no real difference between Indian and white identities. Michaelsen writes that "as soon as Indians begin to conceptualize whites (and themselves), it is already too late to imagine a real difference" (32), so that the "project of legitimation ," the concern to determine "who is an authentic Amerindian, what is authentic Amerindian culture, and, perforce, what is not" (113-14) should simply be abandoned. Rather, I am claiming, first, that what it means to be identified and accepted as an Indian person by other Indian persons is complex and subject to cultural, social, and historical forces—none of which, in my view, entirely extinguish personal agency. Second, I am claiming that an Indian or non-Indian identity does not in and of itself determine critical perspective. (Although critical perspective, as we shall see further in Chapter 5, may indeed partly serve to define the particular sort of Indian identity one might claim.) One might reasonably think it likely that the non-Native or outsider critic like myself would be drawn to cosmopolitanism , but this likelihood is by no means an inevitability. There are many non-Indian culture-workers who are committed to what might well be called a nationalist perspective, and there are others —many ecocritics among them—who foreground an indigenist perspective. No one of these scholars pretends to an Indian identity as somehow necessary to legitimate his or her critical perspective. In what follows, I will comment as well, although briefly, on nationalist , indigenist, and cosmopolitan preferences for the textual and institutional locations for teaching NativeAmerican literatures, and the critical methods for writing about them. 2 Chapter 1 The nationalist bases her critical position foremost upon her understanding of the term sovereignty. As Russell Means and Ward Churchilll have written in their brochure, "TREATY: A Platform for Nationhood": "Within the understandings of International Law, it is the right of all sovereign nations and sovereign peoples to enter into treaty relationships with other sovereign nations and peoples. Conversely, only sovereign nations and peoples are entitled to enter into such relationships (3). Thus Native "nations and peoples" were and are sovereigns inasmuch as, according to Pauline Turner Strong and BarrikvanWinkle,between 1607 and 1775 the Crown and the various colonies entered into at least 185 treaties with Indian peoples .. ., treating them assovereign political entities , if only to limit their sovereignty" (1993: 11). Once the United States achieved its own independent existence as a "sovereign political entity,"for almostone hundred years, from 1776 until 1871 (when Congress ended the treaty-makingpractice),it continued to enter into nation-to-nation treaties with the tribes. Since that time, some Native communities that had not signed treaties with the government have still been able to meet the (changing) requirementsfor "federal recognition " as tribal nations. "Nation," here, although it issynonymous with "tribe," is...