Members of the Tribe: Native America in the Jewish Imagination

Introduction

f 1 f Introduction What does it mean to be an American Jew today? What does it mean to be a member of any tribe in the twenty-first century? —Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg, The Tribe1 Nice Jewish Critics among the Indians In 1991, in anticipation of the Columbus quincentenary, Chippewa/Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor published The Heirs of Columbus, in which Christopher Columbus is reimagined as a “crossblood,” a Mayan Indian and a Marrano Jew, whose descendants, led by Stone Columbus, the protagonist of the novel, create a sovereign nation at Point Assinika in the Pacific Northwest. Columbus’s voyage is not one of discovery but is rather imagined by the novel as a return to his homeland.2 The Mayans, the novel argues, are related to Sephardic Jews, being descendants of the lost tribes of Israel. Blood is a concrete and scientific means of measuring kinship: Columbus’s heirs share a“genetic signature”that is a condition for membership in the new“natural nation”they have created (126). In the novel, both Mayans and Sephardic Jews carry and write “their stories in the blood,” a phrase that, as Arnold Krupat has noted, occurs approximately fifty-three times in the 189-page novel.3 These stories in the blood, additionally, have“power to heal.”4 The healing power of the novel seems to inhere inVizenor’s trickster discourse, his rehabilitation of the story of Columbus to “defang the 2 f introduction monster who enslaved Indians, and opened the door to their slaughter and subjugation . . . in order to gain control over it for tribal people.”5 I begin with Vizenor’s novel because, in the course of referencing nearly every political issue facing American Indians from blood quantum and tribal sovereignty to Western anthropology and contestations over cultural property, Vizenor also stages a dramatic encounter between the Jewish reader and the Native text. In a crucial scene, the crossblood Felipa Flowers is in England to recover the stolen bones of Pocahontas. She meets Pelligrine Treves, an antiquarian book collector of American Indian and associated texts who is descended from Marrano Jews. The most unusual text in his collection, Treves says, is a first edition of Arnold Krupat’s The Voice in the Margin, with marginal notes by a “notable novelist”pretending to be the Pulitzer Prize–winning Kiowa/Cherokee writer N. Scott Momaday: “Who wrote the notes?” asked Felipa. “That much is confidential,” said Treves. “The margins, then,” said Felipa. “Krupat wrote that Momaday offered an ‘invariant poetic voice that everywhere commits itself to subsuming and translating all other voices,’ and so on, to which the novelist made a marginal note, ‘but not enough to subsume your arrogance and dialogic domination.’” “Sounds like an esoteric word war to me, but at the same time the sense of oral stories in the printed word is mythic, the remembered poet over the noted critic,” said Felipa. “Indeed, but Krupat’s discussion of ‘racial memory’ drew the sharpest marginal responses,” said Treves. “The novelist noted, ‘Krupat gives head to footnotes, how would he know about tribal memories?’” “Krupat would be the trickster in the margins,” said Felipa. “The book is great, and the notes are cruel,” said Treves. “The politics of tribal creation stories never ends,” said Felipa. (111) In his substantial discussion of The Heirs of Columbus, Chadwick Allen further elaborates upon Krupat, a well-known scholar of Native American literature, and his argument with Momaday. According to Allen, Momaday’s notion of blood memory, reinforced through all of his work beginning with House Made of Dawn (1968), “achieves tropic power by blurring distinctions between racial memory and narrative.”6 Allen reads Momaday’s invocations of racial, “genetic” tribal memories as a clear “appropriation and redeployment” of the U.S. government’s attempts to control “authentic” American Indian introduction f 3 identities through legislation concerning “degree of Indian blood,” or blood quantum. But Krupat argues in The Voice in the Margin that the phrase“blood memory” is “absurdly racist” and objects to such “mystifications” of American Indian identity. In The Turn to the Native, Krupat continues: “I do not believe that there is any gene for narrative orientation or preference or that stories can be inherited ‘naturally,’ remembered, listened to, or heard ‘in the blood’” (60). The use of such phrases is, in Krupat’s words, “politically retrograde” (62). Although on the one hand the contest between Krupat and...