Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies

Notes

3 249 Notes Introduction 1. In Blood Narrative I offer an extended explanation for my use of parentheses in the term (post)colonial, which is meant to emphasize the irony of an often asserted postcolonial situation for Indigenous peoples in settler nations (where the post- implies beyond) that is never quite one. I also offer an extended definition of the term Indigenous and an extended justification for comparing U.S.American Indian and New Zealand Māori literary and activist texts. 2. My remarks are not meant as a comprehensive account of the historical development or the current state of the established field of comparative literature or the emerging field of world literature studies. 3. My reading of “Comparatively Speaking” assumes the speaker addresses white Australian tourists; the poem produces similar effects if the reader assumes the speaker addresses Pakeha New Zealanders. 4.This settler-driven form of colonial comparison also can be understood through Edward Said’s concept of orientalism or through Gerald Vizenor’s concepts of manifest manners and terminal creeds. 5.In the United States,see,for instance,Kenneth Lincoln,Native American Renaissance (1983); Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1992); James Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (1995); James Cox, Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions (2006); and Sean Teuton, Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (2008). My own comparative study, Blood Narrative, discusses several celebrated mid-twentieth-century American Indian novels but attempts to expand the body and types of texts under discussion, as does Robert Dale Parker’s The Invention of Native American Literature (2003). This list is by no means exhaustive. 6. Reclamations of nineteenth-century texts include the 1997 republication of Wynema, A Child of the Forest by S. Alice Callahan (Creek), originally published in 1891; the 2007 republication of The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, by Joseph Nicolar (Penobscot), originally published in 1893; the 2010 publication of Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, edited by Robert Dale Parker; and the 2011 republication of Queen of the Woods by Simon Pokagon (Potawatomie), originally published in 1899. Reclamations of early twentieth-century texts include the 1987 republication of The Moccasin Maker by E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), originally published in 1913, and the 2007 first publication of The Singing Bird by John Milton Oskison (Cherokee). Reclamations of mid-twentieth-century texts include the 2003 republication of Winter Count by Dallas Chief Eagle (Lakota), 250 7 NoTeS To INTRoDUCTIoN originally published in 1967. Robert Warrior (Osage) argues the need for more attention to nonfiction texts in The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (2005). 7. I am drawing on Diana Taylor’s distinction in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) between the“archive”of supposedly enduring materials—texts, documents, buildings, and bones—and the supposedly ephemeral repertoire of embodied practices and knowledges,such as spoken language, dance, sports, and ritual (19). 8. Many Native and non-Native scholars have called for increased attention to issues of aesthetics within Indigenous literary studies. The Indigenous Australian scholar Marcia Langton,for instance,writes,“I contend that the central problem is not one of racial discrimination,although I do not deny that it might be a factor in specific or general encounters. Rather, the central problem is the need to develop a body of knowledge and critical perspective to do with aesthetics and politics, whether written by Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal people, on representations of Aboriginal people and concerns in art, film, television or other media” (115). 9. Book-length studies published in the United States that also endeavor to engage various Indigenous aesthetic systems and/or technologies include Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008); and Penelope Kelsey, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews (2008). Other scholars pursuing this line of work include Malea Powell and Angela Haas in the field of Indigenous rhetorics. 10. Such calls are often traced to their articulation in Robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets : Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995) and Jolene Rickard’s (Tuscarora) “Sovereignty: A Line in the Sand” (1995). They can be traced further to goals articulated by early activist organizations, including on the global stage the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), beginning...