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Foreword to the Current Edition
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
· vii · ForewordtotheCurrentEdition Philip J. Deloria The book you hold in your hands, Simon Pokagon’s OGIMAWKWE Mitigwaki (Queen of the Woods), is an undeniably odd piece of work. It can be read as a mawkish, sentimental romantic tragedy—or as a subtle recounting of the key ideological underpinnings of American conquest and colonialism. One reader might view the book as an effort to preserve Native language and culture, while another might as easily see in it evidence of the cultural inferiority complex that has so often accompanied attempts at forced assimilation. You might read Pokagon as a cagey trickster figure, as a problematic self-promoting opportunist, as a cultural mediator, as a literary stylist, as a temperance stump speaker—or as something else entirely. Pokagon’s slipperiness, and the slipperiness of the book itself take shape in a fluctuating play around words and language, Native and nonNative interests, and expressive forms and structures.This short foreword and the essays that follow add yet another layer to the copious framing materials that already introduce the novel over and over again in the first edition.A publisher’s short opening turns into an order form.A Dedication makes a statement against race prejudice. A Preface places the novel in the context of autobiography, realism, and racial harmony. An extensive · viii · Philip J. Deloria set of appendices introduce not only Pokagon, but a plethora of other texts—newspaper clippings, poetry, historical footnotes, Pokagon articles and speeches.1 A short primer on the Algonquin language suggests that the novel has been translated, and offers key words and a few linguistic lessons, useful for what is to follow. Only then do we read the novel itself. And following that reading, an Appendix loads the reader down with still more texts: yet another set of articles, obituaries, speeches, and laudatory poetry. Queen of the Woods, then, is less a single novelistic text than a compilation of materials that moves the reader in and out of fiction, history, autobiography, linguistics, polemic, and cultural brokerage. As Kiara Vigil suggests, it is perhaps this proliferation of genre categories that has kept the text from taking a more prominent place in the canon of reclaimed American Indian literary writing. Simon Pokagon’s use of language invites readers to think about brokerage, to imagine and experience a movement back and forth across cultural boundaries. Consider a phrase like this: “After eating our simple morning meal of ‘mandamin’ (corn-cakes) in ‘giwamisigan’ (maple syrup) dipped, and pudding of ‘manomin’ (wild rice) and ‘ajawemin’ (beechnuts) made, I proposed to Loda to go with me and visit Uncle Kawbenaw.” As Margaret Noori points out, most of these translated words are nouns rather than the extended, animate, and descriptive verbs that characterize the language. Nonetheless, it does not require a stretch of the imagination to picture early twentieth-century readers experiencing these linguistic crossings as exercises in both populist ethnography and imperialist nostalgia. Pokagon’s insistent codeswitching (or perhaps “code aligning”) demands a reader’s engaged awareness of something “Indian.” In that sense, Pokagon’s slippages of form, style, and language point to a complicated, ambivalent cultural politics, one in which he sought opportunities to speak to non-IndianAmericans through resonant ideological tropes: primitivism, temperance, sentimentalism, Christian brotherhood, and racial tolerance. At the same time, however, Pokagon clearly wanted readers to understand the consequences of history and to know something of Indian dispossession and struggle. How to articulate these concerns while maintaining an audience? How to guide the content of readers’ engagement with the Indianness coded in the novel? How to use the familiar tropes to speak to readers in ways that allowed them to see Indian histories? These impossibly difficult issues were paramount, not simply Foreword· ix · for Pokagon, but for many of his contemporaries, and they are worth keeping closely in mind while reading Queen of the Woods. Pokagon’s life story is tightly linked with the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which celebrated both the four-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s landing in North America and the consolidation of American continental power. The Chicago Columbian Exposition represented a kind of deep collective breath, as Americans looked back on the results of imperial and colonial practice and contemplated through that frame the rest of the world. Simon Pokagon, celebrated as the Indian representative of a now-past Indian Chicago, was called upon to bless this vision of American history. He was, according to publisher C. H. Engle, “the great master link between Shegogong as...