Toward a Native American Critical Theory (review)

Traveling The Good, Even If Bumpy, Road

Honestly, I approached Pulitano's critical survey with some trepidation, because, well, I often feel I am stretched too thin to read much theory. Accordingly, to Pulitano and others I suffer, along with other practitioners in our field, from a kind of syndrome that leads to an avoidance of theory within discussions of Native American literature. And for the first few chapters I did sputter and resisted, not for a lack of presentation skill on Pulitano's part, but more from having become a habitual couch potato embarking on the much-needed exercise routine. Once I became actively engaged, however, I discovered this discussion has many merits and, in fact, serves up like a well-packaged graduate course. It offers valuable overviews and comparisons, many of them globally crosscultural in origin. Thus, students new to Native American literary criticism will have doors opened for them here, but even those of us who have been reading and/or writing critically about contemporary Native American literature for awhile will also find something here to get the juices flowing.

In her introduction, Pulitano raises questions that dog quite a few of us, namely, what is Native American critical theory and who is allowed to define it? Among her stated goals for this text is one borrowed from Krupat concerning the elimination of a separatist attitude, "by approaching Native American literature, not as an 'other' literature, but as a corpus of works that parallel (in their difference) the literary production of Euroamerican culture" (2). In addition, Pulitano states, "My purpose here was to suggest the parameters that might define Native American critical theory today while dismantling the curious assumptions that theory does not belong to the realm of Native American studies" (191). Taken at face value, these statements are encouraging and much of this text does offer a very valuable and thought-provoking discussion of the various forces at play within this field—a big picture that can help to break us out of our comfort zones. Before I get to that inevitable "but," let me acknowledge and commend Pulitano for devoting time to revealing her strategic position and implicating herself as privileged. I will attempt to be as forthcoming in my own remarks.

In June of this year, the Lakota Journal included a guest column by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, member of the Cheyenne River Sioux and Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe.¹ Looking Horse's reply to a previously published column takes an indirect path and offers an example of a Native American writer drawing from a particular oral tradition. Looking Horse's critical approach is very much in keeping with the discussion Pulitano creates by bringing together the critical works of Paula Gunn Allen, Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, Greg Sarris, Lewis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor, all of whom value the presence of the oral tradition in both Native American writing and in the critical discourse concerning those texts. Looking Horse relates the story of the first appearance of Pte San Win (White Buffalo Calf Woman). Of the two men who approach Pte San Win, one is turned into a skeleton. "She told the remaining scout to go back, tell what he had seen, but not to make more of what it is or make less of what it is. These words are also a teaching of staying with truth."² While I believe Pulitano does attempt to respectfully present the truth as she knows it, she still "makes more of what it is" in her discussion of hybridity and in her argument dismissing the tribalcentric approaches advocated by Allen, Warrior, and Womack.

Explaining this opinion requires that I share something of my own experience with Indigenous oral traditions. My "strategic location" is the result of having grown up in rural, eastern Montana assuming I knew what sort...