Indians, Incorporated

In the final chapter of Shades of Hiawatha: Staging Americans, Making Americans, 1880–1930 (2004), Alan Trachtenberg cites an oft-quoted passage from Luther Standing Bear's The Land of the Spotted Eagle. Standing Bear, an elected chief of the Oglala Lakotas, former student of the Carlisle school, actor, and self-styled "Official Sioux Authority," wrote in his 1934 volume: "America can be revived, rejuvenated, by recognizing a native school of thought. The Indian can save America" (qtd in Trachtenberg 307).

It is an appealing passage, and Trachtenberg wants his readers to understand the richness of that appeal rather than be trapped by its ironies. Indeed, the placement of the quotation—near the end of a substantial study of the figuration of Indians in American life by one of the most visible scholars in American studies—leaves me wondering whether Trachtenberg also seeks for his fellow scholars to hear a disciplinary call behind Standing Bear's imprecation to the nation. It is not only America, perhaps, but American studies that he hopes can be "revived" and "rejuvenated"—or at least refashioned—"by recognizing a native school of thought." Later in the same chapter, Trachtenberg endorses the "symbiosis" described by Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe as a new elaboration of Standing Bear's vision. "Natives and nonnatives," Trachtenberg paraphrases Howe, "have long taught each other to become something different as a result of their symbiotic relations" (309). This time, the implication is even clearer: America—and American studies in particular—needs this history of mutual influence and exchange to continue.

Such claims have a long history. Scholars of American literature, history, and culture who have written about the relationship of indigenous peoples to the US have repeatedly suggested the urgency of attending to the tribal presences in North America as a necessary project for making and remaking Americanist critical projects. One could construct a critical genealogy of this argument by finding versions of it in the writing of recent scholars (such as Shari Huhndorf, Lucy Maddox, and Renee Bergland), tracing it backward through the influential work of Brian Dippie and Robert Berkhofer, through farther to Roy Harvey Pearce's still influential Savagism and Civilization (1953), and from there to the modernist primitivism of the decades in which Luther Standing Bear wrote. (Moreover, one could keep going, via anthropology and linguistics, to the nineteenth century, when to be an "Americanist" meant to study the tribal peoples and languages of the Americas.) At each stage, the stakes of this engagement with the relationship of the US to the indigenous peoples within its borders have shifted, and often dramatically so; yet there remains a consistent belief in the power of American Indians to remake Americaness and Americanists in radical ways.

However, the scholarship on the figuration of American Indians in the discourses—whether popular or literary—of the US has become increasingly distant from the concerns of scholars in Native American literary studies. For those whose primary aim is to show how tribal literatures participate in the articulation of tribal sovereignty, studies of the representation and discursive negotiation of indigenous peoples by scholars of American studies are at best a distraction, and at worst, examples of intellectual imperialism. This approach, epitomized by Craig S. Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999), emphasizes the ways that tribal literatures engage in the production of tribal nations—in Womack's case the Creek, or Muscogee, nation. The perceptions of those tribal peoples by others, such as European-Americans, is of peripheral interest, if any. As Shari Huhndorf has recently explained, critics such as Womack "see the most important task of the scholar as not to interrogate Western categories and practices, but rather to quest for political sovereignty, and for them, dialogue and inclusion resemble colonial incorporation" (1621).¹

The current disjunction between a Native American literary criticism focused on the ways that Indians have incorporated themselves as tribal nations and an American studies scholarship interested in the historical processes that have attempted to incorporate those same Indians (and their land) into the US makes the books under review here even more provocative. As an aggregate, they...