Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI by Dean Rader (review)

Dean Radar's Engaged Resistance is a terrifically appealing, accessible, and provocative book. Taking as its premise that "Native-produced texts like poetry, fiction, movies, paintings, and sculpture are fundamental products and processes of American Indian sovereignty," it approaches varieties of Native cultural expression as acts of "aesthetic activism" and puts them in dialogue to animate current critical debates. Careful to distinguish between the "compositional resistance" implicit in a work's materials, form, or genre and the "contextual resistance" explicit in overt statements of defiance, Radar provides—and tests—an effective vocabulary for speaking about the strategies through which contemporary Native authors and visual artists express resistance and tell stories of survival.

Throughout the book, Radar draws on his extensive experience in writing about American Indian poetry, in analyzing visual culture, and in teaching Native texts. Topics of individual chapters range from the art and rhetoric of Alcatraz to "postindian" films by Sherman Alexie, but the book is neither a sequential history nor a comprehensive survey. At times it invites the reader to look back (on public acts of resistance, canonical works in high and popular culture, neglected works, and institutional histories) and, in the process, to reconsider the value of existing critical paradigms. More often it looks at how Native art is produced and viewed in the present, whether in contemporary fiction, film, and poetry or in public spaces like roads, state capitols, or museums. The art that draws Radar's closest attention—such as Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith's map sequences, Jennifer Wynne Farmer and Valerie Red-Horse's film Naturally Native, poems by Esther Belin and LeAnne Howe, Leslie Marmon Silko's "Storyteller," and the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI)—shares an aesthetic of open-endedness. In his work Radar likewise mixes genres, geographies, and scales of attention within and across chapters to encourage interdisciplinary analysis and further discussion rather than definitive interpretation. Thus he creates a book that can be read through pairings of chapters devoted to a single genre or in "just about any order: from the last chapter to the first, or spiraling out from the middle." If narrative design is "itself an act of resistance, a narrative refusal to capitulate to colonial or generic linearity and chronology," as Radar claims, the design of Engaged Resistance suggests a similar potential for critical discourse.

As the subtitle indicates, the book begins and ends by investigating the places and institutions central to contemporary Native art and activism: Alcatraz and the NMAI. The first chapter, which focuses on the visual art, literature, and proclamatory discourses produced on and about Alcatraz during its Indian Occupation between 1969 and 1971, briskly sketches a historical sequence of events and then analyzes the rhetorics of the Alcatraz Proclamation, Manifesto, and Declaration. Here Radar establishes his characteristic method: to situate individual expressions of resistance in their physical, historical, and aesthetic contexts and then to read them from different angles, playing with a variety of critical tools. He explicates hybrid texts and objects that historians and other critics may have overlooked (such as newsletters, graffiti, or a stretched hide), arguing that all the utterances produced during the Occupation constitute a comprehensive project of symbolic action.

The book's final chapter, on NMAI conception and reception, also collects evidence for art as an effective means of interdisciplinary and intertribal activism. The NMAI serves as a test for Radar's notion of compositional resistance, and he makes a persuasive case for how the architecture and curated exhibits enact "museological procedures of everyday creativity." Noting the museum's location on Algonquin land, its appearance of having been carved by the elements, and its circular and open design, Radar prepares his reader to enter and to engage with the displays of living culture inside. He argues that the absences many visitors have objected to (especially of chronological markers and written histories...