Making It Work: A Model of Tribalography as Methodology

Setting the Stage

Choctaw scholar LeAnne Howe introduced the concept of tribalography because she did not believe that Native writers “tell strictly autobiographical stories, nor memoir, nor history, nor fiction but rather they tell a kind of story that includes collaboration with the past and present and future” (“Story” 42). She has explained that tribalography arose out of “the native propensity for bringing things together, for making consensus, and for symbiotically connecting one thing to another” (42). I argue that in addition to serving as a critical lens for literary study and as a theoretical framework for cultural analysis, tribalography can also serve as an abundantly fruitful methodological approach relevant across the interdisciplinary field of American Indian studies. I discuss my own application of tribalography as a methodology for my article “An Anishinaabe Tribalography: Interweaving and Investigating Concepts of Identity during the 1910s on the White Earth Reservation” and address the following questions: How might scholars intentionally seek to employ the principles of tribalography in their own work? What are the advantages and challenges posed by this methodology?

There is a growing call for an ethical Native literary criticism.¹ Tribalography provides one answer to this imperative by balancing rights and responsibilities via a system of relationships. Tribalographic stories consist of connections drawn between autobiography, fiction, history, and time (past, present, future)—relationships that, Howe suggests, all necessitate reciprocity. Understanding the relationship between scholarship and the real life experiences of Natives is an important aspect of American Indian studies (ais). By acknowledging the work that can and is done by writing, tribalography contains a component of activism as a part of methodology. Scholarship is not limited to the “ivory tower” but has an important purpose to communities because it has the power to create. As Howe has argued, “A Native writer remains in conversation with the past and the present to create the future” (“Blind” 338) and “Native Stories are power. They create people. They author tribes’ (‘Story’ 29).” There was a time when many Americans believed that American Indians were destined to “disappear.” By employing racialization and blood quantum, both scholars and the US government have been working to create a future of absence for Natives. We must write our own futures, and tribalography opens up a space for us to do so.

Methodology

The Big Picture

“Isn’t there a danger in using tribalography as a methodology? Doesn’t it allow scholars to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit their argument? Doesn’t it allow too much creative license?” This is a paraphrased version of a set of questions posed to me after I presented a paper at the American Studies Association’s annual conference in the fall of 2008, which employed tribalography and would later be published as “An Anishinaabe Tribalography” in American Indian Quarterly. In both the presentation and the article, I created scenes in which characters “said” quotes from historical interviews and combined this story with a more traditional historical overview. The questions were not unexpected and were posed in a friendly manner. In fact, I had thought about these questions when I was working on the presentation. There are pitfalls in any methodology; tribalography is not an exception. When I first learned how to bead, I was taught that nothing is ever perfect and that mistakes remind us of this. That lesson transfers to scholarship: nothing is ever perfect, but that does not mean that it is not a work of beauty or something of use and importance. So, my answer was both yes and no. As scholars we have a variety of methodological tools available to us. Tribalography is one of those tools. Are there potential dangers in using tribalography as a methodology? Yes, but these “dangers” are not unlike the dangers inherent in any methodology. Scholars can take (and have taken) creative license without acknowledging it. Consider the idea that the US was destined to expand across the continent and did so in a justifiable manner. This national narrative has been repeated in numerous elementary and high school textbooks. Undoubtedly, it took a high...