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  • Talking TribalographyLeAnne Howe Models Emerging Worldliness in “The Story of America” and Miko Kings
  • Carter Meland (bio)

Put it this way, it’s better to box your students than not. I mean put them in that box with that cat, that vial of hydrocyanic acid, and that radioactive substance that may or may not decay within the hour that the cat is in there: the cat that physicist Erwin Schrödinger postulated in order to deal with questions of quantum superposition. If the radioactive substance in that box decays, the vial shatters, and the cat dies; if the radioactive substance does not decay, the cat lives. For the hour that the cat is in the box it is alive-dead: a superposed state. The cat’s alive-dead state helped Schrödinger address the question of whether light is a particle or a wave. The box contains the potential of both, and for that hour it is both—the cat is both potential: living and potential: dead. Potential: wave and potential: particle, but always light, always cat. Opening the box after an hour resolves the superposed state: either the cat jumps out (and ignores you for the rest of your life), or the box becomes its coffin.

Students in Native literature courses such as mine (at a majority culture institution in the United States) live in a superposed state. They live, for the most part, unquestioningly colonialist, but in the course they see decolonization at work: They are colonialist-decolonized. They, Native and non-Native, are the potential in the boxes we teach, the stories of these Native writers.

LeAnne Howe’s notion of tribalography is a valuable tool in realizing the decolonizing potential within our students.

This potential raises questions about why we teach Native literature (an easy answer: because we love the work the writers do in the stories we love) and, more critically, why students take Native literature. At one end of the spectrum they take our courses to fulfill requirements, and at the other end they take the courses out of a deep and abiding [End Page 26] interest. Regardless of where they fall on this spectrum, what emerges in conversations with most non-Native students (and the occasional Native student) is that what one should want to learn about Indians in taking a literature course is that they have a culture. Rather than existing as an imaginative engagement with Native lived, historical, and political experience, some (many? most?) students predict and believe and hope that Native literature will document Native culture. That Native people possess cultures—are cultural—is a notion deeply embedded in US national culture, and as a result of a lifetime in front of the tv, or seated in classrooms watching educational documentaries, or browsing Wikipedia, or paging through oversized Time-Life books in a desperate attempt to scare up some interesting information for that fourth-grade report on Indians we all had to write, it comes as little surprise to those of us engaged in this field of instruction that “culture” is the focus of our students’ sense of what Native literature should be presenting to them. Apolitical in this American sense of it, culture reassures students with its portrayal of exotic differences, some of which are instructive and hopeful (we are all honor the earth for seven generations related!) while others are safely bizarre to them but unique, and so, though trivialized, the differences are still worth remarking about (they used deer brains for what?!). While we can point to the sources of such misrepresentations, there remains the task of explicating the ways that this lens reflects an American cultural or political imperative to reduce Native lives and histories to “culture” as a means to evade deeper reflection on what America has done to those lives and histories. There remains the task, in other words, of explicating the ways that these stories we love forward implicit and explicit critiques of such notions of “culture” that ease disquieting historical and political questions out of the picture of what Native literature means.

Most (some? many?) of us teach this literature to ease these disquieting ideas back into the picture of what...

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