That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America by David L. Moore (review)

This is a big book about a big topic. Counting the prefatory pages, the book is just twenty pages shy of five hundred small-print pages. The topic is how Native authors rewrite major misconceptions of Americans and American history. David L. Moore places special emphasis on concepts that erase tribal sovereignty (frontier theories) and render Indigenous peoples marginal (Manifest Destiny), invisible (Vanishing Americans), or trapped in rigid binary oppositions (civilization versus savagery). Moore claims that Native authors counter, undermine, and ridicule these powerful historical and cultural constructs with provocative articulations of five concepts, themes, or strategies: sovereignty, community, identity, authority, and ironic humor. To demonstrate how the Native authors express these counternarratives, he discusses a wide range of authors from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, but he focuses primarily on analyses of the works of five authors that exemplify the counternarratives he admires: William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, D’Arcy McNickle, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie.

Moore employs a highly structured and complex organization to make his case. His introductory chapter opens with a narrative analogy for the “rewriting of America.” Martin Charger, or Wanatan, was “a mixed-blood, yet traditional, Lakota” who, with his followers, had been inspired by the vision of another Lakota to “Do good for people” (1), which translated into helping their people as well as some white hostages in the 1860s. Their reward for their efforts: they were jailed by white settlers and ridiculed by their people. Moore doesn’t stress their failures; instead he sees their attitudes and efforts as analogous to the functions of Native writing: “Charger and his friends were willing to risk their lives for peaceful dialogue, reconciliation, and mutual accountability, to affirm the commonality of their Indian bodies and the white hostages’ bodies” (90). Similarly the five writers Moore emphasizes were willing to risk their reputations and hostile criticism by opening dialogues that would undermine the powerful misconceptions enumerated above. The rest of the introduction defines and analyzes in substantial detail those dehumanizing colonization concepts by surveying both secondary and primary sources.

Each of the five chapters that follow the introduction focuses on one of the five concepts, themes, or strategies, beginning with sovereignty, which Moore perceives as the foundation for the other four. Each chapter begins with a substantial overview of relevant scholarship that typically features relevant influential critics, for example, sovereignty (Womack, Warrior, Cook-Lynn), community (Weaver), identity (Owens, Clifford), authenticity (Ortiz), humor (Vizenor). Each overview also offers Moore’s particular slant on each theme: sovereignty (sacrifice), community (animism), identity (change), authenticity (translation), humor (irony and pluralism). Moore follows each overview analysis with discussions of all five authors’ works in a rotating order that follows a chronological progression, with the first author as the featured writer for that theme: sustainability (Apess), community (Winnemucca), identity (McNickle), authenticity (Silko), humor (Alexie). A brief concluding chapter expands upon Moore’s discussions of authenticity and sovereignty, drawing in particular on Philip Deloria’s work and on what is probably the most quoted article in the book, Simon Ortiz’s “Towards a National Indian Literature.”

The advantages to the structure of the book are obvious. The emphasis on the five authors enhances the unity of a wide-ranging book, and the focus on the five concepts, themes, or strategies offers readers a substantial review of many of the most important academic and political issues in Native American studies during the past forty years. The five authors featured represent diversities of tribal affiliation, genre, gender, and historical perspective. The latter is especially important to Moore: “Each [of the authors] is deeply conversant with the experiences of Indians across America in their own and previous periods, sometimes addressing the future as well” (16). The focus on these authors in their historical and cultural contexts in combination with brief references to authors as early as Samson Occom and as twenty-first-century as...