Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies by Chadwick Allen (review)

This latest book from Chadwick Allen is a useful addition to the library of any scholar interested in analysis of Indigenous literature, but may be beyond the needs and interests of a mainstream audience. Divided into two sections, the first chapter in part 1, “‘Being’ Indigenous ‘Now’: Resettling ‘The Indian Today’ within and beyond the U.S. 1960s,” analyzes the republication of an article, “The Indian Today,” which was first published in a 1965 edition of Midcontinent American Studies Journal. The author engages in textual analysis of the original article and juxtaposes that article with similar articles published in venues around the world. The second chapter of this section contrasts the activism of Indigenous populations to the Australian bicentennial in 1988 with that of American Indian people to the United States bicentennial in 1976. Herein, Allen describes the event-oriented activities of Australian Indigenous people with the lower key, publication-oriented activities of American Indians in 1976. While the material in this first part of the book is of interest, it doesn’t have much connection with the second part, although chapter 1 is closer, even though the author’s language and analysis is somewhat convoluted and opaque.

For example, in chapter 1 when discussing the title of the 1965 article published in MASJ, Allen writes, “The time marker ‘today,’ which typically invokes the ‘modern,’ gains particular force in its juxtaposition with ‘The Indian’ and ‘The American Indian,’ unmarked terms that tend to be read as narrowly gendered male and as heavily freighted with temporal and spatial misconceptions (and with negative or romantic stereotypes) in popular, governmental, and scholarly discourses” (5). In addition to the cramped writing style, the content is debatable. Not everyone or possibly very few people would assume that the phrases “The Indian” and “The American Indian” are interpreted as meaning male and a romantically constructed stereotype of “Indian.” The attempt to define these terms is as tortured as trying to decide what the meaning of is is. The second chapter, “Unsettling the Spirit of ’76: American Indians Anticipate the U.S. Bicentennial,” is not really about literary analysis, but is rather about activism, or perhaps better stated as communitism, a neologism coined by Jace Weaver combining the meaning of community plus activism, a process that took different paths to fruition in Australia than it did in the United States during each country’s respective bicentennial commemorations. Allen offers reasons for why this is so. While this is excellent commentary and interesting material, the chapter does not fit well within the overall theme of the book.

The real value of this book is in part 2. Chapter Three, “Pictographic, Woven, Carved: Engaging N. Scott Momaday’s ‘Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919’ through Multiple Indigenous Aesthetics,” uses N. Scott Momaday’s poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” as the subject of analysis through “multiple Indigenous aesthetics,” which is Allen’s way of stating that his analysis uses tribally specific aesthetics to analysis the Momaday poem. This is not a new approach, but is an expansion or demonstration of what Louis Owens called for in his seminal book Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994). Owens advocated that to understand American Indian literature, readers must be informed about the specific American Indian culture of the characters within the text. Allen writes, “The idea of a ‘critical, knowing audience’ is key to developing new modes of inquiry, appreciation, and interpretation for Indigenous arts in all media, including written literatures” (105). In his approach to Momaday’s poem, Allen draws on Momaday’s own Kiowa/Cherokee cultural heritage, fulfilling Owens’s directive. However, Allen goes further and includes approaches to understanding from two other cultures: Maori and Navajo. Likely, Creek scholar and writer Craig Womack would take issue with Allen’s approach in that Womack argues that every American Indian (and presumably Global Indigenous) Nation must have its own culturally specific literature. Womack further advocates that each national literature should be...