Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (review)

Craig Womack’s book is a brave, controversial, and rich argument in favor of establishing a new Native American literary scholarship, driven by Native concerns and written either by Native scholars or by those with the language skills, cultural knowledge, and respect that non-Natives must possess if they are to assist this project. Womack, who writes “from within” his own Oklahoma Muskogee (Creek) nation, provides stimulating examples of this kind of work. Beginning with a Creek version of that nation’s history, which includes a striking challenge to versions of “Creek disappearance,” Womack painstakingly rereads Creek origin stories, showing a fully cognizant Creek nation, complete with its own government and its own concept of nationhood long before Europeans move into sight. Within these chapters lies a stunning critique of ethnographers and anthologists, both of whom have reified Creek people in a timeless—and thus unpolitical—past. (Anthologists, Womack suggests, have been particularly offensive, collecting “quaint and interesting” stories from across indigenous America—many involving that favorite character of non-Natives, the trickster—to produce nothing more than bland, depoliticized, and thus meaningless “folk” tales.)

Womack has other ideas. All indigenous stories, he argues, are profoundly political. In the Muskogee nation, they are so not only because of content but also because of language and modes of telling. Recounting Linda Alexander’s telling of a much-anthologized tale, Womack demonstrates how this Creek elder goes about her political task. Both the setting in which Alexander tells the story and the language she uses make the tale. Womack demonstrates that the simple recording and subsequent translation of the words, the customary technique of ethnographers, is insufficient to capture these meanings, explaining why most ethnographers have added “little morals” to such stories.

In subsequent chapters, Womack reads other Creek writers “from within,” some of them far from uncritically, as is the case of Alice Callahan, about whom he argues that the desire to assimilate overrode her sense of Creek identity, to the detriment both of the writing and the content of her novel, Wynema. Alexander Posey’s political satire, Louis Oliver’s Creek philosophy, and Joy Harjo’s poetry all receive warmer readings, each aimed to demonstrate their authors’ “Creekness.”

In the final chapter, Womack reaches beyond the borders of the Muskogee nation to Cherokee writer Lynn Riggs (best known as the author of Green Grow the Lilacs, the basis for the musical Oklahoma). Womack uses Riggs’s writing as the basis for another aesthetic, which he names “oklahomo.” Womack argues that in his “closeted” position as a gay Indian man, Riggs masked his identities in texts that can be read as gay and Indian, despite the fact that they mostly avoided “gayness” and “Indianness.” Although slightly less than convincing (for one thing, I couldn’t see why Callahan’s avoidance of things Indian was bad, while Riggs’s was excusable), I think Womack’s readings open rich possibilities for more exploration of texts by gay and lesbian Indians.