Toward a Native American Critical Theory (review)

Many Native intellectuals and Native studies scholars would like to see academic work that respects the views, worldviews, and specific concerns of contemporary Native people and communities. Robert Warrior and Craig Womack, for example, propose that one way for scholars to be respectful of and responsible to the originary cultures that inform Native literatures is to foreground Native sources in their analyses. Warrior writes,

A guiding principle of my work, from its inception several years ago, has been to produce a book that explores the extent to which, after more than two centuries of impressive literary and critical production, critical interpretation of those writings can proceed primarily from Indian sources. . . . I have tried to respect the demand that Native writers be taken seriously as critics as well as producers of literature and culture.¹

In Red on Red, Womack develops a critical position that is "more suggestive than prescriptive":²

This is the argument of this study, that Native literatures deserve to be judged by their own criteria, in their own terms, not merely in argument with, or reaction against, European literature and theory. The Native Americanist does not bury her head in the sand and pretend that European history and thought do not affect Native literature, nor does she ignore the fact that Native literature has quite distinctive features of its own that call for new forms of analyses. On another political level, Native Americans have the right, for whatever reasons they choose, to decide how to evaluate their literatures, just as white critics, for decades, have formulated schools of thoughts according to their own dictates.³

Warrior demonstrates his theory by attending to neglected Native intellectuals, while Womack discusses the work of Creek writers in terms of Creek historical and cultural contexts. Their work represents a dramatic shift in focus from conventional academic studies of Native cultures, literatures, and communities that foreground the authority of non-Native intellectuals and epistemologies as well as primarily non-Native concerns.

I want to consider "foreground" and "neglect" as critical terms, for they resonate in a critical way in the debate about the work of Warrior, Womack, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and, for example, about some of the work in Natives and Academics, edited by Devon Mihesuah, and Indigenizing the Academy, edited by Mihesuah and Angela Cavender Wilson. Scholarly books cannot be perfect and complete and cannot include every possible nuance to an argument, so literature scholars must in a practical and often political sense make choices about what to foreground and neglect. Warrior's and Womack's position is that the most constructive way to contribute to Native studies is to foreground the voices of Native people, a strategy which then requires the neglect of non-Native voices. The critical strategy of neglecting Native voices has been a tool of non-Native intellectuals since they began writing about Native Americans. Eurowestern culture broadly sanctions this neglect of Native voices and epistemologies by the large majority of non-Native critics; this neglect is a privilege of colonial dominance and an academic version of manifest manners. However, the neglect of non-Native voices by Native and Native studies scholars is, practically and politically, an act of empowerment, not dominance. Warrior and Womack are developing what they hope will be a productive way to practice Native literary studies, though neither presume to know the only way.

The most egregious misreading in Toward a Native American Critical Theory is the repeated assertion that Warrior and Womack explicitly and categorically reject other ways of practicing Native literary studies. Neither critic states that his theory will produce the correct or an authentic reading. Rather, their theories in practice will produce that which, until recently, scholars in our field have not seen: academic work that unapologetically foregrounds and focuses on Native voices and strategically neglects non-Native voices. They do not...