The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (review)

Robert Warrior's The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction proposes a sweeping new way to read the form and intellectual heritage of Native American literature. In the process, Warrior produces a work that, beyond literary studies, can resonate for historians and for American Indian studies in general. He argues that the roots of Native American literature rest in nonfiction. Despite his book's title, Warrior gives no distinguishing attention to the act of reading. Instead, he approaches Native intellectual history with an eye to the "challenges" it can offer "contemporary Native intellectuals" (xiii). As in his earlier writing, as Jace Weaver notes in That the People Might Live ([New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 49), Warrior "prefers to think in terms of intellectual traditions rather than literatures". Across four chapters, he charts a long path from one of the earliest writers, William Apess (whose first book, A Son of the Forest, appeared in 1829), to the 1881 Osage Constitution as a work of literature, to Native accounts of school education from boarding school days to the present, to N. Scott Momaday's famous 1970 essay "The Man Made of Words." Warrior notes that, apart from autobiography, Native nonfiction has received far less study than fiction and poetry (drama, we might add, has received even less study), and his call to change that pattern is a welcome challenge, as is his direct contribution to changing it in the often eloquent essays that make up this volume.

Part of the peculiarity of nonfiction is that the term says what it is not without saying what it is. Moreover, scholars of nonfiction, especially autobiography, often make a point of saying—ironically enough—that it is fictional, because it cannot present absolute, unmediated truth. Warrior himself seems well attuned to the slipperiness of nonfiction, the ways that it imaginatively constructs a motivated, political interpretation, which has much to do with the value that Warrior finds in Native nonfiction and the passion he brings to its intellectual and political engagements. The nonfictional side of nonfiction (as opposed to the fictional side) carries weight for Warrior, because it represents the special value that he claims for experience, against those who rule out experience as too unstable to point toward helpful interpretation. In tune with arguments by bell hooks and (in a forthcoming book on recent Native writing) Sean Teuton, Warrior finds a nuanced way beyond the thicket of debates about experience. Although appeals to experience have been abused by those who presume that their own interpretation of experience is the only truth, for Warrior such abuse need not rule out the value of thinking through experience. Indeed, though mainstream critics have sometimes implied that the interpretive abuse of experience is the special province of critics of color, historically such abuse is (to say the least) far more characteristic of mainstream American thought and criticism than of Native thought. Moreover, it is impossible not to think through experience, and, given the shape of history in the Americas and the pressure to erase that history, Warrior is onto something important in his sense that a critical confrontation with experience should shape our understanding of Native writing.

Warrior wants nonfiction to garner the elite status often attributed to the literary, but he also seems to want to credit nonfiction with greater truth of representation than readers might grant to the literary. That is a tricky combination, making me wish that he had worked through these ideas more explicitly, so that we could see his way of following through on their implications. For many readers, literature's association with the figurative seems to divorce it from the grit of experience, and yet many readers would also say that the figurative cuts through the clutter of detail to offer a better window to experience. Thus the argument for privileging nonfiction and its supposedly less figurative directness may play well to readers who already prefer nonfiction to fiction and poetry, and yet it seems finally more like a...