Decolonizing Pedagogy: Teaching Louise Erdrich's The Bingo Palace
Rent from DeepDyveIn the October 2005 issue of PMLA, Shari Huhndorf provides a brief survey of the primary challenges facing American Indian studies at the start of the twenty-first century. While she raises a number of significant issues in the article, "Literature and the Politics of Native American Studies," Huhndorf underscores the question of control over representation: who holds—and who in the future will hold—the power to speak about, publish on, and teach in the discipline? As Huhndorf suggests, "ongoing colonization is an essential framework for understanding Native texts" (1619). Moreover, a dichotomous bind exists in the academic setting: the struggle for "intellectual sovereignty," as Robert Warrior puts it (qtd. in Huhndorf 1618), consistently comes up against the threat of "intellectual imperialism" (Philip Deloria qtd. in Huhndorf 1619). Certainly this is not a new issue, especially in the field of American Indian literary studies. For instance, many scholars have argued that the best way for nonindigenous literary critics to be allies is to approach the study of American Indian literature—if they approach it at all—with caution and humility. Otherwise, they risk committing a form of critical violence that perpetuates colonialist ideology. The study of American Indian literature, then, effectively demands a new, non-Eurocentric model.
But this concern about colonialist academia extends beyond the publishing world to the classroom as well. What sorts of problems arise when the nonindigenous educator teaches indigenous-authored texts? How can we teach American Indian literature without "colonizing" it? How might we, in other words, develop and apply an ethical [End Page 91] pedagogy? In this article, I propose a model educators can apply when teaching one text, Louise Erdrich's The Bingo Palace; while I emphasize the particular concerns this text raises, I aim, simultaneously, to offer a more general approach to teaching American Indian literature responsibly. In an increasingly multicultural academic setting, both in terms of the student body and the material we teach, this responsibility must be acknowledged and embraced.
Before turning to the novel, however, I want to spend some time problematizing and, ultimately, situating my own position as a white educator teaching indigenous-authored texts. In the first section, then, I will argue that to teach American Indian texts responsibly, we must contextualize them within a cultural framework and include ourselves and our own complicity in that framework. I will then turn to The Bingo Palace to identify some pieces of the Ojibwe narrative that are often overlooked by critics, issues that should take center stage in the classroom. I begin by addressing at length how the novel participates in the oral narrative tradition. I then turn to focus solely on the characterization of Fleur, a figure tied to two important Ojibwe nonhuman beings: bears and Misshepeshu, the underwater manitou. Following the body of the article is an appendix of possible pedagogical tools for the classroom that use the findings of my research.
In offering this structure, I do not pretend to have fashioned an innovative critical model. But I do hope that this article reflects both a willingness to decenter my Euroamerican analytical power and my commitment to a pedagogy of social change. Moreover, while I emphasize particular issues facing white educators of Native-authored texts, I anticipate that this model—and the theoretical and political convictions it is predicated on—will be useful to all pedagogues.
What is Colonialist Pedagogy?
How does a white educator teach American Indian literature responsibly? While instructors should always think carefully about how they teach texts by authors outside their own racial identity location, the [End Page 92] pairing of white teacher with indigenous-authored texts is particularly fraught, given the history—and ongoing practice—of culture appropriation and imperialism perpetrated on American Indians by whites. Academia—in the name of "knowledge," "ethical progress," or "moral duty" (Whitt 171)—has contributed significantly to this country's long history of...
