The Delicate Dance of Reasoning and Togetherness

Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, a new collection of essays by Native literary critics, is one of the most important theoretical works to emerge out of the study of Aboriginal literature. I do not know whether the collection's title deliberately recalls a dialogue between David Brumble and Karl Kroeber, also entitled "Reasoning Together," which first appeared in The Canadian Review of American Studies in 1981 and later in Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature, but comparing the two works shows us just how far this field has come. In 1981 Kroeber and Brumble, both non-Native, wrote authoritatively about how "Indians" feel about having their stories and belongings collected and displayed by white scholars. The "Together" of the title did not include Aboriginal people as part of the reasoning process, since Native people from the communities under discussion were neither quoted nor, apparently, consulted. Since then, Aboriginal people have slowly begun to enter the academy and, more specifically, the ranks of literary critics. Particularly in the United States, there has developed an intellectual community of Aboriginal literary critics. Here in Canada, this community is significantly smaller, and so I read Reasoning Together with pride, pride at seeing so many Aboriginal people in my field working and writing together with such sophistication and dedication. In recent years there has been an emerging rhetoric within universities on the need to bring indigenous knowledge into the academy. However, too often the attempts to do this have been tokenistic, primarily symbolic, or restricted to particular courses—and have not truly challenged the dominance of traditional academic ways of learning, knowing, and expressing. In contrast, Reasoning Together raises tough questions that go to the core of how we practice Aboriginal literary criticism. How can we work within the "reasoning" mode so valued within the academy while maintaining our responsibilities to our communities and our own experiences? And how will trying to achieve this balance change what our academic work looks like?

These questions are hinted at in the collection's title. The use of the word "reasoning" resists popular stereotypes of Native people as spiritual and superstitious or as radical and angry. It emphasizes that the contributors are intellectuals, highly trained in the practice of reasoning, a mode that is highly valued in and part of a long tradition in the Western academy. "Reasoning" can be generally defined as "clear, orderly thinking, drawing inferences and reaching conclusions in accordance with logical principles" (Lloyd 298). René Descartes was an influential promoter of this mode in the sixteenth century, contrasting it with what he called the "fluctuating testimony of the senses or the deceptive judgment of the imagination as it botches things together" (qtd. in Lloyd 298). Taken to its logical conclusion in Descartes' work, reasoning led to a radical skepticism that left him with only his thinking mind and with no secure connection to the physical world or to other people. The Western university still primarily values a Cartesian reasoning based in logic rather than imagination. We can see this in the profoundly secular and skeptical attitude of contemporary literary theory, where beliefs in religion, gender, nation, tradition, and even the evidence of our senses have been widely deconstructed and destabilized. Some feminist theorists have challenged the primacy of reason in the academy in "an attempt to reclaim emotion and imagination as important to intelligent thinking" (Lloyd 300). But, despite their efforts, the typical literary critical essay is analytical and detached, based in reason without appealing to experience, emotion, or imagination.

The Native literary critics in Reasoning Together are well trained in this tradition of detached reasoning. They can see its value, its ability to break through conventional wisdom and bias. But in an academic world where nations are "imagined communities" (Anderson), where tradition is "invented" (Hobsbawm and Ranger), and where gender is "performance" (Butler), they continue to believe in the importance of "togetherness," as invoked in the title. As for most Native academics, their lived connections to their families, their home communities, their nations, and other Native people are central to their academic work...