American Indian Literary Nationalism (review)

American Indian Literary Nationalism makes a strong and thorough case for a nationalist approach to American Indian literature that its three coauthors have been working toward, individually, over the past decade and a half. Collectively, Robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Traditions (University of Minnesota Press, 1995), Jace Weaver’s That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Other Words: American Indian Law, Literature, and Culture (University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), and Craig S. Womack’s Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) have revolutionized Native American Studies by privileging the relationship between literature and Native communities and by insisting that American Indian literature be approached as a distinct national literature rather than as a corollary to the American literary canon. In American Indian Literary Nationalism, these three authors come together to more fully articulate and defend the principles of literary nationalism—principles that their individually-authored books assert more by example than by direct expression—and thereby crystallize the nationalist perspective as a formidable component within Native American Studies in general, and within the study of Native American literatures in particular.

American Indian Literary Nationalism contains five essays: three lengthy contributions by each of the coauthors are sandwiched between a foreword by Simon Ortiz and an afterword by Lisa Brooks. As readers of MELUS likely are aware, Ortiz is a key figure in the development of Native nationalism; indeed, the coauthors refer to Ortiz’s 1981 MELUS article “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism” throughout the book and include the essay in the appendix. In the foreword, Ortiz opens the discussion by tackling the question of whether it is possible to preserve the integrity of indigenous identity when fewer and fewer Native peoples speak and write in indigenous languages. The answer, of course, is yes: Ortiz asserts that indigenous consciousness is not dependent on language alone but persists instead in “a way of life that has its own particularities, patterns, uniqueness, structures and energies” (xi). The coauthors insist, as Ortiz does, that American Indian literatures and nationalist approaches to them are vital tools through which to protect the Native “way of life” against what Weaver refers to as “pericolonialism,” the “thorough, pervading nature of settler colonialism . . . that, for indigenes, must be gotten under, around, or through” (39). The nationalist methodology thus demands that Native intellectual and critical traditions be used as the primary lenses through which to read Nativeauthored literature. Such an approach is necessary as a way to upend centuries of cultural appropriation and erasure by Euroamericans and to thus exert Native sovereignty and preserve Native communities.

One of the more insidious threats to this sovereignty, the coauthors unilaterally contend, is the ongoing assertion by postmodern critics that the best thing Native people can do is embrace their hybridity and celebrate the ways indigenous cultures have intermingled with the settler culture. As the coauthors suggest, this book is very much a response to one postmodern critic in particular, as the publication of Elvira Pulitano’s Toward a Native American Critical Theory (University of Nebraska Press, 2003) “galvanized [their] resolve” to defend literary nationalism against postmodernist critiques (xx). The coauthor’s problems with Pulitano’s book are manifold, as Womack’s eighty-plus-page exegesis in the second chapter demonstrates, but their argument can be distilled to two primary points. First, they do not reject the validity of hybridity-based theory, nor do they deny the influence of “Amereuropean” culture on Native peoples, but they do take umbrage with the fact that postmodern critics such as Pulitano want all Native writers and critics, as Womack says, to “confess” their hybridity and utilize Western theory as their primary modus operandi. As Weaver explains, “Hybridity works best as a choice rather than an imposition, such as Pulitano demands” (35). But Pulitano’s brand of hybridity, the coauthors argue, privileges the “Amereuropean” side of the...