The Both/And of American Indian Literary Studies

Awa Tsireh. KOSHARE ON RAINBOW. Ca. 1925–1930. Watercolor on paper. University of California, San Diego. ARTSTOR image ID 103_41822003694070.

Many conversations in the field of American Indian literary criticism have taken to resting on an imagined divide between proponents and detractors of contemporary literary nationalism. In the former camp, most often cited are authors such as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Dakota), Robert Warrior (Osage), Jace Weaver (Cherokee), and Craig Womack (Muskogee Creek/Cherokee), while the latter tends to be defined by critics such as Arnold Krupat, Elvira Pulitano, and David Treuer (Ojibwe). These conversations are reminiscent of the 1980s when the word essentialism was often employed as a barbed attack that cast experiential claims as under-theorized, limited stances based on a rhetoric of biology. Within the terms of the current binary, Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999) has come to be a landmark reference point. In fact, I would hazard a guess that as the field edges toward the second decade of the twenty-first century, Womack is giving Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) a run for his money as the field's most-cited critic. The idea that there are deep ideological divisions between these various interpretive approaches to the study of American Indian literatures can most often be attributed to readings that take the title of Womack's critical book—specifically the term separatism, which he has noted was a product of his publishers—as the definition of nationalist arguments. Ironically, Warrior, Weaver, and Womack have made clear in both individually and collectively authored books that their call for Native theorists to engage in tribally centered readings of indigenous literatures is not meant to discount or preclude the work of non-Native allies in the field. But, as most folks learn in graduate school, sometimes it matters little what the straw man actually says.

In All That Remains: Varieties of Indigenous Expressions, Arnold Krupat, a founding member of the field of American Indian studies, who has often been at the center of the debates around contemporary literary nationalism, offers a mediating approach, what he terms "both/and modalities of thought [that] predominate in traditional, oral, Native communities, persist in Native writing, and … are operative as well in Native film" (xii). Krupat first sets up a contrast between the tie that indigenous nationalists see between sovereignty and literature and David Treuer's call for a focus on language and style—textual aesthetics—in his controversial critical text Native American Fiction: A User's Manual (2006). Krupat suggests that this apparent division between nationalist and aesthetic concerns rests on a false dichotomy, which leads to his focus on the both/and framework.

Krupat's frame sets up his five chapters, which function as a collection of essays rather than a single contiguous argument. As such, his text addresses a range of topics. His first chapter, "Trickster Tales Revisited," provides a selected overview of both trickster narratives and critical responses to such texts. He points to the tribal specificity of trickster figures and notes that many critics have viewed the trickster's practice of both affirming and transgressing tribal norms as troubling. Krupat, by contrast, claims that the problem lies in the binaries (either/or) of western critical thought rather than in the trickster's doubled (both/and) nature. In his second chapter, Krupat examines representations of Indian people in Euro-American texts from 1820 to 1870, arguing that "the narrative of the U.S. Americans was emplotted as comedy while the narrative of America's indigenous peoples was emplotted as tragedy" (29), noting that "both structures … strongly imply the justice of their outcomes" (30). Krupat also provides a list of early Native American authors, citing some of the critics who discuss them, and concludes with a year-by-year overview of the relevant publications from the period. The various lists he constructs background the third chapter's discussion of William Apess, in which Krupat offers a reading of "An Indian's Looking-Glass for the White Man" and "Eulogy on King Philip," contending...