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  • The Presence of Early Native StudiesA Response to Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary E. Wyss
  • Eric Gary Anderson (bio)

As this informative essay by Stephanie Fitzgerald and Hilary E. Wyss makes clear, Native American literatures and textualities have, like Native tribal nations, long been plural, multilingual, grounded in home places, deeply invested in land, and shared across networks of relations. Native people have for centuries been literate in earthworks, baskets, trade routes, petroglyphs, ecosystems, rhetorical performances, newspapers, treaties, books, and many other kinds of legible texts that they have created as well as, in some instances, received; Native knowledge has for centuries traversed space as well as time. Contemporary Native writers such as LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), Simon Ortiz (Acoma), and Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe) detail the ways in which the multiple archives of the past—early and recent, oral and written, accessible and inaccessible—inform and challenge the present. Storytellers such as the western Apache in Keith Basso’s landmark study Wisdom Sits in Places (1996) know that “the country of the past . . . is never more than a narrated place-world away. It is thus very near, as near as the workings of their own imaginations, and can be easily brought to life at almost any time” (32). From Abenaki space on the other side of the continent, Lisa Brooks expresses a similar perception in the opening sentence of her important book The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008), writing that she and her friend Natalie “are sitting on the grass, stretching our legs, beside this old riverside trail, which I know her ancestors walked, and probably mine, too” (xix). The early and the contemporary are close enough to touch and are powerfully intertwined in such shared, narrated places.

Known, lived, remembered, and living, the land is quite literally the grounds of Native knowledge, literacy, and textualities. As Brooks, Basso, Erdrich, Ortiz, Howe, Fitzgerald and Wyss, and others demonstrate, this [End Page 251] Native ground keeps growing, sometimes against colonial odds, by virtue of the recovery and continued indigenous reinvention of Native spaces and textualities. As will be obvious, for me, the question is not so much whether early Native American materials matter to scholars working in more contemporary neighborhoods within Native studies; they do, without question, and in some ways they always have. Neither does it seem necessary to ask whether contemporary Native texts often see the past in the present and the future in the past; they do. Instead, I would like to consider the ways in which these strong, longstanding, and complicated connections between “early” and “contemporary” reflect the good health of Native studies. For one thing, as Fitzgerald and Wyss discuss, these links help expand and sharpen our understanding of the multiple textualities and intertexts that populate Native literatures. For another thing, the connections in question point the way to new methodologies that promote a deeper and more far-reaching consideration of alternative American histories, literary and otherwise, and illuminate the ways in which Native literature, both early and contemporary, informs both early American studies and American studies.

In “My Mothers, My Uncles, Myself ” (2000), Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe provides a useful way of thinking about both the theory and the practice of making connections across time:

When I write fiction, poetry, or history (at least the kind of history I’m interested in writing), I pull the passages of my life, and the lives of my mothers, my mothers’ mothers, my uncles, the greater community of chafachúka (“family”) and iksa (“clan”), together to form the basis for critique, interpretation; a moment in the raw world. My obligation in that critique is that I must learn more about my ancestors, understand them better than I imagined. Then I must be able to render all our collective experiences into a meaningful form. I call this process “tribalography.”

(214–15)

What generates, challenges, and drives her thinking and writing is not, first and foremost, the imperatives of received literary forms or imported cultural histories. Rather, the basis for knowledge, for responsible critique, for the impetus to challenge herself to keep learning, and of course for writing, is the lived, collective, multigenerational tribal experience...

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