Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard, and: Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma: Return of the Exiled (review)

Ethnic studies has been built largely upon the belief that cultural difference is good and assimilation is bad. The literary corollary of this belief is that only those writers of ethnic descent who resist the dominant culture and celebrate difference are truly ethnic and, hence, worthy of study—as if resistance and difference were displays of imaginative power and assimilation simply a failure of imaginative nerve. Contemporary ethnic writing presents itself more or less readily to this sort of scholarly scrutiny—cut, after all, from the same cultural cloth—as amply documented in Andrew Furman's study of the much-touted return to tradition in recent Jewish American literature. (The dilemma in his title has to do with academic politics, not with the character of the fiction he surveys.) But the literature produced by ethnic writers in America from the eighteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth has proven more intractable, as much of it is explicitly assimilationist. As a result, critics have turned to apologetics and rehabilitation, combing the nooks and crannies of assimilationist texts to find traces of resistance and difference in an effort to construct a usable oppositional ethnic past.

Such is Siobhan Senier's strategy in her study of white reformer and novelist Helen Hunt Jackson (Ramona), Piute autobiographer Sarah Winnemucca (Life among the Piutes), and Clackamas storyteller Victoria Howard (Clackamas Chinook Texts). Voices of American Indian Assimilation and Resistance focuses on the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, the "relatively monolithic" era of assimilation (4), of Darwinism and the Dawes Act, when "disappointingly few people questioned assimilation" (3), not even the three women writers she studies at length—at least not ostensibly. Nevertheless, Senier argues, "American Indian writers, especially under the threat of assimilation, explored a wide range of resistance strategies," and teasing the texts in the right ways, we can hear "the subtle voice of resistance" (18), in particular, a Native "communitism" that resists white individualism. Each of Senier's three central texts has theoretical issues that make its study tricky—problems of authenticity and mediation well-known to scholars of Native American literature and ethnicity—and Senier negotiates them intelligently, if not always wholly compellingly. Even readers sympathetic to her approach may raise an eyebrow now and then: some, for instance, may question, despite all the author's qualifiers, the inclusion of Jackson as a voice of Indian resistance; others may wonder why Zitkala-Sa's writings are dismissed rather than rehabilitated; still others may find Senier's valorization of "communitism" too close to essentialism for comfort. (Consider, too, that Furman argues that his writers' "communal, rather than strictly individualistic, vision originates from a decidedly Jewish tradition" [163].) Still, even when they wrinkle foreheads, Senier's readings are always informed and suggestive.

To those who do not share Senier's oppositional paradigm, her book proves more fundamentally problematic. Her title is misleading, for in her zeal to hear the voices of American Indian resistance, Senier turns a deaf ear to the voices of Indian assimilation in the texts she analyzes. As a result, the richness of ethnic expression is distorted by what the late Israeli historian Amos Funkenstein called a "false dichotomy" between assimilation and ethnic self-assertion, as traces of resistance stand in metonymically for the complex cultural whole.

Ostensibly, Furman's survey of the contemporary resurgence of Jewish American writing offers a different model. In a polemical opening chapter, he argues that the oppositionalist approach confuses political resistance with cultural diversity, excluding...