Red Matters: Native American Studies, and: Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels of Louis Owens (review)

Arnold Krupat's Red Matters and Chris LaLonde's Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns seek to position Native American literature and cultural production centrally in American studies. Krupat addresses a variety of Native American texts, from the narratives of Sherman Alexie, Charles Eastman, and Mourning Dove to oral histories and translation theory; LaLonde, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on the novels of mixed-blood author Louis Owens. But their goal is the same: to use a variety of theoretical methods (from Derridean-informed poststructuralism to formulations of trickster metafictional techniques) to enrich and complicate our understanding of Native American identity and experience.

In Red Matters, Krupat aims to develop a "cosmopolitan comparativism" (ix) that will acknowledge nativist scholarly and political endeavors (the reach for tribal sovereignty), embrace an indigenist, earth-affirming non-Western knowledge system, employ a poststructuralist understanding of language (the indeterminate sign), and posit a postcolonial subaltern that speaks within and against master narratives of colonialism. Krupat's overarching goal is to develop an inclusive, post-Native "ethnocriticism" that will displace "colonial knowledge" systems that continue to erase or contain Native peoples. Here Krupat balances a series of close readings of texts ranging from Mourning Dove's Cogewea (1927) to Alexie's Indian Killer (1996) with Native social, judicial, and political struggles contextualized within a long history of genocide. For example, in his reading of mixed-blood representation, Krupat explores the varying narrative engagements throughout the twentieth century with larger social and political concerns. Cogewea must be read in its sociohistorical context not as a tragic story of "selling out" but as a text that affirms the "betwixt-and-betweenness of mixed-bloods of different blood types and quanta in the period" (95). And Krupat reads Eastman's autobiography as the cutting edge of race representation. Forcefully declining to embrace the melting-pot ideals of his day and the notion that mixed-bloods are the only ones that face confusion and conflict, Krupat's Eastman is a cosmopolitan, postethnic author who anticipates much of the writing that would pour forth from Native American authors and theorists in the 1980s, affirming hybrid identity in its move from a biological to a social constructionist purview.

Krupat, however, is careful not to wallow in readings that uncritically romanticize the Native as hybrid, carefully noting how this representation and rhetoric can also have a destructive absenting effect for Native peoples. For Krupat, Alexie's power as a writer lies in his unromantic depictions of Natives such as John Smith in Indian Killer. Krupat is careful to mention that although the novel is set during the Vietnam war, another war was being fought closer to home, "in American Indian Country; and this is a war to end domestic colonialism rather than a war to preserve foreign colonialism" (98). Alexie invests John Smith with a "murderous rage" toward whites that, according to Krupat, illustrates the complex process of Native channeling of American society's violent xenophobia. For Krupat, Smith's conscious act of rage represents a powerful form of reterritorializing otherwise colonized Native American lands and subjects.

While Krupat proposes a new, post-Native critical method, LaLonde uses a number of different critical tools, nativist and poststructuralist, to uncover the complex layers of meaning in the novels of Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish-Cajun author Louis Owens. LaLonde grounds his eclectic analysis in an understanding of the power of stories to create resistant communities and cultural identities. For example, he interprets Tom Joseph's mind-body journey in Wolfsong (1991) as simultaneously rediscovering home and coming into a sense of counterconsciousness. Here, as in some of Owens's other fictions, the character must discard Western conceptions of time and space and embrace his...