Cities of Refuge: Indigenous Cosmopolitan Writers and the International Imaginary

1. The Road to Red Power

I begin with two moments, set well over a century apart in indigenous American letters, to introduce my two works: a first book, entitled Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (2008), and a new book project, entitled “Cities of Refuge: Indigenous Cosmopolitan Writers and the International Imaginary.” In so doing, I wish to show how my first book on the literature of a twentieth-century indigenous movement has led me to a second book on the nineteenth century, where the literary arguments for indigenous nationhood came to inform that later movement and continue to challenge our studies of North American indigenous literature.

The first moment takes place in 1828, in the northwest corner of present-day Georgia. Elias Boudinot sits in the Cherokee Nation’s newly erected print shop to pen the first issue of the world’s first indigenous language newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix. The paper declares the vital role that American literacy will play in what Boudinot describes as “this feeble effort of the Cherokees to rise from their ashes, like the fabled Phoenix” (qtd. in Perdue 90). In this iconic image of rebirth, Cherokees configured themselves emerging from the flames of conquest, and offered their model to other indigenous people in the east, where Pequot minister William Apess, lecturing with Boudinot in Boston, beseeched those whom he called “people of color” to gather in solidarity to revalue their lives. This early indigenous movement—this “Red Phoenix”—left a legacy that a later movement—called Red Power—harnessed to enact a social transformation among indigenous people. That legacy included: (1) an adaptation of other cultural ways, (2) an appeal to a shared humanity, and (3) a legal argument to protect indigenous livelihood and land. In 1838, despite a favorable Supreme Court ruling, indigenous people were driven from the Southeast and made to walk the Trail of Tears. Ironically, however, on this same trail that led back to the nineteenth-century indigenous cause, indigenous people built a road to the twentieth-century Red Power movement.

The second moment occurs in 1971. Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday gives a famous lecture, in which he describes a collision with his ancestral history: “At one time in my life I suddenly realized that my father had grown up speaking a language that I didn’t grow up speaking, that my forebears on his side had made a migration from Canada along with Athapaskan peoples that I knew nothing about, and so I determined to find out something about these things, and in the process I acquired an identity” (qtd. in Schubnell 141). It was a political awakening for Momaday to discover his deeper ties to Kiowa land and language, and it began a life-long project of philosophical inquiry. Over time, Momaday came to discern a more detailed portrait of himself in his cultural landscape, on a continent where Indigenes, such as Apess and Boudinot, had lived and governed. From this new understanding of himself in relation to a colonial history, he was better able to explain the features of his past and present world: where he came from, and why his father spoke Kiowa but he himself did not. In so doing, he eventually recovered his complex (and celebrated) indigenous cultural identity. During the Red Power era—the late-1960s and early-1970s movement for indigenous rights—indigenous people similarly forged a new relationship to land and history. This twentieth-century process of decolonization is the focus of Red Land, Red Power.

N. Scott Momaday’s twentieth-century lecture above has come to define the growth of indigenous identity during the Red Power movement. The author joins land and ancestry with language and imagination, this last concept the central faculty of his work. His is a personal discovery that invokes the oral tradition and tribal memory to reattach his Kiowa self to a greater community and ancestral people. Like Momaday’s writing, Elias Boudinot’s nineteenth-century journalism above came to be the voice of indigenous nation-building during this earlier movement to...