Native Women and Land: Narratives of Dispossession and Resurgence by Stephanie J. Fitzgerald (review)

There is a growing body of scholarship that aims to radically reimagine the techniques of indigenous literary criticism and to break down the rhetorical and methodological barriers that sometimes divide academic discourses from the people they are intended to reflect and, ideally, to serve. Stephanie Fitzgerald’s new book, Native Women and Land, might be situated in dialogue with much of that recent work (texts like Craig Womack’s Art as Performance and Betty Booth Donohue’s Bradford’s Indian Book, to name just two). One of Fitzgerald’s major aims in this slender volume is to urge readers to reorient their understanding of narrative genres in a way that foregrounds the broad relationship between acts of storytelling and the politics and history of dispossession. The “Land Narrative,” as she defines it, is a capacious and flexible category that encompasses stories of origin rooted in the oral tradition; the literary fictions of writers such as Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn; and the deployment of social media by activists in the Idle No More Movement. While Fitzgerald rightly situates her book as an intervention into the field of ecocriticism (one that renders it more “attuned to the complex and ever-shifting relationships Native people have with land tenure and the federal government”), this study should also be approached as an invitation to literary scholars to pursue greater experimentation in our critical praxis. To her credit as well, Native Women and Land extends that invitation in a manner that is accessible and well suited to discussion in the undergraduate classroom. Indeed, this is where I suspect the book may find its largest audience.

The introduction to Native Women and Land, “Toward a Land Narrative,” lays out an ambitious conceptual framework. Fitzgerald foregrounds four major critical interventions that her study seeks to advance: (1) refocusing scholarly attention on writings by Native women, which she argues (following Shari M. Huhndorf) have been largely overlooked by a male-dominated literary nationalist discourse; (2) highlighting how Indian dispossession is both an environmental and a political issue; (3) reorienting an increasingly globally focused eco-critical scholarship back toward indigenous locality; and (4) developing literary and environmental studies in a way that avoids shallow and stereotypical notions of the “ecological Indian.” In pursuing these goals, Fitzgerald focuses her attention on diasporic indigenous populations (nations and communities removed from their traditional homelands, such as the Cherokee) and on other peoples who have experienced substantial dispossession (such as the Dakotah). In doing so, she stresses that land narratives (understood as acts of “place-making,” as defined by linguistic anthropologist Keith Basso) can be, and have been, employed to support the resurgence of tribal nations and communities confronting the challenges of land loss. Fitzgerald aligns herself with Elizabeth Cook-Lynn in viewing literature and storytelling as integrally tied to the complex politics of dispossession and recovery. She also insists on the need for an “environmental literary practice” that is attuned to the interconnection between land tenure, U.S. Indian law, and environmental issues. But in invoking examples such as Diné Natural Law to illustrate the nexus between storytelling, ecological consciousness, and jurisprudence, she also highlights how indigenous systems of knowledge can be placed at the center of an ecocritical praxis that responds to the history of colonialism.

Native Women and Land is divided into two parts, each containing two chapters and focused on two forms of dispossession, which are indexed by the Cree words for land (askȋy) and water (nȋpȋy). Considering the scope of the issues raised in the introduction, it is unsurprising, but also a bit disappointing, that these four chapters move very quickly over their chosen territory. Indeed, my main criticism of Native Women and Land is that it would benefit from being considerably longer and more methodical in its explication of its examples. In chapter 1, “Removals and Long Walks...