The Routledge Introduction to Native American Literature by Drew Lopenzina (review)

Drew Lopenzina’s The Routledge Introduction to Native American Literature offers a solid stepping-stone for approaching the reading and teaching of Native American literature. Grounded in decolonizing reading practices and pedagogies, the book brings into relief the major challenges readers face when reading Native texts: how to recognize and challenge reading assumptions based on colonial logics and how to learn about Native epistemologies as the basis for our interpretation of literary texts. To address this challenge, Lopenzina argues for positioning readers in Native spaces, a reorientation of perspective that moves them from a Western-centric standpoint to one shaped by Indigenous epistemologies.

The book is structured chronologically to guide readers through the development of Native writing from the seventeenth century to the present. Lopenzina takes readers on a journey that starts with Caleb Cheeshateaumauk’s letter to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England in 1663, written in Latin, and ends with Louise Erdrich’s Round House, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. Starting with the analysis of early texts, oral traditions, and various media of record-keeping and storytelling (such as winter counts and birchbark scrolls), Lopenzina then turns to the emerging Native voices of the New Republic and the Progressive Era. After discussing early twentieth-century novels and what critics call “the homing plots” of the Native American Renaissance (referring to the journey home framework many novels follow), Lopenzina ends with contemporary fiction, both poetry and prose. In doing so, he examines a body of literature firmly set in Native space by writers no longer including Indigenous epistemologies in their writing but rather using them as their conceptual foundation. In this way, he maps out a history of Native American letters, providing compelling literary analysis that puts the texts in conversation with their sociopolitical contexts. At the same time, he offers a crash course in American Indian studies by centering Native critics and mapping out key issues in the field, such as debates around nationhood, literary nationalism, intellectual sovereignty, and literary representation. Overall, the book walks the walk: it teaches by example as it gives ample entry points into a field of study, providing the necessary resources for readers to learn about the texts and their contexts as they work on decolonizing their critical perspectives.

As Lopenzina emphasizes, the most difficult obstacle for readers, students, and teachers of Native literature is to shake the sediment of colonial assumptions about Indigenous (in)abilities and settler supremacy. He proposes a chronological approach to teaching Native literatures to find the fulcrum for such a decolonizing practice: using Native writers’ mastery of colonial discourse and an understanding of Native lifeways to find the subversion within—the way writers made room for Indigenous perspectives within the boundaries of colonial rhetoric. This approach, Lopenzina argues, begins the process of dismantling the deep-seated assumptions of the colonial savagery/civilization divide and its attending ramifications that have become naturalized for so many US readers. Lopenzina argues that letting go of the romanticization of Indians &à la James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826); cracking open the formulation of the Myth of the Vanishing Indian that would preserve Natives in amber, rendering them forever in the past tense; and undoing the cultural expectations that link Native authenticity only to forests, feathers, and communion with nature are the first steps toward an education in Native literature. In this sense, the shared set of cultural assumptions that readers can use as the foundation for reading and interpreting settler literary texts do not work as a frame to understand Native literature in its own right.

Unlearning the knowledge of the historical record built into the US cultural imaginary and learning about Indigenous epistemologies that challenge the so-called truths that structure one’s view of the world, however, is not a simple task. Indeed, this change in perspective comes as a tectonic shift that often meets with resistance in...