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Part Two Re-Writing Culture Storytelling and the Decolonial Imagination With the loss of Ethnographic Authority, the subjects about whom we write now write back, and in so doing pose us as anthropological fictions. Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography I write fiction not only because I have a passion for literature, but also because I am frustrated with history’s texts and archives. Emma Perez, “Queering the Borderlands” The story and the story teller both serve to connect the past with the future, one generation with the other, the land with the people and the people with the story. As a research tool . . . story telling is a useful and culturally appropriate way of representing the “diversities of truth” within which the story teller rather than the researcher retains control. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies ​ I n the winter of 1936, Zora Neale Hurston was in Haiti conducting research for her blurred-genre ethnography, Tell My Horse. Funded by a Guggenheim fellowship, she spent her days traveling across the country interviewing politicians, workers, and voodoo priests. Her nights were spent in an artistic fever, writing a story that had been “dammed up” inside of her since her final departure from New York earlier that year. She worked on the project intensely, often writing late into the night after a full day of collecting. At the end of seven weeks, she had completed her second novel and perhaps her greatest contribution to Black letters, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston covered some familiar ground in Their Eyes Were Watching God, returning to the scene of her first ethnographic adventure , Eatonville. But this time she ventured beyond Joe Clarke’s storefront 134 Native Speakers porch—the backdrop for men’s talk—and into the store itself, examining the hidden consciousness of the woman behind its counter. That same year, thousands of miles away in Del Rio, Texas, Jovita González was putting the finishing touches on what was to be her last major piece of institutional scholarship. The year before she had been commissioned to design a special display of photographs, short biographical narratives, and material culture for the Texas centennial celebration in Dallas. The historical display she created, titled “Catholic Heroines of Texas,” highlighted the role of Mexicanas in the founding of Texas. By the end of 1936, González was considering writing a history of Catholic women in Texas and was collecting information from sources across the state.1 It was perhaps her research on this subject, as well as the triumphalist mood of the centennial year, that inspired González to reach across the divide that separated Anglos from Mexicans in Texas and begin working on a collaborative novel with her friend Margaret Eimer. Caballero, the historical novel that they wrote together, traces the lives of a ranchero family during the U.S.-Mexico War (1846–1848) and offers a feminist re-articulation of Texas history centered on the complexities of life in the borderlands. Just a few years later, in 1940, Ella Deloria found herself in North Carolina studying a mixed-race community in Robeson County. The community , known at the time as the “Su-ons,” claimed Native heritage but had lost most of the linguistic and cultural traditions that might have connected them to the other Native communities with whom they sought kinship through shared history. Deloria’s work among this community crystallized her thinking about the importance of Indigenous women to kinship and cultural survival, a theme that emerged through the intricate web of social and familial relations that she documented in Waterlily, a novel that she began just six months after her work in Robeson County was finished. Deloria wrote Waterlily alongside two other manuscripts she produced during this period: Speaking of Indians (1944), her nonfiction book geared toward missionaries working in Indian country, and The Dakota Way of Life, the ethnographic monograph that she wrote for the American Philosophical Society. While she focused a good deal of energy on all three projects, it was Waterlily —a novel that centered on the lives of women in Dakota culture—that spoke intimately and eloquently to Indian people themselves. That Hurston, González, and Deloria each chose to reformulate their ethnographic research into novels suggests a shared dissatisfaction with the limitations of ethnographic modes of meaning making, both in terms of narrative and audience. But it also suggests a dialectical approach to imagining history—an approach that operates both as a critical apparatus and a [3.129...

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