That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America

Notes

NOTES Introduction 1. In Lewis’s journal entry of August 19, 1805, written in what is now Montana, as he was describing the Shoshones he reflected back on the Corps’ sexual experiences among the Sioux during the previous travels of 1804. Other archival material suggests ambiguity in Martin Charger’s patrimony. There was a nineteenth-century St. Louis trader, Reuben Lewis, whose name might have become confused with the more famous Lewis in this story. See correspondence dated November 20 and December 6, 1915, between Samuel Charger of LaPlant, South Dakota, son of Martin, and Doane Robinson, secretary of the South Dakota Historical Association in Pierre (Doane Robinson Collection, Alphabetical Correspondence, folder 58: “Charger, Martin,” South Dakota State Historical Society). Sam indicates that his grandfather, who would be the son of a “Lewis,” traveled to St. Louis in 1824 to receive a horse from his father there. Meriwether Lewis died in 1809, so the later trader is the more likely the father of Zomie and grandfather of Charger. 2. Sources for the Fool Soldiers story include the University of South Dakota Indian Oral History Collection; Britain, Return to Shetek; Derounian-Stodola, The War in Words; Sneve, Betrayed; Ketcham et al., The Fool Soldiers; King, “The Fool Soldiers.” 3. Although such terms invoke impossible generalizations that miss specific histories, I am somewhat more comfortable using the term 384 Notes to pages 4–7 colonial than postcolonial to describe aspects of past and present Euro-American relations with Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Certainly the Euro-American enterprise was a colonizing one, and certainly that enterprise is neither past nor post-. 4. See Jace Weaver’s discussion of “communitism,” in That the People Might Live, as the value of advocacy driving Native American literature . 5. Prior to critical questions of authenticity, identity, community, sovereignty , and irony there remains the bibliographic work of scholarship in bringing to light Native texts from across the centuries. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff has been a leader of this foundational scholarship , and a number of scholars, critics, editors, and writers such as Daniel F. Littlefield, Arnold Krupat, Brian Swann, H. David Brumble , Joseph Bruchac, Duane Niatum, Joy Harjo, Gloria Bird, Maurice Kenny, and others have contributed by editing and publishing autobiography , nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. At the outset, I also want to recommend a different form of literary criticism emerging in the field. Scholarship and criticism have developed over the past generation from literary ethnography through literary separatism and linguistic nationalism, while archival bibliography remains core. I note especially three 2008 publications as models of methodology in Native American literary studies: Brooks, The Common Pot; Kelsey, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature; and Wilson, Writing Home. Since I possess neither the linguistic knowledge, the nationalist identity, nor the concomitant skills and perspectives of such accomplished and innovative scholars , I develop a different approach. Avoiding what Maureen Konkle refers to as “culturalist” critique, I overlap with Brooks, Kelsey, and Wilson by following Sherman Alexie’s (and William Apess’s) focus on “the political,” in its many layers. 6. Gordon Henry Jr. marks an important set of questions about the applicability to American Indian literatures of “the historical associations with the words nationalism and nationalist” and indeed the term nation itself: “For some readers those terms may bring to mind, in thought and ideology, in some parts of the world, ways in which nationalism bears traces (at some ends of theories) of colonial Notes to pages 7–9 385 resistance, postcolonial theory, legal and political theory, and (at other ends) oppressive nationalist states” (Henry et al., North American Indian Writing 22). Add the complex histories of “domestic dependent nations,” plus the current discourse of “tribal sovereignty ,” and the terminology clearly needs refining and refreshing. 7. A recent article by the Cherokee scholar Clint Carroll usefully discusses the differences between nations, states, and nation-states. Toward a rebalanced future, Carroll observes, “Indigenous peoples can form (and are forming) state-like governments that do not necessarily carry all the philosophical and ideological baggage of their imperial counterparts” (“Articulating Indigenous Statehood” 4). 8. Alfonso Ortiz discusses his objections to the following eight “standard historical concepts and categories” as “self-serving”: Western civilization, the frontier, wilderness, the civilization/savagism dichotomy, Christianity as “an unquestionable good,” Indians as “without any law or government,” Manifest Destiny, and colonial and national labels for the periods of American history. Ortiz then proceeds to offer specific historiographic...