That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America

2. A Plethora of Animistic Factors Immersed in Ethereal Realities

2 A PLETHORA OF ANIMISTIC FACTORS IMMERSED IN ETHEREAL REALITIES Community as Animism In scholarly efforts at mapping Indigenous identity, from Owens to Vizenor to Clifford, the term community recurs as the ground of identity on which the map is laid. Louis Owens marks “the recovering or rearticulation of an identity” as crucially “dependent upon a rediscovered sense of place as well as community” (Other Destinies 5). Similarly Gerald Vizenor’s “invitation to tribal survivance” envisions survivance as a communal achievement (“Ruins”), and James Clifford’s description of Mashpee dynamics places a nexus identity in a wider system of community as exchange. Following on such analyses, the Cherokee critic Jace Weaver affirms community as the key to Native literature, in complementary contrast to Owens’s assertion that novels by American Indian authors are “defined primarily by a quest for identity.” In his 1997 study, That the People Might Live: Native American Literature and Native American Community, Weaver throws down his theoretical gauntlet: “I would contend that the single thing that most defines Indian literatures relates to this sense of community and commitment to it” (43). It is instructive to look at both the stark contrast between Weaver’s and Owens’s opposing claims about “the single thing that most defines Indian literatures”—identity or community—and negotiations between those not necessarily opposite positions. Identity or community? Certainly they interweave, and by reading how Native voices balance those values we may read for notions of national iden- A Plethora of Animistic Factors 93 tity. Weaver concocts a neologism, communitism, combining community and activism, to describe literature that “has a proactive commitment to Native community, including what I term the ‘wider community’ of Creation itself” (That the People Might Live xiii). Weaver sees Indian writers’ rhetorical activism on behalf on Indian community as that defining feature of the literature: “In communities that have too often been fractured and rendered dysfunctional by the effects of more than 500 years of colonialism , to promote communitist values means to participate in the healing of the grief and sense of exile felt by Native communities and the pained individuals in them” (43). Weaver gets at an undergirding politics and worldview in Native literatures through “this sense of community and commitment to it.” It is difficult to summon any Indian writer whose impulse for writing does not engage “the healing of the grief and sense of exile felt by Native communities” over “more than 500 years of colonialism.” The agonies of authenticity and identity take place on this often uncertain and slippery stage of Native community. “Actual Experience” of Animism Elsewhere I have suggested that not only is healing of Indian community a goal and a context of Indian writing but that dialogical dynamics of Indian community form the very method, content, and structure of many Native narratives.1 The texts themselves incorporate reader, content, context, and writer into a process that advances a value of community in general and Native community in particular. From Apess to Alexie, discursive elaborations of community values permeate the meaning and the manner of narration . If there is a key dynamic, it is not only commitment to community but a kind of commitment of community in the way stories are told. As may be true of literary endeavors in general, Native texts strive to generate fellow feeling through communication. The very manner of writing Native stories creates community across disjunctive frontier boundaries that have tried to limit Indian lives. Silko notes an angle of this dynamic in Almanac of the Dead: “Narrative as analogue for the actual experience, which no longer exists; a mosaic of memory and imagination” (574). This cryptic fragment, as it focuses on “actual experience,” gestures at the “crisis of representation” that Gerald Vizenor negotiates through postmodernism’s agonies of the sign. How can 94 A Plethora of Animistic Factors language convey or represent experience? Especially after the unspeakable, inconceivable losses of the Jewish Holocaust, even as that reflects the Indigenous Holocaust, this question remains the writer’s and the storyteller’s quandary. Yet there remains further a dialogic reality in the process of signification that eludes such linguistic impasses: the very act of communication , especially as it modulates into narration, fundamentally assumes an animate universe, a community of listeners. Narration is about animation. In spite of its abstract disconnection and its linguistic emptiness, narration cognitively and practically connects actors and audiences, characters and listeners, funneling...