That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America

3. The Soul of the Indian Is Immortal

3 THE SOUL OF THE INDIAN IS IMMORTAL Identity as Change If the question of identity must involve the ever changing cycles of selfhood and otherness, of interaction between the body and the world, those cycles may seem to represent broad enough categories for analysis of identity to extend in those terms across cultures. Yet immediately different cultural meanings come into play among such categories and distinctions as self and other, body and world, individual and group. Identity studies across cultures become themselves a cycle of changing boundaries of analysis and projection. If group and individual are terms for analysis, we must acknowledge how, in a “group-oriented” versus in an “individually oriented” society, the term individual partakes of group dynamics differently, and vice versa. Discussing these terms, my students often overlook the critical point that the same “individual” is not participating in the same “group” across the spectrum. The terms beg for definition, perhaps to the extent that group and individual, even self and other, are no longer workable terms. Given such revolving constraints, we may proceed incrementally to understand identity comparatively across cultures, but it is this very circular dynamic of group and individual, other and self, balanced differently in different cultures, that makes the question of identity both so necessary and so difficult to handle as to become hackneyed and even banal. Ground theory offers what remains, what is always there for identity to stand on, the humus that makes the human, the circle that gives life. 166 The Soul of the Indian Is Immortal “Contradictory Signifiers” Let us say, simply, that identity is elusive by definition. It emerges from desire and curiosity, fear and insecurity, nudging cycles of interaction between “self and other” toward a sense of integrity or coherence, or pathologically as disintegration and incoherence, all within cultural forms. To survive and thrive, the self must have developed a perceiving eye; it must have accumulated a symbolic vocabulary to describe its perceptions; and, crucially , it must have decided on a set of values by which to discriminate among those symbols to match its perceptions to the world as closely as it can. That set could be called identity, closely tied, by the translation of perception, to authenticity. Layers of psychological research apply terminology like ego, id, superego, cognition, intuition, the imaginary, neurophysiology, and so forth to various aspects of this process. To whatever extent necessary or possible, a self strives by default to become author of its world. In that authorship is the act of translation, acknowledged and authenticated by self and society. Thus we return to basic questions driving Indigenous literature. Following closely the common binary logic of authenticity as temporal and racial— past or present, Indian or white—a mode of reading for identity asks, as the Choctaw Cherokee scholar and writer Louis Owens opens his study of the Native American novel, “What is an Indian?” (Other Destinies 3). As we have seen, he even places this question “at the center of American Indian fiction ”: “the recovering or rearticulation of an identity, a process dependent upon a rediscovered sense of place as well as community” (5). Owens claims that identity issues are the fundamental focus of Native literary efforts, a declaration that this and other studies have found useful but ultimately limiting . Even with his “rediscovered sense . . . of community,” Owens’s focus on identity leads in turn to his description of “the dilemma of the mixedblood , the liminal ‘breed’ seemingly trapped between Indian and white worlds” as “the dominant theme in novels by Indian authors” (40). He explains, “In spite of the fact that Indian authors write from very diverse tribal and cultural backgrounds, there is to a remarkable degree a shared consciousness and identifiable worldview reflected in novels by American Indian authors, a consciousness and worldview defined primarily by a quest for identity: What does it mean to be ‘Indian’—or mixedblood—in contemporary America?” (20). As he equates “Indian” here with “mixedblood,” The Soul of the Indian Is Immortal 167 the full weight of history leans on his dualistic critical construction, wherein the binary logic of power in colonial and capitalistic dichotomies traps both narrative and critique, writer and reader, in this dilemma of the mixedblood . By this logic, the descriptive force of dialectical materialism comes to bear most intimately on the bodies, indeed the genetic codes, the “blood,” of Indian characters. This focus becomes a narrative vortex that...