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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [76], Line —— 13.0 —— Long PgEn [76], lee schweninger To Name Is to Claim, or Remembering Place Native American Writers Reclaim the Northeast Relying on the assumption (left unspoken) that the cliff dwellers in what is now southwestern Colorado abandoned their city because of a longterm drought, Wallace Stegner writes in the introduction to Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs that contemporary western cities facing the possibility of drought “might ponder the history of Mesa Verde.” Then, as if the former inhabitants of Mesa Verde have no history after all, Stegner turns immediately to this generalization: “all western places are new” (xvi). In a chapter entitled “A Sense of Place,” he actually offers a definition of what it is that makes a place a place: “a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it—have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. . . . No place, not even a wild place is a place until it has had that human attention. . . . No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments” (201, 202). Elsewhere in the book, Stegner mentions in passing Louise Erdrich, Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, and an unnamed Crow friend, but—as is evident from his passing reference to Mesa Verde—his formulation of what makes a place a place essentially writes Native American historicizing out of the history of the West.1 At the same time, however, he perhaps unwittingly provides a means for reclaiming place. To be born in it, live in it, or to remember it is to claim it, he avows. Taking as a point of departure the attitude about place expressed by Stegner in the context of the West, this essay suggests that in the East, also, “things that have happened” are “remembered in history,” in Native American history, even though those histories have been essentially ignored by the dominant culture over the past four to five hundred years. After glancing briefly at examples of how the dominant culture has embraced an almost total disregard of Native histories and Native historicizing, I turn to 76 To Name Is to Claim 77 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [77], Line —— 0.0p —— Long PgEn [77], the essay’s main argument: that many Native American poets of the Northeast attempt through their writing to reclaim the land and history that was denied their ancestors beginning at least as early as the seventeenth century ; through their verbal art, they reassert themselves into the history of New England from which they were essentially written out, and they thus reclaim their place: personally, historically, geopolitically. And further, by asserting a history, these poets also claim a future. In this sense they refute those historians, anthropologists, and archeologists who imply “that Indians lack not only a past of their own but a present and a future as well” (Salisbury 46). There is, of course, a well-established argument that Native Americans have been written out of the historical record. In his study of Puritans and Indians, New English Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (1965), for example , Alden T. Vaughan assumes “the total absence of Indian sources” and implies (without acknowledging) the bias of his endeavor: “I have concentrated on the acts and attitudes of the Puritans toward the Indians and have not, for the most part, attempted to account for the actions and reactions of the natives” (vii). Even though more recent historians have offered correctives to Vaughan, others have continued to disregard and discount Native views of history. Clifford Trafzer writes, for example, that many scholars claim that “oral history taught by American Indian elders is mere myth, fable, and fairytale” (485).2 The suggestion that Native histories have been ignored and written out is important to an understanding of how contemporary (or recent) Native American and First Nations peoples retell and revise...

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