Native Authenticity: Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies

Introduction: Contemporary Discourses on “Indianness”

INTRODUCTION Contemporary Discourses on “Indianness” Deborah L. Madsen Mixed bloods are neither here nor there, not like real bloods. —Gerald Vizenor, Griever: An American Monkey King in China In this introduction, I want to offer a survey of the diversity of understandings of “Indianness” that characterize contemporary Native American literature. Native American Indian literary study is based on the assumption that such a thing as “Native Americanness” or “Indianness” exists to define the category of literary expression that is the object of study. In this respect, all Native American Indian literary study rightly supports and is consonant with Native claims to sovereignty, self-determination , and self-identity. However, the claim to self-identity, to “Indianness ,” is complicated by the long history of colonial relations that characterizes the contemporary United States. The right to define “Indianness ,” to determine who can speak as a Native American Indian, is a matter of very considerable complexity as a result of centuries of federal U.S. intervention that compromise tribal self-government and the sovereignty of tribal nationhood. How the sovereign claim to determine tribal membership, by defining “Indianness,” affects the practice of literary scholarship and teaching is my subject here. 1 2 Native Authenticity It may seem self-evident that Native American literature is that which is written by Native American authors. However, broad ethnic categories are problematic, and not only in a Native context. Issues of history , the political construction of the category, language, and questions of cultural specificity all come together to make ambiguous the answer to the question of whose work qualifies to be read under particular ethnic tags or banners. As with the category of Asian American writers, the issue of what is being hyphenated with America (and how) is an urgent question for students, scholars, and writers of Native American literature . The seemingly simple assumption that a Native American writer is someone legally defined as a Native American Indian is complicated by the many and highly politicized mechanisms by which that legal definition has been formulated and is applied. A blood quantum of a speci- fied percentage of Native American Indian descent is the criterion most frequently invoked but this is a form of identification formulated and imposed by the U.S. federal government, not a form of self-identification arising out of Native lifeways. Alternative, culturally based forms of tribal identification based on the practicing of traditional lifeways and active engagement in tribal affairs have been adopted by some tribes in place of blood quantum; however, by divorcing tribal identity from issues of tribal blood and genetic inheritance this strategy opens the possibility that an individual who possesses no tribal blood can “become” a Native American Indian. As I will explore in more detail here, Wendy Rose’s critique of “whiteshamanism,” the form of cultural imperialism that appropriates control of Native cultures through the exercise of knowledge as power, brings this problem into sharp relief. We might also think here of the recent controversy concerning the authenticity of Ward Churchill’s “Indianness.” And a useful historical case study of the consequences of divorcing “Indianness” from tribal blood is provided by the experience of the Pueblo people who, as Jana Sequoya-Magdaleno describes, were declared non-Indians by the Supreme Court of New Mexico in 1869 and by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1877 on the grounds that they were: “a peaceable, industrious, intelligent, and honest and virtuous people . . . , Indians only in feature, complexion, and a few of their habits.” However, this legal determination was less in recognition of common humanity than of federal and state economic interests in opening the land to settlement and development under the Homestead Act; for if the Pueblo 3 Introduction were not Indians, then they were not protected by rights of dependency established by John Marshall’s Supreme Court decision (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831). (90) As this example highlights, the ways in which “Indianness,” as tribal affiliation and traditional cultural practices, can be enacted are subject to interventions by the dominant colonizing influence of Euro-America and are historically contingent. Consequently, how “Indianness” is possible changes and is specific to places and moments in the ongoing colonial history of Native North America. One way to avoid the pitfalls of any focus on “Indianness” as a tribal identity has been to refocus on the...