Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans

PREFACE: Tragic wisdom and survivance

The guiding principle of the Native Traces book series is the concept of survivance, developed by Gerald Vizenor and exemplified by Joëlle Rostkowski’s conversations with a series of extraordinary Native Americans. Survivance is not a static object or method but a dynamic condition of historical and cultural survival and also of political resistance: an epistemology, an ontology, and an axiology. Survivance is the continual assertion of nonterritorial Native sovereignty, which the interviewees in this book describe as the condition of their lives as artists, writers, journalists, lawyers, and activists. Survivance, as a structuring epistemological principle, is political, cultural, and aesthetic, a resistance and counterinterpretation that constantly seeks to expose the workings of dominant colonialist ideologies in the production of everyday meanings. Survivance refuses the easy acceptance of the “commonsense” interpretation of the world that supports what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls the “possessive logic” of nation-state sovereignty.1 Vizenor describes this interpretative resistance as the “unsaying ” of the world and the corresponding effort to speak it “otherwise” in Native terms.2 In this way, survivance counters the epistemology of disavowal that characterizes settler relations with Native peoples. Freud’s concept of disavowal names a psychological process of simultaneous acknowledgment and denial, characterized by knowing what is actually the case but behaving as if it were otherwise. Disavowal is a defensive function that allows the rejection of some perception of reality because, if accepted as real, that perception would threaten the integrity of an existing worldview. In the context of U.S. settler colonialism, the history of Native dispossession is both acknowledged and denied, for example, in the official legal doctrines of “discovery” and “conquest” that regulate relations between the federal and tribal governments. XI XI PREFACE Tragic wisdom and survivance DEBORAH L. MADSEN XII CONVERSATIONS WITH REMARKABLE NATIVE AMERICANS Survivance rejects the historical and cultural narratives that deny a Native sense of presence, a presence that preceded and endures despite colonial settlement. These narratives write Native communities into a condition of absence—a disavowed presence —and as perpetual victims lacking individual and communal agency. However, as Gerald Vizenor tells Joëlle Rostkowski in the interview published here, “The character of survivance creates a sense of native presence, a critical, active presence and resistance, over absence, historical and cultural absence, nihility and victimry.” Suzan Harjo expresses a common experience among the interviewees here when she tells how this character of survivance was articulated to her in her childhood by family and teachers who “told me that white people would try to break my spirit, just as they had twisted history. . . . I was always prepared for outsiders to try to make me and our Native peoples into lesser beings, and to resist them and to prevail.” The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is an institution inspired by the sentiment of survivance. Indeed, the permanent exhibits are structured around the central assertion of ongoing Native presence and one of the installations, included in the permanent exhibit Our Lives, prominently displays Vizenor’s definition of survivance. The NMAI presents visitors with a succession of survivance narratives that, like the stories told in the conversations presented here, testify to the falsity of dominant narratives that emphasize Native victimry and absence. As Richard West, the founding director of the NMAI, remarks in his interview, “We conceived a museum that was to become not only a cultural space but also a community center . To the consternation of some people it has asserted its difference, its specificity as a civic space where one is confronted not only with native objects but also with the native experience.” This Native experience—this Native epistemology or worldview —is inseparable from the objects that constitute the museum’s collection. West explains that “Objects tell a story. They have a language. To interpret the objects, you need to know the history of the communities and the meaning of the ceremonies . They sometimes have a spiritual dimension that exceeds their aesthetic value.” This recognition of the epistemological power of survivance, enacted in the mission and structure of the NMAI, makes of the museum what West calls “a safe place for unsafe ideas”: a place where “Native peoples can interpret their cultural inheritance and contemporary lives.” The bringing of a living Native cultural inheritance into the contemporary moment is a key survivance move. Emil Her Many Horses describes, from his perspective as a permanent curator at the NMAI, the practical challenges and efforts to develop the inaugural...