"Then One Day We Create Something Unexpected": Tribalography's Decolonizing Strategies in LeAnne Howe's Evidence of Red

Much of the recent, growing acclaim for the work of Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe concerns her first and second novels, Shell Shaker (2001) and Miko Kings (2006).¹ Her mixed genre volume, Evidence of Red (2005, henceforth, Evidence) has, by contrast, received relatively less attention. Evidence puts into practice the theory that Howe developed in her two earlier, influential essays, "Tribalography: The Power of Native Stories" and "The Story of America: A Tribalography." Those essays in conjunction with Evidence reflect Howe's experience in her "storyweaving" collaborations with members of the Spiderwoman Theater, which built from the reciprocal relation of performers and audience (Stanlake, Native American 7, 25, 201-10).² In Evidence as in Howe's essays on tribalography, a mixture of lyric, reflective, and narrative prose appear. While Evidence includes substantial passages of dramatic dialogues and monologues, Howe's essays contain explicit theorizing about storytelling as transformational, arising from collective and reciprocal processes and identities: "Creation stories, as numerous as Indian tribes, gave birth to [Native] people" ("Tribalography" 118). The substantial shifts in time that characterize the narratives in Evidence and her two novels correspond to a goal that Howe announces in her essays: storytelling should establish and reflect the "past, present and future milieu" of native epistemologies (118).

Howe's theories of storytelling in her essays, which she puts into practice in Evidence and in her novels, aim toward decolonization as part of longer-term strategies of Indigenous survivance. Such decolonization, whether brought through reading or performance, is a primarily psychological process with political aspects in which individuals and the members of groups learn to recognize and reject colonial oppression. In the dramatic storyweaving of tribalography as in Evidence, the prospect of decolonization arises from the text's pointing to and poking fun at habits of thought, speech, and self-perception that reflect the warped, inadequate, and dangerous views of the colonizer. This aspect of Evidence represents a continuation of the dramatic skills that the two "Tribalography" essays suggest, as Evidence employs parodic mimicry to set the processes of mental decolonization in motion. Storyweaving then seeks to replace the damaging falsehoods of colonialism by representing an alternative, showing how traditional forms of knowledge are available in the present day. Howe's representations of traditional knowledge as alternatives traverse wide swathes of time. She draws positive attention to decolonization by setting traditional stories and knowledge in startling but relevant contemporary contexts, moving across time and space. In Evidence, for example, the Choctaw speaker's travel and interactions with Palestinians, Syrians, and Jews in the Middle East, brief sojourns in Europe, and locations across the US West show how decolonization arises from personal interactions and presents the possibility of alternative pacts or alliances, corresponding to what Howe has written elsewhere of Choctaw traditions of diplomacy. Still another aspect of decolonization, linguistic revitalization, is manifest in the Choctaw phrases followed by semantic explanations that Howe employs throughout her work. Still another aspect of decolonization that's been particularly influential in Howe's tribalography, practiced in Evidence, is the self-referential and parodic use of photography, which is yet another technique for juxtaposing past and present.³ All of these aspects of decolonization and Indigenous survivance involve one-on-one interaction and performance.

The work of Acoma writer Simon Ortiz shapes Howe's interest in decolonization as she opens her two tribalography essays with quotes from Ortiz's volume Going for Rain. Her work with drama is congruent with Ortiz's observations about the resilience of Indigenous peoples, who have subsumed and appropriated European culture and religion "in their own—Indian—terms," using "prayer, song, drama-ritual, narrative or story-telling" as tribes have "creatively responded to forced colonization" ("Toward" 8, 9-10).⁴ Ortiz regards such cultural creativity as part of on-going resistance to colonialism ("Toward" 10). Ortiz's observations correspond to the performance situation of the storyteller that Craig Womack (Creek-Cherokee), another writer with a clear affinity for Howe, observes in stating that "Indian people speak for themselves . . . [End...