Introduction: Assessing and Advancing Tribalography

Many sail readers will already be familiar with the contributions that Choctaw author, filmmaker, mentor, teacher, playwright, world traveler, and performer LeAnne Howe has made to the interdisciplinary field addressed by the journal and fostered by the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. A finalist for the Prix Médicis étranger and recipient of the American Book Award, multiple Wordcraft Circle book awards, the Oklahoma Book Award, the Wordcraft Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and several prestigious residences and fellowships, Howe is the deserving subject of respect and renown within and well beyond academe. The contributions that constitute this special issue suggest that here—within the pages of sail—and now—the heart of the early twenty-first century—is an opportune spacetime to think creatively and critically about, through, with, and even against one of Howe’s cornerstone critical contributions: tribalography.

In a 1999 article titled “Tribalography: The Power of Native Stories” published in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Howe writes, “Native people create narratives that [are] histories and stories with the power to transform. I call this rhetorical space ‘tribalography’” (118). Even while understanding tribalography in differing ways and emphasizing various potential trajectories for the concept, contributors to this issue collectively recognize the transformative power of Native story, rhetoric, and performance that tribalography illuminates, describes, and engenders. They also have sought subtly to weave their individual offerings together pursuant to the processual core of tribalography. As Howe explains in her 2002 essay “The Story of America: A Tribalography”: “tribalography comes from the native propensity for bringing things together, for making consensus, and for symbiotically connecting one thing to another” (42). Tribalography, then, denotes a dynamic process through which the apparent chaos of contradiction and multiplicity is navigated and reconfigured.

Whether emphasized in relation to its textual, pedagogical, theoretical, methodological, or generative contours, tribalography evokes a long-standing and enduring tradition of transformative literary and intellectual practice while also emerging as a new critical lens capable of illuminating a wide array of issues within and across Native American and Indigenous studies. While the term is a recent contribution to critical discourse, the sophisticated and multifaceted characteristics of tribalography have long been prevalent in American Indian literatures. In each of her discussions of tribalography, Howe gestures toward the consistent tendency of Native writers to eschew fealty to any particular form or genre, even while making deliberate rhetorical use of formal structures and generic conventions. She points to the Haudenosaunee Condolence Ceremony, Irvin Morris’s From the Glittering World, and Susan Power’s The Grass Dancer as archetypal models of tribalography. N. Scott Momaday’s masterwork The Way to Rainy Mountain is also a readily apparent example, explicitly presenting itself as a multivocal, auto/biographical, oral, and archival constellation of narrative symbiosis. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller is another tribalographic narration of family, tribe, place, and cosmos by way of interwoven image, verse, and diverse prose. Landmark texts of nineteenth-century American Indian literature also exhibit the markers of tribalography. Black Hawk’s Autobiography, John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, and S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema variously intertwine family and tribal (hi)stories, conventions of sensation and sentiment, and the layering of narrative intimacy and distance in order to represent and comment upon (with partisan interests) their contexts. Because Howe’s concept of tribalography arises from her own observant and descriptive readings of both the canons and fringes of American Indian literary and intellectual traditions, its relevance and resonance stretch widely across time and space. Tribalography thus gifts us with innovative and exceptionally productive ways to encounter and understand Native story, writing, and performance of the entangled past, present, and future. It also calls us forth to contribute to its ongoing development.

The seeds that at long last have grown into this special issue first found good soil during a session on tribalography convened during the 2009 Native American Literature Symposium (nals). Participants worked toward accounts of tribalography as a critical, methodological, pedagogical, and theoretical framework, asking what the concept of tribalography is, what its limitations are, and what...