Expanding Tribal Identities and Sovereignty through LeAnne Howe’s “Tribalography”

In her nonfiction essay “The Story of America,” LeAnne Howe describes her concept of “tribalography” as constructing a reality through storytelling that helps to “create a people” and “author tribes” by making explicit “unending connections to past, present, and future” (29, 47).¹ To create an authorizing literary space that acknowledges the connections among multiple times, Native writers utilize a storytelling tradition that accomplishes two interrelated functions, “integrating oral traditions, histories, and experiences into narratives and expanding our identities” (46, my emphasis). Critics who write about tribalography often focus on its first function—“integrating oral traditions, [and] histories”—by exploring the ways that storytelling intersects with and accesses the past.² While this usefully broadens our understanding of the way the literary relates to the historical, this critical approach ignores the second interrelated function of tribalography—the way Native stories are used to “create” and “expand” individual and tribal identities. Tribalography asserts that in order to develop, Native identities must create and encounter stories combining oral storytelling and written history, personal experiences and tribal narratives. I hope to draw attention to this critically neglected aspect of tribalography; I believe a greater understanding of the development of Native identities, and the way they are expanded through storytelling, might better serve tribal interests. According to Howe, “expanding our identities” involves not only negotiating the past but also integrating Natives’ present and historical experiences with other peoples; she asserts, “tribalography is a story that links Indians and non-Indians” (46). Therefore, a fuller understanding of tribalography has larger implications for interactions not only across time but also across cultures. This essay seeks to demonstrate how Howe’s writing, especially her novel Miko Kings, provides a model for thinking through tribalography’s relationship to identity, cultural difference, and contemporary Native political praxis.

LeAnne Howe’s writing often explores how historic and contemporary cross-cultural interactions support Choctaw understandings of tribal sovereignty and identity. Her first novel, Shell Shaker (2001), recounts how the Choctaw Nation, and other Native nations, were set against each other in the early colonial period by their European allies, leading to the first Choctaw Civil War in 1747. Rather than focusing solely on the negative effects of colonialism, the novel also points out the positive relations the Choctaws had with their European allies, especially the French, and how these relations affect present-day Choctaws. Contemplating the Choctaw Nation’s historic relations with France, one of the main characters, Adair, notes, “If the Choctaws got mixed up in a war they could rely on their trading partners for support. Just like England and America do today” (42). Adair and other characters in Shell Shaker use the Choctaw tradition of alliance making to understand how their own lives relate to their tribe’s ongoing national sovereignty. Adair, a contemporary stockbroker, “tells herself she’s following a tradition established by her ancestors” (42). Knowledge of the complex diplomatic and trade networks created by her ancestors is portrayed as essential to Adair’s and other present-day Choctaws’ ability to create strong identities, and these identities are portrayed as necessarily intertribal and international.

The Choctaw Nation’s history of diplomacy and alliance is recounted in Howe’s writing to better support contemporary Choctaws’ individual and tribal identities. In her 2010 interview with Kirstin Squint, Howe states, “what I think is most important” about Shell Shaker is its portrayal of how “very ancient communities had vibrant intertribal relationships” with “hundreds” of different tribal and linguistic communities, including settler communities (Squint 215). Admitting that these historic negotiations and affiliations “[weren’t] a paradise; it was fraught with many tensions,” Howe nevertheless asserts the necessity of “uniting, not dividing” (216). Howe claims that knowing stories of both historic trauma and affiliation is essential to tribal identity; she declares, “through the chain of stories we are able to grow stronger” and “bring more of the past back into existence” (218). Howe suggests a dynamic notion of tribal identity here, one that refuses a static identification as solely colonized “victim” and instead “grow[s] stronger” by not only recounting past stories...