Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature (review)

Over the past fifteen years, the work of Craig Womack, Robert Warrior, and Jace Weaver, individually and collectively, has made sovereignty the operative term for the critique of American Indian literatures, extending the political implications of the term to encompass tribally specific intellectual traditions. Their work provides the theoretical frame for Stuart Christie’s Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature, but Christie gives tribal affiliation equal status with US, Canadian, or dual citizenship as simultaneously lived realities for tribal sovereigns, who, he contends, selectively deploy the sovereign behaviors appropriate to a given political, cultural, or social situation.

Christie seeks to demonstrate his thesis through a spectrum of novels published largely in the 1990s. He begins with the denial of plural sovereignties as a threat to indigenous essence in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) and ends with its daily practice by the Blackfeet of Thomas King’s Truth and Bright Water (1999), who move freely, though not easily, across the border between town and reserve as dual US-Canadian citizens. Christie’s digest of Canadian history and law, indeed, is one of the most valuable aspects of this text. Although he touches on the issue of land claims, notably in his discussion of Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991), the political aspects of sovereignty, including the development of tribal casinos, are generally less important to Christie than what Warrior has termed intellectual sovereignty. Central to the practice of plural sovereignties is the strategic use of language, indigenous or English—Christie explicitly excludes French and Spanish—or some combination of both. Knowledge can thus be selectively shared with those who have an appropriate epistemological frame for understanding.

Interestingly, Christie begins his exploration of the successful exercise of plural sovereignties with two transnational historical novels set prior to the conferral of national citizenship upon tribal sovereigns. He reads both James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000) and Leslie Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999) as captivity narratives in which “[c]atastrophic engagements with [Anglo-European] nationalism … bring about the reinvention of plural sovereignties beyond indigenous homelands” (76). However, a novel less well-known to US readers offers the clearest example of the sovereigntist vision, according to Christie. Only when the title character of Jeanette Armstrong’s Slash (1985) gives up on pan-Indian militancy and returns to a traditional life on the Okanagan reserve does he find the freedom he has sought for so long.

Just such a return becomes the basis for the chapter devoted to Louis Owens’s Dark River (1998): Vietnam legend Jake Nashoba’s death finally facilitates his body’s return home to his Choctaw relatives from a self-imposed exile that began, ostensibly, after his army discharge. That Jake’s “spiritual rebirth” is presented as the promise of a sovereign future seems too easy, for Christie totally ignores the plurally sovereign present (171). In the fictional Black Mountain Apache community where Jake has made his home for twenty years, casino capitalism actively contends with traditional Apache reciprocity, and readopting the old way of life almost becomes the newest venture in capitalism.