Writing Home: Indigenous Narratives of Resistance (review)

In Writing Home: Indigenous Narratives of Resistance, Michael Wilson examines Native American narratives as vehicles of community resistance and sites of decolonizing efforts. Grounding his study in a wide-ranging knowledge of global indigenous and postcolonial criticism, Wilson’s monograph provides new insight into novels by N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, Christine Quintasket, Gerald Vizenor, Louise Erdrich, and Ray Young Bear. Wilson begins Writing Home by contrasting the authors he will discuss with writers such as William Warren, George Copway, Elias Johnson, Pauline Johnson, and Charles Eastman, who “challenge the institutions that attempt to erase indigenous peoples from the landscape of America, [but] do not challenge the institutional language and forms” (x). At the core of Wilson’s argument is the belief that the medium of exchange (or genre) that authors use is hardly neutral and may “express a hierarchical relationship between Christian religions and indigenous beliefs and practices” (x); in fact, Wilson argues that “form greatly determines content” (xi). Wilson chooses the writers whose work he examines based upon their use of oral traditions as a strategy to resist narratives of indigenous disappearance; yet, he is clear that he wants to avoid what David Treuer terms “textual necrophilia,” the glossing of oral traditional or cultural elements in Native American works as signifiers of authenticity. Thus, Wilson seeks out texts in which Native American authors use oral traditional genres to inform and shape the trajectory of the text itself, not merely to perform as signs of authentic Indianness.

One of Wilson’s critical measures for indigenous literature is based upon Frantz Fanon’s division of colonial literatures into three stages: the first, or capitulative stage, in which indigenous authors write in European forms; the second stage, or literary ethnological stage, in which indigenous authors separate from their communities and recall their previous lives from a distance; and the third, or “fighting,” stage, in which indigenous authors incite their communities to liberate themselves. Ultimately, the writers Wilson identifies “create from a history of tragedy and ruin works of literature that stand as testaments to the continued existence and power of Native thought in our lives and in our dreams” (xxiv). Wilson’s investment in indigenous epistemology is clear and cogent, as shown in this assertion.

In the initial chapter, Wilson considers the idea of the center and cultural appropriation in Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, using Simon Ortiz and Leslie Silko’s nonfiction essays on the oral tradition and appropriation of non-Indian elements as the basis for reading this novel. In contrast to Arnold Krupat, Wilson finds that The Way to Rainy Mountain is indigenous in its positing of a unitary, not monologic, voice of the Kiowa people. While Krupat faults Momaday for subsuming ethnologies by James Mooney and George Catlin into this narrative, Wilson contends that Momaday’s goal in incorporating the ethnographic record is the creation and examination of “the relationships among more or less sovereign, interdependent discursive groups” (17). In Wilson’s view, Momaday does not deny dialogism; instead, he creates a unified voice in the service of Kiowa sovereign voices.

In the second chapter, Wilson illuminates the role of oral tradition in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, which he views as successful in the integration of modernist and Pueblo oral traditional strategies. Simultaneously, Wilson argues that the novel’s investment in modernist conventions ensures its conclusion in peace, when, in fact, the demands of realizing sovereign status necessitate struggle and possibly war. Ultimately, however, Wilson concludes that “in Ceremony . . . the oral tradition is not a metaphoric sign, or even a unitary sign for authenticity or truth, but is instead the possibility of truth itself, the possibility of a future for indigenous peoples” (41). Thus, Silko’s incorporation of Laguna Pueblo oral traditions into the novel revises its form to some degree and performs tribal knowledge in vivifying, not reifying, ways.

The focus of the third chapter is delineating ethical parameters for the use of the oral tradition in contemporary literature. In this essay, Wilson addresses the...