Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature (review)

"The use of textual analysis," Christopher Teuton writes, "has a historical precedent in the Cherokee Nation as a crucial tool of decolonization" (192). In Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature, Teuton continues, sustains, and transforms the precedents set by his tribe's history of innovators, such as Sequoyah, the nineteenth-century inventor of the Cherokee syllabary. In tune with a growing body of recent work on the history of media, identity, and politics in Indian country—by scholars like Lisa Brooks, Phillip Round, Scott Richard Lyons, and the writers of Reasoning Together, of which Teuton was one—Teuton expands the very categories we use to think about expression. The privileging of Western textuality as part of European expansion's conceptual and practical arsenal took a complex turn with the rise of American Indian writers, who brought far more than just orality to the scene. In making his case, Teuton moves elegantly between his tribal background and a multitribal approach that makes a convincing claim for rethinking the role of media in arguments about indigenous literary studies—indeed, in literary studies across the board.

In a clear and compact summary of the longstanding dialogue surrounding orality and literacy, Teuton's first chapter reveals that dialogue's Western bias. He then warns that, even with the best of intentions, scholars of American Indian literature often propagate this colonial agenda by privileging oral tradition instead of challenging the binary's validity. Deep Waters replaces the oral-literate binary with the model of a textual continuum. Oral and graphic impulses—tendencies to use one or another medium to some cultural or political end—balance each other through an interpretive power Teuton names the critical impulse. Teuton purposefully defines these three interdependent terms broadly rather than mechanistically. The oral impulse indicates "sound-based forms of communication," while the graphic impulse—a crucial, fertile move beyond the problematic term "literate"—is exhibited in the "permanent recording of cultural knowledge in formats that will allow for recollection and study" (31). The critical impulse balances and mediates these two impulses, disrupting and questioning the authority of both oral and graphic forms, ensuring that Native communities remain flexible and attentive to reciprocity.

The four analytical chapters of Deep Waters offer examples of the critical impulse emerging from American Indian literary engagements with the problems of the oral-graphic binary. It is a strength that the four authors examined come from different tribes and range from the well established to the almost unstudied. In each chapter, Teuton uses techniques from textual studies and the history of the book, from comparing different editions of the texts to conducting a readership survey among Cherokees to gauge their literary reading habits. In the changing lives of books, in the way writers, publishers, and readers revise and reframe them, is a key to strengthening "the critical impulse and the community's ability to create and account for both tradition and the need to adapt to a changing world" (153).

In his analysis of N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain, Teuton foregrounds the narrator's struggle to reclaim a Kiowa identity in the twentieth century. Although the oral-literate binary at first drives the narrator's fatalistic mindset about Kiowa culture, Teuton argues that the book's multivocal structure works against these static constructions of culture, pushing the reader toward an awareness of the constitutively emergent Kiowa worldview. For Teuton, what Momaday terms the mythic, historical, and immediate voices of The Way to Rainy Mountain are a fundamental formal structure, embodying the critical impulse by relying on the reader's interpretation to reconcile the graphic and oral impulses of history and myth. This marriage of formal and media analyses is compelling, although Teuton's argument that the narrator evinces a colonial perspective for the benefit of an interpretative reader breezes too quickly over Momaday's modernism, with its emphasis on individual isolation.

Turning to Anishinaabe writer Gerald...