Abstract
When considered as a complex and often contradictory inheritance, at once antiquated and vivid in remembered stories, the indigenous experience of Anglo-European nationality presents a violent and historical proximity. The very imposition of a foreign nationality onto indigenous communities implies an original implausibility that for some American Indians and Native Canadians has over time become something powerfully worth believing in. Yet by remaining only strategically or “temporarily” visible within settler-colonial nations, indigenous subjects—whether full-blood or mixedblood, whether sovereign or disenfranchised, whether reservation- or reserve-situated or urban-based—have in recent years succeeded in walking all the way through the apparent and uneven contradictions of an alien nationality to the other side where freestanding sovereignty awaits. In fact, indigenous sovereignty never departed.1
The basic task that remains after three or four centuries of contact between Indians and whites is still the construction of a bridge of understanding between two worlds that exist as separate realities.
—Harold Cardinal, “A Canadian What the Hell It’s All About”
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Notes
Vine Deloria, Jr. chooses the same figure of speech when describing the persistence of traditional indigenous worldviews beyond the Anglo-European context: “this system has pulled Indians into the Western worldview, and some of the brighter ones are now emerging on the other side, having traversed the Western body of knowledge completely.” See Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat, Power and Place: Indian Education in America (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2004), 133. The term “temporary visibility” is Robert Warrior’s. See his “‘Temporary Visibility’: Deloria on Sovereignty and AIM,” Native American Perspectives on Literature and History, ed. Alan R. Velie (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1994).
Harold Cardinal, “A Canadian What the Hell It’s All About,” in An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, ed. Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998), 215. Original emphasis.
See Craig Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5. Womack and I may disagree on the extent to which, at least in the English language, indigenous literary sovereignty is necessarily separatist. We may well agree, however, that the sovereign politics of contemporary indigenous literature, including Womack’s own groundbreaking Drowning in Fire (2001), cannot be dismissed as such on merely “literary” grounds.
See Chadwick Allen, Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002). By reading Maori treaty discourse alongside activist American Indian literary texts, Allen links different contemporary sovereignty struggles to a shared narrative practice. By embracing a “complex” of “blood/ land/memory” local indigenous literatures can textualize (and monumentalize thereby) specific historical moments accessible to other sovereigns beyond the local. Even more provocative and interesting is the putative claim underlying Allen’s comparative claim: any text, like treaties themselves, may encode sovereign assertions.
Michelle Raheja, “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner),” American Quarterly 59.4 (2007): 1163.
See Charles F. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: Norton, 2005).
Duane Champagne and Jay Stauss, “Introduction: Defining Indian Studies through Stories and Nation Building,” in Native American Studies in Higher Education: Models for Collaboration between Universities and Indigenous Nations, ed. Duane Champagne and Jay Stauss (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2002), 10.
Ramona Ellen Skinner, Alaska Native Policy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Garland, 1997), 70.
See also Vine Deloria, Jr. and David E. Wilkins, Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1999).
See Simon J. Ortiz, “Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism,” in Nothing But the Truth: An Anthology of Native American Literature, ed. John Purdy and James Ruppert (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2001), 122.
For recent, quality treatments of nineteenth-century translations of sover-eign discourse into English, see Robert Warrior, The People and the Word (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005);
Maureen Konkle, Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2004); and
Cheryl Walker, Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1997). The turn toward writing Warrior, Konkle, and Walker (among others) have documented is itself a very significant development when meeting the subsequent “acid test” of verifiable sovereignty imposed by settler colonialists.
Donald L. Fixico, “Ethics and Responsibilities in Writing American Indian History,” in Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians, ed. Devon A. Mihesuah (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998), 96n4.
See Catherine Rainwater, Dreams Like Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 36.
See Stephen May, Indigenous Community-Based Education (Clevedon, Eng.: Multilingual Matters, 1999).
Thomas King, Introduction. All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), x–xi.
Duane Champagne and Carol Goldberg, “Changing the Subject: Individual versus Collective Interests in Indian Country Research,” Wicazo Sa Review 20.1 (2005): 59–60.
As a cipher for indigenous struggle and resistance arising in a multiplicity of forms and contingencies, the English word “nation,” like the “ethnic Indian” formerly, continues to structure emergent oppositional cultures. See Jeffery R. Hanson, “Ethnicity and the Looking Glass,” American Indian Quarterly 21.2 (1997): 195–208. Deloria, Jr. and Lytle confirm that the “ethnic Indian” movement of the 1970s was politically expedient and “certainly an invention of the tribal [traditional] Indians” who sought to further specific treaty rights under the guise of “Indian activism.”
Vine Deloria, Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1984), 235.
In separate literary works, Janet Campbell Hale and Jeannette Armstrong reference the significance of the Jay Treaty to the principle of inalienable tribal sovereignty beyond specific national contexts, including the proliferation of experiences that indigenous identities encompass as North Americans. See Hale, Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1993), 52–53; and
Armstrong, Slash (Penticton, BC: Theytus, 1996), 243–45.
See Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1982), 27. Drawing from her research of the SAI, Hertzberg reminds us that the roots of “pan-Indian” political movements at the beginning of the twentieth century, while assimilationist and gradualist, were secular as well as religious (Christian) and engendered a high degree of sophistication among indigenous actors and stake-holders no longer defined negatively, as “neither citizens nor foreigners” (78).
Arnold Krupat, Red Matters: Native American Studies (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 111.
Robert Warrior, “Native American Critical Responses to Transnational Discourse,” PMLA 122.3 (2007): 808. For a concise rendering of the tensions, implicit and explicit, between these two scholars’ formulations, see
Matt Herman, “The Krupat-Warrior Debate: A Preliminary Account,” Disability Studies and Indigenous Studies, ed. James Gifford and Gabrielle Zezulka-Mailloux (Edmonton, AB: CRC Humanities Studio, 2003), 60–65.
See Brennan, “Introduction,” When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: African-Native American Literature (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003), 40–41; and
Jonathan Brennan ed. Mixed Race Literature (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 20–22.
The proliferation of blood discourses compounded the already bewildering mix of bureaucratic structures designed to administer them. Of the rollout of the IRA in Lakota country, Akim D. Reinhardt writes: “The next step was to supplant the old Oglala Council with the new Oglala Sioux Tribal Council. The new council would prove to be an odd blend of parliamentary, corporate, and republican structures that were foreign to both the Lakota people and the American form of government it was supposedly emulating.” See “A Crude Replacement: The Indian New Deal, Indirect Colonialism, and Pine Ridge Reservation,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6.1 (2005). For the origins of Canadian legislation enforcing blood quantum (as a “status” entitlement) and its impact on contemporary Native Canadian communities distinct from blood quantum policies operating in the United States, see Bonita Lawrence, “Gender, Race, and the Regulation of Native Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview,” Hypatia 18.2 (2003): 3–31.
Berkhofer Jr. writes: “To the extent that. .. discrimination and oppression produced indigenismo, Red Power, or another political movement, then Native American leaders in a sense have given a political reality to the original White image of the Indian as a separate but single collectivity.” See Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage-Random, 1978), 195.
Vine Deloria, Jr. “Foreword,” in Genocide of the Mind, ed. MariJo Moore (New York: Thunder’s Mouth/Nation, 2003), xiii–xiv.
For an insightful argument asserting the continued relevance of Louis Riel’s legacy to contemporary theorizations of Canadian pluralism in the as yet colonial context, see Ian Angus, “Louis Riel and English-Canadian Political Thought,” University of Toronto Quarterly 74.4 (2005): 884–94.
Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1973).
See Joe Sawchuk, “Negotiating an Identity: Métis Political Organizations, the Canadian Government, and Competing Concepts of Aboriginality,” American Indian Quarterly 25.1 (2001): 74.
John Collier, Indians of the Americas: The Long Hope (New York: Mentor/ New American Library, 1947), 15.
Christopher Fritz Roth, “Without Treaty, without Conquest: Indigenous Sovereignty in Post-Delgamuukw British Columbia,” Wicazo Sa Review 17.2 (Fall 2002): 143. The 1997 Delgamuukw ruling seeks to bring British Columbia into line with all other Canadian provinces by closing off its status as a colonial-era “anomaly.” Portions of present-day Northern Alberta excepted, B.C. was the only part of colonized Canada not to have negotiated treaty settlements with indigenous nations.
Evelina Zuni Lucero, “On the Tip of My Tongue: An Autobiographical Essay,” in Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, ed. Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 250.
Lisa Lowe, “The Power of Culture,” in the Journal of Asian American Studies 1.1 (1998): 17–18.
Thomas King, A Short History of Indians in Canada (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2005), 110–11.
Paula Gunn Allen, “Confluence of an Autobiography,” in I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays By Native American Writers, ed. Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1987), 145.
Ignatia Broker, Night Flying Woman: An Ojibway Narrative (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1983), 7.
Thomas G. Colonnese, “Indian Summer,” Wicazo Sa Review 16.2 (2001): 17.
Recently, many indigenous scholars and sovereign stakeholders have distanced themselves from Anglo-European literary criticism generally, citing bad faith, the privileging of fiction over nonfiction, ignorance, outright racism, and most notably, the disturbing misappropriation of indigenous being, properties, and life-ways to fraudulent purposes in a “poacher” or “squatter” discourse having little to do with the indigenous material world. See Devon A. Mihesuah, “Finding Empowerment through Writing and Reading, or Why Am I Doing This?: An Unpopular Writer’s Comments about the State of American Indian Literary Criticism,” American Indian Quarterly 28.1&2 (2004): 97–102; and
Daniel H. Justice, “We’re Not There Yet Kemo-Sabe: Positing a Future for American Indian Literary Studies,” American Indian Quarterly 25.2 (2001): 256–69.
See Jace Weaver, “More Light than Heat: The Current State of Native American Studies,” American Indian Quarterly 27.2 (2007): 236–37.
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© 2009 Stuart Christie
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Christie, S. (2009). Introduction. In: Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230620759_1
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