Narratives of Place in Literature and Film

Steven Allen, Kirsten Møllegaard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351013819
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Narratives of place link people and geographic location with a cultural imaginary through literature and visual narration. Contemporary literature and film often frame narratives with specific geographic locations, which saturate the narrative with cultural meanings in relation to natural and man-made landscapes. This interdisciplinary collection seeks to interrogate such connections to probe how place is narrativized in literature and film. Utilizing close readings of specific filmic and literary texts, all chapters serve to tease out cultural and historical meanings in respect of human engagement with landscapes. Always mindful of national, cultural and topographical specificity, the book is structured around five core themes: Contested Histories of Place; Environmental Landscapes; Cityscapes; The Social Construction of Place; and Landscapes of Belonging.

Part I
Contested Histories of Place: Colonialism, Indigeneity, and Marginalization

Introduction

Steven Allen and Kirsten Møllegaard

Colonialism and postcolonialism are important discourses in considering how indigeneity is defined and performed historically and in contemporary societies. In a Eurocentric worldview, cultural identity and political sovereignty are often assumed to be directly associated with territorial occupancy. Permanent human settlement is a key concept in a Eurocentric understanding of territorial sovereignty to the effect that the absence of permanent settlement gives rise to the concept of terra nullius, or empty land. However, nomadic peoples experience landscapes from other perspectives, and their perceptions of the land’s resources have historically led to clashes with settlers and challenges to the concept of individual landownership. In the case of vast global empires like the British, the local history of one ethnic group’s colonization of another group may be subsumed, or silenced, under the cloak of colonial administration. Part I includes three examples of how colonial displacement leads to altered perceptions of land and place, including the renaming of geographical locations.

In the settler colonization of North America, American Indian peoples were forced to give up their traditional territories. In many cases, tribes were already decimated by introduced diseases. There was loss of access to resources, and due to military campaigns tribes ended up on reservations without the natural resources to sustain their cultural practices. Danica Sterud Miller’s chapter “Constructing Sovereignties in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” compares the ways that two award-winning Native American authors portray Indianness in the context of reservation life. Miller’s analysis reveals important perspectives on the perception of place in two distinct Native American cultures. Miller, a Puyallup tribal member, situates her analysis in relation to the formulations of colonialism, which are at the heart of tribal status in the United States. Given the challenges in defining American Indian sovereignty outside of a federal rubric and the difficulties in articulating self-determination as an assertion of contemporary and future cultural practices, her chapter illustrates how Alexie and Silko reconfigure sovereignty within their unique tribal forms, and position distinct land-based relationships. Miller explores how tribal homelands and displacement to Indian reservations may simultaneously interrupt and perpetuate American Indians’ ancestral, spiritual relationship to places and lead to cultural annihilation due to the continual trauma of contemporary and historical colonialism.

Also on the topic of settler colonialism, Daniel Andersson’s chapter “Colonial and Indigenous Movements Towards and Through the Landscapes of Swedish Lapland in the Journals of Petrus Læstadius” focuses on internal settler colonization in the western parts of Northern Sweden. Between 1750 and 1873, the national government encouraged citizens from other parts of Sweden to establish small-scale agricultural settlements on the land that the indigenous Sami used for hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding. Lapland, or Sápmi, stretches from the Arctic regions of Norway, Sweden, and Finland across to the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The Sami people, who are indigenous to this vast area, have historically been pressured further and further away from territories they claim as their ancestral homelands. Through a critical reading of two journals written by the young missionary priest of local Sami origin, Petrus Læstadius, and published in 1828 and 1833, Andersson examines how colonization changed the demographics of the area and gradually led to the loss of land rights for the Sami people. In colonial narratives, place is always a sociopolitical construction that typically perceives of nature as the opposite of culture, and hence posits the people living in “nature” as less civilized and less deserving of territorial rights in comparison to the settler colonizers who cultivate the soil and believe in a Christian world order. Andersson discusses how ideas about place, nature, and culture are embedded in Læstadius’ journals. Significantly, Andersson demonstrates how Læstadius, despite his Christian devotion and absorption in the ideological discourses of his time, straddled two cultures and often vacillated between indigenous and scientific epistemologies. Andersson explores these ambiguities, which he identifies as perpetuated in contemporary discourses surrounding placemaking processes in Northern Sweden.

In India, the ghosts of British colonialism continue to haunt lived experience as well as the literary imagination. Aparajita Nanda’s chapter “Geographies of Marginalization and Identity Politics in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss” analyzes how the colonial landscape leaves its mark on human identity. Desai’s 2006 novel chronicles the tension between settler and native culture and the resulting cultural schizophrenia. In her analysis, Nanda foregrounds ways of seeing as ways of remembering because memories are embedded in landscapes, place names, and personal histories within the overall frame of the nation-state. Nanda argues that Desai takes the “scape” (view) of India as a psychological map built upon the country’s colonial history of loss and fracture, with the novel’s protagonist losing his sense of belonging and having only memories of “inherited loss” as suggested in the novel’s title. Nanda situates her analysis with the greater colonial geopolitics of space, specifically by tracing the effects of the 1947 Indian partition in the multiethnic area of Darjeeling, a district situated in the Himalayan foothills, and connects the partition’s aftereffects to the Gorkha National Liberation Front movement of the 1980s, which sought to establish an autonomous Nepali-speaking Ghorkaland. Nanda examines the contributions to memory, marginalization, and sense of loss in relation to features of the geographic environment, local myths, and colonial history. In this analysis, she discusses how “space” creates social exclusion of colonized people that cuts across class, age, even generational divides. As an example of postcolonial literature, Desai’s novel traces how cultural meanings animate and agitate the production of space, create social difference, and fuel nationalist rhetoric.

This section on contested histories of place offers indigenous and settler perspectives on local histories and memories of place that ultimately connect to global historical experiences: colonialism and the loss of land and cultural sovereignty to Euro-American powers.

1 Constructing Sovereignties in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Danica Sterud Miller (Puyallup Tribe of Indians)

American Indian tribal communities and their relationship to place are traditionally a spiritual practice, but under the auspices of settler colonialism, literal and figurative place becomes sites of trauma.¹ How to negotiate these seemingly contradictory, yet coexisting experiences – ancestral devotion to place concurrent with displacement to reservations – preoccupies two of the most well-read American Indian novels, Leslie Marmon Silko’s (Laguna)² Ceremony (1977) and Sherman Alexie’s (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene)³ The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007).⁴ Despite the popularity of both Ceremony and Absolutely True Diary, surprisingly no critical work has compared the two texts; however, they have enough overt similarities that a close reading between the two novels suggests not only that Absolutely True Diary is inspired by Ceremony but also that Absolutely True Diary participates within a similar self-determination dialogue that Ceremony supports. Silko’s novel suggests that indigenous communities have spiritual strength resulting from their connection to ancestral place, but the consequences of that insularity, Alexie argues, are indigenous annihilation. Ceremony extends a historical definition of indigeneity by a return to a land-based epistemology; Absolutely True Diary, conversely, redefines indigeneity as inherently nomadic. Using formulations of settler colonialism and tribal status, defining sovereignty outside of a United States federal rubric, and asserting self-determination as an indigenous practice, I will illustrate how Alexie and Silko construct sovereignty within their unique indigenous communities. Ceremony argues that an ancestral land-based epistemology is inherent to indigenous identity. Despite Alexie’s respectful debt to Silko’s work, he radically departs from her assessment by redefining indigeneity as the freedom to have relationships with multiple land locations. In Absolutely True Diary, to be indigenous is to be sovereign of the land, as opposed to practicing sovereignty only within a designated place. Place, then, in Alexie’s work, becomes a spiritual relation to indigenous sovereignty outside the constructs of settler colonial land commodification.

Both novels interrogate what it means to be American Indian in relation to place and community. Much like Ceremony is about a half-blood Laguna Indian struggling to understand his relationship to his people, Absolutely True Diary concerns a young Spokane Indian, Arnold “Junior” Spirit, regarded by his tribal community, as the title suggests, as a “part-time Indian” because he attends an entirely white, off-reservation school. The novel is a fictionalized account of Alexie’s own upbringing on the Spokane reservation, an isolated place Junior describes as “located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy” (30). Junior, who is atypically ambitious, switches to an off-reservation school, Rearden, where true to Alexie’s own biography, the only other Indian at the school is the mascot.⁵ By his own admission, Alexie’s esthetic is heavily influenced by Silko’s work. On the jacket copy of the thirtieth anniversary edition of Ceremony (2006), the back page is blank except for this comment from Alexie:

Ceremony is the greatest novel in Native American literature. It is one of the greatest novels of any time and place. I have read this book so many times that I probably have it memorized. I teach it and I learn it and I am continually in awe of its power, beauty, rage, and vision, and violence.

(Silko 2006)

Silko’s influence becomes even more apparent when Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary is read alongside Silko’s Ceremony and evaluated as a response to and a debate of the polemic Ceremony articulates in terms of indigenous sovereignty.

Indigeneity, Sovereignty, and Place

For the purposes of this chapter, I am interested in how the authors use their characters to destabilize the settler colonial project, specifically Westernized commodification of place, by constructing indigeneity (and by extension sovereignty) according to the standards of their indigenous communities outside of a settler colonial framework. A brief history, then, of the settler colonialism via the reservation system is necessary. According to William Canby:

Reservations were originally intended to keep distance and peace between Indians and non-Indians, but they came to be viewed also as instruments for “civilizing” the Indians. Each reservation was placed in charge of an Indian agent whose mission was to supervise the Indian’s adaptation to non-Indian ways…… when reservation schools were first set up in 1865, they too were directed by religious organizations with a goal of “Christianizing” the Indians.

(1998, 19)

After the initial federal reservation system was enacted, it was quickly followed by the General Allotment Act of 1887 (more popularly known as the Dawes Act), which attempted to destroy indigenous American transhistorical communities by dividing tribal reservation land into individually owned allotments. The federal government “believed that if individual Indians were given plots of land to cultivate, they would prosper and become assimilated into the mainstream of American culture as middle-class farmers” (21). The government also believed that private ownership – as opposed to communal land holdings which indigenous Americans traditionally practiced – would encourage tribes to develop into multiple nuclear familial units, and not as the strong, interdependent peoples they were at the time: “The tribes, which were viewed as obstacles to the cultural and economic development of the Indians, would quickly wither away” (21). The reservation system manipulated indigenous sacred land relationships into a commodity to be owned and sold; a commodity, in addition, controlled by the paternalistic federal government.

Indigenous communities are based in a land-and-kinship solidarity with a clearly articulated sense of place. According to Yi-Fu Tuan, space is a physical location, but space “becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with meaning” (1977, 6). From an indigenous lens, place is central to indigenous belief systems. Kathryn. W. Shanley explains,

For Indigenous peoples – people vitally connected to geographical locations – place means both an imagined home and a vibrantly interactive space inhabited by many sentient beings, what Western thinking might call a “metaphysical” space. Place means kinship in its broadest terms

(2015, 6)

But place within a settler colonial framework becomes space as a distinct commodity to be controlled, manipulated, and exploited, and further, indigenous peoples themselves become commodities to be controlled, manipulated, and exploited (Hoxie 2008, 1163). Even with the disastrous consequences of settler colonialism for American Indian communities, American Indians continue to adhere to their specific constructions of indigeneity, either as a response to settler colonialism, or as a concurrent continuation of ancestral traditions.

Both Ceremony and Absolutely True Diary decolonize Westernized constructions of space by using an indigenous lens to understand the indigenous relationship to literal and figurative place. Ceremony enacts this decolonization through a continuation of ancestral Laguna physical place innately collapsed within Laguna figurative place. For the Laguna (and indeed, many indigenous peoples), a distinction between physical place and an indigenous epistemology is nonexistent because place cannot be commodified into space outside of an indigenous belief system. In Ceremony, a mixed-blood Laguna Indian, Tayo, returns to the Laguna reservation from World War II suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. When he is finally released from the Veterans’ Hospital, he is still far from well, and his grandmother arranges a ceremony with the Laguna medicine man, Ku’oosh.⁶ Despite his doctor’s strict orders to avoid “Indian medicine” and his Auntie’s warnings that “Old Ku’oosh will bring his bag of weeds and dust. The doctor won’t like it,” Ku’oosh visits Tayo just the same (Silko 1977, 31). Ku’oosh, however, cannot perform a ceremony for Tayo because there is no ceremony for this new kind of warfare. Many Laguna veterans, Ku’oosh adds, are suffering like Tayo. Tayo visits another medicine man, Betonie, also a mixed-blood American Indian, who helps him understand that his pain and suffering are not only the result of the war, but they are also the result of the abuse Western colonization has committed ag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• General Introduction
• Part I Contested Histories of Place: Colonialism, Indigeneity, and Marginalization: Introduction
• Part II Environmental Landscapes: Constructing and Consuming Nature: Introduction
• Part III Cityscapes Movements, Ideology, and Discourse: Introduction
• Part IV The Social Construction of Place: Meaningful Imaginaries: Introduction
• Part V Landscapes of Belonging: Nation and Identity: Introduction
• Index