The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature

Deborah L. Madsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317693185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature engages the multiple scenes of tension — historical, political, cultural, and aesthetic — that constitutes a problematic legacy in terms of community identity, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, language, and sovereignty in the study of Native American literature. This important and timely addition to the field provides context for issues that enter into Native American literary texts through allusions, references, and language use.

The volume presents over forty essays by leading and emerging international scholars and analyses:

• regional, cultural, racial and sexual identities in Native American literature
• key historical moments from the earliest period of colonial contact to the present
• worldviews in relation to issues such as health, spirituality, animals, and physical environments
• traditions of cultural creation that are key to understanding the styles, allusions, and language of Native American Literature
• the impact of differing literary forms of Native American literature.

This collection provides a map of the critical issues central to the discipline, as well as uncovering new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. It supports academic study and also assists general readers who require a comprehensive yet manageable introduction to the contexts essential to approaching Native American Literature. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the past, present and future of this literary culture.

Contributors: Joseph Bauerkemper, Susan Bernardin, Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, Kirby Brown, David J. Carlson, Cari M. Carpenter, Eric Cheyfitz, Tova Cooper, Alicia Cox, Birgit Däwes, Janet Fiskio, Earl E. Fitz, John Gamber, Kathryn N. Gray, Sarah Henzi, Susannah Hopson, Hsinya Huang, Brian K. Hudson, Bruce E. Johansen, Judit Ágnes Kádár, Amelia V. Katanski, Susan Kollin, Chris LaLonde, A. Robert Lee, Iping Liang, Drew Lopenzina, Brandy N?lani McDougall, Deborah Madsen, Diveena Seshetta Marcus, Sabine N. Meyer, Carol Miller, David L. Moore, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Mark Rifkin, Kenneth M. Roemer, Oliver Scheiding, Lee Schweninger, Stephanie A. Sellers, Kathryn W. Shanley, Leah Sneider, David Stirrup, Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., Tammy Wahpeconiah

Part I
Identities

1
Indigenous American Literature

The Inter-American Hemispheric Perspective

Earl E. Fitz

In the early decades of the twenty-first century, indigenous American literature can be read in a number of ways. Virtually all the nations of the Americas can claim a Native American literary and cultural heritage, and in many, if not all, of these modern nation-states this heritage lives on, becoming, finally, the common denominator of our multiple American identities. One can, for example, study the Native American cultural experience in Canada (and in both its French and English language traditions), the United States, Spanish America (in all its diversity), the Caribbean, and Brazil. Today, however, one of the most fruitful ways of reading indigenous American literature is comparatively, as separate, distinct components of a larger cultural phenomenon, and from the hemispheric, or inter-American, perspective. Indigenous American literature can, in fact, be said to constitute the very foundation of inter-American literary and cultural study (see Fitz).

Most anthropologists believe that the first Americans were Asians who, pursuing the animals that sustained their lives, crossed the Bering land bridge between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. Another, less widely accepted, theory posits that the first Americans were Pacific islanders who discovered the American land mass by sailing eastward. And a still newer idea holds that a vast ice sheet once connected southwestern Europe to the Americas and so allowed people to make the trip on foot. Clearly, the origin of the First Americans remains shrouded in mystery. Nevertheless, we do know that the Americas, from the northern reaches of Canada to the southernmost tip of South America, and from the eastern shores of the long American coastline to its rugged western coast, were completely peopled by the momentous (and, for some, catastrophic) year, 1492, and the arrival of the first European conquerors. When Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailing under the flag of Spain, dropped anchor off a Caribbean island he mistakenly believed lay just off the coast of India, he had no way of knowing that he had stumbled onto a vast and geographically varied land mass.¹ Nor could he have known that the world he had just entered was culturally diverse and that it contained some twenty million people who spoke some 2,000 different languages, many of which are still spoken today.² The people he first encountered there, the peaceful Tainos, would, for example, tell him of another people, the fierce, cannibalistic Caribs, who lived to the south.³ Because, as a man of his time, he was trained to regard the Tainos and the Caribs as “savages,” Columbus concluded that “they were fit to be made slaves,” according to the Aristotelian doctrine so popular then. “In a single letter,” as Emir Rodríguez Monegal points out, “Columbus” laid out “the future of the New World: discovery, conversion, and conquest were all one for him” (4). The profound and too often bloody clash of cultures that resulted from this first encounter, which was based on the deliberate and systematic subjugation of one group by another, set in motion waves of conflict, violence, and tension that continue to challenge our hemispheric sense of identity and justice to this very day.⁴

There was, in 1492, an astonishing diversity among the thousands of different Native American peoples who lived in the Americas, some of whom knew each other and some of whom did not. As Alistair Cooke puts it:

There were Indian societies that dwelt in permanent settlements, and others that wandered; some were wholly democratic, others had very rigid class systems based on property. Some were ruled by gods carried around on litters, some had judicial systems, to some the only known punishment was torture. Some lived in caves, others in tepees of bison skins, others in cabins. There were tribes ruled by warriors or by women, by sacred elders or by councils, or by fraternities whose rituals and membership were as unknown to the rest of the tribe as those of any college secret society. There were tribes who worshiped the bison or a matriarch or the maize they lived on. There were tribes that had never heard of war, and there were tribes debauched by centuries of fighting.

(24–25)

In short, what Columbus and his men stumbled into in 1492 was a cultural complexity more fantastic than anything they could have ever imagined. Moreover, what they regarded as the “New World” was already an ancient world to the millions of people who lived here.

While we cannot say with any degree of certainty what the literature of these “First Peoples” was like, we can conjecture that it was both oral in nature and deeply integrated into the larger culture that spawned it (see Ong). To a degree, we can think of it as an example of indigenous American performance art, one that, encompassing what we know today as North, Central, and South America, must have included such forms as music and song, dance, and a multitude of different language uses, from the religious to the historical and from the inventive, or “literary,” to the very pragmatic. Working in the 1880s, American ethnographer, Daniel Brinton was “among the first” to consider “indigenous American cultural expression as literature” (Adorno 35). Though the historical, cultural, and anthropological value of Native American cultural production was well established, the notion that it would have also possessed a deliberately creative and philosophic dimension, “the literary conceptualization” of indigenous America, has been a more recent development (Adorno 36). The more one delves into it, the more this early, pre-Columbian American literature reveals itself to have been rich, complex, and socially vital, the kind of art, or cultural production, that held a people together, that created its identity by recounting its history, and that showed it the way forward and how its future might be determined.

Arguably the first piece of indigenous American literature that we know to be authentically indigenous in nature (as opposed to being the hybrid product of the imposition⁵ of a European culture on an autochthonous one),⁶ the Rabinal Achi offers us a glimpse into a distant and largely lost American past. It is, therefore, of particular importance to those who wish to know more about the nature of literature and culture in the Americas before the arrival of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the French, and the English. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Mayans had books with hieroglyphic figures, but nearly all of these were destroyed by the zealously religious Spanish or by the ravages of time and weather (Imbert & Florit 2). Involving long, cadenced, and often parallel speeches (Tedlock 16–17), masks, dance, and elaborately ritualized action, the Rabinal Achi (or “Man of Rabinal”) offers us a Native American, and specifically Maya K’iche’ (the most widely spoken of the several Mayan languages) or, possibly, Maya Achi (Tedlock 5), take on a timeless and tragic theme: How two great warriors, once allies, are cast, by fate, into a situation where one of them, the defender of an established but fading order, must execute the other, now judged to be a renegade. Unique for having been originally composed long before the Spaniards first arrived, for dealing with Mayan historical issues still more remote, and for still being performed, even today, in a Mayan language, this play stands as a fascinating example of how sophisticated, in thought and expression, indigenous American literature could be (Tedlock 1–2, 5). To study Rabinal Achi is to understand how Native American literature has never left us, how it serves as our oldest common denominator, and how it is both ancient and modern, as alive and vital as its most recent presentation in the highlands of today’s Guatemala.

Closely related, linguistically and culturally, to the Rabinal Achi is another immensely important pre-Columbian text, the Popol Vuh, a creation story that gives us the Mayan version of how men and women came to exist and live on the earth. The original manuscript has been lost. What we have to work with today is the translation to Spanish done by Father Francisco Ximémez. This means that what, in the process of translation, was modified, altered, or simply deleted from or added to the original text cannot be determined. Thus it is that, when we read the Spanish translation called the Popol Vuh, we must remember that we are not reading the original but only an approximation, the nature of which is determined not by the original authors or singers but by a translator whose linguistic skills, intentionality, and fidelity to the intent and style of the original are (for religious and cultural reasons) open to question. This situation is true of all translation work, but it is especially acute here, where a serious religious clash is involved. Although it touches on many things, at bottom the Popol Vuh relates the stories of how the gods decided to create human beings (who would honor them) and how the sacred twins, Hunahpú and Ixbalanqué, would be conceived in the womb of the virgin mother, Ixquic (Imbert & Florit 3). Although a few other texts of this same nature (translations of lost oral originals or Spanish or Latin copies of copies), the Popol Vuh even in translation deserves its ranking as one of the most revealing and complete texts we have of our fascinating pre-Columbian world.⁷

Of the several European powers that came to the New World in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, it was the Spanish who encountered indigenous civilizations so sophisticated, complex, and advanced that they rivaled and in many ways surpassed the European civilizations to which they were compared. Chronicler, historian, and eye-witness to the events he recorded, Bernal Díaz recounts, for example, how dazzled he and his compatriots were at discovering the splendor of the Aztec city, Tenochtitlán, which, in 1519, probably enjoyed a population of somewhere around a half-million persons, and this at a time when “London had no more than forty thousand” inhabitants and Paris could boast only “sixty-five thousand” (von Hagen 134). The Aztec citadel was, as anthropologist Victor von Hagen writes, “one of the world’s largest cities” (133), as well as one of its cleanest, best planned, and most beautiful. As the Spanish soldiers, seeking an audience with the Aztec emperor, Moctezuma, entered Tenochtitlán on 8 November 1519, they could hardly believe what they were seeing, such was the grandeur of the Aztec capital, which had been erected in the middle of a great lake. Even in translation, the modern reader can still feel the awe of the Spanish soldiers as they gazed upon the wonder that was Tenochtitlán. As Bernal Díaz writes (via his translator, John Cohen):

We were astounded. These great towns and cues and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. … It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed of before. … With such wonderful sights to gaze on we did not know what to say, or if this was real that we saw before our eyes.

(214, 216)

While the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, and the English all made contact with Native American people whose cultures had served them well for countless generations but who were nevertheless warred against, only the Spanish would experience the extraordinary societies of the Aztecs (in central and southern Mexico), the Maya (in southeastern Mexico and Guatemala), and the Inca (in Peru and along the Andean mountain chain). These three indigenous civilizations were brilliant, and, as their records show, the Spanish conquistadores marveled at what they were seeing. And, sadly, at what they felt compelled to destroy.⁸

Of the many narratives, poems, and dramas that resulted from the tremendous clash of worlds that was the Spanish invasion of the New World, none is more dramatic than Bernal Díaz’s riveting account of the Spanish conquest of the great Aztec empire in Mexico, The Conquest of New Spain.⁹ The power of this text derives from its being a first-hand account of the struggle for control of Mexico by an actual participant in the fierce hand-to-hand combat that characterized this conflict (1519–1521), the first of a series in which a European power would find and crush an indigenous New World people. While the Aztecs held a significant numerical advantage and were fighting for their homeland and way of life, the Spanish, led by their commander, Hernán Cortés, had access to horses, armor, and superior military technology, and, in the end, these factors would turn the tide of battle in their favor.¹⁰ As would their ability to turn people enslaved by the Aztecs against them in an ever-growing revolt rising up to challenge this powerful, vast, and closely controlled pre-Columbian empire, which, in 1519, reigned over “several million human beings,” speaking a variety of languages and stretching from the “Pacific Ocean to the Gulf coast and from central Mexico to the present-day Republic of Guatemala” (León-Portilla xxiii). In the end, though, The Conquest of New Spain is the narrative of the winners, the Spanish, and Bernal Díaz, who often recognizes the valor and the courage of the Aztec warriors, never doubts what he feels is the rightness of the Spanish cause.

This is why the most profitable, and moving, way to appreciate the truly gripping Bernal Díaz account is to read it in conjunction with The Broken Spears, which tells the same story but from the perspective of the defeated Aztecs, whose language (Nahautl), history, and culture continue to live on, even today, in Mexico and forming, finally, a fundamental part of modern Mexican identity. It is an excellent example of how ancient Aztec culture, symbolized here by means of the great Aztec calendar stone, is understood by modern Mexicans as an icon of their brilliant heritage and one that integrates their past, their present, and their future. Paz, an astute and discerning commentator on the differences between Mexican and U.S. culture, has also observed that the “possibility of belonging to a living order, even if it was at the bottom of the social pyramid, was cruelly denied to the Indians by Protestants of New England,” whereas in Spanish America, as ugly as this truth is, the Indians were recognized immediately as heathens to be converted and as a valuable labor force “that should not be wasted,” and so had their place in the Spanish social, political, and economic structure (The Labyrinth of Solitude 101–02). “It is often forgotten,” Paz continues, “that to belong to the Catholic faith mean...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The Indigenous Contexts of “Native.” “American.” “Literature.”
• Part I Identities
• 1 Indigenous American Literature The Inter-American Hemispheric Perspective
• 2 Alaska Native Literature
• 3 American Imperialism and Pacific Literatures
• 4 Clear-Cut The Importance of Mixedblood Identities and the Promise of Native American Cosmopolitanism to Native American Literatures
• 5 The Problem of Authenticity in Contemporary American “Gone Indian” Stories
• 6 Indigenous Writers and the Urban Indian Experience
• 7 Recovering a Sovereign Erotic Two-Spirit Writers “Reclaim a Name for Ourselves”
• 8 Indigenous Feminisms
• Part II Key Moments
• 9 U.S.–Indian Treaty-Relations and Native American Treaty Literature
• 10 The Marshall Trilogy and Its Legacies
• 11 Native Letters and North-American Indian Wars
• 12 Finding Voice in Changing Times The Politics of Native Self-Representation during the Periods of Removal and Allotment
• 13 Assimilative Schooling and Native American Literature
• 14 Federalism Reconfigured Native Narrations and the Indian New Deal
• 15 Embodied Jurisgenesis NAGPRA, Dialogue, and Repatriation in American Indian Literature
• 16 Native American Literature and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
• Part III Sovereignties
• 17 “That We May Stand Up and Walk Ourselves” Indian Sovereignty and Diplomacy after the Revolutionary War
• 18 “What Can I Tell Them That They Will Hear?” Environmental Sovereignty and American Indian Literature
• 19 A Seat at the Table Political Representation for Animals
• 20 Where Food Grows on Water Food Sovereignty and Indigenous North American Literatures
• 21 (Alter)Native Medicine and Health Sovereignty Disease and Healing in Contemporary Native American Writings
• 22 Religious Sovereignty and the Ghost Dance in Native American Fiction
• 23 Native American Activism and Survival Political, Legal, Cultural
• 24 Identity, Culture, Community, and Nation Literary Theory as Politics and Praxis
• Part IV Traditions
• 25 Indigenous Literacy and Language
• 26 Native American Voices in Colonial North America
• 27 Early Native American Writing
• 28 The Historical and Literary Role of Folklore, Storytelling, and the Oral Tradition in Native American Literatures
• 29 Spinning the Binary Visual Cultures and Literary Aesthetics
• 30 Indigenous Hermeneutics through Ceremony Song, Language, and Dance
• 31 Native American Intellectuals Moundbuilders of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
• Part V Literary Forms
• 32 Crossing the Bering Strait Transpacific Turns and Native Literatures
• 33 Reverse Assimilation Native Appropriations of Euro-American Conventions
• 34 From As-Told-To Stories to Indigenous Communal Narratives
• 35 Native Short Story Authorships, Styles
• 36 “A New Legacy for Future Generations” Native North American Performance and Drama
• 37 Native American Poetry Loosening the Bonds of Representation
• 38 Native American Novels The Renaissance, the Homing Plot, and Beyond
• 39 Film in the Blood, Something in the Eye Voice and Vision in Native American Cinema
• 40 Indigenous Uncanniness Windigo Revisited and Popular Culture
• 41 Future Pasts Comics, Graphic Novels, and Digital Media
• Further Reading
• Index