Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature

Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature

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Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature Stuart Christie

PLURAL SOVEREIGNTIES AND CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS LITERATURE

Copyright © Stuart Christie, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–61342–3 ISBN-10: 0–230–61342–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Christie, Stuart, 1967– Plural sovereignties and contemporary indigenous literature / by Stuart Christie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–61342–X (alk paper) 1. American literature—Indian authors—History and criticism. 2. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 3. Racially mixed people—United States—Intellectual life. 4. Racially mixed people—Canada—Intellectual life. 5. Indians of North America—Intellectual life. 6. Racially mixed people in literature. 7. Imperialism in literature. 8. Indians in literature. I. Title. PS153.I52C49 2009 810.9'897—dc22

2008037881

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

for Louis Owens, Gramps, and 林韻莊 with love

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Contents

Figures

ix

Cover Image

xi

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Plural Sovereignties and Indigenous Literary Formation

xiii

1

Part I Representations One Two Three

Blood Legacies: Pathology and Power in Works by Sherman Alexie and A. A. Carr

39

National Captivity Narratives in Welch, Silko, and Armstrong

73

Trickster’s Gamble: Capitalizing Indigenous Discourse in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace

105

Part II Futures Four Five

Recovering Sovereignty in Louis Owens’s Dark River

157

Indigenous Wormholes: Reading Plural Sovereignties in Works by Thomas King

177

Conclusion

217

Notes

231

Index

267

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Figures

I.1 Map, The Nunavut Territory, Canada 3.1 Photograph, the Alaska Packers Association (APA) cannery at Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts), known also as Lily Point, ca. 1895 3.2 Illustration, “Point Roberts, USA.” Book cover image 3.3 Illustration, “Site Plan: Landscape Open Space Plan”

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116 117 123

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Cover Image

Duncan MacDonald on his War Horse, stereoscope, ca. 1907–08. © Estate of Norman A. Forsyth (Butte, Montana). Stereoscopy. Invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone in 1838, stereoscopic photography represents two separate yet parallel perspectives of the same object, combining them within one vision. The man on the horse in the foreground, his wife’s charger to the rear, is my lateral ancestor, nimiipu-Scots elder Duncan MacDonald (1849–1932). MacDonald was the son of the last factor of a Hudson’s Bay Company post (Fort Colville) in sovereign nimiipu homelands before establishment of existing Canadian and American borders on May 8, 1871. Cohabiting Forsyth’s stereoscope are images of two distinct and separate sovereignties, as represented by the U. S. flag and the nimiipu MacDonalds themselves. MacDonald was among the first generation to embody a colonized nimiipu world and being. He was also among the first to experience the plurality of sovereignty; that is, the coexistence of imposed Anglo-European nationality and a freestanding indigenous sovereignty held distinct and apart.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

This book is about the power of belief.1 While I write from a perspective meaningfully informed, I hope, by specific indigenous sovereignty debates, I am not a sovereign of any indigenous nation, and I do not possess any indigenous signature of the blood—status, enrolled, pureblood, or mixedblood. My connections, to me still meaningful, are strictly remembered and now geographically distant. I no longer live in North America where my own experiences with the annual Lummi salmon fishery off of Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts, Washington), my family connections to the Flathead MacDonalds (nimiipu) through my Scots-Canadian grandmother’s cousins in the Hudson’s Bay fur trade, and my indigenous grandfather—my grandmother’s second husband—first sparked the interest that ultimately produced this study. Placing my own interests in publishing this book aside, I also believe it is important to recall that the sovereign instance is always upon us and is indispensable to the hopes of all peoples, whether living free, enslaved, or in the sinister middle ground between the two. In particular, I salute the North American indigenous nations from where it is I am currently writing: the city-state of Hong Kong in the People’s Republic of China, recently returned to its sovereign owners after more than one hundred and fifty years of colonial occupation. Of course, the restoration of sovereignty does not in itself ensure that democracy will ensue. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Hong Kong University Grants Commission and its reviewers, local and overseas, who saw fit to fund this project. Susan Bernardin, Tom and Juana Branson, Lawrence Buell, Ginny Carney, Duane Champagne, Martha Cheung, Jonathan Chan, A. V. Christie, Renny Christopher, Melody Graulich, Clayton MacKenzie, John Purdy, and Jeremy Tambling provided timely encouragement over the years and often at great distance. Although I didn’t work under him at University of California,

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Santa Cruz, Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr.’s work and example inspired and informed me at every turn. My capable research assistants, Carmen Lee, Iris Tsui, and Agnes Lee helped keep the local process moving. The eagle eye of my mother, Glennys Christie, sharpened the final version of this manuscript at the proofreading stage. I would also like to acknowledge the following for authorizing republication of copyrighted material appearing here in a revised form: “Renaissance Man: The Tribal ‘Schizophrenic’ in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer,” reprinted from the American Indian Culture and Research Journal 25.4, by permission of the American Indian Studies Center, UCLA © Regents of the University of California; “Trickster Gone Golfing: Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and the Chelh-ten-em Development Controversy,” reprinted from the American Indian Quarterly 21.3 (Summer 1997) by permission of the University of Nebraska Press, copyright © 1998 by the University of Nebraska Press; “Crossing the Frontier: Hollow Men, Modernist Militias, and Mixedblood Mimesis in Louis Owens’s Dark River,” first published in Western American Literature 40.1 (Spring 2005): 1–20. This book is dedicated to a remarkable trio. I offer thanks and gratitude in memory of my teacher, Louis Owens. His support, friendship, and example kept me at the task long after I was ready to abandon it. My grandfather, Walter Edwin Hall, a dark-skinned, nonstatus mixedblood in the age of John Diefenbaker, lived and died a proud Canadian. In response to my childhood pestering about his origins, he’d smile and tell me his own version of a creation story: that his immigrant Abenaki mother, Mary Tree, left him out one long, hot, and bright day in the Alberta prairie sun, exposed and asleep in a laundry basket during the summer of 1913. For my benefit, he was joking gently about something I would never fully understand. After writing this book, I hope I understand a little better. My wife, Lam Wan Chong, made the stitching together of each word in this manuscript possible. Anything good in these pages came, first, in the form of love from her; without her love, I could not have finished. This book is for you, darling.

Introduction Plural Sovereignties and Indigenous Literary Formation 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”

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 This book makes two overall claims. The first claim is that, across the past century, contemporary indigenous sovereignty has become effectively pluralized, as a consequence of the colonization of freestanding indigenous traditions by specific mechanisms, including the English language, imposed through Anglo-European nationality and culture. The second claim is that contemporary indigenous literature effectively documents such an imagined plurality—for the good as

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well as the ill—and points ahead to newer, imagined forms of community on behalf of indigenous citizens seeking to honor past traditions as well as to sustain present political enfranchisements. It is a commonplace that the nationalization of indigenous cultural assets by Anglo-European North America across the past century has consisted of an ideological (as well as military and economic) occupation. Yet by seeking to channel individual indigenous aspirations through assimilation, this Anglo-European occupation (called the “American” or “Canadian” nation) has in many cases achieved effects opposite to what was desired. Indigenous peoples’ reimagining of the contemporary colonial experience has actually diversified and enlivened discrete indigenous sovereignties as modern “nations” in their own right. Accordingly, my purview does not presume to move upstream, as if seeking the pristine origins of indigenous traditions apart from contemporary experience.2 Instead, I look at how diverse indigenous experiences of sovereignty—expressed in novels in the English language and yet still operating effectively within a variety of situated traditions and beliefs—converge downstream today along a shared sovereign horizon. It follows that I believe contemporary indigenous novels in English offer substantive evidence for the persistence of such traditions emerging in newer forms without serving as substitutes for them. Nor is the voice of indigenous nationalism solely negative, speaking against the Anglo-European occupation. It is also the modality, to turn an old phrase of Stuart Hall’s, through which the contemporary experience—and vitality—of indigenous sovereignty is lived.3 Initially forced, this contest between competing sovereignties and cultural values has produced a plurality in the contemporary indigenous imagining. And the contemporary uses to which indigenous sovereigns and Anglo-Europeans, respectively, put nation and nationality are fundamentally different. Yet both kinds of sovereignty may be put to effective use in the indigenous interest. Another purpose of the following collection of chapters is to highlight in literary terms these differences among plural constructions of nation described by Harold Cardinal (Cree), the renowned Canadian legal scholar and treaty negotiator, as an interpretive “gap.” In Cardinal’s view, different narratives of nation have been instrumental in dividing polities and cultures whose national agendas, when expressed as stories, may not actually be very far apart: [T]he lack of understanding has created what I call a mirage gap between people in [Canada]. What appears to be a divergence on the

Introduction

3

meanings of Canada and Canadian as used by people on both sides is more mirage than reality. Close examination of the definitions clearly shows that there isn’t really that much of a gap between them. But the practical point of this is . . . we have a government that has developed policies aimed at assimilating Indians to make them into what the larger, white society perceives to be Canadians. . . . What it amounts to is simply that the larger society has never understood, and still doesn’t understand, the Indian concept of the terms Canada and Canadian.4

In Cardinal’s experience, competing Canadian Native and AngloEuropean narratives of nation produce an ideological mismatch (“mirage”) between otherwise sustaining visions viewed as exceptional. According to Cardinal, Canadian Natives and AngloEuropean Canadians may agree about the basis of sovereignty in some “national” form. What they can’t agree upon is the specific narrative that the ideological nation should embrace. Responding to this difficulty, Cardinal suggests that consensus concerning the given definition of nation, given the nature of deeply held beliefs, is neither strictly necessary nor practicable. Rather, all parties must instead make a pragmatic commitment to sustaining a sovereign plurality of national narratives of whatever definition. This plurality of narratives, no one among them exceptional, multiplies the “national” experience.5 Cardinal’s delicacy and skill as a negotiator, displayed across a lifetime committed to the cause of Canadian Native sovereignty, is inspiring.6 The fact that some indigenous people might still consider the experience of Anglo-European nationality alien, over five centuries after the onset of the colonial era, may seem unsettling to readers who find American or Canadian citizenship a natural commonplace of contemporary life. But when the Anglo-European nation is viewed as merely a superstructure facilitating a political and economic order that is extrinsic to—and yet, given the reality, necessarily constitutive of—lived indigenous experiences and sovereignties in North America, several questions emerge that are important to this study. How in practice does pluralism constitute the work indigenous communities perform on behalf of their peoples across a variety of sovereign domains that are not exclusively “national”? How and by which operations were prior indigenous “nations” nationalized in the interests of Anglo-European culture? Has the inherent sovereignty of preceding indigenous cultures been compromised in the shift, discursive and material, from an indigenous to a foreign construction of “nation”? How might otherwise competing constructions of nationality, experienced concurrently as an aggregate in contemporary indigenous

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imagining, be retained without compromising freestanding notions of indigenous sovereignty? As primarily a study of literary works, this book cannot address all of these questions. Rather, using contemporary literature as evidence, I draw upon resources in Indian and Native law, the sociology of indigenous communities, and cultural studies to assert the functional plurality of contemporary indigenous sovereignty. In the different chapters that follow, I am also attempting to illustrate how differing literary constructions of nation (both indigenous and not) have intersected and sometimes bypassed the sovereign domain. When thoughtfully theorized and implemented by lawful sovereigns, such a plurality might also serve as a valuable tool further enabling indigenous autonomy. Within the field of indigenous literary criticism today, we need the spirit of Harold Cardinal more than ever. Across the past several years, there has been an apparent fissioning—whether imagined or real has effectively amounted to the same thing—between, in Creek scholar Craig Womack’s terms, “sovereigntist” and “hybridist” approaches and practitioners.7 In Womack’s view, the latter approach, in particular, has promoted “a retreat into sameness and blending in.”8 I read the scholarly divide similarly. However, I use a slightly different terminology than Womack’s to describe it; namely, between divergent “constructivist” and “materialist” approaches to how indigenous sovereignty is best understood. Is indigenous sovereignty best derived, alternatively, from the autonomy of linguistic signs (which theories have often registered, in turn, the impact of Anglo-European philosophical imports such as postmodernism and post-structuralism) or the autonomy of actual indigenous peoples, places, and the material worlds they inhabit? This difference in emphasis is essential. It comprises the difference between the power of words and the power of worlds. Indigenous sovereignty inheres in both; so I have often found myself bewildered by the lack of a desire to achieve consensus between materialist and constructivist scholars. In the present construction of the debate, the constructivists’ stock seems to have dropped overall, with Louis Owens’s legacy flagging (linked, notably, to those of his student, Elvira Pulitano) and that of Owens’s own colleague and mentor, Gerald Vizenor, remaining unchanged. Nor, for that matter, does it do to push the work of Craig Womack or the “nationalists” (or Robert Warrior or Daniel Justice or Elizabeth Cook-Lynn) to another, nether pole when specific claims he and they make are not only sound but persuasive. These scholars

Introduction

5

promote a particular brand of literary separatism that, at least in part, questions the validity of writings about indigenous North Americans when not actually written (or experienced) by sovereign members of specific bands and tribes. Womack suggests that a truly “Nativecentered” consciousness can achieve sovereign aims more effectively than an assimilationist literary practice. I very much agree, and especially endorse Womack’s assertion that literary works deriving from a particular and situated tradition can, and often do, recast the domain of contemporary indigenous sovereignty “that revises, modifies, or rejects, rather than accepts as a model, the European and American nation.”9 I, like Pulitano, was a student (and happily so) of Owens. Yet I, too, read the contemporary resurgence of literary nationalism as a probably necessary correction, on the part of materialist critics who have witnessed the field and its discourses drifting too far from specific communities, their struggles and sovereign sites of resistance. Moreover, more recent scholarship by the “three W’s”—Warrior, Weaver, and Womack—has not only emerged as a consequence of the present constructivist-materialist debate, but (as they freely own in their book American Indian Literary Nationalism) goes back a generation or more, drawing inspiration from the work of Simon Ortiz and others, and recalling (as in Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Warrior’s Like a Hurricane) the late 1960s and early 1970s Red Power movement as both model and turning point. What seems to have gotten lost somewhere in the debate, however, is a value that I trust never can (or should) be taken off the table for any of us, both indigenous and not, working in the field: the notion that all parties must share a common commitment to ensuring present-day and future indigenous sovereignty. The present divide is even more difficult—particularly, I magine, for younger scholars—for those distressed at the prospect of having to demonstrate zero-sum credentials (when gaining access to either one “camp” or the other) as they look forward to their dissertations, to getting ready for the job market, or to steering manuscripts through the publishing houses. There seems to be a lack of desire to achieve some measure of consensus when attempting to reconcile both materialist and constructivist dimensions of indigenous sovereignty as a shared project. In my view, there is a third road running between these two opposing fires which, today, burn so brightly. This third road is the notion of sovereign pluralism, deriving as it does not only from Cardinal’s idea of a multilateral sovereignty read across disparate national narratives, but also from the increasing plurality of sovereign experiences

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within individual tribes and bands. In particular, I base my own reading of contemporary indigenous novels in the chapters that follow on specific histories of engagement with settler colonialists and their governmental structures. (I offer a brief overview of the history of the American Indian Reorganization Act and the Canadian Métis below.) Such plural sovereignties represented in the literature, I suggest, have their origins in legal entitlements (or the fight to achieve them) within otherwise originally alien structures now become entirely familiar. Sovereign pluralism in a literary form is therefore not the subordination of sovereign indigenous traditions to the English language as such, but its adumbration. The literature of plural sovereignties likewise documents, even where it does not accept, the effects of colonialism. Once exercised by lawful sovereigns, even originally “foreign” entitlements and languages have been welcomed, so long as they serve the local community (or sovereign) interest, however lawfully appointed custodians of a given tribe or band view it. Recently, I have argued for the historical basis of separate indigenous sovereignty in the immediate wake of colonization, concurrent with the emergence of plural sovereignties as expressed in literary works written by indigenous author-sovereigns in English.10 I am certainly not alone in embracing a pluralist approach to an iron-clad indigenous sovereignty. For a decade or more, Jace Weaver has been a forceful and articulate proponent of indigenous nationalism, all the while asserting the tenability of a pluralist position.11 At the level of comparativist methodology, Chadwick Allen has also made a forceful statement on behalf of sovereignty when fusing “blood/land/memory” together in a single enunciation.12 Pluralism has inhered in many, if not most, of the most powerful literary articulations of sovereignty in recent years. *

*

*

Before proceeding further, I acknowledge that there is some risk, especially for a nonsovereign such as myself, when referring to sovereignty or its practitioners (“sovereigns”) too loosely. Let me accordingly own and accept responsibility for my own understanding of the term, deriving as it does, in my view, primarily from two fundamental aspects: the inalienable sovereignty of indigenous land in the material domain, alongside what Robert Warrior, since his Tribal Secrets, has called sovereignty in the intellectual domain or “intellectual sovereignty.” These two domains of sovereignty are at once distinct in academic

Introduction

7

terms and connected, if not indistinguishable, in everyday indigenous life. Warrior’s work, in particular, has been crucial when seeking to reestablish links between the more recent history of “contemporary” or sovereign political activism in the twentieth century (as recorded in seminal works like Vine Deloria, Jr. and Clifford Lytle’s The Nations Within) and prior intellectual traditions also encompassing the land, usually written in nonfictional modes, and as recorded by sovereign writers and thinkers throughout colonial eras long preceding our own. (One way of viewing my project, perhaps, is as a provisional attempt to bring more recent fictional works written by indigenous writers into the shared, sovereign intellectual tradition of the past that Warrior has argued for on a nonfictional basis.) Beyond sovereign land and its intellectual traditions, there are other sophisticated models and critiques of indigenous sovereignty worthy of note in today’s field. We recall Weaver’s debate with Gerald Taiaiake Alfred in the former’s chapter of American Indian Literary Nationalism: given that the English language is a long-standing tool that sovereigns can put to good use, shouldn’t they feel confident when seeking to own the discourses of “contemporary” political sovereignty, as inflected by the colonizers’ legal traditions and English as they assuredly are? I quote Weaver: I do not question for a moment the need for a nuanced reading and interpretation of sovereignty. But let’s not forget we are arguing over a word in English here. [Alfred’s preferred concepts of] “Selfdetermination” and “nation” are equally “foreign” concepts. And they are equally indigenous.13

Elsewhere in the essay, Weaver cites the Audre Lorde chestnut about the problem of dismantling the master’s house with his own tools and nevertheless suggests that sovereigns are very capable of making use of English, for instance, in the interest of their community sovereignty. More recently, Michelle Raheja (Seneca) has argued that “sovereignty is difficult to define because it is always in motion and is inherently contradictory.”14 Raheja here reminds us of the difficulty of defining sovereignty, beyond the material domain, as metaphor— its very motility as a concept has frustrated academic consensus for decades and yet also helped to ensure the survival of indigenous traditions in a variety of modern forms and guises along the way. Precisely because of the elusive nature of indigenous sovereignty, legal scholar Robert Odawi Porter (Seneca) has argued for its principled separation

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from any and all subsequent Anglo-European legal constructions of the “Native American,” including Anglo-European nationality, citizenship, and their processes. This kind of response to the problem of defining indigenous sovereignty has involved attempting to extricate it from the shared history of legislative and judicial enfranchisements of colonialism ex post facto, thereby avoiding the potential pitfalls of a pluralist approach but only at the cost of a sweeping excision of shared history.15 Rather than dismantling the master’s gables using Anglo-European rights and entitlements as tools, Porter would return his people to restoring the longhouses of their own proper sovereign traditions. And why not? However, as I see it, the problem with this principled approach is one of an implicit and founding dichotomy unnecessarily dividing inherent indigenous sovereignties from imposed Anglo-European sovereignties, when both have been equally shaped— changed—by a shared legacy of colonial modernity. Both sovereignties are certainly different, constitutively so, and must remain apart. Yet each sovereignty, indigenous and Anglo-European, remains conditioned by, and shares, a parallel experience of the twentieth century at once beholden to, as well as aiming beyond, the colonial context. (This observed parallel does not, I must emphasize, render the historical costs to indigenous sovereigns of the same modernity magically “equivalent to” the rights and privileges of white supremacy enjoyed by Anglo-European sovereigns. The contrast, like the comparison, nevertheless speaks to a shared history of engagement with modernity, however catastrophic it has been.) Must the subject of plural sovereignties, at once traditionally distinct in sovereign terms and yet party to a common modernity, be so split? If the house of indigenous sovereignty is thus divided—and, as such, the “schizophrenic” subject of today’s indigenous literature—must it fall? No. Both “houses”—indigenous traditions apart as well as the experience of colonial modernity in a combined sovereign enunciation—are actually one and the same. If only for survival’s sake, indigenous sovereignties have always cohabited with the structures of whichever (Spanish, French, British, American) colonial modernity failed to co-opt them. Within a pluralist vision at least, one cannot sever such sovereign struts from each other. Both support the common beam. My own position on plural sovereignties therefore falls somewhere between that difficulty of definition posed by Raheja and the strict separation proposed by Porter; that is, between wanting for sovereignty

Introduction

9

something firmer to build on than contradiction and yet also more willing to engage with the (to me apparent) established, material impacts of the colonizer’s sovereignties made meaningful in indigenous hands— including citizenship, as necessary, as well as the English language. Cohering in specific material struggles to retain indigenous land and to recover other properties that have been unlawfully appropriated— from sovereign bones to sovereign coal to sovereign oil and sovereign uranium and all of the carbon world and time in between—is the coeval claim of a distinctly separate set of indigenous intellectual traditions that, most recently in English, have survived of and for “the people.” You cannot sunder the sovereignty of land as such from these sovereign traditions, including the indigenous traditions being refashioned in the here and now. (This is, in fact, part of the difficulty when debating the question of an academic or taught sovereignty, a point to which I return in the conclusion of this book.) To do so is to instrument a false, colonialist distinction in terms of “relative” appropriation, between the materiality of indigenous lands you can steal and then trade (tangible therefore fungible) and those priceless words giving voice to the sovereign experiences of indigenous land that you do not bother stealing because you cannot sell them (intangible, therefore valueless, in your eyes). The sovereignty that inheres in indigenous land and its intellectual traditions is one and the same. To take Derrida’s truism back on behalf of the struggle for indigenous sovereignty: there is nothing outside the land, and certainly not the texts of its intellectual traditions. And in our own moment, many of these texts documenting the struggles for indigenous sovereignty are in the English language and many are literary works. As I hope the following chapters will suggest, many of the most cogent and interesting theorizations of sovereign pluralism, whether constructivist or materialist, have occurred in the pages of contemporary indigenous fiction. Admittedly, pluralism has also been used by colonizers to keep that best and happy face on colonialism. From primary-school curricula to school district bond loan brochures, the discourse of pluralism has been used to sustain unworkable institutional relationships foreign to the concept of indigenous sovereignty and all too often based upon a deficit model of local cultures. Yet as Weaver’s commitment to the concept in the sovereign context attests, I believe that pluralism within and beyond sovereign nations need not remain only a code word for the down-slope to assimilation. Accordingly, my project has something of a balancing act to make. I try not to reify or sugarcoat the emerging plurality of sovereign forms for their own sake as some

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among the constructivists have been perceived as doing. Beyond soft constructivism as a theoretical stance, the shared horizon of plural sovereignties is a working political and cultural reality for many, if not most, active members of indigenous communities.

Sovereignties: Separate and Plural Before turning to the literary evidence for sovereign plurality, it is necessary to center analysis on indigenous nations where sovereignty struggles begin and where they necessarily culminate. Recent work has ranged from Charles Wilkinson’s somewhat cheerful catalogue of Native American successes within an Anglo-European controlled polity16 to Duane Champagne and Jay Stauss’s more pragmatic account of indigenous “Nation building” within hegemonic educational institutions: If Native American/Indian studies needs a central focus, we believe, at least for the moment, that the emphasis should be on Nationbuilding within Indian communities. . . . Native American studies should focus on the analysis and policies of tribal sovereignty, community and cultural preservation, and U.S.-Indian policy.17

However, unlike Anglo-European voting practices or “individual rights” discourses, the expressions of indigenous sovereignty described by Champagne and Stauss should not be reduced only to the contemporary “national” forms that have shaped them. To Ramona Ellen Skinner, individual rights—even (or especially) “Indian” or “Native” individual rights—“promote Indian self-determination by permitting the individual the right to decide to what degree he or she wishes to assimilate and ignore the basic principles underlying tribalism.”18 From this perspective, civil rights declaring equal opportunity to pursue happiness may be significant and empowering, but they can only be, at best, supplemental to preexisting indigenous sovereignties. These latter inhabit far older traditions, regardless of any “rights” subsequently conferred (or handed back) in whatever contemporary form by an occupying power. In his study of Vine Deloria, Jr.’s pragmatic traditionalism, standing as it does apart from the “atomistic premise that society is merely a conglomerate of individuals,”19 Robert Warrior notes that [S]overeignty, in Deloria [Jr.’s] definition of it, requires constructive group action rather than demands for self-determination. . . . Through this process-centered definition of sovereignty, Deloria [Jr.] is able to

Introduction

11

avoid making a declaration as to what contemporary American Indian communities are or are not. Rather, Deloria [Jr.] recognizes that American Indians have to go through a process of building community and that that process would define the future. 20

Warrior’s analysis of Deloria Jr.’s “process sovereignty” is significant for my purposes here. It carefully secures to indigenous communities the collective sovereignty of their own processes of community definition, at the same time as it avoids locating indigenous sovereignty within hegemonic (Anglo-European) nationality or its processes as a necessary culmination in the “self” or his or her “individual rights.” Deloria Jr.’s pragmatic vision is likewise pluralist because it encompasses the reality that indigenous sovereignty must be defined on its own terms, as well as the fact that rights compensating individuals as citizen-participants within Anglo-European society, however useful these may be, cannot in principle be substituted for a sovereign tradition apart. Warrior’s reading of process sovereignty also acknowledges that outside influences inevitably shape indigenous consciousness as a routine part of historical encounter, while ensuring that sovereign traditions remain rooted to specific communities and persons who serve in the unique role of custodians. Via his analysis of Deloria Jr.’s philosophy, Warrior also recognizes that all “political” expressions of indigenous power are, ultimately and irrevocably, tied to those sovereignties that indigenous people have always retained, can never relinquish, and that the dominant culture practically concedes. I’ve suggested that this pragmatic and pluralist experience of contemporary indigenous sovereignty speaks with two voices. The first voice reacts to the ongoing condition and legacy of colonial structures and relationships constraining the viability of indigenous traditions. The second voice articulates forward expressions of sovereignty in emerging forms on the North American scene. As Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma) reminds us, any “contemporary” indigenous experience of nationality is only the most recent; uniquely, all indigenous peoples in the western hemisphere have survived waves of colonization throughout history. Resistance to colonization remains, therefore, a necessary index of indigenous peoples’ “cultural nationalism,” even as proprietary indigenous traditions long precede any present construction of nationality and fall well below the horizon of contemporary AngloEuropean understanding: The ways or methods have been important, but they are important only because of the reason for the struggle. And it is that reason—the struggle against colonialism—which has given substance to what is authentic.21

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Today’s sovereign nationalism can be read as one instance of Warrior’s “temporary visibility” and fits readily within the transhistorical struggle described by Ortiz. So, too, calling contemporary indigenous sovereignty “national,” including the latter’s great variety of political forms and expressions (some of which may still be influenced by the Anglo-European models from which they politically derive) requires present negotiation with anterior forms of indigenous sovereignty (not called “national”) in exchange for the narrative resolution the English term “nation” clearly allows in the present. To return to Weaver’s notion of “a thousand separatisms”—maintaining sovereign plurality and distinctiveness in each and every local context (all the while keeping Ortiz’s transhistorical anticolonialism in a shared focus) can allow for the meaningful proliferation of what “nation” means across the great variety of sovereign bands and tribes. Across the bands and tribes: at least for now, the voice of such collective resistance to colonialism in the public culture relies almost exclusively on the English language. This is much as it always has been; English-language writings translating indigenous intellectual history in North America are as old as colonialism itself. Dating back at least three hundred years or more, sovereign-centered writings in English have included early autobiographies, dictionaries, print journalism and, more recently, works of fiction.22 This is not a question of dependence on English but of strategy—about how to live and speak for another future day, as when taking Ortiz’s longer view. And as that day approaches ever closer, how will sovereign communities change, if at all, their view toward the English language? Donald Fixico states that 127 American tribes still lack a written history—presumably, he means in original texts written in a native or indigenous language and subsequently translated into English—upon which status recognition often depends.23 But meeting that acid-test for status recognition is not all that extant historical writings, as an aggregate in the indigenous imagination, have inspired. Indeed, much of the literature written in English by American Indians and Native Canadians after 1968, purchased in a commodity form, is increasingly coming to complement—where it can never replace—traditional written histories. Extending a much older history of colonialist engagement with indigenous epistemologies, this contemporary fictionalization of contemporary tribal and Native experiences imparts distinctive, sometimes problematic, and usually unanticipated, textual effects.24 For the purpose of this study, I accordingly limit myself to a treatment of contemporary novels requiring “cross-reading” of plural

Introduction

13

sovereignties in the English language, with indigenous sovereignties read through and against hegemonic (Anglo-European) values expressed, again, in English. 25 As both oppressor’s tool and site of sovereign resistance, English imposes constraint as well as empowers political change. Yet even this present and functional constraint of the English language will, I expect, be short-lived. As I write, indigenous nations are presently using corpus retranslation practices—translating salvage ethnography projects in English “back into” indigenous mother tongues—so as to refashion their own orthographies, language corpora, and literary canons anew. 26 I expect that in the coming generations, “English-only” will no longer represent the sole conduit for sovereign written traditions. Rather, English will be one important language resource, alongside the indigenous mother-tongue, when conducting biliteracy projects and training students and writers stewarded by trained professionals in sovereign classrooms throughout indigenous North America. As the present turn toward the indigenous repatriation of Englishlanguage traditions suggests, the great variety of colonial experiences across and within indigenous nations is axiomatic, even as the historical fact of colonialism has remained a unifying constant around which different resistance struggles may coalesce. As I write, Devon Mihesuah’s voice is clear: there is no unitary Indian voice, but many indigenous voices. 27 Fixico concurs, arguing that there is not only “one view” of indigenous history, whether urban or reservationbased, mixedblood or full-blood, Lummi or Witsuwit’en.28 There does remain, however, a lasting and powerful “national” commitment to particular collective experiences—such as anticolonialism and other generationally transmitted modes of belonging—which are no less significant for being rewritings of a prior, usually oral, tradition. There are also proper oral traditions, to be distinguished from their literary redeployments as written. 29 The chapters that follow are limited to interpretations of the latter, including fictionalized encounters between these persisting, oral traditions of community and their succeeding “histories” written in English by indigenous writers who are using literature to respond to the occupation of their sovereignty by Anglo-European nationality. As Thomas King puts it in the introduction to his early and influential collection of Canadian Native writing: In our discussions of Native literature, we try to imagine that there is a racial denominator which full-bloods raised in cities, half-bloods

14

Plural Sovereignties raised on farms, quarter-bloods raised on reservations, Indians adopted and raised by white families, Indians who speak their tribal language, Indians who speak only English, traditionally educated Indians, university-trained Indians, Indians with little education, and the like all share. We know, of course, that there is not. 30

By arguing against a “racial denominator” for all Indian/Native subjectivities, King nevertheless lays claim to the right of sovereign self-determination of, for, and by Native peoples. As Robert Warrior has likewise suggested, steering a pragmatic policy of engagement through the Anglo-European system is possible, without sacrificing either the traditions of indigenous sovereignty or the energies of its vehicle, nationalism.31 Yet tensions between different forms of empowerment—collective sovereignties that inhere within indigenous communities as distinguished from revocable political entitlements accruing to the indigenous individual—pose important challenges to a plural sovereignty model. Duane Champagne and Carol Goldberg observe that restraints on tribal government power are often viewed by tribal members as infringements on their rights to self-government. Some individual tribal members, however, have argued that the rights they have come to expect as U.S. citizens are not always protected by tribal governments. Since Natives in the United States were granted citizenship in 1924, Natives have enjoyed a status of dual citizenship, both in the United States and as members or citizens of a Native nation. 32

This plurality of “expectations” to which Champagne and Goldberg allude tracks what Mihesuah calls a “commonalty of difference” across a variety of citizenship, group, and kinship affiliations encompassing, even as they supersede, any one national experience.33 Moreover, where nationalism adds cohesiveness within and across otherwise disparate groups opposing Anglo-European hegemony, individual indigenous nations are not (and never have been) simply oppositional, but have constituted their own internally consistent terms of reference and value throughout history and continue to do so.34 *

*

*

As the above-cited scholars and writers suggest, there is always more to the exercise of indigenous sovereignty than meets the eye. On a daily basis, indigenous people are called upon to cross-articulate their

Introduction

15

plural sovereignties. This fact alone at once invokes and challenges the historically catastrophic collapse of difference imposed by the English signifiers, “the United States of America” or “Canada,” in the colonial era—the apparently innocuous and commonplace use of which, through assimilation, has threatened to wipe out myriad and freestanding sovereign practices and beliefs, each particularly situated in its own tribe or band in a particular place and time. Such freestanding traditions have not been wiped out. Yet one cannot deny the fact that originally alien texts (ultimately, eighteen American amendments or the Canada Act) were scrawled right across antecedent sovereign forms, or that indigenous persons descending from these original acts of vandalism have come to own (and even embrace) some of the nationalist discourses originally forced upon them. With this original encounter—the first engagement between antecedent, indigenous sovereignties and the settler ideology of nationalism in the interests of colonization—plural sovereignties were born. Supplementing their own inherent sovereignty as nationals, indigenous peoples have compounded the experience of the Anglo-European nation in everyday life, having mastered as well as modified to specific purposes the latter’s institutions and processes. Individual “rights” as American and Canadian citizens, membership in indigenous governments (traditional and Western-styled), economic partnerships engaged in using entitlements regulated by Anglo-European common or case law, the passports individuals carry: all of these forms of “national” identity—colonial in origin as they are—present potential resources to indigenous persons in support of their distinct and traditional sovereignties. Such resources, supplementing but also shaping the contemporary practice of traditional sovereignty, amount to both more and less than the formalized structures and empowerments “bestowed by” Anglo-European nationality. Indeed, it is the everyday negotiations between and across differing yet contiguous domains of nationalist agency and power—differing cultural and political agendas, disconnects between antecedent traditions and contemporary forms, tensions between separatist and accommodationist notions of indigenous being—that constitute the plurality of the sovereign experience. With an eye toward the plurality of definition, then, this book attempts to interpret differing literary charges made to the indigenous account of pluralized sovereignty—whether Anglo-European hegemonic or sovereign counter-hegemonic, whether considered traditional or modern in form. All the while welcoming change into their communities, indigenous sovereigns have effectively resisted

16

Plural Sovereignties

ideologies of “progress” imposed from the outside in a process of uneven sovereign development; and indeed, this uneven process of assimilating alien values has entered into the stories Native and tribal peoples tell. As we push into the twenty-first century, walking the indigenous line of pluralized sovereignty is a path that must cross many fires. But this, too, is a very old story. *

*

*

Under the Jay Treaty of 1794, as enacted between the United States and Britain, indigenous peoples whose homelands fell either side of the newly established border (along the 49th parallel) between the United States and Canada were allowed unrestricted passage and, after 1924, automatic conferral of dual citizenship. 35 Given that the Jay Treaty ratified plural sovereignties as a necessary and rational, if not exclusive, basis for the indigenous experience of nationality, it is perhaps not surprising that this treaty obligation has been only selectively honored by either Anglo-European nation. The effective abrogation of the Jay Treaty also emphasizes why indigenous sovereignties continue to supersede—as the greater among equals—the subsequent “national” forms deriving from it. Yet maintaining this sovereign difference, between an inextinguishable and inalienable sovereignty possessed by all indigenous North Americans and the more mutable “national” discourses provided by the many political and legislative forms that have come (often confusingly) to stand in for it, is crucial. The spirit of the Jay Treaty endorses—whereas regrettably it does not stipulate in practical terms—that members of indigenous communities remain linked to the territorial integrity of their historical homelands and traditions as a whole, and regardless of subsequent and artificial international boundaries dividing them. This holistic understanding of “flexible citizenship” does not necessarily render pluralist national allegiances null as a consequence; rather, it brings into play the array of choices indigenous peoples make everyday about different national roles.36 For Janet Campbell Hale, refusing to renounce the U.S. nationality she shares with her World War I-veteran father endorses the plurality of her sovereignty: “Could the daughter of a man that patriotic renounce her country? I don’t think so. Dual citizenship is one thing. Renouncing one’s country is quite another.”37 And however evident the plurality of sovereignty may seem to us today—including Anglo-European nationality, indigenous

Introduction

17

collectivities called “national,” and other traditional sovereignties not presuming a national form—the counterforce of Anglo-European hegemony has always ensured from inception that “pan-Indian” movements would involve a “blending” of indigenous and foreign ideologies and groups.38 Such mixed constituencies, like the plural sovereignties giving rise to them, were the price indigenous polities paid to play the game of Anglo-European nationality imposed upon them. The Society for the Advancement of Indians (SAI), for example, whose constitution was ratified in 1912 in Washington D.C. with Dr. Carlos Montezuma (Yavapai-Apache) as a co-founder, included among its membership allowances for “Indian-Associates . . . ‘not on any tribal roll and having less than one-sixteenth Indian blood,’ thus taking care of supporters whose ‘Indian blood’ was difficult to trace or possibly imaginary.”39 Yet the notion that sovereign communities, past and present, should or must reach out to the wider polity or face extinction is at once an overstatement as well as at least partial recognition of the relation of structural dependence imposed by the “domestic, dependent nations” judicial formula. As Deloria, Jr. and Lytle’s work has shown, for all of its problems the 1934 Collier Bill—the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) that I address in the next section—sought proactively to redress the alienation of traditional sovereignties arising from the individuation of land holdings. Despite the individuation of land holdings, maintaining sovereign land holdings in the communitarian interest remains fundamental, however widely sovereign nationals may travel, work, or live beyond their own proper nations. The Jay Treaty is not, therefore, a kind of prior endorsement of a rootless transnationalism, which would seek to blur the materiality of lived experiences on shrinking indigenous homelands. Rather, the very nature of contemporary, lived indigenous sovereignty when exercised beyond a given territory or land base—inducted soldiers, trickster travelers, cosmopolitan expatriates all appear as characters in novels I analyze below—suggests the ways in which any nationalizing project might wish to expand its sovereign horizons, coevally, while protecting its existing land base. But, certainly, the sovereign land base cannot itself ever be deconstructed away. Accordingly, how and in what ways should a pluralized notion of sovereignty maintain links with the homelands so crucial to sustaining whatever forms local tribes and bands call their own? How will a writer like Carter Revard (Osage) or a performance artist like Jimmie Durham (Wolf Clan Cherokee), sustain the sovereign properties of their work, when so much of their work occurs in places

18

Plural Sovereignties

and spaces many Indians and Natives might likely never visit or see, let alone recognize as “Indian” or “Native”? After Anthony Appiah and Gerald Vizenor, literary critic Arnold Krupat locates the centrifugal urgency of such indigenous journeys beyond nationalism as a “cosmopolitan Indian” consciousness searching for “human liberation everywhere,” with an indigenous nationalist stance more convenient than necessary, and occupying only a “provisional” site of indigenous resistance.40 Warrior, for one, strongly disagrees with Krupat’s assertion of the provisionality of the indigenous claim to nationality and its specific spaces. Rather, he argues for a critical reading against the transnational trend—a sovereign-based reading—which “seeks to describe a constellation of material realities in the lived [indigenous] world.”41 At the extreme, the theoretical divide existing between Krupat and Warrior suggests the ways in which the constructivist-materialist debate risks stalemating ongoing dialogue about how national-sovereign traditions can be further enlivened by experiments beyond the proprietary national domain. Such experiments have been ongoing within indigenous communities for a long time. In the chapters that follow, I argue that describing anew Warrior’s “constellation of material realities” is one task contemporary indigenous literature has sought to undertake. Documenting the lived reality of plural sovereignties, contemporary indigenous literature necessarily describes the arc of a parallel sovereign tradition—differently national—that is mindful, yet always independent, of the political, cultural, and literary traditions of the settler-national surround. Remaining rooted in the material world as landed sovereignty requires, while endorsing some of the experimental urgency of artistic experiment in the constructivist sense, indigenous literature continues to stand its local ground and on tradition.42 It also documents the overall expansion of the indigenous world into the legal and economic domains of the Canadian and American national traditions with which it has had a long and intimate history.

The United States If the Jay Treaty sought early on to protect indigenous sovereignty by superseding national distinctions, the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934 sought to put a distinctively United States spin on formalizing so-called national entitlements safely contained within a settler-colonial framework. This said, the IRA strengthened the discursive, rather than sovereign, basis of indigenous nationality, by

Introduction

19

reducing the latter to the letter of potentially revocable legal entitlements via legislation or referendum. The further attribution by the IRA of corporate “rights” to indigenous entities not only left the blood discourses of the allotment era more or less intact; it added still more layers of bureaucracy and complexity confounding prior long-standing—and perfectly functional—traditional forms and practices of indigenous sovereignty. At least arguably, the resulting calculus of mixed sovereignties fractured the unity of the indigenous nation even further. In an interesting reversal, early opposition to the IRA in the 1930s came from landed, “full-blood” allottees who, for their own individual reasons, had bought into Anglo-European national settlement after the Dawes Act of 1887. These individuals squared off in public debates against other members, now landless, who had alienated their allotments but wanted to reestablish status under the terms of the IRA. This latter group was designated anecdotally, especially whenever legal evidence was not supplied, as “mixedbloods.” Under the blood quantum and self-governance provisions of the IRA these members could, in some cases, be reenfranchised. Seventy years on from the IRA, similar problems still face contemporary indigenous communities; namely, that of allotted, individual landholders (“landed Indians”) asserting residual pre-1887 treaty-based membership against a disenfranchised (“landless Indians”) group who may or may not possess a federally instrumented blood-quantum claim to citizenship post-IRA: “These landless Indians were mixedbloods who had already parted with their property. The bill would not be good for those full-blooded Indians who continued to live on their allotments.”43 With hindsight, the IRA affirmed (and expanded) the legality of blood quantum the Dawes’ allotments first established nearly fifty years earlier, but only at a terrible cost. It further institutionalized an identity system (i.e., “mixedblood”) based on a constructivist position that, post-Dawes, quantified entitlement to—and degrees of alienation from—specific indigenous lands, values, and resources in exchange for payment and services in a cash economy. (“Fullblood” identities, it must not be forgotten, were likewise constituted as more culturally authentic along the same axis—degrees of purity—at precisely the same historical moment.) While preaching a “two-tier” track to assimilation, the IRA legalized racialist discourses of difference that threatened, where they did not actually subvert, other prior and longstanding traditions of crosscultural integration across local indigenous communities. As Jonathan Brennan documents, indigenous

20

Plural Sovereignties

communities already possessed working arrangements with outsiders, long before colonization required the legalization of such arrangements in the interests of an Anglo-European nationalist platform.44 Beyond greater systemization of the blood-as-land-tenure system, the IRA also radically corporatized blood discourse, creating commercialized structures on behalf of new “self-determining” bodies safely under the aegis of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and its Anglo-European caretakers.45 Catalyzed by the timely convergence of resurgent sovereignty politics and long-standing blood discourse, the American “ethnic Indian” position emerging after World War II was largely urban-based, landless, and born of political necessity far from traditional indigenous homelands: “[t]he merging of many tribal identities and histories in the urban setting meant the adoption of a common, albeit artificial, heritage.”46 At precisely the same moment, the “ethnic Indian” took its place as the latest face of indigenous cultural capital, bought and sold, in the popular-cultural marketplace where sovereign nations continued to operate at a competitive disadvantage despite IRA-era promises of corporate governance, fair play, and oversight. Deloria, Jr. and Lytle likewise remind us that while traditionalists within indigenous communities were among the first to question generalizations about “national” or “pan-Indian” movements during the late-1960s and 1970s AIM era, a generation or more after the IRA they were also just as often instigators of the same activism in the interests of ensuring that “protest became a responsible expression of the people’s feelings, not merely a recitation of liberal slogans.”47 Pan-Indian nationalism, Berkhofer Jr. affirms, was enormously useful as an instrument of cohesion across a broad spectrum of sovereign stakeholders, even as it flirted dangerously with genocidal notions of “the white man’s Indian.”48 Put differently, AIM-era “pan-Indian” nationalism was as necessarily conditioned by the contemporary colonial situation as the precontact experience of indigenous sovereignty had been exempted from it. Itself a collective abstraction, responding more or less effectively to the social and political conditions of late colonialism, “panIndian” nationalism involved the wearing of masks Anglo-European nationalism also utilizes to disguise the often arbitrary exercise of its own legal and juridical power.49 Thus the historical distinction Deloria and Lytle are making is a cultural rather than sovereign one: even as the forms and appearances of indigenous peoples’ “identity” evolve within the broader contexts and geographies of hegemonic constraint, sovereignty will just as certainly persist as a value, despite— or because of—the great variety of its emerging forms.

Introduction

21

In light of subsequent entitlements devolving from indigenous participation in hegemonic (American and Canadian) national projects postIRA, including rights and responsibilities deriving from the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971, the “aboriginal rights” clause (Section 35) of the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982, the Canadian Bill C-31 of 1985 (restoring Native status to eligible persons previously excluded) and the U.S. Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988, among others, there has been cause for both celebration and concern. Indigenous nations and individuals may have acquired practical tools of self-government, including perhaps debatable entitlements to an unregulated capitalist economy. But can any contemporary entitlements in dialogue with colonizers ever exhaust the forward possibilities of sovereign aims and being?50 More than likely, they cannot. Even so, the nationalizing of indigenous sovereignty has been instrumental in building a legal foundation for the indigenous future: It is probably too late to put the [ethnic] Indian genie back into the bottle. John Collier planned too well in his efforts to give Indians selfgovernment. In setting the theoretical framework for reconstituting an ancient feeling of sovereignty, he prepared the ground for an entirely new expression of Indian communal and corporate existence. 51

Aware that American Indian and Canadian Native nationalities to some extent recognize “ancient feelings of sovereignty” for contemporary indigenous communities, Vine Deloria, Jr. suggests that the former do not necessarily imply the negation of traditional sovereignty but its meaningful reinvention in the present. In his more recent work, Deloria, Jr. argued for the reintegration of landless, urban indigenous experiences, for example, as crucial to the continued viability of reservation and reserve sovereignty: With the improvement in the economic fortunes of Indians living in the cities and with better highways available to them, they began traveling back to their home reservations to attend tribal ceremonies and dances even when supporting the activities in the urban area they felt were also authentically Indian. . . . It is difficult, if not impossible most of the time, to tell which people were born on the reservation and which were born in the cities. People move back and forth with ease depending upon the economic opportunities available to them on the reservations. The development of local industries, including gaming casinos, has helped to create a sense of tribalism that transcends the institutional restrictions imposed by the urban areas. . . . Adaptation, not accommodation, has become a reality. 52

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Indigenous Canada For Native Canadians, the taste of defeat and armed resistance to Anglo-European aggression did not culminate in Lakota country at Greasy Grass in 1876, nor with nimiipu (Nez Perce) resistance to forced relocation the following year, but in the Northwest Rebellion of 1885 along the Canadian Great Plains, where the first (and last) alliance between Métis, Cree, and Assiniboine fighters took place under the inspired, if sporadic, leadership of Louis Riel.53 The thriving Métis communities living in Red River country in the mid-nineteenth century (in southern Manitoba and western Saskatchewan today) offer a signal instance not only of plural sovereignties but also, as evidenced by Louis Riel’s war, of effective resistance to colonialism. Métis communities were originally descended from Frenchhaudenosaunee (Five Nations) families who tracked the Hudson’s Bay watershed west for the French crown and, after 1763, the British. The Métis remain a thriving community in Canada and the Northern Plains today. Métis Maria Campbell, author of the influential autobiography Halfbreed, was among the first to base a literary work on a Métis history of plural sovereignties. The first chapter of Campbell’s seminal work revisits the Red River settlement at the time of Riel’s rebellion.54 A contemporary of Campbell’s, Métis scholar Duke Redbird wrote his master’s thesis in the form of a manifesto, entitled We Are Métis, asserting plural sovereignties for Canadian mixedbloods as a distinctive nation within Canada: There is an extant, strong, identity base that the Métis can build upon—the legacy of Louis Riel. However the Western Métis image and cultural characteristics that now serve as a bridge to connect the halfbreed on a national scale, must not rely solely on the historical context . . . but also [on] present-day Canadian life. 55

Continuous with the values Louis Riel had fought for a century earlier, but contemporary in their expression, Redbird’s assertion of the contemporary role Métis continue to play within Canada brings with it a powerful attending claim about the future “Métisization” of the entire continent: The native population is the fastest-growing racial group, per capita, in Canada in spite of the high infant mortality rate. The fact is that all of the races and the ethnic groups in Canada are being integrated into the psychological and geophysical reality that is North America and that THE MÉTIS ARE THE ONLY ETHNIC GROUP INDIGENOUS

Introduction

23

TO THE CONTINENT. All other races, including the Indian and Inuit, came from elsewhere at some other time. Integration is a twoway street and the white majority society is reflecting the native reality more and more specifically as the years go by. 56

Redbird’s manifesto is a powerful piece of rhetoric. Some of its claims are dubious at best, such as his reliance on racialist phraseology, as well as the apparent endorsement, above, of the Bering Land Bridge theory. (This latter theory evacuates the origins of prior indigenous and latter colonizing cultures on the continent and puts their mixedblood progeny, rather too conveniently, as the “first” North Americans by way of technicality.) Other claims are simply undemonstrated, such as the rather vague “two-way street” argument about the impact of plural sovereignties within an overall AngloEuropean assimilationist (“integration”) project. The latter emphasis unfortunately serves to downplay the disastrously disproportionate impact of genocide on all indigenous communities, even as it correctly asserts the statistical emergence of those of mixedblood in North American census data. On the other hand, specific claims made in We Are Métis, where they have proven to be founded, effectively affirm the potentials of plural sovereignties. Redbird recounts historically verifiable claims about the Métis as having established a viable . . . civilization at least a century before [Canadian] Confederation [in 1867]; a founding nation equal to the French and English in the development and growth of Confederation; . . . [and] with great potential for future development and contribution to Canadian life—if the opportunity to unfold that potential is returned to them via aboriginal rights and land claims. 57

It is unclear, over one generation after publication of Redbird’s manifesto, whether or not the writer, scholar, actor, and sometime film producer58 intended to endorse plural sovereignties for the Métis distinguishable from long-standing, sovereign Native claims or in conjunction with them. As Joe Sawchuk rightly notes, the term “Métis” (like “Indian” or “Native”) is still an “over-arching classification” that contemporary indigenous stakeholders and Anglo-European nationalists have a shared difficulty in defining culturally and legally.59 Even so, Redbird’s manifesto was widely influential in the late 1970s and early 1980s, not only in articulating plural sovereignties as a separate model apart from Anglo-European-style nationalism, but in

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urging a regional basis—rather than a settler nation-specific, whether Canadian or American, model—for resolving indigenous claims. His singular efforts also went a long way in helping to establish the NonStatus Native Canadian Association as an important stakeholder in sovereignty debates before the legal revision of the Canadian Indian Register after 1985 on behalf of those constituencies historically excluded, including Canadian Native women excluded through marriage to non-Native men and their descendants of these unions.60 Likewise, Redbird’s vision of plural sovereignties for Native Canadians benefits from, even as it has historically been conditioned by, the differently genocidal indigenous policy—John Collier called it a “death hunt”—undertaken by its massively “national” neighbor to the south.61 Collier, frustrated by bureaucratic roadblocks erected in congressional hearings countering much of the IRA’s longer-term effectiveness, and bewildered by the disastrous fall-out, in diné and Pueblo country, of the “soil conservation” (livestock reduction) program he’d promoted after 1933, transferred his at times romantic vision (“the long hope”) for Native North American plural sovereignties onto Canada: Canada made Indian treaties thriftily and never broke them; neither did Canada drive the tribes at one another’s throats nor fight them. She formulated out of practice, a brief, flexible, body of Canadian Indian law which is eminent for fairness of spirit and for common sense. She did not force land allotment on her Indians; she did not appropriate their communal funds or divert them into her costs of administration; she did not tolerate corruption in her Indian service. She provided an orderly, dignified transition for individual Indians, out of the tribal and into the general life, but she did not force the process by way of the many kinds of bludgeoning and confiscation employed in the United States. And this is still true in the present day.62

The progressive sweep of Collier’s rhetoric here, obscuring important omissions and commissions of historical fact, uses sexist and colonialist language to suggest that indigenous people would always choose— if given the choice—to make “an orderly, dignified transition . . . out of” their traditions. The above statement is all the more shocking when you realize that it was written by the one Anglo-European individual who, perhaps more prominently than any other before or since, most effectively promoted the cause of indigenous self-determination. Collier’s good intentions mask the truth of the indigenous experience of Anglo-European Canada as only less “bludgeoning” and confiscatory, in comparatively colonial terms, than that of the United

Introduction

25

States. Certainly, important historical differences do exist between the two national experiences. But as the continued relevance and urgency of Redbird’s and Cardinal’s work indicate, and Collier’s own rather romanticized view obscures, indigenous and Anglo-European North American partners still have much work to do in the Canadian zone of their shared sovereignty. However, in recent years the plural sovereignties already exercised by autonomous indigenous governments have begun to wrest effective autonomy from the Canadian government in arrangements beneficial to both sides. Established in 1999, the new indigenous-administered territory in the Canadian Northern Arctic, Nunavut, embraces the sovereign concept of inuit qaujimajatuqanjit as “a guiding principle of public government.”63 The creation of a sizable North American territory under indigenous administration, including self-determination for the Inuit people as a majority culture and based on specific cultural values applicable to their own understanding of the public domain as sovereign, is a remarkable achievement. Nunavut fulfills a vision as yet unheard of in the part of the Inuit world under Alaskan (United States) administration. The present Nunavut moment in Canada (figure I.1), set against its older counterpoint in the ANCSA tribal corporation in the United States, presents a contrasting model for future imaginings of indigenous sovereignty. The difference lies in that the gains achieved through ANCSA consisted of statutory entitlements devolving to indigenousrun corporations, whereas Nunavut’s status was secured through an extra-legal—sovereign—treaty process subsequently ratified. Elsewhere in Canada, in British Columbia—which provincial lands were never ceded by sovereign Native bands to the Crown as parties to a negotiated treaty—there is, as in Nunavut, new talk of treaties and indigenous sovereignty. In response to the landmark reversal handed down by the British Columbia Supreme Court in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, one scholar suggests: In British Columbia right now the year is A.D. 1492. That is the most concise and forward-looking reading of a 1997 appellate decision by Canada’s Supreme Court that reverses key findings in the 1991 decision in the First Nations land-claims case Delgamuukw v. the Queen . . . For the Gitksan, Wet’suwet’en, Nisga’a, and neighboring peoples, to whom the language of the original case (and of the decision) is most applicable . . . it represents an inversion of all of the assumptions and certainties of colonialism.64

The hyperbole used here is, I suspect, both strategic and rhetorical.

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Figure I.1

The Nunavut Territory, Canada.

Source: Courtesy of the Nunavut Government, Public domain.

The 1997 Delgamuukw reversal (of the earlier 1991 case by a similar name) represents another approach to realizing plural sovereignties within Canada. If Nunavut—and, possibly, the Labrador Inuit65 —has achieved independent sovereignty through a treaty mechanism (as an empowered “territorial” agent within a parliamentary

Introduction

27

system), the Delgamuukw decision reaffirmed “aboriginal title” through judicial review but only at great risk: subjecting inalienable Native sovereignty to subsequent judicial revision outside a treaty process. In the worst case scenario, the aboriginal title endorsed judicially in the second Delgamuukw decision could be extinguished conventionally by other means—say, a constitutional amendment—subject to the whims of an electoral majority disregarding precedent, or even worse, an openly coercive judicial reversal, such as the original 1991 Delgamuukw ruling (the MacEachern decision). The endorsement of judicial review in lieu of treaty making, while certainly more salutary than the 1991 MacEachern opinion, seems precarious.66 Some British Columbia First Nations are staying clear of treaties altogether. A few bands—notably the Nisga’a who were original parties to the 1987 Delgamuukw case—have reversed course, choosing instead to extinguish their sovereignty and ceding much in the way of material and cultural properties in exchange for an ANCSA-style package promising cash, vested rights in a mixed private-collective land ownership model, and future guarantees.67 All North American indigenous nations are aware that binding agreements between mutually sovereign parties, once entered upon in good faith and subsequently broken, damage more than the sovereignty of the injured party; they invite reaction, as was clearly demonstrated by the Oka incidents through the summer and autumn of 1990. The Oka conflict in southern Quebec preceded the first Delgamuukw ruling by a matter of months. Not surprisingly, sympathetic blockades were erected in Gitksan and Witsuwit’en country, in British Columbia, in the wake of events at Oka so as to demonstrate solidarity with aboriginal land struggles occurring thousands of miles away.68 In Canada, the sovereign moment is as urgent and promising as ever. Sovereign indigenous nations “within” the colonial surround are reemerging on the basis of historically sound and legally enforceable principles. Even so, as the contrast between the Nisga’a and the Nunavut Inuit examples suggest, not all indigenous nations will choose the same path when embracing plural sovereignties. Some may actually choose to extinguish their own sovereignty in the interests of securing shorter-term material gains for their people. Preceding these contemporary examples, however, have been decades of work on an emerging plural sovereignties position in both the United States and Canada. Yet before specific victories endorsing separate and plural

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sovereignties could be achieved in courtrooms throughout North America, they were being imagined and experienced in quality literary works of an emerging indigenous consciousness.

Literary Formation of Plural Sovereignties By the time he attended the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Potawatomi leader Simon Pokagon had already taken full measure of the two, new subjectivities, “Indian” and “American,” imposed on him through national conquest. Written only three years after the massacre of panIndian ghost dancers by the U.S. cavalry at Wounded Knee, Dakota Territory, Pokagon wrote out two parallel—indeed, mutually negating—speeches about his newly acquired “national” status and circulated both at the fair via different means.69 It was seemingly irrelevant to Pokagon’s listeners that neither speech expressed his being: neither “Indian rebuke” nor triumphal embrace of an Anglo-European destiny. They expected, and were dutifully provided, the latter—the speech they wanted to hear—in Pokagon’s widely publicized oratory. Sensibly attending to different audiences within an already uneven terrain of nationalist discourse, Pokagon had hedged his bets in a newly fragmented sovereign totality. Given meager pickings for the new “Indian” in this even newer “United States of America,” nationalist discourses nevertheless presented opportunities for Pokagon’s survival and that of his people. In this early instance, he had already identified what I am calling the exercise of plural sovereignties. He did so to hold his Potawatomi traditions and sovereignty apart from Anglo-European hegemony while, at the same time, honing his fluency in the new rhetorical tools of the nationalist trade. Nearly a generation later, in 1911, the co-founder of the SAI, Dr. Carlos Montezuma, declared: I find that the only, the best[,] thing for the good of the Indian is to be thrown on the world. . . . Better send every Indian away. Get hold and send them to Germany, France, China, Alaska, Cuba, if you please, and then when they come back 15 or 20 years from now you will find them strong, a credit to the country, a help, and an ornament.70

In the absence of existing—meaning enforceable—sovereignties on behalf of self-determining bands and tribes, Montezuma argued that only by embracing other nations, any nation “if you please,” could indigenous individuals, formerly reservation-bound, mint possible virtue

Introduction

29

out of dire necessity. Yet by declaring that indigenous leaders should “send every Indian away,” Montezuma uses powerful rhetoric to place spin on the proposed evacuation of indigenous homelands. Well before “official” enfranchisement as citizens of the United States in 1924, or of Canada in 1960, indigenous persons not having the wherewithal to leave home did not have to leave North America at all to be “thrown on the world”: all they had to do to enter a foreign nationality was, quite simply, to move beyond the boundary of their own reserve or reservation. Another very different nation awaited them.71 This gulf between home-grown indigenous sovereignty and that other tradition, the trailing Anglo-European nationalism tracking conquest, could take generations to cross. Geographical remove notwithstanding, the gulf that Montezuma exhorted other SAI members to help their young in bridging was particularly wide because of a fundamental disconnect—narrative, cultural, political—between how Anglo-European cultures imagined their “National Indian” as an ideological property and the lives North American indigenous peoples were actually living outside the frame of the “white man’s Indian.”72 Both within and beyond the hegemonic nation, indigenous North American sovereigns lived meaningful lives long before AngloEuropean citizenship was conferred upon them, if not as American or Canadian nationals or voters, then as soldiers, farmers, and wageearners contributing not only to their own homesteads and communities but also to the colonial economy. Indeed, in the U.S. context, long-standing historical precedents of indigenous sovereignty, responding proactively to the governmental structures and values of Anglo-European settler-colonialism, had included the so-called Iroquois Confederacy as well as the southeastern Five “Civilized” Tribes. The main problem wasn’t that sovereign indigenous entities didn’t—and, in the United States, until the Collier era wouldn’t—stake claims to hegemonic enfranchisements supplementing the sovereignties most tribes and bands had never relinquished. Rather, the problem consisted of indigenous sovereignty being viewed by Anglo-Europeans as merely supplemental to, and not constitutive of, subsequent entitlements. In the absence of a parallel and plural sovereignties model, viewing indigenous sovereignty as subordinate to “national” entitlements all too often resulted in attempts by settler-colonials using “rights,” once conferred, as a means of extinguishing indigenous sovereignty. By 1916, the Dakota writer Charles Eastman (who, as a physician had witnessed the massacre of ghost dancers by the U.S. Cavalry at

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Wounded Knee in 1890) could declare: “I have never lost my Indian sense of right and justice. . . . Nevertheless, so long as I live, I am an American.” In making the adjustment from Pokagon’s first identification of plural sovereignties to Eastman’s affirmation of them, what ideological forces were necessary, first, to create and, second, to subordinate sovereign plurality within an Anglo-European vision of nationalist containment? Thomas King puts the question succinctly: “But who exactly was this Indian Eastman believed himself to be, and who exactly was this American he believed he had become?”73 By way of argument, this book asserts that the experiences Pokagon, Eastman, and Montezuma alluded to, while notable, have been commonplaces of the indigenous experience of plural sovereignties. All of these thinkers were born into an indigenous totality, experienced its fragmentation through socialization into a foreign ideology of “national” belonging, and subsequently transformed their reality, in life and story, as a composite of sovereignties. *

*

*

A more recent example of the literature of plural sovereignties is offered by Evelina Zuni Lucero (Isleta/San Juan), in a passage excerpted from a brief autobiographical sketch: When my father left for the southwest Pacific, my mother returned to her parents’ home in San Juan [pueblo]. My father was a member of a B-24 bombing group, the tail gunner and nose gunner, flying fifty missions altogether before he returned home the year before the war ended. He speaks very little of his military experience though he was a designated “hero,” with an array of medals and news stories of his missions. One morning Povi’s father woke her [Lucero’s mother], worriedly saying, “Hurry up and get dressed. There is a policeman at the door asking for you. What have you done?” The policeman at the door turned out to be my dad in his military uniform, home from the war.74

In this remarkable anecdote, apparent power (the military uniform) and statist constraint (the policeman’s uniform) cohere in the same outfit. Both roles are “worn” by Lucero’s father, his having donned the proper habit of Anglo-European sovereignty. This doubling is witnessed by Lucero’s grandfather not as a mistake but in the awareness of functionally separate sovereignties: the American, apart from his own. Lucero’s grandfather’s experience, as recollected by Lucero and rooted in her own experience, is at once marvelously

Introduction

31

unique in the telling and a commonplace of everyday indigenous experience. As Lucero’s anecdote indicates, plural sovereignties may be considered as conceptually discrete for the purposes of an academic analysis, but they overlap operationally (and often strategically) in an everyday, contemporary experience relevant to the ongoing reimagining of contemporary sovereignty as, in Lisa Lowe’s terms, “new imaginings . . . in antagonism to the regulatory locus of [any one] citizen-subject.”75 Lucero’s own work belongs to an emerging body of writing which, in the fictional terrain, acknowledges and documents such everyday reimaginings by members of communities who, when finding themselves outliers to any one given national experience, have come to experience sovereignty as the aggregation of plural sovereignties, a theme to which I will return in chapter two. Once recognized as inherently pluralistic, contemporary indigenous literary expression exceeds the demands of the Anglo-European nation in discourse. The sovereign adumbrations of that Other Nation—cultural, technological, economic—emerge visibly within an indigenous sovereign-nationalist horizon of expectations. Thomas King’s “Not Enough Horses” is a story about a young man who finally secures his girlfriend’s father’s permission to marry through the latter’s reimagining of Northern Plains traditions involving giftgiving to the bride’s family. In the following passage, the father of the bride muses about the passing of older traditions and their continuity in newer, unsettling forms: That evening Houston relaxed on the recliner in front of the television. . . . He wasn’t sure about the Catholic ceremony. A little too long, perhaps. A little too pretentious. The priest a little too pleased with himself. But all in all, it had been a fine wedding. Enough to eat, enough to drink. Plenty of cameras. It was too bad about the horses, though. As Houston watched Tiger Woods sink a forty-five foot putt, he wondered what it must have been like for his grandfather to stand in front of his lodge and feel the land tremble, as young men, wild for his approval, galloped by, driving strings of ponies through the prairie grass. A snow blower was a fine thing, to be sure, but where was the romance, where was the tradition? Still, Houston had to admit, it did have an eight-horse motor, six forward gears, and a twenty-six-inch clearing path. And maybe tomorrow, if the weather took a turn for the worse, he’d run it to the backyard and start it up. Just to hear the motor rumble. Just to feel the earth move under his feet.76

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King’s story demonstrates how far contemporary depictions of plural sovereignty have come since Simon Pokagon wrote mutually negating speeches. The constraints for the literature, the reality of the colonial surround, still exist; the literary responses to it have proliferated meaningfully. Writing her own “autobiography of a confluence,” Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna) recounts the persistence of plural sovereignties within indigenous communities before World War II in the southwestern United States: It is the Southwest [United States, Laguna Pueblo, Cubero town and its history], the confluence of cultures, the headwaters of Mexico. It is multiethnic cowboy, with a strong rope of liturgy and classics tied to the pommel. . . . It’s no happenstance that the Gunn in my name has been good fortune, or that the Indians I knew growing up were cowboys. As most of the cowboys I knew were Indians—the others were Chicanos, Nativos, and a few Anglos. . . . Rednecks-Redskins: an odd thing, a dichotomy to Americans who go to movies and believe what they see, a continuum to others who take their history straight from life.77

As both urban and Indian, Ignatia Broker (Ojibwe) affirms Gunn’s “continuum” in the prologue to her Night Flying Woman. Noting her community’s emigration to urban areas after World War II, Broker provides further context for the “adaptation” to ex-reservation life that Deloria, Jr. suggests is axiomatic of contemporary American Indian experience. Broker dedicates her narrative to Indians everywhere, while wryly noting the fact that, through urbanization of the indigenous experience new-fangled types of Indian people came into being: those demanding what is in our treaties, those demanding service to our people, those working to provide those services—and all reaching back for identity. . . . Many of these children were born and raised in the urban areas and they do not make any distinctions as to their tribes. They do not say, “I am Ojibway,” or “I am Dakota,” or “I am Arapaho,” but they say, “I am an Indian.” Now they, too, are looking to their tribal identity.78

This shift toward the “pan-Indian” identity described by Broker and acknowledged by Deloria, Jr. and Lytle in their analysis of AIM raises important questions about how local sovereignties (e.g., Ojibwe) and global identities (“Indian” or “Native”) are negotiated in everyday life by individuals leveraging multiple sovereignties in different situations

Introduction

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as the need arises. Broker’s work, like much of the fiction I analyze in this book, provides evidence of the “lost histories”—in urban centers, off the reserves, in “foreign” spaces of colonized North America or on military duty overseas—that complement recognizably sovereign histories based on the reserve or reservation. These literary histories are no less historical for being fictionalized, and contribute to the patrimony not only of specific indigenous nations and their enrolled descendants, but also of indigenous peoples everywhere still grappling with the legacy of Anglo-European colonization. In his autobiographical piece, “Indian Summer,” Tom Colonnese (Santee Sioux) confirms the sense of confusion he experienced as a youngster when asked to live up (or down) to the expectations of the Anglo-European popular culture, as the white man’s Indian. His pride at having had family members who served honorably in World War II and attending his hometown’s Veteran’s Day parade in their honor is banished by perceptions of his classmates who refuse to accord American Indians legitimacy, alongside Anglo-Europeans, as American nationals: When we got to the lobby the theater staff were handing out small American flags for everyone to wave at the parade. We each took one, and when we got on the street I waved mine. My brother just held his down at his side. From behind us I heard Schroder again, “What are you doing with an American flag?” He walked up close to my brother; their chests were almost touching. “I asked you what you’re doing with that flag. That’s an American flag.” My brother didn’t say anything. “Give it to me,” Schroder said. My brother still didn’t do anything. Then, so fast I couldn’t believe it, Schroder hit my brother square in the face. The blow knocked my brother down, and his nose was bleeding like crazy. Schroder stepped over him and picked the flag up off the ground. He walked away with his friends, an American flag in each hand. I didn’t know what to do. My brother was still lying on the ground, and he was crying a little. There was a circle of kids standing around my brother, just staring at him. Everyone was quiet, but nobody tried to help. My brother took a handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to stop his bleeding. He went back into the theater and washed his face off. I just stood out in the sun. The parade was starting. When my brother came out, he said, “If you say anything to mom, I’ll kill you.” We walked down to the Ben Franklin store. As we picked our way through the crowd, my mother and grandmother and aunts all waved to us. “Here come our soldiers,” my Aunt Tootie yelled. Flags were waving everywhere. I was still holding my flag.79

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“Indian Summer” reminds us that advancing claims to AngloEuropean sovereignty on behalf of indigenous subjects deemed “worthy”—among, for example, the nation’s tribal and Native returned veterans and their descendants—is often as much contested by the dominant culture as is rejecting the inevitability of an AngloEuropean America itself. And the stories continue. In more recent times, plural sovereignties have accelerated indigenous adaptations beyond those specific “landscapes” described by Allen and Broker, as well as signaled forward prospects for the responsible evolution of indigenous democracy.80

Scope and Limitations In very general terms, this book revisits specific scenes and situations bracketing the exercise of plural sovereignties in contemporary works of indigenous literature written in Anglophone North America. More specifically, close-readings of specific novels indicate that the experience of plural sovereignties is transforming the literature within sovereign canons, whether indigenous or hegemonic, established (“American Literature”) or emerging (“Creek/Muskogee Literature”). The sovereignty struggles of which increasing literary pluralism is the evidence have been, I argue, documented effectively not only within the social or anthropological sciences or constitutional law, but also within the debates currently raging about contemporary indigenous fiction.81 A brief word as to the terminology I use throughout this book. When referencing novels written by individual authors, I try to follow their own practice when citing (or not citing) specific tribe or band memberships. Where writers have not recorded their own preferences, my own choice is to use place-specific affiliations (such as Lummi, Blackfoot, Inuit, or Crow Creek Lakota) rather than terms of nationalist derivation (“American Indian,” “Native Canadian,” or “First Nations”). These latter labels, along with the American usage, “tribe,” and the Canadian usage, “band,” and their plurals (“tribes” and “bands”) can and do have important purchase, however, when expressing postcontact, collective forms and contexts of resistance. When describing anticolonial struggle or its descriptions, I therefore do employ these terms, as needed, as the historical context has supplied them. When risking generalizations about a postcontact history, I likewise use the terms “Anglo-European” and “indigenous” to signify that broad—and originally foreign—value system imposed on

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the original inhabitants and traditions of North America with the advent of colonialism. I also acknowledge that the term “Anglo-European,” like the terms “Indian” or “Native,” posits a reducing and problematic abstraction. Even so, Anglo-European colonialism, with whiteness as its beneficiary, remains a historical fact; accordingly, I let specific characters in specific novels speak for themselves concerning the degree to which North American indigenous individuals may or may not have internalized its effects.82 I make no such reservation, however, insofar as my view that Anglo-European nationalism continues to define as well as to delimit—disproportionately—the contemporary experience of indigenous sovereignty. In addition, by focusing on narratives written in the English language, I necessarily limit my analysis to the broader hegemonic British, Anglo-Canadian, and U.S. contexts in North America, and I do not claim to address equally constitutive Spanish and French colonial histories pertaining to the formation of indigenous “nations” as differently sovereign entities impacted by other alien, European ideologies. Now let me turn to a brief description of what this book cannot claim to do. Within the scope of the above limits, as well as my own, this book cannot claim to be in any way proprietary. It is (as I hope), and to turn Weaver’s apt phrase, a (I hope) reasonably well-informed piece of squatter’s discourse.83 An early reader of this manuscript found annoying my tendency to generalize across specific and discrete traditions. In making my revisions, I’ve tried my best to address this problem of tone; it is also constitutive, however, for anyone— especially someone who is not sovereign—attempting to draw some degree of generalization using mere theories as tools. It is precisely out of deference to important tribe- and band-specific sovereignty (as expressed elsewhere, in the work of scholars such as Jeannette Armstrong or Craig Womack) that I express reserve (or nothing at all) when referencing (or not referencing) particulars about another’s proprietary discourse (Okanagan or Creek traditions). Nor do I wish to declare such outsider’s ignorance as a virtue exactly, but to provide context for my authorial reserve, which does not dare speak or sound like what it cannot be as a lived experience: indigenous. If the voice of sovereignty is what a specific reader requires, then I strongly encourage him or her to consult the appropriate works of the many indigenous scholars and writers I reference in these pages. Nor do I claim that the chapters in this book are in any way comprehensive or, by the time they get to press, entirely “contemporary.”

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(I wrote the first draft of the chapter on Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus, here comprising part of chapter three, fifteen years ago.) No one book ever is. Rather, I’ve tried to show how a particular body of work documents a meaningful theme: the plurality of indigenous sovereignties both determined by and exceeding the present demands of colonial experience. If I could, I would start this book all over again. The next time, I would most certainly put my notes toward chapters on Daniel H. Justice’s The Way of Thorn and Thunder trilogy or Lee Maracle’s Ravensong or Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows—to list only several notable examples of novels postdating my analysis here. Readers of these novels can readily see how these works serve as ciphers of specific sovereign experiences, yet also are written on behalf of many other kinds of stories of dispossession beyond any one particular sovereign context. Or I would go back to Womack, who started so much of what is good with Drowning in Fire, and whose description of an emerging gay passion in the context of a submerged (but never dormant) Creek space started a new sovereign turn in indigenous fiction that outsiders can now come to recognize and appreciate. Even more recently, LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story resituates sovereign Choctaw history by placing it in the very belly of a “national” pastime. Whether or not the scope and quality of this book are sufficient the reader alone can decide; for my part, I have no doubt the next analysis will be better using some or any or all of the books I have cited here, and certainly those I have not.

Part I

Representations Right after the 1862 Conflict, most of the Sioux people were driven out of Minnesota. A lot of our people left to other states. —Elsie Cavender (qtd. in Angela Cavender Wilson, “Grandmother to Granddaughter,” Natives and Academics)

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Chapter One Blood Legacies: Pathology and Power in Works by Sherman Alexie and A. A. Carr We’ve been stuck in place since House Made of Dawn. —Sherman Alexie

In a consensus reached by bands, tribes, and colonizers alike, the sovereignties indigenous people exercise today in the Anglo-European sphere of control have been largely defined as blood sovereignties. As a result, the representation of blood in contemporary literary works has also emerged as a site of contestation, between the promise of consanguinity sustaining indigenous continuity in recognizably sovereign forms on the one hand, as well as the threat of tainted blood, including the corruption of sovereign traditions, coming from exogamous outsiders on the other. A biological commonplace as well as the “proof” of cultural authenticity, blood is a doubled figure within the colonial imaginary. It confers the power of an indigenous people and its proprietary traditions equally, alongside the potential menace of alienation apart from those same traditions. However blood subjectivity has come to be defined, its representations are intimately associated with the problems and potentials of plural sovereignties. In Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, the plausible and the horrific potentials of blood collapse into one another, creating the monstrosity of the real in the midst of a serial murder nightmare.1 In Alexie’s text, the truths of blood subjectivity falter when displaced to the realm of Anglo-European national culture. A different version of the contemporary nightmare, the mingling of sovereign blood within vampiric subjectivities by A. A. Carr in Eye Killers also raises questions about the potentials of “blood” when used to juxtapose different constructions of

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sovereignty, indigenous and settler colonial. Through their evocation of horror and violence, these two novels serve capably as illustrations of—as well as opposing stances on—the viability of plural sovereignties when read through contemporary theories of “blood” subjectivity. For both writers, “blood” is at once cipher and sign for the ongoing blood-letting of colonialism in native North America. Nevertheless, for Carr, blood creates new channels for exercising the plurality of indigenous sovereignty despite the ongoing reality of colonialism. Initially, this shift in blood trope, from Alexie’s taint to Carr’s transfusion, may seem slight. As figures for the criticism of capitalist encroachment on the terrain of Navajo/Keresan country, the invading Anglo-European vampires of Eye Killers readily serve the indigenous critique of capitalism I believe both writers would accept.2 However, beyond their shared focus on anticapitalism and monstrosity, both novels arrive at strictly opposing visions of blood consequence. If Indian Killer depicts mixing blood as pathology—or worse, as embodying the progressive decline of indigenous sovereign traditions and communities via assimilation—Carr borrows vampiric subjectivity to an altogether different purpose. Eye Killers initially gives the monster a claim to eternity through an insatiable appetite—a brutal hunger for difference, rather than modeling, as one might have supposed, a “hybridist” critique of culture and blood separatism. Interestingly, however, a found alliance between indigenous and Anglo-European sovereignties kills the vampire at the conclusion of the story. The latter’s monstrosity emerges as the symptom of excess and imbalance in a strictly ordered indigenous cosmology whose violation implicates everyone in the struggle. *

*

*

As Louis Owens once suggested, the term “American Indian Renaissance” conveys both short-sightedness and an overstatement of the obvious.3 If American Indian writers and scholars feel their “hackles rising” at the moniker, it is because the notion of an American Indian Renaissance “denigrates both the incredible richness of American Indian oral traditions and the contributions long made by American Indian writers to American letters.”4 Overstatement of the American Indian literary renaissance is also misplaced, if nevertheless accurate to some degree: It is impossible to argue that a renaissance in the American Indian novel has not occurred since the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn in 1968. 5

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The use of the double negative represents as indisputable fact the prolific output of American Indian and Canadian Native writers since Abel’s celebrated journey home, while at the same time seeking to distance this phenomenon from the scholarly reflex to canonize. Owens was himself a leading figure among those American Indian artists producing fiction in terms only uneasily labeled “rebirth” from a quattrocento and Anglo-European point of view. This caveat aside, Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer aggressively disputes the “Native American Renaissance” through the juxtaposition of blood subjectivity and mental illness. A parable about the inherent dangers of cross-cultural contact, whether by nature (such as mixed“race” parentage) or by nurture (out-family adoption practices), Indian Killer is part fictionalized biography and part detective story. It depicts the life and death of a deracinated indigenous character, John Smith, whose sovereign traditions are obliterated by a suburban upbringing in an Anglo-European household. All Smith is left with is a longing for absence that rapidly fuels his own descent into mental illness and eventual suicide. John Smith’s story is also set against the backdrop of a wider cultural pathology, that of settler colonialism, which degrades colonizers and colonized alike, and spawns a collective orgy of ensuing violence and reprisal. In his novel, Alexie brings the biography of a sociopath (Smith) and the pathology of the wider culture (a degrading colonialism) into a shared focus when we discover that a serial murderer is loose on the streets of Seattle and scalping his victims. What remains unclear, even by the final pages of the novel, is who serves as the perpetrator of the murders. Are individuals entirely to blame for the malaise of a wider culture? Abandoned to his own delusions, John Smith is caught inexorably by the logic of a “whodunit” in somebody else’s colonialist captivity narrative (a theme to which I return in the following chapter). The plot design of Indian Killer is admittedly complex. Yet part of Alexie’s project with the novel, largely via John Smith’s psychotic experiences, would seem to constitute a categorical denunciation of indigenous literary canon formation based on modernist precedents. Specifically, Smith’s mental illness represents, for Alexie at least, what being “stuck in place since House Made of Dawn” has meant: the despair and hopelessness engendered by mixed blood and culture legacies. At one point in Alexie’s narrative, John Smith’s father, Daniel, works the Seattle streets querying street-people, Indian and white, as to the whereabouts of his son. Daniel Smith does not find his son, but the street-dwellers do report having seen Jim Loney (Welch’s The

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Death of Jim Loney), Tayo (Silko’s Ceremony), and Abel (Momaday’s House Made of Dawn) and “a dozen [other] homeless Indian men” who, along with John, remain lost on the streets of Seattle.6 Whether invoked merely as an ironic aside, or as one of the “Indian trapdoors”7 through which falls the knowing indigenous reader, these indigenous heroes of the American Indian Renaissance appear subversively in Alexie’s text. They are still wandering, still the potential victims and perpetrators of rage produced by the white alienation they have come to internalize. Alexie’s representation of Loney, Tayo, and Abel as homeless, possibly mentally ill, and urban also highlights the divide that remains—not only between Anglo-European canonbuilders and North American Indian and Native writers and scholars, but among the mixed- and full-blood indigenous communities that endow such a canon with meaning. Smith is a wandering misfit— scapegoated by Anglo-European culture and, equally, suffering in the absence of a viable indigenous past. He is abandoned by the sovereignties of both traditions, indigenous and settler-colonial, and madness inevitably follows. I argue that Alexie’s representation of mental illness in Indian Killer obscures several underlying issues. First, the text’s laudable attempt to critique a sugar-coated “American Indian Renaissance” is undercut by the narrative’s insistence on countering plural sovereignties as a threat to indigenous essence. Second, the text reflects a parallel trend in the North American academy that appropriates mental illness or schizophrenia as a facile metaphor (the “schizophrenic text”) for the present predicament of indigenous cultures and histories. In Indian Killer, schizophrenia (or its loose figuration as “schizophrenic text”) is used to several different purposes: to criticize the legacy of Anglo-European modernism within American Indian letters; and to render monstrous any and all pluralistic readings of sovereignty through the use of a specifically “postmodern” figure (what I call the “indigenous schizophrenic”). Such usages fit within a broader movement in indigenous literature and criticism that aestheticizes the clinical experience of mental illness by making it synonymous with the “postmodern” effect of indisputably destructive and violent dislocations in the lives and cultures of contemporary American Indians and Canadian Natives. These uses and abuses of the “indigenous schizophrenic” and the “schizophrenic text” in Indian Killer succeed in deconstructing the legacy of AngloEuropean modernism and the rhetoric of “Renaissance” but only at

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a significant cost: Alexie’s novel solidifies racial purity as the guarantor of authentic indigenous experience. In particular, Indian Killer updates the figure of the indigenous schizophrenic by including John Smith among the ranks of the homeless (alongside Loney, Abel, and Tayo) and other urban nomads within the American Indian canon. By linking Smith’s postmodern predicament to these precursor texts, Indian Killer pathologizes plural sovereignties as adulterated, at a time when the topic is of considerable contemporary interest. This linkage of plural sovereignties within a broadly categorical “schizophrenia” effectively reduces the former to a racial caricature of impurity, if not outright dissoluteness; and reduces the latter to an undifferentiated madness: as if sovereignty were an essence violated, in principle, through mere contact with Anglo-European cultures. One cannot (and would not) dispute the historical facts of genocide at the hands of Anglo-Europeans in the Americas since 1492, but I do question the tactic used in Indian Killer of blaming its indigenous inheritors and representing them, ultimately, only as assimilationists. I say “tactic” because Indian Killer also participates in a broader movement (on the part of indigenous writers and scholars alike) that conveniently subordinates an embodied experience, schizophrenia, to the instrumentality of metaphor. This signifying move—from body to metaphor—is a commonplace of writing; you can’t write a novel (or anything else) without it. But in the case of schizophrenia, which defies smooth categorization in medical terms and lends itself readily to artistic and critical appropriation, ethical problems arise about how literary practices (“postmodernism”) risk silencing the discourses they would otherwise liberate. In Alexie’s Indian Killer, the indigenous schizophrenic is the new “Renaissance” man. As a caricature of narrative futility, John Smith comes dangerously close to signifying not only the fate of plural sovereignties, but of schizophrenics, too, whose place in the postmodern world invites not discourse but destruction. Accordingly, John Smith’s eventual suicide signifies the ultimate “postmodern” signifier of indigenous madness: the “nothing” of nothing. Some brief clarification of terms is in order. When referring to Native North American texts as modernist I do not intend to conflate the terms Native American or Canadian and “modernism” as such; I do presume links in style and influence between Native North American narratives after 1968 and precedents in the AngloEuropean modernist canon.8 Such links are rightly considered unstable rather than determinative and are considered in full light

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of subsequent contestations of Anglo-European modernist styles, usages, and techniques by Indian and Native authors. Indian Killer should be read in this iconoclastic context. By using “schizophrenia” to frame (as well as to deconstruct) the impact of the Anglo-European modernist canon on American Indian letters, Alexie’s text delivers a nightmare of profound psychosocial proportions to the very doorstep of Renaissance theorists, including those who would assimilate American Indian texts unquestioningly “into” the canon of received notables and greats simply for “emulating and imitating the discourse of the cultural center.”9 To this extent, Alexie’s project in Indian Killer is both notable and warranted. The novel fails, however, to make a responsible differentiation between schizophrenia as a lived experience and its literary or metaphorical appropriation by writers and critics as a narrative device. The very appellation “schizophrenic,” used for literary or any other purposes, is itself suspect and reductive, in terms of a widely varying construction of the actual disease.10 I consider Lovell’s definition of narrative schizophrenia as axiomatic: “the reception or construction of the ‘schizophrenic text’ . . . is rendered impossible by the devices its discourse appropriates.”11 An exhaustive treatment of literary appropriations of schizophrenia in the broader modernist context, from James Joyce to James Welch, lies beyond the scope of this chapter. However, the progenitors of the critical practice deserve brief mention. Clara Claiborne Park cites Foucault’s Madness and Civilization which, in freeing up discourse as an instrument of institutional power and knowledge formation, also radically distanced concerns of the body from those individuals who enunciate and express its behaviors.12 Any process of reembodying postmodern discourse—I focus on the figure of the indigenous schizophrenic here—also must critique Jameson’s allegory of “schizophrenia” as in any sense a measurable affect of a contradictory late-capitalism.13 From the perspective of French poststructuralism and Marxism, respectively, both thinkers may reasonably be considered to have sacrificed the subjectivity of the mentally ill in the interest of broader literary formations of (post)modernity. In my view, this troubling practice has been unnecessarily adopted by critics and writers of North American Indian and Native letters. Homeless indigenous schizophrenics deserve better. Any representation of schizophrenia ought to demarcate carefully the metaphorical slippage of the term in its critical usage, as distinguished from the material conditions that define the individual experience of the disease. Using both registers, Alexie’s novel might have achieved a

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more than “postmodern” success, by demonstrating how the blood subjectivities imposed by the Anglo-European nation provoke despair to the point of seeming pathology, if not the physiological actuality of schizophrenia as such. *

*

*

As Anne Lovell’s work suggests, the problem “schizophrenia” presents for narrative is complex, artistically titillating, and ultimately, dangerously misleading. She suggests that a basic presupposition of the “schizophrenic text”—that “alienation, estrangement, and incomprehensibility . . . [of] schizophrenia come to stand for ways of being in the world”—caters to the worst variety of postmodern opportunism.14 The success of works by Foucault, Jameson, and Lyotard has established postmodern theory as a means of both representing and diluting notions of distinct difference—such as mental illness—and has encouraged the refashioning of illness as a metaphor of wider applicability by an entire generation of critics.15 Illnesses, mental and physical, have been appropriated to make pronouncements of wider cultural relevance: While philosophy and literary criticism offer a toolbox for analyzing illness narratives, their particular metaphorical treatment of schizophrenia problematizes the application of narrative tools to the anthropology of . . . “psychotic experience.”16

Strictly speaking, Lovell suggests that what postmodern scholars call the “schizophrenic text” is based on a tautology, whereby “the person who narrates and the schizophrenic narration itself are without listener or interlocutor.”17 Caught in this closed text of schizophrenia are delusional acts that are regarded as either meaningless or so radically devoid of context or form as to be effectively meaningless for the fictional narratives essential to “normal” identity formation. Moreover, the fact that we can read Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney or Alexie’s Indian Killer at all flies in the face of any scholar who would call them “schizophrenic” texts. John Smith’s mental illness, purportedly the stylistic expression of his radical disjunction from Anglo-European and indigenous cultures alike, is central to the narrative’s criticism of plural sovereignties. Smith is ostensibly cut off from his own indigenous story, and it follows that his schizophrenia would therefore preclude him from narrating it, as Lovell suggests.18 Yet the

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narrative structure of Indian Killer, unlike its primary character, is designed to profit from the aesthetic imparted by the “schizophrenic text.” The novel presumably would explore such artistic possibilities by removing the stable “I” (subject position) or “eye” (horizon-line perspective based on Renaissance models) of the Anglo-European reader. Yet by attempting to approximate a “schizophrenic” (or discontinuous) mode of narrative discourse, the novel imparts mixed metaphors of madness that contrast sharply with the clean essentialism of Alexie’s identity politics as revealed at the text’s conclusion. For the great majority of schizophrenics, lived experiences (including disturbances of temporality, wandering and homelessness, and the obliteration of stable constructions of the “self”) are radically and individually stylized. The appropriation of these individualized states to a novelistic aesthetic called the “postmodern experience” is gratuitous. David Harvey, among a host of others, has identified—as characteristic of “schizophrenic” post-Fordist capitalism—that material changes in the international economy determine, rather than define, late twentieth-century narrative practices.19 Alexie’s work might be read as registering the impact of such determinations upon Native North American experience in fugue mode, with Gerald Vizenor’s presumably more celebratory articulations of the postmodern trickster (discussed in chapter three) also presenting material complications for local American Indian and Canadian Native groups in comic mode. Yet however carefully one tries to approximate the degree to which the “schizophrenic text” presumes stock or literary notions only loosely associated with the homeless mentally ill, Alexie’s reading of “schizophrenia” as the metaphor best describing North American Indians and Natives tainted by contacts with Anglo-European sovereignty seems cultural cart before the genetic horse. Of course, this reservation about the epistemological nature-and-nurture of indigenous homelessness (culminating ambiguously in a physiological disorder) need not necessarily fall to the lot of indigenous novelists, in particular, to resolve. Interestingly, however, the use of the signifier “schizophrenia” to describe the psychosocial predicament of American Indians, Alaskan Natives, and Native Canadians appears across a broad spectrum of projects within contemporary indigenous fiction. Vizenor coined the term early with his “narrative description” of the Thomas White Hawk case. 20 Similarly, Owens bases his comprehensive reading of indigenous novels in Other Destinies on a positive transition from the “schizophrenic” breakdown of tribal signifying systems toward a unified and harmonious worldview. 21 And it is perhaps surprising

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to discover that, at least with respect to the “schizophrenic text,” both of these indigenous writer-critics find themselves in the company of Crow Creek Lakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who suggests that “schizophrenia” accounts for the improbable and infantile projections of white desire onto American Indian communities.22 From cogent indigenous critique to criticism of the wanna-be Indian, the signifier “schizophrenia” seems a useful catch-all term that, at least in part, appears to have informed the essence-alterity debate raging among scholars in the field.23 Initially, Alexie’s postmodern novel appears to engage this debate obliquely, primarily because the voice and tonality of his “schizophrenic” text seeks to overturn what Owens calls the “trojan horse” logic operating within contemporary American Indian narrative as the “unmistakably modernist . . . novel in the mainstream tradition that . . . contain[s] within its shell of modernist sophistication a thoroughly ‘Indian’ story and discourse.”24 Attempting to steer clear of such “sophistication,” the representation of the indigenous schizophrenic in Indian Killer is programmatically elided with the predicament of the broader homeless community, thereby furthering the novel’s recuperation of homelessness as an issue for all of its readers. In these terms, however, Alexie’s novel betrays its own “trojan-horse” logic—its ostensible postmodern narrative project (the attack on Native North American “Renaissance” modernism) disguises an underlying liberal reformist impulse that effectively backdates the representation of homelessness in the novel to that of a darker and brooding realism. *

*

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John Smith, adopted by white parents and raised in an affluent Seattle suburb, lacks any meaningful connection to his indigenous past except that “[his] birth mother was fourteen years old” and that he was “a brown baby” (12). The opening chapter of Indian Killer, “Mythology,” details John’s fantastic construction of a myth of origins. In this fantasy, John is violently ripped from his mother’s womb and transported by helicopter, with guns blazing, to Bellevue, Washington, in advance of a Polaroid camera’s flash. Using an aggressive present tense, Alexie describes the scene: John cries as the jumpsuit man hands him to the white woman, Olivia Smith. She unbuttons the top of her dress, opens her bra, and offers John her large, pale breasts with pink nipples. . . . and as John takes the

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Plural Sovereignties white woman’s right nipple into his mouth and pulls at her breast, he discovers it is empty. . . . Olivia and Daniel Smith look at the jumpsuit man, who is holding a camera. Flash, flash. Click of the shutter. Whirr of advancing film. All of them wait for a photograph to form, for light to emerge from shadow, for an image to burn itself into paper. (7–8)

The calculus of oppositions frozen in the photograph—between white and brown, white light and dark shadow—is striking. Smith’s fantasy embeds a polarized logic of “race” into his remembered past, even as he desperately tries to reconcile the perceived schism between notions of Indian authenticity and his parents’ Anglo-European culture. As he grows older, the young Smith is increasingly aware that he possesses a story that his suburban upbringing has not trained him to recognize. The society around him, including education and upbringing in the Catholic church, has not taught him the skills with which to transform the stark binaries of the imagined photograph into a workable and sustainable rendering of plural sovereignties. 25 This advent of photographic realism within an ostensibly “schizophrenic” text initially comes as something of a surprise, even if its aims appear salutary. In its more sympathetic moments, Indian Killer uses Smith’s illness to represent the plight of North America’s homeless, and to highlight specific symptoms of mental illness such as paranoia and hallucination (74; 94; 200; 249–50) as well as delineating the pitfalls of existing standards of medical treatment (74). In realist mode, Indian Killer thus invites reconsideration of the actual facts and common assumptions about indigenous homelessness and mental illness, facts and assumptions typically rendered “true” or “actual” in statistical terms that, in turn, govern the scientific guesswork structuring all narratives (fictional and nonfictional) about mental illnesses. But documentary realism “about” indigenous mental illness cannot change the fact that it is defined very differently from within traditional indigenous communities. 26 Ultimately, however, John Smith remains a schizophrenic without adequate treatment and an indigenous subject without exposure to a sustaining sovereignty. He struggles with his own gut instincts that tell him he is a false construct and merely the projection of his white parents’ misplaced desires. It is a commonplace that parents’ ills are often visited upon their children; Alexie compounds this truism negatively, by using stereotypes of mental illness to pathologize cross-race, out-family adoption practices. Despite disturbing and documented exceptions, the reality of such adoptions does not necessarily lend itself to the assumption that mental illness inevitably follows.27

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Orphaned twice over, the indigenous schizophrenic in Indian Killer is represented peculiarly as his own narrative negation: his disease is at once cause (schizophrenic illness) and consequence (“schizophrenic” effect) of profound and devastating loss. This circular logic causes the trojan-horse realism of Indian Killer to draw attention to itself. The problem of homeless schizophrenia is presented, only to be subsequently evacuated in favor of stock treatments (such as Smith’s aural and visual hallucinations) that serve, alternatively, to muddy subsequent plot twists in the novel. Smith’s mental illness emerges ambiguously as a hard truth and, at times, the harder (and seemingly inevitable) consequence for urban Indians in white supremacist America. This transitive leap from literary metaphor of Native North American predicament to material referent (a disease and its symptoms) is nowhere directly acknowledged in the text. Timely hallucinations also serve conveniently to isolate indigenous characters from recuperative discourses—such as plural sovereignties—which could enable them to fashion a more meaningful response to such a punishing reality. As a metaphor for Alexie’s critique, the schizophrenic text deteriorates, only to affirm suicide as a somehow understandable, if not desirable, consequence of indigenous perplexity. *

*

*

Beyond its admittedly catchy moniker, the concept inhabiting the “schizophrenic text” proves to be inconclusive, precisely because there is no existing consensus about the form and conventionality of mental illness narratives. There is no particular narrative model (subgenre) considered the norm among such texts, and none available that claims to represent the variable complex of mental diseases we call “schizophrenia,” indigenous or otherwise. In fact, whatever symptoms may be considered to characterize the disease schizophrenia, the most salient among them is the very struggle around narrative possibility itself, on behalf of persons who cannot necessarily be represented within those bounds of narrative as generally conceived. Thus any notion of the “schizophrenic subject” (the term verges on oxymoron) disputes finite sequences and temporality (“plot”), rejects patterned behaviors provoking causality (“motive”), and typically transgresses generic bounds (i.e., “the novel”). Already resistant to narrative modes of representation, “schizophrenia” is in Indian Killer further imposed on indigenous epistemologies that have not necessarily privileged writing over orality, a fact that further erodes the credentials of the “schizophrenic text.”

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As schizophrenics experience reality in synchronous rather than linear terms—without a beginning, middle, and end—their quest for meaning never ends. The schizophrenic’s experience posits “an existential struggle between annihilation and survival to reclaim a sense of self. . . . Were the plot to reach a climax, were [the schizophrenic] to find [the object of his quest], his travels would terminate. His homelessness would become banalized, stigmatized, his voyage meaningless.”28 The specter of John Smith’s death-wish, “telegraphed” to the reader from the very beginning of the novel, 29 raises questions about narrative as a disciplined literary formation that attempts, implausibly, to plot the novel in “schizophrenic” terms. The particular case is Father Duncan, the Smith family priest at John’s baptism, as well as the boy’s mentor, friend, and schizoid exemplar. Of Spokane ancestry and Jesuit training, Duncan is atypical and “strange” (13). The affection and intimacy John Smith and his spiritual mentor share are based on the identification of their peculiar “secrets,” (13) their pathology compared with those around them: The Jesuit held the baby John in his arms, sang traditional Spokane songs and Catholic hymns, and rocked him to sleep. As John grew older, Father Duncan would tell him secrets and make him promise never to reveal them. John kept his promises. (13)

On the surface, Father Duncan represents Alexie’s desire to demonstrate the incongruity of white liberal assumptions about innate American Indian and Canadian Native authenticity. “An irony, an Indian in black robes,” Duncan takes “a special interest in John and, with Olivia and Daniel’s heartfelt approval, often visited him” (13). An “irony,” Duncan embodies what, for the adult John, will amount to insoluble contradictions between “split” Indian and white selves, as well as pitfalls associated with plural inheritances here represented as oppositional. At one point in the text, Duncan takes the six-yearold John to see the Chapel of the North American Martyrs in downtown Seattle. In graphic detail, the stained-glass windows of the chapel depict the martyrdom of Catholic missionaries at the hands of Indians. The exchange between Duncan and John is significant: “Did those priests die like Jesus?” asked John. . . . “Did they die like Jesus?” John asked again. Duncan was afraid to answer the question. As a Jesuit, he knew those priests were martyred just like Jesus. As a Spokane Indian, he knew those Jesuits deserved to die for their crimes against Indians.

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“John,” Duncan said after a long silence. “You see these windows? You see all of this? It’s what is happening inside me right now.” (15)

In this passage, Father Duncan’s admittedly precarious being is eerily conflated with death and sacrifice, conveyed by yet another of John’s fantasies about the priest’s disappearance as a final vision quest that only “real” Indians can perform (16). Inspired by his own particular demons, Duncan disappears from Alexie’s text, symbolizing John’s societally induced taste for paradox and abandonment. Lacking the healing power of what Owens calls “a new valuation in life, of going on” that Spider Woman, Yellow Calf, or Coyote impart to other American Indian Renaissance texts, 30 Duncan’s agency is deeply conflicted, imparting an ambiguous symbolic inheritance to John who, in important plot essentials, emulates his mentor precisely. Accordingly, Duncan’s disembodied voice, the sounds and feel of the all-consuming desert, and footsteps (16–17) inspire John at his most symptomatic, most “schizophrenic,” moments. Clearly, the beliefs, contradictions, and ultimate fate of Father Duncan model John’s own spiritual journey, including darker encounters with not only the violence perpetrated on indigenous peoples by white society but also the equally grave consequences of internalized rage and oppression that can kill. Like Tayo, John must face his own demons, but he does so without Duncan, without Betonie, at his side. An ineffectual white father, and a white mother whose love cannot fully comprehend the overarching spiritual scope of apparently isolated acts and events in the story, leave John to face the “strange music” (23) of his mental illness alone. Cacophonous, and to a beat that renders the racial signifiers “white,” and “Indian” in seemingly eternal opposition, this music is John’s madness, burning belly, and a “sharp pain in the lower back,” “written especially for him” (23). John ultimately follows this uncanny music, and Father Duncan, into the desolate land of statistics, leaping to his death off the “last skyscraper in Seattle” (24). *

*

*

Unfortunately, the embedded realism and irony of Indian Killer also engulf the nascent sympathy deriving from the novel’s assertion of the rights of the disenfranchised homeless. Smith and Father Duncan’s elegy, like that of Junior Polatkin in Reservation Blues, affirms the realist drift of indigenous representations as reflected in the stat

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sheet: troubled Indian and Native men have a statistically verifiable tendency to disappear, shoot themselves, or jump off buildings. Thus the brand of literary schizophrenia utilized in Indian Killer parleys in actual flesh without owning the responsibilities it incurs thereby. Similarly, indigenous being is weighed down by the all-too-telling impact of statistics as “truth,” culminating in the text with suicide as an accomplished fact, an all-too-predictable conclusion to the multifarious indigenous experience of mental illness. Yet John Smith’s personal plight, intended to emphasize the virtuous flights of the postmodern narrative, is placed against a broader, realist platform of heroic, homeless resistance. Comprising some 49 percent of American Indians, “urban Indians,” defined as indigenous persons dwelling off-reservation in major metropolitan areas, do not consist entirely of the so-called success stories of 1950s-era termination policies. Homeless American Indians within this group, making up somewhere between 3 and 5 percent of the total American homeless, are the most “urban” of urban Indians and Natives, without the safety net of traditional indigenous ties to land and community. The indigenous schizophrenic’s inalienable difference from his own ostensible group—the Indian and Native homeless and, beyond them, the sustaining indigenous community—is, of course, his purported mental illness, his schizophrenia. While anywhere between 20 and 50 percent of all homeless persons are mentally ill, in Indian Killer Smith encounters few like himself among the homeless ranks. Accordingly, he represents the interesting figure of a functional yet episodic indigenous schizophrenic in caricature. With both job and domicile, John Smith is not well represented in the statistics; by some standards, he would not be considered homeless at all. 31 Belying a statistical profile, Smith both eludes and invites narrative definition. Both more and less than metaphor, and like so many of his real-life contemporaries on the streets, John the indigenous schizophrenic is about to fall through the cracks of the text, or rather, the cracks of the metaphor. John Smith’s homelessness in narrative, like his “schizophrenia,” motivates a recognizable, but countervailing, trajectory in contemporary indigenous fiction. In the far less terminal context of Momaday and Silko’s work, Owens called the indigenous arrival at a centered self, the awareness of “a spiritual tradition that escapes historical fixation, that places humanity within a carefully, cyclically ordered cosmos and gives humankind irreducible responsibility for the maintenance of that delicate equilibrium.”32 Jesse Peters affirms that most American

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Indian narratives involve some version of “centering” in the context of coming home.33 In contrast to such readings, narrative schizophrenia in Indian Killer ordains Smith’s doom, as we have seen, alongside other perpetual wanderers within the American Indian canon—fallen, indigenous heroes, by definition homeless and forgotten. We perceive that Smith is redeemable neither as a schizophrenic nor as a living Indian. He remains, in this sense, the canonical excess of Indian Killer—a totemic sacrifice to Alexie’s criticism of the Native North American Indian Renaissance and, in particular, to those plural sovereignties deriving from it. The linkage of Smith’s illness, schizophrenia, to the satisfaction of a desire fostered (and shared) by Anglo-European majority culture—the somehow pathological need to identify as “authentically” North American (i.e., indigenous)—breeds terror, violence, and ultimately, self-destruction in the novel. Contemporary Seattle is the scene of ritual serial killings believed to have been committed by an “Indian Killer” who shares John’s rage. Yet we are also told that schizophrenics like John “rarely hurt anybody except themselves” (363), and that they, too, are victimized by other various and raging madmen who likewise stalk the text. In Indian Killer, the actions of white vigilantes and equally vengeful mixed-blood Indians (338) raise questions about the bloodstained grounds of culture and “race” normalcy, alongside Alexie’s own sometimes provocative viewpoints. 34 I have suggested that the scholarly practice of selling “schizophrenia” as literary metaphor compromises the subjectivity of those persons, indigenous or otherwise, whose radical experience of reality does not readily translate to narrative. Indian Killer presents this problem most honestly when Smith reflects upon the ordering of reality through language: The paragraph was a fence that held words. All the words inside a paragraph had a reason for being together. They shared a common history. John began to see the entire world in paragraphs. He knew the United States was a paragraph within the world. He knew his reservation was a paragraph within the United States. His house was a paragraph distinct from the houses to the west and north. Inside the house, his mother was a paragraph, completely separate from the paragraph of John. But he also knew that he shared genetics and common experiences with his [indigenous] mother, that they were paragraphs that belonged next to each other. John saw his tribe as a series of paragraphs that all had the same theme. (291)

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This passage strikes to the heart of “the problem the temporal experience of schizophrenia poses to the narrative genre.”35 Smith, his tribe, and his mother—all are “fenced in” by language, by the holocaust of representation engendered by centuries of white supremacy. Here Smith appropriates this alien discourse to group certain “paragraphs” together, each with the same theme. Nietzsche’s dictum is indigenized in Indian Killer and apparently rendered “postmodern” through John’s escape beyond the “fence,” via mental illness, beyond the prison house of language. Importantly, however, Indian Killer is not simply posing the universal dilemma of language, the supposition that any and all expressions of community and being are inherently limited by sign and signifier. Alexie puts this universal in a particularly devastating context by reminding readers that language, too, is usually imposed by winners upon losers, as well as the users and abusers of history in a colonial context. The difficulty of Alexie’s Nietzschean reading arises, however, with the novel’s conclusion, suggesting that John has become a “real Indian” at last, only by escaping the tyranny of regimes of representation and by escaping language: He was still watching the shadow in the fortieth-floor window when he hit the pavement. . . . Pushing himself up, he felt a tearing inside. . . . John looked down at himself and saw he was naked. Brown skin. Muscles tensed in anticipation of the long walk ahead of him. He studied the other body as it sank deeper into the pavement. John stood, stepped over that body, and strode into the desert. Dark now, the desert was a different place. Colder and safer. An Indian father was out there beyond the horizon. And maybe an Indian mother with a scar on her belly from a Cesarean birth. (412–13)

In death, John Smith’s skin becomes legitimately “brown.” Nameless and tribeless, “maybe,” Smith’s identity achieves authenticity at the expense of his erstwhile (and as yet unexplored) plurality of historical being, a bloody punctuation to the narrative that has a chilling, rather than simply metaphorical, resonance. Statistics on the suicide rates of American Indian men between the ages of 15 and 24 are grim. For this age group suicide is the second leading cause of death (after accidental deaths) and, at 23.5 deaths per 100,000, exceeds that of men of all races in the United States by greater than two to one.36 Among reported figures, a weighted average of mentally ill American Indians lies near 3 percent.37 No statistical composite that groups together the three constituencies in Indian Killer and combined in John Smith—the mentally ill, urban

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Indians, suicide victims—is currently available. Typically homeless, these indigenous people tend not to tell their stories or to stay around long enough to be counted. What the available numbers do suggest is that the tale of John Smith is statistically anomalous yet also broadly representative of larger structures of social and cultural disenfranchisement of the indigenous mentally ill. It is in this context that the terminal creed of Smith’s “schizophrenic” self-revelation (or lack thereof) seems so profoundly disturbing. We can infer that Smith, never having possessed an authentic indigenous being, kills himself as the ultimate expression of a purportedly “schizophrenic” alienation from that absence. It seems that the protagonist of Indian Killer—it should be noted that Smith’s alienation is produced by his sense of not being a culturally constituted full-blood—has not come very far since Jim Loney staged his own execution over thirty years ago. And if the “postmodern insistence upon the fragmented sense of self finds its reflection in the radically deracinated mixedblood of much Indian fiction,” we have come worse than full-circle.38 In Indian Killer, even the uprooted fullblood cannot come into contact with AngloEuropean culture without toxic consequences. The novel thus renders paradigmatic what was the merely provisional (if equally despairing) mandate of Welch’s text. Nor is it entirely clear how Indian Killer productively shifts (in “schizophrenic” terms) American Indian texts any further from the “stuck” modernism invoked by Alexie in the epigram to this chapter: John Smith appears little more than a quintessential postmodern victim, on the same shelf with modernist, and earlier, realist treatments of American Indian tragedy and epic.39 Put differently, the “killer Indian” in Indian Killer, whoever he is, seems little more than Jim Loney with a more current and homicidal attitude, jibing with the more sensationalist, broad-based readership of the smart-horror detective stories popularized by James Ellroy, Martin Cruz Smith, and Walter Mosley among many others. Finally, Alexie’s novel concludes with the symbolic sacrifice of the indigenous schizophrenic, John Smith, in an act that attempts to reveal the implicit violence lurking within white, liberal pathos. The “schizophrenic text” disciplines its schizophrenic subject at last, thereby revealing its epistemological investment in conventional narrative form, with beginning, middle, and end and undercutting any “postmodern” claim to novelty. Smith abducts the bogus “mixedblood” writer, Jack Wilson, retreats to his eyrie atop the last skyscraper in Seattle and, with a flashing finality, slashes the length of the writer’s face deep to the bone. “You’re not innocent,” John declares before he jumps, having excoriated Wilson and the false tribe he represents for not allowing American Indians to

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have their own pain (411). Wilson does not heed Smith’s indictment; he publishes an “interesting portrait” of Smith in realist mode that, analogous to the Moynihan Report that stereotyped African American family models based on inconclusive data, suggests simply “that Indian children shouldn’t be adopted by white parents” (415). In an eerie parody of segregationist social engineering, John’s life and death have, at last, found a narrative form highlighting the homelessness of the indigenous subject. *

*

*

The bodies of the indigenous mentally ill are more than literary metaphor, more than Jamesian figures in the carpet. As Indian Killer illustrates, the relation between Native North Americans and homelessness, literal and figural, is not only art but chilling historical fact. The novel’s overall argument seems to be that schizophrenia may be the only viable “Renaissance” left to indigenous artists in a white supremacist society. Otherwise, novelists like Jack Wilson will write such novels on the indigenous behalf and get it all wrong. However, John Smith’s suicide in Indian Killer and its association with the lasting achievement of racial purity are troubling. This claim of purity effectively silences the operation of metaphor (difference) on the field of plural sovereignties, substituting for a play of subtleties the hardened statistics of realist discourse. Postmodern metaphors such as “schizophrenia” may never be entirely sufficient in describing the material conditions that currently constrain indigenous being and representations—Alexie’s own pointed critique of Gerald Vizenor’s “word masturbation” comes most immediately to mind40 —but they are certainly preferable to the ultimate resolution through death that Indian Killer endorses. The implication of John Smith’s suicide is that it achieves peace, cures madness, and resolves the old cliché of split- or warring selves. Yet the fact remains that in Indian Killer, pure products do not go crazy—only the impure ones do. Far from being perceived as a wrong-headed and self-destructive act, John Smith’s suicide is seen as his best, most prophetic, most indigenous undertaking. John Smith’s suicide is likewise meant to pass terminal judgment on the prospect of pluralized sovereignties, just as the metaphor of “schizophrenia” is intended to aestheticize the outer limits of miscegenation as pathological and subversive. The representation of John’s mania, however, simply revisits the by-now tired theme of alienated indigenous subjects forced to wander forever between

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cultures. More peculiar still, John Smith’s literary schizophrenia imparts a backhanded symbolic agency, allowing him to embody (like Father Duncan) essential truths, even ostensibly false ones. Sustaining bouts of lucidity between hallucinatory episodes, John Smith embraces the very absence Indian Killer asserts but cannot prove: the purported lack of viable plural sovereignties and being for American Indians and Canadian Natives. As something other than an empty postmodern signifier, John Smith might have had a chance to survive. As it is, however, his narrative fate risks the abandonment of history and the embrace of suicide as a false apotheosis. Both are dangerous, and emerge at precisely the moment when a portrayal of Smith’s plurality of being could have better served to address the persisting question of indigenous homelessness on and off the streets, on and off the literary reservation we call the American Indian “Renaissance.” *

*

*

Indian Killer has hardly amounted to Alexie’s final word on the question of indigenous violence and its motivations, however. In the intervening years and, in particular, since the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, Alexie’s interest in isolated characters like John Smith, both indigenous and not, has become at once more sensitive and complex. In a welcome coda to some of the social problems Indian Killer demonstrated—and to some extent would seem to have represented as inevitable—Alexie has apparently undertaken to move beyond the inherent pathology of plural sovereignties and turned instead toward the indigenous young and their battle for the future despite the odds. His more recent work has benefited from this philosophical turn, so as to make a more general enquiry into the consequences of living in an ethically damaged world where Native North Americans, like most (if not all) people, manufacture violence all too readily in the search for meaning. In works such as the short-story collection Ten Little Indians and Flight, Alexie makes a convincing case against the dangers of violence masquerading as existential fulfillment. After 9/11, Alexie’s stylization of violence appears to have shifted, linking specific indigenous perspectives to broader, essentially humanist ones. His underlying message, however, has remained consistent: all humans are complicit with violence in a dangerous world with unjust rules of engagement. Only the foundational and historical contexts of conflict, as unique triggers

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of specific times and places, will differ. Same will to violence, different contexts. For Alexie, what the Anglo-European context in particular has achieved, and masterfully, is the more rapid and destructive detonation of indigenous histories already deeply embedded and, over time, made reflexive—such that the false promise of violence may actually, impossibly, be equated with a meaningful life. Unlike John Smith, who dies as a sacrifice to violence, Alexie’s post-9/11 characters are now experiencing afterlives in the very midst of violence. And, unlike Smith, they are surviving; irrevocably altered, but surviving. Ultimately, Alexie’s genius lies in his intimate understanding of the transformative power of violence. These are certainly not only indigenous questions, but also human ones. In my view, not since J. D. Salinger has any writer so keenly depicted the threat of violence under the guise of desire and attempted to protect youth from its categorical reach. Like many of Salinger’s stories do, Alexie’s Flight points the finger at breeding violence inter-generationally, in ways that all cultures, all families—both our own and those of the “enemy”—can and should feel squeamish about. Interestingly, it is only since 9/11 that Alexie has been able to shake himself free, at least in part, from the dangerous fascination with violence as catharsis and its chicken-and-egg “schizophrenic,” cause-as-consequence tautology.41 With his character Zits in Flight and Arnold Spirit in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie has come to recognize the dangers of this fascination, particularly for the young. There is an abiding cynicism in both of these novels written for young adults—Holden Caulfield hides behind it, too—but there is also survival. As an indigenous writer (and not one evoking comparisons with other “greats” in the Anglo-European canon), Alexie’s voice also adds historical weight and depth beyond the settler-colonial literary tradition he has often and justly criticized. His work sounds warnings about individuated renderings of pathology and suffering exponentially, right up to (and probably well beyond) that point at which the moral becomes ineffectual and banal in the face of genocide. And while I am critical of Alexie’s pathological renderings of plural sovereignty in Indian Killer, I concede the bravery of his attempts to acknowledge (rather than celebrate or trade on) the constitutive basis of violence in everyday being for most, if not all, subjects in an as-yet-colonized world. *

*

*

We have seen how Alexie’s Indian Killer rejects forward prospects for plural sovereignties in a blood discourse. Wherever and whenever a

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bloodline mixes—whether by virtue of biological necessity or cultural difference—it fails, creating a “schizophrenic” torque and signature for those surviving the toxicity of the encounter. Anomalies like John Smith fall through the cracks of pluralized culture and blood discourses; accordingly, they do not survive for long. For A. A. Carr (Navajo/Pueblo), the blood-letting achieved through indigenous contact is no less bleak, no less demonic. Nevertheless, in his novel Eye Killers, Anglo-European vampires are reborn in American Indian country only to be—like all vampire stories— vanquished by the light of dawn. What makes Eye Killers an appropriate counter-text to Alexie’s Indian Killer is the former’s refusal to damn the exercise of plural sovereignties outright. Just as notably, a life-affirming “hybridity” does not effectively result as the novel’s over-arching claim. (Indeed, Michael Roanhorse, the protagonist of Carr’s novel, ultimately dies after having passed through a vampiric state in rejection of his own indigenous blood and its traditions.) Rather, Eye Killers recounts the story of a found blood-alliance— between Roanhorse, his erstwhile vampire lover, Elizabeth, and a third Anglo-European character, Diana Logan—that counters not only the vampire’s immediate threat but the environmental degradation of which he is symptomatic. By burying a medieval European vampire deep in the earth of Navajo/Keresan country, and letting him rise from the dead there, A. A. Carr’s novel presents a contemporary rewriting of indigenous being still defined by blood sovereignty. In marked contrast to the isolation of Alexie’s indigenous “schizophrenic,” the vampire in Eye Killers emerges as the ever-resurrected symptom of transformation: Eye Killer awakened beneath a shroud of soil. Sand and dead wood pressed upon his body. . . . The moon, a pale eye, glared above a barren land. Blocky, buttressed towers rose above an ocean of sand and shattered rock. He remembered fragments of crossing the still, dead sea: a turning bowl of alien constellations; shifting sand hills; twin starimprinted masked heads emerging from red boulders and white sands, sleepless eyeholes watching and hunting. A freezing wind numbed his eye. He remembered a lithe, dark-eyed girl; how he had howled her name when the sun’s fire descended. He remembered his name.42

At first encounter, the Anglo-European vampire, Falke, clearly and conventionally represents the predicament indigenous communities face through encroachment, lawful and not, by settler cultures.

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More significantly, by juxtaposing vampirism with the ongoing transformation of the indigenous future, the novel reflects contemporary “blood talk” by attempting to move forward from the fragmentations imposed by neocolonial blood discourse.43 To this extent, Eye Killers demonstrates a “crossblood” imperative, when described in terms of the literary-critical framework popularized by Vizenor and Owens among others.44 Blood plurality gathers under the sign of the vampire in Carr’s novel, with the resulting figure—otherwise a standard generic signature—an innovative exemplar of ongoing debates within contemporary indigenous fiction about whether—and how—the exercise of plural sovereignties amounts to blood sovereignties. Yet this “crossblood” or “mixedblood” element, keyed as it is to the contemporary debate among constructivist and materialist scholars, is only one element in Carr’s overall design. It may perhaps not even be the most interesting. Clearly, vampire subjectivity requires the mixing of blood, even as it erodes any assumption of blood-as-difference. Any and all blood is consumed subject to the monster’s overriding and transgressive appetite. (The vampire couldn’t care less whether his or her blood is “mixed” as a metaphor for staking an authenticity claim: s/he just needs to drink blood, now. And a lot more after that.) The very imagining of vampires suggests mobility, transgression, and a cloak-and-dagger contingency, through blood, whereby we might, someday, become them regardless of whether or not we want to. In other words, beyond crossblood or indigenous metaphor, Carr’s Falke is a powerful figure for rampant consumption and the erosion of difference in the interests of blood uniformity. None can deny that blood is in all of us; but once it stands in for something else, for national or indigenous status, it is not blood any longer. Instead, it becomes a mutable sign within the domain of culture, where all references become line-drawing exercises of power, the marking of bodies, the gothic separation of blood from its flesh, and the tearing of being from its experience. The novel’s instrumentalized use of blood metaphor, and not the monsters themselves, is why Eye Killers is such a frightening story.45 On the one hand, the novel gives us metaphorical “vampires” who, as scapegoats, become the convenient targets of closed systems or communities that must create an external threat—in this case tainted blood—so as to police their own bright-line boundaries better.46 On the other hand, these vampires are also very real agents of rampant consumption who threaten the carefully calibrated limits placed upon intergroup interactions despite, or because of, those indigenous traditions being closed to outsiders.

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It follows that in Eye Killers the problem isn’t only about how (or whether) sovereign indigenous traditions are forced open through blood contact. Carr’s novel also addresses innovatively how indigenous cultural resources—and, I emphasize, “blood” in the colonial era possesses cultural, and not only biological, properties—must respond creatively to threats beyond established limits of what is known or trusted. As evil invaders from without, vampires would seem to operate under the sign of an alien colonial threat that has capably served the purpose of assimilation into our own day, including Anglo-European attempts to co-opt all indigenous cultures, to corrupt sovereign traditions, and to assimilate autonomous indigenous cultures into the Anglo-European nation. Yet the threat of the vampire may rise equally from within indigenous communities, as greater numbers of indigenous peoples integrate foreign elements into their own narratives of survival and are lost to the organic community of “pure” traditions held apart. Against this view, as represented by Alexie’s fashioning of the tribal “schizophrenic” in Indian Killer, I argue that plural sovereignties can survive the encounter with any sanguinary nationalism, whether indigenous or hegemonic, because such a plurality is rendered suspect—multiply marginalized—by agents from each and every competing nation promoting blood purity as an absolute requirement.47 Emerging initially as a figure of nationalist allegory, of the reducibility of all blood into a common national or assimilating type, the vampire actually subverts an absolute nationalism by forging sinister “power-alliances,” as Catherine Rainwater puts it, in the interests of sustaining pluralized sovereignties.48 Such alliances, formed from within blood nations, transgress those very boundaries of endogamy that the vampire’s unreal subjectivity, as a feared outsider, would seem to require. Once having penetrated the local community, the vampire’s blood must be held apart from the pure remnant of the nation by any means necessary. It follows that if the sovereign nation fails to contain the vampiric threat, its ultimate defeat will result in a nation of vampires whose impure blood moots the question of authenticity altogether. But it’s always too late. The vampire’s impure blood is already among us. And yet, as Carr depicts it in Eye Killers, the vampire is neither solely an instrument of Anglo-European power nor the site of its dissemination, neither solely the capitalist predator nor the progenitor of a new “postindian” prey.49 That Falke inspires both love and horror

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in the novel neatly pinpoints the collective fascination, among all parties to “blood talk,” with blood as a marker of difference, distinction, and, in racist terms, as the ultimate arbiter of authenticity. By fashioning a pluralist response to blood talk, Carr’s representation of the vampire in Eye Killers has been read by some as signaling the impoverishment of indigenous sovereignty. Yet such critics also have chosen to overlook how Eye Killers effectively redeploys the trope of blood so as to criticize, equally, the privileges and prerogatives of AngloEuropean pluralism without teeth—if you’ll forgive the expression— and a liberal consanguinity that has stood idly by, and weak-kneed, for the better part of two nationalist centuries while capitalist predators roamed Indian and Native country unchecked. *

*

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By risking a politics of engagement with nonindigenous outsiders to combat the vampire’s (Falke’s) evil, the novel’s Navajo/Keresan hero, Michael Roanhorse, does not question the traditional worldviews underlying his experiences. Rather, he requires outside help in defeating an all-encompassing evil. Combining Roanhorse’s quest to recapture his indigenous past, along with the timely help of enlightened liberal sympathy in the form of Diana Logan (Roanhorse’s niece, Melissa’s, school teacher), Carr’s novel engenders little doubt that Falke must be vanquished before he transforms Melissa into his next bride. Here, however, the problem of consanguinity, of blood talk, asserts itself again. An early reviewer of Eye Killers, Reva Gover, had this to say about the “multicultural”—read assimilationist—focus of the novel: A. A. Carr is to be applauded for his efforts to “push the envelope” for Native American writers. However. . . . [i]n being responsible to our youth does he belittle our elders by making their efforts ineffectual and letting the “good whiteman” or in this case woman, save us? . . . Eye Killers should be kept to the learned, those who know their culture and lifeways, and are secure in themselves as Indians. I definitely would not recommend this book to young adults still forming an idea of who they are.50

Gover’s reservations speak sensibly against the good intentions of Anglo-European liberalism, whose onerous track record with tribes and bands under conditions of national captivity is insulting precisely by the light of those good intentions. (I speak to such conditions of captivity more expressly in the following chapter.) More disturbing in

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Gover’s rendering, however, is the implicit assumption that younger indigenous readers exist under a state of threat, Falke-like, from inherently corrupting modern discourses. For some, Carr’s novel, not unlike the vampire stalking its pages, represents contamination of otherwise “authentic” indigenous blood discourses. Notably, Sherman Alexie also reacted strongly against the outing of traditional Navajo practices in Eye Killers and, like Gover, objected to the intervention of a white character in the novel, Diana Logan: Purdy: But there’s some interesting work coming out. Have you read Carr’s Eye Killers? Alexie: I hate it. JP: You did? Well, that’s right, it does have that traditional thing going on, but to move into the genre of the vampire novel I thought was interesting. SA: That’s fun, but I thought that book was blasphemous as hell to Navajo culture, the way he used ceremonies and such. I have a real problem with that. I don’t use any at all. And a white woman saved everybody. 51

Alexie’s rejection of the novel rests on its use of ceremony for the uninitiated—“blasphemous as hell”—and is not unlike GunnAllen’s criticism of Silko’s use of ceremony in another context. A self-styled “conservative” in defense of strict cultural purity, Alexie elaborates: We shouldn’t be writing about our traditions, we shouldn’t be writing about our spiritual practices. Not in the ways in which some people are doing it. Certainly, if you’re writing a poem or story about a spiritual experience you had, you can do it. But you also have to be aware that it’s going to be taken and used in ways that you never intended for it. . . . The responsibilities of being an Indian writer are enormous. Even more so than any other group of people because we have so much more to protect. 52

When read as a figure for a spectral and invasive national allegory, Falke clearly represents the threat underlying Alexie’s alarm, that of an encroaching settler-colonial nationalism and its failed “assimilation project that claimed the power to successfully elide Native cultures.”53 As tempting—indeed as historically manifest—as this reading may seem, reading Eye Killers as national allegory nevertheless risks an unnecessary dichotomy between reductionism and polarization, either in the form of soft-selling indigenous sovereignty within the Anglo-European

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nation, or a hard-core indigenous counter-nationalism, which sees a strict, even phobic, cultural separatism as the only viable alternative.54 To which nation does the foreigner Falke belong? The Anglo-European or indigenous? Neither? or, once blood is drawn, both? Eye Killers skirts this dichotomy carefully, linking Falke’s emergence in Indian country with the uncanny (and yet always violent) sense of the colonizer’s unalterable difference as alien, yet also reminding us that the witchery of vampires speaks through ideologies (including nationalism) that remain essentially familiar to us. In this scenario, our friends, family members, and loved ones, once corrupted, may no longer care to remember their origins but can “pass” as if they did. As evidence of nationalist disregard, Tillett notes that both Falke and the Roanhorses are removed from the purview of the dominant culture: By juxtaposing and therefore mirroring a wilfully imposed Native American absence . . . with the fantastical, but nonetheless “real” monstrosity that the vampire represents, Carr reveals the carefully hidden imperial impetus and the visible effects of capitalism and corporate enterprise. 55

That Carr’s indigenous vampires pass spectrally through national cultures unobserved speaks directly to the truth that all nationalisms impose a lack of seeing difference as the necessary, and unfortunate, erasure of origins elsewhere. We cannot actually see national difference at all. Rather, it is encoded all too conventionally using deceptive (and typically racialized) signs of biological difference. Certainly, Falke, Hannah, and Elizabeth kill people (of whatever blood nation) to drink the blood they need to survive. Yet it is also their monstrously different (alien) blood that, once drunk, emerges as the marker that “national” authenticity most strenuously seeks to erase. Falke is supremely hidden within the national allegory, precisely because his visibility as difference, his monstrosity, is not required to declare itself. No one (mis) recognizes his blood “impurity” for the mixture of indigenous and Anglo-European blood it truly is. Anyone can look at his face and see that he’s not from around these parts, that he doesn’t belong here. *

*

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Allow me to summarize briefly. As conventional literary figures stylizing the threat of miscegenation, vampires are born anew in Carr’s narrative under currently existing conditions of nationalist,

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indigenous captivity at the dawn of the twenty-first century. 56 The arch-vampire, Falke, is at once the resurrected symptom of long-ago contacts between indigenous peoples and Anglo-European colonizers, as well the embodiment of continuing contacts and present desires for tribal and Native vengeance in the name of past wrongs. That the blood of the vampire is mixed, mingling both indigenous and Anglo-European legacies—of mutual recognition, engagement, and as has often been the case, rejection and hostility—has gone largely unnoticed by critics, as above, otherwise impressed by the ease with which Carr translates a celebrated genre to his own indigenous purposes. In addition, Falke occupies a doubled subject position in Eye Killers: first, as that external threat of miscegenation from without, attending a genocidal assimilation project that indigenous separatists have had cause to fear; and second, as the extreme (predatory) consequence of assimilation itself, whereby some acculturated members of indigenous nations have claimed indigenous roots and being without owning up to the responsibilities and debts incurred thereby. In both cases, Falke’s veins run with stolen blood, not only in the embodied, narrative instance of Eye Killers (blood-letting as a plot device, predictable in sustaining the vampire plot) but, more importantly, as an instance of acquired plural sovereignties (blood-getting, of blood talk made necessary so as to protect sovereignty in the colonial era). Such plural sovereignties may therefore be viewed pathologically, or, as I’m arguing here, as the means of engagement across cultures that Carr’s friend, Louis Owens, promoted in his own fiction and creative work as the constructivist credo of “mixedblood.”57 In making his own bid for eternity outside history, Falke seeks to create the American Southwest as his sanctuary from the past (“It’s clean here. . . . And there are no ghosts” [102]). He kills white and indigenous victims indiscriminately. In attempting to escape the past, moreover, Falke remains grimly unaware of his role as a figure of contact—a colonizer—forcibly joining indigenous and AngloEuropean histories. His character is of significance precisely because questions of “ethnicity,” the array of his victims’ cross-cultural identifications, does not weigh directly into his consideration of how and when he will be required to feed next. 58 Falke is merely using the cover afforded by nationalism, much as “ethnic” outsiders might, as a disguise to further his own thirsting necessity. His hunger for blood remains oblivious to the cultural groundings of the various hosts who become his victims.

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Initially, this fact alone would seem to signal Carr’s use of literary vampirism as a vehicle to criticize mainly the consumption of blood, rather than making a statement about its “hybridist” exchange. As a blood consumer, Falke is an undead “desiring machine,” leveling blood difference in the uniform desire for accumulation and repetition; his “monstrosity” emerges as nothing other than the desire to articulate (so as to totalize) difference within a shared dynamic requiring the appetite for both life and death.59 Accordingly, Falke marks all of his victims equally under the sign of consumption—the vampire bite—regardless of whether they have been chosen to survive as his brides.60 From this side of the dynamic, Falke and the indigenous domain are threatened, equally, by a larger witchery of which Falke is merely the telling symptom: the rampant commodification of experience and its consumption in the interest of late-capitalism.61 Yet Falke’s vampiric subjectivity is more than merely a monstrous breakaway reaction, replicating the capitalist urge to assimilate and consume cultural difference. He is also a present nightmare indicting the present capitalist dispensation using nationalism as its form.62 Blood is Falke’s instrument as well as his medium, and in consuming the blood of others, he is also consumed by them, with all parties absorbing difference reflexively in blood, being, and narrative along multiple sites of exchange. For the reader approaching Eye Killers in this way, bites on the necks of Falke’s victims signify not only his serial consumption in a narrative progress; they also represent his insatiable hunger for, his necessary borrowing from, different subjectivities. The quotation marks embedded in the necks of his victims also signify what is central to my purpose here, the understanding that Falke’s ingestion of so-called pure indigenous blood (and its discourses) is necessarily tainted by what, after Bakhtin, Jesse Peters calls “routes, roads and paths” of broader, heterogeneous experiences.63 Histories of blood exchange complicate the accumulative basis of the vampire’s consumption; blood difference inhabits Falke’s veins and keeps his rest uneasy. If the Eye Killer (Falke) would tear vision out of time, in so doing he forgets that time also writes a filigree of his own story, his own modernity, by embedding it within a far older blood narrative: [W]hat enables the eye to grasp a terrible equivalence between the voice of alliance that inflicts and constrains, and the body afflicted by the sign that a hand [or vampire’s teeth] is carving in it?. . . . And what is his pain if not a pleasure for the eye that regards it [in] . . . a theater

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of cruelty that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the graphic hand, and the appreciative eye.64

Deleuze and Guattari’s “theater of cruelty” above, recast in Eye Killers for Falke’s victims, must also in time consume him. Blood history, rather than blood eternity, observes Falke from without and waits patiently for the sun. The reader, too, watches: the witness to a rising awareness in the novel that embraces indigenous sovereignty beyond blood discourse. If the “signs” of pain link victims to their vampire perpetrator, parcel to a Navajo/Keresan narrative design, they nevertheless remain undecipherable to Falke and the uninformed Anglo-European reader alike, for whom the “articulated voice, the graphic hand, and the appreciative eye” serve AngloEuropean generic requirements alone. Only by enlisting a larger, indigenous story, long preceding master narratives of nation and capital, may Falke’s presence in Indian country be properly understood. From the indigenous perspective, then, there is another story, another legacy compounding, even as it rewrites, the vampire novel structure and its logic. To argue against Falke’s vampirism on the basis of its cruelty alone is to perceive only the demand, rather than the supply, side of the vampire’s existence in an indigenous narrative. Evil, too, has an integral part to play. It is the Navajo-Pueblo (Keresan) tradition that watches Falke, even as he feasts on the eyes of others to deprive them of their visioin, as in sight? Or visions, as in what they see? Fleeing Europe for America, Falke has lived in fear of watchers, the “sleepless eyeholes” (3) and “cheerless masks [that] watch endlessly” (45). These masked images, totemic of what Falke and Elizabeth call a “savage” past (46; 98), hunted him down one fiery night and destroyed him after he had killed a “native girl” (45). But the indigenous warriors did not destroy his essence in mythic time, thereby enabling him to rise again in the historical narrative Eye Killers resurrects. In Falke, Michael Roanhorse encounters a version of power he recognizes, even hinting at their shared origins: “A warrior as yourself could only have come from a race who knew. . . . Yet I [Falke] am a creature from that age who knows from sweet experience. Your knowledge and your blood have passed through many hands. It is tainted and weak.” . . . Falke gazed at [Michael], examining. “Where do you come from, old man? From what world?” “I might tell you my name. And from that, you would understand my weakness. But I’m not ready to die, yet.”

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Plural Sovereignties “I would not recognize your world, savage.” “You come from the same place, ma’iitsoh. I know you.” (247–48)

The link Carr establishes here between Navajo/Keresan eye-killer traditions (the vampire-hunter stealing life visions of the unwary) and the witchery engendered historically by the wider colonizing culture—with Falke’s emergence as its recurring symptom—is telling. Roanhorse recognizes Falke’s form as the historical eruption of a much older witchery against which his people have been battling for all time.65 The vampire and the Navajo are known to one another; hence, they are both knowable and known, watched. Once reborn in the Americas, Falke is drawn to the newness of the indigenous domain, its freshness and purity, even as he does not recognize that by drawing “savage” blood into his veins, he implicates himself within a wider blood history that can more readily locate, so as to hunt, him. Alongside this paradigm of eternal patterning—Falke’s marking of his brides so as to deprive them of history; Roanhorse’s covering his murdered daughter’s body, Melissa’s mother, Sarah, with pollen so as to remember her history (284–85)—Carr’s novel posits historical irruptions onto timelessness both indigenous and vampiric. Eye Killers aligns good and evil as lawful opposites, so as to assure their necessary conflict. Within this historical frame, the discourse of blood emerges not only in self-referential terms of hunger and need, but also in Falke’s own necessary repetitions of blood-letting in a narrative trajectory that will culminate in his destruction. Herein lies the problem for “pure” blood traditions when narrating historical contacts with the alien blood differences that are commonplaces of modern—and, as is likely, premodern—experience. There is no going back to a recovery of purity. Nor, however, is the point of Carr’s narrative one of capitulation to the vampires’ evil or of submitting to their attempted erasure of blood origins that, in the end, also claims the vampires themselves. Eye Killers argues, rather, that blood sovereignties may be reinvented, through a renaming in story that can return evil to its proper place in mythic as well as historical time. For Michael Roanhorse, knowing evil will require—at least for a time— that he embody it. *

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By engineering his own death for his granddaughter’s sake, Roanhorse stakes a claim beyond the policed limits of the indigenous blood

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domain. To render Changing Woman’s magic immune to Falke’s own considerable mastery over life, Michael provokes a losing combat with another of Falke’s brides, Hannah, and is killed. However, another of Falke’s brides, Elizabeth, returns Michael’s corpse to life-in-death with her own blood: She held her wrist to the light, slashed an artery. . . . Black jewels appeared on the corpse’s [Michael’s] chest and face. . . . Elizabeth lifted his head to her breast, held her bleeding wrist over his mouth, guided him to the falling stream. She called to him. His dead pupils began to fill with tears, trickling like rain pools forming in stone. “Drink for me.” Time creeped. She heard a sound like paper rustling and looked down. Michael’s eyes closed, blinked open. Elizabeth smiled emptily as his fingers grasped onto her arm. She continued to smile even though it hurt when he began to suckle the blood from her body. . . . “Don’t hate me, Michael,” she said. (300)

Michael Roanhorse’s reappearance in Eye Killers as an indigenous vampire is one of the more striking emergences in recent indigenous literature. Carr’s strategy is one of resistance through co-optation of alien difference, rather than a strict separation from it. Roanhorse proclaims, “I am Eye Killer,” and in seeking vengeance for his granddaughter, Melissa, apparently turns his back for a time on his own Navajo/Keresan traditions (312). Yet by striking one of Vizenor’s “fugitive poses”—by drawing upon notions of the popular gothic originating from within the AngloEuropean novelistic tradition—Carr is appropriating the blood discourses of the vampire novel to the broader purpose of sovereign repatriation.66 Subsuming once alien discourses within the sovereign, narrative traditions of indigenous cultures is necessary, Simon J. Ortiz argues, to the latter’s ongoing survival: [I]n every case where European culture was cast upon Indian people of this nation there was similar creative response and development . . . it can be observed that this was the primary element of a nationalistic impulse to make use of foreign ritual, ideas, and material in their own—Indian—terms.67

In Eye Killers, Roanhorse clearly is participating in the process of creative transformation that Ortiz describes as necessary to indigenous resistance. Having inhabited the dark recesses of the vampiric mission

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proper, Carr is nevertheless able to “creatively” rewrite its legacy within the larger, indigenous imagining. Reading Eye Killers through the lens Ortiz provides— reworking the earth of indigenous survival via the “making use” of alien difference—the indigenous vampire story is truly reborn, not under the sign of disintegration before an alien predator, but as the knowing agent of continuity.68 *

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Falke’s alien blood, having passed through Elizabeth into Michael Roanhorse, now finds a reducible origin, a landed history, in Navajo/ Keresan time. However, Roanhorse’s resurrection as a vampire also requires his death (“I asked the Holy Ones for a final gift . . . I must hope that they [granted it] and pay for it anyway” [341]). And, he cannot conclude his life by passing through death in the form of Eye Killer. That Roanhorse has embraced death-in-life is a grave mistake, a risky action undertaken in an effort to restore order to his family and the world. By doing so, he has also upset that order. Changing Woman comes to Roanhorse after his vampiric rebirth and rebukes him: “You are not Eye Killer. Remember those who came before you” (313). Changing Woman returns to Michael his rightful name and place as Coyote (“I am First-Warrior. I am First To-Hurl-Anger”) and knits his bones into a succeeding shape, the shape changer in life, not in death: A glassy pain tore through his skeleton as his joints separated and rearranged themselves. His legs drew up and bent themselves into a strange angle. The muscles whipped furiously, forcing him onto the ground on all fours. His fingers, clenching into the snow, shortened and sprouted claws and pads. His ears lengthened into large, furry cups. His body shifted and molded itself into a streamlined, bullet-shaped animal— not a wolf. Coyote. Its tailbone shot out into a bushy tail to give balance while running. Coyote opened his eyes to his destination: The ancient land of his ancestors and the place of his emergence. A monster hunted there, its song of evil and murderous intent. It was killing children. Coyote lifted his muzzle and raised his voice into a raging, thundering howl. He began his race with the dawn. (314–15)

As Coyote, Michael Roanhorse keeps Melissa out of Falke’s embrace just long enough for the dawn that, right on time, kills him (333–34).

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Homologous to Falke’s territorial claims in the vampiric plot (for more blood and more room) is the horror genre’s requirement for narrative closure. Interestingly, Eye Killers presents the seemingly predictable denouement (death of vampire by sunlight) innovatively. As Coyote, Roanhorse rips Falke’s essence away from its blood familiar and banishes his spirit—not to the tomb of an artificial closure in narrative time (which invites the prospect of Falke’s return) but to a ceaseless, and probably cyclical, deferral of relevance, scattered among larger lights, waters, and winds (343). Coyote, we recall, tricked Roanhorse into the vampire’s cave in the first instance (283; 295), as if the latter’s vampiric rebirth was part of a larger plan. If the Anglo-European novelistic tradition demands closure for the narrative—as much for the Western conventions of the genre as for its scriptural operations that encode indigenous identities as absence—then Carr rejects Western narrative closure equally, by appropriating Falke’s concluding death as the ritual empowering Melissa’s rebirth. By ultimately linking the Blessingway of Changing Woman to the Coyoteway of change, indigenous narrative can “see” and hear the Eye Killer’s own death-song (Evil Moving Upway) and so banish Falke forever. Enmeshed in a magic stronger than his own, Falke cannot survive the encounter with Michael’s altered being which, crucially, now partakes of Falke’s own. Roanhorse, too, must awaken. Falke’s evil is only a small element within a larger composition that Changing Woman views in its entirety: from her view, Roanhorse was always required to relearn— to remember—the story of Monster-Slayer (133–34). By becoming the Monster as well, being reborn as an indigenous vampire, Michael Roanhorse will come to slay the monster within. Eye Killers concludes by reminding us that wherever and whenever vampires—skinwalkers, Eyekillers, exogamous outsiders—may be written into local stories, they survive, or not, only according to the story’s own consequence. Once spoken into being, vampires can be spoken away. Coyoteway dissembling and shape-changing, its unraveling of the narrative impulse toward nationalist closure, counters not the threat of sinister capital accumulation alone, but drives the indigenous reckoning of Falke’s power and its eventual destruction. *

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By killing Falke at the hands of a born-again, indigenous vampire, Carr cleverly buries, one hopes forever, the plot of pureblood exceptionalism.

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Ultimately, neither blood purity nor the promise of its closure speaks to the indigenous agency Carr utilizes in Eye Killers, which ritualizes the defeat of evil through perpetual deferral. As that trace visible to the Anglo-European vampire novel genre, blood subjectivity emerges in indigenous hands as the means of decolonizing “one’s own subjectivity through the active use of memory—remembering a way of doing things that has been forgotten in a neocolonial culture.”69 The North American Indian or Native is not subsumed within the vampiric plot; rather, it is the vampires who have come to rest, once again, within indigenous ground. Both Roanhorse and Falke awaken to memory and die safely secured within an encompassing tradition. The circulation of blood signs beyond the tribes and bands (and back again) also presents unintended ancillary benefits for the indigenous narrative in a capitalist order that threatens indigenous sovereignties as stand-alone entities but also creates opportunities for the making of found alliances beyond the proper indigenous domain. Wherever commodities may circulate beyond “real” indigenous being, they can also be said to proliferate alternative images of experience that can shock dormant subjectivities—like Michael’s or the vampire Elizabeth’s—into awareness. This devil’s deal may, in fact, hide a workable trade: “In Carr’s universe . . . plastic replicas of animals and automobiles named for beautiful predators are traces of our essential being that await our spiritual awakening to their deep significance.”70 The indigenous worldview is capably accommodated within a plurality of national and commodity forms, rather than being absolutely domesticated by them. In flight from national allegory, the indigenous vampire allows for the decoupling of sovereignty from blood and, most especially, imagines a future beyond the present dispensation that continues to make blood sovereignty necessary. Generic trappings notwithstanding, the example of Eye Killers—an indigenous vampire novel—speaks to often risky attempts at translation when undertaking the fashioning of meaning across distinctly different sovereign traditions. The results can be, and often are, monstrous, but even monsters have their place. As the proxy embodying contamination apart, the indigenous vampire is consistently damned by stake-wielding priests of authenticity. Just as equally, he or she is nourished—resurrected—through the convergence of disparate sovereignties in a continually reconstructed narrative. Such is the indigenous vampire’s flight as Carr would have it, enlivened by blood even as it transgresses it.

Chapter Two National Captivity Narratives in Welch, Silko, and Armstrong [T]he captivity narrative is interesting and valuable to us . . . not because it can tell us a great deal about the Indian . . . but rather because it enables us to see more deeply and more clearly into popular American culture, popular American issues, and popular American tastes. —Roy Harvey Pearce None of us is the victim of Columbus anymore. —Gerald Vizenor I had never felt anything real except other peoples’ lives and concerns. I felt like I wasn’t real, like I could just fade away into nothing. —Tommy Kelasket, Slash

In this chapter, I look at several works that assert the foreignness of Anglo-European nationalist ideology as an artifact of the imagined indigenous past.1 Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes and James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk represent the advent of what I call the indigenous captivity narrative in contemporary indigenous literature. Both novels relate the maneuvers and resistances that Indigo and Charging Elk undertake, respectively,

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when subverting the encroaching surround of Anglo-European nationalism. While invoking the traditional structure of the bildungsroman for their characters’ development, Welch and Silko nevertheless subvert its primacy, by suggesting that the life-story of Anglo-European nationality can be survived as a derivation of sovereign experience. Both novels also address the perceived deficit of Native North American historical fiction, signaling the continuity and resistance of sovereign traditions distinct and apart from nationalist prescriptions defining “Indian” and “Native” experiences and sovereignties in a progressive United States or Canadian canon or history lesson. 2 By adapting to the captivity imposed by the colonial surround, all the while safeguarding their sovereign traditions at a remove, these novels illustrate the historical basis of sustaining plural sovereignties. Using Okanagan Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash as an illustration, I conclude the chapter by addressing the issue of how indigenous writers choose, or not, to translate indigenous sovereignty using nationalist terms of reference, even when these latter are tribal or Native-centered. Entering into—and then exiting—a nationalist narrative provided by the AIM era, Slash documents the movement’s benefits and most, if not all, of its drawbacks for North American indigenous peoples during the 1970s. The novel’s protagonist, Tommy Kelasket, ultimately rejects the pan-Indian ideology of his political awakening, in favor of sovereign, Okanagan traditions that will serve him better, in absolute terms, when prosecuting the broader anticolonial struggle. By rejecting nationalist narratives of origin, Slash inaugurates Armstrong’s career-long turn toward plural sovereignties through a principled application of linguistic determinism. Armstrong distinguishes the English language—held apart from her own Okanagan language—as that instrument betraying complicity with colonialism. And by traversing the North American continent on behalf of AIM-style activism, Slash comes to measure his travels and being through the cipher of whichever language he is using. Initially working in English, he measures himself mainly by the alienating standard of the dominant Anglo-European culture. By its standard alone, Slash fails. However, in closer proximity to his homeland and its language, Okanagan, Slash reacquires the sense of sovereignty displaced by English. No longer a victim of Columbus, as Vizenor’s epigram would have it, Slash has walked the long road through nationalism

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and emerged on the other side, surrounded and comforted by his own proprietary traditions. *

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A periodically re-emerging symptom and consequence of North American colonialism, the Anglo-European captivity narrative first appeared in highly sensationalized form as “the eighteenth-century equivalent of the dime novel.”3 Usually written in the first-person, these narratives typically featured white settler-colonials before, during, and after (surviving) capture by marauding “savages” on the westering frontier. The settler-colonials escaped to tell their stories, tendering highly effective propaganda on behalf of the civilizing mission (usually Christian) and its colonial-nationalist frame (first British, then American). Pearce first noted the cross-genre and popular bases of such narratives sixty years ago, citing their “various historically and culturally individuated purposes” (as religious confessional, pulp thriller, and finally a version of American gothic). I take a narrower focus here, in noting the more recent refashioning of the captivity narrative by indigenous writers, in whose novels characters ultimately achieve separation from the Anglo-European frame of “nation,” even while asserting its alienating nature in everyday experience.4 Noting this ambivalence—between the “push” of indigenous individuals and communities forcibly dislocated from sovereign or Native homelands and the “pull” of the choices that result as evidence of indigenous survival—Cook-Lynn notes that the Indian-hating forms and functions of Anglo-European captivity narratives have remained essentially unchanged into our own day: The tellers of the [Anglo-European] captivity narrative . . . are interested in Indians only to the extent that the Indian historical actors can be cast in specific roles, such as the wild man or savage occupant of a wild and new land, a helper of whites, a deficient occupant displaying a willingness to sacrifice themselves for whites, and a barbarian who can be redeemed through civilizing and Christianizing strategies. 5

Cook-Lynn’s analysis of the captivity narrative does not extend the substance of Pearce’s earlier analyses, even as it effectively imparts the urgency of the contemporary moment for sovereigns—the misplaced celebrations of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial in 2004—whereby

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indigenous North Americans, particularly adopted children, continue to be held captive by a notably pernicious version of nationalist modernity.6 Cook-Lynn’s and Pearce’s critiques speak, respectively, to the narrative foundations of the ongoing process and experience of such ideological captivity. Pearce researched indigenous captivity from the colonizer’s perspective; Cook-Lynn argues on behalf of sovereign resistances to it. In my analysis, both approaches converge in the contemporary literature to invert the prior tradition such that indigenous characters, and not settler-colonials, view themselves as captive. In their works, Welch, Silko, and Armstrong effectively subvert the Anglo-European captivity narrative by relocating the “frame,” using Paula Gunn Allen’s term, of indigenous survival; indigenous characters persist in “wanting out” of national structures that would contain them.7 Gunn Allen speaks further to what she terms “abduction narratives,” the latter involving the rewriting of traditional captivity narratives by indigenous peoples in their contemporary colonial context: We see that abduction narratives were a very important part of Native American traditions, if it was the Shoshonis, or Laguna or whatever, we find these abduction narratives. And contemporary Native cultures don’t have any slave narratives. What they did was they took the abduction narrative and shifted it to contemporary situations, so that all that happens is that the oral tradition gets reframed, but it’s the same story. It’s just got a different setting. Different costumes, same story.8

For Gunn Allen, inverted captivity narratives, or “abduction” narratives, are not merely texts of submission or defeat but questions of reframing contemporary indigenous being beyond any given spatial, ideological, or geographical focus. Beyond mere inversion, indigenous captivity narratives provide meaningful evidence of the active subversion of nationalist ideologies into our own time. Catastrophic engagements with nationalism, documented in all three of the novels I analyze, bring about the sustainability and reinvention of plural sovereignties beyond indigenous homelands. In all three novels, the “same story” of indigenous dispossession is reenacted in newer and more enlivening contexts beyond the original captive-captor binary, including arenas beyond victimization where individuals conquer or transform newer domains of knowledge originally designed to keep them captive. Paradoxically, Welch’s character, Charging Elk, emerges as “a prototype, as a new kind of Native American” through the fictionalizing of past historical narrative.9 Of

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greater interest in my view is the contemporary literary response, by indigenous writers, to the ascent of Anglo-European nationalism as a received history. The problem for characters in this contemporary literature is no longer the prospect of a “literal” captivity, but its displacement as national ideology, including the safeguarding of sovereignties held separate and apart. *

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One of the indigenous captivity narrative’s most compelling storytellers is the Okanagan poet, Harry Robinson, whose voice, work, and stories—in English, as I read them—Wendy Wickwire (and, subsequently, Thomas King, among others) had the wisdom to transcribe and publish before his death.10 Long before Vizenor theorized the “crossblood” experience for the academy, Robinson was reframing the Okanagan experience of Anglo-European nationalism in his own stories. In “An Okanagan Indian Becomes a Captive Circus Showpiece in England” George Jim of the Ashnola Okanagan Band is abducted after fleeing a felony charge, kidnapped by Anglo-Canadian marshals, and then sold overseas to one of the touring, European “Buffalo Bill” circus shows. To cover their trail, the marshals tell the Ashnola band elders that Jim is dead, only to be countered by the Okanagans who have heard word that Jim is still alive. Sensibly, the band requests a disinterment of the casket, and having retrieved it, they bear it all the way home, to verify Jim’s status as deceased. Robinson continues: All right, they bring ’em and they never open ’em. But when they get him to Ashnola, then, whoever they were there, and they say, “We should open ’em. We should make sure if that was him.” “Well,” these other people said, “if he’s going to be smelly, that don’t matter. Open ’em, we want to see.” So, they break it open and they looked at ’em. “That’s not Jim. That was a Chinaman.”11

The members of the Ashnola band go back to the marshals, report their discovery, and are told that a mistake was made: “George is

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THERE./Now that you’ve come back,/ we can take him out and clean him/ and you can take him away./Take him home.”12 A second casket is then provided to the band members who, once again, transport the second casket overland back to Ashnola: So, they bring him, and that was the second time. From Westminster to Chilliwack. Then, they packed him from Chilliwack to Ashnola. When they get there, whoever they were home tell ’em, “We got to open ’em, see, to make sure if it was Jim. Maybe another Chinaman.” Anyhow, they open ’em. They looked at him And he was a Negro boy. A small man too. Well, they bury him there. But there’s no use to go back and get George. And George is not dead. They take him away. ........................................... Long time, quite a few years after that, and then they find out George Jim, he’s not dead. He’s alive yet, but he’s in England. So, that’s the end of the story.13

Robinson’s story is a brilliant exegesis of the indigenous subversion of the national captivity narrative. The casket traveling back and forth overland, with the bodies of unknown and differently marginalized persons inside—and none of them George Jim—symbolizes the contact zone of indigenous western Canada, long before the institutionalization of white supremacy in a national form. An apparent outsider to the unfolding of the story’s plot, a “halfbreed” named Charlie Harvie, who speaks both Okanagan and English, returns to Ashnola from an overseas tour in the English army and reports having met a group of Okanagans alive and well abroad, including a man fitting George Jim’s description.14 If George Jim’s absent essence motivates the search in the tale, Harvie enters the tale to confirm that George Jim has escaped both the nationalist project of white supremacy and the instruments of Canadian law that unjustly

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held him in its name.15 George Jim’s captors, if initially intending to profit from his national captivity, have unwittingly freed him from it. Another nation, England, now houses his story—a similar turn of events, we note, occurs in Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk— and, as Robinson puts it, “he’s alive yet” in the Native imagining. Paula Gunn-Allen’s abductions capably serve, in Harry Robinson’s story, as the instrument of freedom—for George Jim at least—beyond the nationalist domain. Writing about Robinson’s willingness to share his stories with people outside his band, Okanagan writer Jeannette Armstrong— who counts the late Robinson as one of her mentors—has stated that Robinson drew a careful distinction between the postcontact stories and worldview of his Anglo-European audience and the traditional stories he saved for Okanagan ears alone. According to Armstrong, Robinson in effect modified his traditional storytelling practice to facilitate the understanding of his non-Okanagan listeners. To connect his story to these particular listeners, he steered away from traditional knowledge expressed in Okanagan toward descriptions of plural sovereignties expressed in English: I in my whole life I hardly ever heard [Harry Robinson] speak English, but I know that he as a storyteller was masterful in using what English he had to transfer that information that he did transfer to Wendy in the English that he knew. . . . The stories that he tells in these two collections that were published by this anthropologist are stories that are not Okanagan stories actually. They are stories that are contemporary. . . . In that sense I laugh—knowing Harry and knowing how he was— because he was doing the best that he could in English in the stories that he felt could be shared, or should be shared, and his choice making in terms of what the rest of the world should know was, from my point of view, really clear: because he was speaking to a non-Native person, he was telling these stories to a non-Native person. And my respect for him is tremendous in result of that, but it makes me laugh. . . .16

Armstrong’s laughter, alongside her insight, is significant. Shifting Gunn Allen’s focus from the contemporary reframing of Native tradition, Armstrong isolates the everyday fact of switching (language) channels to exceed the Anglo-European frame—of using the English language only when speaking to nonsovereigns—as palpable evidence for sovereigns everywhere of what must remain unsaid to even sympathetic outsiders. Armstrong laughs, I suspect, because of the respect she feels for Robinson’s generosity to non-Okanagan speakers—his

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willingness to work in English at all—alongside the truths his generosity preserves exclusively for his own people. The integrity of the Okanagan language and its traditions, for the people who speak it, requires no translation. Where bilingualism may be said to exist in contemporary Native communities, Armstrong affirms the effective linguistic separation of plural sovereignties practiced in everyday life. Even more significant is what Armstrong alludes to by way of the humorous unsaid. Where anthropologists might seize on, so as to domesticate, Robinson’s stories in English as if they were “traditional”; in fact, they are “contemporary.” This latter term points in at least two directions: “contemporary” as in the more recent (viz. “traditional”) indigenous past of 1880s or 1890s British Columbia in a historical rendering of settler colonialism and the story of George Jim; and the “contemporary” that is Robinson’s, the storyteller’s, utterance—where his listeners’ access to Okanagan stories (the content of the salvage ethnography project) is carefully calibrated in forms comprehensible to non-Okanagan listeners. The story Robinson is offering to Wickwire, and just as certainly to you and me, is thus a representation of plural sovereignties proper, the story of the indigenous encounter with Anglo-European interlocutors right up to, and including, Robinson himself. The story of George Jim is not a traditional Okanagan story, but one story that is part of a successor tradition that emerged with the advent of colonialism: the tradition of plural sovereignties. After decades of practice, Native storytellers have mastered the artful tradition of evading capture within the shell (or casket) game of AngloEuropean discourse—nationalist, literary, canonical—all too well. And Robinson’s traditions, as Armstrong confirms, are nowhere to be found in the English language. He never even thought to take these tools out for strangers to see. Instead, he is being a good host, offering foreign visitors a taste of his own personality—unmistakably Okanagan for anyone, like Armstrong, who can recognize it—insofar as it elaborates not only upon the core values and traditions of Okanagan culture, but also the Anglo-European sovereignty colonialism introduced via the English language. It is to Robinson’s credit, of course, that colonialism has not fragmented or fractured his own worldview. Rather, his storytelling “aesthetic” in the English language, if we do want to call it that, offers the appreciation not merely of Robinson—although his skills certainly may be considered extraordinary—but is evidence of the ordinary pleasures derived from stories told often and well as a commonplace of contemporary indigenous experience.17

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Just when we think we have found Robinson’s “traditional” Okanagan culture alongside George Jim in “An Okanagan Indian Becomes a Captive Circus Showpiece in England,” neither of them is to be found. Among the interplay of nations and sovereign differences shuttling around so rapidly in the casket game of Robinson’s own devising, his story reemerges not as originally titled, but as “An Okanagan Indian Storyteller Becomes a Captive Anthropological Showpiece in Late Twentieth-Century North America.” This alternate rendering makes no judgment impugning Robinson’s generosity of spirit in the telling, or against his sharing this knowledge within its scope, or for that matter, by mocking any scholars who might have in good (if perhaps misplaced) faith recognized him based upon an entirely partial record of the master storyteller’s experience. But again Armstrong reminds us: we cannot, and should not, presume that Robinson’s work in English is traditional Okanagan knowledge.18 Once such different criteria of value are provided, Robinson’s work fits well within a plural sovereignties focus and signals, equally, the persistence of Okanagan sovereignty in a parallel tradition apart from the English language. In artfully modified responses, sustaining this parallel tradition includes indigenous storytellers asserting sovereignty over their own stories in the present colonial context. Robinson’s example is significant, because he reminds other Okanagan storytellers, including Armstrong, that while narratives of colonialism are of long-standing and convey the historical truths of contact with AngloEuropeans in Northern America, they are not founding traditions but found ones in a now plural vision. Maintaining this distinction, even while embracing the tension between precolonial and colonialnationalist frameworks, as well as when using different languages in different situational contexts, is necessary to indigenous survival. Using different languages to preselect his audience, Robinson subverts monolingualism as the exclusive requirement of Anglo-European nationality.19 Following Robinson’s example, Jeanette Armstrong affirms a pragmatic language policy—different languages for different purposes— that, like Robinson’s, governs her own storytelling practice. This policy is pragmatic, because English, along with Spanish and French, is the most effective lingua franca available to North American indigenous artists when linking their particular experiences of anticolonial struggle to the imaginings and representations of other indigenous North American groups located outside a given indigenous culture and language. 20 It is principled, because other indigenous groups,

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even where they are similarly situated as colonized, remain outsiders to a specific (i.e., Okanagan) language and tradition. The English language doubles, accordingly, as a placeholder of connection among indigenous peoples as colonized, as well as securing the protective displacement of indigenous traditions expressed in languages other than English (or Spanish and French). When using English, indigenous storytellers therefore achieve both the placement of “Indian” and “Native” collectivity as sameness in a nationalist-colonial rendering as well as the displacement—protection—of sovereign traditions and languages apart from the Anglo-European nation. By not intruding on the sovereignties of other indigenous cultures and languages, Armstrong seeks to better maintain the integrity of her own. 21 Nor is this principled stance a rejection of English or what English can achieve in the sovereign interest. In particular, Armstrong is amenable to the artistic potential of anglophone literature, in indigenous hands, as a meaningful lingua franca for artists sharing a colonized past: One poet in particular [at the En’owkin Center/International School of Writing] read this poem in Micmac—and I don’t read Micmac or understand Micmac other than a few words . . . and one of the things that he did was, he translated it into English, but translated it not as a word-for-word translation, but translated it poetically. It was astounding, the effect on everyone there. All of the people that were there weren’t Micmac, but all of the people there that listened to the reading . . . [felt that] he couldn’t have achieved . . . that particular poem if he had started from English. 22

Armstrong is, I believe, alluding to an effective use of “transition English”23 in indigenous art without importing, to whatever extent this is possible, the privilege of English as a discourse of mastery over indigenous mother-tongues. Accordingly, Armstrong’s literary position, while separatist in reserving the specifics and integrity of her own (Okanagan) traditions, is not practically so in her contemporary use of English as a foreign language. Many other indigenous artists all over the continent—from Armstrong to Womack and many others in between—are using mother tongues and English together effectively, in one overall decolonizing project in service to their own sovereign communities. It is all the more interesting, therefore, that Armstrong’s novel Slash, written in English and exhaustively documenting, as it does, the indigenous encounter with Anglo-European nationalist ideology, remains consistent with the above platform of bilingual pragmatism

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by being reticent about “translating” Okanagan traditional cultural properties for outsiders. If, for Armstrong, the plurality of sovereignty is empowered by “English only,” then the latter value emerges also as a practical justification for her own culture’s reticence about translating indigenous traditions into English. Accordingly, she reserves to the English language only those contemporary uses—including nationalist or “pan-Indian” uses—that it may reasonably be expected to perform in the interests of her people. The remaining sovereign demands put to language devolve, appropriately, to Okanagan (or whichever mother-tongue) indigenous language workers. It is there, outside English, that the plurality of sovereignty ceases to be visible and where yet another definition of indigenous “nation” resides. *

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In an oral medium, Harry Robinson’s narrative about George Jim is rightly considered a paratext of Welch’s novel, The Heartsong of Charging Elk. Both narratives speak to roughly contemporary events, as experienced by North American indigenous persons from greatly different backgrounds—one an Okanagan in the British-controlled zone of Okanagan country called British Columbia, the other an Oglala in the U.S.-controlled zone then called Dakota/Lakota territory. Despite these important differences of place and being, however, George Jim and Charging Elk’s experiences share remarkable similarities engendered by colonization: the forcible imposition of AngloEuropean law, the encroachment of white supremacist violence onto indigenous lands and communities, and the expatriation, whether by force or of necessity, of any local indigenous culture’s key asset in the ongoing struggle—its people. Both stories begin with protagonists (George Jim and Charging Elk) experiencing the nationalization of their physical and cultural properties outright—their way of life— without seeing immediate gains for their people, even as the disastrous rationalization of boundaries and land holdings (from largest to smallest: nations, provinces, states, counties, towns, and individual allotments) has only just begun to make an impact on the indigenous reckoning of the land. 24 For Charging Elk, like George Jim, the AngloEuropean nation has arrived at the very threshold of his imagining, and it isn’t bringing smiles or the promise of a turkey dinner. The grim prospect facing the Oglala in The Heartsong of Charging Elk is not defeat, but the accomplished fact of a meaningless victory after their decisive truimph at Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn) in

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1876: “Their gaunt faces were painted as if for war, but there was no fight left in them” (1). The military columns of the American government, the enemy, and wagon trains of settler colonists crowd the plains below them. In a brief prologue, Welch restages the capture of Crazy Horse, the latter having returned to captivity with a remnant of his people after the Wolf Mountain battle of January 1877. Crazy Horse’s subsequent internment at Red Cloud’s Agency, as well as his eventual execution at the instigation of American authorities, is well documented; here, rather, Welch focuses on Crazy Horse’s calm rather than Red Cloud’s apparent betrayal, although the latter is evident to all. 25 In Welch’s prologue, a young boy of eleven, Charging Elk, watches the somber proceeding, and something remarkable happens. The Oglala remnant begins singing a song of peace following victory, and those interned back at the encampment join in: He looked down at the fort, at the log buildings, at the red and white and blue flag of America that hung listlessly from a pole, at the rows of soldiers with their rifles with steel knives tight against their soldiers, at the thousands of Indians who ringed the open field, and he wasn’t afraid anymore. The Indians who awaited them were alive—and they were singing. (4)

Welch’s prologue deftly establishes the founding fiction—the sustaining story—determining Charging Elk’s encounter with a “listless” foreign nationalism, a limp flag, that will serve as a backdrop to the many choices he will make as the modern, rather than vanishing, subject of plural sovereignties. In this passage, Indians encircle troops, in a deft and figurative reversal of the captivity narrative’s logic. The survival of their song effectively serves the contrast with tense and anxious soldiers. The encircled Anglo-European nation stands suspended as the Indians sing on. So, too, the Oglala stories will proliferate beyond their colonized nation and into the wider world as The Heartsong of Charging Elk powerfully relates. But something has changed. Crazy Horse and his Oglala remnant have come into the reservation, “rather than remaining free, which amounted to running and running” (12). Tired of running, they choose to return to a land changed against them, a conquering culture that, by defining them as a remnant, embeds a necessary ambivalence: no longer divided from their Oglala people (now sharing their experience of captivity), Crazy Horse and his remnant achieve solidarity in confinement. This solidarity as a people transcends the

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devastating losses charged to a foreign nationality and ensures that they will remain undefeated as a living people. Narratives of captivity have indeed become part of a living sovereign tradition. Forward in time and space, Charging Elk awakens to his own internment in a Marseilles hospital, where he has been recovering, if slowly, after sustaining a serious fall while riding for Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. Meanwhile, Cody and the traveling circus, keeping no headcount, have moved on and abandoned Charging Elk to his fate in a strange place, with strange sensations and sounds: “He only knew that he wanted the taste of something familiar” (8). Unable to fully comprehend his surroundings, Charging Elk regards himself anew: He looked at his dark hands, which lay on the blanket on either side of his body. He was not of these people. He was a different color and he couldn’t speak their tongue. He was from somewhere a long way off. And he was here, alone, in this house of sickness. (9)

Welch’s effective use of color here, Charging Elk’s darkness against the sanitary lightness of the hospital blankets, highlights Charging Elk’s difference as ikce wicasa, “the natural humans, as his people called themselves” (11). Here, in France, he feels unnatural; however, Charging Elk’s story is a fictionalization of actual experiences and struggles faced by performing “Indians” in Europe. 26 Notably, Charging Elk’s first word to his nurse is French (café); his second and third words in English, addressed to men come to ascertain his identity, are national identity markers: “American. Lakota” (13). Both foreign tongues, even could Charging Elk speak them, fail to convey much during the early years of his French capture. The poverty of nationalist (Anglo-European) signification in Charging Elk’s early years in France mirrors that of his youth. Back in Lakota country, genocide has effectively contained the freedoms associated with Northern Plains culture; but, as with Crazy Horse, a remnant of Charging Horse’s people refuses to come into the agency despite considerable privation: They moved to a place in the badlands called the Stronghold, a long tall grassy butte with sheer cliffs on three sides that could be easily defended. But the white men, soldiers and settlers alike, were afraid of the Stronghold. The Indians out there were considered bad Indians, even by their own people who had settled at the agency and the surrounding communities. (14)

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The Stronghold is a center of Oglala power and memory, the site of Charging Elk’s visions, and the home of his spirit-helper, Badger, whose revelations will ensure his safe passage to maturity (14). Charging Elk and his brother-friend (kola), Strikes Plenty, live out in the Stronghold—at times a cold and unforgiving place—for nine years. The Stronghold’s significance is more than symbolic; its separateness is pivotal, both to the encircling zone of the Anglo-European nation as well as to the ongoing processes of Oglala assimilation and resistance, with the latter evolving to meet the former’s demands. Charging Elk’s own parents have come in from the cold, and now live on the reservation at Pine Ridge. The Stronghold, by contrast, is the anchor of Charging Elk’s memory, a spatialization of his own resistance against the world of the “reservation Indians,” who, in the person of his father, bring him shame. He and Strikes Plenty contemplate the option of traveling with the Wild Bill Buffalo Show instead: “What if we don’t come back?” (33). The young men’s dream of travel, as a form of escape from nationalist containment, is significant. Strikes Plenty and Charging Elk hope to escape feelings of profound loss accompanying Anglo-European conquest, as well as feelings of complicity with the new order. After 1883, Bill Cody’s Wild West Show traveled all over the world promoting fictions of nation-building, in choreographed lockstep with the silencing of America’s indigenous peoples as if with their own consent and participation. Cody’s show hired Indian riders “that no mere cowboy could match.”27 Charging Elk does join up and performs overseas, in Paris. Suddenly, however, he is forced to confront the reality that the Wild West Show has presently abandoned him, forcing him to dispense with the “escape” logic the show had initially represented in exchange for parodying his own national captivity for foreigners in Europe.28 Just now, Charging Elk’s escape from North American colonialism is all too real. In a remarkable turn, Charging Elk, never having embraced Anglo-European nationality, finds himself absent any of its necessary protections in yet another, and probably hostile, foreign nation. Alone, sick, cold, singing his death song in a Marseilles prison—the scales fall from Charging Elk’s eyes, and he enters modernity as the protean subject of plural sovereignties with only one regret: that his spirit (nagi) cannot find the way home to Lakota country. Here, in France, the compensations provided by the Stronghold, a place held apart from his assimilating people yet deeply rooted in its traditions, are nowhere present: “Now he would have given all his good times, all his freedom, to be one of them, home in the little shack with his mother and father

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in the village of his people” (20). Charging Elk’s humility reaps its own reward. With the intervention of Martin St.-Cyr, a well-intentioned but sensationalizing reporter, Charging Elk avoids death and is sent to live with a French foster family, chez Soulas, from whom he acquires new knowledge about the rules and rituals of French society. In an arresting juxtaposition, Welch takes care to have Charging Elk’s first encounters with everyday Marseilles, and his own place in it, resonate with the experiences of that fantastic American simulacrum, the Wild West Show, which has recently abandoned him: “The stature that had once made him so proud in Paris now made him feel as freakish” (146). His difference, in turn, allows him to feel he has more in common with the outsiders around him: a deformed vendor in the market (146); the African exclave (“These people were closer to his own than any of the others he had come across since he left Pine Ridge” [190]); the prostitute, Marie Colet, for whom he develops something close to love; and, even, the feeling of belonging as a member of the dockworker’s union, “[a]nd he liked it” (416). Charging Elk’s survival involves his more or less even (and perhaps even positive) perceptions of figures and tendencies on the margins of respectable French society. In these freakish outsiders, he sees himself, even as newer bonds of affiliation emerge: “He seemed to be free, yet he was with [the Soulas family], as though he and they had become relatives” (148). Beyond some unproblematic embrace of cosmopolitanism, Charging Elk’s experience as a foreigner abroad derives from a set of difficult choices that narrow his options when compared with the French or those fully assimilated to French culture. 29 Having embraced aspects of foreign nationalism, Charging Elk is forced to assimilate the destructive knowledge of “race.” Recalling the color of his hands on the hospital bed sheets, Charging Elk further internalizes his own being, negatively, as absence: He had become so used to the people of this town and his own uniqueness that he had not thought of himself in terms of color. . . . he thought of himself as one who had no color, was in fact almost a ghost even though his large dark presence always attracted attention from both light and dark people. But now he felt that he was in a place where he did not belong. (198)

In a subsequent scene, however, Charging Elk rejects the logic of “race” as necessary to the understanding of centered being. After being abused by foreign (probably American) sailors, who threaten

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him under the ubiquitous signs of “goddamn” and “Indian” (201), Charging Elk fears once again for his nagi, and begins, as in the Marseilles prison, to sing his death song: What would happen to his nagi? It would never find its way home. But he could see no way out. . . . [T]hen he began to sing as though he were alone, as though he had staked his sash to the ground and meant to make his final stand; as though he were alone on the plains, surrounded by enemies, suddenly calm and determined, as though he meant to take as many as he could before he was killed. Then he stood. . . . Charging Elk was in another country, a quiet country, and he was strong with meat and song. He had remembered that he was a man, and a man who sings his death song in a proper way is a man to be reckoned with. (201–2)

The recovery of sovereignty here, in this moment, returns Charging Elk to the final stand of his homeland in Oglala country; as if, impossibly, he were not in a tavern in the port district of Marseilles. (As I detail in chapter four, Jacob Nashoba’s recovery of Choctaw traditions in Louis Owens’s Dark River also collapses temporal and geographical spaces, returning Nashoba, as above, to the consciousness of “another” place of indigenous being, the landed place of sovereignty.) Notably, Charging Elk’s death song transports him back to a particularly gendered form of remembrance: what being a man means when connected to his people’s traditions. Sung before battle and when “surrounded by enemies,” the song transports him again, beyond the “race” fictions of a foreign nationalism, to the Oglala people. This scene offers a potent reminder of plural sovereignties, as articles of faith persisting even (or especially) when isolated at the outposts of an as yet foreign, national consciousness. Welch softens the glory of Charging Elk’s mastery over evil in superb fashion. Having mastered French, Charging Elk nevertheless returns to his native tongue when silencing racist arrogance. Charging Elk makes his choices in the story, and ultimately, survives with a “fighting chance.”30 But his individual capacity for choice still emerges at the cost of alienation from his indigenous homeland. Having discovered himself a “foreigner” in France, paroled on a technicality from a life-term prison sentence for murder, stripped of livelihood and initially of language, Charging Elk comes to view his parents’ “surrender” in a new light and, interestingly, makes decisions paralleling their own. Staying in France with his new wife precludes Charging Elk’s return to the Oglala people. This tension throughout

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The Heartsong of Charging Elk, between segregated resistance and assimilative solidarity, encompasses contemporary literary debates about indigenous sovereignty in the present day. That Charging Elk feels both feelings, and must negotiate them at all times, complicates the otherwise polarizing tendency to read his character as either a good or bad Indian, either an Oglala or French, either a reservation or Stronghold Indian. In the actual rendering, he inhabits all of these worlds equally and must make a meaningful pattern out of them as the composite being of plural sovereignties, something that bright-line distinctions of blood and nation all too seldom allow. *

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In the case of Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk, the indigenous subject enters modernity as the subject of plural sovereignties but only at the cost of an initial and bewildering alienation. Dispelling such alienation also stages the recovery of sovereignty, made all the more potent because of the threat, actual as well as imagined, of displacement from home. In indigenous national captivity narratives, travel beyond the sovereign domain becomes necessary for survival but also creates the conditions for a perhaps more meaningful return to it. Like Welch’s and Robinson’s stories, Leslie M. Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes asserts the ongoing survival of indigenous sovereignty against a colonial backdrop of division and apocalypse. Unlike them, however, Silko’s novel is a tale of gynocentric repossession of the earth, shifting focus from the militarization of borders (as in Almanac of the Dead) to the safeguarding of sacred indigenous spaces. The gardens in the dunes represent a not as yet colonized—not as yet nationalized—space among sovereign lands outlying steppe and desert beyond Needles, California, in the immediate aftermath of the late nineteenth-century Ghost Dancers movement. These gardens have belonged, since time began, to the proprietary traditions and deity of the Sand Lizard people: For years of little rain, Sand Lizard gave them amaranth and sunflowers; for times of drought she gave them the succulent little roots and stems growing deep beneath the sand. The people called themselves Sand Lizard’s children; they lived there for a long time. As their numbers increased, some Sand Lizard people joined their relations who lived down along the big river, until gradually the old gardens were abandoned. From time to time, Grandma Fleet and others still visited their old houses to feed the ancestor spirits. In a time of emergency, the old gardens could be counted on for sanctuary. 31

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For the young Sand Lizard protagonist, Indigo, and her grandmother and sister, the gardens in the dunes offer sanctuary indeed: serving not only as a place to flee encroaching settler colonialism in the southwestern United States; but as just the first among a series of gardens Indigo will visit across several continents in the novel. Oases of imagined difference, these gardens seek to subvert the positivist, AngloEuropean construction of nation and science rising triumphantly throughout the world. These woman-centered gardens also act as bulwarks against the predations of a male-centered colonialism. Like Welch’s Stronghold in The Heartsong of Charging Elk, the Sand Lizard gardens signify places where “renegades” live; reservation Indians nearby in Parker, Arizona, are punished for associating with the Sand Lizards (51). The gardens also represent the outer limit of Anglo-European authority and encroachment, the Sand Lizards preferring them “because the slave hunters did not usually travel that far” (233). And, like the Stronghold, the Sand Lizard gardens and traditions precede the encroaching nation; just as likely, they will outlive it. Silko’s indigenous gardens, with strong women as their custodians, similarly govern an entire array of representations keyed to Silko’s overall project summarized in three parts: to cultivate the diversity present in all forms of creation; to assert the essential connectedness of all women (as creators of life) to indigenous places; and, finally, to reject nationalism as an artificial abstraction dividing nature from civilization. The predations of Anglo-European capitalism, in particular—as that relatively recent and toxic intruder upon natural places—also provokes imbalance in Silko’s rendering of plural sovereignties and, as in her previous novels, requires forceful and meaningful intervention from both human and cosmic actors.32 Gardens in the Dunes offers, therefore, an ambitious summation of many of Silko’s career-long interests, even as aspects of the story’s presentation are markedly different from her earlier attempts at conveying similar themes. For example, the plot is housed within a more traditional novelistic structure—think Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre or Henry James’ Daisy Miller rather than, say, Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus—that stages the nationalist capture and subsequent escape of indigenous sovereignty in a variety of “non-Indian” forms and locales. Indigo is first abducted in Needles by Anglo-European authorities and sent to the “Riverside” Indian School, from which she escapes only to be folded into another period formula from the mid- to late-Victorian novel: bourgeois entrapment within the family drama of Hattie and Edward Palmer. In a tidy plot stroke, Silko has combined

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those two most coercive factors—boarding schools and out-family adoption—central to a genocidal “Indian problem” in the manifest destiny period. Silko’s Sand Lizard garden, by contrast, in seeking to prize open the discursive restraints imposed by privileged narrative forms and national histories, must grow through the cracks, rows, and runnels of the printed page. As an indigenous rewriting of the patriarchal hortis conclusis, Silko’s gardens are linked to fertility cults all around the globe in a universalizing pastoral critique. Consistent with Ceremony, the novel offers an “ecofeminized image of the Laguna cosmos that purifies it of certain patriarchal encrustations introduced by Christianity,” but also extends the earlier novel’s critique in interesting ways. 33 For example, in Gardens in the Dunes the Sand Lizard people are carefully crafted so as not to invoke the Laguna people and its various cultures; nor are they simply a fictionalized analog of the Laguna. Rather, the Sand Lizards have their own power, place, and presence, precisely because they are fictional. By orchestrating a gap between the imagined and the “real” experience of indigenous history, Silko makes an important foray beyond the limiting discourses of the apparent, even as she clearly draws on historical research and events throughout the work, including indirect but substantial references to the Darien scheme, the rise of etymology as a classificatory discipline, and southwest U.S. history (including the destruction of Needles by fire in 1897). Gardens in the Dunes thus acknowledges that the fictional basis of historiography is every bit as central as historical “facts” in a narrative design. Where factual and fictive domains intersect truth resides. In noting Silko’s commitment to this shared contiguity within narrative, Lawrence Buell writes: The historicization of the eschatological trivializes it, in a sense, in tying it to this or that secular matrix or event. The grandeur of the divine design is diminished when the great work of redemption is made to hinge on this or that puny time-bound experiment. 34

To some extent, fiction-making allows imagined truths to masquerade in a historical form, even as fiction happily transcends the latter’s commitment to the literal dimension of experience. As I have argued, this latter characteristic—the combination of material and constructivist literary strategies—is necessary when sustaining the literature of plural sovereignties: not as the endorsement of the colonial status quo, but as the imaging of the next phase beyond it.

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To be sure, in Gardens in the Dunes Silko cannot fictionalize too much beyond the consensus that countervailing historical claims presume. To do so would open her project to criticisms based on reality claims; seldom does fiction care to sustain these. For example, by imagining indigenous forms too far removed from histories of national or colonial containment, the novel may in fact emerge independent of context altogether, too closely resembling the very forms and ideologies it hopes to criticize. (I make a critique of Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus on similar grounds in the next chapter.) By placing the Sand Lizards too far beyond the threshold of the real, Silko risks sacrificing the strength of actual indigenous history in favor of its imagined possibilities beyond what has been experienced. One response to such a critique, however, and rather like the hybridist platform Gardens in the Dunes unequivocally supports, would be to assert the provisionality of any historical experience altogether. However defining and buttressing, history, too, is a subject of knowledge and susceptible to the intrusions of imagined difference. Indigo, as a Sand Lizard girl, may indeed be a fictional construct. However, she does enjoy the hospitality of “real” Matinnecock (Manhassett Bay) Indians whose experience of dispossession back-dates Indigo’s appreciation of the historical dimension of colonialism by some three centuries (171). Sand Lizards can and do talk to Matinnecocks in the ubiquitous pan-indigenous encounters Gardens in the Dunes orchestrates; for Silko, fiction can, and probably should, cohabit the terrain of fact. Silko’s commitment to imagined difference, as necessarily rupturing the field of historical authority, is axiomatic. She treats both history and fiction even-handedly, as merely different forms of mimesis. She enjoys the conspiracies arising between these two modes. Observing this, we are in a better position to understand the novel’s adherence to the “real” and imagined inevitability of plural sovereignties. Located securely within the stronghold of Sand Lizard traditions—centering Indigo’s consciousness—Silko’s indigenous women nevertheless occupy many different cultures and geographies, radically globalizing her critique of Anglo-European nationalism as a manifestation of male dominance. Wherever these women-gardeners may be found, they may be perceived as promoting the hybridization of form and being, rejecting the science of “race” divisions, and embracing the posterity of mixedblood progeny well beyond blood lineages, coercive monogamy, and patriarchy in the interests of nationalist captivity. Back in Sand Lizard country, Indigo’s older sister, Sister Salt, has grown into womanhood. After her little sister’s abduction, she settles

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into the regular service work their mother performed—profiting from the appetites created by the over-heating Anglo-European cash economy. For Sister Salt, this work includes combining the pleasures of sexuality with sex as business in a worldview consistent with Sand Lizard teachings: The only time she wasn’t homesick was when she was flirting with handsome strangers or lying with one of them on the sandy riverbank in the shade. The old-time Sand Lizard people believed sex with strangers was advantageous because it created a happy atmosphere to benefit commerce and exchange with strangers. Grandma Fleet said it was simply good manners. Any babies born from these unions were named “friend,” “peace,” and “unity”; they loved these babies just as fiercely as they loved all their Sand Lizard babies. (220)

Sister Salt embraces the connection between sex and commerce. More importantly, she has no patience for moralist proscriptions, whether expressed in Christian or ethnic absolutist terms, coming from outsiders. Sister Salt, along with her friends and roommates, Maytha and Vedna, the Chemehuevi twins, profit exuberantly from their pleasure and, but for a concluding plot twist whereby Sister Salt’s money is stolen to finance an indigenous insurgency being waged further south in Mexico, buy their freedom within an otherwise exploitative wagelabor system. It is important to note Silko’s careful avoidance, if not outright defiance, of a moralist perspective that would seek to deny or inhibit women the pleasure of their own bodies. While in Needles, Sister Salt remains emotionally committed to one partner—the dark-skinned, African-Red Stick Creek, Candy—but both are sexually polygamous without any effective tension arising between them. Sister Salt’s son, the dark-skinned “old grandfather,” is of uncertain parentage (most likely either Candy or the Mexican, Charlie Luna, is his father [462]), and by the end of the novel he will be raised by his mother and Indigo back at the old Sand Lizard gardens. The community of indigenous women, rather than verifiable parentage with a patriarch heading the household, constitutes Silko’s vision for the next Sand Lizard generation: Sand Lizard mothers gave birth to Sand Lizard babies no matter which man they lay with; the Sand Lizard mother’s body changed everything to Sand Lizard inside her. Little Sand Lizards had different markings, and some were lighter or darker, but they were all Sand Lizards. Sex

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In the above passage, Silko highlights Sister Salt’s vulnerability to ethnic absolutism—she apparently avoided the fate imposed by systematic infanticide—but also suggests, in no uncertain terms, that the notion of racial purity was, along with genocide, introduced into indigenous cultures by Anglo-European colonialists. In Silko’s rendering, “race” ideology is an effective instrument of genocide, every bit as efficient as Lord Amherst’s smallpox-infested blankets. Against the pathology of “race” discourse, Silko presents a much more affirming vision of mutability, natural and constructed, using the garden as a figure mediating human enterprise and nature’s power. To the last, all of the many gardens Indigo encounters during her childhood, as well as throughout her international travels with Hattie, are tended by women: Grandma Fleet teaches Sister Salt and Indigo how to make Sand Lizard sovereignty and its foods thrive in the desert; the Matinnecock farm; Indigo’s Aunt Bronwyn (her adopted mother, Hattie’s, family connection) tends to insular, gynocentric Celtic values in Bath, England; and the “professora” Laura artfully arranges IndoMediterranean fertility runes as blessings of her own flower-grafting experiments in Lucca, Italy. Unfurling in a global arc, Indigo’s moral education—her bildung—explodes its own nationalist inheritances. Like the eighteenth-century Grand Tour novel, which required its protagonist to travel to acquire global (enlightenment) knowledge, Indigo transcends nationalist captivity through picaresque exposure to a universalizing gynocentrism that, as in Ceremony, fuses the regional and global, and makes “individual and social pathologies . . . coextensive.”35 Moreover, such an instrumented fusion of being in Gardens in the Dunes does not merely describe the witchery of patriarchal science; it seeks to correct it, by offering Indigo a series of differently indigenous women-teachers who, while being limited to their respective spheres of knowledge, nevertheless give pattern to contiguous, shared values that link all gynocentric, indigenous traditions in an affirming, global reckoning.

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The shift in Silko’s focus bears repeating. The singular, masculine, and anchoring role played by Betonie in Ceremony is occupied, in Gardens in the Dunes, by a plurality of women from a variety of sovereign backgrounds, divided in their experience, and clearly possessing notable blind spots concerning the specifics of alternative traditions. Yet they remain anchored to their local sovereignty (gardens) and hence united in their roles as custodians of indigenous values wherever they are found. Bronwyn, for example, shares Hattie’s iconoclastic views about the central role of the male-dominated Catholic church in suppressing female-centered, Gnostic and Celtic alternatives to religious orthodoxy. Laura, like Hattie’s husband, Edward, possesses true scientific and scholarly skill when grafting species; unlike the latter, however, she feels no compulsion to industrialize, hence profit from, her own grafting experiments. In particular, Laura’s prize hybrid, the black gladiolus, crowds upon Indigo’s sight: Black flowering stems rose out of graceful arched leaves, from terrace to terrace—black gladiolus descending to the sunken stone lily tank. [Indigo] could not take her eyes off the hundreds and hundreds of black blossoms; on closer examination, Hattie noted here and there scatterings of mottled rose-gray and ivory-gray gladiolus accented the black. (297)

Laura’s hybrid gladiolus is a populous and thriving vision in the Italian garden. They are uniformly “black,” but on closer inspection are only “black” insofar as they are mottled and shaded as variations on the principal color. Laura’s scientific savvy—with, as it seems, nature’s collusion— signals Silko’s careful reverse engineering of enlightenment procedural and scientific knowledge, away from colonialist exploitation, toward the purposes of refining pleasure and beauty in mixed forms. Indigo’s pet monkey, Linnaeus, is named after the founder of modern classification in a thoughtful juxtaposition of the Darwinian and the taxonomic methodologies in one simian character. Both sciences, of selection and classification, were instruments in service to the fragmentation of the environmental totality during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, by seeking to profit from hybridizing technologies in an unnatural collusion with science, Edward, Hattie’s husband, unleashes a powerfully personal witchery on his family. He remains abandoned, hobbled, and cursed throughout the novel. Hattie, too, is effectively poisoned—and subsequently raped (458)—through mere contact with her husband’s

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mad science and profiteering. To heal, Hattie returns, as do Indigo and Sister Salt, to the indigenous garden: Hattie to Bronwyn’s garden at Bath, and Indigo to her own traditions in Sand Lizard country where she, with her own women relatives around her, has transplanted the seeds and clippings gathered throughout her travels abroad: The twins especially like[d] the “speckled corn” effect of the color combinations Indigo made with the gladiolus she planted in rows to resemble corn kernels. Maytha agreed with Indigo; their favorite was the lavender, purple, white and black planting, but Sister and Vedna preferred the dark red, black, purple, pink, and white planting. They were closed now, but in the morning sky blue morning glories wreathed the edges of the terraces like necklaces. Down the shoulder of the dune to the hollow between the dunes, silver white gladiolus with pale blues and pale lavenders glowed among the great dark jade datura leaves. (478)

With this passage, the literal seeds of Indigo’s overseas experience are planted, repatriated, in Sand Lizard earth. Her bildung completed, she has returned home, introducing new strains, new species, into the sovereign garden. Accordingly, the novel’s concluding judgment on hybridity would therefore seem to be positive overall, provided it is secured within a particular gynocentric and sovereign tradition that can prevent its exploitation to unnatural ends. By thus ensuring that hybridity remains bounded by (rather than exceeding) the indigenous sovereign experience of a natural order, women are made proper custodians of Silko’s version of plural sovereignties. This stance is made all the more remarkable when we realize that Silko globalizes the notion of gynocentric sovereignty beyond the North American indigenous context entirely, rendering all local women—everywhere—indigene of their own proper traditions. Lacking the grim, apocalyptic force of Almanac of the Dead, Silko’s vision in Gardens in the Dunes is no less total, no less encompassing. The novel promotes a hybridist vision of sovereignty grounded in a universalizing but not dogmatic gynocentric tradition. For Silko, indigenous gardens, like the traditions their women custodians continue to husband, are not merely outliers to nationalism and its equally domesticating ideologies. Always present within the proper ground of the nation, the indigenous garden and its alternative traditions presage the return and revolutionary reconquest of indigenous lands. Put to better

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use, indigenous gardens prophesy the failure of late-comer, patriarchal nationality as an alien weed. *

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Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes affirms that indigenous traditions may be safeguarded by practicing plural sovereignties that service the demands of the local imaginary. Writing about the activist 1970s, Jeanette Armstrong’s Slash not only documents the history of indigenous encounters with Anglo-European inspired nationalist movements and indigenous experiments with them; it fictionalizes the colonization of the indigenous mind, via nationalist ideologies, and the resultant risks to traditional sovereignties. As Noel Elizabeth Currie notes, Armstrong takes decolonization as her overall project in the novel, addressing the problem whereby an AIM-style nationalist movement “is generally limited to reaction: by defining itself negatively, it has some difficulty in achieving positive results.”36 Armstrong’s decolonization project begins by questioning the basis of Anglo-European hegemony in nationalist ideology proper, even a postcontact indigenous nationalism. Like Silko, Armstrong has made a career of distinguishing between sovereigntist and nationalist worldviews. Armstrong criticizes nationalist discourse by demonstrating how, no matter where her protagonist, Slash, goes in North America in service to the pan-Indian cause—in love, manning the barricades, in safe houses—he always suffers feelings of psychological confinement. The locus of his liberation, at least in geographical terms, is nowhere at hand. Initially searching for a meaningful outlet for his anger, Tommy Kelasket finishes his jail time for assault and is initially attracted to the principled stance of the AIM activists, the allure of immediate action, and his interest in Mardi, the character who first calls Tommy’s new, nationalist identity into being. As “Slash,” Tommy will embrace a role that gives him strength as a fighter on behalf of the broader political struggle. Mardi watches out for Slash in the hospital while he is recovering from his wounds, steers him through his court hearing—he is found guilty and sentenced to serve eighteen months in prison—and pledges her support during and after his incarceration. She is lovely and a somewhat predictably “Indian”-looking woman: “She was extra deluxe. Tough with hard eyes and long black hair that hung below her hips.”37 While Mardi claims an indigenous background, the book carefully avoids any specific declaration of her tribal or

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Native sovereignty, including traditional bases or roots for her activism. Instead, it is Slash’s fantasies of coming of age as the nationalist warrior with Mardi at his side that, in some romanticized future, will bestow on them both a sense of indigenous belonging: I guess we got to feeling pretty strong about one another. I couldn’t wait to hear her footsteps coming. I thought about her at night, too. Sweet secret thoughts. I wanted to take her home [to Okanagan country] and show her my hills and teach her our language. I wanted to put my arms around her and hold her and never let anything ever hurt her again. (62)

There’s nothing wrong with Slash’s sustaining vision of Mardi; she keeps him alive through the worst of his incarceration. Not unlike Julian Morning Star’s visions of Cecilia Bluespruce in Evelina Zuni Lucero’s Night Sky, Morning Star, love remains an important—if not the most important—anchor linking imprisoned Native North American men and women to their traditions and people outside the prison walls. As in Lucero’s text, love populates the dark sky of despair with bright stars, points of light in memory sustaining the many Native North American veterans of AIM-era nationalist struggles, some still serving time today.38 Mardi nevertheless remains a fugitive essence for Slash as they both get caught up in the wider struggle. Mardi, unlike Cecilia Bluespruce, lacks any particular connection to specific place or home. Like the pan-Indian platform she promotes, Mardi is a powerful presence, but she wanders in and out of the story, disappears, and—recalling Anna Mae Pictou Aquash—becomes a tragic vision signifying, for Slash, the sacrifices made to nationalist excess. If Slash “had expected Mardi to go back up to Canada with [him],” his expectations are disappointed when Mardi says goodbye to pursue the nationalist fight elsewhere (106). There is an implicit, and hardly surprising, association in the novel between getting over Mardi and recognizing the shortcomings of pan-Indian, nationalist ideologies. With the passage of time and considerably troubled personal experience, Slash refuses the legacy of violence embedded in his name, returns to the Okanagan, and reestablishes his traditions and lifeways. Perhaps not surprisingly, given Armstrong’s necessary reliance on the Queen’s (Canadian) English and in a novelistic genre at least partially constructed by the author’s (Armstrong’s) imagination of a Westernized implied reader, Slash doesn’t merely acquire a more stable identity after AIM and Mardi: he acquires a more stable, Okanagan woman, the more traditional Maeg, as his wife. To this

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extent, at least, Slash clearly critiques what Gayle Rubin referred to as the “traffic in women” in a male-dominated society. 39 So, too, the ultimate deaths, in Slash, of both Mardi and Maeg leave Tommy alone to raise his son into the next generation. Yet, just as clearly, both women are sacrificed to the principle of Tommy’s development, casualties of the proximity to politics that all too often remain the province of men. In Slash, the sustaining ideology of a foreign nationalism, like Mardi, goes missing. Armstrong presents the proximity of her characters to nationalist ideology as toxic, whether it involves violence carried out by indigenous “goons” and white “pigs” or AIMstyle reprisals. In the meantime, Slash’s creeping awareness of the continent-wide scope of indigenous activism develops, attending his own inquiries about Mardi’s whereabouts (76; 78; 86; 91). Even as his search for Mardi proves time and time again to be futile, the novel meticulously documents period activist initiatives that Slash either participates in or hears about: the British Columbia fish-ins (Kamloops and elsewhere [70]); the AIM take-over of Alcatraz from November 1969 to June 1971 (77); the “people’s caravan,” or the Trail of Broken Treaties Caravan, that culminated in the spontaneous occupation, in November 1972, of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) headquarters in Washington D.C. (93); the siege at Wounded Knee (South Dakota) in 1973 (109–12); oil pipeline agitation, on the Canadian side, involving the Northwest Indian Brotherhood (123); Cree resistance, at James Bay (Hudson’s Bay watershed), to unregulated hydroelectric development (123); a demonstration affirming indigenous hunting and fishing rights on “cut-off” lands throughout British Columbia and Okanagan Falls in particular (133–37); the Canadian Trail of Broken Treaties in 1974 (151) culminating in the disturbances on Parliament Hill in Ottawa (155–57); and the occupying of the Okanagan band Department of Indian Affairs office in Vernon, British Columbia (170–79). Through the prism of Tommy’s consciousness, Slash meticulously documents AIM participation in specific actions and policies throughout the United States and Canada for many of the events Armstrong describes; most notably, at Alcatraz and Wounded Knee. However, Armstrong gives relatively greater weight to events affecting the Okanagan and Canadian Native dimensions of the nationalist experience. Accordingly, to group—or to dismiss—all grass-roots period activism under one platform, under the sole aegis of AIM for example, is a distortion of historical fact.40

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And while clearly sympathetic to some, if not all, of the stated objectives of nationalist movements, Armstrong uses “pan-Indian” ideology as something of a straw man in Slash. The novel probably overemphasizes the movement’s will toward violence, even as it capably represents those plural sovereignties the author knows best within a broader international and North American framework. Using such a documentary perspective on pan-Indian nationalism, the novel depicts Tommy’s travels all around the United States and Canada so as to observe—and question—its prerogatives and effects. While conceding that pan-Indian nationalism offers helpful and necessary visibility concerning the origins and continuation of Native North American oppression, the novel in no uncertain terms questions its efficacy as a mode of resistance capable of uniting a plurality of cultures and peoples whose sole common denominator is that of having been colonized. The caricature of AIM that Armstrong provides, accordingly, does not fault specific historical individuals. Instead, it underlines the potential perils of all assimilative nationalist movements when not rooted to specific indigenous locales, languages, or peoples, including dangers of a misplaced commitment to a foreign (Anglo-European) nationalist tradition as unwitting parties to a broader complicity. Where nationalist representations do appear in Slash, they tend toward extremism and zero-sum reckonings of cultural difference with racialist overtones. One very illustrative scene occurs at a roadblock where fifteen American policemen, “rifles pointed at our heads” (111), interrogate Tommy and other Native Canadians attempting to enter the Pine Ridge reservation during the siege at Wounded Knee: . . . Our head man, Wiser, from the Toronto area, played dumb. He kept asking, “What’s going on? We’re just on our way back to B. C.” One cop kind of sneered at him. He asked, “What’s your business in the United States?” He had been really unfriendly, saying stuff like, “Shoulda done you all in at one time that first time,” . . . “Goddamn wagon burners, you think you’re so damn tough now!” 41 . . . Wiser had told them that we would be talking to the immigration officials about our treatment as visiting Canadians. . . . They kind of backed off after that. (112)

In this scene, Anglo-European racism, the prerogative of whiteness, enunciates the will to exceed national difference, even as it reinforces “race” as the ultimate guarantor of white supremacy inside (and outside) all Anglo-European nations. Here Wiser lives up to his name: his invocation of Canadian national difference masks his real agenda and

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likely saves Tommy and the entire group further harassment. Wiser’s indigenous savvy, by playing “Canada” against the “American” racism modeled on cowboy-on-indian “wagon-burning” genocide, offers clear evidence for what I have been calling plural sovereignties. Subject to the deteriorating influence of nationalist captivity, Slash begins to crave expressive violence as a form of catharsis: “I wanted violence. I wanted things to break and people to get crazy” (126). At one strategy session after the Ottawa march, however, Tommy is criticized for assuming bad faith on the part of the government: “You would have thought I insulted everybody, the way I was heckled” (128). His desire for violence persists. Another encounter, with one of his older cousins, forces him to reconsider his views concerning violent resistance: [Chuck] looked at me straight in the eye and said, “I know how easy it is to blame everything on Whitey. There are times when I get the anger boiling inside me and I do hate them. . . . At home, though, I always have a steady reminder from my family what a shitty and weak way that is. I know that we have to use every measure of politics to achieve what we want but we must do it without violence for violence’s sake. . . . You try to explain that to a bunch of kids that figure it is in to be a Bro and to be that you had to want to kill every stinking white man around. . . . [R]espect for all races is the most important thing that some of the socalled militant Indian tribes go by. They demand respect for their own tribe and only give respect to those who respect them. Sometimes, in demanding respect, they’re put down. But, it means they don’t tolerate things like aggression because they truly believe one race is not superior over another. Every time I try to talk about that, everybody looks at me like I was a bug or something. They think like you. They think I’m some kind of sissy pants or a chicken shit. (139–40)

Chuck’s monologue, backed up by his maturity and steady manner, marks a decisive turn in Slash’s development. For the first time, Tommy is willing to consider that traditional beliefs and sovereigntybased activism are, in fact, compatible and probably a better strategy than militancy over the long run. Chuck’s words also speak directly, deeper than Mardi ever could, to the power of violence and the misplaced desire for revenge which, however justifiable, perpetuates conflict. Armstrong, like her character Chuck, has gone on record rejecting violence for violence’s sake.42 Also of interest is the novel’s indictment of the role nationalist ideology plays in promoting systemic violence on behalf of “law and order,” which is far less defensible than defending your family from attack.

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Slash does not trivialize the pernicious effects of colonialism. Yet neither does the novel justify nationalist violence as the uniform response to colonialism under all circumstances. If violence characterizes the response of persons who feel—even when they are mistaken— that they have no other political means under present circumstances to express their sovereignty, then Slash sets itself the task of demonstrating for Tommy that, even where he is so mistaken, violence is a unique witchery deriving from misplaced loyalty to nationalism beyond the local tradition. Offering a return to Okanagan traditions that compensate Tommy for the alienation brought by his own life experiences, the novel throws out any pan-Indian or Native militancy. The hero formerly known as Slash lays down his name and embraces his role as husband and protector of the next generation, whose happiness is the best possible “weapon” in the fight to restore indigenous sovereignty. Tommy Kelasket, formerly known as Slash, is born into, nearly dies from, and ultimately rejects, the violence of his own nationalist becoming. Focusing on the failures of this nationalist journey, contrasted with the promised fulfillment of a return to the Okanagan sovereign traditions, is this novel’s notable achievement. Whether appearing in the form of recollected history (a catalogue documenting the sustained efforts of nationalist activism), specific images of nationalist glory (“Slash,” the “bro,” and AIM-style warrior), or the savvy of individual actions of survival (Wiser outwitting American state troopers), Slash demonstrates that contemporary indigenous sovereignty is not necessarily eclipsed by any one momentary, nationalist endorsement in time. Rather, Armstrong’s novel, like the path chosen by its hero, suggests that plural sovereignties are sustainable despite the high-resolution promises made by nationalist ideology. *

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The several novels I have analyzed in this chapter suggest unequivocally that indigenous sovereignties should be held apart, in principle, from the surrounding ideologies of Anglo-European nationalism. In everyday life, moreover, the alien sovereignties encountered by the protagonists invoke the reality of the struggle beyond the sovereign, landed domain. For the good as well as the ill, the struggle requires indigenous characters to adapt to the tendencies and expectations of the colonial surround. Each of the novels accordingly offers a different reframing of indigenous place and history beyond ideologies

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of nationalist captivity, even as its contours are forever shaped by the encounter. Silko’s Lizard People in Gardens in the Dunes, for example, are fictionalized so as not to be capturable by history; Welch’s Charging Elk embraces the consequences of emigration (to France), choosing his French wife and child over and against confinement and assimilation in Lakota country under the American yoke. Armstrong’s novel, set in the more recent past of the activist 1970s, prefers sovereign Okanagan traditions to any abstracting ideology of national liberation. All three of the novels write toward a better historical understanding of the indigenous past and its independent traditions, as experienced by individuals who are not ultimately captives of the Anglo-European nation literally speaking—although, notably, all of the protagonists discussed here do suffer incarceration as part of a larger nationalizing, disciplinary process. Rather, becoming citizens of Anglo-European nations in the absence of sustained, sovereign traditions risks unhealthy transformation. These several novels’ rejection of nationalist erasure fuels the subsequent and necessary reaffirmation of traditional sovereignty both within national time and exceeding the latter’s ubiquitous limitations. The writers of these novels are confident that this time of Anglo-European nationalism, too, shall pass; their narratives urge the sustaining of plural sovereignties as the “meantime” the reality of colonialism mandates. Finally, as figures for the indigenous transition toward plural sovereignties, Charging Elk and Indigo serve capably as reminders of the belatedness of Anglo-European nationality that, even when wielded effectively in indigenous hands, still carries the heft of the oppressor’s tool. Slash also endures the punishment Charging Elk and Indigo experience but worse: having internalized the oppression of the Anglo-European nation, he spares hegemony the trouble and punishes himself and those he loves at his own expense. That all of these characters experience “foreignness” as outliers within nations or nationalist movements distinguishes them, whether expressed as remembrance of their original dispossession through violence (they have been forced to abandon original homelands or memories) or as figures hoping to recover their home traditions on the margins of hegemonic consciousness as “outer-national” subjects.43 An interesting and, I would suggest, sustainable norm emerges: by ensuring the marginality of their proper sovereignties within the Anglo-European nation as outliers—whatever the degree, or not, of “choice” entailed in the founding instance—Charging Elk, Indigo, and Slash retain a

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measure of sovereign immunity from nationalist assimilation and its violence. At the very most, the embrace of outer-nationalism by Indigo and Charging Elk remains a strategic concession imposed by practical necessity, even as their own initial indifference to foreign nationality requires secondary alliances formed as a consequence of forced contacts with colonizing cultures. In this respect, Slash’s experience of a latter-day colonialism differs from theirs. Hinged to a longer history of indigenous adaptation to the colonial present, he possesses more resources when rejecting Anglo-European nationalism, even as he, unlike Indigo and Charging Elk, cannot draw upon direct memories of an indigenous being and totality not fragmented by an alien presence. Robinson, Armstrong, Welch, Silko: all of the writers whose work I have addressed in this chapter intervene in the “reframing” project of indigenous history Gunn Allen alluded to by inverting the prerogatives of the captivity narrative and requiring that the ideology of the captor be serviceable to the sovereignty of the outlying captive. Beyond mere inversion, the productive and positive negotiation of plural sovereignties in The Heartsong of Charging Elk, Gardens in the Dunes, and Slash can be distinguished readily from any reductive or uniform description of nationalist ideology, Anglo-European as well as panIndian. Any such ideology has all too often sought to capture—so as to domesticate—the complexity of the indigenous experiences at our own turn of the millennium. Outliers such as Slash, Indigo, and Charging Elk remain, like their indigenous successors, in the strongholds of sovereign traditions and memories only selectively visible at the horizons of nationalist imaginings.

Chapter Three Trickster’s Gamble: Capitalizing Indigenous Discourse in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace

For the good as well as the ill, the wholesale penetration of market capitalism into local indigenous economies has created ideal conditions for the emergence of plural sovereignties at the dawn of the twenty-first century. At least for now, there is no other game in town. As economic subjects of an increasingly capitalized modernity, indigenous peoples can seek to effect meaningful changes in their communities as agents using capitalist tools even while being harnessed to a system they may, at times, reject or even abhor. In descriptive terms, this is the balancing act the pluralism inherent in plural sovereignties requires of indigenous writers and the subjects of their novels. As capitalists, characters in Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Louise Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace can participate to greater or lesser degrees in the market structures capitalism would have us accept as universal. And quite probably, as indigenous subjects moored to their own a priori sovereign traditions, proto-capitalist or otherwise, these same indigenous characters are funding their own sovereignty projects using the same capital. But as a kind of capitalist truism, expressed in the jargon of the day, complicity with money has its own longer-term downsides on an uneven playing field. Denominating otherwise ineffable values, memories, and traditions in dollar terms brings with it considerable risks alongside the promise of return, and only uncertain prospects of “value added” to sovereignty once capitalized.

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Accordingly, both Vizenor and Erdrich put the uses and abuses of capitalism to good use in their respective works but to differing consequences. Vizenor’s strategy seeks to transform material practices and conditions by using the colonizer’s gold to liberate indigenous signs from the apparent limitations of national context. He uses the currency of the colonizer to create possibilities for his characters well and virtuously beyond material confines and to the very limits of the recognizable. Rather than mooring The Heirs of Columbus securely to a specific material context, Vizenor risks abandonment of the “real” tribe or band—such as the Lummi trickster tradition—so as to reinvent an alternative indigenous future wholesale. As such, beyond its bold constructivist exercise, The Heirs of Columbus is an example of the limits the fictionalizing of indigenous experience places on material grounds of indigenous resistance. I attempt to address this deficit by offering my own contextualization of Vizenor’s work alongside events affecting the Lummi homeland where he bases his novel but to which he does not—chooses not to—allude. For her part, Erdrich’s use of capitalist tropes throughout The Bingo Palace is equally witting. Only by acknowledging the extent to which money talk has penetrated the consciousness of her characters can Erdrich, a master illusionist, succeed in demystifying capitalist magic in the interest of rendering the material demands of the Ojibwe universe more visible. Less willing than Vizenor to cede the present ground of being and context for futures as yet unimagined, Erdrich nevertheless shares his concerns when capitalism is used to vivify prior indigenous traditions. Notably, she bases her skepticism about contemporary capitalism not on a “postmodern” critique of things as they are (or may seem), but by centering the impact of money (or its lack) on the ability to form loving relationships within and across indigenous community and family. However elusive, love for Erdrich remains a sign of the “real,” as something substantial for indigenous community to build on. If Vizenor’s strategy is consciously postmodern and constructivist, Erdrich’s novel remains more rooted in an ideologically romantic tradition that constructs material reality to serve individualistic purposes. Her characters’ indigenous differences are humanized through their encounter with strangely universalizing—and potentially problematic—values of getting and spending money for love. Finally, both novels acknowledge as inevitable the great extent to which contemporary indigenous representations are determined by capitalism, however helpful or discordant the aims of the latter may seem. Whether working within or beyond the constraints of material

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contexts, both seek to wrest from the energy of capitalism further resources for achieving sovereignty on indigenous terms. *

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Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and the Chelh-ten-em Development Controversy Assinika is in the book [ Heirs], a much better place than a map. —Gerald Vizenor, Postindian Conversations

In his articulation of trickster discourse, Gerald Vizenor asserts that any static or artifactual basis for American Indian identity is an invention. Describing the postmodern “language game” of the trickster sign, Vizenor calls trickster “communal, an erotic shimmer in oral traditions; [where] the narrative voices are holotropes [shimmering, shapeshifting signs] in a discourse.”1 In its reading of Vizenor’s novel The Heirs of Columbus, this chapter addresses the emergence of the trickster sign in its postmodern context, as well as interrogates the practice of trickster discourse as a politics. I agree with Vizenor that trickster is an extremely positive and elastic sign in the indigenous context of what Stuart Hall has referred to as the determinations of culture and being by both local and global factors.2 However, the omission of any mention in The Heirs of Columbus of the local, Lummi nation trickster tradition in the Coastal Salish region of Washington state, called Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts), where Vizenor situates his novel; or of the Chelh-ten-em development controversy involving the threatening of traditional Lummi Indian salmon fishing practices and burial middens by golf resort developers in the northern Puget Sound, threatens to confuse Vizenor’s liberatory trickster signifying practices with the global master-narratives of New World discovery he is trying to contest. Beginning with his groundbreaking work Ethnocriticism and continuing through Red Matters, Arnold Krupat has consistently lauded Vizenor’s trickster discourse as one instance of “ethnocritical” practice on the literary borders of American Indian expressive culture. According to Krupat, the ethnocritical text conjoins treatment of local values and issues “already . . . shot through” with global issues such as regional economy, immigration, borders, and nationalism. Enjoining a “radical epistemological relativism,” Vizenor’s work represents a

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similarly cosmopolitan scope and a local focus or “politics of placement” for its readers. 3 Here I want to take Krupat at his word, and to take a look at Chelh-ten-em in Lummi country (redescribed as “Point Assinika” in The Heirs of Columbus) as one particular ground where Vizenor’s irony has displaced a particular locus of indigenous resistance in the name of comic liberation. Such ironic displacement, I will suggest, emerges as a problem for the local situation of Lummi Nation sovereignty. Beyond irony, the uneven experience of nationality that the novel represents nevertheless serves usefully as an illustration of the function and plurality of contemporary sovereignties, as Krupat’s more recent scholarship on the novel has noted.4 The theoretical roadmap Krupat’s work provides—a series of benchmarks designed to translate Vizenor in terms of the swirling definitions and positions within a postmodernist literary practice—has as its ostensible function the “discovery” of Vizenor’s texts, and the political values underlying them. The problem remains, however, that Krupat’s discoveries lead to the site of Vizenor’s purported politics, only to have their presumed content dematerialize, in trickster fashion, before the reader’s very eyes. One has the sense that Krupat, and not the reader of Vizenor’s texts alone, has been duped, the trickster signs written on Vizenor’s page having remained one shape-change ahead of any critical quest. As Stuart Hall has written in another context: At that very moment, whenever [a] discourse declares itself to be closed is the moment when you know it is contradictory. You know, when it says, “Everything is inside my knapsack. I have just got hold of all of you. You are inside the bag. Can I close it?” No. 5

Given trickster’s trademark reluctance to remain containable as an object of knowledge, one nevertheless sympathizes with Krupat’s attempt to posit a “politics of placement” for Vizenor’s trickster discourse. Locating Vizenor’s texts more firmly to the material ground of their utterance is necessary if we are to forestall a now fairly standard critique of postmodernism. David Harvey writes: [W]hile [postmodernism] opens up a radical prospect by acknowledging the authenticity of other voices, postmodernist thinking immediately shuts off those other voices from access to more universal sources of power by ghettoizing them within an opaque otherness, the specificity of this or that language game.6

This “radical prospect,” the mutable difference of the sign which is the arena of choice for the trickster, is at the heart of my treatment

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here. If I do not criticize Vizenor’s trickster art as such—as art, it is at once virtuous and timely—I nevertheless attempt to reconcile his method with the positing of a stable politics of place. And I ask, perhaps more pointedly than Vizenor and Krupat do, questions about how the politics of cosmopolitan, “pan-Indian” texts (such as The Heirs of Columbus) can mesh with indigenous communities more strictly situated within their own local sovereign traditions. For these communities a much more pressing question than cosmopolitanism emerges: What are those material forces for change that not only invite trickster sovereignty, but also threaten place-specific sovereignties in indigenous homelands? *

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Krupat’s analysis illustrates one of Vizenor’s central projects in The Heirs of Columbus, namely the redefinition of North American indigenous being and identity beyond the limited scope of Anglo-European conceptions of nationality and citizenship. The Heirs of Columbus, a novel written and published to coincide with the quincentenary of Cristóbal Colón’s discovery of the “New” world in 1992, concludes with the remark that “Christopher Columbus, no doubt, would rather be remembered as an obscure healer in the humor of a novel and crossblood stories than the simulated quiver in national politics; he deserves both strategies of survival in a wild consumer culture.”7 As the narrative relating the founding of a sovereign, crossblood tribal nation by the heirs of Colón (he being, the novel claims, a descendant of seafaring Mayans who first discovered the European “old” world), The Heirs of Columbus has at its core a contestation of the historiographical operation by which the Columbus of the nineteenth century became the icon of Anglo-European nationalist discourse, imperialist world dominance, and ascendant status as the World’s First Ethnographer-Anthropologist. On October 12, 1992, with public endorsement from talk radio and funding from their megabingo gambling caravels previously moored along the headwaters of the misisibi (probably the White Earth reservation in Minnesota), the heirs of Columbus disembark at Point Assinika, plant the blue bear paw standard, and assert the sovereign sign of the trickster nation. “Columbus Takes Back the New World at Point Roberts” and the heirs, with Dvorák’s New World Symphony blaring, proclaim that: Point Assinika, otherwise named Point Roberts, situated in the Strait of Georgia between Semiahmoo, Washington, and Vancouver Island,

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Canada, became the wild estate of tribal memories and the genes of survivance in the New World. (119)

Here Vizenor moves beyond a mere inversion of the conquista narrative to refract the sign “nation” itself. Comprising a plurality of precontact sovereignties, indigenous nations were instrumentally excised from postcontact, colonial narratives of traditional Anglo-European focus: westward expansion, Turner’s “frontier thesis,” manifest destiny, and so on. In contrast, Vizenor’s history is itself a trickster subject, buoyed by language-game deliverance and indigenous participation in the shifting and subversive “national” narrative it tells. With the aid of biogenetic engineering and technologies, involving trickster manipulation of genetic signatures, Vizenor deploys science and technology on Assinika so as to reinvent the “Indian” sign, and in abeyance of the “racist arithmetic measures of tribal blood” that divide indigenous communities (162). The genetic therapies of healing promote a positive partnership between science and tribal memory: “the trickster opposition in the genes, the ecstatic instructions, and humor in the blood. The scientists delivered the genetic signatures, the tribal healers touched the wounded and heard their creation stories” (144). However, in The Heirs of Columbus technology as a sign, like the “nation,” is rooted productively only with regard to its usefulness as a tool of deconstruction.8 Defining the trickster as a sign imbues it with an elasticity with which it escapes containment within language, technology, and any restrictive mappings of national space. The deconstructive, action potential of trickster discourse is immediately apparent. In work on representations of artifacts and other “authentic” cultural objects, Aldona Jonaitis and Richard Inglis have applied Fredric Jameson’s notion of “wrapping” as “the core of an entity that changes as a result of the layers of meaning applied to it.”9 Layers of signification, including different cultural histories and spiritual fabrics, “wrap” social space and interact, according to Jonaitis and Inglis, “to create a composite entity” considerably “different from” the original object.10 In the case of The Heirs of Columbus, however, wrapping the Assinikan nation becomes rather like anthropological Christmas, provoking the desire in readers to unwrap the cultural package, with Boas, Malinowski, and the tradition of salvage ethnography they inaugurated on hand as resident, participantobserver Santas. Doubtless this is not an event trickster would be invited to attend.

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In contrast to the wrap of the nation, Vizenor offers the “striptease” of the (un)wrapping “nation”—to a trickster beat and rhythm heard all along the streets of Assinika. As dialogic and relational (after Bakhtin), trickster striptease recaptures polyvalent indigenous histories at the expense of the Anglo-European gaze that would contain them: The inventions and historical plunders of tribal cultures by colonists, corporations, academic culture cultists, with their missions, reservations, deceptions, museum durance, have inhibited the sovereign striptease; racism and linear methods of perception have denied a theater for tribal events in mythic time.11

The sovereignty of the trickster striptease and the “theater” or field on which its tease is enacted combine to present trickster legitimacy and priority over static, racialist representations of indigenous identity, which Vizenor has called “terminal creeds.” Trickster theater and sovereignty also suggest important political—as opposed to merely aesthetic—aspects of Vizenor’s project in The Heirs of Columbus, not to be lost on those who might misapprehend it as merely a rootless field of significations in the anthropological ballroom of dancing signs. Trickster signification in the form of striptease tempts the gaze of the Anglo-European reader and captures it, underscoring the collusion of desire with racialist discourses, the latter being masked as merely the aesthetic appreciation of cultural difference. Vizenor, in a now patented, stylistic double turn, tempts the imagination only to have the desires of the audience themselves unmasked, laid bare. The trickster striptease also reveals that the historical and institutional underpinnings of any national tradition are dependent upon a stable, linguistic economy of the sign. A crucial chapter in The Heirs of Columbus relates the suit brought against trickster poachers in the “bone court” (the federal circuit in St. Paul, Minnesota) by the culture industry (the “Conquistador Club” in The Heirs of Columbus). The “Conquistador Club” brings suit against the heirs for their theft of Anglo-European owned indigenous artifacts, including the remains of Christopher Columbus from a New York museum, and the remains of Pocahontas from Gravesend, England. Used subsequently by the heirs to consecrate the Trickster of Liberty at Assinika, the traditional objects contested in the case contain communal stories that can be possessed but never owned (77). Taking the stand in bone court, the heirs-as-defendants argue that they can only be accused of repossession of these artifacts which, in their tradition, is not a crime (76–77). In prosecuting their

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successful case, the heirs draw on an interpretation of an opinion from Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas that, according to the defendants, allows inanimate objects to offer testimony. Shadows fall on established laws and legal precedents during the mythic light show sponsored by the heir and techno-shaman, Tulipe Browne, who summons virtual reality effects to the aid of the heirs’ case. In winning their case, the heirs win more than recognition from a system of law that has not, typically, recognized their semiotic rights. They procure the indictment of a nationalist, linguistic tradition shrouded in authorized discourses. The trickster sign, the language game in the communal context, is thus officially endorsed as applicable and sovereign in all linguistic relations in all utterances for all indigenous time. The courtroom achievement, like the Assinikan nation, is merely another instantiation of a universal trickster narrative chance. This semiotic reversal in the bone court—within the very bowels of the colonial establishment—legitimizes the heirs’ claims for temporal sovereignty back at Assinika. The world listens as trickster manipulation of the “nation” occasions a radical remapping of geopolitical boundaries. Stone Columbus announces on CARP radio that “Point Assinika is a natural nation. . . . Humor rules and tricksters heal in our state, and we have no checkpoints or passports, no parking meters to ruin the liberty of the day” (126). A crisis of national indeterminacy results when the heirs, perhaps recalling the Jay Treaty, deny the legitimacy of the international (Canada/U.S.) border and the institutions and epistemologies that police the line. Using talk radio to disseminate the gospel of their semiotic insurrection, the heirs’ message reaches homes far beyond the purview of their material sovereignty on Assinika, including interested callers from Pocatello, Rapid City, and Duck Lake, Saskatchewan (126–27). As with the case in the courtroom, the local effort to liberate the national sign is total, stopping short only at novel’s end, with the victory of the heirs over the Anishinaabe windigoo, the devourer whose defeat signals the fate of the Assinikan nation to that of the entire world (183). A triumphant indigenous event in narrative time, the founding of Assinika by trickster-healers raises interesting questions about Vizenor’s choices when chronicling what is a striking instance of strategic counter-colonialism. It is worth considering, for instance, the predicament Vizenor’s narrative presents as a written account of a postmodern language game with an extra-scriptural foundation

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and agenda. Vizenor readily asserts that the postmodern is the condition, rather than a specific periodization, of indigenous discourse: “oral cultures have never been without a postmodern condition. . . . a comic utterance and adventure to be heard or read.”12 But as we see in Vizenor’s case, indigenous expressions are not merely “heard or read,” they are written. And, as written, trickster texts must first write themselves out of associations with earlier writings in service to what Michel de Certeau has referred to as the scriptural economy.13 The text of genocide, the scriptural economy first established the means whereby First World conquerors attempted to write oral cultures out of existence. Written textuality run amok, the scriptural economy “trample[d] and travel[led] over the earth . . . in order to fabricate [write] its representation.”14 Indigenous peoples were written as always-already traces of an authentic past, concurrent with the present violence accompanying forced encounters with their conquerors. The footprints, tracks, and traces that recorded the passage into memory of “New” world peoples anticipated and generated the empty, absolute space of representation required to implement the actual violence toward, and destruction of, entire grounds (histories) of indigenous resistance. In the nineteenth century, the ascendancy of fledgling anthropological and social scientific discourses—also contested by Vizenor in The Heirs of Columbus—in turn designated the cultures of colonized indigenous peoples as artifactual within the disciplined, Anglo-European academy. De Certeau’s notion of the scriptural economy—the complicity of writing within all colonial projects—also suggests that The Heirs of Columbus, as with any written text, suffers under the onus of those possible representations it displaces. Vizenor’s text, in particular, shoulders this burden triumphantly, as the rewriting of Columbus’s master narrative in the indigenous interest. Yet Vizenor’s rewriting of Assinikan cultural and geographic space, as it so happens, is also an overwriting of the oral, trickster tradition of the coastal Salish peoples who have historically inhabited not “Assinika” (as Vizenor defines it in The Heirs of Columbus, using Anishinaabe/Chippewa, as “the place of the stones” [170]) but Chelh-ten-em, translated from coastal Salish as “the place where one hangs salmon to dry.” The silencing of coastal Salish traditions and places in The Heirs of Columbus, across which Vizenor maps his liberated Assinikan nation, casts a long shadow across his powerful articulation of trickster potential. In the heirs’ experiment, every narrative instrument imaginable that can be brought to bear—corporate, juridical, institutional—colonizes the

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textual and discursive space that is Chelh-ten-em, except the one necessary sovereignty whose expression continues to call the land and its people into being today: the Lummi. For the coastal Salish people, who return annually to fish salmon off Chelh-ten-em, the declared and unremitting reassertion of sovereignty is not only meaningful as a literary gesture but is necessary for community survival. Clearly, The Heirs of Columbus seeks to transcend particular indigenous predicaments in the collective “postindian” interest, as well as to liberate the sovereignty of tricksters from material constraints everywhere. Yet by doing so, the novel also illustrates how the extraterritorial urge underlying any expanding sovereignty—particularly when exercised in a would-be redemptive project or parody—can unwittingly silence in the form of a settler discourse, indigenous survivance. Vizenor’s occupation of Lummi Chelh-ten-em in a literary redeployment goes unmentioned in the novel as such; it is, however, only the latest in a long history of appropriative gestures Chelh-ten-em has experienced throughout the history of colonization. *

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As far as written histories of colonial contact are concerned, Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts) was “discovered” by the Spaniards Eliza, Galiano, and Valdez in different expeditions across 1791–2; and the George Vancouver expedition of summer 1792, including onboard officers Lieutenant Henry Roberts and Peter Puget who, through the imposed text of their names, brought northwest coastal spaces into being for the Western imaginary. Eliza mistakenly named Chelh-ten-em “Isla de Zepeda”—the first of several historical misapprehensions—and encountered an “incredible quantity” of salmon, as well as a settlement of “numerous Indians.”15 Ascertaining that Zepeda (newly renamed Point Roberts) was indeed a peninsula and apparently devoid of any market potential in the Hudson’s Bay Company fur trade, Vancouver moved on and “explorations after 1792 were few.”16 Like all colonial mappings, “Point Roberts” was born of chance yet remained particularly untranslatable to Anglo-European peoples, power, and institutions because of its peculiar territorial situation. Located below the forty-ninth parallel and nominally under American sovereignty after 1871, but not contiguous to the mainland United States, the Chelh-ten-em peninsula was dependent upon an alien power to which it was (and still is) connected, British Canada, for its trade and supply. With the exception of several highly sensationalized

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murders, reports about the seasonal habitation of Chelh-ten-em by the coastal Salish (primarily the Lummi), and complaints about its use as a drop-off point for the smuggling of liquor and merchandise across the international border by Anglo-European settlers, Chelh-ten-em remained largely outside the print culture discourses Benedict Anderson has suggested as central to nation formation, for literate cultures at least, in the modern era.17 A typical representation, from 1886, reads: Nobody has property rights at Point Roberts under the law as it is a military reservation; but for years it has been the rendezvous of smugglers and desperadoes. Men too lazy to earn an honest living have squatted there, fenced fishing grounds and compelled fishermen to pay tribute. This has been a fruitful source of trouble. The Point is a wild place, removed from civilization, covered over with fishing shanties occupied by Indians during the fishing season.18

So represented, the writing of Chelh-ten-em as a “wild place” (presumably an atextual place, beyond the reach of Anglo-European national narratives) served, not surprisingly, as the ideal ex post facto justification for the colonization of Chelh-ten-em by squatters of Icelandic descent through the 1890s, happy buyers-in to the American dream.19 Rather than family-unit homesteading, however, it was the largescale commercialization of the salmon fishing industry by nonindigenous, capitalist interests that put Chelh-ten-em “on the map” after 1892. The expansion of local, regional, and, during World War I, global markets of canned salmon guaranteed an intensity of capital accumulation on Chelh-ten-em unheard of before that time (figure 3.1).20 Clearly, Chelh-ten-em had emerged from the shifting, representational flux of its early-colonial history and became, at least until World War II, an arena of sustained commercial and industrial interest. It had made the move from wild zone to the all-American space of free enterprise, including then commonplace practices of hiring sweatshop, immigrant labor (mostly Chinese), and occupying by force what had been traditionally Lummi reef net sites.21 Now that the Pacific salmon stocks are nearly gone, and the APA cannery on Chelh-ten-em (Lily Point) has long since disappeared— although some of the weathered, pier pilings still remain—the few contemporary treatments of Chelh-ten-em have tended to focus on its geographical peculiarity as an anachronism dating from the period of British-American colonial competition, or its unique situation deriving from competing Anglo-European sovereignties (figure 3.2). In

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Figure 3.1 The Alaska Packers Association (APA) cannery at Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts), known also as Lily Point, ca. 1895. Fixed salmon traps can be seen at all points on the horizon of the photo, taken at high elevation facing southeast across Boundary Bay toward Lummi Island and Bellingham Bay. Source: Courtesy of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, 8195.

very few of these accounts does the perpetual and present history of Chelh-ten-em under Lummi sovereignty appear, nor of its importance for work (by the remnant of Lummi commercial fishermen) and enjoyment by members of the tribe. As in figure 3.2, this brief sketch of Chelh-ten-em’s history shows how multilayered and complex even the most apparently typical and local of indigenous histories can be. In the movement from premodern (“wild”/preindustrial) to modern (national/industrial) figurations of cultural space, the unique locale of Chelh-ten-em has time and time again served as a justifying pretext for Anglo-European colonization and remained consistently susceptible to the dramatic transformations of global markets and economies. Given this history, Chelh-ten-em/ Point Roberts emerges as the ideal staging ground for Vizenor’s own postmodern appropriation of contemporary plural sovereignties. *

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Clearly, the virtuosity of the heirs of Columbus in pursuing their sovereign objectives in bone court parallels the indigenous manipulation of the tools of the capitalist trade—including free enterprise, self-interest, and free access, for instance, to gambling and technology markets. Even so, one wonders as to the implications of trickster agency

Figure 3.2 “Point Roberts, USA.” Book cover image. In the above image, an English place name, “Point Roberts, USA” serves as the textual boundary bisecting competing nationalist appropriations of Lummi Chelh-ten-em. The flags of two Anglo-European nations, Canada and the United States, envelop coastal Salish memories and uses of the land in exercise of their lawful sovereignty. Source: ©Point Roberts Historical Society.

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being subsumed within a capitalist mode of signification. Is it possible that Vizenor’s text presents not only the possibility or subversion of capitalist structures, but their reiteration and extension? David Harvey’s work has charted this problem of sustaining political agency within his own analysis of the enervating “postmodern condition.” Constructing a contemporary, political economy of space based on economic models, Harvey describes the tendency of “post-Fordist” capital formations toward “flexible accumulation” defined as: flexibility with respect to labor processes, labor markets, products, and patterns of consumption. . . . It has entrained rapid shifts in the patterning of uneven development, both between sectors and between geographical regions, giving rise . . . to a vast surge in so-called service sector employment as well as to entirely new industrial ensembles in hitherto underdeveloped regions.22

The bewildering effects of flexible accumulation upon labor, the “timespace compression” of public and private sectors, and the impact of the forced acceleration of capital on local decision-making processes are profound. The production time of commodities and images, Harvey relates, has been halved since the Fordist era: “the relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has given way to all the ferment . . . of a postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms.”23 In such terms, Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus appears to be an exact illustration of Harvey’s assertion that the postmodern “aesthetic” tends to mimic the conditions of flexible accumulation.24 The signs of the heirs project—the celebratory deconstruction of the “nation,” “tribe,” and artifactual identity—appear to be determined by the material field established by the latest trend of consumer capitalism. Beyond postmodern mimicry or irony, however, the quick-money successes of Stone Columbus’ adventures in The Heirs of Columbus likewise gloss over concerns about the long-term impact of capital-intensive industries upon indigenous communities, including increasingly popular gaming operations, which I explore further in my analysis of Erdrich’s novel below.25 Yet the indigenous replication of a “flexibly accumulated” postmodernity, along with capitalist cash put to indigenous purposes is, we are told, Vizenor’s most brilliant move.26 This may well be. Nevertheless, carefully suspended between the refutation of artifactual “Indian” being (museum or reservation) on the one hand, and a cleverly wanton rejection of pan-tribal (or universalist) notions

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of indigenous sovereignty on the other, when, if ever, will the postmodern trickster-capitalist ever stand his ground? As Harvey rather wryly observes, “we here encounter the heroic side of bourgeois life and politics, in which real choices have to be made if the social order is not to dissolve into chaos.”27 In this context of “late” capitalism and the postmodern narratives it produces, it remains to be seen whether or not the trickster sign can (or should) resist the limitations of its own material condition—offering the valence of culture hero to indigenous peoples as well as a comic figure resisting that agency. In either case, the (anti)culture hero and trickster figure of the coastal Salish in the context of Chelh-ten-em could never be the Chippewa bear/trickster of Anishinaabe origins, whose mythic power underlies and authorizes each of the heirs’ projects in Vizenor’s novel. Rather, the trickster voice and tradition conspicuously absent from The Heirs of Columbus is the coastal Salish trickster figure, Salmon. Vizenor’s manipulation of the quick-changing climate of global postmodernism and the doublings of commodity capitalism—including jet-setting trickster-poachers, sea-voyaging bingo caravels, and Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio—overshadow the compelling local histories that I assume influenced, at least to some degree, his decision to choose Chelh-ten-em as the site for his textual experiment. *

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Chelh-ten-em occupies a place “of special cultural and spiritual significance”28 in the history of the coastal Salish, that linguistic group comprising the historical kinship affiliations of the Semiahmoo, Saanich, Songhees, Sookes, Klallams, and Lummis. These groups were given discrete tribal sovereignty after the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855 and relocated to the Lummi reservation in 1884, three years before the Dawes Act. What has allowed for the centrality of Chelh-ten-em to Lummi salmon culture is its unique geographical location in the northern Puget Sound, ideal for the traditional reef-netting of king, silver (coho), and sockeye salmon (and other salmonids) on their seasonal run up to the Fraser River delta ecosystem—and, equally, Alaskan salmon running south around the tip of Vancouver Island—to spawn. The intimacies of this cultural and commercial resource to Lummis’ own contemporary sovereignty, especially since the 1974 Boldt ruling reaffirming indigenous fisheries on par with Anglo-European fisheries in the Puget Sound, have been effectively detailed in Daniel Boxberger’s To Fish in Common.

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According to coastal Salish beliefs, Chelh-ten-em was the seasonal home of a trickster figure, part man-part salmon, who, in mythic time, guaranteed the seasonal replenishment of the salmon harvest. As the story goes, the mysterious man slept with the daughter of a high-status family, leaving only a salmon scale to mark his passing. The story continues: [The daughter] became pregnant and she had a man child and the man came to see his baby. Then he said he would take the child away to his village, but before he left he sprinkled the woman four times with some medicine from a bush and she became a salmon. Then he did the same with the baby boy and he, too, became a salmon. 29

The Salmon trickster thus ensured that his children would return at specific times each year to Chelh-ten-em, their birthplace. Also particular to the sandstone bluffs in the southeast corner of Chelh-ten-em (also called Lily Point) was their function as a petroglyph that indicated the coming of the salmon each year. A ritual figure, Xtecten, would inaugurate the First-Salmon ceremony by interpreting the signs provided by the “north bluff at Chelh-ten-em.” With the first catch by Lummi fishers, the First-Salmon Ceremony would continue with each family/crew. The First-Salmon was treated as a special guest in the village. After it had been honored and every member of the village had partaken of a small portion of its flesh, its bones would be returned to the water, where it would resume its previous form and go tell the other salmon how well it had been treated. The salmon would then allow the Lummis to capture them. 30

In this instance, the salmon becomes a trickster to his own species, the price of hospitality being not merely the invitation to dinner, but themselves as dinner. Of precapitalist, coastal Salish subsistence fishing practices Boxberger notes that individuals who had “free access” to the salmon resource held the resource in “trust” on behalf of the larger kinship, linguistic, and by extension, communal group: The precapitalist fishing economy of the Straits Salish was a complex interaction between free-access resources and locations held in trust by individuals for a larger kin group. A man was guaranteed access to fishing locations as far as his (and his wife’s) kinship networks extended. For practically everyone, this included virtually all the territory occupied by the Straits Salish speakers.31

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With the imposition of capitalism, this relation to the salmon resource and its distribution has changed, yet the particular nature of salmon harvesting ensures its status as a common-property resource with ownership undefined until the resource is procured. Unlike other natural resources such as agricultural land invested with property rights, no one “owns” the salmon resource until it is harvested. The collectivist economy underpinning the coastal Salish salmon resource—its “free access” status, collectively owned until the moment of procurement—meshes well with the linguistic economy of the trickster sign. Like all tricksters, Salmon is animated in the act of his own communal harvest before an audience, possessed by many yet owned by none. As such, Salmon continues to influence coastal Salish community and beliefs today, as a cultural resource of both material and mythic significance, and it is crucial to any understanding of Lummi being as decentered and transformative, versus fixed or essential, in form. So, too, Chelh-ten-em remains an established point along the migratory route of the Lummi cultural and spiritual framework their annual fisheries provide and which, in turn, has a material reference, a co-temporaneity in historical time, called Chelh-ten-em—the traditional home to seasonal Lummi fisheries off reservation—well beyond the limits to Lummi space imposed by the Treaty of Point Elliott in 1855. As the trickster sign of the coastal Salish, Salmon eludes the bounding representations typical of indigenous identity as a lost authenticity. Whichever the ethnographical unwrappings inducing the search for the artifactual “Indian” at Chelh-ten-em—including the name games of Assinika, Isla de Zepeda, Point Roberts, Tract 110, Lat. 49°, 0’, 00”; Long. 123°, 3’, 53”—Salmon undercuts the location to any specific, containable cultural space. Like the woodland tribal trickster Nanabozho in the Anishinaabe context, Salmon serves as a more appropriate comic holotrope for Lummi Chelh-ten-em, the migratory sign not merely in the form of a capitalist commodity but “eternal contradictions that release the ritual terror in captured images.”32 Salmon guarantees trickster potential in common for the Lummi communal whole, as well as for the specific Lummi individual animating the trickster sign. That is, if he or she can catch it. Vizenor’s omitting any mention in The Heirs of Columbus of the Lummi people and their historical sovereignty over Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts), including coastal Salish salmon culture, is significant. While I appreciate that Vizenor’s constructivist project in The

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Heirs of Columbus would have us focus upon the agency of the trickster sign irregardless of local and material constraints, he might have done even better by bringing local, sovereign values into his vision. Indeed, throughout his long career, Vizenor has often made an effective critique of the overdetermination of local, sovereign spaces by increasingly global capital formations and the writings such static representations produce.33 The pressures of development Chelhten-em is facing today demand the composite textualities of Lummi/ Chippewa and Salmon/Bear in a shared, sovereign response. The rules of the game are changing. The windigoo has again returned to gamble at Assinika/Chelh-ten-em and, for the time being, he plays a mean round of golf. *

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The proposed development is [the] construction of a 200 room resort hotel, approximately 218 residential condominiums, and an 18-hole golf course. . . . The site is located on the southeast corner of Point Roberts. It encompasses 436 acres. —Resort at Lily Point Draft EIS (figure 3.3) When we’re going to our land it’s very sacred to us. . . . I’m not just talking about where they’re proposing a piece of the pie. I’m talking about all of Point Roberts, what’s left of it. The water, the land, the beach, the air, and everything in the earth, belong to the people of this, the indigenous people of this land. —Kenneth Cooper (Lummi), Cultural Resource Specialist

The postmodern reimagining of Lummi sovereign land is being undertaken on Chelh-ten-em in the pressurized context of the flooding of Pacific Rim capital into the southern British Columbia, northwest Washington state region. Surplus value is being invested not in the salmon resource of Fordist, high-industrial capitalism, but in the image of the luxury resort within the larger logic of flexible accumulation. Vacation paradise is being proffered to potential retirees moving into the area over the protests of Lummi Council officials who rightly see the proposed resort developments in the larger context of the historical usurpation of their collective sovereignty. Whereas the

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Figure 3.3 “Site Plan: Landscape Open Space Plan.” The site plan involves development of the majority of acreage on southeast Chelh-ten-em (Lily Point). Note the “Score Card” graphic situated top, midfield, as well as the “Eagle Management Area” cordon. Source: “Resort at Lily Point Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS, July 1992),” Public domain.

sovereign trickster nation Assinika has colonized the textual space along the “wild border” of representation, its material counterpart, Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts), Washington, is currently experiencing the appropriation of its cultural resources for far less noble pursuits.

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Only 4.6 square miles in total area, Chelh-ten-em/Point Roberts faces the imminent development of no fewer than three luxury-scale resort and golfing facilities in the next five to ten years, including the Lily Point Resort to which I give my attention here. Before turning to specific discontents in the ongoing controversy currently raging among real estate developers, the Lummi nation, and AngloEuropean booster-conservationists, it may be useful to again situate Chelh-ten-em’s local position in terms of the larger, historical reality of global, economic transformations. As mentioned in the context of the APA salmon cannery on Lily Point, by the turn of the century Chelh-ten-em already existed as the site of a remarkable capital concentration along highly monopolistic, antitrust era lines. The commodity orientation, rather than the intensive production potentials of the local setting, is all that has shifted in the intervening hundred years: from placing the perfect salmon trap to building the ideal, luxury resort and golfing facility. Such a commodity shift marks Chelh-ten-em as an exemplary instance of what Harvey calls the “spatial displacement” and “absorption of overaccumulation” that has characterized the movement toward post-Fordist resolution of surplus accumulation problems arising since the end of the post-World War II economic boom. In general, overaccumulation is a spatial “fix,” a neocolonial movement of capital into local labor and investment relationships on behalf of the credit system and other “fictitious” capital formations of developed countries: [T]o the degree that the progressive implantation of capitalism across the face of the earth extends the space within which the over-accumulation problem can arise, so geographical expansion can at best be a short-term solution to the over-accumulation problem.34

The potential pitfalls of overaccumulation strategies raise doubts as to the viability of large-scale development on Chelh-ten-em, which has no economic infrastructure to support the demise of such projects. Because of the vagaries of the world market and the predominance of Pacific Rim capital invested in the area, there is always the strong possibility that golfer’s paradise could turn into golfer’s graveyard. Unfinished construction projects, or hopelessly under-utilized ones, could constitute the final slap in the face to the Lummi community for whom the image of Chelh-ten-em has been reduced to not merely the mockery of their sacred space in terms of the pleasure economy of the postmodern, but the emptiness of that reality-effect as well: the

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petroglyph, burial middens, and habitats levelled only to be left vacant by consumer-golfers who never materialized. By contrast, developers (despite a dearth of statistics to support their claim) have insisted that: The applicants propose The Resort . . . in response to their perceived need for greater golfing opportunities. The rate of growth for the golf industry is estimated by the applicants at 6 to 7 percent annually. Increases in the region’s population and the influx of overseas golfers contribute to the demand for golf courses in the Point Roberts vicinity. 35

Local readers of the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), submitted on July 30, 1992 to the public by the resort developers, are asked to weigh the perceived demand for golf in conjunction with the imminent influx of golfers and population as inevitable facts. Ongoing opposition to such developments has been based on traditional associations in Lummi memory linking Chelh-ten-em with the as yet active, seasonal salmon fisheries industry, as well as the existence of ancestral burial middens in the area. During fishing season (typically June through September each year) many Lummis still moor their gill nets and skiffs offshore and camp below Lily Point (the bluffs adjacent to and beneath the par 4, hole number one, and the par 5, hole number two, of the proposed development) so as to avoid the moorage fees charged to their vessels by the privately owned marina to the west. Unfortunately, the Lummi can only be discouraged by recent developments, ecological and political, adversely impacting on Chelh-ten-em’s sovereignty and its association with salmon.36 Kenneth Cooper, counsel to the Lummi Cultural Committee, testified in hearing that: Now downtown Bellingham is dead. They say, “Up, well we can develop elsewheres,” and they just keep going along, because there they keep developing it, and each time they do they’re covering on top of our sacred ground. And it’s a concern to us, because that’s where we practice our belief. I belong with the painted people on my land, and there’s three hundred and fifty of us in that tradition. We’re interested in the whole thing, the whole thing. 37

Yet despite the determining influence of salmon culture upon Chelh-ten-em into the present day, the strongest case for the Lummi tribe in an Anglo-European legal system paradoxically rests on verifying the

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presence of indigenous remains at the proposed site. In a no-win situation for their chilangin, their tribal way of life, the Lummis must either give up Chelh-ten-em to developers or turn it into a museum piece. Of the extant burial grounds, Cooper testified that: We’re talkin’ about our way of life, our chilangin. Our people, reef net sites, petroglyphs, archaeological sites, burial sites, tree burial sites. The trees don’t exist there no more, but that don’t take away from where it was at. The place where we stored our sacred regalia. You look on what’s that, where that line’s at, the border, even standing at Point Roberts you can see the rows of shell middens, our burial sites. You can see them down where the houses are sitting, burial sites. 38

No doubt turning Chelh-ten-em away from salmon culture toward a more artifactual rendering of Lummi sovereignty, as with a tribal museum, could have nearly as deleterious effects as the proposed golf courses. The imperative remains, instead, to keep a functioning and productive site of Lummi salmon culture and its sovereignty alive to an ongoing process of community definition, in marked contrast to the Lily Point Resort map—empty, rational, and devoid of cultural significance to the tribe.39 The postmodern narrative, responding increasingly to the tempo and rhythm of flexible accumulation on a global scale, would seem to provide an ideal ground for a politically active trickster discourse. Across a long and successful career—ranging from print journalism in the Thomas Whitehawk case forty years ago, to the historical narrative (in blank verse) of Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point—the body of Gerald Vizenor’s writing continues to present a significant resource for those who would respond exuberantly to the material predicaments facing indigenous sovereigns everywhere. The trickster’s ongoing reinvention of the sacred as a nonartifactual and living truth—and Vizenor’s constructivist gestures are among the most refined and sophisticated of any—must continue to flourish in the blindspot of global determinations. But the rationality, scope, and vision of global capitalism proper, which is being uniformly imposed on Chelh-ten-em and the Lummi people without adequate treatment of their particular sovereign concerns, demand the immediate voicing of local interests in terms more convincing than Vizenor’s literary pose in The Heirs of Columbus provides. The seeming irrelevance of Lummi sovereignty to The Heirs of Columbus suggests the political, rather than semiotic, limitations of trickster discourse. Writing Chelh-ten-em and trickster Salmon into his postmodern narrative would have given a more explicit political

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and material basis to Vizenor’s otherwise laudable refiguring of the Assinikan nation on the “wild border” of trickster discourse. Beyond fictionalizing redemptive sovereign experiments, however, The Heirs of Columbus also stands as a warning to those who would implement plural sovereignties uncritically as a deconstructive writing practice. Trickster virtuosity necessarily enlivens the many represented scenes of indigenous life; indeed, an alive-and-kicking trickster capably sustains the reinvention of sovereignty beyond existing forms and events as they are presently imagined. This is a point that Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace capably documents, by allowing trickster to inhabit other originally alien structures—Anglo-European capitalism and romance—in the sovereign indigenous interest. *

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For Love and Money in The Bingo Palace The Bingo Palace . . . originated from my consistent failure to break even at the blackjack tables. —Louise Erdrich The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours. —William Wordsworth

In The Bingo Palace, Louise Erdrich lays out some of the contemporary perils facing indigenous individuals when engaging originally foreign, found ideologies in the exercise of their pluralized sovereignties. Rather than ironizing a transnational project as does Vizenor, Erdrich’s novel represents the uses and abuses of capitalism by her characters in their latest roles as “bingo chiefs.” Specifically, Erdrich’s characters come to embody differing constructions of chance operating within the Anishinaabe experience of love. Reading love as money, The Bingo Palace fictionalizes what Paul Pasquaretta has observed, in the Pequot and Mohawk contexts, as “the impact of reservation gambling on the development of contemporary tribal communities and the important role of traditional Indian gambling practices and stories in the survival of indigenous cultural tradition.”40 The resulting nexus Erdrich brings to bear in the novel—of individual experiences, sovereign imperatives,

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and overriding economic constraint—layers the contemporary indigenous experience of sovereignty in a compelling fashion, as the fates of her Ojibwe characters, the reckoning of their past history, and forward prospects for sovereign viability converge in seemingly inconsequential (yet pivotal) moments of good or bad fortune. The very volatility of indigenous chance in The Bingo Palace illustrates how a localized, Anishinaabe capitalism affects individuals differently, masquerading as luck or just plain—that is, undetermined—fate.41 Lyman Martine, whose successes as an indigenous Midas would supply his people in material terms, appears as a trickster genius wielding an accumulation strategy. Elsewhere in the novel, indigenous chances appear as labile trickster signs, readily liquidated by the demands of individual desires, such as Lipsha Morrissey’s, that are not necessarily materialistic, dollar-denominated, or reducible to exchange value. Clearly, Lyman and Lipsha’s apparently contrary experiences of capitalist chance together constitute the dynamic they share—indigenous supply meeting indigenous demand—and serve Erdrich’s broader endorsement of a trickstering romance that punishes and rewards in turn.42 Underwriting all chances in the novel, romantic love is used, so as to question, the ultimate aims and motives of indigenous capitalism. Romantic ideology also comes to resemble most, if not all, of the predatory and quixotic forms of capitalist venture. This is Erdrich’s gambit in The Bingo Palace: by parleying with her enemy, the windigoo of corporate gambling, she willingly capitalizes Anishinaabe discourse, but only so as to safeguard a more precious currency minting monied chances. Love remains the proper and best essence guaranteeing indigenous chance, a value in Erdich’s cosmology at once more precious and stabilizing. In an echo of Vizenor, Erdrich’s novel uses capitalism to accelerate the novel’s trickster dynamic in the interests of community and family: The trickster animates this human adaptation in a comic language game and social science overcomes chaos in a monologue; the environment bears the comedies and tragedies.43

Inhabiting capitalist structures and indigenous traditions equally, trickster “animates . . . human adaptation[s],” in Vizenor’s words, whether in the form of the anishinaabe nanabozho, the ojibwa micipijiu, or both.44 Yet, as in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus, Erdrich’s jacking into the structures of capitalism is a high-risk strategy that

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promises trickstering rewards and returns, but just as clearly will not guarantee them.45 Declaring their fictionality up-front as caveat, characters in The Bingo Palace gamble with what they hold most precious and often lose. The novel demonstrates time and time again how Anishinaabe love risks being tainted through contacts with the grubby commerce it alternatively abhors and relies upon. Meanwhile, the proliferating forms and motivations of capital gain make significant inroads into indigenous spaces and places heretofore considered off-limits by otherwise self-sustaining traditions. Are the fabulous rewards promised by Indian and Native gaming just another assimilationist lever, another late-capitalist treaty promise? Before making a beginning at addressing these various issues in Erdrich’s novel, it may be useful to sketch out briefly the collective stakes tribes and bands throughout North America have placed in the gaming industry, even while many of its longer-term prospects for sustainability remain unclear. *

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On reserves and reservations throughout the continent, long-standing traditions of indigenous gaming for ritual and recreational purposes have had to compete in recent decades with the decidedly different and industrialized model of high-stakes gaming. The gaming industry has arisen in close proximity to, and as a by-product of, the historical encounter between indigenous peoples and Anglo-European settlercolonialism, but with an important reversal: Anglo-European gamblers are now, by and large, the sovereign tribes’ and bands’ largest clientele.46 Indigenous gaming, its benefits to American Indian and Canadian Native individuals and corporations held apart, is without doubt the result of plural sovereignties deriving, in the U.S. context, from increasing political sovereignty (self-determination) provided to tribes by the IRA, and subsequently, by the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) of 1988 and its subsequent amendments.47 The Canadian Native experience of gaming, while distinctly different from that of the American IGRA in legal terms (within an essentially British derivation of law), also shares several of the latter’s fundamental characteristics. These include the requirement for specific Native bands to enter into mutually binding agreements with individual provinces; Native bands’ acknowledging the principle of a negotiated provincial regulatory authority over indigenous gaming operations on or off reserve; and provincial over federal jurisdictional

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authority when negotiating and enforcing such gaming and lottery compacts with individual Native bands and nations.48 Viewed positively, the indigenous experiment with industrialized gaming has usually involved some degree of recognition that greater economic viability for autonomous (or semi-autonomous) corporate entities lends itself to greater distribution of life chances and material prosperity (“trickle-down”) for all participating tribal or band members including, ideally, the reestablishing of indigenous sovereignty over previously alienated homelands. The image of high-stakes gaming has for many come to stand in as a proxy—at times, all too conveniently—for the complexity of contemporary plural sovereignties, and this image at once clarifies and oversimplifies the stakes of this latest phase in the indigenous experience of self-determination. Unfortunately, gaming has also brought with it a host of problems that have tended to magnify previously existing differences among bands and tribes, exploited class and status differences within bands and tribes, and heightened tensions with the dominant AngloEuropean culture. Settler-colonial sovereigns have been inconsistent in their approaches—alternately encouraging and challenging—to the ongoing prospects of Indian and Native gaming as an extension of indigenous autonomy.49 Moreover, tribal and Native elites have found themselves as stakeholders in enterprises whose proceeds, ideological and capital, are not always universally redistributed, thereby increasing class stratification within local communities. 50 Nor are the social and cultural impacts on indigenous communities deriving from such gaming operations perceived as uniformly beneficial for all members. The L’Anse Ojibwa (Keweenaw Bay), among the largest indigenous landholding tribes in upper-peninsular Michigan, and probably closest culturally to that worldview Erdrich is fictionalizing in The Bingo Palace, were mired in a divisive, gambling-related factional struggle for years. 51 At present, the gaming industry supports indigenous gambling enterprises using the now familiar, circular argument of in situ priority justifying capitalism more generally; that is, that tribes and bands must play the gambling game because it is, for most, the only game available. Yet despite notable exceptions, and general assertions of good faith notwithstanding, gambling revenues from the “have” gaming tribes have not as a rule found their way in support of the “have nots.”52 Nor has the impact of gaming on indigenous communities been uniformly harmful, but uneven.53 Pasquaretta has researched the oft-cited

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example of the Mashantucket Pequot, whose historic rise from near termination to thriving viability illustrates how gaming capital has helped to transform indigenous communities at the start of the twentyfirst century: As a result of the state, federal, and tribal collaborations [culminating in recognized tribal status in 1983], three distinct subgroups of the Pequot community currently coexist. . . . The largest of these groups is composed of the tribe’s “black” Indians, those Pequots of AfricanAlgonquian descent. Another group of “white” Indians is heavily intermarried with European peoples. . . . A third group, and the reservation’s smallest, is composed of persons with a mostly indigenous inheritance. These distinctions have caused friction within the community. . . . Yet all of these people are at least second cousins, and the decision to unite everyone who belongs regardless of race or ethnicity has been a central feature of the community’s new success. 54

Here the Pequots’ success affirms the plurality of indigenous and Anglo-European sovereignties quickened through collective capital gains. As Kimberly TallBear’s analysis of the recent disenrollment of black Seminole Freedmen in Oklahoma has suggested, however, the promise of plural sovereignties within the indigenous nation—in this immediate context, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma—can be decisively stymied when a majority of voters affirms blood quantum (what TallBear calls the “racializing of the tribe”) over and against legitimate historical association as the overriding prerogative determining national citizenship and its economic benefits.55 Whether by choice or necessity, then, the everyday consumers, principal owners, and administrators of indigenous gaming enterprises over the course of time have become stakeholders in the ideology of Anglo-European capitalism as an expression of indigenous sovereignty, once held as absolutely distinct and apart from colonizing ideologies (including capitalism). An aggregate of sovereignties, exercised concurrently by indigenous individuals, has emerged accordingly, requiring the negotiation of overlapping sovereign roles: as members of tribal or Native nations, as Canadians and American nationals, as shareholding entrepreneurs or wage earners invested in capital enterprises and their ability to generate income. This adaptation has involved sustaining a plurality of indigenous and AngloEuropean values that, where not found to be competing, have nonetheless risked, so as to profit from, the privatization of cultural, material, and economic assets traditionally held in common.

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Such necessary adaptations, modifications, and redeployments of dominant ideologies are not “anomalous,” in fact, but have been a creative commonplace necessary to the ongoing reinvention and continuation of the indigenous presence in Native North America. 56 With the emergence of such plural sovereignties as its backdrop, The Bingo Palace thus invites our considerations of the resulting constellation— individualist, nationalist, capitalist, romantic—rising above indigenous consumer consciousness. Literary critics have confirmed the sophistication of Erdrich’s novels when depicting indigenous communities wielding the ideologies of a once foreign Anglo-European modernity. Noting Erdrich’s blending of Anglo-European and traditional Anishinaabe gambling practices, Sarvé-Gorham goes so far as to suggest that Erdrich’s novels “tacitly [suggest] that Indians receive a fairer chance at positive resolution to land disputes through gambling than they do through the EuroAmerican legal system.”57 John Purdy suggests that the capitalist predicament faced by indigenous peoples derives from the clash of different sovereign traditions: [G]ambling in its current usage does not mean [only] gambling in a social setting, but in actuality the engagement of two societies and the juxtaposing of two conflicting views of the future. Which society— Euro- or Native American—should have the funds and therefore the final say in what will be? Like gamblers poised over the craps table, Native nations face off against the Federal Government and individual states, and at stake are the next generations. This confrontation has been an on-going concern in Erdrich’s novels. 58

Given the apparent confrontation of differing sovereign values, one profound change The Bingo Palace documents is the emergence of the indigenous individual when held apart from his or her traditions. An abstraction, the notion of an indigenous “consumer” has been identified—some might say isolated—as intrinsic to the penetration by capitalism of sovereign life-ways. Joanne Barker notes that the capital-intensive gaming industry only magnifies, as an economy of scale, existing threats to sovereign industries and resources already experiencing capitalist penetration and realignment. 59 Organizing indigenous being using the tenets of corporate consumerism, including the enjoyment of a particularly nationalist consumption— accompanied by cries of “Buy American!” or “Buy Native!” or, quite possibly, both—ensconces capitalism for indigenous entrepreneurs as a necessary evil. The Bingo Palace also weighs the issue of

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Anishinaabe consumerism and highlights the potential alienation of indigenous resources, traditions, and “flexible” citizenship when sovereignty is reduced to the commodity form, a point to which I will return.60 Certainly, consumer capitalism accelerates adaptation to the colonial surround, but is the sticker price indigenous cultures must pay, in the absence of a sovereign guarantee, really worth it? The Bingo Palace similarly documents the impact of gambling revenue streams whose longer-term effects, individual and collective, have yet to be adequately measured, let alone accounted for, in a longitudinal study. As I write, there are more than 224 tribal gaming operations in the United States, and only one-quarter of these issue per capita dividends to all eligible tribal members. Even among those indigenous communities where gaming proceeds are distributed, furious debate has ensued as to who deserves how much and for how long.61 Internal disagreements within tribes and bands notwithstanding, most indigenous governments with successful gambling operations have delivered on their agreements with hegemonic jurisdictions, channeling previously negotiated profit percentages off-reservation to states and provinces in the form of charitable donations. In addition to providing real and measurable benefits for nontribal communities, such charitable donations are designed to win over hearts and minds in the midst of an at times contentious public debate.62 Although it would seem that indigenous gaming interests are mostly justified when citing effective sovereignty as the basis for husbanding gaming profits into the coffers of tribal and band governments (instead of issuing lifetime, nontransferable equity stakes in corporate enterprises to all eligible members as occurred in Alaska63), important and potentially disturbing questions remain. For example, to what extent does the capitalization of indigenous resources once held in common and now administered (and institutionalized) by the tribal and band few extinguish the principle of inalienable sovereignty enjoyed as a group right? Even the issuing of universal equity stakes, or per capita payouts, for example, does not necessarily extinguish in principle the group right to reject capitalization of tribal resources. What about specific bands, tribes, and nations left out in the cold, who possess no land to barter, no market to capture, no start-up capital, and no gambling revenues at all? Or again, does the expression of indigenous gaming rights in terms of a discrete economic model, capitalism, actually hedge against the bright-line principle of indigenous sovereignty proper, which in itself has not (at least until more recent times) derived from either industrial

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capitalism or its terms of reference?64 The fragmentation of the sovereign, indigenous totality into distinct groups possessing different capital resources—capitalists call this “market differentiation” based upon a tribe or band “market capitalization” as indicated on the balance sheet—results in the shattering of the notion of an inalienable sovereignty applicable to all indigenous peoples of all nations for all time. Skinner, for example, takes succinct measure of such tensions: if individual indigenous consumers have acquired specific rights under Anglo-European notions of self-determination and representation, they do so only at the risk of alienating preceding values determined in the collective interest.65 Finally, indigenous casino operations are not uniformly successful across different microeconomies, nor are their gaming operations protected, beyond standard state bankruptcy codes—where, in fact, these latter may actually apply—against insolvencies whose impacts on local reservations and reserves tend to be disproportionate to those in nonreservation communities. In support of such a claim, Buerger and Robinson suggest that demand for tribal gaming is neither elastic nor “infinite”; rather its market tends to favor larger operations in urban settings (as against rural or semirural operations) in an economy of scale, which risks the “pauperization” of local (predominantly indigenous) populations least able to afford gambling losses. And the much-vaunted employment gains from casino operations primarily occur at the lower end of wage-earning scales.66 Further evidence suggests that gaming enterprises will encounter increasingly strong competition in a deadly cycle, alternating between entrepreneurial differentiation and vertical alignment in the absence of competition. None of these arguments carry much weight with cash-strapped band and tribal councils, however. Longer-term feasibility studies have usually been given short shrift in the rush to open new casions.67 Nor, at present, does there seem to be an effective regulatory body disseminating information and know-how on ways to link extant gaming revenue streams to the sustenance (why not expansion?) of precapitalist sovereignties, practices, and beliefs. *

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Getting and spending: these tropes structure attempts in The Bingo Palace to ground romantic love as an indigenous bulwark against many of the capitalist predations described earlier. Yet Erdrich’s capitalization of indigenous discourse also risks co-opting her characters

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as actors and agents who might otherwise resist colonial-capitalist hegemony.68 By proposing a “thesis,” in Purdy’s words, on the many constructions and varieties of indigenous chance in the context of an alien capitalism, is Erdrich courting disaster for the precapitalist rendering of indigenous lifeways?69 In The Bingo Palace, the exploration of one dimension of this question falls to Lyman Lamartine, the tribal leader and venture capitalist. Lyman, espousing a naturalistic philosophy reminiscent of earlier capitalist heroes in Theodore Dreiser novels, learns how to mint capitalist gold out of indigenous necessity. Embodying a question about how indigenous characters can and cannot survive for the love of money—his actions in the novel progress through specific and controlled circumstances of capitalist remorse, attrition, and eventual rebirth—Lyman maneuvers within both indigenous and capitalist signifying systems. He negotiates plural sovereignties not in terms of indigenous “identity” as such but, in Walter Benn Michaels’ terms, within a shared “economy [where] . . . that structure of desire and that structure of feeling ma[k]e sense.”70 Benn Michael’s statement reminds us, for better and worse, that contemporary life involves the juxtaposition of different “structures”— of capital and of desire in this case—within a shared construction of being. (The same held true for Wordsworth’s Romanticism and its subjects, as it does for Erdrich’s rewriting of Romanticism in the indigenous context.) But it is equally certain that the resulting construction, once compounded, is at once familiar and alienating: the capitalization of indigenous desire rewrites plural sovereignties as a doppelgänger, foreign in inspiration yet now perfected through subsequent use. On the one hand, Anishinaabe capitalism in The Bingo Palace “makes sense” and seems perfectly suited to Erdrich’s literary design as the indigenous expression of romantic feelings. On the other hand, by structuring such feelings at all, indigenous capitalism risks overdetermining them, by reminding individuals how capitalist processes may be distinguished from prior, sovereign feelings. And as Vizenor’s and Erdrich’s novels demonstrate, indigenous capitalism gives tremendous explanatory power when representing the neocolonial present. Yet if late capitalism has become indigenized in the North American context of high-stakes gaming, only in very recent times has its “structure of desire” (in Benn Michael’s phrase) come to resemble and abet sovereign objectives. Indeed, Erdrich’s fiction just as conceivably points toward a postcapitalist future, by using the drive of capitalism

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to return her characters and readers to a newly vitalized understanding of the Anishinaabe past. Through a process of mourning Henry, his dead brother, Lyman in particular comes to query the outcomes of indigenous chances, for good and ill, grounding (however precariously) relationships otherwise floating without purpose in a marketplace of human emotions. To this extent, Erdrich’s capitalizing strategy resembles that strategic essentialism employed by Thomas King (discussed further in chapter five below) but to a different purpose. She invests not in the logic of naturalism tied to capitalist gold, but in the essences of a “magical” naturalism tied to love, as “applied to writers from cultures more closely aligned to religious oddities and the natural and strange world.”71 Promising such “strange” liberation from the material world, love’s magic worries at the seams of capitalist expectations and outcomes, including the narrative conventions of the novelistic form. Thus what is expected from a naturalist view on life, whether by way of closure or escape from “the end,” is never fully delivered. We, the readers, have this much of a realization in common with Erdrich’s characters: thankfully, nothing ever really shuts on her world; nothing, not even the prison-house of the text, really closes it down. Erdrich’s novel achieves the apparent arresting of plot, yet one that is only ever provisional. The Bingo Palace winds up, but it does not really conclude. Lyman’s position within this textual economy is one of supply. He spends money, usually lavishly, and typically requires correction as a result. Cash in hand, Lyman determines plot events more often than he is an instrument of them; he readily spends tribal dollars and usefully predicts the probability of material outcomes beneficial to his family, kin, and people. We recall his role in bailing Lipsha out at the Canadian border crossing.72 Lyman’s agency grants him greater control over bankable “luck,” including his expert regulation of its contingencies and signs in a capitalist system whose rules he understands. As Purdy notes, Lyman’s character also moves from rejecting elusive randomness (vulgar “luck”) as a negative principle to the positive manipulation, through determinations more easily made and figured, of predictability and probability.73 Lyman is the right man for this job, fusing the mechanics of a foreign capitalism to the purpose of boosting the sovereign current account. But the capitalism he practices is also influenced by his own unique consciousness as an indigenous individual. As Purdy puts it, long before Anglo-Europeans arrived on

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North American shores, indigenous gaming demonstrated “ ‘games of chance’ [as] games of change and power over it.”74 Once harnessed by the rules of Anglo-European hegemony, however, Lyman’s ability to determine chance is nevertheless limited, and his resulting contortions represent (with Erdrich pulling the strings) the future of indigenous corporate entities as both puppet and puppeteer in a capitalist rendering of the world. To survive in this world, Lyman and his people must recover an evaluative basis, beyond the thrill of luck and random chance, for the new capitalism they are practicing. As Purdy and Sarvé-Gorham both point out, Lyman Lamartine is only one part of a complex dynamic or “matrix” of the multifaceted construction of chance in the novel.75 Ultimately endorsing Lyman’s embrace of determinism in the indigenous interest, the premise that good fortune usually follows winners, Erdrich’s novel nevertheless leverages an equal, and alternative, construction of chance in its pages. This alternative chance is more contingent, transcends contexts and individuals and, ultimately, balances outcomes and events beyond any one lifetime. Gerry Nanapush, after long years in prison and locked within its “still eye of chance,” comes to recognize this broader construction: [F]ate was not random. Chance was full of runs and soft noise, pardons and betrayals and double-backs. Chance was patterns of a stranger complexity than we could name, but predictable. There was no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it seemed unrepetitive up close, that is, until you sat doing nothing for so long that your brain ached and, one day, just maybe, you caught a wider glimpse. (226)

From this perspective, individual successes and failures are equally contingent in a vaster design that may seem chaotic or formless but is not. All outcomes are given an equal weighting, none organize reality along a binary scale (winners or losers, never winners-as-losers), and all events constitute meaning beyond the causes or consequences with which they are all too often confused. Whether adverse, outcomeneutral, or beneficial, all chances exist merely as patterned redistributions of form in something we misperceive as “the great game of fortune.” All fates are merely relative thereby, none are absolute, and any reducible meaning is necessarily subordinated within the totality of all possible meanings, with actions and opposing reactions conforming to an ineluctable Brownian motion of unconstrained circumstance. Under this guise, indigenous capitalism (like nationalism,

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colonialism, or any reducible history) occupies only a given and limited role within a larger universe, itself in motion. By asserting this purportedly more leveling chance premise—that the ultimate balance of all fortune occurs in an overall dynamic, regardless of present histories, outcomes, or uses—Erdrich hitches the apparent truth of her narrative to something stochastic; that is, hardly determined at all. Outcomes become more or less irrelevant in the broader construction of indigenous fortune as inherently, ideally, and ceaselessly paradigmatic in an unregulated torrent of shared moments none of which ever stands alone. Unfortunately, this alternative reading of chance as of limitless and uniform opportunity is not inherently evaluative. It throws out the dishes of present consequence with the dishwater of ineffable causality, and sacrifices the promise of settling historical accounts—of Lyman’s capitalist agency—for the forward projection of alternative futures. An absolute position about the relativity of circumstance— mark the paradox—this “chance of no chance” (Vizenor’s term) ensures that “luck” is not strictly required for either success or failure. “Good” luck or “bad” luck simply happen (and as “happenings” both are rendered equivalences), as if apportioned blindly (therefore justly), and assume the rather tidy leveling of accounts regardless of agency or historical motives that, in any case, no one human can ever entirely compass or judge. As the case of the war-wounded Russell Kapshaw illustrates—a man who considers himself lucky despite, or because of, his life’s experience—this second construction of chance is process, rather than outcome-based: “[l]uck . . . has many sides and is not always physically apparent in those who possess it.”76 This second construction of chance as “luck,” imputed to an antideterminist equilibrium, depends heavily on abstract idealization and absolves actors of agency and responsibility, whether for good or for ill. As Lipsha Morrissey puts it: “That’s when our stroke of luck, good or bad is no telling, occurs” (251). Lyman’s own energy and agency through capitalism resist such an antideterminist construction of chance. Success, and not the overall equivalence suggested by a neutral “fortune” alone, motivates him. But, just as significant, the ideology of capitalism to which he subscribes rationalizes the prospect of failure—even catastrophic failure—in similarly abstract terms of overall equivalence. If good “luck” follows winners, chance also endorses the punishment of losers in an overall cosmic balancing. In this rendering, chance isn’t chance, really. It masquerades as “justice” mandated by a system requiring

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individual losers (or their proxies) and apparently rejecting a communal philosophy of value, just as appointed “losers” in the capitalist game all too often take their similarly situated extended families and communities down with them. By which standard of chance, then, should Lyman measure success? Intriguingly, at this moment in the analysis the capitalist truism asserts its own truth: for Lyman, the magic behind the novel’s naturalism is not gold after all, but the essences lurking within the indigenous commodity that, once fetishized, liberates the novel’s drives and romantic desires. It is at this moment where Erdrich’s leveraging of plural sovereignties in the indigenous interest, whereby the occult “magic” of the commodity fetish that Marx deplored (as somehow not determined by the actual labor of actual people) converges with the “magic” of a sacred sovereign tradition only indigenous stakeholders can recognize as such. Certainly, the two are not the same: indigenous sovereignty is separate and apart from the capitalist tradition that has settled on it. Nor does a “hybrid” value, linking the commodity fetish to the sovereign transcendence of its context, necessarily emerge (resulting in a gothic rendering of value, Frankenstein-like, that Carr’s Eye Killers flirts with but ultimately does not embrace). Erdrich can tell the difference between these two magics that, all too often, assume each other’s form. And in The Bingo Palace she takes the gamble of a temporary alchemy in the sovereign interest. *

*

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Certainly, love is not reducible to the love of objects alone. But love, like money, does produce a parade of fetishes throughout The Bingo Palace: June’s car, Nestor’s pipe, Shawnee Ray’s stash, and Lipsha’s tattoo erased and then redrawn. Lyman, who has had a hand in every deal on or near the reservation, struggles to find the right metaphor to describe to Lipsha the transforming power money possesses over life, liberty, and the pursuit of indigenous happiness: “Money is alive,” Lyman tells [Lipsha]. “You don’t just stuff it somewhere, leave it. You have to put it in a place where it grows.” “Money’s dead stuff, but I like it.” . . . “Have you ever heard of compound interest, Lipsha?” Now Lyman looks serious. I nod to keep the conversation going. . . . “You let your money out to work for you, like each dollar is a horse, and you lend the herd out to people who pay you back extra for the privilege. It grows, it accumulates.”

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“The facts of life,” I joke. Lyman has no humor about this. “The real facts. The sex of money. How it reproduces if you pile it up high enough and put it in the right circumstances.” (101)

Whether herding, growing, or conjugating, capital not only compounds but is, for Lyman, a sacred organism accumulating anywhere, “in the right circumstances,” almost as if unassisted. Lyman’s own subjectivity is correspondingly indexed, bear and bull, to market drives that seemingly capitalize all aspects of his being: “he began to receive a hint of himself, an ID picture composed of his economic tribulations and triumphs. . . . He was drive. He was necessity. If not him, there was no one who would plan his plans, lift his voice, scheme, and bring the possibilities into existence” (148). For Lyman, hard cash and its commodities remain something “you can put your hands on” (102), “something real” (103). But then, just as suddenly, they are not. When first attempting to buy Nestor’s sacred pipe from Lipsha, Lyman states the convergence of competing value systems in the contemporary indigenous experience succinctly: “It belongs to all of us, Lipsha. It especially belongs to me” (87). For the “us” and “me” of indigenous being to coexist in the broader marketplace occasions a radical refashioning of subjectivity in the novel. Engineering this change, bringing collective chances back into your own individualist corner, requires a magical complicity. Arriving early at the Indian Gaming Conference, Lyman enters the casino to try his luck, only to be in turn penetrated (“[p]leasure soaked into him like resin”), overwhelmed (“[f]ascinated, awed”) and enchanted: “his hands lifted from his pockets in a magical arc” (90). After a guilt-instilled hiatus, Lyman returns to the tables, “his brain on and humming like a machine connected to that money” (92). By six a.m. the following morning he has won, lost a little, then lost everything. Finally Lyman pawns his own father’s (Nestor’s) ceremonial pipe on loan from Lipsha. In selling the pipe as a conclusive and constitutive act, Lyman has borrowed, leveraged, and alienated something he never rightfully owned which is, after all, the essence of trading in the capitalist market. The role of Lyman’s shame in this particular instance, and Erdrich’s careful foregrounding of it, is motivational. He needs to learn something about the commodity fetish. This otherwise commonplace description of a night of hard gambling in Reno effectively describes Lyman’s transformation in service to the object (Nestor’s pipe) that makes him its instrument. The pipe’s

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value is not merely alienated but transformed, giving Lyman a crash course on the operations of the commodity fetish whose mystical power, once harnessed, can drive (one hopes) the indigenous posterity toward perpetual solvency. After this painful experience, Lyman will no longer be a gambler, but a trader, grooming chance so as to better exploit it. But he doesn’t realize this difference yet, and neither do we; only Nestor’s pipe realizes the true significance of this encounter, and its own status—thanks to Lyman—is about to undergo a change wrought by chance, from object to subject and back again, in a capitalist discourse. Anchoring specific Chippewa community values and community relationships of long standing, the pipe must nevertheless “transcend” its specific history through transformation into a commodity: It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. . . . The mystical character of commodities does not originate, therefore, in their use-value.77

The commodification of the ceremonial pipe is significant, for it marks the culmination of another series of lovingly touched and recognizable value fetishes throughout the novel: poker chips, checks, paper currency, coin, and now, strangely, the indigenous sign that, once having been sold, becomes reified, apart from the specific history (“social character of labor”) that gave it life. Outside this community, however, Nestor’s pipe takes on another life, containing no use value whatsoever (earlier in the story a Canadian border guard impounds Lipsha’s vehicle only long enough to determine that it isn’t a hashish pipe [34–35]), and only limited exchange value (during his hours of early dawn desperation, Lyman hocks it for a mere US$ 100). And yet, beyond use and exchange, the “Indian collector” commodity fetish is born. Why does Erdrich introduce the indigenous uncanny as Lyman’s culminating gesture? By imparting to Nestor’s pipe a mystical commodity status, Erdrich effectively juxtaposes two “mysteries” when constructing a new indigenous depository for what Marx refers to as the “mystery of the form of value.”78 The commodity fetish (of Nestor’s pipe) can never fully capture this (indigenous) value, but only proposes it. The first “mystery” value the indigenous fetish proposes, therefore, is its promised

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transcendence of the commodity form itself; that is, the essence of being beyond any captured objectivity that the commodity’s presence (in your hand or on your bookcase) claims. The second “mystery” of value follows from the first: the emergence of presence, an alienated subjectivity, inheres in the object as imparted by its unique history. As Marx demonstrates, the commodity form makes these two promises, neither of which it can deliver. In the case of Nestor’s pipe, it first tempts its buyer beyond itself; that it will transcend its object status by offering a glimpse into a magical “indigenous” being and world in the presence of time (a very attractive proposition, perhaps, to the nonsovereign). The second promise Nestor’s pipe-fetish proposes is that it will tell its story—that of a sacred Anishinaabe pipe smoked by many as a repository of indigenous memory and value—to a stranger. It won’t. (Commodities never do, and I suspect indigenous commodities are particularly tight-lipped about revealing their sovereign histories to unknown parties.) Both mysteries are present in Nestor’s pipe as a commodity fetish, and neither are extinguished by converting it into exchange value (Lyman’s US$ 100) that, after all, catalyzes the commodity’s mystical transformation from object to subject and back again—as if the pipe could speak. (In Erdrich’s novels, it probably can speak, too, although in this instance it remains mute.) Compounding capitalist and indigenous values as shared mysteries within the same commodity form, Lyman has achieved something masterful despite himself. He couldn’t have done better if he had run the tables that night in Reno. Lyman ultimately learns what all gamblers are willing to give up under the spell of capitalist chance. Even better, he learns what Anglo-European gamblers, in particular, might be willing to sacrifice to access indigenous communities marshalling both capitalism and sovereignty as a twinned mystery. So inspired, Lyman can safely return Nestor’s pipe, via a long detour through the money form, back to his people as the emblem of a broader institutional framework for Indian gaming: “a more profitable, a more enormous bingo hall with drawing power that will attract not only surrounding residents but also people from as far away as Grand Forks and Winnipeg” (103). Using gambling proceeds, the Ojibwe can buy back everything that was ever stolen from them and using the conqueror’s money to boot. By now, we can clearly see that Erdrich entertains the juxtaposition of two different “mysteries” in the commodity fetish form—not principally to reject either value system, indigenous or capitalist, in absolute terms but to conjoin the plural sovereignties enlivened by

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both. That the “mystery” of the commodity fetish is already fraught with mysticism, as per Marx’s critique, makes the fate of Nestor’s pipe admirably suited to Erdrich’s trickstering purposes. Yet Marx’s formulation also questions the objectification of labor power in any commodity: “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labor.”79 In other words, commodities propose to profit from fetishization in a mystical process whereby the object is empowered as a bogus subject in its own right displacing the social history of its creation. Here is the crux of Erdrich’s problem in enlisting the aid of the commodity to the indigenous cause: how can well-intentioned individuals like Lyman utilize the magic of the commodity without reducing all indigenous commodities (or their signs) into fetishes alienating indigenous history? Erdrich’s challenge, therefore, becomes one of harnessing the magic of the commodity fetish while ensuring that the social history of the object (its “labor power”) is not objectified in any lasting sense. To achieve this inversion of a capitalist axiom—commodities by definition require the objectification (“reification”) of the labor power expended to make them—Erdrich must reverse-engineer the commodity fetish by recalling the social history of Nestor’s pipe. Even (or especially) as a commodity, the pipe must continually invite speculations about those histories its very existence as a commodity at once calls into question and inspires. Its authenticity as an artifact within Erdrich’s fictional universe, moreover, requires the existence of community to make its once and future uses (its once and future smokes, in point of fact) known and manifest. Nestor’s pipe can never dwell in the commodity form for very long; it is meant to be used. The voices of the indigenous fetish must be reanimated within the pipe as the promise of forward posterity on the indigenous behalf and not as a museum piece representing the past alone: Passed to Nestor from his old man, Resounding Sky, that pipe is the very one smoked when the treaty was drawn with the US government. So there are some who say that it was badly used and has to be reblessed, and it is, I don’t argue, a pipe that capped off the making of a big fat mistake. This is the same pipe refused by Pillagers who would not give away our land, the same one that solemnized the naming ceremony of a visiting United States president’s wife, but it is also the pipe that started the ten-summer sundance. It is a kind of public relations pipe, yet with historical weight. Personal too. (39)

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And then it dawns on us suddenly: Nestor’s pipe has been speaking through the fetish all along and marshalling indigenous chances in the sovereign interest to boot. Nestor’s pipe has been using Lyman all along. So as to become the fetish of an alienated indigenous history in the capitalist present, Nestor’s pipe arranged its own commodification. As we have seen, it also got itself sold so as to teach Lyman, the charismatic tribal councilor with connections and a firm handshake, how to purchase freedom back—not that indigenous sovereignty can ever truly be sold—for his people. And if, like Lyman, the communities behind the “public relations” pipe risk the commodification of their cultural assets, they do so in hopes of securing the continuity of their traditions in another emerging—commodified—form. As a metonymy for the gaming future for all indigenous peoples, Nestor’s pipe has affirmed Marx’s commodity fetish theory and done it one better. In indigenous hands, the commodity fetish will forget nothing of its past labor. It will not have to remain mute before strangers. It will speak to its own and help them remember. Lyman’s capitalist surfeit, his own labor to that accumulative end, will remain mostly expedient: “[G]ambling is not the nicest, not the best, not the prettiest. It’s just the way available right now” (103). By striving to wrest beneficial outcomes from a newly indigenized capitalism, Lyman achieves an unintended singular benefit beyond market cap, luck, and risk management. He also recovers his brother’s love through yet another chance agency, a “tiny article of faith” (149). In a final ceremony, Lyman learns to dance for the love of Henry, “the first time, ever, that [Lyman] didn’t dance for money” (203). In so doing, Lyman puts the ghost of Henry, his drowned brother, to rest and reasserts the value basis—against blind randomness—of chance. Acquiring knowledge about the “mysteries” behind Nestor’s pipe, Lyman learns that community values can and should undergird capitalism’s overall dynamic that, after all, is unregulated only to the extent that human actors agree to suspend (or downplay) their own involvement as agents. Beyond “luck,” Lyman learns that success most often tracks those who have already succeeded in fashioning stories of their own devising, and through which they have achieved a certain degree of peace: Everybody thought that when Lyman danced, he was dancing for Shawnee. But no, every dance, he was dancing for Henry. In younger days there had been times he resented dancing in the shadow of his brother. . . . As the sun rose, heating the ground, as he continued to dance, Lyman began to wish for that shadow. For Henry not only danced before him

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and blocked out the sun but the glare, too. He had absorbed it and folded his brother back into his friendly shade. . . . Then Lyman danced his own rough struggle from the freezing muscle of water where he had jumped in to grab Henry back, and failed . . . until finally, from the drum and with the singers just past the clearing, he heard Henry’s voice ride the sky: It is calm, so calm In that place where I am My little brother (204–5)

Having recovered Henry, Lyman continues with his bingo palace project, disabused of the notion that chance is either random or merely vulgar—lucky—in its equivalence. He will build his casino as a monument to the indigenous victory over capitalist chance in the community interest, and not as an expression of servitude to it. Ultimately, “Lyman’s luck,” isn’t, really; he seeks to determine indigenous chances and to profit from them. Spending his way out of an Anishinaabe depression is Lyman Lamartine’s all-too-Keynesian problematic in the novel, representing as it does the supply-side dynamic within Erdrich’s economy of plural sovereignties. Deriving manageable indigenous chances from a foreign capitalist system, Lyman gambles on winning, and in at least one notable instance of the commodity fetish, loses. But here is Erdrich’s gambling double-turn: through losing, Lyman wins, and—as long as he gambles on winning—so will his people. *

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Admittedly, Erdrich’s alchemy is impressive but also somewhat problematic. Transforming indigenous properties into commodities requires their capitalization in terms of a foreign currency. And could we but resurrect him, Marx probably would not recognize—beyond “mystery”—the value of an indigenous fetish as in any way different from any other commodity, bought and sold. For their part, other characters in The Bingo Palace (besides Lyman) come to be supremely aware of the varieties of alienation symbolized by the standard commodity fetish. Lipsha Morrissey recalls: “all I can think is that the good people I have known so far in life have been cash poor” (102). Lipsha’s observation underscores the truth, as opposed to commodity truism, behind the trickster economy Erdrich promotes in The Bingo Palace: the indigenous current account fluctuates, even madly so, but its cash is more tender than legal. Such tenderness is the

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romantic response to the capitalist system within which it is subsumed, and this includes replicating—so as to modify for its own purposes— the very commodities, the money form, notions of identifiable value, and of “identity” as value proper.80 Caring little about money, Lipsha therefore spends what little he has towards fulfilling the improbable proposition that money can buy you luck, even if it can’t buy you love. At the end of the novel, Fleur Pillager will lay down her life for Lipsha to prove just the opposite—that the “real” estate in the novel is not solely the sovereign land repurchased under Lyman’s custodianship, but the promise of a loving posterity among members of a community. This is not to say that Lyman’s bingo palace will fail; only that, in due course, its survival depends upon not only the community’s balance sheet at the bank, but the one in their hearts. Against Erdrich’s metaphysical retooling of the commodity fetish (which Lyman can tether to his own supply-side dream), and again different from the antideterminist and antihistorical rendering of chance-as-equilibrium all too easily co-opted by the house dealer (the historical tab you simply roll forward, and never settle, until it’s too late), there is yet another position Erdrich considers, and, in the case of Lipsha Morrissey, finally settles on. Ultimately, “Lipsha’s luck,” isn’t, really; he’s channeling absolute energies—like love—which only appear contingent insofar as he imperfectly uses them, but aren’t. Lipsha’s chances are not ultimately determined by capitalism, even as the latter does inspire many of the forms (as signs) his chances take: June’s punch card, the van, his stash of dollar-denominated IOUs readily exchanged for beef jerky and beer suds at the bingo hall. For Lipsha, luck matters. It only and always arrives to a specific and meaningful purpose, the knitting of specific and life-affirming love relationships heedless of exchange value. Accordingly, in The Bingo Palace Lipsha serves as the agent of demand, rather than supply. For him, as we recall, money is a dead thing. Lipsha, of course, is also the novel’s hapless romantic, the necessary counter-balance to Lyman’s acquisitiveness. Lipsha’s spending (healing hands and “con and fluke rich” luck [105]) imply Lyman’s getting, and together they constitute a tandem: Lyman and I have our fates intertwined, mixed up like the roots of two plants. I kept on seizing . . . that comfortable feeling we once had together, when Lyman said he remembered the day he and his brother Henry lay and dozed under the powwow trees, the pine arbor, listening to dancers pound dirt. (198)

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As relatives joined by a shared dynamic of chance, Lipsha and Lyman have different roles to play. Lyman’s embrace of supply, Lipsha’s love as demand: both characters represent the Anishinaabe commitment to a balance of contending forces.81 Always heartfelt, Lipsha’s role involves the necessary translation of luck into love, of minting bogus currency or deadening commodities into something essential and “real” underwriting the economy of Erdrich’s novel. Accordingly, Lipsha’s tendency displays Erdrich’s preference for base metals: not tricksterish signifying paper or mystical fetishes, after all, but the heavy, hold-in-your-hand weight of gold. This gold, and the loving labor that mints it in a specific ideology, displays not the logic of naturalism, but of romance.82 For Erdrich, romance serves well when critiquing the idealization of indigenous chances as vulgar equilibrium. People are not, after all, merely vessels for capitalist success and failure, their destinies rising and falling as living embodiments of the stock market. Romantic ideology militates against the volatility of capitalist excess, the “toomuch” threatening to overdetermine indigenous chances by subordinating community interest to individual desires. Lipsha declares: “If my love is worth anything, it will be larger than myself” (229). Given his contrarian and characteristic rejection of money, along with the commodities toward which Lyman gravitates, Lipsha searches for something more true: “[m]oney gets money, but little else, nothing sensible to look at or touch or feel” (221); “money doesn’t make any sense” (100). Love, on the other hand, always does. While Lyman is off scheming and accumulating, Lipsha is after Shawnee Ray to give his heart—all of it—away. Unfortunately, no one believes. The chorus at the beginning of The Bingo Palace doubts Lipsha—“We think Fleur Pillager should settle her bones in the sun with us and take a rest, instead of wasting her last words on that medicine boy” (7). No one sees what he is capable of, including Lipsha himself. He represents the blind spot of community transformation within the Ojibwe imaginary, a misfit seemingly living outside the story and waiting to be placed in its wider design about which he—especially he—remains supremely ignorant. The hapless conductor beckoning luck and chance, Lipsha’s present nothingness hangs dry and electric: We saw him [Lipsha] immediately as he entered the gym during the winter powwow. . . . [W]e had to notice that there was no place the boy could fit. He was not a tribal council honcho, not a powwow organizer,

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not a medic in the cop’s car in the parking lot, no one we would trust with our life. He was not a member of a drum group, not a singer, not a candy-bar seller. Not a little old Cree lady with a scarf tied under her chin, a thin pocketbook in her lap, and a wax cup of Coke, not one of us. He was not a fancy dancer with a mirror on his head and bobbing porcupine-hair roach, not a traditional, not a shawl girl whose parents beaded her from head to foot. He was not our grandfather, either, with the face like clean old-time chewed leather, who prayed over the microphone, head bowed. He was not even one of those gathered at the soda machines outside the doors, the ones who wouldn’t go into the warm and grassy air because of being drunk or too much in love or just bashful. He was not the Chippewa with rings pierced in her nose or the old aunt with water dripping through her fingers or the announcer with a ragged face and a drift of plumes on his indoor hat. He was none of these, only Lipsha, come home. (9–10)

Expressed as an iterative negativity, the repetition of “was not,” Lipsha here described prefigures his fate: being nothing, he demands everything. It is love that Lipsha will ignite, ultimately organizing the novel’s as-yet-dormant chances; and, over time, his latent powers will produce chain lightning. For the moment, however, he is still the amateurish apprentice of chance. Like Lyman, he must acquire his own particular set of skills. We first feel the spark of Lipsha’s power in the form of a tensile electrical current, first connecting his luck to those people he would heal with his hands, then shorting out the very instant he charges for his services: “My hands are shocked out, useless” (66). When Lipsha first makes love with Shawnee Ray, however, the current from her brushed hair restores him, is “electric to [his] touch. . . . The air goes thick. Her hair gets lighter, full of blue static, charged so that I am held in place by the attraction. A golden spark jumps on the carpet. Shawnee Ray turns toward me. Her hair floats down around her at that moment like a tent of energy” (72–73). Loving Shawnee Ray gives focus to Lipsha’s power and, having once felt her charge, he subsequently associates his luck changing as a star falling: first, after the ghost of June visits (56); again, after he consummates his passion with Shawnee Ray (74); and, yet again, as an image in Russell Kapshaw’s tattoo-shop: “Then suddenly I see the star. It is the same one that scattered my luck in the sky after my mother left me alone that night, it is the sight that came into my head as I sat in the woods. Now here it is. The star falls, shedding rays, reaching for the edge of the page” (82). As Lipsha’s love gathers, his

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lucky stars cluster, brighten, and then fall. They do not accumulate for Lipsha the way cold, hard cash will for Lyman—but like Nestor’s pipe they, too, present evidence of a parallel (indigenous) economy, and beckon a kind of wishing that measures life differently than capitalism does. Lipsha speaks aloud: “It makes no sense, but at this moment I feel rich” (83). Being these, shooting stars and electricity, Lipsha’s luck is not reducible to the money form. Indeed, once his healing hands are commodified, Lipsha shorts out their power entirely. His “luck” at bingo— contrived by the ghost of his mother, June, who has provided him with all of the winning numbers—is proven to be entirely fraudulent: [T]hrough my [bingo] winnings, my uncle has paid up on loan moneys, questionable and necessary transactions. He has made the bottom line. I was the conduit, the easy mark, my name the temporary storage. I was the pool in an indoor-plumbed wishing well. . . . [f]or my luck has turned uncertain. My luck is pollen and chaff. Sprinkled onto me by Lyman’s schemes, it was merely sucker’s fortune. (231)

Lipsha has been suckered by capitalist fortune, but he has also achieved considerable recompense as the heir (“a young one, a successor” [7]) to Fleur Pillager. Lipsha’s all-too-predictable reading of chance as love, not money, will therefore be binding on the Chippewa posterity and linked to the monumentality of continuity and being Fleur has always represented. Lipsha is the slave to dumb luck, but in his honesty, his willingness to love at any cost, he, like Lyman, also represents the indigenous future. In choosing Lipsha as the custodian of the Anishinaabe posterity, Fleur’s choice may not have been misguided. Fleur is taking a gamble on Lipsha—on the boy’s capacity for honest love and his ability, someday, to make the community value it—and, as usual, she chooses her battles carefully. We have seen Fleur gamble before, a younger woman in white, who once enlisted the aid of a windigoo to win back the alienated land titles from a corrupt former Indian agent. The windigoo appears in The Bingo Palace in the form of a vacant-eyed white boy, smartly dressed, with an insatiable appetite for sweets: “Those light eyes! That pale hair! Then the sun came out, and someone noticed, as well, that he did not cast a shadow. This, at last, answered many questions” (142). The windigoo-boy is Fleur’s ready accomplice in a long-ago historical moment requiring gambling, just as certainly as Lyman’s present

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now will require it. Crucially, the windigoo is also a striking avatar, embodied, of the capitalist juggernaut, consuming and growing, that will soon mature and surround all indigenous homelands. When it can, it will destroy indigenous and Anglo-European worlds indiscriminately; what it cannot immediately devour, it will gamble for: They saw his smile gleam, once, knew that dullness was a veil. They saw the smallness of him, the childish candy fat, the tightness of his rich-boy suit. And then, unfurling from his cuffs and wrists, they saw his hands. His wrists appeared, his palms, and then the fingers—long and pale, strong, spidery, and rough. The boy shuffled with an organist’s blur and the breath of the little crowd held. He dealt. (144)

By enlisting the aid of a trickster demon, the young Fleur plays readily with the windigoo threat. She does so willingly, buying the windigoo’s support with the soul of the Indian agent, so as to ensure her tribe’s further survival (and its land base) into the next generation. This fact doesn’t diminish our understanding, however, that the windigoo is not an honest dealer and that Fleur is engaging with a force that, just as willingly, will try to devour her and her descendants. Accordingly, for Fleur, still stately and fierce in Lipsha’s and Lyman’s time, the long walk back to the reservation to find Lipsha must seem more tiring than that previous time when she looked for, and found, the windigoo, another boy, “the fourth and [previous] time” (139) she came to town. But the journey is also iterative and familiar: She is still looking for a boy; she still must gamble to ensure her people’s posterity. And the threat of the windigoo, now institutionalized in the form of the colonial culture, is still coming to the indigenous table, hungry for indigenous spoils. By choosing Lipsha, however, Fleur clearly has placed her bets on love. It’s a gamble, to be sure, but love is the one force, quite possibly, that the windigoo cannot figure in that game of capitalist chance he so deftly controls. Lipsha, chosen at the conclusion of The Bingo Palace by Fleur and Shawnee Ray alike, believes he has lost his niche in time when, in fact, the opposite is true. He has been identified, equally, as the successor to Fleur Pillager’s past and Shawnee Ray’s future. Bracketed in time by these two strong women, Lipsha affords them a necessary present; he is the risk worth taking for them, because chances are not chances unless they supply risks. Of course, Lipsha cannot see this on his own; he gets this all wrong.

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After aiding his father’s (Jerry Nanpush’s) flight from justice, Lipsha inadvertently kidnaps an infant hostage. All three are stranded in a snowstorm. (It is the same storm, and yet somehow different, that readers will remember from Tracks.) Right on cue, June speeds up and whisks Jerry away; both of Lipsha’s parents, predictably, ditch their son, Lipsha, in the name of eternal love. But Lipsha is not alone in the car. Frostbitten and shortly fading to black, he justifies his own existence in the only terms he understands, the only terms that make sense, those of love. Wrapped in Lipsha’s coat, the baby is warm, heavy, solid: But at least I can say, as I drift, as the cold begins to take me, as I pull the baby closer to me, zipping him inside of my jacket, here is one child who was never left behind . . . at least this baby never was alone. At least he always had someone, even if it was just a no-account like me, a waste, a reservation load. (259)

Lipsha’s own survival at infancy (an improbable bout of luck having survived his own mother’s, June’s, attempt at infanticide) prefigures his untold escape (and the baby’s) from this snowy death-hold here, and fits easily within the age-old calculus of fateful convergences in Erdrich’s cosmology. Lipsha probably survives the storm, but he is now off the radar of the text, except in the memory of Shawnee Ray who keeps his kisses alive in an imagined engagement for the future that The Bingo Palace does not describe (269). Once again, here is Erdrich’s loving double-turn: through losing, Lipsha wins, and—so long as he gambles on loving—so will his people. *

*

*

To conclude, among multiple constructions of chance Erdrich chooses a “real” estate based upon love as a safer, more essential contingency. Even within a textual economy where trickster reigns, the most solid counter-claim Erdrich feels comfortable making—as against the anonymity of capitalist determinations, for example—is one expressed romantically. As the skunk in Lipsha’s vision puts it, with the both of them sitting smack dab in the center of the deeply forested land that will be clear-cut to build Lyman’s casino: “[t]his [land] ain’t real estate” (219). In The Bingo Palace, only love occupies the province of the “real.” And in this respect—as the fullest expression of indigenous being through love of another—Erdrich gambles that loving

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chances will win out, over and against the unevenly even distributions of capitalist fate disguised as equilibrium. In placing this bet, the novel becomes decidedly less tricksterish, and Erdrich’s prose dares to become embodied, more urgent, and connective. It is not Lyman’s “sex of money” that wins out in the generative sweepstakes, but the sex of love. This is Erdrich’s preferred state for the “real,” as well as Fleur’s inheritance passed to Lipsha—a romantic estate, indeed, for which one must be willing to gamble everything. Yet nor is Erdrich’s absolute commitment to the inalienable right of indigenous sovereignty, over homelands and their signs, to be signed away for a kiss. Rather, her signature on the issue involves a sleight of hand, a trickster bait and switch: The Bingo Palace swaps the exchange value of Fleur’s real property (the acreage where her bones rest is also the site of Lyman’s gaming enterprise) for the irreducible romantic estate of “real” love. Both material and intangible, loved and traded, the actual land is ideologically reseeded so as to be fruitful, to ensure the posterity of its people: Love won’t be tampered with, love won’t go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other. Throw it in the garbage and it springs up clean. Try to root it out and it only flourishes. Love is a weed, a dandelion that you poison from your heart. The taproots wait. The seeds blow off, ticklish, into a part of the yard you didn’t spray. And one day, though you worked, though you prodded out each spiky leaf, you lift your eyes and dozens of fat golden faces bob in the grass. (151)

If indigenous romance is the gold standard underwriting the circulation of trickster representations in the story, then the land, Fleur’s land, is the locus of return for all among the Chippewa who ever loved and who, in years to come, will ever love or gamble on loving. The land and the body: these two resurrected ghosts of capitalist referentiality—like the shade of June Morrissey, Lipsha’s mother, who “has put herself out royally to get here” (54); like the spectral kisses of Lipsha that to Shawnee Ray “seemed so real” and with a “matter-of-fact joy” (269)—faithfully and reliably return to their embodied and loving referents in Erdrich’s novel. Gambling, we are made to understand in Erdrich’s final reckoning, is best left to those who know how to love. And, as far as we have seen, the novel presents compelling figures of drive (Lyman) and demand (Lipsha) who, ultimately, acknowledge their complicity and, nevertheless, generate bankable returns in the

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respective universes they inhabit. By using Lyman to denominate indigenous materials in dollar terms and, in a parallel economy, using Lipsha to dispense with it romantically, Erdrich’s interest of sustaining plural sovereignties, at once indigenous and alien, becomes evident and even virtuous. To be sure, by commingling both constructions of sovereign chance, Erdrich is leveraging heavily in indigenous legacies now recast in the once foreign ideologies—capitalism and romance—of an occupying power. She is nevertheless creating art of the highest order, using trickster juxtaposition to render sacred objects profane, such as Nestor’s pipe, in the interests of revitalizing commodified traditions. And by acknowledging the degree to which emerging and plural sovereignties involve the delicate, and possibly dialectic, negotiation across differing value systems for members of contemporary indigenous communities, Erdrich dares to admit the power of fugitive Anglo-European essences in the contemporary indigenous imagining. They are fugitive, probably to be feared, because of the inroads into indigenous love and money they permit; to wit, these very same found ideologies would risk linking indigenous desires expressed formerly on their own terms to the penetration of outlying capitalist determinations. Yet in Erdrich’s universe love nevertheless remains irreducible of capitalist chance, even as it tracks it. Hence the essence of what I have called Erdrich’s gamble in her search for sustaining plural sovereignties within one literary vision. Undertaking such a gamble, Erdrich carefully secures romance as a value-based hedge that will, hopefully, insulate indigenous individuals against many, if not all, of capitalism’s pernicious side effects. She also meticulously documents the array of sustaining ideologies tracking the affects and effects of everyday indigenous life in a world that requires money and commodities to survive. These, too, are the tracks Fleur has left in the snow, and required her descendants—your money or nothing—to follow.

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Part II

Futures This [colonial] 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. Once this path has been established, it is almost a certainty that the rest of the Indian community will walk right on through the Western worldview and emerge on the other side also. —Vine Deloria, Jr.

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Chapter Four Recovering Sovereignty in Louis Owens’s Dark River It is almost impossible, and it seems quite futile, to make general statements about a country which has no center, no place by which it can be tested. —Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound’s assertion in 1913 that America has “no center” initially seems to endorse frontier as the figure best representing the ideology of American exceptionalism. An America without a center invites the displacement of culture to its margins, or beyond them in the context of imperialism, and offers the justifying pretext for Anglo-European expansionism that Frederick Jackson Turner deftly exploited in his famous essay “closing” the Western frontier.1 Yet Pound’s foundational decentering act in Patria Mia just as brusquely negates the ideological thrust of Turner’s frontier, by suggesting America has “no place” anywhere—everywhere—to test its national identity, thereby sounding an antiromantic, indeed modernist, note of futility within the otherwise triumphal clamor for Anglo-European, global hegemony. 2 From Pound’s perspective, the problem facing the young “America” was one of identity. Its resolution lay in addressing the perceived deficit of culture indigenous to the Americas, and as a consequence, cultivating the metropolitanism sufficient to justify the prosperity of Anglo-European elites. With no London, no Paris, no Rome, what engine could drive the nation’s cultural production? In response to

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this perceived deficit, Pound proposed a vigorous and homegrown movement, a proactive conservancy of humanity, inspired by debates during the U.S. presidential campaign of 1912: Whatever the American sense of property may be, there has been a watchword used in the present presidential campaign that would scarcely have been used in any country except America or France . . . “The first duty of a country is to conserve its human resources” . . . I believe that this sentence contains the future greatness of America. . . . I believe that because of this perception we shall supersede any nation that attempts to conserve first its material resources. 3

Cast in the humanist rhetoric of nationalist politics, Pound’s endorsement of America’s “future greatness” is striking; particularly peculiar, in the age of Carnegie and Rockefeller, is Pound’s privileging of human over material resources. Clearly, the dichotomy between human and material/environmental resources Pound posits is false. The use of Afro-Caribbean labor to detonate fuses during the U.S. sponsored construction of the Panama canal, a project nearing completion at the time of Pound’s writing, gives appropriate reminder of the ways in which human matériel was exhausted to coordinate the opening of frontiers nationally (and hemispherically) in the interests of American corporate capital.4 Similarly, the establishment of the nationwide federal parks system in 1916 designated lands as off-limits to development in the interest of “national” culture, but only at the expense of indigenous peoples, who already had millions of acres surveyed (ostensibly on their own behalf) only to be in turn stripped from them.5 The country’s Americanness, which Pound here constitutes with a characteristic mania, emerges only at the material cost of subordinated sovereignties. As these instances suggest, any humanist rhetoric of American exceptionalism (“we shall supersede any nation”) based on the conservation of human resources remains deeply compromised by the adherence on the part of AngloEuropeans to an acquired indigenous conservancy (also referred to as “nativism”) about material resources.6 Those who actually protect or expand a given frontier are the soldiers whose lives are expended, contra Pound’s dichotomy, as the human matériel of national (and extra national) interests. The bodies of soldiers police those boundaries of contestation between us and them, their way and our way, between ethnos and ethos. Yet as ethnics forced through conquest to participate within the ethos of “America,” indigenous soldiers uniquely demarcate, as well as embody, such a

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frontier. Louis Owens’s Dark River does not tell us why its mixedblood subject, Viet Nam veteran Jacob Nashoba, enlisted or whether he was drafted. Yet his being a working-class veteran brings new dimensions to an already complicated array of issues arising from the exercise of plural sovereignties, Anglo-European as well as indigenous, and which respective loyalties derive from each. What remains clear is that Nashoba embodies a very different frontier at the close of the “American century” that Turner and Pound inaugurated. Both Choctaw and Irish-American, Nashoba is poised to inhabit the “frontier” Owens theorized as the unique embodiment of mixedblood experience, the liminal space with the potential to conjoin indigenous and nonindigenous sovereignties: [W]hen one is looking from the “other” direction, “frontier” is a particularly apt term for [a] transcultural zone of contact . . . “frontier” carries with it such a heavy burden of colonial discourse [that] it can only be conceived of as a space of extreme contestation. Frontier, I would suggest, is the zone of trickster, a shimmering, always changing zone of multifaceted contact within which every utterance is challenged and interrogated, all referents put into question. In taking such a position, I am arguing for an appropriation and transvaluation of this deadly cliché of colonialism—for appropriation, inversion, and abrogation of authority are always trickster’s strategies. “Frontier” stands, I would further argue, in neat opposition to the concept of “territory” as territory is imagined and given form by the colonial enterprise in America.7

Yet even insofar as he rejects the injustice of colonial-era territoriality— the expansionist logic Pound and Turner institutionalized as uniquely “American”—Nashoba has assimilated its tenets and built an identity as frontier outcast on it. And if, as I have argued throughout this book, the key to indigenous forward prosperity remains the imagining of a sustained plurality of sovereign roles in a still colonized world, Nashoba begins Dark River already defeated, without the capacity or desire for change. Isolated from his own proprietary traditions, Nashoba remains trapped within “territory” as Owens describes it above, as a meaningless and null state. Nashoba is unable to affirm his sovereignty as an indigenous being apart from those colonial modes of fragmentation and division he has internalized. In Dark River, Nashoba must journey toward the articulation of plural sovereignties, informed by indigenous stories of place rather than the expropriating violences of westering, capitalist expansion. Yet so long as he remains unaware that his imagined being occupies

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the intersection of indigenous and Anglo-European sovereignties productively, Nashoba cannot liberate metaphors as, using Owens’s words, the “appropriation, inversion, and abrogation of authority.” Until he can cross this “frontier” in representation and anchor it to sovereign and sustaining Choctaw places, Nashoba will remain “no place” as Pound augured; his identity will remain colonized territory in the absence of sovereignty, which is the foremost (and most deeply embedded) anxiety inhabiting the enterprise of Anglo-European colonialism in the Americas.8 Dark River also rejects, as little more than violent, masculine fantasy, the humanist basis of American greatness, heroism, and valor that Pound proposed. In its particular attempt to “transvaluate” the Anglo-European frontier, Owens’s novel sets itself the task of refuting the legacy of American modernism as a vehicle for constructing frontier manhood. Dark River rejects the necessary sacrifice of local, in this case American Indian, cultures and subjectivities to the “test” of American identity that Pound first displaces, then reinscribes chillingly, as the function of expanding global power.9 As a narrative of masculine heroism, Dark River falters by postmodern design and is countered by an equally relentless, equally mighty reinscription of feminine values central to the novel’s Choctaw and Apache traditions. *

* *

The novel begins with Jacob Nashoba suffering self-imposed exile on an alien reservation. His very name knits the seam of seemingly discrepant sovereignties, Anglo-European and indigenous.10 A tribal game and fisheries warden, Nashoba lives among his estranged wife’s people, mostly Apache, and in its midst has hardened against his own Mississippi Choctaw stories.11 Even the surrounding beauties of the Dark River canyon, with all of its indigenous associations, are not his own. Nashoba encounters problems of fit and understanding among his ex-wife’s tribe, fiercely (and at times appropriately) guarding its own traditions from the incursions of exogamy: “Jacob Nashoba didn’t belong” (263). In such an imaginatively divided country— seemingly divided against him—Nashoba suffers doubly damning visions. Although sensitive to his immediate environment as sportsman and conservationist, the gamekeeper cannot fully embrace his surroundings in the absence of his own particular connections, fed by the waters of the Mississippi further east. He appears little more than

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an emasculated husband, disempowered within a different, matriarchal tradition. His ex-wife, Tali, has expelled him from his own home because of his demons, attributed to posttraumatic stress syndrome acquired while fighting in Viet Nam. Nashoba has become the “Lone Ranger” or “L. R.,” (17–18)—the impossible Indian, impossibly caught. He wears Clayton Moore’s mask desperately, in isolation, with only the ebbing consolations of frontier masculinity. He eats, works, and fishes alone. As a returned veteran of indigenous ancestry, Nashoba’s isolation registers on several cultural and symbolic levels. His skills at fighting incorporate the long, past history of indigenous tribes in fighting Anglo-European expansion, as well as the exigencies of the present in a white supremacist society where indigenous peoples still need to be vigilant.12 A warrior in service to the U.S. Army, Nashoba also served in the interest of that same white supremacist government abroad. This dialectic between local and global registers of Nashoba’s being— as both colonized indigenous subject at home and instrument of American colonialism abroad—results in a near pathological torque for its subject. A survivor turned survivalist, Nashoba, like Abel and Tayo before him, cannot by himself resolve the predicament Owens theorized as paradigmatic of mixedblood narrative, the “profound awareness of conflicting epistemologies.”13 Just as clear, however, is the fact that Nashoba is not fully aware of how far down the road to destruction he has traveled, or of how much he has assimilated the anomie of Pound’s “no place” that is modernist America. Perhaps not surprising in this context, Nashoba enjoys reading Hemingway because of the latter’s graceful futility. Nashoba remains spellbound by the false apotheosis Hemingway’s writing offers, that of modernist exile and violence: “His people are all fucked up, just like the rest of us, but there’s this sense . . . that nothing’s going to change and it’s not so great but basically okay” (11). Nashoba suffers from this particular sickness suffered by many veterans of foreign wars, indigenous and non-indigenous alike—the inertia, cynicism, and sense of hollowness T. S. Eliot immortalized as the unique province of the Anglo-European man. Nashoba lives up to this modernist billing: he is mentally unstable, incapable of happiness, prone to violence but still, impossibly, “basically okay.” The history of Viet Nam that Nashoba is fleeing not only maps trauma onto his present, his immediate surroundings, but also places beyond his reach otherwise sustaining memories of his Choctaw grandfather. Nashoba is dead-in-life, a sort of living shilombish (translated

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loosely from Choctaw as “soul” or “outer shadow”) who lacks the ceremonies necessary to reclaim his own stories and so achieve a durable peace. He perfectly embodies Turner’s frontier, a man closing into himself, lacking the “map of the mind” (as McNickle called it) with which to guide himself beyond the territory of failure and the betrayal of Anglo-European colonialism. And again, like Abel and Tayo before him, Nashoba remains reluctant to cross over to his remembered sovereignty, even when urged in a recurring nightmare to ford his own Dark River by Choctaw ancestors beckoning him from the opposing bank (42; 109). Yet until Nashoba endeavors to make such a crossing, until his recognition of the overarching indigenous story overcomes his own modernist urge toward dissolution, he will idle hopelessly midstream and will secure his own drowning. Nashoba’s death is an eventuality that he has been seeking for years (“he was worth killing, and he had survived again” [85]) and which the narrative declares (in terms similar to Alexie’s Indian Killer and Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney) as the defining condition of the plot’s end-game: “And how was he to know, now, that he was racing toward death along the narrow rutted road through thick pine forest?” (111). There seems little question of when Nashoba will die, but how, and under what conditions. The indigenous world screams warning in the form of spider webs and owl cries, feathered bears and coyote calls, but all Nashoba can muster in response is depression. He has not yet become adept at reading such signs, and if he could, wouldn’t fully accept them.14 His death visions only further bewilder, and convey the nagging burden of ignorance, the feeling that “[s]omething’s going on . . . I don’t know what” (39). As yet oblivious to the warnings around him, Nashoba, now beyond middle-age, is addled by recurring bouts of misplaced rage and misogynistic distemper. Evicted from the house he built for himself and his former wife, he now sleeps in a trailer the walls of which are marked by the imprints of his fist: But no one could live with him and no one could kill him, though many had tried the latter. He was the world’s enemy. “I will kill the world,” he’d said as he rolled to his side and fell into a sickened sleep in which he battled a brother he’d never had, circling in the dark and hearing the clatter of metal as his brother stalked him. In the background a train whistle sounded like the repeated cries of owls, or owls cried like a distant train. (93)

The association of the Choctaw owl-witch ishkitini with the train’s whistle links indigenous foreboding to technological, Anglo-European

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advancement. Here paired, these prophetic signs in turn motivate the struggle to reconcile apparently discrepant sovereign traditions within the same subjectivity, the stalking brother (Irish or Choctaw?) who would, in a less agonistic light, be the biblical Jacob’s angel. Nashoba’s further stated desire to kill any or all living subjects in the world— animals, humans, or the signs of humans as animals (and vice-versa) Owens calls animages—is simply his own refusal to signify anything any longer, a sickness about living, a sense of despair about the environment and future.15 Nashoba’s inarticulate response to the perils of his own modernist position, as both hollow man and patriot, dooms him to the modernist fate of the dissolved subject. In the novel, Nashoba’s predicament is similarly projected outward in the form of particular material features of the natural environment. As in Owens’s previous novels, Wolfsong, The Sharpest Sight, Bone Game, and Nightland, the mixedblood subject is so thoroughly mediated by representations of the natural environment that any threat to the latter results in a profound distortion of the former’s ability to understand, hence represent, the world to himself or others. Nashoba’s pathology arises as an early symptom of the representational and environmental dilemmas, the responses to which involve translating socalled schizophrenic texts into more life-affirming, sovereign-centered, visions.16 Clearly, the challenge that Owens places before the reader in his works is how to sustain plural sovereignties within the same mindset. Preparing the ground for such a departure, Dark River initially presents a schematic, symbolically saturated setting that at once defines and constrains its plot, giving an unsettling, circumscribed feel that capably reflects Nashoba’s psychological struggle. Occupying a wedge of country between two rivers—the Dark and the White—the reservation where Nashoba works and lives is fed by two profoundly differing tributaries, one indigenous and teeming in the Dark River canyon, the other destitute: “the White was shallow and littered from the reservation homes and small tribal capital a couple of miles upstream” (9). The overtly dichotomized terrain maps Nashoba’s predicament into discrete, as yet bifurcated, territories. The manichean mapping of the text also ultimately ends up requiring the reader to question all binary models of mimesis, such as those allowing impossibly clear-cut decisions between white and nonwhite, Indian and non-Indian, and Anglo-European and indigenous. Such zero-sum decisions betray a racialist logic and are deeply embedded, as we have seen, in the imagined landscape of Dark River. Nashoba’s predicament as an indigenous subject, willingly divided

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by the Anglo-European and modernist “self,” writes toward a larger global witchery. *

* *

Tired to the point of death, Nashoba is more than a man fatigued. He was extremely adept at taking life in Viet Nam, and he still carries this guilt as a fog blanketing his consciousness. It provokes violent fantasies, and an army-bred masculinism, formerly exploited by the military, feeds on his gentler sensibilities. Like the World War II-era veteran Domingo Perez, Nashoba must find his way beyond denial, beyond the toxic discourse he assimilated in the U.S. army, which posits a breach between his indigenous and American subjectivities. Nashoba, like Perez, must look beyond the frame of nationalism: Beside Jesus a framed color photograph hung on the sheetrock, showing Domingo carrying the American flag during a big intertribal ceremony in Gallup one year. He’d just returned from the war and was the most decorated veteran, so he got to carry the flag. His back was straight and his shoulders square as he proudly walked at the head of all the veterans. Behind his image, the stands were filled with Indians in all kinds of traditional dress, and elaborately costumed dancers lined the edges of the room, waiting to join the flag procession. The glass in the frame was cracked, the fracture running right up through the middle of Domingo’s chest and the drooping flag. A tiny spider had woven a web in an upper corner of the picture. (100)

Two sovereign traditions are aligned in the composition of this photograph. But whereas patriotism reconciles these lineages—the photo celebrates the fact that throughout the conflicts of the twentieth century, American Indians provided the U.S. military with high rates of voluntary enlistment and defense industry labor17—the image is fractured by a break in the glass and a telltale spiderweb, where Spider Woman weaves the Perez and Nashoba veteran stories into a larger story, as yet unknown. Throughout the history of colonization, North America’s indigenous soldiers have integrated plural sovereignties within a flexible but consistent pattern: their protection of traditional homelands; complex histories of British, American, and intergroup alliances based upon strategic exigencies throughout the period of Anglo-European conquest; and, after Collier’s Indian Reorganization Act, an increasing tendency to embrace Anglo-European sovereignties and duties

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as “Americans” and “Canadians.”18 However, solid statistical data addressing the enlistment and casualties of American Indian soldiers in Viet Nam are at present elusive.19 Available estimates do underscore the proportionately high numbers of indigenous soldiers serving in Viet Nam, including the correlation of military enlistment with relative advancement in life opportunities for the indigenous working class, whether living on-reserve (or reservation) or in the cities. In addition, many Viet Nam era enlistees had relatives who had served honorably in previous world wars, even under conditions where the legal standing of inductees as regards actual American citizenship was debatable. 20 In aggregate, these factors suggest that American Indians had their own compelling reasons for signing on for a tour of duty despite the lower overall status of Viet Nam veterans compared with nonveterans of the same generation. 21 That Nashoba holds a particular identification with a soldiering culture “without honor or meaning” (110–11) makes devastatingly clear the adverse impact of Viet Nam relative to the generally more positive assessments of indigenous military service in the century’s previous wars. This point is driven home when a for-hire militia headed by two of his former friends and fellow veterans invades the Dark River canyon with the collusion of the tribal chairman and without Nashoba’s knowledge. The cowboys are riding into Indian Country again, but this time, “enemy country” is sovereign indigenous land, considered wrongly, as Viet Nam had been, “out there somewhere, beyond law, and whatever somebody did out there didn’t come home with them” (106). In this particular case, an unspoken code of profit serves to blur the line between private fantasy and collective obligation, a lack of clarity that proves to be deadly in Dark River, and is seemingly sanctioned by different parties—indigenous and not—in the interests of a fast buck. The leader of the militia, Stroud, is something of a repentant populist, a man whose life Nashoba once saved. Stroud’s instincts are good, but perverted by the witchery of violence he thinks he can manipulate. In the text, acts perpetrated in the interests of ambition and profit are always juxtaposed with earlier recollections of Viet Nam: He [Stroud] knew it would take time, years, but that eventually he’d find enough like him to make it worthwhile. One day they’d come together, and they’d take down the same bunch of fat-assed rich bastards who’d killed fifty thousand boys in Nam just to get elected to a bloody path of money. Eventually he’d have an army that could gut the

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bastards. And he’d be the first to slip the tip of the knife in, but this time it wouldn’t be a little brown man who was fighting for justice but a rich sonofabitch who needed killing. Yet somewhere along the way it had all become business. (121)

Stroud, like his partner Nguyen, trades in the fraternal fantasy of military brotherhood for the oligarchy of profit, American-style; the two find community in capital. This, not revolution, is the tip of the knife they are slipping in. Nguyen, a South Viet Namese recruit during the war, has become a recently naturalized American citizen; like Stroud, he is only too glad to cash in on the trammeled aggression of pudgy, peacetime dentists. The populist ideals of both men are surrendered in favor of “funny checkered pants . . . a golf cart with little holes for drinks and the entire nine yards. . . . Nguyen’s more American than anybody else now. He’s found his place” (166). Nashoba demurs: “Nguyen’s got more hate in him than a thousand of us. That’s why he’s never gotten any older, Steve. All that hate keeps him in one time and one place” (167). Seasoned hate, infantile wish-fulfillment, or vainglorious search for meaning: the variety of psychological motives attributed to the masculine desires on which any militia depends is thoroughly canvassed, if not fully explored, in Dark River. Owens’s point seems to be that an all-male cast composed of Viet Nam vet wannabes, legitimate vets trying to trade on their abilities in a society that no longer appreciates them, and gung-ho but cocky “war hobbyists” (114) may offer emotional compensation to groups of Americanized men unable to establish meaningful connections with their own precolonial traditions and cultures. These “Americans” are men who, like Stroud when recollecting how Nashoba saved his life in Viet Nam, can only fantasize about the possibility of cultural difference in their own lives: . . . the Indian was huge, holding him to the earth. . . . And he’d often dreamed of killing the bastard who’d taken him out of the air of gods and fate. Other times he’d dream of that embrace when he lay on the hot earth and the feeling then was different. (122)

A dream positing the heroic transcendence of class, Stroud’s violent fantasy also suggests specific socioeconomic and demographic trends linking military enlistment to American working-class consciousness.22 As a soldier, Nashoba is ostensibly a member of an elite confraternity that would erase class and “race” distinctions; yet as a member of the working class, he also shoulders deeply conflicted attitudes

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about the longer-term objectives and costs of the war. Ultimately, perhaps especially, this conflicted tradition, of an American war without American Indian honor, orphans him. Nashoba, repeatedly referred to as “tough,” or “the toughest” soldier in Viet Nam is not strong (151). Unlawful and dishonorable, the presence of the militia on tribal land in Dark River is nevertheless perfectly consistent with two centuries of Anglo-European “Indian policy” in the Americas: to secure material resources through violent means (implied or real) when negotiation does not serve. Having secured “American” local spaces to capitalist penetration, privatized militias can now apply this successful model to other “Indians” globally, whatever the purported benefits to local peoples and cultures may ultimately be.23 In recollecting Viet Nam, Nashoba comes to understand that he’d killed his own: “In Nam they’d called VC-controlled areas Indian Country” (106). This linking of these two colonized peoples reshapes consideration of their status as enemies. “Viet Nam,” Nashoba discovers, “wasn’t a white man’s war at all. . . . Ironically, it was a kind of war more familiar to Indians than to anyone else” (110). Nashoba cannot (or is no longer willing to) compartmentalize the violence along the Choctaw-Viet Namese frontier—memories of two wars doubled in his imagining—or to reify them in the interests of patriotism. Owens’s Dark River need not state the critique of neoimperialism so baldly. Yet the fact remains that Jacob Nashoba’s thanatos is intimately linked in the novel to the proliferating and toxic legacy of capitalism facing indigenous peoples everywhere, stretching all the way from Arizona to Viet Nam. Equally indisputable is that, as a once loyal instrument of American policy, Owens’s protagonist rejects not only the legacy of Turner’s American “frontier,” but its newer, geopolitical avatar: the global penetration of sovereign local lands and traditions by capitalist militias in the interests of foreign (in this sense, nonindigenous) capital. As suggested by Shorty Luke—the wise-cracking trickster figure who learned Italian alongside immigrant extras playing Indians in Hollywood westerns—American culture is in the vanguard of colonizing interests. All frontiers, virtual and real, are in this sense potentially westering and expansionist. Nashoba, if not fully aware of such chilling correspondences, nevertheless rejects himself as the only man he ever indeed knew himself to be, an American soldier. 24 Ultimately, perhaps inevitably, the militia in Dark River turns on itself, creating a fast-moving plot sequence as the narrative winds down. Yet beyond its utility as plot instrument, beyond comeuppance

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for its cashiering of populism for profit, the decay of the militia betrays a deeper complicity. As man after man is killed, hierarchy and order are stripped away in the very midst of the American no-place that is “Indian country.” The devolution of the modernist militia (its literal unmanning) enables the emergence of two postmodern conditions that can transform Nashoba’s despair before his very eyes: first, the substitution of Choctaw sovereignty for individual (“self”) interest and alienation; second, the emergence of such an imagined indigenous collective in the form of shared stories shaped by trickster signification. The arrival of postmodern signifying practices on the text is signaled by two agents at the conclusion of Dark River. Nashoba’s estranged wife, Tali, uses Apache beliefs to link her husband’s story to his Choctaw history and so achieves the reknitting of formerly disjunctive sovereignties; simultaneously, the novel’s trickster figure, Shorty Luke, appears to sever indigenous consciousness from the legacy of AngloEuropean conquest, even while playfully importing key figures and signatures from the latter’s history. Only by recasting Nashoba’s modernist malaise as the shimmering effect of a ceaselessly productive and variegated trickster story can the American wasteland be reclaimed along the frontier of sovereign possibility. No longer bound by the grotesque, yet all too immediate, perils of masculinism in the absence of indigenous values, Dark River engages the power of plural sovereignties so as to restore a precarious balance to its alienated subject. *

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Mimesis, Auerbach reminds us, arises in representation through not only through the imposition of the real but the displacement of the actual.25 Owens’s Dark River takes up the challenge first to recover, then recast, sovereign traditions without proffering the ideological compensations Turner and Pound offered a century ago and which persist today: a newworld humanism giving lip service to equality while shoring up cultural disenfranchisement based upon “race” and class exclusion. Having at one time embraced global militarism in the interests of the American confraternity, Nashoba perishes by it in a final gun battle. His last, bleeding moments, shrouded by the roots of a great pine, are suffused with a many-tiered, asynchronous vision replete with significance. Nashoba’s physical body dies, to some degree the sacrifice to historical and material forces his own formerly sundered subjectivity could not accommodate except as negation: “He wasn’t really an Indian, he knew, or really anything else” (111). Nashoba’s

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death vision rises above such a hallowed and hollowing logic, however, by enjoining newer models of representation. In response to the predations of the modernist militia, a narrative emerges in Dark River that takes into account both material (sovereigntist) and constructivist (or “hybridist”) registers of sovereign power and belief. The final sections of the novel seek to indigenize the “frontier” first constituted by Turner (and later by Pound) as that inward “territory” bounding indigenous possibility. The concluding passages also offer a compelling, even triumphant, assertion that plural sovereignties will continue to push toward the boundary where otherwise disparate indigenous traditions cross, rather than culminate. Yet before Jacob Nashoba’s story can be retold, the fatalistic (yet aggressive) legacy of Anglo-European modernism must be stripped away. Choctaw bonepickers must pull this alien skin from his bones, and the bones themselves must bake in the heat of hashtahli, the SunFather: “The heat struck him again, and his body was probed and bent, changed, pulled and pinched” (214). Nashoba’s Anglo-European manhood must fail, and fail irrevocably, as the embodiment of Hemingway’s defeatist hero if we are ever to imagine him differently as a postmodern, postmasculinist indigenous subject. (In this respect, Nashoba does fail: he dies without honor, having been shot in the back, and unable to protect his granddaughter, Alison, from the militia.) Moreover, in making the attempt to move beyond the wasteland of a flawed masculinity, away from the mandated violence of “Indian Country” in the collective Anglo-European consciousness, Nashoba is forced to discount the psychological compensations of his own isolation. He must come to acknowledge, in death as he could not in life, that he needs help from his own particular indigenous history—past, present, and future. To argue otherwise would be to risk the abandonment of Nashoba’s spirit (shilombish) by his Choctaw community, as well as the betrayal of his bones to the eater of souls (216). In the midst of his own people, however, Nashoba’s shilombish might rest, alongside his physical remains held in trust by careful custodians, the Bonepickers. But Nashoba does not yet know how to ask for help from his people or even how to find them; presently dying in Apache country, he is too far from home. Resolving Nashoba’s spatiotemporal “dead-end” is arguably Dark River’s most radical undertaking. Bridging the gulf in time and space between Nashoba and his own tribal stories—getting his shilombish across the Mississippi as he lays bleeding in Arizona—reflects the postmodern exigencies expanding the geographies of contemporary

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indigenous narrative and at heretofore unfathomable speeds. The novel temporarily joins together disparate Choctaw (chahtla), Apache, and Navajo (diné) traditions to ensure Nashoba’s continuing journey to the east as Choctaw teachings require. In so doing, the text avoids effacing the particularities of these specific, and importantly discrete, traditions. Only by rejecting the assimilationist vision of Pound’s “America,” which exhausts its local peoples, environments, and cultures in the interests of a false vision—the freedom from material wants—can Nashoba take off the Lone Ranger’s mask. Yet by removing it, Nashoba does not discover his “real” identity underneath, the image of the Anglo-European “Indian” conditioned by centuries of violence and fatalism, but another shimmering surface: the indigenous immanence suggesting not essence but what Owens refers to as “cross-blood” heteroglossia. 26 Nashoba and all but one of the militiamen in Dark River die, casualties of the hate and violence they dared to unleash on the world. Importantly, however, the ringleader of the militia and embodiment of evil, Jensen, is not destroyed. The monster of indigenous stories reborn in fatigues—in Choctaw culture, he is called na-lusa-chito, a beast who feeds on solitary hunters—Jensen is an interesting amalgam of the albino and the German tank in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. He is a metallic humanoid, the clanging pursuer of Nashoba’s earlier nightmares, who represents the chilling and flexible combination of technology and militarism in the interests of evil (215; 257). A willed ignorance of his own sovereign tradition costs Jacob Nashoba his life at Jensen’s hand. Just as important, however, Dark River does not entertain the mistake Abel made: the false apotheosis of revenge, the temporary indulgence in retribution that begets rather than silences evil. 27 Shorty Luke, the Monster-Slayer given power by his mother, Changing Woman, in traditional Apache and diné teachings, kills Jensen initially, but then rescripts the ending so as to merely capture him (282–84). Shorty’s mockery of Jensen (including his chastisement by Nashoba’s grand-daughter, Alison, and a visionquesting French tourist, Sandrine Le Bris) signify the commitment of Dark River to the acknowledgment and avoidance of evil, as well as to the centrality of women in Choctaw and Apache/Navajo traditions who protect men against its power. The recentering of the feminine in Dark River is necessary to the indigenous vision of the redemption of the world, a task that Nashoba’s masculinity, like that of the violence it engenders, is illequipped to undertake. A crucial plot element in Dark River is the

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fact that all of the women (Tali, Mrs. Edwards, Sandrine, and Alison) not only survive the predations of the modernist militia but are each and collectively responsible for its downfall. With the power of Bear aiding her vision (129), Alison has powerful medicine to assist her. Alison will not need rescuing, as Nashoba wrongly supposes; rather, she is instrumental in bringing him into Dark River canyon from which locale, rich in indigenous significance, the story of his spiritual rebirth can begin. 28 Alison sets the plot of Nashoba’s end-game in motion, but it is his ex-wife, Tali, who will ensure his safe passage through it. Her unsolicited act of love at the conclusion of Dark River ensures her husband’s recovery in the indigenous imagination, as well as the return of his shilombish to his own people, the Choctaw, on their journey east. At the moment of his passage from life into death, Nashoba feels the heat of the sun, and he senses Tali’s presence (198–99). Far from being the emasculating witch of an alien, Apache tradition—no less matriarchal, it must be added, than that of Nashoba’s own Choctaw forebears—Tali undertakes the completion of Nashoba’s story using the power conferred on her by an awareness of her own place in the Apache cosmology. From her own place and position, respected by her people, Tali glimpses her husband’s fragility in isolation from his own sovereign traditions: She saw Jacob as she never had before. His strength was an illusion. Her husband, she understood now, was the most fragile, defenseless person she’d ever known. Like his displaced ancestors, he had gone wherever forces moved him, unconscious and connected to nothing. . . . He hadn’t grown up with this river, didn’t know the stories, didn’t understand how to live with what the river meant. He had been vulnerable to everything. (263)

Tali’s understanding of Nashoba’s vulnerability results, among other things, in her having woven him a belt in four sacred colors, an Apache talisman that he wears down into Dark River canyon (270). Her craftsmanship as a weaver links Tali directly to the agency of Spider Woman, who traditionally aids the lost and forgotten by weaving their stories into the broader pattern of elemental forces. The unpacking of Tali’s agency is complex and necessary to the understanding of the novel’s conclusion. Like all indigenous actors, Tali is merely effecting Spider Woman’s prophecy concerning Nashoba’s life and death: initially Jacob is conducted into the hooghan (the place “home”) of Spider Woman herself, a pleasant and healing

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place, ringing with the laughter of pubescent young women dressed in the four sacred colors of Tali’s sash and the belt she has given him (235; 254). The presence of the young women also suggests Changing Woman, the figure most associated with fertility, the natural order of the universe, rebirth, and renewal. Spider Woman’s hooghan gives form to Changing Woman’s elemental harmony; the presence of both women together suggests the smoothing out of narrative and reordering of chaos in terms of the diné bikéyah, the four mountains bounding the spiritual geography of the Apache and Navajo worlds and which support the vault of the sky. Yet these are Apache traditions, not Nashoba’s own, and he leaves the Apache hooghan without the protection of specific gifts that Changing Woman had given her twin sons, Monster Slayer and Son Born for Water, to protect them: “She should have given him turquoise and a white shell bead, you know, and he should have gone over the four mountains” (255). Tali must usher Nashoba further along the path of Spider Woman’s design by opening this Apache portal onto Nashoba’s proper indigenous imaginary, onto the Choctaw world. In a significant conjunction, the name Tali is also the suffix of the Choctaw Sun-Father, hashtahli, the supreme guide of the Choctaw and Chickasaw peoples after they emerged from nanih waiya (the Great Mound). In the Choctaw language, -tahli also can mean “the completing of an action.” It is this recognition of Tali’s power, linking both Apache and Choctaw signifiers, that allows the reader to recognize her ability as the shape-shifting agent of both Spider Woman and Changing Woman, and to dismiss Nashoba’s earlier misogyny as destructive and meaningless. 29 Guided by the Apache shaman, Mrs. Edwards, Tali searches for (and eventually finds) her husband’s vision and joins it to her own. Wearing “white shell beads hung around her neck, and turquoise dangled from each ear” (271), Tali’s vision confers the protections necessary to secure her husband’s safe passage through death in Apache country to the more familiar spirit, his Choctaw grandfather, awaiting him on the other side of the Mississippi: “Welcome back, grandson. Halito. It’s been a long time” (271). Tali’s intervention redescribes the modernist linearity of Nashoba’s life—his urges toward a self-destructive and sacrificial heroism—as an arc, the cyclical return to community of all indigenous culture heroes. 30 As an indigenous story written in English, moreover, Dark River can only recast Nashoba’s redemption in terms of the narrative conditions imposed by Western signifying practices.31 Spider Woman spins the tale, and Tali ensures the safe passage of Nashoba’s shilombish to

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the Mississippi, but the Apache trickster, Shorty Luke, must finish it (256). Shorty ensures the story’s reenactment using trickster signifying practices within and beyond the mistranslations and “pleasurable misreadings” embedded in the text. 32 Nashoba’s unwillingness to embrace his Choctaw history provides Shorty with more than enough trickster material to mock, in an overdramatic fashion, the novel’s attempts at closure: The earth had opened up, and two enormous mandibles framed by spider legs reached out and seized Jake. In a moment he was gone, dragged into a hole that closed at once. “My idea,” Shorty said. (284)

Trickster mockery of conventional narrative form avoids compelling resolutions and pat compensations for the back-end reader. Trickster defeats the imposed unity of the text by liberating it from the diktat imposed by an Anglo-European narrative telos: that the end of the tale, however altruistic, justifies the means, however violent. Neither altruistic nor cynical, the restaging of Nashoba’s death is undertaken by Shorty Luke, who must “finish” the story, thereby highlighting the provisionality of any conclusion (279). In the Apache tradition, Shorty is the Monster Slayer, the surviving twin (among several pairings in Owens’s text) who lives to ensure the survival of the global story connecting all present and possible plots (257; 271). Naturally, trickster gets just about every story wrong; but in so doing, he also hits upon just about every truth in the process. Trickster’s coverage of the panoply of indigenous experience is total. Musing about John Ford’s The Searchers, Shorty Luke rescripts the fate of Jensen, as mentioned earlier, ensuring capture rather than revenge. He introduces creative energies anew to Dark River’s now horribly depopulated plot, highlighting the vagaries and pitfalls (here rendered virtuous) of translating sovereign traditions into print, as well as across genre and media. 33 Shorty Luke’s restaged trickery offers a particular and precious indigenous commodity: not Two-Bears’ get-rich-quick schemes (the tribal chairman had secured a “college deferment” and so avoided going to Viet Nam [61]) but bankable, trickster currency at the root of all critiques of linear narrative and commodity realism. 34 Ever the stealer of stories, Shorty Luke reshoots and crosscuts multiple concluding scenarios of Dark River, achieving an extremely effective, slapstick effect of trickster montage (270–77). There is no culmination, no one ending.

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Nashoba’s death, neither exclusively comic nor modernist, manages to fit the hollow man precisely to his proper convexity—the Choctaw awareness he sorely missed. Shorty Luke proceeds to dice up any prospect for narrative closure, to “cut and re-take stuff” (280), distributing Nashoba’s story as he must for collective consumption, for all time. In this sense, Nashoba’s death vision does not conclude anything; rather, it informs the potential of all other, subsequent stories. Jacob Nashoba’s story is woven into Spider Woman’s web, its all-encompassing warp and woof, and spliced into all other narratives, thereby ensuring its survival. Clearly, Nashoba’s creed is no longer terminal, no longer that of the survivalist trapped in a meaningless world. His story will survive with “no gaps and nothing is forgotten” (256). It is at this moment that we realize that Nashoba’s death vision is anything but: it is his vision of life, his ultimate crafting of plural sovereignties more meaningful than his “divided” subjectivity heretofore allowed. And, but for the instances of a gentle “Do you know, Shorty” (52) nested early in the narrative, the reader might never grasp the delicacy of the cyclical reemergence that is Nashoba’s fate. Shorty Luke, like all tricksters, gets to finish the story, but it is Nashoba, now whole and complete in the indigenous imagining, who has been telling it to us from its very beginning, here situated at Dark River’s end (256). Jacob Nashoba, we now know, has arrived safely at the destination of his journey, including the securing of his rebirth as a Choctaw in the sovereign story. *

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In its final analysis, Dark River ably documents the concessions made to survival in an increasingly complex and changing world where all of the characters, all of the roles—Anglo-European, Indian, Native, mixedblood, fullblood—are complicit. The universe of Dark River is one where, in a cosmological register, everyone is implicated: Nashoba, the militia, the tribal chairman who receives kickbacks for letting the militias trespass on indigenous land, and even the well-intentioned youth who suffers from the cynicism that has been the only tool of survival given to him. At one point in the novel, Nashoba states: “You know, I read where the Choctaws, Jews, and Quakers were the only ones to send money from America to Ireland during the potato famine they had” (58). By referencing this particular historical fact, we recognize that Owens’s story strives to articulate the heretofore impossible: the crux where nonsovereign outsiders can make insider contributions

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to those who need it, where the material “real” as well as the constructivist imagination, may conspire together in representations of plural sovereignties. There is no opting out of such a story, however; there is nowhere beyond the collective predicament. Inclusive without being universal, Owens’s concluding vision of a recovered sovereignty at the conclusion of Dark River is a courageous one. Using the tools of poststructuralism in an era of skeptical hermeneutics, Dark River dares to affirm a precious, fragile community within an expanding, not expansionist, indigenous consciousness. A century on, Dark River tests the principles underlying the humanism of Pound’s America, the modern America that from its founding moments dared to excise indigenous histories and material cultures from its definition of the nation, and America fails. The mixedblood outsider, now indigenous insider, leaves America behind in favor of a more sustaining vision: “it is said that Jacob Nashoba went home” (286). Yet it is perhaps not solely sufficient for Dark River to content itself with deconstructing the racialist logic informing Anglo-European presumptions along the indigenous “frontier.” The novel also negotiates complex crossings between multiple indigenous histories and sovereignties without rendering these latter formulaic or needlessly antagonistic. Eschewing “Indianness” at the same time as it specifies those discourses of power that may bring different indigenous and sovereign histories into dialogue, Dark River offers its own processes as evidence of an ambitious program: the future of the indigenous sign. Pound, as we have seen, trades the cross-cut materialities of American cultures, “identities,” and histories (whether ecological, environmental, or historical) for their ideological reification as an enlightenment ideal: “America.” Dark River recounts the cost to the once sovereign subject of this denatured “America,” as engendering a necessary division between American “man”—including the violence of men—and his or her environment and once sovereign community. By contrast, Nashoba’s eventual recovery of indigenous sovereignty acknowledges the necessity of retaining an intimate connection with alternative, indigenous constructions of being and place beyond the nationalist frontier. Neither irreversible nor inevitable, the legacy of American colonialism at home and abroad—juxtaposed here in form of the devastating impacts of modernist masculinism on the indigenous subject—is part of the historical record and requires urgent revision, a warning Owens’s text unequivocally sounds. Yet if Dark River offers a seemingly grim tale about an indigenous soldier sold out by America, it also presents the “frontier” of plural sovereignties as providing a

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solid basis for the recovery of traditions influenced by, yet not subsumed within, Pound’s toxic discourse.35 Finally, Nashoba’s recovery of plural sovereignties enlivens, rather than makes incursions upon, the environmental substrate of the natural world. It is nature that offers Nashoba a coda, which extends to him one stray strand of Spider Woman’s story and reintroduces it into her wider design. Dark River dares to place the indigenous reckoning of the environment beyond the neoromantic sublime: “nature” as the false promise of escape from modernity, rather than central to it. Nor does the novel downplay, in the interests of postmodern solipsism or a meaningless word game, intertwined, environmental predicaments facing habitats, species, and sovereigns everywhere. Registering environmental conditions while remaining immune to the temptation to gloom and doom—those ever-ready signifiers of indigenous cultures’ foretold destruction—Owens’s novel squarely addresses the challenge facing contemporary ecocriticism, the “constructive engagement with poststructuralist thinking and ensuing strands of literary and cultural theory.”36 In its decisive turning away from the manifest modernism that is the destiny of Anglo-European colonialism in the Americas, Louis Owens’s Dark River stands as a monument to triumphal return— constructivist metaphor grounded in the substance and customs of a persisting and material world, the suture between the land and its sovereigns reknit as redemption. These are the coordinates of the “someplace” that is the new indigenous millennium, the lands that continue to belong to the memories and lives of indigenous North Americans.

Chapter Five Indigenous Wormholes: Reading Plural Sovereignties in Works by Thomas King I guess I’m supposed to say that I believe in the line that exists between the U.S. and Canada, but for me it’s an imaginary line. It’s a line from somebody else’s imagination; it’s not my imagination. It divided people like the Mohawk into Canadian Mohawks and U.S. Mohawks. They’re the same people. It divided the Blackfoot who live in Browning from the Blackfoot who live at Standoff, for example. So the line is a political line, that border line. It wasn’t there before the Europeans came. —Thomas King

In this chapter, I analyze two of Thomas King’s novels, Medicine River and Truth & Bright Water as offering different—yet equally critical— responses to nationalist modes of representation. Effacing complex cultural geographies of indigenous life in the interests of assimilation, Anglo-European nationalism has required the attribution of a given literary “identity” to otherwise very diverse Native and tribal communities straddling a multiplicity of sovereignties, languages, and subjectivities. Both novels, alongside King’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Massey Lectures, The Truth about Stories, consistently reject these bounding discourses and offer the everyday reality of plural sovereignties as the cogent indigenous rebuttal to them. In Medicine River, King criticizes the Anglo-European tradition of literary realism that Edward Sheriff Curtis reimagined using a thennew technology, photography, to capture “Indian” subjectivities as anachronistic artifacts of an irretrievable past. In Truth & Bright

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Water, King moves beyond the critique of photorealism to offer a new vision of readership. Anglo-European readers of King’s texts struggle to decipher meaning in the absence of locally situated knowledge but, precisely because they are located “outside” the sovereign domain, engage in the practice of what I call collateral reading, where static and pastoralizing representations of indigenous being may be enlivened.1 In Truth & Bright Water, collateral reading accumulates specific meanings and layers relationally—giving cohesion to a universalist ethics King calls “all my relations”2 —without sacrificing the local commitment to a particular sovereignty that may be aligned, when it does not precisely converge, with specific literary-nationalist interests. Throughout his career, King has consistently opposed as problematic those ideological burdens placed on indigenous North Americans by a centric nationalism. He has done so by questioning the exclusivity of “national” representations as foreshortened, and by linking these nationalist imaginings, in turn, to other effective restrictions— usually legal and political—placed by Anglo-Europeans on indigenous persons and homelands. Rather, to survive as “differently” national, American Indians and Native Canadians are subjects of plural sovereignties, even as they strive to sustain their own local traditions and are forced to respond to the ongoing engagement between radically different indigenous and “national” worldviews. King, a Greek-Cherokee mixedblood with strong ties to indigenous peoples throughout Canada, has publicly asserted the indigenous right to live a plurality of sovereignties: Unlike most other ethnic groups, [Native Canadians and tribal Americans] have two identities, a cultural identity and a legal identity, and the argument that I want to make is that we should be able to take both of them with us wherever we go, whatever we do, and with whomever we do it.3

While acknowledging the fact of European colonization of North America, King has sought to revitalize contemporary indigenous sovereignties by reconceptualizing representations of nationalism and keying these latter to the lived fact of multiple citizenships for indigenous peoples, regardless of legislative attempts, such as the Canadian C-31 Amendment (1985) and the U.S. Indian Arts and Crafts Act (1990). These, in King’s words, arrogantly declare the prerogative right of nationalist inheritance: “Whom will we allow to be an Indian?”4 However well-meaning, such nationalist legislation draws

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artificial lines through indigenous homelands, divides communities, and brings King back to his representative concern as a writer: imagining representations in a shared language, English, for indigenous readers and Anglo-European communities to embrace equally. *

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In his fiction, King writes about indigenous cultures in the language he knows best: North American English, in its many varieties, spoken and heard. King has called Canada home for a generation or more, so the concerns of place he represents usually (but not exclusively) occur in a Canadian context, whether urban or reserve. As far as I know, King was born and raised in the United States, however, so I might also add that his purview, like his writing, is principally North American in scope. As against an exclusively sovereign outlook, therefore, King’s own position, as both American-born Cherokee and nationalized Canadian Native, has always been one of crossing boundaries, and it is probably most accurate to suggest that he does not write solely “about” Canadian Native culture, as if the latter were hermetically sealed in a nationalizing discourse. He writes about how indigenous North Americans feel “Canadian” and, in different stories (or sometimes the same story) how indigenous North Americans feel—much like King must himself feel—having family relations on both, or all, sides of a given boundary in nationalist discourse: being “Canadian,” “American,” and Blackfoot (or Mohawk or Ottawa or Ojibwe or Coastal Salish) all at once. It is pretty hard to place anyone “inside” or “outside” such a nation, when you have a foot on either side of the enjambed indigenous line; it is technically impossible to posit my ethos to your ethnos from multiple positions on all sides of a given nationalist boundary. King’s “boundaries,” like his characters’ sovereignties, always occupy overlapping sites of nationality. This makes his style at once multidimensional and transgressive, even when a given interlocutor seems to be speaking only at one given moment in time and space. 5 In fact, King’s characters are often speaking, living, and feeling several histories and presences simultaneously. At its best, King’s work necessarily addresses the legacy of English language as a colonial instrument—as in Armstrong’s work, an originally foreign inheritance now enjoyed by indigenous communities as fluency. King’s work does not reject the legacy of English, weighing the language’s immensity and volume (as collaborator and witness to colonialism), against contemporary reimaginings of precontact

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traditions that, as in King’s work, can use English as a vehicle to reassert the viability of the indigenous present and future. Despite the expanding “empire” of English and its literary formation in white North America, therefore, King views it as a juggernaut whose institutional course can be corrected so as to better safeguard indigenous oral traditions, in original languages as well as in English. In itself, English writing is not an enemy of indigenous traditions, but rather the accomplice to two concurrent phenomena attending its rise: the neglect of otherwise vital and sustaining oral traditions (alongside long-established, indigenous written traditions) and the smug assertions of the “primitivism” of indigenous orality proper.6 Following a literary trajectory established by N. Scott Momaday, and continued in the work and scholarship of Craig Womack, King’s work aggressively dogs both of these mistaken assumptions. He privileges orality and writing equally, as parties to one representative act—printed words speaking—and his typeset words invariably invoke speakers. His words are not merely vacuous, Cartesian signs of geographical or topographical spaces, but activities that suppose a plurality of indigenous experiences and traditions in a social context of multiple identifications. Beyond the commonplace, King’s “words speaking pictures” require, for me, a kind of pictorial gerund transforming the act of writing otherwise reduced to a scriptural operation. His writing perhaps best exemplifies the representation of what I have been calling plural sovereignties throughout this book. *

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King’s mastery of plural sovereignties lies in the consistency of his argument about the contiguity, in the English language, of even profoundly different worldviews. He is evenhanded when representing Anglo-European and Native representations, but he does not reduce indigenous literature to any one definition (“we do not [have one]”) or indigenous sovereignty to any one absolute blood quantum or “identity” (“there is not [one]”). Even King’s provisional “definition” of “Native literature [as] literature produced by Natives” only suffices “providing we resist the temptation of trying to define a Native.”7 Nor is King’s via negativa, his anti-identitarianism, passively constructivist. He chooses not to sacrifice entire histories of indigenous struggle and resistance to the signifier of “Indianness,” that irresponsible conflation of “Indian” identity with indigenous history as it is popularly imagined (tragically, agonistic, inevitably). Rather,

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he stands firm on the duplicity of that very sign and moment when indigenous characters, themselves in character, play “Indian” (comically, forcefully, presently) either to themselves or to somebody else. The main difference being, of course, that the unwary reader is called upon to recognize in these moments, as with Will in Medicine River or Monroe Swimmer in Truth & Bright Water, that his characters are simply playing plural sovereignties off against one another. All too often, we do not recognize that they are doing so, or we simplistically assume that these alternating modes in discourse cancel each other out in the indigenous imagination (Sherman Alexie’s pathology in Indian Killer comes to mind), rather than emerging, in aggregate, as a powerful critique of the unity of the Anglo-European national subject. Similarly, King’s decentering of nationality is not merely relativist. Instead, writing against ethnic absolutes imposed from outside indigenous communities and all too often parroted by powerful elites within them, King is unabashedly essentialist about indigenous values and beliefs. His trickster narrator (usually, but not exclusively, Coyote) operates within a given indigenous value framework, Blackfoot or Cherokee or Mohawk, that even (or especially) non-Natives should be called upon to recognize as, if not “Indian,” then not Anglo-European either. By his own description, King suggests that the best indigenous (in this case, Canadian Native) work stands for “timelessness”: [A] timeless quality that speaks to some of the essential relationships that exist in traditional cultures—the relationship between humans and the animals, the relationship between humans and the land, and the relationship between reality and imagination.8

King rejects dichotomies categorically, and in this passage he collapses several by incorporating the space “between” them. His approach, most probably, is that of a strategic essentialist who has had the courage to stand by a version of truth he calls: “All my relations” . . . the web of kinship extending to the animals, to the birds, to the fish, to the plants, to all the animate and inanimate forms that can be seen or imagined. More than that, “all my relations” is an encouragement for us to accept the responsibilities we have within this universal family.9

I say the position is courageous, because King uses universalizing terms at once alien to indigenous consciousness and disparaged by post-structuralist theories—such as “essence,” “human,” and “universal”—and in

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full view of abuses committed on indigenous communities throughout the colonial era in their name. For some, such a position is too generous; it concedes too much to the conqueror’s discourse.10 Yet it is precisely King’s familiarity with the Western literary historiography written about Indians that makes his criticisms of Anglo-European representations of indigenous life and being, particularly nineteenth-century realism, at once seamless, comic, and devastating. *

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“You still got some film in your camera, Will? I want to get a picture of us standing over Custer’s grave. . . . I’ll bet Custer wasn’t even close at half-time.” . . . Harlen laughed and slapped his legs. “Hell, Will, Crazy Horse slam-dunked that bastard. Whooeeee, slam-dunk.” “Timeout,” I shouted. “That’s what Custer was yelling when all those Indians came riding out of the hills.” “Time out,” shouted Harlen. We missed the turnoff. —Thomas King, Medicine River11

At rest on the “broad back of the prairies,” Medicine River is a town Thomas King writes about in his novel with the same title (1). This town, King continues, is “an unpretentious community of buildings banked low against the weather that slid off the eastern face of the [Canadian] Rockies” (1). Like High River, Alberta, or maybe Medicine Hat, Alberta (further east), the text called Medicine River invokes historical correspondences without wanting to be reduced to them. The novel moves as a metaphor between Indian or Native history and its representation, and everywhere it raises the issue of the negotiation and relation between the two. As a metaphor on Native experience, the title of the novel also suggests early the overall representational project of the text. In the creative gap established between official History (with a capital ‘H’) of Indian or Native experience, and an individual’s personal experience of it, there is an indigenous photographer furiously reinventing memories on silver nitrate plates and, ultimately, wondering which side of the camera he is on. The narrator of the novel, Will, doesn’t wonder long; he discovers that the representation of the town Medicine River mandates his presence on both sides of the lens as well as on both

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sides of the discourse the lens creates: subject and object, white father and Native mother, status and nonstatus, urban and reserve, Native and Canadian. The story begins with Will recounting his first glimpse at photos in an old box inherited from his mother, a Blackfoot woman who has lived and only recently died in this town that abuts the Blackfoot reserve somewhere in southwestern Alberta. These “photographs in the chest” (4) offer stories to the narrator throughout the novel. After locating pictures of his mother, Rose Horse-Capture, Will finds “one of an old man with braids sitting in a straight-backed chair on the edge of a coulee,” (4) a man Will learns is his maternal grandfather. Will’s process of unearthing each photo’s meaning, the stories that each brings into personal context, serves to accumulate the shared history of the town and reserve, the network of community relationships, and the role of Will’s witness for the novel’s readers. This gradual elaboration of meaning, of family and history, accretes in King’s text associatively through a proliferation of shared images. This association of what King refers to as “all my relations,” rather than an express definition of what Medicine River “is,” or what its people “are” in photographed form, takes pictures of indigenous persons out of museums, off the tops of coffee tables, and puts them back into the hands of the communities that give them meaning.12 As texts of relation, the pictures Will “discovers,” much like those that he will subsequently shoot, offer King’s critique of photographic realism in the text. “Photographic realism” may be considered the alliance of photographic technologies with literary genres of American realism (including romanticism).13 With origins in nineteenth-century representations of “the noble savage,” this alliance of discourse and technology persists in representing indigenous sovereignties as artifacts of their own inevitable disappearance, the history of AngloEuropean genocide conveniently cropped out. Photographic realism on the so-called frontier, in Native country, establishes fundamental rules of representation, rules that typically, until the last generation or so, excluded the historical “real” as distinctly (and often violently) different. The literary mode of American realism—from tragic romance to dismissive definitions of what indigenous sovereignties are “really” like—has been nothing less than the discursive strongman of AngloEuropean colonization. The indigenous revitalization of the photographic image undertaken by Medicine River transgresses the lineage of photo colonialism associated with camera technologies that began in the nineteenth

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century on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel. Photographic technologies were instrumental in the military conquest of indigenous communities (including the hunting down of Indian and Native fugitives), indispensable to the so-called Great (American) Surveys prior to allotment of indigenous lands, and concurrent with attacks on indigenous cultures once military conquest was achieved. Warriors in service to colonialist discourses of conquest, assimilation, and termination, Frank Hamilton Cushing, N. A. Forsyth, Alexander Gardner, Louis Herman Heller, William Henry Jackson, James Mooney and, after 1895, Edward Sheriff Curtis—among many others—participated in “ethnological” projects the ostensible imperatives of which dovetailed with the new Anglo-European attempts to discipline—so as to nationalize—the autonomy of sovereign indigenous signs. (One of Forsyth’s pictures, in fact, serves as the cover image of this book.) While the Anglo-Canadian history of colonization brings important differences to the American version of genocide, photo colonialism offered a necessary and lucrative support to the popular invention of the West in both nations; the alliance between visual media and popular culture was early established as necessary to the political and cultural agenda of white supremacy on both sides of the Medicine Line. Yet Medicine River does not preoccupy itself solely with disabusing readers of the innocence of photography as a tool attending colonialism, nor limit itself to applauding the notion of First Nations photographers (“Medicine River Photography” [100]) setting up their own shop (although both points are important). A merely ironic inversion, as suggested by the notion of an “Indian photographer,” cannot alone account for the text’s power. Indeed, it becomes clear that King’s text challenges the mode of irony as itself an insufficient literary response to the complex dimensionality of indigenous representation. For instance, that Indians and Natives believe ghosts return from the dead in pictures is a persistently racist truism that, in ironic terms, haunts Indian encounters with technologies, reducing them to the status of victim rather than agent. King’s text may be read as a lengthy rebuttal of this position, held by the nameless Anglo-Canadian character in the novel, suggesting to Will that it is “Kind of ironic, isn’t it? I mean, being a photographer. . . . You know . . . the way Indians feel about photographs” (229). Rather than validating irony as a legitimate form of indigenous critique, Medicine River rises above irony by offering a compelling rewrite of realist photography. The novel presents a self-reflexive

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text—words as pictures—about what pictures can and cannot achieve as frames around, or borders onto, indigenous discourses. Amidst “all my relations,” Medicine River reinserts indigenous relationality into photographs, puts back stories that were excised and which, in the absence of meaningful historical relationships, run the risk of becoming confused with the pictures themselves. *

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The realist, often romantic, discourses invoked by Edward Curtis’s coffee table portraits explode in the materiality of the present of Medicine River where the adult Will, after sufficient cajoling by Harlen Bigbear, establishes the town’s only Native-owned photography studio. Despite Will’s protests at the idea, the fulfillment of which entails his returning to his mother’s home on the reserve and giving up his work and life in Toronto, Harlen is persistent: “No Indian photographers [in town], Will. Real embarrassing for us to have to go to a white for something intimate like a picture. Bertha says you got a lot of relatives on the reserve. You think they’d go to a stranger for their photography needs when they can go to family?” (94–95) At the beginning of the story, Will’s witness—via the lens—seems merely documentary. Apparently Harlen Bigbear, the likable and dogged champion of community planning, as well as unflagging enemy of entropy within the narrative, gets most of the credit for keeping relationships together in Medicine River. Yet Will too has an important function in town. In a tidy division of labor, Harlen orchestrates much of the narrative and—at weddings, funerals, and impromptu photo shoots—Will records it. Moreover, by means of a stylistic device in the text that crosscuts Will’s childhood memories of 1950s-era termination policies in Canada with contemporary events in town, Will directs the gaze of his audience away from linear narrative while still framing important associations that link present to past. For example, the mysterious suicide of Jake Pretty Weasel, a wife beater in town (43), emerges in a diptych alongside Will’s childhood memories of another eccentric neighbor, Mrs. Oswald, whose misplaced faith in ideals of Canadian liberalism suffer underneath her own husband’s blows (48). Will, like Harlen, “keeps track” of community events, and both are “somehow reassuring” at the community events each attend (47). Nevertheless, Will’s role as cultural historian, we discover by story’s

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end, necessitates breaking down the enlightenment perspective and objectivity of such a historical remove, necessitating Will’s participation within the frame of community histories he previously merely documented. To this end, King’s project in Medicine River moves beyond the photographic frame of reference associated with Will’s witness to contest the ontology—the self-referential realism—of the photographic text. Indeed, King’s text reminds us early and often that photographic realism—and the prophetic verisimilitude it seems to offer—only exists through an artful and potentially duplicitous (re)arrangement of any photo’s historical contents. Yet even before photos emerge in the story as text-objects presently bearing the burden of an absent history, the issue of representation writ large, of how meaning is made graphically, cues the community work Will subsequently undertakes in the darkroom. Will’s brother James, an accomplished artist at an early age, possesses the artistic talent in the family: “My lines were stiff and crude. James tried to help me, but I just couldn’t see what he saw” (12–13). James makes beautiful pictures that the neighbor kid, Henry, defaces (17). James isn’t rattled at all. He says, “I can make them as big as I want . . . And I can draw eagles over and over again” (16). The two brothers acquire a large piece of butcher paper, James draws an eagle on it, and they hang it out of their bedroom window: The rain came first and soaked the butcher’s paper and plastered it to the side of the building. The wind came a few days later and tore the drawing loose. Some of the ink bled through, and for a long time after, you could see a faint outline of the eagle in the brick. James could draw. He really could. (24)

Here the inexhaustibility of James’s own creation is linked to what the text tells us about the “ink bleeding through.” James’s art imparts permanence to representation, to the indelibility of history, even—or especially—when the materiality of a specific representation is threatened, a theme to which King will return in Truth & Bright Water. Part of Will’s coming of age appears to be his understanding of such an indelible history bleeding through any superseding act of representation. History imparts an ethical trace that violates every socalled neutral or objective representation of “what happened”; you can’t erase it, paper over it, or hide it. Attending representation, history necessarily transgresses the supposedly level terrain of “objective truth” and renders such truths political, just or unjust, right or wrong.

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Remembrance transgresses all historical borders, in representation as well as in being. Back in Medicine River, the world travels of community elder Lionel James offer tangible proofs (as well as contestations) of such Anglo-European representations that would attempt to domesticate Indian and Native signifying practices.14 Like Jim of the Ashnola band in Harry Robinson’s tale, or James Welch’s Charging Elk, we read that James is part of a traveling exhibit that showcases “Indianness” to European audiences willing to pay for displays of cultural authenticity. Recently returned to the reserve from a European trip, Lionel James pays a visit to Will’s photo shop to ask for help in getting a credit card. It seems the hotels where Lionel needs to stay in Europe won’t let him in without one (169–71). Specifically, James laments the backdating of contemporary indigenous sovereignties to a mythic past. He says, “I got some real good stories, funny ones, about how things are now, but those people say, no, tell us about the olden days” (173). This forced antiquation of contemporary Native sovereignty— banished, as it were, to a fabulist representation—bankrupts the indigenous vision and experience of the present. It likewise and unnecessarily backdates the very reemergence of history that can heal. Will, too, suffers from the internalization of this backdating process imposed by generations of playing Indian on celluloid, and years away from the reserve have further isolated his sense of community belonging. By contrast, Lionel James embodies positive engagement with the present, as opposed to the backdated mythologies imposed from without by photographic realism. James’s refusal to acknowledge domestication within the photographic frame—he uses stories as props for the living—emboldens and hastens Will’s own transformation. Lionel’s example helps Will to free his own camerawork from complicity with colonialist representations. *

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Informed by hazy and distorted memories of long ago, the image of Will’s long-deceased father remains curiously unresolved for much of the story. Using materials gleaned from his mother’s old box, Will constructs a composite of the rodeo man, a pastiche consisting of old letters without return addresses, several photos, incomplete jokes and recollections, and indulgent fantasies. We do know Will’s father is Anglo-European, and that he left Rose and her sons to get by alone in Calgary. In the photographs, Will’s father is typically concealed—an

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off-center figure in uniform “kneeling behind” Will’s mother (5), or again “a hat . . . was pulled down over much of his face” (86). In one of Will’s photos, where both his parents do appear together, Will’s mother “look[s] back, not turned quite far enough to see the man behind her” (10). Early on, you discover that the project of enhancing Will’s father’s image, of making his history visible to his grown son, is intimately related to the book’s larger project of asking questions about how collective history is made and remembered. Glancing at one of the photos, Will recalls: I remember the picture of the two of them. My mother with her dark hair and dark eyes, the pleated skirt spread all around her. . . . His hand lay on her shoulder lightly, the fingers in sunlight, his eyes in shadows. (10)

You can read, I think incorrectly, the play of light here, of light onto shadow, as the effect of pathos on the visual text. The unfamiliarity of the man, his whereabouts, the alternative histories he gave up when he chose to leave Rose and the boys behind—such gaps in history inform an allegory of larger historical forces affecting indigenous communities, what in this case the camera cannot see. In King’s text, this argument runs, the shadow obscures or “darkens” Will’s father’s whiteness as a function of its exclusion from an indigenous world. I would argue, however, that Medicine River challenges such an allegorical reading of “race” as shadow, in much the same way as it contests ironic reversal as an adequate vehicle for contemporary indigenous representation. Such allegories verge dangerously toward essentialist givens of what such a “shadow” might mean. Instead, Susan Bernardin has suggested how the emergence of shadow in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea marks competing and often-conflicting discourses of nation and miscegenation within representations of mixedblood identity.15 Shadows indeed conceal, but they also render other aspects of composition, of representation, visible. In Will’s case, it will be indigenous stories (from Lionel James and others) that, rather than “unveil” his father’s identity and history, provide added resolution to what his search for his father has heretofore displaced: the network of indigenous relations that have held him strong. Fittingly, it is Lionel James who, unlike the camera, can share his humor and memories so as to speak of Will’s father intimately, in terms that neither romanticize nor damn the man’s history in a grown son’s eyes. Up to this point, the absent figure of Will’s white father

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has exerted a strong undercurrent in the story, pulling toward a tragic and agonistic fate for indigenous being that the body of King’s work categorically resists. From Lionel, for example, we learn that he and Will’s father were friends before Will was born (168). Lionel recounts the time Will’s father hid Will in a laundry basket and tried to convince Rose that the boy was in the washing machine (175). In a longer anecdote, Lionel recalls: “When I was in Norway, I told the story about the time your father and mother went to one of those chicken restaurants after a rodeo. Your mother was pregnant, and I guess the smell of all that fat and grease made her sick because she threw up.” “Threw up. At the restaurant?” “That’s right. She was sitting near the window, and she couldn’t get out. It was real messy.” “My mother did that?” “So your father, quick as he can, said in a real loud voice, ‘Hey, what’s in this chicken anyway?’ ” (172–73)

Through the prism of Lionel’s memory, Will’s father takes on a dimension no photographic lens can reproduce; Will’s father has a sense of humor that Lionel can appreciate. Not the globe-trotting freelance photographer, pilot, or college professor of Will’s fantasies (84–85), Will’s father emerges here as a no less sympathetic figure, a rodeo man whose story has a meaningful basis in memory. Lionel James, and the trickster humor he brings to the text, emerges at precisely the right moment foregrounding Will’s role—not merely as witness to the indigenous history he is photographing around him, but as a remembered individual whose being remains integral to the unfolding community story. A more positive valuation of Will’s past allows him to reimagine a role within indigenous community beyond the fragmented bodies and shadows of alien photographs and their legacy. Via Lionel James’ memory—Harry Robinson-like in its power to evoke the past—Will accordingly begins to enter the field of indigenous stories and memories in his own right. At the same instant that Medicine River reveals the basis of photorealism in fictions of pathos, the novel, in like manner, rejects the representational claims of photography as in any way a meaningful substitutes for indigenous memories (such as Will’s or Lionel’s). In King’s novel, indigenous histories such as Will’s can no longer be reduced to an aestheticized field of lack and longing, as constructed

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through the croppings and excisions of the photorealist negative. Medicine River thus avoids the stylistic play of light that has all too often come to define indigenous history, recognizable in the black blankets used as backdrops in the photos shot by Edward Curtis, the chiaroscuro effects of light-and-shadow dampening the vitality of indigenous discourse, and the foredoomed visages emblematic of what Louis Owens called the “Hollywooden Indian.”16 Ultimately, the increased resolution of Will’s father’s image, his reemergence in indigenous discourse, indemnifies neither his abandonment of Rose and the boys nor the larger issue of Anglo-European neglect. Rather, Will is able to construct a more meaningful and historical relation with a man who, up until that moment and in the absence of more informed knowledge, has been characterized using fictional modes originating beyond the indigenous context, including sentimental realism (abandonment) and tragic romance (the orphan’s tale). *

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Finally, two photo shoots—one missed, one achieved—validate Medicine River’s critique of photographic realism. The shoot that doesn’t happen occurs on the way back to Medicine River from a basketball tournament in the States when Harlen convinces Will to stop by the Custer National Monument at Little Big Horn (Montana) to take a photo for the folks back home. Will, whose spirits are low, declares, “I wasn’t that depressed” (110) and adds, “The Blackfoot didn’t fight Custer” (107). In any case, Will and Harlen arrive too late for the gate, shut out by a young white park ranger who, despite a long night of travel and Will’s exclamation that “[D]id you tell him we’re Indians!” (112), refuses to let them in. Will fantasizes that he could “see that kid hiding in the dark, hunkered down behind the fender of [his] Bronco, his hands shaking around his rifle, waiting for us to come screaming and whooping and crashing through the gate” (112). Will doesn’t crash that gate onto the Anglo-European national imagining of Indians; he doesn’t let fantasy realize what is, after all, a “dumb idea” (110). More importantly, Will reads his exclusion from the Anglo-European narrative of “national” history in increasingly more positive terms as the epigraph to this section of the chapter suggests. Up to this point in the novel, hints about Will’s possible investment in a psychology of abandonment and exclusion—entwined in the narrative with an account of an abysmal relationship with a white woman in Toronto—have kept his self-image static. As his persistent

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fantasies about his father similarly attest, Will has distanced himself from the very indigenous history that he needs. “Timed out” from the hegemony of Anglo-European representational practices, and primed to “time-in” to the indigenous critique of such nationalist imaginings, Will’s jubilance at the temporally mixed metaphor of slam-dunking Custer (111) speaks to the revisionary representational practice Medicine River subsequently implements. Attending this revisionary process, the photo shoot that does take place in Medicine River starts out innocuously enough. After some cajoling from Harlen, Will decides to offer an affordable special on family portraits. “So I ran a special. Not for Harlen’s reasons and not for Leon’s . . . So for the last two weeks in June, you could get a family portrait for twenty dollars . . . It was a great deal. Joyce Blue Horn was the first one to call” (202–3). Suddenly, however, things get complicated. Joyce Blue-Horn, Will realizes, has a broad construction of what “family” is: “By twelve-thirty, there were in the vicinity of fifty-four people—adults and kids—in my studio” (206). They adjourn to the river, where Will sets up his camera and, with some difficulty, prepares to take his first shot. Everybody clamors for Will to be in the photo too (214). (Harlen, of course, knows how to coach him on the self-timer.) The visual effect the narrative achieves is remarkable: The first shots were easy. I set the timer, ran across the sand and sat down next to Floyd’s granny. But with a large group like that, you can’t take chances. Someone may have closed their eyes just as the picture was taken. Or one of the kids could have turned their back. Or someone might have gotten lost behind someone else. . . . Then, too, the group refused to stay in place . . . the kids wandered off among their parents and relatives and friends, and the adults floated back and forth, no one holding their positions. I had to keep moving the camera as the group swayed from one side to the other. Only the grandparents remained in place as the ocean of relations flowed around them. (214–15)

As a literary text resisting (re)colonization in realist terms, Medicine River here achieves a masterful appropriation of what might otherwise appear as simply a visual text, the simple capturing of a picture in narrative. By dismissing the realism, or prophetic verisimilitude, of what photos capture in Medicine River, King frees up their “content” to better and different purposes: the imagination and reinvention of bonds and histories that can reawaken the desire for home and expand the definition of community through an “ocean of relations.”

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This liberation of “all my relations” from the static image results in a history that cannot be captured, with a vitality that refuses to sit still for the camera. The indelible nature of a remembered history that King continuously recalls to each image emerges here as the plenitude of time, a time-in-being that verges, as close as any writing can, on the cinematic.17 The elusive image of indigenous community points outside itself to explode the self-referential and contained nature of the realist frame. In terms of its larger project, Medicine River goes even further in making an argument about how a revisionist practice of photographing indigenous community actually might work. Photos, after all, just speak what they’re told: they don’t necessarily have to create the fiction, the illusion, of capturing a meaning that can stand by itself. Only a photographer, on behalf of his or her photo, can ever claim the innate self-sufficiency of what photos merely represent: “reality.” And even then, as the outtakes among Curtis’s photos suggest, the photographer is often wrong and needs to suppress “inadvertent” representations that might contest his or her own. Will, at home with his own sense of a renovated personal history and that of the indigenous community around him, refuses any longer to stake such a representational mastery. By the conclusion of the novel, Will has recorded the photographic history of his town, all the while investing his photos with a testimonial witness and temporality that is “timed out” from the representational hegemony that is Anglo-European photorealism in Native (Blackfoot) country. Will’s photos retain something that the residents of Medicine River can hold on to, in terms even more compelling than Harlen Bigbear’s failed career as a hoop dancer or Clyde Whiteman’s effortless jump shot on break from serial jail terms. Yet his photos cannot, in any strict sense, be considered artifacts. The AIM-era activist in the novel, David Plume, carries what Will considers an “unremarkable” image—torn, emulsion cracked, and peeled, “beat up a lot”—the only artifact he has left to link him to Dennis Banks and his claim to have been present at Wounded Knee. Like Slash in Armstrong’s novel, David has separated himself from his sovereignty in the name of a wider, nationalist struggle that, paradoxically, has alienated him from his own community: “That’s me,” David says. “What do you think?” (190). Indigenous being kept alive in memory, rather than entombed as an artifact in the realist imagination, distinguishes Will’s use of the indigenous image from that of his peers. Will, unlike Plume, revitalizes his family memories in the present by

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liberating them from their realist context as merely shadowy signs on Kodak paper. Avowing photographs as repositories of communal memory rather than individual pathos, Medicine River discounts the function of photorealism as conveying “authentic” indigenous culture apart from those subjects who give the image meaning. Finally, Medicine River inaugurates King’s career-long project of deconstructing any distinction between words and pictures. The novel’s critique explodes the realist frame around indigenous referentiality to include vast histories and memories excluded by more than a century of foreshortened Anglo-European expectations. The pictures themselves remain: not only as metonymies of larger realist practices sustaining the “capture” of Indian and Native communities within represented boundaries—the subjects of nationalism, captured by “America” or “Canada”—but as metaphors for indigenous difference, resistance, and humor attending the ongoing negotiation, by individuals and communities alike, of plural sovereignties. Medicine River proffers wordimages in form of pictorial representations that, ultimately, collapse back into words in a jubilant deferral of stabilized meanings. In indigenous hands, photography emerges as an historically enlivening process, rather than merely reproducing cherished authenticities as commodities. This enables Will, a Native chronicler of indigenous survival, to assert his own Native (in)difference to a Eurocentric notion of history limited to a silent parade of alienated images. A Blackfoot wizard of silver nitrate and its processes, Will excises this version of capital-H History—the inheritance of Edward Curtis—from the legacy of the indigenous present. Thomas King, for his part, merely lets the pictures of Medicine River speak for themselves, acknowledging that they must willfully slip out of any strictly realist frame, borne upon a flowing “ocean of relations” (215). *

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Truth & Bright Water continues Thomas King’s treatment of themes previously explored in Medicine River and Green Grass, Running Water—including critiquing realist misreadings of nature and community, the dangers of nationalist representations, and the threat posed to children by the abuses of their parents. In Truth & Bright Water, King continues his preferred format of “associational” storytelling that uses humor, rather than realist documentary or exposé, to exhume indigenous identities from the tombs of representation imposed by centuries of colonial contact.18

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As in Medicine River, it is a river, the Shield, which serves to situate (as well as to confound) people’s community relationships. Truth & Bright Water begins with a vivid description of scene, with two towns, one people, and their community divided by, even as they are joined within, a larger landscape: Grey-green and frozen with silt, the Shield shifts and breaks out of the mountains in cataracts and cascades, fierce and alive. It plunges into chasms and dives under rock shelves, but as the river leaves the foothills and snakes across the belly of the prairies, the water warms and deepens, and splits the land in two. Truth and Bright Water sit on opposite sides of the river, the railroad town on the American side, the reserve in Canada. (1)

The bridge, like the ampersand19 in the title of the novel, would link Truth, on the American side, to the Canadian reserve, Bright Water, where the narrator, Tecumseh’s, grandmother lives. The reserve is also where Tecumseh’s best friend and cousin, Lum, lives with his abusive father, the band council chairman; accordingly, the ampersand also joins the story of the boys’ friendship. However, unlike the conjunction in the title (signifying equally the ampersand sign, “&,” as well as “and”), the bridge bridges nothing. 20 Its steelwork is unfinished, dilapidated (with “open planking and . . . rusting webs of iron mesh” [1]) and dangerous and, for those who don’t know any better, going nowhere. If the broken bridge represents the bankruptcy of vision that could span obstacles presented by nationalist ideologies, there nevertheless remain other means—indigenous ways—of crossing, which can readily negotiate the river’s chasm: “The fog has filled the river valley . . . In the moonlight, the fog glows like steel, and it looks as if you could step out and walk across it all the way back to Truth” (60). King’s description is transitive here; by becoming steel, the fog combines the possible with the imaginable, conveniently collapsing distinctions between them. The Shield and the night fog achieve the crossings the dilapidated bridge cannot. As in the epigram to this chapter, King has spoken directly to the damage nationalism causes by foreshortening representations of the spaces and places indigenous people actually inhabit. In King’s topography, by contrast, bodies of water link but never bisect: The cruise around [Waterton Lake] was interesting, and if I hadn’t gone, I would never have known that the Canadian/United States

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border ran right through the middle of the lake. When the guy driving the boat told us that, I expected to see a floating fence or inner tubes with barbed wire and lights, something to keep people from straying from one country into the other. (78)

Nationalist ideology apart, there is nothing, represented or real, Tecumseh can “see” about this border. It is this present absence that regulates bounded indigenous communities and forms the basis for King’s endorsement of plural sovereignties in Truth & Bright Water. His task, as we will see, is to rub all borders out of the representational frame in discourse, not in the interests of erasure but so as to sustain connections across the nationalist divide. *

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Monroe Swimmer, as his name suggests, presents the vision that can bridge gulfs, whether representational or geographic. He has purchased the church high on the bluff above Truth, successively abandoned by waves of different Christian denominations, and is beginning to reimagine, using installation art, the world before Anglo-European colonialism: Monroe walks to the lip of the coulee and looks out across the river. “There’s Canada,” he says. Then he turns and spreads his arms. “And this is the United States.” He spins around in a full circle, stumbles, and goes down in a heap. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” (131)

Swimmer has returned to Truth after many years away, including a tour through 1970s AIM-era activism, and a rags-to-riches career as a painter in Seattle pitching his wares to urbanites raised to expect images of the “Indian” as “swollen, shadowy figures stuffed into distorted police cars and army tanks, chasing pastel animals and neon Indians at murderous angles across long, dark stretches of prairie landscape” (27). Swimmer (preferring the nom de guerre “Famous Indian Artist”) is now in fact not a painter, but a “restorer” (129), using his art to carefully remove traces of colonial history—including the borders nationalist fictions require—from the canvas of the indigenous landscape: “I went around the world fixing paintings. They said my brushes were magic. You believe that?” “Sure.”

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“One day, the Smithsonian called me in to handle a particularly difficult painting. It was a painting of a lake at dawn, and everything was fine except that the paint along the shore had begun to fade, and images that weren’t in the original painting were beginning to bleed through. . . . “The new paint wouldn’t hold. Almost as soon as I finished, the images began to bleed through again.” “So, you had to paint it over.” “You know what they were?” says Monroe. “What?” “Indians,” says Monroe. “There was an Indian village on the lake, slowly coming through the layers of paint. Clear as day.” (129–30)

Swimmer, once his sense of artistic justice has been aroused by the indelibility of history, stops painting over history’s unseemly traces and makes a newer career of painting them back in (133). 21 Swimmer’s restorations are, in his new understanding of indigenous art, the refusal to concede colonial erasures of history. When left to their own devices in landscapes they unwillingly forfeited, the traces of indigenous sovereigns always reappear, reconstitute themselves, and are remembered by forcing themselves upon the representational field—canvas, photo, printed word—as gazed upon by the viewer. Such “Indian” traces, figures, and memories stare back into the present. Swimmer takes care to associate the erasure of history in tomb-like, static representations with the museum culture of colonial institutions that, as with King’s critique of photorealism in Medicine River, dared to presume an eternity when representing the merely momentary. Swimmer’s artistic project in Truth & Bright Water is another illustration of a representational practice that has emerged consistently throughout King’s work: the opening of doors and windows multidirectionally onto adjoining terrains and discourses, cohabited by both Anglo-European and indigenous sovereigns. These shared apertures link discrete and distinct, but still connected, domains of tradition, culture, and being. And despite having importantly different means of egress and access, depending upon the specific reader’s experience and his or her respective knowledge, these “doors and windows” are not traps22 but conduits. In his short story “Where the Borg Are,” King’s narrator calls these doors onto adjoining sovereignties “wormholes,” time portals linking radically segregated, but nevertheless contiguous, spaces, standpoints, and positions. These doors and windows open onto third spaces of imagining that indigenous and Anglo-European worldviews can inhabit on equal terms of novelty, discernment, strength, and respect such that “the non-Native reader,

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knowing the [Western discourses], might recognize the other . . . and understanding, suddenly become an open window through which we could see and hear each other.”23 By painting such doors and windows onto—as conduits linking— alternative sovereignties, Swimmer’s overall aim is to bring the truth back to Truth by erasing the old Christian church from sight and establishing new sites for crossing between two indigenous communities, formerly one, now divided internationally with the river serving as a border. Through these alternative imaginings, the two communities the river presently divides can reimagine themselves as whole; and, as formerly, the river will be conjunctive, not divisive. Swimmer’s facilitating the Christian church’s disappearance from sight will commemorate Indian Days on the bluff above the Shield and not on the reserve, across the river in Bright Water, where the band chairman, Franklin’s, get-rich schemes depend on peddling violent displays of “Indianness” to tourists. Once the church has been erased, Swimmer also wants to hold a house party in Truth to celebrate the July 1 holiday (also Canada Day), where he will redistribute goods once stolen from indigenous peoples by Anglo-European culture vultures. Before doing so, however, he must establish an opening in representational space (equally, a rupture within colonized space) accessible and acceptable to a plurality of sovereignties: I go around the church a couple of times before I notice it doesn’t have a door. The windows are there and the steeple is there, but the part of the church where you would expect to find a door has been painted away. . . . I find an open door hanging in the middle of the prairies. It looks really weird. A door hanging in space. (44)

Through further installations—“Teaching the Sky About Blue,” “Teaching the Grass About Green,” along with “ ‘Teaching the Night About Dark’ . . . a lot trickier” (49)—Swimmer uses antimimetic representations to assert a fundamental truth about King’s purpose in writing Truth & Bright Water. Centuries of colonialism may have painted indigenous communities and their representations into a corner, but with persistent remembrance, the apparent collusion of the natural world, and a good sense of humor, they can certainly paint themselves out of it. Tecumseh asks: “Remember that platform you built in the grass and painted green?” Monroe shakes his head and looks sad. “It was more difficult than I thought.”

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Plural Sovereignties “Why’d you paint it yellow?” It’s really hard to see.” “I didn’t. I keep painting it green.” (126)

And, even when indigenous sovereigns all too often are subject to representational practices they cannot control, nature will take care of itself, as Tecumseh finds out, after consistently barking his shins on Swimmer’s installation art pieces that keep morphing to match the surrounding landscape. In time, Swimmer achieves the “removal” of the church and works just as hard to achieve the prairie’s repopulation with buffalo. Nor are Swimmer’s bison “real”; instead, they are fashioned out of steel rebar, shaped and planted into the prairie, but with shadows that move and pulse in the wind. Material reconstructions, the promise of these shadow-bisons’ presence—they replant sixty into the earth—soothes Swimmer and Tecumseh (135), even as Lum’s father, Franklin, is back in Bright Water terrorizing the herd of living buffalo that remains by offering out of town visitors thirty bucks a shot at them with a paint gun (150–51). Playing their part in Franklin’s reenactment (Wild Bill Cody-like) of the buffalo hunt for gawking tourists, Lum and Tecumseh “paint” (shoot with paint pellets) the starving buffalo (151), securing the fundamental equivalence, in King’s vision, between representations and praxis: colonialist fictions constitute actual violence. As Swimmer reminds Tecumseh, not only buffalo, but indigenous people, too, have been “painted” (killed) and so rubbed out of the canvases of the Anglo-European nation: “Fun!” Monroe spins on me. “Not fun,” he says, low and hard. “Serious. This is serious” (135). To say that paint brushes, and not bullets, are used is to miss King’s point. (Indigenous warriors of the past also painted themselves so as to signal their protection of sovereignty.) Killing representations can be just as deadly, perhaps even more so, over the long run in a theater of imagined being where indigenous life-ways are not even assumed to have existed. For Swimmer, who uses installation art to counter stillborn representations of indigenous absence on a nationalist canvas, this is indeed serious business. It is important to stress that this “seriousness” of Swimmer’s role is not limited to parody, or solely to specific “comic” trickster effects that King uses elsewhere in Truth & Bright Water to leaven the dead mass of Anglo-European history and art. Through Swimmer’s own “egocentrically misconceived”24 agency as “Indian artist,” King nevertheless pursues his own deadly serious representational agenda

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concerning all too real and irrevocable consequences of deadening images. As Hirsch points out, Swimmer is certainly not a hero, and only a half-decent mentor figure. 25 In the family back story of Truth & Bright Water, Swimmer broke Tecumseh’s mother’s heart and, most likely, stole Cassie away from her. In terms of his own story, Swimmer’s self-described role is, technically speaking, that of a formerly foiled painter in search of relevant canvas, cast anew in an indigenous role as an enemy of representational stasis. If it seems incidental that Tecumseh continuously stumbles into Swimmer’s installed representations, it is hardly accidental that the boy learns that the wrong kinds (and placements) of representation can and often do hurt. It is this hurting, the hard lessons of experience, that Tecumseh must come to learn in Truth & Bright Water. 26 Alternatives to despair do presently exist in Tecumseh’s indigenous midst, but the boy has not yet learned to recognize their signs through his own justifiable tears. *

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Another child, whose full significance is unheeded by Tecumseh—but are children, after all, required to entertain “full significances” or, maybe, just literary critics?—stands as a good foil for Tecumseh, not only because she is an historical figure, but because of her very ordinariness, her ability to feel her experience, present and past, honestly. Rebecca Neugin is playful, curious, and, at root, searching for her duck. She has returned from the past to attend the annual Indian Days celebrations in Truth & Bright Water, giving a sovereign and pluralist thrust to King’s overall representational project in the novel. Part of a Georgia Cherokee caravan group making a sharp, northward detour before heading down to their final destination in Oklahoma, Rebecca is a unique cross-temporal presence inhabiting, interstitially, the wormhole in time and space that Swimmer’s art has created. That Rebecca’s existence in the text is not entirely limited to the present tense is suggested by the names of those traveling with her family, including Mr. John Ross and George Guess (Sequoyah), famous nineteenthcentury personages among the Cherokee party who actively resisted removal to Indian Territory (Oklahoma).27 Rebecca is searching for her lost duck, and she reminds Tecumseh that the duck (or muskrat or otter or beetle) is the Earthdiver of Blackfoot and Cherokee creation myths, the helper who made land to stand on when all was water (101–2). The torn edges of Rebecca’s dress are themselves feathery (“Feathers . . . I

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think the edges look like feathers,” [148]), and she occupies a welcoming and gentle presence on the twilight of Tecumseh’s innocence, serving as a present reminder that history, like the seasons, must always dive back into the earth and be reborn. Rebecca represents the possibility of historical recovery and healing in the indigenous present. She and her family, like the rest of the Georgia Cherokee caravan, may have been “removed” by President Andrew Jackson’s pursuit of nationalist genocide and in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court, but she reappears here in Truth & Bright Water alive and well. Her witness is a good sign for Swimmer’s artistic reconfiguring of the “Indian Days” celebration along entirely different lines: in the form of affirming the cross-temporal present within which all indigenous peoples, and not only the Blackfoot and Cherokee, can participate and celebrate, regardless of the histories and representations “reserved” for them as “American” and “Canadian” nationals. It is fitting, too, that Rebecca finds a sympathetic circle of listeners in Tecumseh’s grandmother’s lodge at Indian Days—Blackfoot people who, despite not understanding Cherokee, can feel Rebecca’s creation story as receptive listeners (“More to a story than just the words” [219]). As collateral readers of the Cherokee experience, the Blackfoot elders activate Rebecca’s own healing-telling as willing listeners and despite (or because of) linguistic divides. By retelling her own story of loss and subsequent return to an indigenous context newly found beyond her homeland, Rebecca Neugin’s “removal” (from Georgia) is reversed, and her history, shared in a traditional discourse among like-minded indigenous people, is secured. *

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Meditations upon the persistence of indigenous sovereignty in a world defined by the mastery of representational practices, King’s novels encompass a plurality at once preceding and incorporating AngloEuropean modes of being and history. These parallel visions, if forcibly segregated, must dissolve into competition and failure. In close proximity, however, each takes some meaningful measurement of the other as a separate, yet plural, sovereignty. King, like so many of his characters, benefits from multiple frames of reference, without subordinating his own interest, that of indigenous sovereignty, in merely relativist or aestheticizing terms. The resulting interplay of plural sovereignties can therefore seem intimidating, operating as it does in abeyance of more familiar plotting

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devices or recognizably “authentic” artifacts or images of indigenous provenance. Yet if King’s readers may not be expected to be “literati” of indigenous lifeways, they might at least strive to be literate to some extent when encountering them.28 Providing such incremental “exposure” to indigenous sovereignty and experience, at once liberating and binding (and without coddling or provoking) is an important part of King’s inclusive project, as it pertains not only to Anglo-European readers but (as Armstrong reminds us) to indigenous sovereigns with little knowledge of other traditions beyond their own. To this purpose, King’s investment in plural sovereignties can be found in a series of sketches embedded within Truth & Bright Water. These inset sketches resonate for Anglo-European readers not as the recoverable and authentic “indigenous content” of King’s work— search, exhaust, destroy, salvage—but as evidence of an always provisional process of collateral readership. Read this way, the text becomes a shared domain where the signposts of indigenous sovereignty, even when misunderstood, are visible to all: as markers of trespass, warning, and perhaps even—where due respect for sovereignty is shown— welcome. And if my overall argument about plural sovereignties is to sustain challenge, the literature of contemporary plural sovereignties must propose its own distinctive mode of reading amenable, equally, to the sovereign objectives of indigenous nationalist literary formation. 29 Whether nationalist or pluralist in design—or both—collateral reading must result in the shared commitment on the part of all readers (indigenous insider, indigenous outsider, Anglo-European) to the cause of sustainable forward sovereignty for all indigenous nations. The first sketch involves a description of Tecumseh’s mother’s quilt: My mother’s quilt is not the easy kind of quilt you can get at the Mennonite colony near Blossom or one of the fancy machine-stitched quilts you could get in Prairie View at the Woodward’s store before it went out of business, and that is probably why it’s taken my mother so long to finish and why she is still working on it. Along with the squares and triangles and circles of cloth that have been sewn together, patterns with names like Harvest Star, and Sunshine and Shadow, and Sunburst, my mother has also fastened unexpected things to the quilt, such as the heavy metal washers that run along the outside edges and the clusters of needles that she has worked into the stitching just below the fish hooks and the chickens’ feathers. . . . The geometric forms slowly softened and turned into freehand patterns that looked a lot like trees and mountains and people and animals, and before long, my

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father said you could see Truth in one corner of the quilt and Bright Water in the other with the Shield flowing through the fabrics in tiny diamonds and fancy stitching. (61)

This is a remarkable passage and not only because, as is conventionally observed in the critical scholarship, King’s powers of description are at once tonally understated and extraordinarily vivid. Rather, King’s description of the quilt invites collateral reading, the positing by different readers of plausible relations that link the passage to other “unexpected” imaginaries across a variety of sovereign domains. King’s sketch, his description of the quilt, nevertheless remains precisely what it is—a paratext of Blackfoot understanding filtered through Tecumseh’s mother’s consciousness. So represented, the indigenous cosmology makes subsequent readings, including collateral readings, derivative. But nor are such subsequent readings entirely irrelevant to King’s “associational” project, whereby all readers are invited to recall other images and memories beyond the Blackfoot universe, “softening and turning” into recognizable forms (here expressed in English). The cumulative design of such a collateral reading practice approaches, like Monroe Swimmer’s invisibly painted installation art, that moment when King’s art exceeds its own boundaries as the mimesis of indigenous sovereignty, and becomes life itself in alternative forms that readers, arriving through the wormhole from vastly different backgrounds and sensitivities, can recognize, transform and, as King would have it, bump into. After reading the above sketch, I first recalled Grandma Dee’s quilt, described in Alice Walker’s often anthologized “Everyday Use,” where Mamma’s quilt constitutes a womanist canvas, linking Maggie to three generations of African American women in a matrilineal repossession of family history, including the remembrance of slavery and an African American family’s survival as the stitching together of once lost, and now reclaimed, fragments in a satisfying whole. 30 At precisely this moment in my own collateral reading, Walker’s quilt dematerializes, and a wormhole opens, only to have lines from John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” emerge, a poem which, in romantic terms, glorifies the status of beautiful forms as static perfection and then, remarkably, acknowledges the mistake.31 Now, to make provisional sense of the Blackfoot quilt, the reader doesn’t really need or want or require Keats here—or Walker either, for that matter.32 But, as a collateral reading, Keats’s criticism of the

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eternity represented in the Grecian urn (as a silent, “Cold Pastoral!”) contributes effectively to King’s criticism of Anglo-European representational practices in the era of North American colonization, including turning an otherwise living and populated indigenous landscape into a pastoral mural. Abruptly, the next wormhole in my collateral reading opens. Keats’s “Grecian Ode” seems itself a re-reading of Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad, which, like the Blackfoot quilt in Truth & Bright Water, represents the reach of destruction, as well as of an ensuing peace, between two cities, two peoples, who have come to know one another intimately through strife, the knowledge of relations as enemies, and shared history.33 Even factoring in King’s own Greek ancestry, however, a skeptical reader might justifiably recognize in my interpretation—reading King’s text collaterally, in English, back to Walker back to Keats back to Homer—traces of an old colonizer’s trick of absurd reduction. This old trick reduces an indigenous original to a Western derivation, thereby discounting the particularity of indigenous achievement, ownership, and still-sacred claims of place and origin.34 For its part, however, King’s text is not required to avow my interpretation of it, with its admittedly sweeping importation of Walker’s womanism, Keats’ pastoral, or Homer’s vision of a warrior culture recovering a civilization based on the polis. My collateral readings of his text apart, what King seems to be counting on is the power of his story to produce its own unique effects and memories—a narrative foundationalism—in the mind of any reader with an internally consistent and sustaining cosmology: The magic of Native literature—as with other literatures—is not in the themes of the stories . . . it is in the way meaning is refracted by cosmology, the way understanding is shaped by cultural paradigms. 35

I accordingly note King’s allowance for the plural in “paradigms” above, and for me, this plurality makes sufficient allowance for my reading of Tecumseh’s mother’s quilt otherwise, as the outward “refraction” of an internally congruent Blackfoot cosmology. As cosmologies, the Blackfoot quilt and Homer’s shield share a fundamental equivalence as structuring paradigms; beyond this relation, of their being related as produced by ancient cultures at once powerfully sustaining and oral, they are incomparable. What is important is that they are both cosmological.

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Yet I believe the point of collateral readership, at least in the catchall English language which to some extent requires it, is not so much to reinscribe the old tired binary of “insider and outsider” discourse36 but to situate any reader within a given practice of reading whereby any and all representations are understood as provisional. To read sovereignty legitimately, therefore, is not necessarily to undertake the capture of its meaning or to mandate its preferred subject or reader, especially when exclusion of another kind of reader is the price of the privilege. If this were a necessary requirement, then indigenous writers would not, I presume, write in English at all. (We recall Robinson’s, and Armstrong’s, use of Okanagan for specific purposes and people.) Rather, the same “associational” practice of reading that might in certain contexts exclude me (as an Anglo-European reader) from specific aspects of indigenous cosmology also allows me to supply other contexts from my own experience.37 Nevertheless, no-one should be so bold as to enter a given narrative space as solely the function of his or her own innocent choice. Rather, the inherent potential of a narrative will self-select its reader; the “take away” will be proportionately great or small depending on the knowledge (or its lack) an individual reader brings. Even among knowledgeable readers, different associations will accrue and coalesce. Accordingly, the multidimensional wormhole onto indigenous discourse provided by King’s fiction presents the nonindigenous reader with a hospitable invitation that promises something better than interpretive chaos and, I hope, value-neutral apathy. Rather, associative writing, and its corollary, collateral reading, asserts reading practices justifiably as the search for value within language, even while affirming the provisionality of those very representational tools necessary to judge the world and, as necessary, to intervene in it. Such a search for understanding indigenous sovereignty, by the light of the provisionality of its representations, pushes King’s project further beyond the indigenous doorway into a contiguous realm that Anglo-European readers may be better equipped to understand. The second sketch, akin to the critique of photorealism used by King in Medicine River, foregrounds the dangers of collateral reading for those not trained sufficiently to recognize the signs of the indigenous everyday. In only five paragraphs, the nineteenth chapter of Truth & Bright Water recounts, in a flat journalistic style, the death of an older German couple, Helmut and Eva May, on the Alberta prairies.38 The Mays are found dead in their Jeep Cherokee—another

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pluralist signifier—with the cause of death stated as “exposure” to Native North America (155). There is no hint of foul play, and all the usual accessories for a photo-taking holiday in Indian country are found in the back of their vehicle: exposed film, cameras, maps, and guide books. The hint of mystery provided, however—the “neat thing” about the exposed film as described in Tecumseh’s words— remains the exposed photos themselves: All of the photos were panoramas, landscapes, the sort of thing that you would expect tourists to take. But . . . everything in the distance, the rivers, the mountains, the clouds, the prairies, was slightly blurry and out of focus, while everything in the foreground, the steering wheel, the windshield wipers, the hood, was crisp and sharp. (155)

Here, in realist mode, the Anglo-European reader may feel ready to embark, sleuth-like, on a search for clues. The technology provides sharp resolution in the foreground but can’t capture the big picture; a little murky, the landscape provides nothing readable. It might therefore be easy to skip over the parable of the poor old Mays as unnecessary to King’s novel. Why is it even included at all? The journalistic take on the fate of the Mays, like the wasichu (Anglo-European) description of the Lakota/Dakota landscape in Welch’s Fools Crow is strangely neutral in tone, lifeless and arid. The Anglo-European reader of Truth & Bright Water ignores the May parable at his or her own risk, however. The Mays, German tourists with maps in Indian country, cameras, and good intentions, are nothing if not stand-ins for the readers of Truth & Bright Water. They are you and me, struggling to make meaning out of a radically different indigenous cosmology (whether Blackfoot, Lummi, or Inuit). We’re inevitably lost, once all signposts translatable to Anglo-European foreigners are removed, including the aesthetics of “Indianness,” in all of its racist visibility, that the real-life Karl May provided for fin de siecle German popular culture. When we, like these latter-day Mays, look upon the Blackfoot world we see nothing there; or rather, the sheer enormity and scope of the nothing we see (“blurry, out of focus”) squelches our own customary mode of seeing. (We may recall King’s short story “Rendezvous,” where an entire ecosystem takes over a Toronto suburb and dominates it, before just as suddenly moving on in an unfathomed pattern of migration.) The totality of relations in the natural world—that many ignore at their own risk—comes and goes at whim, regardless of our existence.

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It is this lack of “exposure” to a spatial indigenous presence—the sheer enormity of relations linking all living things—that overwhelms the Mays. Again, the Mays’s overexposure, in this instance, arises not only because of their inability to read the signs present in the indigenous world but, perhaps, because they have, in the absence of proper guideposts or translation, seen too much. Too late for the Mays, King’s novel offers one such warning and guidepost for the unwary. And the May parable, seemingly innocuous in the wider canvas of King’s novel, is a window we can peer through only at our own peril, like Swimmer’s church door hung into the middle of the prairies, opened onto the ongoing story of Truth & Bright Water. The May parable affirms that the windows opening onto indigenous spaces constitute seams or junctures where different sovereignties, languages, and their representational practices collide. If Tecumseh and Lum look outside their own windows, into the dominant culture, they also pick up the “white noise”—to echo the title of James Cox’s book—of the Anglo-European culture traveling into their homes like ambient music: the melodies of Rogers and Hammerstein, watching The Deerhunter at home on TV (4), or possibly, Peter Sellers’s Pink Panther movies (191). Tecumseh enjoys listening to his World War II-veteran grandfather’s records of Puccini’s La Boheme, Lerner and Lowe’s Camelot and, like his mother, over time picking up their tunes (16–17). Tecumseh will someday, no doubt, find himself represented as a “Native” or “Indian” in the strange fantasies and imaginings found on the other side of the window; to survive, he will become adept at cross-articulating plural sovereignties as he shuttles—lives—between both sides of the wormhole. 39 Rebecca Neugin’s presence suggests that such wormholes are also time portals where conversations across time can nevertheless occur meaningfully. This Blackfoot backdrop, the vista the Mays are unable to resolve within their field of vision, is the handicap of a colonial history the Anglo-European reader must acknowledge in order to make sense of the foreground of Truth & Bright Water.40 This foreground of indigenous sovereignty is everywhere present, if you know how to look for it, and it helps to explain Lum and Tecumseh’s respective fates, their sacrifices and celebrations, as well as those of their families. Despite the two boys’ search for clues (174–75), recurring mention of a jumping woman and a dead baby, there is no “mystery” in Blackfoot country, and there never has been. Readers revisiting the “blurry” Blackfoot backdrop make meaning out of the apparent

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disconnectedness of much of King’s novel. What the Mays cannot see at all, most (if not all) of the Blackfoot view steadily. The reader has to catch up quickly, however, if he or she is to make it to “Indian Days” in time for Monroe Swimmer’s give away (actually, it’s a “give back”) of treasures previously stolen from North American indigenous communities during generations of removal. The departure of the timetraveling Cherokee guests is imminent, and the rebirth of the next generation’s story is about to begin. *

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The next generation will not include Lum, who jumps to his death into the Shield at the end of Truth & Bright Water. Lum is a runner, but he is not, in the end, able to outrun his own self-destructive story, instilled in him by an abusive father, Tecumseh’s uncle.41 Still gripped by grief, Lum alternately fantasizes about taking revenge on his father and his mother’s impossible return from the dead. The combined torque of these imaginings never gives the boy much of a chance. We first meet him, armed and volatile, in the book’s early pages. Like Tecumseh and the rest of us, Lum misreads the “mystery” of the falling woman’s apparent suicide, but actually constructs it anew through the prism of his anger and abandonment, convincing himself that the woman chose death in response to the loss of her baby. Lum’s anger is of the same variety that Will in Medicine River learns to overcome. Lum’s adolescent misreading of the Earthdiver story confirms King’s own belief that the power of stories is all-determining; Lum has no “[s]aving stories,” in King’s words, no stories that can help keep him alive: “whether he lives or dies depends on which story he believes.”42 Lum’s story, like John Smith’s in Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, does not save or sustain. In the end, he sets up his own suicide as if it were the necessary culmination of a deadly imagining embedded by the surrounding circumstances. With violence as its predictable incident, Lum’s story requires and resurrects colonialist toxicity. Avoiding equally damaging stereotypes of “the suicidal Indian,” King’s novel nevertheless documents the terrible dangers present to indigenous youth in the absence of sustaining narrative alternatives coming from their traditional backgrounds.43 Tecumseh’s instinct is to be Lum’s protector; his visions sustain, through bonds of love and attachment, despite Lum’s trauma. Before Lum’s death, Tecumseh (still wrapped in his mother’s quilt) dreams

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yet again of the jumping woman, who receives a little help from an unexpected quarter: In my dream, the woman is standing above the river with her back to me. She’s looking over the side of the Horns, and even though it’s dark, down below on the water you can see a duck swimming back and forth. Every so often, the duck dives down and comes up with a fish in its mouth. But other times, the duck bobs to the surface with a bone or a beak of baby clothes. I keep trying to get the woman to turn around, but in the end she jumps off the Horns, and as she falls, the duck flies up and catches her and sets her gently on a suitcase that is floating in the water. (206)

Tecumseh’s dream, recasting Rebecca Neugin’s earth-diving duck in the dual role of a loyal companion, lost and then refound in indigenous stories of ongoing survival, is one of many necessary iterations.44 The mystery woman, Tecumseh’s dream, Lum: for all of these jumpers, there is no story that will not include them as divers into the Shield’s creation, no grounding earth that, in fleeing, they can avoid. As an Earthdiver, the duck (or muskrat or otter or beetle) is a figure of stability and continuity throughout the novel. If, in the dream, the turtle’s back seems small, placed as it is far below in the river, Tecumseh needn’t worry. The duck’s back, like the turtle’s, is as vast and broad as the world, and all divers—in death and life—will land safely. Each character in Truth & Bright Water has a role to play in King’s reenactment of the Earthdiver creation story, and each new strand (including Lum’s) affirms an overall emblematic design. Subsequently, Tecumseh learns that the mystery jumper opening the novel was none other than Monroe Swimmer himself, wearing a blond wig—a Graham Greene-like cross-dresser—who jumped into the Shield to “repatriate” indigenous remains stolen by AngloEuropeans and subsequently stolen “back” by Monroe while in their service (250–52). Lum refuses this reading of the mystery woman, preferring the tragic ending supplied by the story of his own experience. Not limiting himself to the narratives of calamity provided by AngloEuropean colonialism, Monroe is King’s trickster in the novel, phase shifting through a variety of guises and genders, male and female or both, and which may conform to indigenous culture heroes.45 In this case, in the opening jump sequence that the two boys witness, Monroe reprises the Woman Who Fell from the Sky creation story central to several indigenous traditions.46 As divers, then, who begin and conclude the story respectively, Monroe and Lum encompass (so

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as to encircle) the narrative. They fall, earthdivers both, intrinsic to King’s story and its continuity beyond their lifetimes. Even so, it seems difficult not to view Lum as a tragic jumper in the tradition of Anglo-American realist discourse. We can avoid doing so, however, by recalling Lum’s different—and equally constitutive—role as one twin returning to water in mythic Blackfoot time.47 Moreover, while Tecumseh looks on, Soldier, his canine companion—who defines good sense and loyalty in the novel—jumps after Lum into the void. Soldier’s own name provides a provisional answer to his actions: he is a Dog Soldier, named after members of the Cheyenne warrior clan revered for their loyalty and bravery, for whom sacrifice was honor. Certainly, Soldier is the kind of friend Lum will need in the spirit world, as he needed him in life, to cover his back. Their bodies are never recovered, lending credibility to the suggestion that both realist and mythic narrative modes in Truth & Bright Water are contiguous.48 As cruel and pointless as Lum’s death in historical time may be, and despite the teenager’s destructive power, he will always find an important place in the larger creation story. *

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Monroe Swimmer’s critique of colonialist pastoral in Truth & Bright Water, alongside the novel’s reenactment of earthdiver cosmology, is consistent with King’s own real-life criticism of the canonizing tendency within the “national” literatures of Canada and the United States, that would silence, so as to domesticate, otherwise sovereign representations of indigenous storytelling: “No need to send in the cavalry with guns blazing. [National] legislation will do just as nicely.”49 Literature is not legislation exactly, but as writings both are informed by problems of representation dwelling not in the indigenous stories themselves, but with the pastoral that has sought to assimilate them within an at times stifling nationalist allegory of Anglo-European conquest. The surround: this is an old story about the indigenous experience of colonialism, and tribal and Native writers are well equipped to face it. Hence King’s effective deployment of the May parable. It is worth reminding, however, that indigenous stories, written and told, do not constitute a “minority” or “ethnic” enclave within a nationalist canon. Nor does the great diversity of indigenous sovereignties constitute a monolithic subset, subordinated to a national—Canadian or American—ideology, except when invoking a strategic, and potentially dangerous, “Indian” or “Native” reduction. Indigenous stories

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are integral, much as they always have been, to an independent and autonomous body of sovereign literatures in North America. In the nationalist context, and often despite it, indigenous traditions comprise parallel and distinctively sovereign imaginings long preceding Anglo-European dominion.50 King uses plural sovereignties to obliterate the horizons of nationalist reductions, even as his stories neither add to, nor subtract from, the totality in representation that indigenous sovereignty has always encompassed. The problem for many readers, and most especially for endangered kids like Lum and Jeff Weise, is that they are no longer listening to indigenous stories, or worse, are taking the nationalist pastoral at its face value, without painting themselves back into its otherwise effaced—and plural—histories. In much the same way as Tecumseh misreads the “AIM” tattooed on Aunt Cassie’s fingers as a signature of the American Indian Movement—they actually spell the letters of Cassie’s daughter, Mia, given up for adoption many years prior (229–30; 233)—reading is always just a question of misreading; or rather, seeing differently, for once, what was right in front of you all along. Having indirectly suffered the violence of a colonialist history, Mia, too, is missing in action; her story is still defined by gaps and omissions in the community history that has yet to be fully recovered. But her mother, aunt, and cousin carry on; Mia, too, is remembered. This same principle of operational misreadings, which would reintroduce the truth of indigenous memory bleeding through the nationalist-colonial imaginary, applies to King’s indigenizing of pastoral in Truth & Bright Water. By the end of the novel, we realize that Swimmer’s project all along has been to return “disappeared” indigenous traces to the totality of the North American landscape and, alternatively, to make all pastoralizing abstractions—the church in Truth, for example—disappear. Inking in (so as to resurrect) the disappearances from a colonized history, and aggressively erasing ideologies of erasure: the net effect of Swimmer’s artistic retributions is equivalent. Truth is still truth, and no pastoral representation can lock it out for long. I have a hunch that Keats and Homer, on a cosmological if not sovereign basis, would have agreed. And I am equally certain that I may have misread King’s outstanding novel, too. *

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King’s insistence on writing character relationships across representational domains in history, as well as encouraging “relational” reading

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practices that bridge different sovereignties offers, I hope, a fruitful epitaph to the shop-worn dichotomy, essentialist versus constructivist, that has defined the “identity” politics of the North American literary academy for far too long. 51 When we look a little bit harder, we realize that King’s bedrock essentialism (if at the end of the day we really want to call it that) is made effective only through recognizing historically proven facts no less diluted for being representational: the ongoing indigenous search for justice inveighing against AngloEuropean genocide in North America, the necessity of confronting coordinated policies of English-only monolingualism (particularly in the United States) as state policy, and the deadening weight of a very sorry colonial history in general. King artfully co-opts representational energies so as to affirm the historical “facts” of genocide by the light of indigenous memories, yet without limiting the representation of the indigenous future to the horizon of past colonial experiences. Beyond inevitability, King’s writing also challenges ex post facto denials that such a genocide ever took place, disputing apologies for assimilation or Anglo-European nation-building projects. King’s writing expects little of a nationalist history, whose institutions he does not control, and chooses a different (more level) terrain by recognizing that the creative resources available to sovereign, indigenous artists are fictional as well as material.52 To survive, indigenous peoples have been forced to cede vast ground in the face of an historical violence of unparalleled ferocity. But across the intervening centuries indigenous writers have never stopped making, sharing, and expanding the stories of their own traditions as tellers on their own terms. In this, these writers have ceded nothing; indeed, their universe has grown. King’s fiction should therefore properly be considered as materially true and fictionally expansive, documenting as it does yet another illustration of indigenous sovereignty—not merely by holding the line against the nationalization of indigenous discourse by Anglo-Europeans but by penetrating deep into the heartlands of colonial traditions and finding material for its own sovereign projects there. The two sovereign domains, indigenous and Anglo-European, are importantly distinct; but they are also increasingly coextensive to subjects who know how to look and read both ways. Essentialist in inspiration, King’s writing is also constructivist, because he willingly risks employing categories—of universality and relationality—wherein indigenous and nonindigenous persons can each lay claim to the writing of an ongoing history, although it

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is pretty clear which party deserves the blame. This said, neither is King necessarily sanguine about the prospects for shared engagement. Describing his friendship with Louis Owens, King uses oxymoron: “[W]e were both hopeful pessimists. That is, we wrote knowing that none of the stories we told would change the world. But we wrote in the hope that they would.”53 By being willing to imagine engagement with the non-Native world, rather than burning the bridges to it, King nevertheless sees no alternative, no outside, to the stories of engagement and the worlds they create: “[I]n the novel [Robert Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls], as in life, whether [a character] lives or dies depends on which story he believes.”54 It follows that if King’s belief in the regenerating (if unrelenting) power of stories makes him constructivist, then he is willingly so; and storytelling proper, whereby the impulse to tell stories and to listen and learn from them, becomes likewise universal and immutable. But the telling itself, in King’s application of the indigenous essence, is unpredictable, life-giving insofar as it is life-changing, and never settles into the deathly conformity of the expected. Moreover, I suspect that King isn’t entirely content merely to restage another Borges moment in indigenous fiction, whereby the sleuth embeds his own solutions in the narrative, manufactures the necessary clues corresponding to what the authoritative readers, the detectives, want to observe after the fact, and collapses the conventional distinction between the sleuth and the criminal.55 Instead, in recent years, King has undertaken the project he first used as a theme in Medicine River, namely, the photographing of Native North Americans—many of whom are artists—as a corrective to Curtis’s comprehensive catalog of the vanishing native: To date, I’ve photographed about five hundred Native artists. In that time some of the people, such as the Navajo artist Carl Gorman, have died. Before I finish, more will pass away, and new ones will take their place. I may never finish the project, may never see the book I had imagined when my brother and I headed off that first time almost ten years ago. But it doesn’t matter. The photographs are themselves no longer the issue. Neither are the questions of identity. What’s important are the stories I’ve heard along the way. And the stories I’ve told. Stories we make up to try to set the world straight. 56

Like Lionel James’s cameo reappearance in Truth & Bright Water as the master of his own capitalist domain, selling technology back at a good mark-up to the dominant culture, King is choosing a corollary medium,

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photography, so as to create another shop of represented horrors and beauties we can run around in and, hopefully, learn something from. In lieu of the reader’s role as sleuth, scouting for authorial traps, King undoubtedly prefers his reader’s palpable commitment to imagining. By allowing King’s universe to live and breathe, by animating his stories with our own imaginative potentials, we recognize the ballooning inverse principle of collateral readership King has embraced since Green Grass, Running Water: that signs are always more than signs, and readers are—at least potentially—always more than isolated individuals in aggregate. If given the chance, we will embrace and build community. Collateral reading unlocks tangible realities insofar as ordinary people may transform their lives, or fail to transform them, by embracing (or denying) specific fields, regimes, or trajectories of representation. And by reading texts more carefully, it may be that we can come to read our lives differently, too. Ultimately, writing down the sequence of narrated events comprising our life, when rendered as a constellation of occurrences, doesn’t particularly matter. What matters is the nature of the stories we told in securing our relationships to those events and people that mattered to us. If our stories didn’t matter, then neither did we, and neither did they. If our stories have mattered to others, then we may finally enter the wormhole. That brings me to one final observation. King’s work and example have been so welcome, a tonic for a sometimes divided indigenous literature, because he is a constructivist believing in the process of storytelling as being able to transform the material world. Both positions, constructivist and materialist, quest after truths entombed in tricky signs, but differently so. For King, no one story is ever the same story twice, and this dynamic—the inimitable telling, each time unique— holds forth powerfully against the logic that strict (and even mechanical) adherence to one given story is required so as to restore order and discipline to the totality of the world. King’s stories certainly express the importance of order, balance, and harmony; however, they never require—or invite—the abuse of power ensuring adherence to a given order or reality beyond any one story’s expressive claim. It is a fine line: a believer in trickster creation, King keeps the expressivity and questions much of the discipline. By doing so, he refuses to make the origins and traditions of any one sovereignty an entombing monument, and rejects prescribing any one present, any one authorized telling, against the plentitude of once and future tellings. In practical storytelling terms, King’s strategic constructivism in the interest of sovereign essence—let me put academic discourse to

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the side for a moment—simply means that King’s storytellers are not going to pick the same story, are not going to insist on the same narrative fates for indigenous communities, or cooked-up “identities” for doomed Indians and Natives every time around. His characters won’t choose self-effacement when they can effectively imagine other, better ways around the problem of colonial history and its terminal creeds in other, potentially transformative ways. Accordingly, King picks the poison of his colonial necessity and, by writing in the English language, flourishes at it.57 King remains willing to write back to the old enemy in our shared language, English, because he feels that this is the only choice he can reasonably make.58 Rather than risking isolation, King opts for engagement burdened by the facts of a colonial history: This is [our] territory of Native oral literature. And it is the territory of contemporary Native written literature. The difference is this: instead of waiting for you to come to us, as we have in the past, written literature has allowed us to come to you. 59

In service to this cause, Thomas King makes a forceful argument against killing representations at once statist and static. As a viable alternative to these, the best Native writers and artists writing today, whether recognized or as yet unknown, are creating plural sovereignties within the same consciousness, “small panoramas of contemporary Native life by looking backward and forward with the same glance.”60 To return to this two-way portal: imagine seeing through the same aperture onto two different nations and sovereignties, two different temporalities, at once. As far as I can understand it, it’s about keeping an eye on both traditions at one and the same time—the sovereign and the colonial—and watching how and when they engage or turn away from each other. I conclude with a passage from King’s short story, “Where the Borg Are,” which successfully captures the plural sovereignties—all King’s relations—in a contemporary indigenous North American indigenous literature, and without conceding anything to the injustice of a nationalist and pastoralizing history: Milton’s grandfather was in the backyard setting up his tipi when Milton arrived with his backpack and his sleeping bag. “Nothing like sleeping out under the stars,” said his grandfather. “Like the old days, right?” “Right.”

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“Before television, right?” “You bet,” said his grandfather. “Here, give me a hand with this.” “What is it?” “An antenna. If you hook it to one of the lodge poles, it really improves the reception.” “We moving the big television outside?” “No,” said his grandfather, “it’s too heavy.” Watching Star Trek on the seventeen-inch portable wasn’t quite the same as seeing it on the big screen. But it was cozy inside the tipi, and during the commercials, if you looked up, you could see the stars.

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Conclusion

At once material and imagined, the plurality of sovereign experiences has come to define the contemporary experience of colonialism for Native North American peoples. As I have tried to argue in this book, these writers and their stories of contemporary indigenous North America artfully document the uneven, lived experiences of nation, capital, and blood in a landscape that nevertheless remains unalterably sovereign: “of the people.” To argue otherwise is to risk decentering sovereign custodianship of indigenous material and imaginary resources. I do not want this book to be interpreted as being committed to the latter task. Rather, I have attempted to interpret moments in contemporary indigenous novels where plural sovereignties cohabit place and mind, as well as to anticipate the effective separateness of indigenous literary sovereignty such that tribal and band custodians, when moving forward, can develop their own literatures—whether in or outside the English language as they see fit—and in formations of their own design irrevocably impacted by the colonial experience. This conclusion is bracketed by two instances: an ethnographic anecdote that reveals how plural sovereignties have operated effectively in the past, and by a recently reported event documenting their viability under conditions of mutual respect in the future. In between, I make a brief commentary on the legacy of my former teacher, Louis Owens, as well as revisit some of the overall claims of this book. *

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In a paragraph towards the end of a now dated anthropological study, Philip Drucker wryly notes the impact of commodity-based capitalism and the industrialization of the salmon harvest on

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traditional worldviews of the Kwakwaka’wakw: I recall an elderly Southern Kwakiutl [Kwakwaka’wakw] informant who wandered from the theme we were discussing—the function of the potlatch, about which he knew a great deal—into a long discourse on marine insurance, about which he also knew a great deal. The old gentleman owned a seine boat worth some forty thousand dollars, and, sensibly, kept it insured from keel to masthead light.1

Here Drucker’s observation makes his point by way of an apparently humorous digression. Yet his informant’s knowledgeable grasp of marine insurance, as the “wandering” (for Drucker) off the topic of the traditional potlatch, also makes my point as an example of plural sovereignties effectively bridging the interpretive “gap” to which Harold Cardinal alluded, between contemporary material realities of national captivity and far older sovereign precedents. Appearing at the conclusion of Cultures of the North-Pacific Coast—itself a powerful rendering of the salvage ethnography project Vine Deloria, Jr. so capably criticized in his landmark study, Custer Died for Your Sins—Drucker’s forty-year old anecdote is telling. It presents the traditional Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch expert stepping out of his traditional role as “informant” into a new guise: the savvy, insurance-minded seiner skipper. We are meant to be struck by the incongruity of the moment, as if seeing the modern indigenous subject, compounded and yet surprisingly whole, for the first time. It is in the revealing of this role, uncanny and yet upon reflection entirely appropriate, that we are made to understand that the nameless informant is offering the anthropologist tremendous insight into the reinvention of indigenous traditions. Instead, Drucker signals the “elderly gentleman’s” exceptionality, his appearance here in a contemporary form as evidence, by way of discrepancy and displacement, for the inevitability of indigenous assimilation to an Anglo-European national destiny. I would suggest, rather, that the appearance of the indigenous seiner skipper’s “long discourse” signals not only the imminent demise of participantobserver anthropology that Drucker’s own long and distinguished career after 1935 typified, but also establishes as “contemporary” merely the latest instance of a much longer, generational process of indigenous adaptation to plural sovereignties. 2 The latter is a commonplace of indigenous survival, probably just one instance among many others that Drucker might have cited had they fit within his ethnographic focus.

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Drucker’s glib stylization of his Kwakwaka’wakw subject’s “wandering” also signals the values that have been so necessary to indigenous life experience in the ongoing late colonial era: the incorporation of contemporary meanings, technology, and relevance—in this case, seiner, marine insurance, and fishing technology—within far older sovereign traditions, stories, and life-ways passed on to the next generation. What Drucker does not recognize is how integral the Kwakwaka’wakw fisherman’s carefully insured purse seiner is to the contemporary experience of the “traditional” potlatch proper. By investing in the band’s traditional knowledge of fishing in the form of the seiner as a capital investment, and by buying extensive insurance coverage for it, the skipper is ensuring that his community’s investment in knowledge and technology will be passed on, guaranteeing the continuance of the potlatch tradition for his children and grandchildren. Drucker’s indigenous informant was very helpfully sticking right to the topic, even if Drucker was oblivious to the fact. Visible to us for an instant, yet misperceived as anomaly, the unnamed Kwakwaka’wakw informant disappears within Drucker’s authoritative discourse, his passing barely noted. And so the ethnographic enterprise, like its entombed indigenous subject, fails to record the successful negotiation of modernity by indigenous individuals and communities belonging to whichever “contemporary” the as-yetcolonial present provides. As this example from Drucker’s ethnography attests, evidence for plural sovereignties may be readily found in a variety of extant writing across all disciplines being repatriated by sovereigns today. *

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Going back and rereading Drucker’s anthropological account with new eyes, from the perspective of the plural sovereignties indigenous subjects exercise as agents, allows for the recentering of landed sovereignty within a multivariate discourse of sovereign belonging—whose shorthand I’ve here called pluralism—and not merely as the afterburn of the theoretical buzz about “hybridity,” “ethnicity,” or “multiculturalism,” with the latter all too often serving as an academic voice-over for ongoing colonial dominance. Most nonsovereign academics I know own neither indigenous land nor histories, but they can and do attempt in good faith to “borrow” indigenous discourse through their work. Our words and perceptions can and do make positive changes happen for indigenous communities;

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all too often, however, our work does not. And herein lie the dangers of academic misappropriation of sovereign discourse. Via anthropological entitlement, Drucker clearly “borrowed” the representations of the Kwakwaka’wakw potlatch in English (if he didn’t entirely recognize their modern variant). For its part, can academic literary studies, whether materialist or constructivist in inspiration, truly ever “own” indigenous imaginings? I suggest that maintaining the distinction between nonsovereign “borrowing” for academic purposes and proprietary ownership for sovereign purposes is crucial. First, and based on my own experience, I can sketch out some of the pitfalls of nonsovereign borrowing. You can write well “about” an indigenous topic intellectually and know next to nothing about the peoples and places about which you are writing. Specific meanings will always elude you. (Or, worse, you can write badly about the particular issue or topic, regardless of how much you care. Your intellectual “topic” is another’s life-way. The gap between nonsovereign sympathy and a sovereign’s lived reality is constitutive and insurmountable.) Or perhaps you do know a tremendous amount, are an acknowledged expert in your area of indigenous studies, and yet still question how effective literary studies, in particular, really are when prosecuting the case of indigenous sovereignty in every other disciplinary or institutional hole-and-corner context where the fight is being waged. In this sense, literary studies in English marketed to a nonsovereign majority—as opposed to, for example, literary (or other) works informing specific local and sovereign communities— will always run the risk of having the whiff of snake-oil merchandising about it. (Which is not to say, I must emphasize, that sovereignty cannot and should not be conveyed in English: the novels that I have analyzed in this study are evidence in my view that it can.) If you are nonsovereign, you are getting tenure, or a paycheck, on the back of somebody else’s sovereign discourse. Even if you are sovereign, then you’re still running the risk of banking on the colonizer’s patronage. Words as such, in the wrong hands, are just so much air written down. And worse, such words can actually do some harm. As in my discussion of Jeanette Armstrong’s work, this difference between borrowing and owning sovereignty may be readily distinguished linguistically, between mother-tongue knowledge that is owned and lived and the colonizer’s knowledge that is merely acquired using a second language. One sovereign can master English as a second language—another will have mastered English as a first language— and both can effectively pursue sovereign objectives using it. But, as

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sovereign, he or she will always own whichever mother tongue as an instrument of collective history, whether it is native or acquired. By contrast, a nonsovereign may undertake to learn a sovereign tongue, too; then the question will be to what extent s/he may be permitted to acquire, versus borrow, its sovereign properties. For those sovereigns who cannot or do not feel compelled—at least not yet—to “own” sovereignty in their own mother- or grandmother-tongues, English and English language literature also serves a useful purpose in the “meantime” that is the colonial experience. Ultimately the question is proprietary, about who can enforce sovereign claims best and in whose longer-term interest and in which language. And, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be landed and sovereign is to possess (as in the sense of to “inhabit”) sovereignty best. This is not to say that indigenous discourse cannot or should not be taught to the nonsovereign in academic contexts, but that the outcomes of such learning may be different for different groups. I, for example, am a “taught” sovereigntist; it follows that as a nonsovereign, I can attempt to teach sovereignty as a politics without having any idea of what it means to live it in the actual world. (Which may be viewed by some as an oxymoronic stance.) Interestingly, Louis Owens, himself a mixedblood nonsovereign, taught me as he had been so taught by his sovereign mentors, most notably Vizenor and perhaps, in the more distant past, N. Scott Momaday, when the two briefly crossed paths at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1960s. Yet can indigenous sovereignty really be taught? Any sovereign who ever taught in a majority nonsovereign classroom, off the reserve, must have thought it could be, subject to relative degrees of understanding and commitment. But, via literary study, can sovereignty truly be taught to nonsovereigns? Should it be? How are the stakes different when doing so, between a lived reality for one and an academic exercise for another? It’s an important question. To say, no, “it cannot be taught,” is to acknowledge important differences existing between the landed and the nonlanded, the indigenous and the not, the different weightings, if you like, of historical costs and opportunities on the actors, indigenous and not, of yesterday and today. Who has blood on their hands and who doesn’t? Who got or gets caught, in a white supremacist world, because he or she is or was Native or Indian? Who is descended from, or related to, those who were implicated, directly or indirectly, in the dishonorable or unlawful death of sovereigns present and past? Who really means sovereignty

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talk and can back it up with concrete actions, or is just peddling the discourse of good intentions? Beyond blood discourse, these historical differences of reckoning and remembrance are crucially important to maintain. Not everyone can or should be sovereign. Yet to say, yes, to this question—that “sovereignty can and should be taught”—is also to acknowledge that a greater consciousness about what sovereignty actually is helps everyone, sovereign and not, over the long run. From the supply rather than demand side, this argument suggests that sovereignty should be taught whenever and wherever possible to the nonsovereign majority. You cannot come to respect indigenous sovereignty if you have not the slightest idea, inside or outside the academy, of what it is or seen it up close in the lives of sovereign communities. (It is likely that I am oversimplifying, but I expect that many, if not most, Anglo-Europeans outside the academy, particularly beyond the casino context, have little idea of what everyday, lived sovereignty is for most Native North Americans. I didn’t, in fact, until the first flash of insight when I saw three generations of Lummi fishing together in the same gillnet fishing boat.) One major task of this book has been to suggest to nonsovereign readers—to people like myself—that indigenous sovereignty, like the literature that has come to promote it, is utterly separate and apart from us. I’ve also suggested that, via a different lens—that of pluralism—sovereignty can nevertheless be accessible, in English, to some manageable and necessarily respectful extent. When invited to do so, we nonsovereigns may access it as a different, far older cosmology of what we ourselves hold to be sacred about North America. But indigenous sovereignty is not an artifact of the imagination merely: we can also learn from the modern exigencies of indigenous sovereignty as a political force shaping communities right now. We can put our shoulders behind sovereign moments and initiatives, for example. But we cannot and should not dare to access its separateness apart. This aspect of sovereignty does not belong to us. It is not ours and never has been. Without being the enrolled sovereign of an indigenous nation, Louis Owens taught me—and many others, until his death in 2002—a tremendous amount about the autonomy of indigenous sovereignty in a variety of traditions and contexts. But he never once dared to suggest to those of us who were nonsovereign that we could or should own sovereignty. Perhaps I am not entirely objective—I hope Owens was my friend, and not just my teacher—but I doubt that he ever intended for the body of his work (as influenced by theory as it may have been)

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to be read apart from a sovereigntist position that materializes meaningfully back down here on some particular tribe or band’s indigenous earth. As far as I could tell, theoretical sovereignty and lived sovereignty were not epistemological antitheses for Owens; he tried to make the two domains coextensive. His was, if you like, a critical practice toward the sovereignty of the spoken and written word, a theory of sovereignty he imagined could move beyond the material limitations imposed by blood, blood memory, and their colonial contexts. In this sense, he was not the inheritor of Momaday’s modernist legacy alone but, just as clearly, of Vizenor’s postmodern vision. And so, too, Owens may have inherited the latter’s sometimes dangerous tendency to dismiss context; if only so as to imagine a better, more sovereign world beyond it. So he attacked blood determinism aggressively, as the colonial-era instrument it is, and perhaps (although I wouldn’t bet on it) disregarded those safeguards blood still guarantees for the sovereign few, as opposed to the mixedblood many, and for whom blood status is still a vital issue securing life and livelihood. From this perspective, at least, Owens may not have entirely succeeded when seeking to recast sovereign aims, beyond blood nationalism, using theoretical discourse. (I hope my chapter on Dark River in this book stands, at least in part, as a rebuttal of this view.) Even so, Owens was an able and insightful critic who dared to talk of sovereignty largely outside the landed domain. And this displacement from lived, material contexts—as opposed to academic ones— has cost his legacy dearly. For example, Robert Warrior (whose work has figured prominently in this book and whose materialist vision I greatly admire) suggests in his introduction to The People and the Word that Owens’s work, while important, is flawed because it remains too “existential” and not rooted sufficiently to a “critical notion of experience,” which I read as the latter’s lack of sovereign experience.3 In my view, not only is Warrior’s general claim about necessary experience valid; in fact, the implied distinction he makes between sovereign and nonsovereign worldviews, as fundamentally separate and yet contiguous via the English language, has been fundamental to the pluralist fretwork undergirding this book’s overall argument. More problematic in my view is Warrior’s specific claim about Owens in particular; notably, the latter’s use of postmodern theory that obscures, for Warrior, “the facts surrounding the many ongoing struggles for specific territorial homelands.”4 And while in earlier chapters of this book I have criticized Owens’s (and others’)

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application of postmodern theory in similar terms, as when applied to the bodies of the mentally ill; or again, questioned Vizenor’s apparent disregard for local Lummi sovereignty and its material experience in The Heirs of Columbus, Warrior’s claim here about Owens is, in my view, too sweeping. Owens may have published books using theoretical tools, but in the classroom he capably taught sovereignty, at least insofar as I understand the latter term. In lecture after lecture, consultation after consultation, I never once heard Owens teach theory for theory’s sake or in any way abstracted from a given material context necessary to the fuller understanding of the work in question. (In fact, he openly criticized this practice: Lyotard was one of his favorite targets.) As I recall, Owens’s pedagogy always involved situating each literary text in its proper sovereign context. When we read Ceremony, we were guided toward uranium pit mining and its impact on specific Pueblo communities. When we read Bearheart, we learned about the importance of the occupation of the BIA offices in Washington D.C. in November 1972 and the specific political struggles and actors Vizenor was at once parodying and highlighting. I could cite numerous other examples from memory. Even so, through his use of theory to deterritorialize—so as to generalize across—specific sovereign struggles and material realities, Owens may have been liable (at least to some extent) for the charges Warrior levels. What probably isn’t sufficiently recognized, however, is what may have been gained by Owens’s displacement of sovereignty talk from its proper landed contexts (à la Vizenor): namely, how effectively Owens did succeed in opening the doors of the literary academy to sovereign discourse through his writing and teaching of the finest English-language indigenous literature those days provided. Within respectful limits, and guided by the reserve such a respect engenders (for what should not be taught when approaching someone else’s sovereign domain), Owens believed sovereignty could be taught by nonsovereigns to nonsovereigns. And we learned.5 As a consequence, to argue against Owens’s legacy by asserting his student Elvira Pulitano’s work as its culmination, requires considerable revision of Owens’s own prior record that—in retrospect, somewhat regrettably—took its own sovereigntist position for granted. It follows from the wholesale rejection of Owens’s “mixedblood” model, in turn, that we must debunk pluralism as merely the politically gutless paean to a groundless hybridity. Yet in Mixedblood Messages, Owens directly refutes what Chadwick Allen subsequently called “grafting”

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in Blood Narrative; that is, the simplistic reduction of indigenous sovereignty lumped in along with other “minority” discourses in a globalizing postcolonial (or canonical) master-narrative.6 Until the end of his too short life, I believe Owens was not naïve. I believe he understood the risks of mixing his blood metaphors—that materially lived sovereignty and theoretical approximations of sovereignty are crucially different things. And yet, as a nonsovereign, he nevertheless weighed such risks alongside the potentials of a constructivist mixed-metaphor he called “mixedblood,” which attempted to broaden the base of sovereign knowledge usefully (in the universities and cities) beyond the landed sovereign domain. Mainstream cities and universities, after all, could never really be sovereign spaces serving the cause of indigenous nations. Or could they? *

*

*

When initially I sat down to revise this collection of chapters, I chose the title Native States because of the (to me) evident plurality of sovereignties—of mind as well as of place—contemporary Native and American Indian fiction writers exercise in their writing. It seemed clear to me at the time that they do so, if not always through choice then through adaptation of existing sovereign traditions in the interests of ongoing survival and, beyond this, hoped-for prosperity for themselves and the communities from which they draw strength and inspiration. Drawing in these pages from the works of many of this generation’s finest indigenous writers, I have attempted to argue in a variety of contexts and across a reasonable range of novels that such a sovereign plurality is not divided, not “schizophrenic,” and not solely postmodern; although these names have often come to be associated with different literary projects documenting the contemporary development of indigenous literary traditions as sovereign. This generation of writers is now passing, of course, and a newer generation of indigenous writers is emerging to recast some of the issues I have presented here. It is perhaps appropriate that I had to scrap the initial title—not on its merits: it’s a very good title for the purpose I had in mind— but because Gerald Vizenor, being the founding father of constructivist readings of pluralized sovereignty, beat me to the punch with his own Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade, first published thirty years ago and reissued in 2003 with a new title: Wordarrows: Native States of Literary Sovereignty.7 As the reissue of Wordarrows suggests, the project of literary sovereignty that Vizenor

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inaugurated, and which the other indigenous writers in this volume continue to champion, is ongoing. And, as the literary exercise of what Warrior calls the “ungovernable, unpredictable, and obdurate” spirit of indigenous sovereignty, may this project be everlasting.8 And, now, let me make some necessary reminders before closing. By asserting sovereign plurality in these pages, I hope it is clear that I have not been endorsing assimilation within an Anglo-European canonical-nationalist framework. I have used pluralism exclusively as an adjective modifying the contemporary forms and practices of indigenous sovereignty in the colonial context and solely, I trust, in the interests of indigenous political autonomy. I have not invoked the discourse of pluralism in the attempt to confine freestanding indigenous sovereignty within the domain of Anglo-European culture, theory for theory’s sake, and the psychology of conquest. In addition, although indigenous literature certainly derives energy, market share, and volume from the shared cultural domain sovereigns and non-sovereigns access via the English language, I am not keen that my work (or this book) be shackled to a “culturalist” framework which, as Konkle warns confines Native writing to the expression of the critic’s notion of the values or beliefs that constitute that culture and then incorporates Native peoples into the United States [or Canada] politically by making them representative of one of the many ethnic cultures that constitute the multicultural [nation].9

In the end, whether I have succeeded in avoiding the multicultural trap will be for the readers to judge. Rather, I hope for the acknowledgment of a shared sovereign horizon to which all responsibly engaged parties can subscribe— the status and the nonenrolled, nonindigenous stakeholders who are welcomed and accepted by indigenous custodians legitimately as such, mixedbloods in cities or on reserves and reservations—as a common denominator within an activist, environmentally responsible “indigenist” discourse.10 This shared sovereign horizon is the rightful harvest of the indigenous literary emergence across the last generation, and not solely that academic fate so carefully nurtured by the university academy and bearing fruit all too often picked so as to serve the canon formation of settler literary traditions. Sovereigns will continue to decide if, and how far, nonsovereigns should participate.

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Beyond documenting the plurality of literary sovereignty in contemporary indigenous fiction, the previous chapters have also shared a common interest in negotiating the divide currently existing between materialist and constructivist approaches to indigenous literature. Materialist critics have often supported a nation-centered sovereignty; constructivists also have supported a position that may or may not question the centeredness of any one particular “national” construction. Rather than enforcing this divide, I have sought to erode it. In these chapters, the gap between “real” and imagined domains of indigenous experience can and often does diminish to the point where, one hopes, they may become meaningfully contiguous in a shared and respectful sovereign exercise. Each of the novels studied offers its own necessary, indigenous transformation of material circumstances as given or imposed. Such acts of imagining—wishing the indigenous world otherwise through sovereign acts of immunity—are hardly the stuff of an empty postmodern shibboleth. I am also enough of a materialist critic, however, to believe that all narratives are to a great extent determined by the kinds of actual (usually economic) conditions giving rise to them. Imagining the world differently accordingly requires transforming specific structures and institutions, empowering individual sovereigns to collectively manage and negotiate, in Weaver’s terms, “communitist” necessity. For example, many of the novels I have discussed demonstrate how much of the work that sovereign nations perform today emerges as a corporate enterprise. Marketing “Indian” or “Native” being in our own day is increasingly determined by structures of capitalism. Such features are not only characteristic of the Anglo-European nation without but also, increasingly, the indigenous nation within, given the ongoing capitalization and nationalization of indigenous resources globally. Although constitutive, such material features and constraints remain only one part of the literary dynamic I have been trying to trace in these pages. But to ignore them as inconsequential to the project of achieving literary sovereignty would be to risk subordinating the lived world to the imagined one. This, too, is no longer acceptable in a now-capitalized indigenous world of diminishing returns. Even where I have disagreed with specific emphases or approaches used by specific indigenous writers and thinkers, I have attempted to appreciate their power of imagining a present indigenous materiality differently, as the lifeline to an alternative, more affirmative and— hopefully—more sovereign future. Accordingly, the pluralist dynamic of multiple sovereignties to which I have alluded throughout this book

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must acknowledge as its effective limit the straitjacket of contemporary colonialism. The indigenous novel of the future will undoubtedly document, so as to exceed, present colonial limits. Fictionalizing this forward moment of literary sovereignty, shimmering and autonomous, becomes not only interesting but even instrumental to the ongoing reinvention of indigenous traditions. Constructivism actually enables forward sovereignty in this regard, by reworking the demands of the as-yet-colonial present into forms that actually may transgress the functional limits of present constraint. As Vizenor’s best work attests, literary liberation is the result, and this liberation is not merely representational but has within its scope the power to rupture the material world as it is. At the extreme, neither materialist nor constructivist renderings of indigenous sovereignty can entirely do without the other. Cardinal’s “mirage gap” still exists today, and not only between AngloEuropean and indigenous understandings of the national narrative. Unfortunately, it also exists among competing practitioners and renderings of indigenous sovereignty. There’s been too much talk of the constructivists not embracing a sovereignty-centered vision and vice versa. (Vizenor’s career, for example, has been a testament to defeating this kind of instrumented dichotomy.) It seems unhelpful to mandate a perpetual schism or antagonism between disparate and ensuing legacies of sovereignty once held exogamous to the indigenous literary record and now, increasingly, made meaningful through it. In the English-language literature of the present lies the retelling of the indigenous past as well as the recasting of the future. From the evidence in these pages, it seems that prospects for materialist and constructivist approaches combining within a shared sovereign vision look brighter than ever before. Of course, the best indigenous novels are always those that have yet to be written or imagined. *

*

*

In 2002 and 2004, on two separate journeys, Lummi Nation healing poles headed east on a month-long journey across the continent to share in mourning with their proximal neighbor, the settler-colonial nation known as the United States of America. Harvested in the Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington State, the poles were first commissioned, and then carefully shaped and painted, by craftsmen and craftswomen belonging to the Lummi Nation’s House of Tears Carvers. The cedar trees from which the totem poles were carved are older than the founding of the American colonies by British settlers.

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During the second journey the poles made, throughout the month of September 2004, indigenous leaders and elders offered blessings in major metropolitan areas (Sacramento, Albuquerque, and Nashville) and at the Gettysburg National monument. The two poles (called “Liberty” and “Freedom”) were welcomed as guests by other sovereign indigenous nations along the way before arriving at the Pentagon in Washington D.C.11 Upon arriving at their destination, the poles were presented to official representatives of the United States and were dedicated on September 19, 2004, in commemoration of the fallen dead during the attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as to honor the past and present members of the United States armed forces, including many indigenous veterans. (These two poles followed two others already placed, in 2002, by the Lummi Nation and other local representatives at sites in New York [Healing Pole] and Pennsylvania [Honoring Pole] dedicated to those killed at the World Trade Center and on Flight 93, respectively.) Lummi master carver Jewell “Praying Wolf” James has stated that the purpose behind the carving of all four poles was to honor the sovereignty of all free peoples in a shared exercise of grief. In 2002, Darrell Hillaire, Lummi council chairman, commented upon the significance of the journey the first pole (Healing Pole) made to New York: This process is familiar to us. Just this time, it’s a nationwide ceremony. We’re not doing anything different than what my grandma would do. To offer something for their sorrow, to listen to their grief is to give them medicine for their hearts.12

Honoring the 9/11 dead and those men and women in uniform who have died since, the Lummi healing poles were gifted to the settlercolonial nation by indigenous sovereigns, despite centuries of mistrust, anger, and betrayal. As the example of the Lummi healing poles suggests, there is a third road down which all persons among the nations, nonsovereigns and sovereigns alike, may choose to walk. It is not only a road connecting back to our remembered traditions, as both enemies and friends, but also one that walks right through the middle of our future as a shared predicament. This third road is a way of imagining the future differently, of recalling the injustices of the past truthfully and, perhaps most importantly for the younger generations, of approaching the material realities of the present challenges that face us all. Those who walk down this road together demand the mutual respect shared among sovereign nations in close proximity.

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For indigenous peoples, this road will remain sovereign and necessarily landed. Yet walking down this road also invites the imagination of sovereign forms and partnerships as yet unknown. For those of us who are neither indigenous nor sovereign, I suggest we accept the gift of honor the Lummi healing poles have given us and commit ourselves in kind to honoring Lummi sovereignty, all indigenous sovereignties, as we have been so honored. I wrote this book in the firm belief that all who are committed to the cause of indigenous sovereignty might walk down this road and towards this horizon together. At least, as far as we can go.

Notes

Preface and Acknowledgments 1. I echo the words which, arguably, inaugurated critical study of representations of Native North America within the literary domain of the colonized Americas. See Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1965), ix. An exhaustive analysis of the literary tradition of savagism, Pearce’s study, first published in 1953, was among the first to historicize the ongoing ideology of Anglo-European conquest.

Introduction: Plural Sovereignties and Indigenous Literary Formation 1. 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). 2. The ethnographic term “upstreaming” denotes a commonplace practice—and a commonplace problem—whereby social scientists take a contemporary finding and attempt to posit, retroactively, a linear relationship from that contemporary finding to a previous event, supposition, practice, or belief. 3. Stuart Hall’s original phrase is “race is the modality through which class is lived.” See “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 55. 4. 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.

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5. Describing this operative multiplier comprising the plurality of any “national” experience begs poesis, the use of metaphor. Negotiating Cardinal’s “mirage gap” across sovereignties nevertheless requires a commitment to lived history as “real,” including the acknowledgment of substantive material outcomes grounding metaphor as praxis. 6. On behalf of the First Nations of Alberta, Cardinal was empowered on June 22, 1998 to enter into bilateral negotiations with the Canadian government, in an effort to hold Canada accountable to provisions originally guaranteed to First Nations by Treaty 8 (1899). Although Cardinal, who died in 2005, did not live long enough to see the full implementation of Treaty 8 sovereignty provisions on behalf of Northern Alberta bands and communities, he did witness the creation of the self-governing Canadian territory, Nunavut, on terms of parallel sovereignties similar to those he argued for during the Treaty 8 negotiations. 7. Craig Womack has written that “hybridists continue to attribute to the sovereigntists arguments they have never made [rather than addressing] the role of the literary artist and critic in helping, rather than hindering or simply ignoring” sovereignty. See his “Review,” American Indian Quarterly 28.1&2 (2004): 133. In the wake of Elvira Pulitano’s Towards a Native American Critical Theory (2003), differences between these groups have only sharpened; and while I don’t think it is right to paper over important differences between them, I also believe “hybridists” and “separatists” can, and often do, collaborate effectively in the sovereign interest. As a field, we simply require more evidence of such collaboration in everyday terms and with palpable and meaningful—that is, sovereign-centered—outcomes. 8. 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. 9. See Womack, Red on Red, 60. In the chapters that follow, I see the emergence of plural sovereignties as “modifying and rejecting” the hegemony of Anglo-European nationalism. 10. Stuart Christie, “Warriors’ Trade: Duncan MacDonald and the Birth of Separate Sovereignties During the nimiipu War of 1877.” Paper delivered at the Indigenous Studies Association meeting, University of Oklahoma. Norman, Oklahoma. May 2006. 11. See Jace Weaver’s discussion, particularly in Chapter Four, of sustaining a plural and yet separatist sovereign literary tradition in That the People Might Live (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997). Weaver sustains his commitment to what I’m calling a “separatist yet plural” platform in “Splitting the Earth: First Utterances and Pluralist Separatism” where he repeats his earlier injunction (from Turtle Goes to War) to let “a thousand separatisms bloom” (46). See his chapter in American Indian Literary Nationalism, ed. Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2006).

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12. 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. 13. Weaver, “Splitting the Earth,” American Indian Literary Nationalism, 44. 14. Michelle Raheja, “Reading Nanook’s Smile: Visual Sovereignty, Indigenous Revisions of Ethnography, and Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner),” American Quarterly 59.4 (2007): 1163. 15. Robert Odawi Porter, “The Demise of the Ongwehoweh and the Rise of the Native Americans: Redressing the Genocidal Act of Forcing American Citizenship upon Indigenous Peoples,” Harvard Blackletter Law Journal 15 (1999) and “The Inapplicability of American Law to the Indian Nations,” Iowa Law Review 89 (2004): 1595. 16. See Charles F. Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: Norton, 2005). 17. 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. 18. 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). 19. Warrior, “Deloria on Sovereignty,” 55. 20. Ibid., 54. 21. 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. 22. For recent, quality treatments of nineteenth-century translations of sovereign 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 NineteenthCentury 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.

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Notes

23. 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. 24. See Catherine Rainwater, Dreams Like Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 36. 25. The term is Owens’s, “Columbus Had It Coming: Crossbloods, Crossreading, and Cultural Survival,” Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 9–11. 26. See Stephen May, Indigenous Community-Based Education (Clevedon, Eng.: Multilingual Matters, 1999). 27. See Mihesuah, “Introduction,” Natives and Academics, 3. 28. Fixico, “Ethics,” 94. 29. Angela Cavender Wilson, “Grandmother to Granddaughter: Generations of Oral History in a Dakota Family,” in Natives and Academics, 29–30. 30. Thomas King, Introduction. All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990), x–xi. 31. Warrior, “Deloria on Sovereignty,” 57. 32. Duane Champagne and Carol Goldberg, “Changing the Subject: Individual versus Collective Interests in Indian Country Research,” Wicazo Sa Review 20.1 (2005): 59–60. 33. Devon Mihesuah’s term, “commonalty of difference,” calls attention to the diversity actively shaping indigenous communities including “race (or races), tribal social systems, factionalism, culture change, physiological appearance, and personal motivations.” See her “Commonalty of Difference,” Natives and Academics, 37. 34. 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. 35. 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. 36. The term “flexible citizenship” is Aihwa Ong’s. See her Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1998). 37. Hale, Bloodlines, 54.

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38. 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). 39. See Hertzberg, Pan-Indian Movements, 81. There is every indication that the SAI leadership entertained this mixedblood recruitment drive to raise funds, as well as to build alliances with like-minded Americans not of tribal ancestry, or only virtually so, including members whose blood quantum was ranged from “one-sixteenth to one-two hundred fifty sixth who [were] extremely anxious to have it recognized” (102). 40. Arnold Krupat, Red Matters: Native American Studies (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 111. 41. 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. 42. In the United States, traditional sovereign courts are operating increasingly independently of the structures inherited from the IRA even while attempting to maintain strict standards in law and keeping dialogue with federal and state authorities open. See, for example, the policy statement “Philosophy on Sovereignty and Historical Context” provided by the U.S. Tribal Law and Policy Institute at http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/vision.htm (accessed on June 15, 2007). 43. Deloria, Jr. and Lytle, Nations Within, 105. 44. See Brennan, “Introduction,” When Brer Rabbit Meets Coyote: AfricanNative 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. 45. 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

236

46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

Notes Identity in Canada and the United States: An Overview,” Hypatia 18.2 (2003): 3–31. Deloria, Jr., and Lytle, Nations Within, 236. When tailored carefully, this pragmatic “common, albeit artificial” consensus that emerged within indigenous communities post-IRA and into the AIM era—between otherwise distinctly sovereign constituencies and interests as “ethnic Indians”—sought to avoid reinscribing blood terminology within indigenous communities and, however schematic, may have allowed for greater visibility for indigenous issues and concerns. Deloria, Jr. and Lytle, Nations Within, 241. 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: VintageRandom, 1978), 195. After a term borrowed from John T. Noonan Jr., David E. Wilkins labels the current juridical-hegemonic consensus that shields U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence from sovereign challenge the “masking” of justice. See his “Introduction,” American Indian Sovereignty and the U. S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice. (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1997), 8–10. Deloria, Jr. and Lytle make a useful distinction between the attempts John Collier made to enfranchise indigenous governments under a legislative settlement, the IRA, and inalienable sovereign rights to self-determination that can never be extinguished legislatively. See Nations Within, 244–45. Deloria, Jr. and Lytle, Nations Within, 267. 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). Duke Redbird, “From We Are the Metis,” in An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, 124. Redbird, 125. Original emphasis. Redbird, 126–27. In 1995, Redbird co-produced Dance Me Outside, a fine piece of community drama set in Native country. Redbird’s work and example have also influenced contemporary Canadian Native writers, notably Jeannette Armstrong, whose Slash (1985) I look at in greater detail in chapter two. See Joe Sawchuk, “Negotiating an Identity: Métis Political Organizations, the Canadian Government, and Competing Concepts of Aboriginality,” American Indian Quarterly 25.1 (2001): 74. I discuss Canadian Native plural sovereignties with reference to literary works by Harry Robinson and Jeannette Armstrong in chapter two and

Notes

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66.

67.

68. 69.

70. 71.

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Thomas King in chapter five below. The Canadian Bill C-31, passed by Parliament in 1985, restored Native status to certain members among these previously excluded constituencies based upon individual application. John Collier, Indians of the Americas: The Long Hope (New York: Mentor/ New American Library, 1947), 15. Ibid., 175–76. See http://www.gov.nu.ca/English/about/cg.pdf (accessed November 21, 2005). 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. Recently the Labrador Inuit Association (LIA) entered into an agreement with Canada by ratifying “a modern-day treaty . . . the first of its kind in Atlantic Canada.” See http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/nr/prs/j-a2005/2-02574_e.html (accessed August 20, 2005). One has only to look southward, to the vexing history of the treaty-making tribes engaging with the British, then United States, government after 1763—concluding ignominiously in 1871 with the unilateral termination by the U.S. Congress of constitutional rights to treaty-making guaranteed to all Native Americans—to observe the all-too-revocable promises of any judicial or legislative approach. Roth writes: “This agreement was to extinguish aboriginal title and settle for 8 percent of the Nisga’a claim area to be designated as ‘Nisga’a Lands,’ with some fee-simple-like areas (i.e., on the model of private ownership) to replace Indian reserves outside the Nisga’a Lands. In exchange, the Nisga’a would receive a cash settlement and would cease to fall under the Indian Act: they would run their own justice and other systems and have a version of self-government, and they would also pay taxes like other Canadian citizens” (“Without Treaty,” 149). Roth, “Without Treaty,” 147. Pokagon’s initial and strident rejection of Anglo-European nationality, in defense of prior “Indian” (sovereign) entitlements, was subsequently entitled The Red Man’s Book of Lamentations and distributed unofficially at the fairgrounds. The speech Pokagon subsequently gave at the exhibition, in his role as the invited keynote speaker to assembled delegates, was radically different in tone and approach from the first speech. The second, inaugural address urged assimilation for indigenous peoples within the broader AngloEuropean national design. See Walker, Indian Nation, Chapter One. Qtd. in Hertzberg, Pan-Indian Movements, 87. Original emphasis. Native North Americans were not given the vote until very late in the period of colonization. It was not until an ad hoc decision in 1919, subsequently formalized in 1924, and in acknowledgment of indigenous persons serving in the U.S. military during World War I, that Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act in support of universal suffrage and citizenship for all Native Americans.

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72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

81.

Notes After 1924, however, individual states did not necessarily facilitate the exercise of indigenous electoral rights. For a comprehensive and standard timeline, see American Friends Service Committee, “Voting Rights Timeline,” http://www. afsc.org/pwork/0410/041005.htm (accessed July 2, 2006). Native Canadians were not given the franchise until Parliament passed the “Indian Act” of 1960, subsequently ratified under Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982. A piece of legislation, Section 35 guarantees unspecified “aboriginal rights” to Natives previously extinguishable by Parliament under common law. The term “National Indian” is Thomas King’s. See The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005), 79. As above, the term “white man’s Indian” is Robert F. Berkhofer Jr.’s. King, Truth about Stories, 85. King notes that the Charles Eastman quote appearing here comes in the “closing paragraph,” as the final words, of Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). 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. Womack, for example, readily identifies lesbian, gay and “queer” Creeks as necessary to the ongoing transformation of local sovereignty debates. In response to recent Oklahoma Cherokee efforts to criminalize homosexuality, Womack writes: “The tribes, sadly, seem to lack the vision of viewing gay marriage as an opportunity to actually do something sovereign and to delineate tribal government from state government, asserting autonomy instead of derivative status, seeing gay marriage as an opportunity rather than a liability.” See his “Review: Lynn Riggs, The Cherokee Night and Other Plays,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 17.1 (2005): 121. See also Chapter Eight of Womack, Red on Red. Womack’s literary construction of Creek nationality may be separatist; just as clearly, however, his reading of indigenous sovereignty—in particular as it would safeguard the sexual sovereignty of Creeks, whatever their preference—is pluralist. 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”

Notes

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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. 82. Owens argued that as parties to mutually binding treaties whose claims are still legitimately in force, indigenous tribes and bands were never colonized, at least by definition, and therefore cannot, and do not, possess a “postcolonial” outlook. See I Hear the Train (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 214. I understand Owens’s position as acknowledging, equally, the destructive effects of Anglo-European colonialism on free and sovereign indigenous peoples as well as its pernicious effects once internalized by indigenous individuals (and experienced in terms of captivity and dependency). 83. See Jace Weaver, “More Light than Heat: The Current State of Native American Studies,” American Indian Quarterly 27.2 (2007): 236–37.

One Blood Legacies: Pathology and Power in Works by Sherman Alexie and A. A. Carr 1. Rebecca Tillett describes Alexie’s Indian Killer as presenting the “idea of real monstrosity on the loose within the real world.” See “ ‘Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces’: The Concerns of the Living Dead in Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 17.3 (2005): 108. 2. Reading Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari alongside Eye Killers makes the return of the capitalist vampire seem the culminating fragmentation of a “primitive” totality: “Primitive societies are not outside history; rather, it is capitalism that is at the end of history. . . . It cannot be said that the previous formations did not foresee this Thing that only came from without by rising from within, and that at all costs had to be prevented from rising.” See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 153. 3. Louis Owens, “The Jailing of Cecelia Capture,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 8 (June 1984): 56–58. Critics have noted the wide diffusion of Anglo-European, “modernist” styles and techniques toward comparatively “authentic” American Indian narratives, and vice-versa, in the last generation, a development Kenneth Lincoln calls “Renaissance.” See his Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), 3–5. 4. Owens, “Jailing,” 56. 5. Ibid. Emphasis added. 6. Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer (New York: Warner, 1996), 220. Subsequent references to the text will be made parenthetically by page number.

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7. John Purdy, “Crossroads: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9.4 (Winter 1997): 9. 8. Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 91. 9. Owens, Other Destinies, 90. 10. Rob Barrett, The Psychiatric Team and the Social Definition of Schizophrenia (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 23. 11. Anne M. Lovell, “ ‘The City Is My Mother’: Narratives of Schizophrenia and Homelessness,” American Anthropologist 99.2 (1997): 355–56. For a recent and thoughtful elaboration of the constructivist basis of schizophrenia, which uses a “dialogic theory of self” to engage with schizophrenic presence as “an ensemble of dialogues,” see John Lysaker and Paul Lysaker, “Being Interrupted: The Self and Schizophrenia,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19.1 (2005): 1–21. 12. Clara Claiborne Park, “Canst Thou Not Minister to a Mind Diseas’d?” Rejoining the Common Reader: Essays, 1962–1990 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1991), 221. 13. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press), 1991. 14. Lovell, “Narratives,” 355. 15. One can trace this discursive lineage back to Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978), Norman Cousins’s Anatomy of an Illness (1979) and, as mentioned, to Foucault’s discourse archaeology in Madness and Civilization (1967). That Alexie’s work may be plotted alongside these liberal scholars, albeit with a compelling indigenous focus, comes initially as no small surprise. Indian Killer criticizes a naive liberal vision (represented by the blind, faithful love of John’s mother, Olivia Smith) that would universalize metaphors of mental illness and homelessness across cultures, prejudices, and worldviews. 16. Lovell, “Narratives,” 355. 17. Ibid., 356. 18. Strictly speaking, the “schizophrenic text” cannot exist at all, because its subject does not plot time chronologically, and hence his or her story lacks any conventional basis in narrative. Accordingly, John is homeless within a spatial (rather than linear) narrative and walks off the girders of his construction job into dreams conjoining past and future (76). That he believes he must die once the “last skyscraper in Seattle” is constructed seems both logical and unduly fatalistic; there is no other place for him to go (103). 19. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 54–55. 20. Gerald Vizenor, Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader (Hanover: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1994), 246. 21. Owens, Other Destinies, 8; 19–20; 98–99; 150. 22. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 32. 23. For Cook-Lynn’s dismissal of the work of Owens, Vizenor, and other writers she terms “urban mixed-bloods,” see “American Indian Intellectualism

Notes

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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and the New Indian Story,” in Mihesuah, Natives and Academics, 124. For Owens’s response, see Mixedblood Messages, 151–57. Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 69–70; Other Destinies, 90–94. The remarkably static, polarized image “freezes” this defining moment of Smith’s first contact with Anglo-European culture as one of alienation. See my reading of the works of Thomas King in chapter five. Scott H. Nelson and Spero M. Manson, “Mental Health and Mental Disorders,” in American Indian Health: Innovations in Health Care, Promotion, and Policy, ed. Everett R. Rhoades (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000), 311–12. Statistics never tell the entire story, but white mothers adopt white children only 4.8 percent of the time, a number that casts doubt upon generalizations about the lesser desirability or frequency of cross-race adoptions (Statistical Abstract of the United States; U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Economics, and Statistics Administration; Bureau of the Census, 117th ed., 1996). Lovell, “Narratives,” 360. Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 77. Owens, “Jailing,” 58. James Spradley, You Owe Yourself a Drunk: An Ethnography of Urban Nomads (New York: Waveland, 1999), 97–108. Owens, Other Destinies, 20. Darrell Jesse Peters, “Diving Home: Centering in Louis Owens’s Wolfsong,” American Indian Quarterly 21 (Summer 1997): 471. The baiting and punishment of white liberals are among Alexie’s favored pastimes (see Timothy Egan, “An Indian without Reservations,” New York Times Magazine [January 18, 1998], 19). Violence against whites, however, is merely one manifestation of a collective madness operating in Indian Killer, and the narrator’s early declaration that “John needed to kill a white man” (25) serves, sensationally, as a false lead for another of the text’s salient projects: the indigenous deconstruction of the detective story. Lovell, “Narratives,” 356. Nelson and Manson, “Mental Health,” 315; Lawrence S. Wissow, “Suicide among American Indians and Alaska Natives,” American Indian Health: Innovations in Health Care, Promotion, and Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2000), 260–80. Marlita A. Reddy, ed., Statistical Record of Native North Americans (Detroit: Gale Research, 1993), 717–19. Owens, Other Destinies, 19. Ibid., 23. Purdy, “Crossroads,” 7. Imposing schizophrenia on the subjects of his pre-9/11 writing, Alexie’s view is apparently “Romantic,” which latter term Hayden White describes as “born of the awareness of both the creative and the demonic aspects of a capitalist society, [and which] prefigures the schizophrenic condition of life reflected in modernism’s style.” See The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1987), 152. Alexie’s more recent work, on the other hand, represents

242

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

Notes the struggle of indigenous Americans to resist genocide in terms that increasingly reject a “schizophrenic” condition and the latter’s modernist (or, even, postmodernist) style. A. A. Carr, Eye Killers (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 3. Subsequent references to the text will be made parenthetically by page number. Kimberly TallBear writes: “Blood talk and, increasingly, talk of DNA have unfortunately infiltrated tribal political life and are used to help justify cultural and political authority. Such biological measures reaffirm racial definitions of the tribal nation and who rightly claims tribal citizenship. . . . [S] uch attempts to protect cultural authority actually undermine that authority.” See “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe,” Wicazo Sa Review 18.1 (2003): 81. See Jesse Peters, “A Multitude of Routes, Roads and Paths: Transcultural Healing in A. A. Carr’s Eye Killers,” Paradoxa 6.15 (2001): 184. In his reading of Eye Killers, Peters makes use of Vizenor’s distinction between synecdoche and metonymy, suggesting that metonymy threatens to reduce the diversity of individual sovereign experiences, whereas synecdoche risks unduly homogenizing these same particularities across groups (186–87). That genres, too, impose signatures of purity and uniformity on otherwise heterodox texts provokes Jacques Derrida’s scorn and irony: “Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres. I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them.” See Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 223. Thanks to Ian Fong for this reference. See Stephen Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation,” in Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 119–44. Applying Arata’s framework to Eye Killers, Falke represents the threat of indigenous miscegenation visiting not the metropolitan center (i.e., Bram Stoker’s London in the late Victorian era) but a traditionally indigenous center already penetrated by capital formations. The term “multiple marginalization” is taken from Arturo Aldama. See “Tayo’s Journey Home,” in Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders, ed. John C. Hawley (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 166. In this context, plurality is itself suspect: to practice any more than one sovereignty effectively is also to run the risk of being considered a traitor to nations requiring exclusive allegiance. Catherine Rainwater, “Who May Speak for the Animals? Deep Ecology in Linda Hogan’s Power and A. A. Carr’s Eye Killers,” Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, ed. Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 270. Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1998), 15. The term “postindian” speaks to what Vizenor calls “a fugitive pose in national histories; at the same time, the indian was a cultural concoction of bourgeois nostalgia and social sciences evidence” (145).

Notes 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60.

61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

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Qtd. in Peters, “Multitude,” 195. Purdy, “Crossroads,” 9. Ibid., 15–16. Rebecca Tillett, “Your Story Reminds Me of Something,” Ariel 33.1 (2002): 151. Contemporary literary nationalists, I’d note, risk neither extreme in their own balancing of plural sovereignties on the one hand and embracing the English language as a contemporary resource for sovereigns on the other. See Weaver, Womack, and Warrior eds., American Indian Literary Nationalism. Tillett, “Story,” 155–56. I speak further to the notion of national captivity narratives in contemporary indigenous cultures in chapter two, elaborating on a trajectory established in the final chapter of Shari Huhndorf’s Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2001). In Eye Killers, Carr acknowledges Owens in his dedication with “undying thanks” (vii). Descriptions of the novel’s conclusion, as endorsing a pluralist-assimilative project in “ethnic” terms, mislead by way of reduction. See Alexie’s comment to Purdy above; also, Rebecca Tillett’s description of a “multi-ethnic group of vampire hunters” in “Resting in Peace, Not in Pieces: The Concerns of the Living Dead in Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 17.3 (2005): 108. The term “desiring machine” is Deleuze and Guattari’s, used axiomatically in their Anti-Oedipus. Falke selects Melissa Roanhorse, in particular, but only as the repetition of his own reminiscences of another lover, Christiane, departed many ages ago when Falke was not as yet undead (99; 102). Citing Moretti, Tillett represents the vampire’s threat as that of capitalist accumulation, an insatiable desire beyond history, destroying everything in its path (“Story,” 162–63). Enlisting the vampire in these interests of national consumption and blood metaphor—of the eternal promise of capital circulation—poses an imminent danger to the otherwise finite, material indigenous domain. Jacques Derrida uses the term “hauntology” to locate the revisitations of an alienated Marxism upon the stage of a triumphant global capitalism. See Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Peggy Kamuf trans. (New York: Routledge, 1994). In Eye Killers, hauntology aptly describes links between Falke’s quest for continuing life-in-death and his serialized mourning after absent truth (his former life and its love, Christiane). Peters, “Multitude,” 184. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 189. Falke’s own barbarian tendency, his longings for a past medieval unity in time, seeks to colonize what Deleuze and Guattari rather unfortunately reproduce in Anti-Oedipus as a “savage” stage of natural development. Rainwater links Falke’s fate to that of Michael, both of whom recognize in each other larger adversarial forces at work (“Animals,” 271). Falke is

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66.

67. 68.

69. 70.

Notes Wolf (ma’iitsoh), a lawful agent of evil, to Roanhorse’s Coyote (ma’ii); in concert, their shared struggle engages good and evil, equally, as agents of transformation. Falke’s quest for ontological justification apart remains subject to material forms of time and language. He drinks blood in the avoidance of history, but at the very moment he taps its authentic vein he must therefore enter its blood discourses; hence, the uncanniness of Falke’s eerie old-world diction that Melissa hears but cannot understand (12). Ortiz, “National Indian Literature,” 121–22. Ortiz views latter-day nationalism as resistance involving “the creative ability of Indian people . . . to gather in many forms of the socio-political colonizing force which beset them and to make these forms meaningful in their own terms” (“National Indian Literature,” 120). In American Indian Literary Nationalism Weaver, Womack, and Warrior canonize Ortiz’s model, deriving from his seminal article axioms fundamental to their understanding of literary nationalism. Aldama, “Tayo,” 163. Rainwater, “Animals,” 274.

Two National Captivity Narratives in Welch, Silko, and Armstrong 1. Shari Huhndorf deserves credit, particularly for her reading of Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes in the final chapter of Going Native, for inaugurating (along with Philip Deloria) study of the abortive “capture” by a colonizing culture of as yet elusive sovereign and indigenous representational practices. See her Going Native; and Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2004). 2. King, Truth about Stories, 132–34. 3. Roy Harvey Pearce, “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative,” American Literature 19.1 (1947): 13. 4. Pearce, “Captivity,” 1. Pearce begins his survey with Cotton Mather’s Magnolia (1702) and concludes with the bogus (probably corporate) authorship of Clarissa Plummer (1838), by which point the captivity narrative “continued to be a popular journalistic, terroristic vehicle. . . . New episodes came with new frontiers; yet patterns and themes were reproduced again and again” (16). 5. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, “The Lewis and Clark Story, the Captive Narrative, and the Pitfalls of Indian History,” Wicazo Sa Review 19.1 (2004): 29. 6. Cook-Lynn strengthens her argument against Anglo-European genocide by citing recent scholarship that has effectively broadened the scholarly consensus on “captivity” beyond narrative to include the alienation derived from language loss and separation of indigenous peoples (particularly children) from their historical homelands. See also Troy Johnson and Holly Tomren, “Helplessness, Hopelessness, and Despair: Identifying the Precursors to

Notes

7.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

245

Indian Youth Suicide,” in Medicine Ways: Disease, Health, and Survival among Native Americans, ed. Clifford E. Trafzer and Diane Weiner (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2001), 245; and Donald A. Grinde Jr, “Taking the Indian out of the Indian: U.S. Policies of Ethnocide through Education,” Wicazo Sa Review 19.2 (2004): 25–32. John Purdy, “ ‘And Then, Twenty Years Later . . .’: A Conversation with Paula Gunn Allen,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 9.3 (Fall 1997): 5–16. Using similar language, Rainwater suggests that indigenous stories may be held captive inside specific material contexts that silence (or muffle) them. Referring to Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit, Rainwater observes that indigenous stories always “want out” (Dreams, 135). Purdy, “Twenty,” 6. James J. Donahue, “A World Away from His People: James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk and the Indian Historical Novel,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 18.2 (2006): 63. For me, the paradox is constitutive: Charging Elk is not a “new” prototype of Indian character but represents a new imagining of the indigenous historical past, beyond national captivity, that contemporary indigenous writers are allowing themselves. See Wendy Wickwire, Write It on Your Heart (Vancouver, BC: Talon, 1989). Robinson’s “An Okanagan Indian Becomes a Captive Circus Showpiece in England” was subsequently anthologized in King’s All My Relations, 1–26, the text cited here. King dedicated his anthology to the memory of Robinson. Robinson, “Okanagan,” 24. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 25–26. Ibid., 18–19. Despite Robinson’s playful trickster tone throughout, the casket-switching sequence recounted above reveals more sinister, symbolic “substitutions” required in the attempt to contain the body of the fugitive Native essence. The Ashnola scene recasts Shakespeare’s casket-choosing scene in The Merchant of Venice within a ghoulish frame of colonial predicament, of marginalized and discarded bodies for whom new national uses—even in death—have been devised. Hartwig Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 172–73. Original emphasis. See Robert Dale Parker, “Introduction,” The Invention of Native American Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 2003) for an approach affirming the pleasurable ordinariness of indigenous storytelling—allowing for the formation of political positions, but not subordinated to them—and not “necessarily artistic in cultural identity, but . . . [where] the act of expressing . . . cultural identity takes on aesthetic form” (3). Armstrong states that Robinson’s English stories offer Okanagan history rather than ritual: the “folk stories, the folk lore, that exist about historical events and people and things that occurred. . . . [H]e must have spent hours and hours and hours talking to Wendy, giving her these stories that are

246

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

Notes very important in their own right about our own contact with Europeans.” Isernhagen, Conversations, 172–73. The En’owkin Centre in Penticton, British Columbia, with Armstrong as one of its founders, is partially subsidized by the Canadian government and remains an outstanding example of what the nexus between effective mother-tongue language policy, indigenous sovereignty, and at least some degree of institutional support can achieve. Armstrong presumes no situated (Okanagan) knowledge for her readers, whether Anglo-European or indigenous. She mandates it, however, for any writer claiming her own indigenous traditions responsibly. Writing in English, for Armstrong, cannot ever be the vehicle for traditional knowledge but offers, instead, opportunities for artistic experimentations within linguistic confines imposed by colonialism: “[T]he exploitation in that [consumerist] sense is a necessity for any art, for the reinterpretation and the saleability, I guess, out there. That’s reality, that’s the way the world operates, now” (Isernhagen, Conversations, 161). Isernhagen, Conversations, 146. Ibid., 144–45. In his work with Creek English dialect, Craig Womack allows for the meaningful translation of sovereign values into English by Creek translators as “a recognizably Muskogean literary conceit in English . . . with the assumption in mind that Indian viewpoints and philosophies will still be meaningful in translation.” See Womack, “Alexander Posey’s Nature Journals: A Further Argument for Tribally-Specific Aesthetics,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 13.2&3 (2001): 49. Isernhagen, Conversations, 171. British and American diplomats negotiated, and then established, the Western border between Canada and the United States along the forty-ninth parallel: first in 1846 and, again, in 1871. In the prologue, Welch describes the encounter between Crazy Horse and Red Cloud, the latter now taking “his orders from white chiefs.” James Welch, The Heartsong of Charging Elk (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 2. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically by page number. Charging Elk is a composite, fictional character Welch derived from several different accounts of North American Indians and Natives performing in Europe. See Ron McFarland, “Review,” Wicazo Sa Review 16.2 (2001): 172. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 60. Wild Bill Cody was a historical figure as well as a histrionic one. Philip Deloria writes: “Cody dared the world to differentiate between two distinct forms of action—historical and representational—embodied in his person. The world refused the dare and learned [after 1883] to love the refusal” See Indians in Unexpected Places, 59–60. McFarland, “Review,” 172. McFarland notes that “Welch makes it clear that most of what happens to his protagonist results from choices he makes.” Sherman Alexie’s phrase, taken from the promotional blurb appearing on the first, Doubleday edition, hard-cover dust jacket.

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31. Leslie Marmon Silko, Gardens in the Dunes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 17. Subsequent references are made parenthetically by page number. 32. Focusing on the trope of the Ghost Dance, A. M. Regier writes that Gardens in the Dunes presents a “discursive space producing transformative rather than nativistic forms” within Native American literature and recuperates “the Ghost Dance’s revolutionary expressive terms” in an overall project of gender liberation (137). See “Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing, Transatlantic Travel, and Modernist Arson in Gardens in the Dunes” Modern Fiction Studies 51.1 (2005): 134–57. 33. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1995), 288. 34. Ibid., 298. 35. Ibid., 286. 36. Noel Elizabeth Currie, “Jeannette Armstrong & the Colonial Legacy,” Canadian Literature 124&125 (1990): 150. 37. Jeanette Armstrong, Slash, 6th ed. (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 1996), 59. Subsequent references will be made parenthetically by page number. 38. Evelina Zuni Lucero, Night Sky, Morning Star (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000), 161–62. 39. See Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 40. See Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior eds., Like a Hurricane (New York: New Press, 1996), Part One (1–86); as well as Troy Johnson, Duane Champagne, and Joanne Nagel eds., American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1997), 9. 41. Note the converging uses of time in the policeman’s racist discourse, “at one time that first time”: fear and the threat of violence collapse any distinction between historical time “then” and the narrative time in the colonized “now” Slash depicts. Nation, as Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” thesis reminds us, is nothing so much as the imagined construction of being expressed in terms of a shared (“horizontal”) temporality. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1991). 42. Armstrong has stated: “I feel that ultimately everything can be resolved without conflict because we are given the capacity of our minds and our emotions, and all of the history that we have. . . . Conflict is not necessary. . . . However . . . Violence is necessary for self-defense and self-preservation, and it is justifiable for that.” See Isernhagen, Conversations, 181. Original emphasis. 43. Christopher Breu, “Practicing Disruptive Economics: The Remapping of the Economic Space of the Americas in Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba, Sorcière . . . Noire de Salem,” in _Re-Placing America: Conversations and Contestations, Ruth Hsu, Cynthis Franklin, and Suzanne Kosanke eds. (Honolulu, HI: College of Languages, Linguistics and Literature, University of Hawaii, with East-West Center, 2000), 272–74.

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Three Trickster’s Gamble: Capitalizing Indigenous Discourse in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus and Erdrich’s The Bingo Palace 1. Gerald Vizenor, “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games,” in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 188. 2. See Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World System, ed. Anthony D. King (Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1991). 3. See Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 244–45. 4. See Arnold Krupat, “ ‘Stories in the blood’: Ratio- and Natio- in Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus,” Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor, ed. A. Robert Lee (Bowling Green, OH: Univ. Popular Press, 2000), 166–77. 5. Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 68. 6. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 117. 7. Gerald Vizenor, The Heirs of Columbus (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan/New England, 1991), 189. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically by page number. 8. As Louis Owens has suggested, this partnership of indigenous healing with Silicon Valley technology-triumphant is itself a trickster move, which shimmers of the darker possibilities of a genetically engineered indigenous universe, and the artifactual—rather than generative, and self-contradicting—appeal of pan-tribalism. Lecture, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, June 5, 1993. 9. Aldona Jonaitis and Richard Inglis, “Mowachaht Whalers’ Washing Shrine,” South Atlantic Quarterly 91.1 (Winter 1992): 206. This more nuanced layering of authenticity nevertheless risks repositing, in literary terms, modernist palimpsest. The palimpsest, by definition, produces the desire in the reader to glimpse a “core” or “center” of truth. 10. Jonaitis and Inglis, “Mowachaht Whalers,” 206. 11. Gerald Vizenor, “Socioacupuncture: Mythic Reversals and the Striptease in Four Scenes,” Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture, ed. Russel Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 412. Emphasis added. 12. Vizenor, Preface, Narrative Chance, x. 13. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, Tom Conley trans. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), 100–102. 14. Ibid., 234. 15. Daniel L. Boxberger, To Fish in Common: The Ethnohistory of Lummi Indian Salmon Fishing (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 2000), 19. 16. Ibid., 18.

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17. See Anderson, Imagined Communities. 18. See Richard E. Clark, Point Roberts, USA: The History of a Canadian Enclave (Bellingham: Textype Publishing, 1980), 41. 19. The Icelandic squatters received a special dispensation from Congress granting them ownership rights on Department of Interior land. Overjoyed by their good fortune, the local Icelandic community responded by sending a sheepskin rug to Teddy Roosevelt and were delighted to hear word from the White House that it was being used in the President’s bedroom. See Clark, Point Roberts, 58–59. 20. Though such rapid capital accumulation was to some degree typical of pre-Sherman Act (antitrust) business practices, Boxberger relates that the salmon processing boom at Chelh-ten-em at the turn of the century was particularly intensive: “During the late 1890s the Alaska Packers Association [APA] accounted for an average of 80 percent of the total Alaska salmon pack and a sizable portion of the Puget Sound sockeye pack” (63). 21. Through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Lummis took the APA to state court in 1897 to argue for their traditional fishing rights [United States et al. v. Alaska Packers Association (CC Wash., 79F 152 [1897]) and lost. On appeal, their case was subsequently denied review by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1899. See Boxberger, To Fish in Common, 52. 22. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 147. Harvey bases the “transition” from postwar Fordism to flexible accumulation on the saturations of West European and Japanese domestic markets after their post World War II “ ‘recoveries’. . . . [The] drive to create export markets for their surplus output had to begin” (141). 23. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 156. 24. Ibid., 302. 25. Citing the historical case of American Indian community economic underdevelopment, Boxberger writes “we see that Indian communities have all suffered similarly from the effects of economic and political factors that strive to incorporate Indian resources into the national political economy. . . . The native people of the United States have been incorporated into a dominant political economic system but do not participate as equals” (To Fish in Common, 186). Harvey’s macroeconomic argument echoes Boxberger’s more local view insofar as “the world capitalist system produces development in the centers of developed nations and underdevelopment in the peripheries . . . as applicable to regions within developed nations” (Condition of Postmodernity, 5). 26. Vizenor has gone on record criticizing the long-term impact of tribal gaming, stating that “[C]asinos have distracted the lost and lonesome, and with some humor, but not with a native vision that heals. . . . The Supreme Court might hear a case over taxation on treaty land, the rights of states and native casinos, and rule against the idea of native sovereignty.” See Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee, Postindian Conversations (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999), 92–93. 27. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 181.

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28. In 1994, the Lummi Cultural Director, Al Scott Johnny, and the tribe’s attorney, Stephanie Ross, worked successfully to obtain Chelh-ten-em’s listing as a “Traditional Cultural Property” by Washington State and subsequently an entry on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places (“Site #92001281”) administered by the U.S. Park Service. 29. Stephanie Ross, “Nomination Form Draft Statement,” Letter to the National Register of Historic Places, June 24, 1992, typescript. 30. Boxberger, To Fish in Common, 18. 31. Ibid., 13. 32. Vizenor, “Socioacupuncture,” 412. 33. In Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1978), Vizenor highlights the ecological predicament faced by indigenous communities, with Proude Cedarfair relinquishing the Cedar Circus to federal loggers in a post-apocalyptic America. The post-apocalyptic space of Bearheart constitutes Vizenor’s warning about a potentially avoidable crisis of representation in a colonial environment preyed upon by material demands. 34. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 183. 35. “The Resort at Lily Point,” Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), submitted to Whatcom County Council (Bellingham), July 30, 1992, 2–2. 36. Boxberger relates: “The Lummi have [since 1989] been forced to sell [their] fish processing plant . . . to non-Indians. The marina they planned to build has not come to fruition. Involvement with hatcheries, cooperative fisheries management, and international treaties have failed to stem the tide: Lummi fishers still struggle with a resource that continues to diminish” (To Fish in Common, “Epilogue to the 2000 Paperback Edition,” 188). Continuing Lummi control over extraction of the salmon resource promises, though cannot guarantee, greater forward prosperity for the tribe in an era of precipitously low salmon counts. 37. Kenneth Cooper, Address to the Whatcom County Council Planning Commission, “Partial Lily Point Re-Zoning Hearing” (Bellingham), March 24, 1993. 38. Cooper, Address, March 24, 1993. 39. In the fifteen years that have elapsed since I wrote the article on which this chapter is based, several developments have occurred. In the late spring of 1994, and despite Chelh-ten-em’s listing on the National Register, Whatcom County council approved the Lily Point resort development. In consultation and dialogue with Lummi authorities, a local coalition of residents of Chelh-ten-em/Point Roberts, the Resource Management Group, appealed the Council decision to the Washington Superior court. During the course of these hearings, the case made for rejection of the Lily Point development on the basis of the presence of onsite Lummi burial middens was, in the eyes of the county council, effectively discounted. Much to everyone’s dismay, Daniel Boxberger (whose work figures prominently in this article) offered expert testimony on behalf of developers regarding this issue. The irony of my extensive use of Boxberger’s historical research in this article, in light of his reaching an apparently opposite conclusion to mine as to the viability of the proposed project on Chelh-ten-em, suggests

Notes

40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46.

47.

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that trickster remains one step ahead of my grasp of the debate. In 1996, the Lily Point development group backed off the proposed development, citing insufficient demand in a changing market and the ongoing delays as a consequence of the county review and oversight process. In the meantime, an individual owner of a 20-acre parcel withdrew his lot from the proposed package promised to the development consortium and, before injunctions could be obtained, promptly clear-cut it. Paul Pasquaretta, Gambling and Survival in Native North America (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2003), xii. The reimagining of chance demonstrates fruitful tensions between chance opportunities and absolute consequences, and most probably, the trickster premise of chances as absolutes or, as Vizenor puts it, “the chance of no chance.” See Vizenor, Narrative Chance, “A Postmodern Introduction.” For her part, Erdrich distinguishes between two kinds of love: one being the fraught individualized expressions of the self when routed through a love object; and the other being those “romantic notions” that “categorize a people” rather than acknowledge that indigenous lives (like any other) are “complex and unpredictable.” The trickster plot of the The Bingo Palace benefits from an operating conflation between these. See Nancy Feyl Chavkin and Allan Chavkin, “An Interview with Louise Erdrich,” in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, ed. Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 231. Vizenor, “A Postmodern Introduction,” Narrative Chance, 14. Jeanne Rosier Smith writes that Erdrich’s novels “embody [anishinaabe trickster’s, Nanabozho’s] changeability: the stories contain contradictory and alternative truths; they go past their boundaries.” See Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997), 99–100. For a discussion of Erdrich’s treatment of micipijiu, see Victoria Brehm, “The Metamorphoses of an Ojibwa Manido,” American Literature 68.4 (1996): 677–706. Vizenor views American Indian casino gambling operations somewhat suspiciously and, most probably, “an invitation to casino riches and the enervation of native sovereignty in competition with the constitutional sovereignty of the [individual American] states.” See Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 197. The NIGA spent approximately US$ 420,000 on policy-targeted lobbying in 2004. U.S. tribes donated a further $US 13.8 million toward political campaigns at all levels of government, for Republican and Democratic candidates alike, during the 2002 and 2004 election cycles. See “Lobbying Report: National Indian Gaming Association,” (May 9, 2005), http://indianz.com/ News/2005/ 008053.asp (accessed June 26, 2006). For a detailed overview of the rise of indigenous gambling in the United States before 1995, as well as the roll-out of the IGRA and contemporary impacts on indigenous communities, see Steven Andrew Light and Kathryn R. L. Rand, Indian Gaming and Tribal Sovereignty: The Casino Compromise (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 2005); and Franke Wilmer, “Indian Gaming: Players and Stakes,” Wicazo Sa Review 12.1 (Spring 1997): 89–114. For a focused analysis on the 1998 California tribal gambling initiative, Proposition 5,

252

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

Notes see Carole Goldberg and Duane Champagne, “Ramona Redeemed?: The Rise of Tribal Political Power in California,” Wicazo Sa Review 17.1 (2002): 43–63. See Colin S. Campbell, Timothy F. Hartnagel, and Gary J. Smith, “The Legalization of Gambling in Canada,” Proceedings of the Law Commission of Canada (July 6, 2005), 26. Since 2001, provincial governments have typically reached working agreements with Native gaming commissions. In Nevada v. Hicks (2001), a unanimous U. S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to investigate tribal members for crimes allegedly occurring off-reservation. By contrast, in the spring of 2003, the Federal Court of Appeals (Ninth Circuit) upheld the sovereign immunity of the Bishop Paiute-Shoshone tribe from a state-issued search and seizure warrant issued against the tribally owned casino in Inyo County v. Bishop Paiute Tribe. On May 20, 2003, a Supreme Court majority reversed and remanded the lower court’s decision, arguing that tribal governments cannot use federal legal-rights protections understood to protect individuals to initiate legal claims against states for damages. See http://www.indianz.com/News/ show.asp?ID=2003/ 04/01/scourt for an overview of recent and relevant court rulings pertaining to Indian gaming; Kristan Sarvé-Gorham, “Games of Chance: Gambling and Land Tenure in Tracks, Love Medicine, and The Bingo Palace,” Western American Literature 34.3 (1999): 277–300; and, also, Wilmer, “Indian Gaming” for treatments of what nontribal jurisdictions stand to gain in the way of down-slope benefits from indigenous gambling enterprises, even as these same nonindigenous constituencies all too often dismiss incremental gains made by the tribes as unnecessary “privileges.” Pasquaretta cites the example of the Mohawk nation whose people remain divided by the gambling issue, with each party to the conflict invoking different interpretations of tradition to bolster pro-gaming and antigaming positions. See Gambling and Survival, 131–37. During the summer of 1995, a spontaneous alliance (Fight for Justice [FFJ]) of L’Anse traditionalists, one time AIM members, and anti-casino interests arose in response to the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC) official policy of disenrollment. The disenrollment of up to 33 percent of the total KBIC membership was suspected of having been politically motivated. For detailed descriptions of these events, from a variety of perspectives, see the NativeNet Archive, “Keweenaw Bay Standoff,” http://www.nativenet.org/ archive/nl/keweenaw-bay.html (accessed June 27, 2006). In an updated preface to their classic study, The Nations Within, Deloria, Jr. and Lytle address the emergence of the gaming issue obliquely and (with hindsight) somewhat optimistically: “At some point, the wealthier tribes should begin investing in the fortunes of those without gaming resources” (viii). While being among the more visible sectors of indigenous commercial enterprise, the concentrated media emphasis on “boom or bust” ventures such as organized gaming often (and unfairly) obscures other efforts indigenous communities are making to diversify and sustain community capital investments in alternative ventures, ranging from land and energy

Notes

54. 55. 56. 57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

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resource management to business-to-business and private-public entity partnerships. See Robert B. Anderson, Bob Kayseas, Leo Paul Dana, and Kevin Hindle “Indigenous Land Claims and Economic Development: The Canadian Experience,” American Indian Quarterly 28.3&4 (2004): 634–48; Kevin Hindle, Robert B. Anderson, Robert J. Giberson, and Bob Kayseas “Relating Practice to Theory in Indigenous Entrepreneurship: A Pilot Investigation of the Kitsaki Partnership Portfolio,” American Indian Quarterly 29.1&2 (2005): 1–23. Nor are such market-enterprise alternatives uniformly welcomed across all ranks of indigenous stakeholders whose notions of exercising sovereignty remain uneven and therefore contested. See Tracylee Clarke, “An Ideographic Analysis of Native American Sovereignty in the State of Utah: Enabling Denotative Dissonance and Constructing Irreconcilable Conflict,” Wicazo Sa Review 17.2 (2002): 43–63. Pasquaretta, Gambling and Survival, 104. TallBear, “Racializing the Tribe,” 95–98. See Philip Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, “Introduction,” 4–7. See Sarvé-Gorham, “Games of Chance,” 287; Pasquaretta, Gambling and Survival, 125. This strategy was dealt a severe blow, in the United States at least, after March 1996 when a Supreme Court ruling found that tribes may no longer sue states for redress in federal courts, thus depriving them of a crucial venue to prosecute past claims. John Purdy, “Betting on the Future: Gambling against Colonialism in the Novels of Louise Erdrich,” in Women in Native American Literature and Culture, ed. Susan Castillo and Victor M. P. Da Rosa (Porto, Portugal: Fernando Pessoa Univ. Press, 1997), 37–56. See Joanne Barker’s elaborate study of the commodification of “Indian” identity by mainstreaming, capital formations in “Indian™ U.S.A.,” Wicazo Sa Review 18.1 (Spring 2003): 25–79. Barker’s point is not to object to indigenous consumers in principle, but to reorient debate toward the extent to which the rank and file among indigenous communities still do not control their own products, ideas, and enterprises—most recently, DNA—in a capitalized landscape. The term “flexible citizenship” is Aihwa Ong’s. Lisa Lowe’s project likewise “engage[s] in a materialist critique of the institution of citizenship [in order] to name the genealogy of the legal exclusion, disenfranchisement, and restricted enfranchisement . . . as a genealogy of the American institution of citizenship.” See “Power of Culture,” 18. See “Native Gaming Resources,” http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/gaming.htm (accessed April 15, 2006). Disenrollment remains one strategy adopted by elected tribal officials to regulate gambling income payouts. An often cited justification for disenrollment is that policy objectives may be more reasonably matched to the most deserving constituency, which, if not regulated, tends to grow. See, for example, important exchanges posted on the chatroom, “Are Pechanga and Redding Rancheria Wrong [to disenroll],” (August 10, 2005), http://www.indianz.com/board/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID= 15305 (accessed June 27, 2006).

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62. Given the uneven geographical and political landscape in the U.S. tribal gambling sector, and the lack of a unified indigenous position on how best to reinvest in collective tribal sovereignty interests, not all tribal gambling stories are successful ones. See Editorial, “Indian Gaming Oversight Nets WinWin in AZ,” Tucson Citizen (August 9, 2005), http://www.tucsoncitizen. com/index.php?page=opinion&story_id=080905op (accessed April 15, 2006). Similarly, native-operated casinos in Canada have disbursed extremely generous cash payouts in the absence of uniform guidelines which, beyond voluntary disclosure and transparency, vary from province to province where they exist at all. See Sue Bailey, “Cash Cow for Native Bands,” Toronto Globe and Mail (June 18, 2006), http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/ RTGAM.20060618.wrama0618 (accessed June 27, 2006). 63. Per capita equity stakes based on tribal rolls was the approach initially proposed, and subsequently revised, in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971. After lengthy negotiations involving a cash buyout that extinguished all native claims to aboriginal title pending in Alaskan courts, ANCSA required participating Alaskan bands to incorporate themselves as native corporations on the IRA (Howard-Wheeler Act of 1932) model, and subsequently, to enter into partnership agreements with state and federal authorities regulating resource extraction, including timber, oil, and fishing rights. See Skinner, Alaska Native Policy, 89–90. 64. Attending specific economic initiatives, indigenous sovereignty claims remain actively subverted by the state interest in limiting perceived “privileges” of tribal and band enterprises. On July 14, 2003 the governor of Rhode Island called in state troopers to enforce the suspension of “illegal” activity at Naragansett, defying the Naragansett nation’s claim of sovereign immunity from state intrusion, including its democratic right to initiate its own economic activities. The incident turned ugly, with state troopers squaring off against angry tribal members and policemen. The tribal chairman, Chief Sachem Matthew Thomas, was arrested by deputies after heated exchanges and a general scuffle among state police, tribal police, and bystanders. Protracted legal debate in both state and federal courts has ensued. See Naragansett Tribe v. Rhode Island, http://www.ca1.uscourts. gov/pdf.opinions/04–1155-01A.pdf (accessed June 27, 2006). 65. Skinner, Alaska Native Policy, 70. 66. See Robert B. Buerger and Stephen Robinson, “Reservation Gambling: Im proving the Odds through Natural Resource Recreation Management,” Journal of Recreation and Leisure 17.1 (1999). 67. In a widely publicized closure, the first tribally sponsored casino in Washington State, the Lummi Nation Casino, ended operations in August 1997 after 12 years, resulting in the loss of 238 jobs for tribal members. According to Vern Johnson, a Lummi tribal council member and stakeholder, the council chose closure over bankruptcy protection; that is, liquidating its assets to pay debt, rather than risk ultimate foreclosure. Johnson also blamed the dwindling number of international (Canadian) gamblers, now gambling at other facilities closer to home, for the failure of the first Lummi gaming business. See Minutes, Washington State Gambling Commission. http://72.14.203.104/

Notes

68.

69.

70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

81.

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search?q=cache:tWeuX7vbhtEJ:www.wsgc.wa.gov/minutes/1997/9708min. pdf (accessed June 30, 2006). Carlton Smith similarly reads The Bingo Palace as “critiquing the idea of colonial constructs” (103) and problems of land and genealogy as “tools of property and capital” (111). However, I differ with Smith’s focus on tribal “escape,” (118–19) “transcendence,” (117) and love located “outside the nexus of colonial culture” (117). Rather, Erdrich’s novel is all the more effective as the demonstration of how capitalism transforms sovereignty with indigenous individuals as stakeholders. See Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier (Lebanon, NH: Univ. Press of New England, 2000). Purdy writes that The Bingo Palace offers an exploration of the nature of chance “as a thesis on the efficacy of understanding the nature of possibility, of cusp, and employing it to one’s advantage” (“Betting,” 38). See Jeffrey J. Williams, “Against Identity: An Interview with Walter Benn Michaels,” Minnesota Review 55–57 (2002): 127. See Chavkin and Chavkin, “Interview,” 221. Erdrich notes that comparisons between her work and “magical realism” (conflating, I presume, important differences between Marquez’s uses and Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso) may or may not be justified but that, for her, “events people pick out as magical don’t seem unreal to me” (221). Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 37–39. Subsequent references to the novel will be made parenthetically in the text. Purdy, “Betting,” 48. Ibid., 38. The term “matrix” is Sarvé-Gorham’s (299). Purdy describes the division of labor shared by Lyman and Lipsha in The Bingo Palace as “a telling blend of culturally determined means and motivations” (44). Purdy, “Betting,” 47. Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 319–20. Marx, “Fetishism of Commodities,” 313. Ibid., 320. Emphasis added. Suspicious of the claims of “identity” upon representation, Walter Benn Michaels nevertheless accounts for the emergence of identity as a reading practice: “The minute the work, the text, is reduced to its materiality, then the primary question about it is an experiential one about the reader’s relation to it. It’s at that moment the text becomes meaningless that the identity of the reader becomes essential” (“Interview,” 127). In The Bingo Palace, community (not “identity”) becomes essential to a specifically indigenous construction of the commodity. The entire Morrissey-Nanapush genealogy, including the next generation with Shawnee Ray Toose and her love for the foundling Lipsha, now grown, lost and then found, emerges as an important strut within the larger generational design. Thus reconciled, at least temporarily, are the tangled and still-born byways of love in between these particular relationships stretching back to Tracks and Love Medicine.

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82. Allan Chavkin was among the first to theorize Erdrich’s indebtedness to romantic discourses when refashioning the worldview of her novels: “modern writers [such as Erdrich] do not merely imitate and repeat their romantic predecessors. . . . [They] dramatically assimilate, transform, and extend romanticism as they forge their own unique visions.” See English Romanticism and Modern Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York: AMS Press, 1993); and The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1999).

Four Recovering Sovereignty in Louis Owens’s Dark River 1. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner, ed. Ray A. Billington (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 37–38. 2. Ezra Pound recasts “postfrontier anxiety,” post-Turner, into a positivist ideology endorsing American imperialism before World War I. See David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1993), 71–85. 3. Ezra Pound, Patria Mia (Chicago: R. F. Seymour, 1950), 57. 4. Afro-Caribbean men constituted a prominent minority among approximately five thousand working-class dead throughout the course of the project. See Michael L. Conniff, Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 8–10. 5. See Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), 26–40. Established on August 25, 1916, the U.S. park system was, for indigenous sovereigns, the insulting culmination to the Dawes allotments which after 1877 had surveyed sovereign lands “off-reservation” and ceded them to nonindigenous individuals, corporations, governing authorities (including counties and states) in the event of legal proceedings, tax default, or probate. Subsequent legislation ensured that lands held in common were either privatized outright, or rendered inalienably “public” in the name of ecotourism; in either case, beyond the reaches of their sovereign custodians. 6. In Patria Mia, Pound subordinates indigenous sovereignty to his own nativist rendering of Anglo-European racial superiority: “Our [American] convention dates, not from an era of sedan-chairs and lackeys [as in Europe], but from a time when people lived at least ten miles apart. You were friendly with your next neighbor because you wanted his help against savages” (53). For an overview of the scholarship and debates about modern reemergence of nativism in form of parochial, and often reactionary nationalisms, see William H. Katerberg, “An Essay on Nativism, Liberal Democracy, and Parochial Identities in Canada and the United States,” American Quarterly 47.3 (1995): 515. 7. Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 26. Drawing inspiration from scholars and writers, including Gerald Vizenor, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Mary Louise

Notes

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

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Pratt, Owens’s frontier rewrites Pound’s “no place” as the indigenous “transvaluation” of Anglo-European territory. At the opening of Dark River, Nashoba stands sentry between adjoining sovereign camps, welcome in neither, but with a degree of loyalty to each. Owens briefly considered using this phrase “between two fires” as a subtitle for the seminal work that later became Other Destinies and which derives from a passage of Mourning Dove’s Cogewea (1927). Owens chose to cite this passage as an epigraph to Other Destinies instead (conversation with the author, April 1994). Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 218–36. The novel acknowledges the violent correspondence between indigenous expropriation within the United States and American neocolonialism abroad. Addressing both “economies of scale” in literary terms, Dark River details the costs to all local cultures of membership within a now-global American neocolonialism, including the exhaustion of indigenous cultures as matériel expended in the effort to expand and sustain capital markets. For an exact illustration of how the resources of local indigenous cultures are targeted within a “national” economy, see Winona LaDuke and Ward Churchill, “Native America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 13 (1985): 109–20. As stated in the text, nashoba can be translated from Choctaw as “wolf.” In the Judeo-Christian Bible, Jacob, the son of Isaac and father of the tribe of Israel, comes to faith only after wrestling with God (NIV, Genesis 32:4–26). The name Jacob Nashoba amalgamates these two respective traditions. Louis Owens, Dark River (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 4. Subsequent references to this text will be made parenthetically by page number. The Mississippi Choctaw nation, in particular, bears a conflicted history relative to the imposition of Anglo-European sovereignty. The Choctaws adapted elements of the latter to a degree far beyond many other antebellum “civilized” tribes (with the possible exception of their eastern neighbors, the Cherokee, and the Iroquois Federation further north) only to be faced with the unlawful removal of many of their titles and lands in the Mississippi country with the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830. Owens, Other Destinies, 92. Nashoba is unwilling or incapable of engaging in the practice Owens has called “crossreading”: the stance whereby all readers of culture “engage texts across some kind of cultural boundary or conceptual horizon” (Mixedblood Messages, 5). In Dark River, the irreverent youth, Jesse, who sells bogus vision quests to outsiders and dazzles impressionable kids with cynical renderings of the Hollywood Indian, dies and is then be reborn as a man-wolf with nylon lashes and synthetic fur (75; 79), what Owens called a postmodern “animage.” Murdered by armed militiamen in Dark River Canyon, Jesse pays for a lack of gravity about the power of the forces with which he tampers. See my discussion of the indigenous “schizophrenic” and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (New York: Warner, 1996) in Chapter One.

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17. Referring to World War II, Townsend offers conclusive figures: 25,000 American Indians served in the military, with another 40,000 serving in critical-industry employment. See Kenneth W. Townsend, World War II and the American Indian (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2000), 2. Owens would not, I suspect, have disputed the clear devotion of American Indian veterans in service to the United States, nor have questioned their voluntary right to be patriots on behalf of their own sovereignty as well as that of the United States. The valor of veterans continues to shape indigenous communities today and has changed the course of all foreign wars fought by Americans this century. 18. See Tom Holm, Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls: Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1996); Townsend, World War II, 61–65; and Thomas A. Britten, American Indians in World War I: At Home and at War (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1997), 59–72. It should be noted that alongside the majority enlistment of eligible American Indian men as clear evidence of patriotism, reluctance to enlist also appeared within indigenous communities. See Britten, American Indians in World War I, 71; Holm, Strong Hearts, 121. 19. Holm puts the number of American Indians serving in Viet Nam between 1964 and 1973 at more than 42,000, but the number may well be higher. See his “American Indian Veterans and the Vietnam War,” The Vietnam Reader, ed. Walter Capps (New York: Routledge, 1991), 191. Of Native Americans in Viet Nam, Appy argues that along with Hispanics and Asian Americans, “even the most basic statistical data about their role . . . remains either unknown or inadequately examined.” See Christian G. Appy, WorkingClass War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993), 19. 20. See Townsend, World War II, 63–64; Britten, American Indians in World War I, 57–58. 21. Citing data gathered in the Veterans Administration (VA) report, Legacies of Vietnam (1978), Appy states: “When measured against backgrounds of nonveterans of the same generation, Vietnam veterans came out on the bottom in income, occupation, and education.” See Appy, Working-Class War, 24; Holm, Strong Hearts, 117–23. 22. See Renny Christopher, “The Poverty of Mississippi and the Harshness of Indian Territory: Louis Owens’s Representations of Working Class Consciousness,” in Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 154–74. 23. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire-Building (New York: Schocken, 1990), 451. Drinnon’s analysis builds usefully from an historicist trajectory first established by Roy Harvey Pearce, such that the ideology of “Indian-hating” in North America secures capital markets overseas in a globalized “Indian Country.” The veteran of a foreign war, Nashoba views American ideology increasingly critically as it expands toward the last remaining untapped frontiers of global markets, renewable sources of cheaper, indigenous labor, and demand-side consumerism—a phenomenon, at the dawn of the millennium, some have called postnational

Notes

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25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

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“empire.” See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000). 19. The reader understands that if Nashoba has any hope at all of recovering his dignity as an indigenous subject, he must not only shed his skin as an American soldier, but also as the hollowed-out hero of American modernism. Dark River accordingly rejects the presumptions implicit behind what Owens has called “modernist scaffolding” within American Indian literature (Mixedblood Messages, 62); that is, the generic trappings required to render “alien [indigenous] story and discourse” recognizable to non-Indian readers. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Willard R. Trask trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), 15–16. See Owens, Other Destinies, 13–14; Mixedblood Messages, 92–95. The influence of Bakhtin on Owens’s corpus was considerable, even as the scholar and writer willingly conceded “the tendency by critics to consider Bakhtin as a topical ointment applicable to virtually any critical abrasion” (Other Destinies, note 8, 256). On the one hand, Owens’s appropriation of Bakhtin neatly undercuts the postmodern tendency to aestheticize historical conflict in narrative terms; on the other hand, Dark River resists the New Historicist tendency (including the traces of an economic determinism) to overemphasize material conflict at the expense of narrative transformation. See Owens, Other Destinies. The restoration of balance in Dark River allows Nashoba to realign his own priorities: away from the frontier militia, which rages on spellbound by modernist malaise, and toward the potential of refashioning indigenous sovereignties within a plural vision. Popular diné teachings recount the rescue by Spider Woman of a lost Apache hunter, cornered by an enemy, in Dead Man’s Canyon. From her traditional home in Spider Rock (Canyon de Chelly), Spider Woman offered the man a strand of her long web and pulled him upward to safety. Nashoba’s aimless rage against matriarchy (“Fuck them all” [91]) is revealed to be nothing so much as the explosive animus of Anglo-European alienation (epitomized by Stroud’s militia and its willful self-destruction) transferred to his wife, her people, and his own refusal admit the need for help (219). Tali’s intervention restores Jacob to an awareness no evil, no misogynistic misjudgment, can challenge. Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 158. Owens, Other Destinies, 11–13. Gerald Vizenor, Introduction, Narrative Chance, 5–8. Owens gives a careful reading elsewhere of John Ford’s The Searchers (and the career of John Wayne, in particular) as typifying “America’s eroticized hatred of the indigenous peoples of America.” See Mixedblood Messages, 106. Owens, Other Destinies, 241. Owens’s and Vizenor’s work, in particular, have been viewed as a constructivist response to the “terminal creeds” offered by essentialist readings of American Indian authenticity, on the one hand, and the entombing effects of Anglo-European literary modes on the

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other. See my treatment of the deadening claims of photorealism in chapter five. 35. As above, Nashoba’s sickness and despair spring from the foundational dichotomy that Pound posited as uniquely “American” near the beginning of the bloodiest century in world history: the socially symbolic division existing between environmental and human resources. To turn a fine phrase of Lawrence Buell’s, the refusal to acknowledge the cost to America’s “greenness” of its “greatness” ultimately risks all indigenous cultures and the specific subjects they enunciate. See The Environmental Imagination, 288–90. The ailing modernism from which Nashoba suffers (qua Pound) simply represents—canonizes—the toxic environmentalism of its time. 36. See Lawrence Buell, “The Ecocritical Insurgency,” New Literary History 30.3 (1999): 705.

Five Indigenous Wormholes: Reading Plural Sovereignties in Works by Thomas King 1. See Robin Ridington, “Happy Trails to You: Contexted Discourse and Indian Removals in Thomas King’s Truth & Bright Water,” Canadian Literature 167 (Winter 2000): 89–107. 2. King, Introduction, All My Relations, x–xi. 3. King, Truth about Stories, 149. King notes: “There’s not an Italian Act that defines who is and who is not an Italian. Or a Russian Act. Or a Greek Act. . . .” (148). 4. King, Truth about Stories, 139. The C-31 bill amended the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, retroactively confirming native “status” rights for Native women who, unlike Native men, had had status rights automatically revoked upon marriage to a nonstatus Canadian. The U.S. Indian Arts and Crafts Act [IACA] sought to protect licensed artisans and craftspersons in indigenous heritage industries from unlawful competition by outsiders, whether indigenous nonmembers or fraudulent nonindigenous enterprises. Unfortunately, the IACA made no provision for nonsovereign indigenous artisans without tribal or band membership; nor, in many cases, could the bill legitimize “full-blood” artisans of mixed ancestry. 5. See Patricia Linton, “ ‘And Here’s How It Happened’: Trickster Discourse in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water,” Modern Fiction Studies 45.1 (1999): 212–34. See also Ridington (“Happy Trails to You,” 105). 6. King, Truth about Stories, 95–98. 7. King, Introduction, All My Relations, x–xi. 8. Ibid., xiii. 9. Ibid., ix. 10. See Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism,” 124. 11. Thomas King, Medicine River (Toronto: Viking Penguin, 1989), 110–11. Subsequent references to this text will be made parenthetically by page number.

Notes

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12. King writes: “ ‘All my relations’ is at first a reminder of who we are and of our relationship with both our family and our relatives. . . . a common admonishment is to say of someone that they act as if they have no relations” (All My Relations, ix). See also Introduction above. 13. For scholarship investigating the relation between the agency of indigenous photographers and their “subject” see Lucy Lippard ed., Partial Recall: Photographs of Native North Americans (New York: The New Press, 1992) and Timothy Troy, “Anthropology and Photography: Approaching a Native American Perspective,” Visual Anthropology 5 (1992): 43–62. For work on Curtis see Christopher M. Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of Indians by Edward S. Curtis (New York: Pantheon, 1982). 14. The character of Lionel James likely draws inspiration from King’s friendship with Okanagan story-teller Harry Robinson. See Chapter Two above. 15. Susan Bernardin writes: “A signifier of sexual danger in sentimental fiction as well as a term widely associated with blacks in the nineteenth century, the term ‘shadow’ . . . denotes the presence of the predatory white [character]” (499). See “Mixed Messages: Authority and Authorship in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range,” American Literature 67.3 (1995): 487–509. 16. See Owens, Other Destinies, 201, 219. This term has also been attributed to Walter Stanley Campbell, born Stanley Kestal, one time professor and author of popular, Anglo-European accounts of the colonization of the American West. 17. King’s novel presents narrative “snapshots” that, once motivated by the plot, move cinematographically. The film, Medicine River (Margolin 1992), starred Graham Greene, Sheila Tousey, and Tom Jackson and won critical acclaim at the 1993 American Indian Film Festival (Taos). 18. As above, King early on described this kind of story-telling as “relational.” Patricia Linton defines “associative story-telling” as a mode where the “narrator is situated among peers, one narrator among others . . . King’s narrator defers to other narrators, so that even in his final conceit . . . he asserts an earned right to speak without explicitly casting it as ‘authority.’ ” See Linton, “Trickster Discourse,” 232–33. 19. Bud Hirsch also notes the significance of the ampersand (&), suggesting that this sign denotes King’s “[in]tolerance for binaries.” See Bud Hirsch, “ ‘Stay Calm, Be Brave, Wait for the Signs’: Sign-Offs and Send-Ups in the Fiction of Thomas King,” Western American Literature 39.2 (2004): 153. 20. Linton notes that the title of King’s previous novel, Green Grass, Running Water is a “metonymic allusion to the bad faith that separates Native and European Americans” (217). See also Ridington, “Happy Trails to You,” 89. 21. King first experimented with this concept, of history bleeding through a surface coating of paint, in an earlier sketch, “The Colour of Walls,” collected in his volume of short stories, A Short History of Indians in Canada (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2005), 86–89. 22. Deploying Margaret Atwood’s early characterization of King’s use of “ambush” as a strategy to “trap” the reader, Hirsch emphasizes the “literal” meaning of the term: “setting a trap by creating, or seeming to go along

262

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

Notes with, certain expectations on the part of the intended target, playing to the target’s preconceptions or habits of mind, only to shatter them when the trap is sprung” (160). King, Truth about Stories, 108. Hirsch, “Sign-Offs,” 149. Ibid., 148–49. I differ with Hirsch’s assertion that by the end of the former novel “Little beyond despair seems left to Tecumseh” (151). Rather, Tecumseh has yet to begin his own apprenticeship in “reading the signs” of potential renewal, such as the Earthdiver and Falling Woman stories, that greater exposure to his own indigenous traditions will provide. Rebecca Neugin (née Ketcher) was herself famous as the last survivor of that deathly march—she reached one hundred years of age, dying in Oklahoma on July 15, 1932. Her reemergence out of time, just in time, to witness Swimmer’s project, marks yet another example of the persistence of history upon the scene of contemporary indigenous writing. The usage is Linton’s: “In King’s novel, the literati narrator seems not so much a controlling consciousness as a participatory consciousness; however, that participation encompasses not only the narrow span of human lives but the broad spectrum of realities that shape Native consciousness” (228). In the interests of a “mixedblood” theorization, one such model was Owens’s “cross-reading.” See Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 9–11. I address contemporary debates around literary sovereignty in the introduction above. Alice Walker, “Everyday Use,” In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women (New York: Harvest/Harcourt, 1974). John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams et al., 5th ed., vol. 2 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), 794. Hirsch, too, bumped into Keats in his own collateral reading of King’s text. See “Sign-Offs,” 156. Richmond Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961). Vizenor comments: “The Bering Strait migration myth or story has always fascinated me by its arrogance, that natives came here from somewhere else. . . . That tidy bit of cultural arrogance denies the origin myths of natives, the traditional myths that natives emerged from the earth here, and with a very creative understanding of their own presence.” See Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 128. King, Truth about Stories, 112. For a useful description of the “insider/outsider” dynamic attributed to King’s work, see Hirsch, “Sign-Offs,” 158; and Linton, “Trickster Discourse,” 214–17. King constructs a readership who, beyond mere intellect, can only supply what their own experiences, whether indigenous or Anglo-European or both, have provided. See “Godzilla vs. the Post-Colonial” in New Contexts of Canadian Criticism, ed. Ajay Heble, Donna Palmateer Pennee, and J. R. Tim Struthers (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997), 246.

Notes

263

38. Their surname is shared by the German nineteenth-century novelist and inventor of European “Indianness,” Karl May (1842–1912). May’s Indianthemed fiction was retooled by the Nazi propaganda machine for use in an all-encompassing platform of popular Reichkultur—including Hitler Youth programming and outward-bound excursions—based on white supremacy and the inevitable decline, Hiawatha-like, of inferior races. 39. A famous adept at negotiating the art of plural sovereignties was the poet, screenwriter, and playwright Lynn Riggs (Oklahoma Cherokee). A protégé of H. L. Mencken, Eugene O’Neill, and in 1928–29 the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship—Riggs wrote more than fifteen plays, including Green Grow the Lilacs (1931). Riggs adapted this play for the 1955 film version, Oklahoma!, starring Gordon Macrae, Shirley Jones, and Rod Steiger. The University of Oklahoma Press recently republished three of Riggs’s plays in a new edition collected by Jace Weaver, The Cherokee Night and Other Plays (2003). See also Womack, Red on Red, Chapter Eight. 40. The May parable is a significant statement about the obstacles indigenous peoples face in the everyday form of Anglo-European ignorance. It is also consistent with King’s career-long critique, as previously depicted in Medicine River, of the bad habit of evacuating natural landscapes of their social and habitable contexts as an “aesthetic.” 41. Note the contrasting fate of the protagonist in Barry Milliken’s “Run,” first anthologized by King in All My Relations, who is able to make the crossing— “[a]lmost fifty miles to the city, almost two marathons” (43)—linking his dysfunctional home on the reserve and hopes for a better future in the city. 42. King, Truth about Stories, 118–19. 43. Even while deploying a barrage of disheartening indicators and statistics about American Indian youth suicide, Johnson and Tomren warn that “it is [equally] dangerous to generalize, oversimplify, and to over-emphasize American Indian suicide. The stereotype of the suicidal Indian . . . may actually perpetuate American Indian suicides” (235). See Johnson and Tomren, “Identifying.” Lum’s fate recalls the real-life example of Jeff Weise, a sixteen-year-old Ojibwe mixedblood who killed his grandfather, his grandfather’s partner, a security guard, and six of his fellow classmates in March 2005 before killing himself. 44. In Truth about Stories, King retells the Earthdiver creation story at leisure for his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Massey lectures, with Falling Woman (called Charm) protected from the water by a helpful flock of partners in the enterprise who fly up and form a “net with their bodies” and bring “her gently to the surface of the water. Just in time” (15). 45. In Truth & Bright Water Monroe appears, alternatively, as Graham Greene, Geronimo, and the Woman Who Fell From the Sky. These roles embody a variety of culture heroes from Anglo-European and indigenous perspectives, both comic and earnest. See Ridington, “Happy Trails to You,” 104–5. 46. King enjoys recasting creation stories in contemporary terms, as with his earlier short stories “Coyote and the Enemy Aliens” and “The Garden Court Motor Motel” both of which may be found in King’s A Short History of Indians in Canada. 47. Ridington, “Happy Trails to You,” 102–3.

264

Notes

48. Collateral reading marks the expansion of King’s overall storytelling project. The sharp and localized critique of Anglo-European photorealism readily apparent in Medicine River has broadened to encompass the precarious nature of representation categorically. 49. King, Truth about Stories, 143. 50. In the U.S. context, Duane Champagne has written about the resurgence of the “trend” which, by viewing independent traditions as minority discourses, “submerge[es] American Indian studies into ethnic studies programs, or sometimes anthropology departments, American studies or other units or departments. . . . Most universities manage relations with Native peoples as if they are minorities and group them with ethnic studies for administrative purposes.” See “From Sovereignty to Minority: As American as Apple Pie,” Wicazo Sa Review 20.2 (2005): 21. 51. The term “strategic essentialism” is Gayatri Spivak’s and speaks to the concession identity politics allows to spaces beyond discourse, if such a thing is possible, to buy time to consolidate specific counter-hegemonic positions. For a fine overview and a fresh perspective of these debates, see Sheena Malhotra, “Belonging, Bridges, and Bodies,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17.2 (2005): 47–69. 52. For a foundational study situating nineteenth-century historiography within a broader discussion of expressive fictional modes, see Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973). 53. King, Truth about Stories, 92. 54. Ibid., 118. 55. Ridington confesses: “For the last month I have been obsessed with decoding the secrets of Truth & Bright Water” (“Happy Trails to You,” 104). 56. King, Truth about Stories, 60. 57. See Womack, Red on Red, Chapter Two (“Reading the Oral Tradition for Nationalist Themes,” 51–74) for a good, overall discussion of how and why the English language, and not solely the artifactual “orality” of an anthropological tradition, is a powerful vehicle for indigenous sovereignty today. 58. King’s justification for doing so is functional: “What difference does it make if we write for a non-Native audience or a Native audience, when the fact of the matter is that we need to reach both?” See Truth about Stories, 118. 59. King, Truth about Stories, 114. 60. Ibid., 112.

Conclusion 1. Philip Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 230. 2. Like Simon J. Oritz, and taking a longer view of any given era’s “contemporary” focus, Robert Warrior presents a generational approach “engaging the future contours of Indian America” rather than merely reproducing ephemeral Anglo-European theories or, alternatively, criticizing them simplistically as “bugbears . . . in an endless dance of criticism and dependence.”

Notes

3. 4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

265

See his Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1995), 2. Warrior, The People and the Word, xxv. Ibid., xxv–xxvi. Elsewhere critical of Owens’s role ensconcing “hybridity” as the agon presently defying the sovereign aims and objectives of literary nationalism, Craig Womack acknowledges the former’s commitment to a “compassionate criticism” and willingness to train the next generation of critics (“Integrity,” American Indian Literary Nationalism, 169). See the discussion of Chadwick Allen’s term, “grafting,” in Weaver’s chapter of American Indian Literary Nationalism (“Splitting the Earth,” 39–40). Owens directly refutes such an incorporation of indigenous sovereignty within a master-narrative of postcolonial theory in Mixedblood Messages, Chapter 5 (“ ‘The Song Is Very Short’: Native American Literature and Literary Theory”). Gerald Vizenor, Wordarrows: Native States of Literary Sovereignty (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2003). Warrior, “Transnational Discourse,” 808. Konkle, Writing Indian Nations, 32. In different works, Joni Adamson and Eva Marie Garroutte have proposed models linking effective indigenous sovereignty to eco-critical predicament and internationalist “radical indigenism” as activist platforms. See Eva Marie Garroutte, “The Racial Formation of American Indians: Negotiating Legitimate Identities within Tribal and Federal Law,” American Indian Quarterly 25.2 (2001): 224–39; and Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2003). See also Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000). For a map of the cross-country route, see http://www.lummihealingpole. org/3/index.htm#Journeymap. The pole was blessed en route during ceremonies by leaders of the Chemawa, Viejas, Salt River-Pima Maricopa, Navajo, and Cherokee nations (accessed May 30, 2008). http://www.gannettonline.com/gns/911/feature2.hwtm (accessed May 30, 2008).

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘f’ refer to figures. Endnotes are indicated by ‘n’ between the page and note numbers. abduction narratives, 76 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Alexie), 58 adoptions, cross-race, 48, 241n27 AIM (American Indian Movement), 20, 97, 99, 100 Alaska Packers Association cannery (Chelh-ten-em), 116f, 249n20 Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA), 21, 254n63 Alexie, Robert, 212 Alexie, Sherman criticism of Eye Killers, 63 disputing “Native American Renaissance”, 41 post 9/11 works of, 57–58, 241n41 on transformative power of violence, 58 on Vizenor’s “word masturbation”, 56 See also Indian Killer (Alexie) Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake, 7 Allen, Chadwick, 6, 233n12 Allen, Paula Gunn, 32, 76, 104 American exceptionalism, rhetoric of, 157–158 American Indian Literary Nationalism (Warrior, et al.), 5, 7

American Indian Movement (AIM), 20, 97, 99, 100 American Indian Renaissance, 40–41, 239n3 ANCSA (Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971), 21, 254n63 Anderson, Benedict, 115, 247n41 Anglo-European nationalism belatedness of, 103 bounding discourses of, 177 indigenous experience of, 1, 3–4, 231n1(Intro.) Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 18 Appy, Christian G., 258n21 Arata, Stephen, 242n46 Armstrong, Jeannette, 220 on English as lingua franca for storytellers, 81–83, 246n20 on Harry Robinson’s storytelling practices, 79–80, 245n18 on justifiable violence, 101, 247n42 on linguistic separation of plural sovereignties, 80 on sovereigntist vs. nationalist worldview, 97 See also Slash (Armstrong) associational storytelling, 202–203, 204, 261n18 Auerbach, Erich, 168

268

Index

Barker, Joanne, 132, 253n59 Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point (Vizenor), 126 Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (Vizenor), 250n33 Bering Strait land bridge, 23, 262n34 Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr., 20 Bernardin, Susan, 188, 261n15 BIA (Bureau of Indian Affairs), 20 Bill C-31 (Canada, 1985), 21, 178, 237n60, 260n35 The Bingo Palace (Erdrich), 127–153 commodity fetishes in, 139–142, 144 indigenous capitalism in: capitalization of discourse, 134–135; chance and, 137–138, 255n75; commodification of ceremonial pipe, 140–144; formation of loving relationships and, 106–107, 151–153; gambling revenue impact on tribe, 133; romantic love questioning motives of, 128, 136, 251n42; use and abuses of, 127 indigenous chance in, 128, 147 Lipsha’s role: as agent of demand, 145–149, 255n81; as blind spot of community transformation, 147–148 Lyman’s dance for Henry, 144–145 Lyman’s negotiation of plural sovereignties in, 135 reality of love in, 151–152 trickster plot and kinds of love, 251n42 windigoo in, 149–150 blood quantum and entitlements, 19–20, 131, 235n45 blood sovereignties blood as arbiter of authenticity, 62

in Eye Killers, 39–40, 59–60, 66–68 in Indian Killer, 39, 41 of indigenous people, 39 infiltrating tribal politics, 242n43 reinvention of, 68 Boxberger, Daniel on incorporation of Indian resources into national economy, 249n25 on Lummi sale of fish processing plant to non-Indians, 250n36 on Salish subsistence fishing practices, 120 on salmon processing boom at Chelh-ten-em, 249n20 support for development of Lily Point Resort, 250n39 To Fish in Common, 119 Brehm, Victoria, 251n44 Brennan, Jonathan, 19 Broker, Ignatia, 32 Buell, Lawrence, 91, 260n35 Buerger, Robert B., 134 Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), 20 Campbell, Maria, 22 Canada Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Bill C-31 (1985), 21, 178, 237n60, 260n35 Constitution Act of 1982, aboriginal rights clause (Section 35), 21 Indian Register of, 23 indigenous sovereignty in, 22–28 Nunavut Territory, 25, 26f, 232n6 plural sovereignties in, 24–25 capitalism chance and, 137–138, 255n75 commodity fetishes and, 141–142 commodity-based, among Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw), 217–219

Index flexible accumulation and, 118–119, 249n22 impact on indigenous communities, 105, 118, 227, 249n25 Indian identity, commodification of, 253n59 Indian-hating and, 167, 258n23 objectification of labor power, 143 transformation of sovereignty, 255n68 vampire in Eye Killers as critique of, 40, 66, 239n2, 243nn58–62 See also The Bingo Palace (Erdrich); The Heirs of Columbus (Vizenor) captivity narratives as abduction narratives, 76 Anglo-European, 75–76, 244n4 contemporary indigenous, overview of, 73–75 indigenous dispossession in, 76 indigenous subversion of, 78, 104 “An Okanagan Indian Becomes a Captive Circus Showpiece in England” (Robinson), 77–79 sustaining plural sovereignties, 74, 103–104 See also Gardens in the Dunes (Silko); The Heartsong of Charging Elk (Welch); Slash (Armstrong) Cardinal, Harold on interpretive (‘mirage’) gap, 2–3, 218, 228, 232n5 on plural constructions of nation, 1, 2–3, 232n5 as treaty negotiator, 3, 232n6 Carr, A. A., 71 See also Eye Killers (Carr) casinos, indigenous. See indigenous gaming centering, 53 Certeau, Michel de, 113

269

Champagne, Duane, 10, 14, 233n17, 264n50 chance in capitalism, 137–138, 255n75 as luck, 138 volatility of, 128, 251n41 as vulgar equilibrium, 147 Changing Woman, 70, 71, 170, 172 Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts, Washington) appropriation by developers, 122–126, 123f colonization by Icelandic squatters, 119, 249n19 cultural and spiritual significance for coastal Salish, 119, 250n28 history of, 114–116 Lummi Nation and: plural sovereignties of, 116, 117f; postmodern reimagining of sovereign land, 122–124, 123f; salmon culture of, 119, 121; trickster tradition in, 107, 120 salmon cannery at, 116f civil rights, indigenous sovereignty and, 10 Cody, Wild Bill, 86, 246n28 collateral reading, 202–204, 213, 264n48 Collier, John, 21, 24, 236n50 Collier Bill (U.S.). See Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA) colonialism British-American competition, 115 contemporary, limitations of, 228 cultural nationalism and resistance to, 11–12 photographic realism as, 184 plural sovereignties as contemporary experience of, 217 reimagining of, 2 scriptural economy and, 113 of settlers, 41

270

Index

Colonnese, Tom, 33 commodity fetishes, 141–142 conservancy of humanity, 158 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 4, 47, 75–76, 244n6 Cooper, Kenneth, 121, 125 Cousins, Norman, 240n15 Crazy Horse, 84–85, 246n25 cultural nationalism, 11–12 See also pan-Indian nationalism Cultures of the North-Pacific Coast (Drucker), 218 Currie, Noel Elizabeth, 97 Curtis, Edward Sheriff, 184, 185, 190 Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 184 Dark River (Owens), 157–176 American neocolonialism and local cultures, 160, 257n9 articulation of plural sovereignties, 159–160 engagement with ecocriticism, 176, 260n35 indigenizing of frontier in, 169 indigenous soldiers embodying plural sovereignties, 159–160 Jesse’s irreverence in, 257n15 joining disparate indigenous traditions, 170 mercenary militia in, 165–168 Nashoba in: as dead-in-life, 161–162; death of, 168–170; failure of crossreading by, 162, 257n14; guilt of, 164; isolation of, 160–161, 257n8; rage against matriarchy, 259n29; significance of name, 160, 257n10 recentering of feminine, 170–171 restoration of balance in, 259n27 sovereign traditions, recasting and recovery of, 168–169, 174–176 sustaining plural sovereignties, 163–164, 168

trickster discourse, 167, 168, 170, 173–174 Dawes Act (1887), 19 The Death of Jim Loney (Welch), 45 Deleuze, Gilles, 239n2 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 25–27, 237n64 Deloria, Vine, Jr. on colonial system, 155 on Indians traversing Western worldview, 231n1(Intro.) The Nations Within (with Lytle), 7 on pan-Indian nationalism, 20 pluralist approach to sovereignty, 11 process sovereignty of, 10–11 on reintegration of urban indigenous experiences, 21 Derrida, Jacques, 242n45 disenrollment of tribal members, 131, 252n51, 253n61 Dog Soldier, 209 Drinnon, Richard, 258n23 Drucker, Philip, 217–219 dual citizenship, 14, 16 See also plural sovereignties Durham, Jimmie, 17 Earthdiver, 207–209, 263n44 Eastman, Charles, 29–30 economic change, 46 See also capitalism Eliot, T. S., 161 empowerment, forms of, 14 English language legacy as colonial instrument, 179–180 as lingua franca for indigenous storytellers, 12–13, 81–82, 246n20, 264n58 plural sovereignties and imposition of, 1 transitional use of, 82, 221 translation of sovereign values into, 246n22

Index En’owkin Centre (Penticton, British Columbia), 246n19 entitlements and blood quantum, 19–20, 131, 235n45 Erdrich, Louise blending of Anglo-European and traditional gambling practices, 132–133 commitment to indigenous sovereignty, 152 fiction pointing toward postcapitalist future, 135–136 on kinds of love, 251n42 magical realism in works of, 136, 255n71 trickster discourse in novels of, 242n44 See also The Bingo Palace (Erdrich) ethnic Indian, 20, 236n48 ethnocritical practice, 107 Ethnocriticism (Krupat), 107 “Everyday Use” (Walker), 202 Eye Killers (Carr), 59–72 acquired plural sovereignties in, 65 Alexie’s criticism of, 63 blood metaphor, instrumentalized use of, 60, 66 blood subjectivity in, 39–40, 66–68, 244n66 as counter-text to Indian Killer, 59 crossblood element in, 60, 242n44 indigenous sovereignty beyond blood discourse in, 67–68, 72 multicultural focus of, 62–63 ritualizing defeat of evil in, 72 Roanhorse role in: as Coyote, 70–71; as indigenous vampire, 67–70; as symptom of environmental degradation, 59 vampire role in: as critique of capitalism, 40, 66, 239n2, 243nn58–62; as ‘desiring machine’, 66, 243n59; as

271

invasive national allegory, 63–65, 243n54; signaling impoverishment of indigenous sovereignty, 62; as threat of transformation, 59–62, 242n46; as Wolf, 244n65 feminine, recentering of, 170–171 First-Salmon Ceremony, 120 Five Civilized Tribes, 29 Fixico, Donald, 12 flexible accumulation, 118–119, 249n22 flexible citizenship, 133, 253n60 Flight (Alexie), 57, 58 Fools Crow (Welch), 205 Forsyth, N. A., 184 forty-ninth parallel, 246n24 Foucault, Michel, 44, 45, 240n15 frontier American identity and ideology of, 157–158 indigenization of, in Dark River, 169 indigenous soldiers demarcating, 158–159 as transcultural contact zone, 159 gambling on reservations. See indigenous gaming Gardens in the Dunes (Silko), 89–97 abduction of Indigo, 90–91 fictional power of Sand Lizards, 91–92, 103 hybridity in, 95–96 negotiation of plural sovereignties, 104 overview, 73–74 race ideology as genocide, 94 sex and commerce in, 92–94 survival of indigenous sovereignty, 89 woman-centered gardens in, 89–90 Gardner, Alexander, 184

272

Index

genres, literary, 242n45 ghost dancers, 28, 247n32 Goldberg, Carol, 14 Gover, Reva, 62–63 Great (American) Surveys, 184 Green Grass, Running Water (King), 213, 261n20 Guattari, Felix, 239n2 Hale, Janet Campbell, 16 Halfbreed (Campbell), 22 Hall, Stuart, 2, 107, 108, 231n3 Harvey, David economy determining narrative practices, 46 on flexible accumulation, 118, 249n22 macroeconomic arguments of, 249n25 on overaccumulation, 124 on postmodernism, 108 hauntology, 243n62 Hawk, Thomas White, 46 healing poles, Lummi, 228–230 The Heartsong of Charging Elk (Welch), 83–89 alienation and acquisition of plural sovereignties, 86–89, 103 capture of Crazy Horse in, 84 Charging Elk: as composite fictional character, 246n26; as Native American prototype, 76, 245n9 negotiation of plural sovereignties, 104 overview, 73–74 prologue, 84–85, 246n25 Robinson’s George Jim narrative poem as paratext of, 83 Stronghold in, 86 The Heirs of Columbus (Vizenor), 107–127 capitalism and transformation of indigenous practices in, 106–107, 118–119

omission of Lummi trickster tradition from, 107–109, 113–114, 119, 121–122 redefinition of indigenous identity, 109 technology as tool of deconstruction, 110, 248n8 trickster discourse and founding of crossblood tribal nation, 109–112 Heller, Louis Herman, 184 Hertzberg, Hazel W., 235n38 Hillaire, Darrell, 229 Hirsch, Bernard A. (Bud), 261n19 Hollywooden Indian, 190, 261n16 Holm, Tom, 258nn18–19 Homer, 203 homosexuality, 238n80 House Made of Dawn (Momaday), 40, 170 Huhndorf, Shari, 244n1 identity, as value, 146, 255n80 The Iliad (Homer), 203 Indian Act of 1960 (Canada), 237n71 Indian Arts and Crafts Act (IACA, 1990), 178, 260n35 Indian casinos. See indigenous gaming Indian Citizenship Act (U.S., 1924), 237n71 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (IGRA), 129 Indian Killer (Alexie), 41–58 blood subjectivity and mental illness in, 39, 41 dangers of cross-cultural contact in, 41, 55 Eye Killers as counter-text to, 59 Father Duncan in, 50–51 frozen images as alienation, 48, 241n25 indigenous schizophrenic: homelessness of, 44, 49, 51–53;

Index as metaphor, 43–44, 49; as postmodern victim, 53, 55 mixed blood as pathology, 40, 56–57 postmodernism of, 47 rejection of plural sovereignties, 59 schizophrenic text in, 42–43, 45–47, 55–56, 240nn15,18 suicide of John Smith, 53, 54, 55–57 trojan horse logic of, 47, 49 vigilantes’ actions in, 53, 241n34 Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA), 17, 18–20, 129, 235n45 “Indian Summer” (Colonnese), 33 indigenous captivity narratives. See captivity narratives indigenous conservancy, acquired, 158 indigenous gaming Anglo-European gamblers as primary clientele of, 129 autonomy of tribes and, 252n49 clash of different sovereign traditions, 132, 253n57 gambling revenue impact on tribes, 133–134, 252n52, 253n61, 254nn62–63 indigenous cultural tradition and, 127 lobbying expenditures, 251n46 mixed success of casinos, 134, 254n67 plural sovereignties and benefits of, 129–130 problems resulting from, 130, 249n26, 252nn50–51 as tradition, 136–137 indigenous history, 13, 116 indigenous literature English language, reliance on, 12–13 equal privileges for orality and writing, 180

273

imagined plurality, documentation of, 1–2 King on timelessness of, 181 literary criticism: academic borrowing of sovereign discourse, 219–220; constructivist-materialist approaches to, 4–5, 227–228; sovereign pluralism in, 5–6, 225–226 modernist scaffolding in, 259n24 oral traditions and, 13 plural sovereignties, formation of, 28–34 pluralism in, 34, 225, 238n81 reimagining of colonial experience, 2 separatism in, 5 traditions as sovereign imaginings, 209–210, 264n50 translations from English into indigenous mother-tongues, 13 trojan horse logic of, 47, 49 indigenous people Deloria on traversing Western worldview, 231n1(Intro.) oral traditions of, 180 sovereignty and autonomy of, 4 voting rights for, 237n71 indigenous schizophrenic, 42–44, 47–49, 51–53, 55–56 indigenous sovereignty accessibility of, 222 autonomy and, 4 blood quantum and entitlements, 19–20, 235n45 borrowed vs. owned, 220–221 civil rights and, 10 cohabitation with colonial structures, 8–10 definition of, 7–8 Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, 25–27, 237n64 dual citizenship and, 14, 16 empowerment and, 14

274

Index

indigenous sovereignty—Continued Erdrich’s commitment to, 152 Indian Reorganization Act and, 18–20 lack of racial denominator for, 13–14 local, negotiation in everyday life, 32–33 nationalization of, 2, 21, 236n50 Nunavut Territory and, 25, 26f pragmatic and pluralist experiences shaping, 11 resistance to colonialism and cultural nationalism, 11–12 secondary status in U.S., 29 state interests in limiting, 254n64 survival in Gardens in the Dunes, 89 teaching of, 221–225 Inglis, Richard, 110 inuit qaujimajatuqanjit, 25 Inyo county v. Bishop Paiute Tribe, 252n49 IRA (Indian Reorganization Act of 1934), 17, 18–20, 129, 235n45 Iroquois Confederacy, 29 ishkitini (owl-witch), 162–163 Jackson, William Henry, 184 James, Jewell “Praying Wolf”, 229 Jameson, Fredric, 110 Jay Treaty (1794), 16, 17, 234n35 Jonaitis, Aldona, 110 Justice, Daniel, 4 Keats, John, 202–203 Kelasket, Tommy, 73 Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, 252n51 King, Thomas, 77 affirming indigenous memories of genocide, 211 arguments against killing representations, 214 associational storytelling of, 193

character relationships across historical domains, 210–211 as constructivist, 211–212, 213–214 on contiguity of different worldviews, 180 critique of nationalism, 177, 194–195 decentering of nationality, 181 deconstructing distinction between words and pictures, 193 doors and windows linking alternative visions of sovereignties, 196–197, 196n22 on Eastman’s affirmation of plural sovereignties, 29–30 on English language as colonial instrument, 179–180 fiction as materially true and fictionally expansive, 211 friendship with Owens, 212 Green Grass, Running Water, 213, 261n20 on history bleeding through painted surface, 196, 261n21 on indigenous right to live plural sovereignties, 178–179, 260n4 “Not Enough Horses”, 31 on overlapping national boundaries, 177, 179 photography of Native Americans by, 212–213 plural sovereignties in works of, 180–182, 200–201 rejecting racial denominators for indigenous subjectivities, 13–14, 180–181 “Rendezvous”, 205 on storytelling and transformation of material world, 213–214 strategic essentialism of, 136 trickster narrators of, 181 “Where the Borg Are”, 196, 214–215

Index See also Medicine River (King); Truth & Bright Water (King) Konkle, Maureen, 226 Krupat, Arnold, 18, 107–108 Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw), 217–219 Labrador Inuit Association (LIA), 26, 237n65 L’Anse Ojibwa, 130 Like a Hurricane (Smith and Warrior), 5 Lily Point. See Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts, Washington) linguistic signs, 4 literary separatism, 5 love as anchor to traditions, 98 as money, 127 questioning motives of capitalism, 128, 136, 251n42 reality of, 151–152 Lovell, Anne M., 44, 45 Lowe, Lisa, 31, 253n60 Lucero, Evelina Zuni, 30–31, 98 luck, chance as, 138 Lummi Nation Chelh-ten-em and: plural sovereignties in, 116, 117f; postmodern reimagining of sovereign land, 122–124, 123f; salmon culture of, 119, 121 failure of casino, 254n67 healing poles, 228–230 loss of traditional fishing rights, 249n21 sale of fish processing plant to non-Indians, 250n36 trickster tradition of, 107, 120 Lytle, Clifford M., 7, 20 Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 44, 240n15 Marx, Karl, 141–142 Mashantucket Pequot, 130–131

275

May, Karl, 263n38 Medicine River (film, 1992), 261n17 Medicine River (King), 182–193 “all my relations” in, 178, 181, 183, 185, 192, 261n12 backdating of contemporary indigenous sovereignty, 187 as critique of Anglo-European photographic realism, 177, 183–185, 192–193 Lionel James as trickster, 189, 261n14 as metaphor between Native history and representation, 182–183 as narrative “snapshots”, 261n17 permanence of artistic representation in, 186–187 race as shadow allegory, 188, 261n15 reinserting indigenous rationality into photographs, 184–185 Will’s role in: constructing image of white father from photographs, 187–190; distancing from indigenous history, 191; exclusion from Custer National Monument, 190; as Indian photographer, 185–186; liberation of relatives from static images, 191–193 Métis people (Canada), 22–23 Michaels, Walter Benn, 135, 255n80 Mihesuah, Devon A., 13, 14, 234n33 Milliken, Barry, 263n41 mimesis, 168 mirage gap, 2–3, 218, 228, 232n5 Mixedblood Messages (Owens), 224–225 mixedblood narrative conflicting epistemologies in, 161 frontier as embodiment of, 159

276

Index

mixedblood narrative—Continued hybridization and, 92 in indigenous discourse, 226 in Medicine River, 188 Métis in, 22, 23 as motif in Eye Killers, 60, 65 natural environment and, 163 Momaday, N. Scott, 40, 170, 180, 221 Monster Slayer, 71, 170, 172, 173 Montezuma, Carlos, 17, 28–29 Mooney, James, 184 nation building, indigenous, 2, 10 national boundaries, 83, 246n24 national parks system, creation of, 158, 256n5 nationalism Cardinal on plural construction of nation, 2–3, 232n5 cultural, and resistance to colonialism, 11–12 survival of plural sovereignties and, 61, 242n47 See also Anglo-European nationalism; pan-Indian nationalism The Nations Within (Deloria and Lytle), 7 nativism, 158 Neugin, Rebecca, 199–200, 206, 208, 262n27 Nevada v. Hicks (U.S., 2001), 252n49 Night Flying Woman (Broker), 32 Night Sky, Morning Star (Lucero), 98 Nisga’a band (Canada), 27, 237n67 Non-Status Native Canadian Association, 23 Northwest Rebellion (1885), 22 “Not Enough Horses” (King), 31 Nunavut Territory, Canada, 25, 26f, 232n6

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats), 202–203 “An Okanagan Indian Becomes a Captive Circus Showpiece in England” (Robinson), 77–79, 83, 245n15 Ong, Aihwa, 253n60 oral traditions, 13, 180 Ortiz, Simon J., 11–12, 69–70, 244n68 Other Nation, 31 Owens, Louis on American Indian Renaissance, 40, 41 on Bakhtin’s pervasive influence, 259n26 as constructivist, 4, 65, 259n34 on frontier as transcultural contact zone, 159 on indigenous arrival at centered self, 52–53 King on friendship with, 212 Mixedblood Messages, 224–225 on postcolonial outlook of indigenous people, 239n82 postmodern theory of, 223–224 on The Searchers, 259n33 as teacher of indigenous sovereignty, 221–225 Warrior’s criticism of, 223–224 See also Dark River (Owens) owl-witch (ishkitini), 162–163 palimpsest, postmodern, 248n9 Panama Canal, construction of, 158, 256n4 pan-Indian nationalism, 17, 20, 100, 235nn38–39, 236n48 Park, Clara Claiborne, 44 Pasquaretta, Paul, 127, 130–131, 252n50 Patria Mia (Pound), 157, 256n6 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 73, 75, 76, 244n4

Index The People and the Word (Warrior), 223 Peters, (Darrell) Jesse, 53, 66, 242n44 photographic realism, 177, 183–185, 191–193 plural sovereignties acquired, as engagement across cultures, 65 capitalism and local indigenous economies in, 105 conceptual discreteness of, 31 as contemporary experience of colonialism, 217 cross-articulation of, 14–16 effective past operations of, 217–219 emergence of, 15 empowerment and, 14 indigenous adaptation to, 218 indigenous land vs. intellectual traditions, 8–9 land holdings and, 17 literary formation of, 28–34 Lummi healing poles honoring, 228–230 Montezuma on exercise of, 28–29 nationalism and survival of, 61, 242n47 for Native Canadians, 24, 237n60 operational misreadings of, 210 as strategy resisting colonization, 9–10 terminology of, 34–35 transnational trends and, 18 unilateral termination of treaties, 237n66 U.S. vs. Canada, 24–25 Point Roberts, Washington (Chelhten-em). See Chelh-ten-em (Point Roberts, Washington) Pokagon, Simon, 28, 237n69 Porcupines and China Dolls (Alexie, R.), 212 Porter, Robert Odawi, 7–8

277

postindian, 61, 242n49 Postindian Conversations (Vizenor), 107 postmodern palimpsest, 248n9 postmodernism flexible accumulation and, 118–119, 249n22 Harvey on, 108 Owens on, 223–224 schizophrenia as metaphor for, 56–57 potlatch, 218–219 Pound, Ezra, 157–158, 175, 256nn2,6–7 process sovereignty, 10–11 Pulitano, Elvira, 4, 224 Purdy, John, 132, 136–137, 255n69 quilts, 202, 203 race as shadow, 188, 261n15 racist discourse, 100, 247n41 Raheja, Michelle, 7 Rainwater, Catherine, 61, 245n7 The Red Man’s Book of Lamentations (Pokagon), 237n69 Red Matters (Krupat), 107 Red Power movement, 5 Redbird, Duke, 22–24, 236n58 Regier, A. M., 247n32 Reinhardt, Akim D., 235n45 “Rendezvous” (King), 205 reservation gaming. See indigenous gaming Revard, Carter, 17 Riel, Louis, 22 Riggs, Lynn, 263n39 Robinson, Harry Lionel James inspired by, 261n14 modification of storytelling for non-Okanagan listeners, 79–81 “An Okanagan Indian Becomes a Captive Circus Showpiece in England”, 77–79

278

Index

Robinson, Stephen, 134 Roth, Christopher Fritz, 237nn64,67–68 Rubin, Gayle, 99 “Run” (Milliken), 263n41 SAI (Society for the Advancement of Indians), 17, 235n39 Salish people cultural and spiritual significance of Chelh-ten-em for, 119, 250n28 omission of traditions and places from The Heirs of Columbus, 107–109, 113–114 subsistence fishing practices of, 120 tribal sovereignty of, 119 See also Lummi Nation salmon fishing, commercialization of, 115–116, 116f, 249n20 Sarvé-Gorham, Kristan, 132, 137, 252n49 Sawchuk, Joe, 23 schizophrenia as cause and consequence, 49 in Indian Killer, 42–43, 47–49 indigenous schizophrenic, 42–44, 47–49, 51–53, 55–56 literary appropriations of, 44 as postmodern metaphor, 56–57 as projection of white desires onto Indian communities, 47 as psychosocial predicament of indigenous people, 46 schizophrenic text, 42–43, 45–47, 55–56, 240nn15,18 scriptural economy, 113 The Searchers (Ford), 173, 259n33 September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 57, 229 settler colonialism, 41 shadow, race as, 188, 261n15 Shorty Luke (fictional character), 167, 168, 170, 173–174

Silko, Leslie Marmon, 92 See also Gardens in the Dunes (Silko) Skinner, Ramona Ellen, 10, 233n18 Slash (Armstrong), 97–102 AIM activism documented in, 97, 99–100 bilingual pragmatism of, 82 as decolonization project, 97 love as anchor to Native American traditions, 98 Mardi’s role in, 97–98 overview, 74–75 plural sovereignties in, 102, 104 racist discourse in, 100, 247n41 rejecting nationalist narratives of origin, 74 Smith, Carlton, 255n68 Smith, Jeanne Rosier, 251n44 Smith, Paul Chaat, 5 Society for the Advancement of Indians (SAI), 17, 235n39 soldiers, indigenous conflicting epistemologies of, 161 demarcating frontier, 158–159 integrating plural sovereignties, 164–165, 258nn17–19 Lummi healing poles honoring, 229 as mercenary militia, 165–168 Viet Nam era service of, 165, 258nn19,21 voluntary service of, 164–165, 258nn17–19 sovereign courts, 235n42 sovereign pluralism. See plural sovereignties sovereignty, material vs. intellectual domains, 6–7 Spider Woman, 171–173, 259n28 Stauss, Jay, 10, 233n17 storytelling, indigenous English as lingua franca for, 12–13, 81–82, 246n20, 264n58

Index ordinariness of, 245n17 Robinson’s modifications for nonindigenous listeners, 79–81 strategic essentialism, 264n51 striptease, trickster discourse as, 111 suffrage, indigenous, 237n71 suicide in American Indians, 54–55, 263n43 in Indian Killer, 56–57 in Truth & Bright Water, 207, 208–209 Tallbear, Kimberly, 131, 242n43 Ten Little Indians (Alexie), 57 Tillett, Rebecca, 64, 239n1 To Fish in Common (Boxberger), 119 Treaty of Point Elliott (1855), 119, 121 tribal governments, restraints on, 14 Tribal Secrets (Warrior), 6 trickster Chelh-ten-em as seasonal home of Salmon, 120 in Dark River, 167, 168, 170, 173–174 indigenous chance as, 128 in King’s works, 181 in Lummi tradition, omission from The Heirs of Columbus, 107–109, 113–114, 119, 121–122 political limitations of, 127–128 striptease and, 111 technology as tool of deconstruction, 110, 248n8 Vizenor on, 107–108, 128 wrapping and, 110, 248n9 Truth & Bright Water (King), 193–210 ampersand in title, 194, 261n19 associational storytelling in, 193, 202–203, 204 broken bridge in, 194 collateral reading of, 178

279

death of German tourists as parable, 204–206, 263nn38,40 Dog Soldier in, 209 Earthdiver cosmology in, 207–209 indigenous sovereignty in foreground, 206–207 killing representations in, 198–199 Lum’s suicide in, 207, 208–209 narrator’s role in, 262n28 operational misreadings in, 210 Rebecca Neugin as crosstemporal presence, 199–200, 206, 208, 262n27 Swimmer in: critique of colonialist pastoral, 209, 210; as restorer, 195–198; as trickster, 208, 263n45 Tecumseh in: dream of jumping woman, 207–208; learning lessons of experience, 199, 262n26; as Lum’s protector, 207; as narrator, 194 Tecumseh’s mother’s quilt, 201–202, 203, 207 “white noise” of Anglo-European culture, 206 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 157 United States Indian Citizenship Act (1924), 237n71 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (IGRA), 21 indigenous sovereignty in, 18–21, 29, 236n50 plural sovereignties in, 24–25 United States et al. v. Alaska Packers Association, 249n21 upstreaming, 2, 231n2 vampires. See Eye Killers (Carr) Vizenor, Gerald, 18, 73 Alexie’s critique of, 56

280

Index

Vizenor, Gerald—Continued Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point, 126 Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, 250n33 on Bering Strait migration, 262n34 comic postmodernism of, 46 as constructivist, 4, 228, 259n34 criticism of tribal gaming, 249n26 on “crossblood” experience, 77 as mentor of Owens, 221 Postindian Conversations, 107 on trickster discourse, 107–108, 128 Wordarrows: Native States of Literary Sovereignty, 225 See also The Heirs of Columbus (Vizenor) voting rights, indigenous, 237n71 Walker, Alice, 202 Warrior, Robert, 4 on flaws in Owens’s work, 223–224 on indigenous sovereign’s engagement with AngloEuropean system, 14, 264n2 on indigenous sovereignty, 226 on intellectual sovereignty, 6 Like a Hurricane (with Smith), 5 on national-sovereign traditions, 18

on process sovereignty, 10–11 We Are Métis (Redbird), 22–23 Weaver, Jace, 6, 7, 227 Welch, James, 45, 205. See also The Heartsong of Charging Elk (Welch) “Where the Borg Are” (King), 196, 214–215 White, Hayden, 241n41 Wickwire, Wendy, 77, 80, 245nn10,18 Wilkinson, Charles F., 10 windigoo, 149–150 Womack, Craig, 180 on approaches to indigenous literary criticism, 4–5, 232nn7–9 on homosexuality and local sovereignty debates, 238n80 on Owens’s commitment to compassionate criticism, 265n5 on translation of sovereign values into English, 246n22 women, in male-dominated society, 99 Wordarrows: Native States of Literary Sovereignty (Vizenor), 225 Wounded Knee massacre (1890), 28 Wounded Knee siege (1975), 100 wrapping (cultural signification), 110, 248n9