Skip to main content

Trans-Indigenous: Notes

Trans-Indigenous
Notes
    • Notifications
    • Privacy
  • Project HomeTrans-Indigenous
  • Projects
  • Learn more about Manifold

Notes

Show the following:

  • Annotations
  • Resources
Search within:

Adjust appearance:

  • font
    Font style
  • color scheme
  • Margins
table of contents
  1. Cover
  2. Half Title Page
  3. Series List
  4. Title Page
  5. Copyright
  6. Dedication
  7. Contents
  8. Acknowledgments
  9. Introduction: Ands turn Comparative turn Trans-
  10. Part I. Recovery / Interpretation
    1. 1. “Being” Indigenous “Now”: Resettling “The Indian Today” within and beyond the U.S. 1960s
    2. 2. Unsettling the Spirit of ’76: American Indians Anticipate the U.S. Bicentennial
  11. Part II. Interpretation / Recovery
    1. 3. Pictographic, Woven, Carved: Engaging N. Scott Momaday’s “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” through Multiple Indigenous Aesthetics
    2. 4. Indigenous Languaging: Empathy and Translation across Alphabetic, Aural, and Visual Texts
    3. 5. Siting Earthworks, Navigating Waka: Patterns of Indigenous Settlement in Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run and Robert Sullivan’s Star Waka
  12. Notes
  13. Bibliography
  14. Author Biography

Notes

Introduction

  1. 1. In Blood Narrative I offer an extended explanation for my use of parentheses in the term (post)colonial, which is meant to emphasize the irony of an often asserted postcolonial situation for Indigenous peoples in settler nations (where the post- implies beyond) that is never quite one. I also offer an extended definition of the term Indigenous and an extended justification for comparing U.S. American Indian and New Zealand Māori literary and activist texts.
  2. 2. My remarks are not meant as a comprehensive account of the historical development or the current state of the established field of comparative literature or the emerging field of world literature studies.
  3. 3. My reading of “Comparatively Speaking” assumes the speaker addresses white Australian tourists; the poem produces similar effects if the reader assumes the speaker addresses Pakeha New Zealanders.
  4. 4. This settler-driven form of colonial comparison also can be understood through Edward Said’s concept of orientalism or through Gerald Vizenor’s concepts of manifest manners and terminal creeds.
  5. 5. In the United States, see, for instance, Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (1983); Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1992); James Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (1995); James Cox, Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions (2006); and Sean Teuton, Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (2008). My own comparative study, Blood Narrative, discusses several celebrated mid-twentieth-century American Indian novels but attempts to expand the body and types of texts under discussion, as does Robert Dale Parker’s The Invention of Native American Literature (2003). This list is by no means exhaustive.
  6. 6. Reclamations of nineteenth-century texts include the 1997 republication of Wynema, A Child of the Forest by S. Alice Callahan (Creek), originally published in 1891; the 2007 republication of The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, by Joseph Nicolar (Penobscot), originally published in 1893; the 2010 publication of Changing Is Not Vanishing: A Collection of American Indian Poetry to 1930, edited by Robert Dale Parker; and the 2011 republication of Queen of the Woods by Simon Pokagon (Potawatomie), originally published in 1899. Reclamations of early twentieth-century texts include the 1987 republication of The Moccasin Maker by E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), originally published in 1913, and the 2007 first publication of The Singing Bird by John Milton Oskison (Cherokee). Reclamations of mid-twentieth-century texts include the 2003 republication of Winter Count by Dallas Chief Eagle (Lakota), originally published in 1967. Robert Warrior (Osage) argues the need for more attention to nonfiction texts in The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (2005).
  7. 7. I am drawing on Diana Taylor’s distinction in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003) between the “archive” of supposedly enduring materials—texts, documents, buildings, and bones—and the supposedly ephemeral repertoire of embodied practices and knowledges, such as spoken language, dance, sports, and ritual (19).
  8. 8. Many Native and non-Native scholars have called for increased attention to issues of aesthetics within Indigenous literary studies. The Indigenous Australian scholar Marcia Langton, for instance, writes, “I contend that the central problem is not one of racial discrimination, although I do not deny that it might be a factor in specific or general encounters. Rather, the central problem is the need to develop a body of knowledge and critical perspective to do with aesthetics and politics, whether written by Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal people, on representations of Aboriginal people and concerns in art, film, television or other media” (115).
  9. 9. Book-length studies published in the United States that also endeavor to engage various Indigenous aesthetic systems and/or technologies include Greg Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive: A Holistic Approach to American Indian Texts (1993); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (2008); and Penelope Kelsey, Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews (2008). Other scholars pursuing this line of work include Malea Powell and Angela Haas in the field of Indigenous rhetorics.
  10. 10. Such calls are often traced to their articulation in Robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995) and Jolene Rickard’s (Tuscarora) “Sovereignty: A Line in the Sand” (1995). They can be traced further to goals articulated by early activist organizations, including on the global stage the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP), beginning in the 1970s.
  11. 11. Although not an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw nation, I trace Chickasaw ancestry through my maternal line.
  12. 12. For an account of the formation of NAISA, see Robert Warrior, “Organizing Native American and Indigenous Studies.”
  13. 13. I was fortunate, for example, to spend six months in 2005 at the Turnbull Library in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.
  14. 14. In 2006 and 2007, Māori scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville and I collaborated on several related projects in comparative Indigenous literary studies. We cofacilitated an interactive workshop on pedagogy; we copresented a plenary address for a symposium, which led to a special issue of the Journal of New Zealand Literature, which we coedited with Alex Calder and Witi Ihimaera and for which we cowrote an introduction staged as a back-and-forth exchange; and we copresented, along with Steven Salaita, in an interactive conference session.
  15. 15. See N. Scott Momaday, The Gourd Dancer (1976), In the Presence of the Sun (1992), and In the Bear’s House (1999); Wendy Rose, Lost Copper (1980) and The Halfbreed Chronicles (1985); Peter Blue Cloud, Elderberry Flute Song (1982); Gail Tremblay, Indian Singing in 20th Century America (1990); Nora Naranjo-Morse, Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay (1992); Eric Gansworth, Nickel Eclipse: Iroquois Moon (2000) and A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings (2008); Joy Harjo, Letter from the End of the Twentieth Century (1995), Native Joy for Real (2004), Winding through the Milky Way (2008), and Red Dreams: A Trail beyond Tears (2010); Sherman Alexie, The Business of Fancydancing (2002); and Diane Glancy, Flutie (1998) and its film adaptation, The Dome of Heaven (2010).
  16. 16. While a visiting professor at the University of Oregon in 2007–2008, I organized Indigenous Literatures and Other Arts: A Symposium and Workshop, held at the Many Nations Longhouse on campus. I experimented with collaboration enacted along several axes at once and tested my hypothesis about the productiveness of the trans-Indigenous staging of unexpected conversations across genres, forms, and media; across academic fields and arts practices; across Indigenous nations; and across historical periods and geographical locations. Rather than a keynote or panel format, the symposium was organized around staged conversations between an artist and/or arts scholar and a writer and/or literary scholar and hands-on workshops led by one or more workshop leaders.
  17. 17. Kauri is a species of tree native to Aotearoa; swamp kauri is kauri wood that has been recovered from a swamp. Pāua is a species of abalone.
  18. 18. For more information on Northwest Coast style, see Bill Holm, Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (1965). Graham’s use of interlocking spirals to form the whale’s head is reminiscent of paintings made by the Māori artist John Hovell to illustrate Witi Ihimaera’s 1987 novel The Whale Rider, which I discuss in chapter 4.
  19. 19. I am thinking of newspaper journalism but also of academic essays, broadcast and published speeches, government reports, and book-length works of scholarship in several fields, as well as biography, legal and political analysis, and social commentary.
  20. 20. See, for instance, Momaday’s foreword to Earth Is My Mother, Sky Is My Father.
  21. 21. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs.
  22. 22. Jahnke, “Māori Art towards the Millennium.”
  23. 23. Survivance, Gerald Vizenor’s concept of “active native presence” and “survival as resistance,” was first demonstrated in a series of provocations about American Indian representation, published in 1994 as Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (reissued in 1999 as Manifest Manners: Postindian Narratives on Survivance). Vizenor continues this demonstration in Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, published in 1998. He provides a more straightforward definition in his 2008 essay “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.”

1. “Being” Indigenous “Now”

  1. 1. The Midcontinent American Studies Journal, now American Studies, was associated with the University of Kansas and the Midcontinent American Studies Association (MASA), now the Mid-American American Studies Association. The 2005 special double issue of American Studies was published jointly with the journal Indigenous Studies Today. An earlier version of this chapter was titled “Unspeaking the Settler: ‘The Indian Today’ in International Perspective.”
  2. 2. For a detailed account of the AICC and its Declaration of Indian Purpose, see Allen, Blood Narrative, 103–6.
  3. 3. For an additional account of the development of the 1965 special issue and its relevant historical and political contexts, see Valandra, “National Coexistence Is Our Bull Durham.”
  4. 4. Vine Deloria Jr. begins Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), “To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical” (2). He argues, further, that “the deep impression made upon American minds by the Indian struggle against the white man in the last century has made the contemporary Indian somewhat invisible compared with his ancestors. [. . .] Indians are probably invisible because of the tremendous amount of misinformation about them” (12). Writing about the representation of American Indians in popular discourses in the 1950s and 1960s, the non-Native historian Robert F. Berkhofer Jr. notes in The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (1978) that “no matter how new the media were, the old White stereotypes of the Indian generally prevailed in their presentations” (103).
  5. 5. Of course, in either version, emphasis can be shifted so that “Today” becomes the significant noun, modified by “The Indian” or “The American Indian,” which become its adjectives. In this reading—more against the grain than with it—the special issue announces its subject as the contemporary moment as experienced, understood, or imagined by Indigenous North Americans. While intriguing for its suggestion of subverting dominant discourses, this possibility is not realized in the special issue. For an extended definition of “imperialist nostalgia,” see Resaldo, Culture and Truth.
  6. 6. The time marker “today” is common in “contemporary” assessments of all categories of difference. From the 1960s and early 1970s, such texts include Herbert Aptheker’s The Negro Today (1962) and expanded Soul of the Republic: The Negro Today (1964); Robert Penn Warren’s essay “The Negro Now” published in Look magazine (1965), an excerpt from his book Who Speaks for the Negro?; J. I. Simmons and Barry Winograd’s It’s Happening: A Portrait of the Youth Scene Today (1966); Seventeen magazine’s The Teen Age Girl Today (1968); and Edward Simmen’s edited collection Pain and Promise: The Chicano Today (1972).
  7. 7. The Indian Affairs Branch became part of Canada’s Department of Citizenship and Immigration in 1950.
  8. 8. Information about Dunstan is taken from William J. Megill, “Editor’s Note-Book.”
  9. 9. The 1964 edition of The Indian in Transition was reprinted in 1969.
  10. 10. Here and throughout, I refer to the indigenous Polynesian inhabitants of what are known as the Hawaiian Islands and their descendants as Hawaiians rather than as Native Hawaiians.
  11. 11. A third printing appeared in 1976, the year of the U.S. bicentennial, and a fourth, in 1995; the most recent editions were published by Ku Pa’a Publishing.
  12. 12. An earlier overview survey was published in Australia in March 1962 by the Council for Aboriginal Rights, located in Victoria. Titled The Struggle for Dignity, the brief book carries this explanatory subtitle on its front cover: A Critical Analysis of the Australian Aborigine Today, the Laws Which Govern Him, and Their Effects. Edited by William M. Murray, it includes chapters written by Shirley Andrews, Mary M. Bennett (in whose memory the book is dedicated), Alastair H. Campbell, Len Fox, and Barry E. Christophers. In the front matter the editor claims, “In presenting this book the Council for Aboriginal Rights has completed a unique project. For the first time a picture of Aboriginal life on a nation-wide scale is given” (n.p.). The five contributors are described only as “experts in their field.” Bennett, who died in 1961, is described in more detail as a “crusader” for Aboriginal rights and an author of a short book, The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being (1930), and several articles on Aboriginal history and culture. Additional overview surveys with similar titles were produced in the 1970s, including Susan Reid’s 1972 The Aborigine Today, published by the Victoria Education Department for use in middle schools, and Chris Mullard’s 1974 booklet Aborigines in Australia Today, commissioned and published by the newly organized National Aboriginal Forum. The latter text is of particular interest. As described in the preface, Mullard, “a black British sociologist and author, was invited to Australia by the National Aboriginal Forum to report on the conditions under which many Aborigines are living” (6). Mullard had recently published the 1973 study Black Britain (released in the United States in 1975 as On Being Black in Britain), one of the first books published by a black writer born and raised in the United Kingdom. Outside Australia, R. D. Cartwright’s Aborigines Today was published in 1977 by the New Zealand commercial press Smith/Methuen for use in elementary and junior high schools; Survival International, based in London, published its booklet The Aborigines Today: Land Rights, Uranium Mining, Social Disruption, Anthropology in 1978. Several texts with titles similar to that of the 1965 special issue were published both in Australia and abroad in response to Australia’s bicentennial in 1988, including a double issue of the journal Kunapipi, “Aboriginal Culture Today”; Julian Burger’s Aborigines Today: Land and Justice, published by the Anti-Slavery Society in London; and Penny Taylor’s After 200 Years: Photographic Essays of Aboriginal and Islander Australia Today, published by Cambridge University Press.
  13. 13. Reay does not capitalize Aborigine in her introduction or in any of her contributors’ essays. The phrase “aboriginal life today” is taken from the blurb on the dust jacket.
  14. 14. By 1968, Schwimmer had left New Zealand to become a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. For a history and analysis of Te Ao Hou, see Allen, Blood Narrative, 43–72.
  15. 15. See Allen, Blood Narrative, 103–6.
  16. 16. Curiously, the map insert is not listed in the table of contents or front matter. Titled “The North American Indians: 1950 Distribution of Descendants of the Aboriginal Population of Alaska, Canada and the United States,” the map was prepared between 1956 and 1959 under the direction of Sol Tax at the University of Chicago and originally published in December 1960 in preparation for the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference, which Tax and Lurie helped organize. In the Penguin paperback edition, the map is listed in the table of contents and integrated into the final pages of the book.
  17. 17. Holt mentions in passing the history of systematic violence against American Indians. Similarly, several writers in Aborigines Now make passing reference to American Indians or New Zealand Māori. I have identified only one comparative survey from the period with a title similar to “The Indian Today,” published by the Inter-American Indian Institute based in Mexico. In December 1962, the institute published an English translation of its “Indianist Yearbook,” an annual supplement to its quarterly journal America Indigena. Titled “Indians in the Hemisphere Today: Guide to the Indian Population,” it offers brief profiles of the contemporary demographics and economic development of Indian communities in eighteen nation-states across the Americas, arranged alphabetically from Argentina to Venezuela. Included are entries for the predominantly English-speaking United States (a member of the institute) and Canada (a nonmember). Edited by the institute’s director, Miguel León-Portilla, and supported financially by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the guide’s eighteen monographs were written by several Latin American and one U.S. anthropologist; their primary audience appears to be governments and nongovernmental organizations involved in community and socioeconomic development across the hemisphere. The institute was established in 1940 at the First Inter-American Indian Congress. Prior to 1962, the annual supplement to America Indigena was titled “Boletín Indigenista.” The English translation for “Indians in the Hemisphere Today” was prepared by Virginia B. García.
  18. 18. In their introduction to “Indigeneity at the Crossroads of American Studies,” D. Anthony Tyeeme Clark and Norman Yetman overview the careers of Thomas and Witt (20n17).
  19. 19. The other is “Tight Shoe Night” by the non-Native researcher Carol K. Rachlin.
  20. 20. We might compare Holt’s description of this “vicarious sense of courage” with the American Indian intellectual and writer Ella Deloria’s description of “vicarious honor” in her historical novel Waterlily (85). We might link Holt’s specific statement about “the fantastical navigational feats of our ancestors” to the work of Māori poet Robert Sullivan in his sequence of poems Star Waka, which I discuss in chapter 5. Here and elsewhere, I use square brackets to indicate when ellipses are mine rather than the author’s.
  21. 21. Holt’s emphasis aligns with what I describe in Blood Narrative as the “blood/land/memory complex.”
  22. 22. Information on the publication history and promotion of The Maori Today is from files held at Archives New Zealand in Wellington (file GP1 W2714 5/32/1, Maori Affairs: “The Maori Today”).
  23. 23. New Zealand sent troops to Malaya in 1956 as part of a Commonwealth effort to fight communist insurgents. The so-called emergency lasted until 1960.
  24. 24. Information on the publishing background for The Maori People in the Nineteen-Sixties is from files held at Archives New Zealand in Wellington (file ABJZ 869 W4644 18 9/3/28 1, Maori Purposes Fund Board—Publications, “Aspirations and Stresses of a Minority”).
  25. 25. The committee hoped to actually receive at least eighteen completed essays from the invited contributors by the publisher’s deadline.
  26. 26. Beaglehole agreed to write a new essay for the collection but died before its completion.
  27. 27. This passage begins: “One of the authors has suggested to me that ‘the term “Aborigines” has clearly taken on a “nationality” aspect . . . their being singled out as a special group seems to require the capital that one would normally give to other nationalities’” (168).
  28. 28. In the obituary for Marie Reay (1922–2004) published in the Australian Journal of Anthropology, Paula Brown Glick and Jeremy Beckett remark that Reay was not “comfortable with the increasing radicalism of the 1970s and 1980s, and never had much sympathy for Aboriginal land rights.” Beckett is one of the young anthropologists featured in Aborigines Now.
  29. 29. Information on the production of the film The Maori Today is from files held in Archives New Zealand in Wellington (files AAPG W3435 16 3/2/87, “The Maori Today,” and AAMK 869/1160A 52/1/8 1, “The Maori Today—16 mm film”).
  30. 30. September 25, 1968, file AAPG W3435 16 3/2/87, “The Maori Today,” Archives New Zealand, Wellington.
  31. 31. Numerous scholars have analyzed this early ethnographic photography. For a contemporary Indigenous analysis and response, see Ortiz, Beyond the Reach of Time and Change.
  32. 32. The American Indian writer Thomas King, who is also an accomplished photographer, writes, “That’s really what photographs are. Not records of moments, but rather imaginative acts” (43).
  33. 33. A one-thousand-year Hawaiian time line runs down one side of each cover, beginning with the year 960 and ending with 1960. A one-inch margin above “960” and a quarter-inch margin below “1960” indicate that Hawaiian history extends before and after these markers of a Hawaiian millennium. Five other designated years punctuate the space between these markers, dividing the millennium into rough periods; these are illustrated in a vertical mural on each cover. At the top of the mural, corresponding to the period around 960, are images of double-hulled Polynesian canoes with triangular sails; next, for the period from 1350 to 1630, are images of well-organized and highly developed Hawaiian villages; below these, corresponding to the period around 1770, are representations of the first appearances of European sailing ships, as well as representations of classic Hawaiian artifacts; further down, near “1820,” are images of the Hawaiian kingdom, Euro-American architecture, and plantations; finally, for the period between 1920 and 1960, the mural illustrates the contemporary coexistence of rural communities and the large modern city of Honolulu, with images of a commercial airliner and a cruise ship to indicate the importance of modern travel and tourism.
  34. 34. It is a surprise, then, that the more recent editions of On Being Hawaiian appear with a different cover. Instead of the time line and mural, the later printings use one of the historical sketches included in the original edition, a representation titled “Masked Kahuna” that is described in the 1964 edition as “Secret alii sect in gourd helmets, sketched by Webber at the time of Captain Cook’s last visit to Hawaii.” The sketch depicts a group of Hawaiian leaders paddling a double-hulled canoe, suggesting that On Being Hawaiian is about Hawaiian identity in the historical past. Moreover, the later editions include only forty-four illustrations rather than the fifty-three of the first printing; the final images are now “Pa’u Riders, after annexation” (63) and “Unidentified singers of the early 20th century” (64), which also link the text with the past rather than with the present or possible future.
  35. 35. The photograph is captioned “David Mathewson, 3 years, of Hamilton, Ontario, has a chat with an Indian, Perry Williams, also 3 years, at the Six Nations Indian Fair at Ohswekan” (186). Most of the photographs that illustrate Dunstan’s essay, including this one, were provided by the Department of Citizenship and Immigration.
  36. 36. The 1970 Penguin paperback edition of The American Indian Today includes a different image on its cover. In this black-and-white photograph, an apparently Plains Indian woman wearing a “traditional” beaded and fringed buckskin dress, moccasins, and headband stands inside the doorway of a decorated tipi, cooking on a modern range and looking down at an Indian child wearing a “modern” girl’s party or perhaps church dress and white shoes. No caption accompanies the unattributed photograph. Gilda Kuhlman is credited with cover design.
  37. 37. Similar to other familiar terms for peoples indigenous to North America, the term Sioux is actually foreign, an abbreviated form of an Odawa term that was borrowed into Canadian French during the seventeenth century and later anglicized. Today, peoples typically designated Sioux tend to refer to themselves as Lakota, Nakota, or Dakota, indicating their particular dialect, or by specific nation names. Throughout the book, I try to follow the usage of particular authors.
  38. 38. Levine mentions Haskell in his introduction to the special issue only in passing: “A colleague of mine and his wife hired a teen-age girl from Haskell Indian Institute to do housecleaning.” The brief anecdotes he tells about this Pima girl and her interactions with the “modern” world of Lawrence, Kansas, are meant to suggest her difference as Indian (“Even months after coming to Haskell, this intelligent youngster was still bewildered by the elementary artifacts of the larger civilization”), but the stories are awkward in their telling. They say more about Levine’s assumptions about what counts as Native difference and why difference might or might not matter than they do about the diverse lives of American Indian young people in the 1960s (13).
  39. 39. A billy can or billy is a metal pot or kettle used for camp cooking.
  40. 40. The Pintubi are referred to in a subsequent essay, “Papunya: Westernization in an Aboriginal Community” by Jeremy Long, an investigation officer for the Welfare Branch of the Northern Territory Administration. Long’s statements make more sense as captions for the photographs—such as, “Newcomers to the settlement who have seldom if ever worn clothes exhibit shame at nudity within weeks of their arrival” (78).
  41. 41. Lois Briggs was the first Indigenous Australian fashion model, appearing on both runways and television. Although her skin is visibly lighter than that of the unnamed subjects on the same page, she is marked as “Aboriginal” rather than “Part-aboriginal.”
  42. 42. According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Robert Tudawali, also known as Bobby Wilson, was born c. 1929 on Melville Island off the coast of the Northern Territory to Tiwi parents and died tragically of severe burns and tuberculosis in 1967. He served in the Australian military during World War II and was an outstanding athlete before being cast as the male lead, Marbuck, in the 1955 film Jedda, directed by Charles Chauvel. He played subsequent roles in the 1958 film Dust in the Sun and in the Australian television series Whiplash. An advocate for Aboriginal justice, in 1966 Tudawali was elected vice president of the Northern Territory Council for Aboriginal Rights. See Forrest, “Tudawali, Robert (1929?-1967).”
  43. 43. Tudawali is also mentioned in “The Popular Image: Aborigines and the Newspapers” by Ted Docker, a journalist and historian. Echoing Beckett, Docker writes: “What of Robert Tudawali, of the flashing teeth and the frank engaging personality? [. . .] If you look for Robert Tudawali or one of a dozen other bright alert young full-bloods who have been favoured at one time or another by the special approval of Darwin’s native administration, you will find most likely he is in jail. Search in Kempsey for one of its famous aboriginal boxing heroes. He cannot be found. His wife has not seen him for six weeks. He is probably drunk somewhere” (18).
  44. 44. Aborigines Now includes “Negritude for the White Man” by Randolph Stow, a lecturer in English at the University of Western Australia and a published poet and novelist. In his analysis of white representations of Indigenous Australians, Stow laments, “What is needed, of course, is an aboriginal writer, a literary Namatjira [the Indigenous painter], an Australian Camara Laye [the West African novelist]” (6). Stow appears unaware of Kath Walker, an Aboriginal poet who published a first book in 1964. In her introduction, however, Reay includes Walker in a preemptive rebuttal to Stow that is also another instance of barely veiled paternalism: “Kath Walker, an aboriginal poet, has shown considerable promise in a volume of verse that is mainly propagandist for her people, but I see a real danger that she and others may find recognition before their grasp of the craftsmanship of writing gives them the literary stature to justify it. I would not like to see their work acclaimed just because it is written by aborigines and not because of any intrinsic merit it may have: the prospect calls to mind a circus in which fleas and elephants are applauded because they perform actions that are commonplace in humans” (xvi).
  45. 45. “Canadian Indians Today” includes a photograph of Micmac artist Michael Francis at work at his desk, with six of his “wildlife paintings” clearly visible on the wall behind him (193). In Aborigines Now, “Totemic Designs and Group Continuity in Walbiri Cosmology” by the anthropologist Nancy Munn includes three “figures” of contemporary Walbiri drawings, although there are no photographs of the artists.
  46. 46. Thompson’s Getting to Know American Indians Today is part of Coward-McCann’s Getting to Know series of juvenile books, which “cover today’s world.” In 1965, the series included seven titles devoted to explaining various United Nations agencies and many more titles set in various parts of Africa (eleven), the Arctic (one), Asia (twelve), the Caribbean and Central America (eight), Europe “East and West” (twelve), the Middle East (six), the Pacific (six), and South America (seven), as well as in North America (five). The publishers described the books in these terms: “This round-the-world series not only covers everyday life in many countries and regions and includes their geography and history—it also highlights what’s new today” (n.p.).
  47. 47. Unfortunately, I have been unable to secure Larsen’s short book. I assume it takes an explicitly Mormon perspective, based on descriptions of Larsen’s other publications: You and the Destiny of the Indian (1966), Free to Act (1989), and People of Destiny (2001).
  48. 48. Robinson’s revisions, however, amount to only an additional four pages.
  49. 49. Kirk often produced several books related to a particular geography. David, Young Chief of the Quileutes: An American Indian Today (1967), is part of a series that includes The Olympic Seashore (Port Angeles, Wash.: Olympic Natural History Association, 1962), Exploring the Olympic Peninsula (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), and The Olympic Rain Forest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966). In this period Kirk also produced another book with Harcourt, Brace and World focused on a “foreign” child, Sigemi: A Japanese Village Girl (1965).
  50. 50. Lurie uses similar language in the opening sentence of her contribution to the 1965 special issue, “An American Indian Renascence?” [sic]: “American Indian people constitute one of the smallest yet most durable minority groups in the United States” (25).
  51. 51. Information about Roessel is taken from the Navajo Nation’s press release upon his death; see Navajo Nation, “Navajo Nation Bids Farewell.” Much of this information is also included in the 1969 revised and expanded edition of Robinson’s Navajo Indians Today (see 46–49).
  52. 52. These efforts were successful. In the Fall 1967 issue of the MASJ, Levine writes, “Our last special issue, the one devoted to the American Indian, is a case in point: it’s all sold out. Please stop adopting it as a text for the time being. Adoptions continue to pour in, and we have no way to fill the orders. It will be reprinted, in expanded and much-revised form, this spring, and will then be permanently available” (2).
  53. 53. Levine’s language about “fences” alludes to Robert Frost’s 1914 poem “Mending Wall.”
  54. 54. In his introduction Levine states, “The Editor conceives of this journal as a kind of Scientific American for American Studies, a place where specialists can ‘report in’ on the direction in which new research is going in their areas and on the implications of that work for people in other fields” (4). Near the end of the “MASA Bulletin,” he argues further that “in practical terms responsibility for transmitting such information lies on the shoulders of our growing group of interdisciplinarians, people who as a professional commitment keep in close touch with a number of disciplines” (188). He then states, “It is one of the functions of the present Journal, and this issue in particular, to serve as a medium through which such contact [among different disciplines] can be established and maintained” (188). He ends the bulletin by stating, “Thus another one of the purposes of the present collection is to provide information, observations and recommendations which will be of use not merely to people working directly with the complex problems faced by the American Indian community, but to others, in fields as diverse as diplomacy and education as well” (189).
  55. 55. Although it was not published in the United States, we might include the scholarly collection The North American Indian Today (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1943), proceedings of a seminar conference jointly sponsored by the University of Toronto and Yale University from September 4 to 16, 1939, and coedited by C. T. Loram, chair of the Department of Race Relations at Yale, and T. F. McIlwraith, professor of anthropology at Toronto. Contributors include the U.S. anthropologist Ruth Underhill and the commissioner of Indian affairs John Collier. Attendees include the American Indian intellectuals Ruth Muskrat Bronson, then an associate guidance officer in the Office of Indian Affairs, and D’Arcy McNickle, then also an employee of OIA.
  56. 56. We might also include the national newspaper Indian Country Today, which began publication in 1981.
  57. 57. In the new century versions of the word Indigenous are increasingly used in similar ways. See, for example, the 2007 collection of scholarly essays titled Indigenous Experience Today, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Orin Starn, which concludes with an afterword by Mary Louise Pratt titled “Indigeneity Today.”
  58. 58. We might also ask what it means that only one title in this list includes an explicit reference to Alaska Natives.
  59. 59. Curtis is listed in the 1936 edition of Indians of Today as “Kaw—one-eighth” (38).
  60. 60. The 1936 edition includes an entry for the now infamous Gray Owl, who claimed various Indigenous identities during his lifetime—he is listed here as “Apache—three-eighths”—but is now known to have been non-Native.
  61. 61. Unlike McNickle and Peterson, Dozier is not identified as American Indian in the volume itself. However, Dozier is among the notable living Indians profiled in the 1960 and 1971 editions of Indians of Today (17–18; 208–9). He is also listed among prominent American Indians at the end of Hildegard Thompson’s 1965 Getting to Know American Indians Today (58).
  62. 62. For a more detailed history of these events, see Allen, Blood Narrative.

2. Unsettling the Spirit of ’76

  1. 1. A history of Australia Day is available at www.australiaday.com.au.
  2. 2. Local Aborigines were not invited to participate in the reenactment of Phillip’s landing in 1938. Instead, a small group from western New South Wales were brought in to perform a brief corroboree (ritual). The reenactment did not include settler contact with any Indigenous peoples. For an overview, see www.australiaday.com.au.
  3. 3. For original documents, see Attwood and Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, 82–91. Also see Heiss and Minter, Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature, 30–37.
  4. 4. “Active Indigenous presence” is one of the definitions Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) has given for his politically charged term survivance.
  5. 5. Foley notes, in particular, that the New York Times ran a page 2 article about the protest (Seth Mydans, “Aborigines Cast a Shadow over Australia’s Party,” New York Times, January 26, 1988). Australia Daze (1988) is a seventy-five-minute “observational documentary” shot on January 26, 1988. Twenty-nine directors and their camera crews were posted to different parts of the country to record the bicentennial celebrations. Five of the directors were charged specifically with recording the Indigenous protest march. See http://australianscreen.com.au/titles/australia-daze.
  6. 6. Similar sentiments were voiced by other Aboriginal leaders, including Philip Morrissey, who developed and managed the Bicentennial National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program. Writing in the special double issue of the journal Kunapipi, Morrissey stated that “the march itself was considerably broader in its cultural implications than a straightforward boycott. One Aboriginal leader’s speech, following the march, would not have been out of place coming from an advocate of the ‘Living Together’ theme of the Bicentenary and the striking news photographs of the march and its individual participants point to a victory of the spirit over historical circumstance” (11).
  7. 7. See Lonetree (Ho-Chunk), “Museums as Sites of Decolonization,” for a discussion of the need for “truth telling as a decolonizing strategy” within the museum context. Lonetree’s work draws from the important collection For Indigenous Eyes Only: A Decolonization Handbook, edited by Waziyatawin Angela Wilson and Michael Yellowbird.
  8. 8. I quote from the version of “The Burnum Burnum Declaration” reprinted in the Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature, 124–25. For brief accounts of Burnum’s life and activism, see Milliken, “Obituary: Burnum Burnum,” and the foreword to Burnum Burnum’s Aboriginal Australia (7–9). A detailed account is available in Norst, Burnum Burnum.
  9. 9. Philip Morrissey argues that “Burnum’s irony in part exemplifies his refusal to be imprisoned by history or to accept a moral or a political dimension of the Bicentenary as being the only one.” Morrissey also notes, “Speaking of his own Bicentennial grant to prepare a traveler’s guide to Aboriginal Australia [. . .] Burnum has sometimes said that he is celebrating 250 Bicentenaries [that is, 50,000 years of Aboriginal tenure in the land]” (11). In the travel guide itself, Burnum includes a photo of the Aboriginal protest of the bicentennial First Fleet reenactment in the section titled “Aboriginal Sydney today” (51). For an analysis of the 1969 Alcatraz proclamation, see Allen, Blood Narrative, 162–68.
  10. 10. For an account of the Aboriginal demand for a treaty, see, for example, Kevin Gilbert, “Aboriginal Sovereignty: Justice, the Law and Land: A Draft Written in Consultation with Aboriginal Members of the Sovereign Aboriginal Coalition at Alice Springs on 19–21 June 1987” (cited in Attwood and Markus, 310–13); and the “Barunga Statement” of June 12, 1988 (cited in Attwood and Markus, 316). The call for a treaty went unfulfilled, as documented by the Aboriginal rock group Yothu Yindi in their 1992 hit single “Treaty.” For an account of the Bicentennial National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program, see Morrissey, “Restoring a Future to a Past.”
  11. 11. See Heiss and Minter, Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature, 6, 40.
  12. 12. The case of The Education of Little Tree has been reported in numerous accounts. Dan T. Carter (no relation) broke the story of Carter’s identity in “The Transformation of a Klansman,” New York Times, October 4, 1991. Among other Indigenous scholars, Gerald Vizenor has written extensively about Carter; see, for instance, his remarks in Fugitive Poses, 114–17. Vizenor includes the detail that “The Education of Little Tree has sold close to a million copies, more copies sold than The Way to Rainy Mountain [1969] by N. Scott Momaday, which once was the best seller at the University of New Mexico Press” (116). See also Huhndorf, “The Making of an Indian: ‘Forrest’ Carter’s Literary Inventions,” in Going Native.
  13. 13. July 4 has been used by American Indian writers and activists (as well as by other so-called minority writers and activists) as a key symbol of (hypocritical) U.S. ideals of freedom and justice, beginning as early as William Apess’s 1836 Eulogy on King Philip (see Apess, 286). For a discussion, see Lopenzina, “What to the American Indian Is the Fourth of July?”
  14. 14. Warner was a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, a lawyer, and secretary of the navy under President Nixon from 1972 to 1974. He served as a five-term Republican U.S. Senator from Virginia between 1979 and 2009.
  15. 15. Information on Thomasine Hill is taken from The Desert Yearbook, Class of 1974 (Tucson: University of Arizona, 1974), 24, www.e-yearbook.com.
  16. 16. Office of Native American Programs, Annual Report, n.p.
  17. 17. McNickle makes similar references to recent activism and the power of a collective Indigenous voice in the revised edition of They Came Here First. In Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, Deloria lays out the historical and social contexts for this activism. Drawing from the recent history of Israel, he asks readers to contemplate alternative futures for Indigenous Americans: “Who is to say that Indians cannot regain their independence some time in the future?” (83).
  18. 18. Harris gives few production details for the Reader’s Digest film, which she would have been able to screen only in a theater. A footnote indicates Harris viewed a “matinee showing . . . in Tallahassee, Florida (1974)” (8n6). Released in 1973, Tom Sawyer was directed by Don Taylor for Reader’s Digest/Apjac International and distributed by United Artists. In 1976, it aired on the CBS television network, a fact Harris could not have known but appears to have anticipated in 1974.
  19. 19. The speech appears to have been given to a Rotary Club or similar organization.
  20. 20. Revard subsequently published “Discovery of the New World” in Ponca War Dancers (1980), and it has been reprinted, in slightly revised versions, in several places, including Revard’s How the Songs Come Down: New and Selected Poems (2005).
  21. 21. For a reading of Revard’s poem in relation to Vizenor’s novel, see, for example, Wilson, “Nesting in the Ruins,” 183. For an account of Indigenous responses to the Columbus quincentenary in the museum context, see, for example, Cooper (Cherokee), “No Celebration for Columbus,” in Spirited Encounters, 109–19. For Indigenous responses to 1992, see, for example, Gonzalez, Without Discovery, and Gentry and Grinde, The Unheard Voices.
  22. 22. The Luiseño artist Fritz Scholder, for instance, painted his provocative “Last Indian with [U.S.] Flag” in 1975, included in the bicentennial exhibition The American Indian and the American Flag, Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan. The exhibition also showed in New York, Wisconsin, Houston, and Phoenix during 1976 and 1977. A number of other exhibitions of American Indian arts, “traditional” and contemporary, were organized in the United States and abroad to commemorate the bicentennial, including One with the Earth, Institute of American Indian Arts; I Wear the Morning Star: An Exhibition of American Indian Ghost Dance Objects, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, cosponsored by the Minneapolis Regional Native American Center; The Artistic Spirit of the North American Indian, Roberson Center for the Arts and Sciences, Binghamton, New York; Interwoven Heritage: A Bicentennial Exhibition of Southwestern Indian Basketry and Textile Arts, Memorial Union Art Gallery, University of California at Davis; and Sacred Circles: Two Thousand Years of North American Indian Art, Arts Council of Great Britain and Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City.
  23. 23. Davids also participated in the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars in 1970.
  24. 24. A similar range of sentiments appeared in Akwesasne Notes. In the issue dated Late Summer 1975, for instance, the paper published a series of readers’ letters under the banner “Native Perspectives on Bicentennial” and included a center fold-out titled “The Native American Revolution Bicentennial 1776–1976: 200 Years of Resistance.”
  25. 25. The Newberry Library event was held February 21–22, 1975. In addition to Deloria, the conference featured Reginald Horseman, “The Image of the Indian in the Age of the American Revolution”; Bernard W. Sheehan, “The Ideology of the Revolution and the American Indian”; Mary E. Fleming Mathur, “Savages Are Heroes, Too, Whiteman!”; Francis Jennings, “The Imperial Revolution: The American Revolution as a Tripartite Struggle for Sovereignty”; James Axtell, “The Unbroken Twig: The Revolution in America Indian Education”; and James H. O’Donnell, “The World Turned Upside Down: The American Revolution as a Catastrophe for Native Americans.” Robert Berkhofer Jr. and Barbara Graymont provided commentary. I am grateful to Scott Stevens and the staff at the D’Arcy McNickle Center at the Newberry Library for their assistance in confirming the conference dates and presentation titles.
  26. 26. Douglas Latimer edited the Harper and Row series. Preceding Indians’ Summer were Seven Arrows by Hyemoyohsts Storm (1972), Ascending Red Cedar Moon by Duane Niatum (1974), and Winter in the Blood by James Welch (1974). Immediately following Indians’ Summer was Carriers of the Dream Wheel: Contemporary Native American Poetry, edited by Duane Niatum (1975).
  27. 27. According to its website, the Shawnee Nation, United Remnant Band, which is not a federally recognized tribe, reorganized in 1971 and, through a Joint Resolution passed in 1979–1980, received recognition as a “historical tribe” from the State of Ohio. In 1995, after raising its own money, the United Remnant Band was able to purchase a small land base in Ohio, a historical homeland of the Shawnee. See www.zaneshawneecaverns.net.
  28. 28. In addition to his novel published with Harper and Row, Nasnaga (sometimes rendered Nas’Naga) self-published two volumes of poetry, Faces beneath the Grass (completed in 1975, published in 1979) and The Darker Side of Glory (n.d.), as well as a book titled Warriors (1979). Like his novel, these works feature examples of Nasnaga’s art. Nasnaga also published at least one short story in a national journal, “Two Paths to Eternity.” Correspondence between Nasnaga and his publisher written between 1972 and 1976, held in the American Heritage Center archives at the University of Wyoming, indicates Nasnaga worked closely with Douglas Latimer on completing the manuscript between 1972 and mid-1974, while he was living in Texas, and then returned to Ohio in late 1974, after the manuscript had gone through copyediting and Nasnaga had completed his illustrations. The novel was published in January 1975, with an official release date of February 28. The initial printing of 3,000 sold out in March 1975 (2,600 in actual sales, 400 given away), and an immediate reprint was ordered of an additional 2,000 to 3,000 copies.
  29. 29. Vernon Bellecourt, interview by Richard Ballard, Penthouse, July 1973, 58–64, 122, 131–32. Nasnaga slightly alters the original. Bellecourt made similar statements in other venues, including the speech “American Indian Movement” published in the anthology Contemporary Native American Address (1976): “We recognize that in 1976 when this country is going to celebrate its 200th birthday, they will be celebrating in our backyard. And, by then, they had better have involved the host, or we are going to be very much concerned whether they are going to have a Happy Birthday or not” (74–75). The editors do not provide the date or site of the speech. Bellecourt’s Penthouse interview also appears to have influenced Michael Dorris’s language of “. . . we’ll blow out / Your candles, one by one.”
  30. 30. Nasnaga appears to follow a trend in this period, among some Native activists and intellectuals, to use Anishinabe as a pan-Indian term across North America or across North and South America. See, for example, Jack D. Forbes’s pan-Indian and pan-hemispheric use of Anishinabe and the related term Anishinabe-waki (Indian country) in “It’s Time to Throw Off the White Man’s Names” and Aztecas del Norte. Nasnaga also follows Forbes in spelling Anishinabe with only one a, rather than the more typical spelling of Anishinaabe.
  31. 31. For original readers this structure may have suggested the “Bicentennial Minute” vignettes regularly aired on the CBS television network between 1974 and the end of 1976. CBS aired 732 different versions of these vignettes.
  32. 32. The Battle of the Hundred Slain on December 21, 1866, also known as the Fetterman Massacre, was the worst U.S. Army defeat—and the greatest Indian military victory—on the plains before the Battle of the Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876. The Battle of the Hundred Slain can be viewed as part of the larger Red Cloud’s War, also known as the Bozeman War or the Powder River War, fought between the Lakota and their allies and U.S. forces in the Wyoming and Montana Territories from 1866 to 1868, ending with victory for the Lakota and the signing of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.
  33. 33. Booklist, unsigned review of Indians’ Summer. Nasnaga’s Indians’ Summer is included in the University of Iowa’s Books for Young Adults program’s annual “poll” of “contemporary books selected by juniors and seniors in local schools” for 1975. The program staff reports, “These books have been chosen by popular appeal,” and the books “represent the viewpoint of the adolescent who has found them relevant” (95). Indians’ Summer is grouped with other popular books under the subheading “Intense Encounters,” which includes works of “science fiction, the supernatural story, and the whodunit mystery,” such as Peter Benchley’s Jaws (1974), William Goldman’s Marathon Man (1974), Laird Koenig’s The Little Girl Who Lives down the Lane (1974), and Stanley Konvitz’s The Sentinel (1974). The program staff describes Indians’ Summer as an “angry, often humorous novel” and quotes one of their young adult readers as saying, “My fear is that the incidents in this book could really happen” (96). Carlsen, Manna, and Yoder, review of Indians’ Summer.
  34. 34. Virginia Quarterly Review, review of Indians’ Summer.
  35. 35. Freling, review of Indians’ Summer. Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, is located near the Saginaw Chippewa (Anishinaabe) Reservation.
  36. 36. Evers, review of Indians’ Summer.
  37. 37. Press, review of Indians’ Summer.
  38. 38. CH, review of Indians’ Summer. The language of this final sentence echoes the opening line of the plot summary given on the inside of the novel’s dust jacket: “Indians’ Summer is a warning, and quite possibly a prophecy.” This summary ends by noting that “Americans should remember that in the summer of 1976, when one group of Americans is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the United States, a different group—the Native American people—will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Seventh Cavalry’s annihilation at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.”
  39. 39. Other novels considered in this chapter are George Pierre’s Autumn’s Bounty (1972), James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977).
  40. 40. I offer extended definitions for “treaty discourse” in “Postcolonial Theory and the Discourse of Treaties” and in Blood Narrative.
  41. 41. Akwesasne Notes also published an account of the events at Wounded Knee, Voices from Wounded Knee, 1973: In the Words of the Participants (1974).
  42. 42. Many accounts have been written about the efforts of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. See, for example, Colin G. Galloway’s The Shawnees and the War for America (2007).
  43. 43. Nasnaga appears to follow Forbes in his use of the term Cabolclo, as well. In his 1972 article published in Akwesasne Notes, “It’s Time to Throw Off the White Man’s Names,” Forbes similarly defines Caboclo (his spelling) as “a Tupi-Guarani word meaning ‘copper colored,’” adding, “This word is used in Brazil in the same way that Indian is used in the United States (to include all people of Indian race, Indian appearance, or Indian culture).” Later in the article, he states, “Since the word Caboclo is already available and already refers to ‘Pan-Indian’ people, I would suggest that we adopt it for use in North Anishinabe-waki. If we do so, then a Caboclo would be an Anishinabe living away from a specific native, traditional homeland” (31).
  44. 44. Martin Cruz Smith is best known for Gorky Park (1981) and for his five subsequent novels featuring Arkady Renko, a Russian investigator: Polar Star (1989), Red Square (1992), Havana Boy (1999), Wolves Eat Dogs (2004), and Stalin’s Ghost (2007). At least two of Smith’s post-1970 works feature American Indian characters and/or themes, Nightwing (1977) and Stallion Gate (1986). He was born in 1942, a year after Nasnaga. Smith’s mother, a Pueblo Indian, was a jazz singer and, in her later years, an advocate for American Indian rights. Smith adopted the middle name Cruz, the maiden name of his maternal grandmother, in 1977, when he published Nightwing. For an overview of his career, see Wroe, “Crime Pays.”
  45. 45. Red Shirt was a Lakota leader who fought at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
  46. 46. My attempts to contact Smith about his awareness of activism at the time have been unsuccessful.
  47. 47. Tension between the past of Indigenous–settler history and possible Indigenous futures is prevalent in literary discourses published throughout the bicentennial year. In “The Red / White Blues: Bicentennial Poem,” published in her collection Lost Copper (1980), Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwok) individualizes the collective emotional, psychological, and spiritual legacies of invasion and colonization on Indigenous peoples. The speaker states, “I know / of passing for the unreal, / I know / of bloodlessness.” She wishes for “a chrysalis / [. . .] without human doubts” but feels unable to “burrow” into the reviving earth and its cleansing waters without “my father’s badger claw, / my mother’s buckeye burden basket” (25).
  48. 48. Toni Morrison is featured under the heading “The Black Experience.”
  49. 49. The Times artist appears to respond to Deloria’s point that “it seems to be the general Indian consensus that the Washington Monument should be renamed the Indian Memorial because it represents the shaft the Indians got when the white man came to the continent” (80).
  50. 50. In 1976, Momaday also gave a radio interview to CBS News, “Tradition, Arts and Future of the American Indian.”
  51. 51. The American Indian scholar Clara Sue Kidwell (Choctaw) expressed similar views in a speech she delivered in 1976, “American Indian Attitudes toward Nature: A Bicentennial Perspective.” She opens, “The history of Native American nations in North America extends far beyond that of the American nation whose 200th anniversary occurs this year. For millennia, the native people of this continent lived in a state of harmony and balance with the natural environment around them” (277). After comparing European to Native worldviews and discussing the current ecological crisis, she concludes: “Let the traditional values and attitudes of American Indian people toward nature here serve as models for American society” (292).
  52. 52. Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada, delivered a similar apology to Indigenous peoples in June 2008 in the House of Commons: “The government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly.” See “Canada Apologizes for ‘Failing’ Native People,” Indianz.com, June 12, 2008, http://64.38.12.138/News/2008/009265.asp; and Sarah van Gelder, “Canada Apologizes to Its Native People. Will We?,” Yes! Magazine, June 16, 2008, http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/88325. For broader analysis of the Canadian apology, including comparisons with Australia, see Henderson and Wakeham, “Aboriginal Redress.”
  53. 53. “Brownback Applauds Committee Passage of Native American Apology Resolution,” Senator Sam Brownback’s official website, May 11, 2007, accessed October 7, 2010, www.brownback.senate.gov (site discontinued).
  54. 54. See www.crazyindn.com.
  55. 55. The Saami are Indigenous to northern Scandinavia and southern Russia. The title of the Crazy Ind’n world map may allude to Fear of a Red Planet: Relocation and Removal (2000), a 7-by-160-foot mural painted by Steven Joe Yazzie (Navajo/Laguna) for the Ullman Learning Center of the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.

3. Pictographic, Woven, Carved

  1. 1. Quoted in Sciascia, “Ka Pu Te Ruha, Ka Hao Te Rangatahi,” 160.
  2. 2. The most cited analysis of Indigenous aesthetics in American Indian film remains the work of Leuthold. On the need to develop critical understandings of Hawaiian aesthetics, see Dudoit and Ho’omanawanui.
  3. 3. This type of museum practice has become more common since the 1970s. In 1995, for instance, critical dialogues were organized among Navajo weavers, art historians, and anthropologists while developing the exhibit Woven by the Grandmothers. See Bonar, Woven by the Grandmothers.
  4. 4. See Allen, “Blood (and) Memory,” Blood Narrative, and “N. Scott Momaday.”
  5. 5. Momaday’s title may do additional work in its allusion to Andrew Carnegie, the celebrated philanthropist, who was born in Scotland in 1835 and died, coincidentally, in the United States in 1919. Carnegie funded many libraries, schools, and universities that bear his name, and we might link his association with philanthropy and education to themes central to Momaday’s poem (e.g., “the giving of gifts”). The town of Carnegie, Oklahoma, was originally called Lathram; when it was incorporated in 1903, city leaders changed the name in the hope that Carnegie would build a library there. He did not.
  6. 6. Christina E. Burke explains, “The term winter count comes from the Lakota name for these pictographic calendars: waniyetu wówapi. The first word is glossed as ‘winter’ and refers either to the season or to the span of a year from first snow to first snow, as reckoned by the Lakota. [. . .] The second word (wówapi) can refer to anything that is marked and can be read or counted, from the root verb owá, meaning ‘to draw, paint, color, or mark’” (1–2).
  7. 7. See, for example, Blish, A Pictographic History of the Oglala Sioux; Wong, Sending My Heart Back across the Years; Donnelley, Transforming Images; Greene, Silver Horn; and Greene and Thornton, The Year the Stars Fell. Also see my discussion of how pictographic traditions are innovated in contemporary written literature in Blood Narrative. Contemporary artists continue to innovate the conventions of ledger art.
  8. 8. See Names, 47–52.
  9. 9. Burke notes, for the Lakota, “By the end of the 19th century, some winter counts were solely texts; pictographs were replaced by written year names as the mnemonic device of choice” (4).
  10. 10. In Telling Stories the Kiowa Way, the Kiowa linguist Gus Palmer Jr. praises Momaday as a writer but remarks that he is not a “storyteller [. . .] in the Kiowa sense [. . .] as the term applies to the oral Kiowa world,” because Momaday “writes exclusively in English” and “does not speak the Kiowa language” (58).
  11. 11. Howe designates these four dimensions as the spatial, in which people and lands are seen as intimately connected; the social, which emphasizes relationships between a distinct community and its “remembered landscape” (165); the spiritual, which guides the relationships between tribal peoples and their lands; and finally, the experiential, which emphasizes the community’s ongoing relationship with higher spiritual powers (161–66).
  12. 12. Boyd notes the Kiowa continued to hold their summer dances from 1890 to the 1930s despite the federal ban and “today the Kiowa Gourd Dance has replaced the annual Sun Dance” (1:114).
  13. 13. The number four is important to many American Indian aesthetic and ritual traditions, including Kiowa and other Plains Indians, as well as the Navajo. Four typically is associated with balance, harmony, and completion.
  14. 14. My understanding of a “now” that collapses distinctions among past, present, and future is influenced by the novels Potiki (1986) and Baby No-Eyes (1999) by Patricia Grace (Māori).
  15. 15. See Berlo, “Artists, Ethnographers, and Historians,” on the importance and prominence of horses in Plains Indian graphic arts.
  16. 16. Gila River Pima philosopher David Martinez argues, “The horizon, too, is like the wind—a phenomenon we can perceive but never really apprehend. For as we move about any given place, the horizon is that which constantly moves away from us as we approach it, yet which never leaves our perceptual field” (260).
  17. 17. See Allen, Blood Narrative, for an analysis of Momaday’s use of the pun on “eye/I” in his well-known essay “The Man Made of Words.”
  18. 18. Martinez argues that here “is emphasized as a term defining place because it is being here from which our knowledge and understanding of place truly derives. It is from here that we ultimately organize our perception of the world, at least as we experience it” (258).
  19. 19. See, for instance, the work of Lawrence Evers, Matthias Schubnell, Susan Scarberry-Garcia, and Kenneth Roemer.
  20. 20. Art historian Jennifer McLerran makes a similar point in relation to how Navajo weaving has participated within non-Native semiotic systems in the context of the non-Native purchase, trade, and collection of Navajo textiles, and she borrows art historian Ruth Phillips’s concept of dual signification to describe how these textiles produce meaning within two distinct aesthetic systems (10). McLerran does not consider the possibility of trans-Indigenous purchase, trade, and collection, however, or the possibility of multiple rather than dual signification.
  21. 21. Harry Walters (Navajo), director of the Hatathli Museum at Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona, states similarly, “The male and the female not only signify sex, but principles. There are male principles and female principles, and the male and female should have equal power. When they work together in balance, they establish harmony and peace. The word we use is hozho. Hozho means, ‘I will walk in the Beauty Way’” (30).
  22. 22. In this analysis I follow the innovative work of Witherspoon, a non-Native linguist and anthropologist married into a Navajo family, and other ethnographers who have worked collaboratively with Navajo to understand weaving not simply as a commodity but as what the non-Native anthropologist, curator, and weaver Kathy M’Closkey calls “cosmological performance” (242). In Swept under the Rug: A Hidden History of Navajo Weaving (2002), M’Closkey overviews the conflicting accounts of Navajo aesthetics produced by the majority of non-Native ethnographers, museologists, and traders, on the one hand, and Witherspoon and the majority of interviewed Navajo weavers, on the other (see, especially, chapter 7, “Toward an Understanding of Navajo Aesthetics”). M’Closkey is particularly critical of accounts of Navajo weaving and aesthetics produced by non-Native museologists, which, she demonstrates, reflect “the imposition of the dominant society’s ideas” onto Indigenous concepts and practices (9).
  23. 23. Trudy Griffin-Pierce notes, “What [the folklorist Barre] Toelken calls ‘the metaphor of movement’ permeates Navajo mythology, religion, language, and thought,” and she states, in her own words, “The structure of Navajo language clearly emphasizes movement” (24). See also M’Closkey, Swept under the Rug, 236.
  24. 24. The word parfleche is a French Canadian term derived from the French parer (to parry or turn aside) and fleche (arrow)—that is, “to deflect arrows.” This etymology may suggest a connection between the syllabic structure of “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” and Momaday’s telling of the Kiowa story of the arrow maker, part of The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969).
  25. 25. Momaday includes an extended passage from the Navajo Night Chant, in English translation, in House Made of Dawn (146–47). See Scarberry-Garcia’s analysis of Momaday’s use of Navajo ceremony in this novel.
  26. 26. Sciascia’s description of how Māori carving produces more power when “embraced” by discourse resonates with Wesley Thomas’s (Navajo) description of how Navajo weaving is “personified” through the weaver’s elaborate process, which includes the raising of sheep and the production of wool and dyes in preparation for weaving, as well as the weaver’s singing, praying, and talking during the weaving itself.
  27. 27. See Allen, “Blood (and) Memory” and Blood Narrative.
  28. 28. See, for example, Krupat, “Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner and Its Audiences,” in All That Remains. In his analysis of the reception of the Inuit film Atanarjuat, Krupat designates “three distinct audiences”: (1) “a local and quite specific indigenous community”—that is, the Inuit in Canada; (2) a non-Inuit “southern—French and English Canada and the United States, but also more generally metropolitan—audience” that is willing to be challenged “to see with a Native eye”; and (3) an audience of non-Inuit “southerners who are either unwilling or unable to alter their habits of perception” (132–33). Although Krupat is willing to acknowledge the possibility of a “fourth audience” of other Indigenous peoples, at my urging, he does so only in a footnote (196n9). The possibility of non-Inuit Indigenous perspectives does not inform his reading, analysis, or argument.
  29. 29. For an example of how little attention is paid to Indigenous arts in the current “multicultural” approach to expanding ideas about literary aesthetics, see Elliott, Caton, and Rhyne, Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age.

4. Indigenous Languaging

  1. 1. Some readers may recognize in the phrasing of Revard’s title an allusion to Black Elk Speaks, the popular as-told-to autobiography of an Oglala holy man written by the non-Native poet John G. Neihardt and first published in 1932. In Neihardt’s reworking of Black Elk’s voice, it is this “herb of healing” and its as yet unrealized potential for rebuilding a broken Indigenous nation that is emphasized by the Lakota elder when he describes the life-altering vision revealed to him as a child. Despite the allusion to Neihardt’s Black Elk, and despite stated overtures to healing, Revard’s essay is at times openly combative. In this way it reminds readers that in the more expansive account of Black Elk’s powerful vision, detailed in the stenographic notes made during Neihardt’s interviews with him in the early 1930s but not published until 1987 under the title The Sixth Grandfather, edited by the non-Native anthropologist Raymond J. DeMallie, the vibrant herb for healing is balanced by an equally potent herb for war. Although Revard’s “Herbs of Healing” is an awe-filled celebration of the poetic and human possible, unlike Neihardt’s text, it is no work of imperialist nostalgia.
  2. 2. In a personal communication, Jahnke indicated that he is following Māori art historian Hirini Moko Mead in his use of rereketanga. In his English–Maori Dictionary, Ngata translates the English adjective novel as “rerekē.”
  3. 3. Revard’s reference to “this America” appears to be a purposeful echo of the opening poem in Simon Ortiz’s from Sand Creek (1981): “This America / has been a burden / of steel and mad / death, / but, look now, / there are flowers / and new grass / and a spring wind / rising / from Sand Creek” (9).
  4. 4. I offer a reading of “Sad Joke on a Marae” in Blood Narrative.
  5. 5. Upper Hutt Posse’s name refers to their hometown of Upper Hutt, located in the Hutt valley north of Wellington.
  6. 6. Upper Hutt Posse released a new version of “Tangata Whenua” as part of their 2002 CD Te Reo Māori Remixes (Māori-language remixes). The rap has an updated musical and vocal arrangement, and some of the lyrics have been changed to convey an even more explicitly activist message. The hook (chorus) remains unchanged. On their website Upper Hutt Posse offer this translation of the hook: “People of the land, the durable ancestral connections / People of the land, the root and the authority / People of the land, the glow of the breath / People of the land, the ever burning fire” (www.tekupu.com).
  7. 7. Robert Sullivan makes a similar point about how the phrase “Tihei Mauriora” accrues meaning through its repetition in Taylor’s poem in his essay “A Poetics of Culture” (16–17).
  8. 8. For a photograph of Strawberry and Chocolate, see National Museum of the American Indian, Essays on Native Modernism, 51.
  9. 9. In a footnote Losch explains several of her specific references in the poem: “In 1920, the United States Congress created the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act. Persons of 50 percent Hawaiian blood or more were eligible to lease homestead lots for 99 years at $1 a year. Since then, other programs which have been established to help the Hawaiian people have had the 50 percent blood quantum imposed. 5(f) is a clause in the Admissions Act (for Statehood) which provides for Hawaiians as defined in the 1920 Act. The Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), a multi-million dollar State of Hawai’i agency, also has a provision for native Hawaiians as defined in 1920.”
  10. 10. Haunani-Kay Trask translates one hānau as both “birthsands” and “homeland”; see also From a Native Daughter, 126, 140.
  11. 11. See Allen, Blood Narrative, 146–56.
  12. 12. Created by an act of Parliament in 1965 and originally administered by the Department of Education, the National Library of New Zealand received its Māori designation when it became an autonomous government department in 1988. On the library’s website, the Māori phrase is translated as “The Wellspring of Knowledge.”
  13. 13. In Blood Narrative I analyze a similar interaction across and between languages in a dual-language Māori–English literary text. There, I refer to this potential third text as “te korero i waenganui/the text between”; see 64–65.
  14. 14. For a detailed discussion of the history of Te Ao Hou, see Allen, Blood Narrative.
  15. 15. Often referred to as the “Jesus fish,” the simple fish symbol of two intersecting arcs is thought to have been used as a recognition sign by Christians since the first three centuries of the common era.
  16. 16. Ika also carries the meanings of “cluster,” “band,” “troop,” and “heap.” The phrase Ika whenua can be used to refer to a main line of hills, and the phrases Te ika o te rangi and Ika whenua o te rangi can be used to refer to the Milky Way.
  17. 17. I am grateful to Hugh Karena (Te Aupouri) for helping me understand these aspects of the use of the word ngohi.
  18. 18. Note the Māori pun on matau, which means both “right side” and “fishhook.”
  19. 19. Before publishing The Whale Rider, Ihimaera explored several of its key themes and invoked much of its key imagery in a short story titled “The Whale,” part of his early collection Pounamu, Pounamu (1972). See Allen, Blood Narrative, 133–35.
  20. 20. Ihimaeara’s revisions for the U.S. edition are notable for a number of reasons. Part of their context is Ihimaera’s decision to rewrite and essentially update many of his early works, including his first collection of short stories Pounamu, Pounamu (1972), his first novel Tangi (1973), his second novel Whanau (1974), his second short story collection The New Net Goes Fishing (1977), and his third novel The Matriarch (1986). In a May 2009 interview with Peter Mares for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Ihimaera states that “from The Whale Rider on I’m really happy [with my work]” and that he has not—and has no intention of—rewriting The Whale Rider. Moreover, in the interview Ihimaera asserts, “I never translate my Maori words into English. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s an edition that’s appearing in England or the USA or whatever. And so my work is not really all that amenable overseas”; see www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2009/2558016.htm.
  21. 21. In 2007, to mark the twentieth anniversary of its original publication in 1987, Ihimaera produced yet another edition of The Whale Rider. Published by Reed Books in New Zealand, the 2007 anniversary edition retains most of the language of the U.S. edition and makes further changes, including the addition of color photographs from the film, an expanded glossary, a list of film and literary awards, and an expansive set of author’s notes that runs twenty-three pages. In the author’s notes Ihimaera describes his work on the 2003 U.S. edition in these terms: “For that edition I reversioned the novel” (180, emphasis added).
  22. 22. This is the only section title that is revised in the U.S. edition. The original title is restored in the 2007 anniversary edition.
  23. 23. Although mauri has been added to the expanded glossary of the 2007 anniversary edition and defined as “life principle,” neither the Maori word nor its English translation appears in the passage quoted from the prologue. Ihimaera retains the language of the 2003 U.S. edition.
  24. 24. The language of the U.S. edition is maintained in this passage in the 2007 anniversary edition (157).

5. Siting Earthworks, Navigating Waka

  1. 1. Sullivan continues these themes in his 2005 collection Voice Carried My Family.
  2. 2. In making this claim, I am reminded of Thomas King’s claim in The Truth About Stories that “the magic of Native literature—as with other literatures—is not the themes of the stories—identity, isolation, loss, ceremony, community, maturation, home—it is the way meaning is refracted by cosmology, the way understanding is shaped by cultural paradigms” (112). Indigenous technologies are one of those cultural paradigms.
  3. 3. See Lepper, Newark Earthworks.
  4. 4. For an early account of the research for establishing the so-called Great Hopewell Road, see Lepper, “Tracking Ohio’s Great Hopewell Road.” Many of Lepper’s theories, based on archival data, ground survey, and aerial photography, have been substantiated and expanded by more recent work involving LiDAR technologies, which I discuss in the following paragraphs.
  5. 5. Joyce M. Szabo, “Native American Art History,” 74.
  6. 6. Computer-based interactive exhibits of earthworks sites have been developed by the Center for the Electronic Reconstruction of Historical and Archaeological Sites (CERHAS) at the University of Cincinnati. See their website at www.cerhas.uc.edu and follow links for the EarthWorks project. Also see the website for the Ancient Ohio Trail, a collaborative site geared toward earthworks tourism created by the Ohio Historical Society, the U.S. National Park Service, the Newark Earthworks Center at The Ohio State University–Newark, and CERHAS at www.ancientohiotrail.org.
  7. 7. In 2008, Romain and his colleague Jarrod Burks published several online essays on the preliminary findings of their LiDAR research in Ohio, from which my information is taken. Romain presented many of these findings in a lecture at Ohio State University, “LiDAR Imaging of Ohio Hopewell Earthworks: New Images of Ancient Sites,” October 23, 2008. The base unit of measurement for Ohio earthworks appears to be 263.5 feet; its double, 527 feet; and its quadruple, 1,054 feet. Another key unit of measurement appears to be 1,178 feet, which is the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle when the two legs of the triangle are 527 and 1,054 feet, respectively.
  8. 8. Scholars working in several fields—archaeology and anthropology, art history, history, literary and cultural studies, literacy studies, and rhetoric—identify a range of writing systems in use across the Americas prior to the introduction of alphabetic literacy, including not only the Mayan codices but also petroglyphs and pictographic rock art; pictographs painted on tanned animal hides (Plains Indian winter counts and brag skins) or inscribed in birch bark (Anishinaabe and Passamaquoddy birchbark scrolls); and strings or belts of wampum. These and other writing systems and mnemonic devices were used to complement oral performance traditions. A number of these systems continued to be used into and through the so-called contact era, often in modified forms that responded to changes in social conditions and available resources (such as the development of a more narrative style of Plains Indian ledger art on paper or the incorporation of alphabetic writing in French or English into birchbark scrolls); many continue into the present. I am suggesting that we add the construction of earthworks to our broadening understanding of Indigenous writing systems and their multiple media.
  9. 9. Existing scholarship and interpretive materials on earthworks include almost no information about Indigenous understandings of these sites.
  10. 10. Although it is the first text to animate an earthworks site and give voice to the mounds, Hedge Coke’s sequence of poems is not the first representation of earthworks in contemporary American Indian literature. LeAnne Howe (Choctaw), for instance, incorporates the Nanih Waiya, a large platform mound located in what is now Mississippi that is sacred to the Choctaw and other southeastern peoples, into the plot of her 2001 novel Shell Shaker. The Choctaw filmmaker Ian Skorodin incorporates the Nanih Waiya into the elaborate website built to support his 2007 and 2009 stop-motion Crazy Ind’n animated films, discussed in chapter 2.
  11. 11. Hedge Coke made statements to this effect during her presentation on Blood Run at Indigenous Literatures and Other Arts: A Symposium and Workshop, held at the Many Nations Longhouse, University of Oregon, May 2–3, 2008. See also Hedge Coke’s account of how she came to write Blood Run in her introduction to the anthology Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas.
  12. 12. Here is a complete list of the thirty-seven distinct personas, in the order of their first appearance: River, Clan Sister, Memory, Horizon, The Mounds, Ceremonial Mound, Burial Mound, Morning Star, Sun, Dog, Starwood, Corn, Redwing Blackbird, Sunflower, Moon, Blue Star, North Star, Snake Mound, Esoterica, Deer, Beaver, Buffalo, Fox, Cupped Boulder, Pipestone Tablets, The Tree at Eminija Mounds, Ghosts, Skeletons, Jesuit, Squatters, Tractor, Looters, Early Anthro, Early Interpreter, Stone Snake Effigy, Prairie Horizons, and Skeleton.
  13. 13. Romain and Burks, “LiDAR Analyses.”
  14. 14. Romain and Burks, “LiDAR Analyses,” note 1.
  15. 15. Previously, I have employed the concept of a fourth dimension metaphorically to highlight the activist politics of Hedge Coke’s inclusion of explicitly Indigenous perspectives in Blood Run. Within Western mathematics and philosophy, however, the concept of a fourth dimension generally refers to time. Here, I evoke the possibility of a four-dimensional quality to Hedge Coke’s poetic structures to suggest their potential to link the present to the past and to project into the future.
  16. 16. Hedge Coke’s subtle manipulations of four, three, seven, and the sequence of the first twenty-four primes illustrates what Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete describes in Native Science as the “proper role of mathematics” within Indigenous scientific systems. As in contemporary physics, a field often engaged with phenomena “that cannot be explained in words,” Cajete argues that within Indigenous fields of science, mathematics helps render “transparent” certain “basic relationships, patterns, and cycles in the world” through their quantification and symbolic “coding” (65, 234).
  17. 17. The word capital carries a number of potentially significant meanings and connotations for this analysis. As a noun, capital can refer either to a city that is the seat of government for a larger political entity or to a city or region that is the center of a particular activity, such as trade or artistic production. The noun capital also can refer to any form of material wealth used or available for the production of additional wealth. In a similar vein, it can refer to any asset. As an adjective, capital can indicate the qualities of being first or foremost, being first rate or exceptional, but also the qualities of being extremely serious or of involving death or calling for the death penalty. The verb capitalize can mean to utilize or take advantage of some thing or some situation, to provide financial support for an enterprise, or to estimate the present value of an asset. The common preposition by also carries a number of potentially significant meanings and connotations. For instance, it can indicate not only agency (through the action of or with the help or use of) but also the physical positions of next to or close to and up to and beyond or past, as well as the temporal position of in the period of or during.
  18. 18. Margaret Bender, “Writing, Place and Indigeneity in Cherokee,” Global Script of Indigenous Identities, international symposium, Michigan State University, October 30, 2008.
  19. 19. Twenty is the result of four (the book’s sacred and primary—but not actually prime—basic unit of measurement) multiplied by five, the third prime. The number five is also significant because it is the hypotenuse of a right triangle whose legs are four and three.
  20. 20. The two brief and unmarked dedications included in the front matter of Blood Run, one of which precedes the table of contents and one of which follows the author’s note, are not listed in the table of contents and, thus, are not part of this official measurement.
  21. 21. The total number of poems in Blood Run, sixty-six, mirrors the number of books in the Christian Bible. In standard Protestant and Catholic versions, the Bible is composed of an Old Testament with thirty-nine books and a New Testament with twenty-seven books.
  22. 22. The elaborate intraline spacing in the poem suggests the purposefulness of the poem’s division into 176 lines.
  23. 23. The number twenty-four is the factorial of the number four. A factorial is the product of all the positive integers from one up to a given number, typically designated within mathematics by a given number followed by an explanation point. Thus, the factorial of four (4!) is 1 × 2 × 3 × 4 = 24.
  24. 24. The midpoint of the thirty-seven distinct personas, number nineteen—eighteen personas precede it and eighteen follow—is “Esoterica,” which speaks only once in the sequence. Nineteen is the eighth prime (4 × 2). “Esoterica” is further distinguished by the fact that it is the only poem that is divided into numbered sections; not surprisingly, there are seven (the fourth prime). The poem is composed of fifty-three lines; fifty-three is the sixteenth prime (4 × 4).
  25. 25. Ten is the result of two, the first prime, multiplied by five, the third prime. And twenty-seven, as noted, is the cube of three, the second prime; it is also the number of books in the New Testament.
  26. 26. The Earthworks series is edited by the U.S.-based poet and scholar Janet McAdams.
  27. 27. “The poems of Blood Run are cupmarks,” Noori writes, for example, “small indentations on the surface of our souls, invocations that cannot be ignored. Allison says it all when she writes, ‘no human should dismantle prayer.’ [. . .] By writing this book, she begins the mending of a rent in the fabric of sacred spaces on earth” (xi).
  28. 28. Hedge Coke lists the Ho-Chunk, Ioway, Kansa Otoe, Osage, Omaha, Quapaw, Ponca, Missouri, Arikira, Dakota, and Cheyenne nations as having “history in the Blood Run site” (98).
  29. 29. In contrast, Noori states that the site “extends back in time to as early as 8,505 years ago,” when the site may have been occupied by as many as “10,000 individuals,” but that “the heaviest years of use may have been between 1675 and 1705 A.D.” Noori’s figures appear to come from the Iowa State Historical Society’s web page for Blood Run.
  30. 30. 8,500 years = 4 × 2,125; 400 mounds = 4 × 100; 2,300 acres = 4 × 575; 276 mounds = 4 × 69; 1,200 acres = 4 × 30; 176 mounds = 4 × 44; 80 mounds = 4 × 20.
  31. 31. The first and sixth stanzas, each composed of two lines, introduce and conclude the ritual sequence. The four stanzas situated between them, each composed of four lines, “perform” the ritual prayer (10).
  32. 32. Our exit from the dramatic world of Blood Run is similarly mediated. Hedge Coke’s final persona poem is followed by the second narrative poem, “When the Animals Leave This Place,” which is followed by a series of acknowledgements and another set of dedications. In contrast, no material follows the final poem of Sullivan’s one-hundred-poem sequence, unless we count the additional poem included on the book’s back cover, “A Cover Sail,” which most readers are likely to read before beginning the book rather than after its completion.
  33. 33. Romain and other scholars describe the mound-building cultures of Ohio and elsewhere as having this kind of three-worlds worldview. See Romain, Mysteries of the Hopewell.
  34. 34. Hedge Coke’s ideas about place identity can be linked to Momaday’s ideas about how individuals and communities “invest” themselves in particular landscapes and at the same time “incorporate” those landscapes into their “fundamental experience” and thus into their sense of self. See Allen, “N. Scott Momaday.”
  35. 35. In her acknowledgements, Hedge Coke writes, “Once, a snake mound effigy of a mile and a quarter length, much like the worldwide lauded Snake Mound in Ohio State, existed in this very place—Blood Run. The railroad used it for fill dirt” (93). I analyze the poems “Snake Mound” and “Stone Snake Effigy” and their relation to the extant Serpent Mound in Ohio in “Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations.”
  36. 36. Here, I am following Mignolo and Schiwy (5).
  37. 37. In its first appearance, the Burial Mound describes its body as a “venter,” the swell of a muscle but also a belly or uterus, or any swollen structure, suggesting the state of pregnancy (19). In its second appearance, the Burial Mound states, “I do my best to shelter, keep them” (46).
  38. 38. James Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre) tells a Blackfeet version of the Feather Woman story in his 1986 historical novel Fools Crow.
  39. 39. The twenty-eighth persona in the book is Skeletons, which speaks four times: three times in the “Intrusions” section and once in the fourth, future-oriented section, “Portend.”
  40. 40. This central exclamation can be aligned with Hedge Coke’s opening narrative poem in section 1, “Dawning,” which ends with a meditation on the power of breath and breathing (9–10).
  41. 41. The title of this narrative poem is anticipated in the seventh and final appearance of “The Mounds”: “When the animals leave this place, / now without protective honorary sculpture. / When River returns with her greatest force.” This “The Mounds” poem also anticipates the theme of renewal through flooding: “when the Reclaiming comes to pass, / all will know our great wombed hollows, / the stores of Story safely put by” (82). Lines from several persona poems anticipate the final narrative poem as well, including the fourth “Clan Sister” (62), the third “Horizon” (67), the third “Skeletons” (69), and the sixth “Clan Sister” (80).
  42. 42. The long number of years of the state’s deliberation about preserving Blood Run, twenty-three, can be worked into the earlier analysis of the structural patterning of Blood Run. Twenty-three is the ninth prime, and twenty-three is a factor in two of the key numbers listed among the site statistics in Hedge Coke’s author’s note: 2,300 acres at the site (23 × 100) and 276 mounds surveyed in 1883 (23 × 12). Twenty-three also points to specific poems in the sequence of personas. The first twenty-third persona poem, located in section 2, “Origin,” marks the single appearance of “Beaver” and is composed of twelve lines (12 × 23 = 276). The second twenty-third persona poem, in section 3, “Intrusions,” marks the third appearance of “Horizon” and is composed of twenty-three lines.
  43. 43. Sullivan offers additional (minor) metacommentary about the sequence in several specific poems. See, for example, “xvii: Some definitions and a note on orthography” (21), “Waka 62: A narrator’s note” (70–71), and “Waka 74: Sea anchor” (83).
  44. 44. The Roman section includes poems 1–36, with two “waka” interruptions at 16 and 29; the Arabic section includes poems 37–55, with no interruptions; and the “waka” numbering section includes poems 56–100, also with no interruptions. Thus, thirty-four of the core one hundred poems are Roman, nineteen are Arabic, and forty-seven are “waka.”
  45. 45. The 2,001 lines may also allude to the iconic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick and released in 1968 (incidentally, the year following Sullivan’s birth in 1967). Explicit reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey is made in “Waka 58: Waitangi Day.” The film’s title, of course, alludes to Homer’s Odyssey, which makes explicit appearances in “Waka 62: A narrator’s note” and “Waka 88.”
  46. 46. It is unclear whether this is a genuine mistake (which seems unlikely) or part of Sullivan’s artistic depiction of navigational uncertainty (which seems more likely).
  47. 47. The Maori Canoe by Elsdon Best appears in “Waka 59: Elsdon Best”; The Raft Book: Lore of the Sea and Sky by Harold Gatty appears in “Waka 67: from We the Navigators”; Nga Waka Maori: Maori Canoes by Anne Nelson appears in “xxvi,” “Waka 69: Kupe,” and “Waka 72: Hawaikinui’s 1985 journey”; Nga Waka o Nehera: The First Voyaging Canoes by Jeff Evans appears in “Waka 69: Kupe” and “Waka 70.”
  48. 48. Sullivan uses the term Hawaiiki throughout to name the Polynesian “homeland.” This is a variant of the more common spelling, Hawaiki.
  49. 49. There is a subtle play in these lines on the puns to/two and for/four: “A prayer to” is repeated four times, while “A prayer for” is repeated two times.
  50. 50. The final line of English is a translation of the preceding line of Māori. A more literal translation would be, “A prayer for you two, waka, star of this world.” Other poems in the sequence reveal that “stars” also can refer to ancestors, who are believed to become stars after death. See, for example, the lines “yet stars are / ancestors / they are stars / our ancestors / and we will be stars” in “Waka 16: Kua wheturangitia koe” (20) and the line “And you stars, the ancestors” in “Waka 100” (112).
  51. 51. See, for example, the review by Perez and the essay by Marsden.
  52. 52. Sullivan’s twelve personas, in order of their appearance in poems 84–90 and 92–96, are “the waka of memory”; “the star Kopua” (Venus) and its “cousins” the Southern Cross; the Polynesian explorer Kupe; “the anonymous [British] settler”; Homer’s archetypal voyager Odysseus; the Polynesian culture hero Maui; the Kurahaupo Waka; the Polynesian homeland Hawaiiki; the ocean; the Māori god of forests, Tane Mahuta; the Māori god of the sea, Tangaroa; and finally, the “star waka” itself.
  53. 53. Pā can refer to any type of stockade or fortification, but especially a fortified village. In addition to palisades (takitaki), pā often involved some kind of earthworks (maioro), such as terracing or moats.
  54. 54. For an overview of such debates, see, for example, Finney, “Myth, Experiment, and the Reinvention of Polynesian Voyaging,” and Turnbull, “Pacific Navigation.”
  55. 55. In “Waka 57: El Nino Waka,” the speaker contrasts the past, when navigators could count on “the reliability of the sea,” with the contemporary situation “Today,” when “the sea / is unreliable” because of environmental degradation (64).
  56. 56. Twenty-nine is the tenth prime; eleven is the fifth prime; and five is the third prime.
  57. 57. See Orbell’s version, “Hine-pūkohurangi: Woman of the Mist” (Concise Encyclopedia, 39–40). Many other versions have been recorded. In a separate entry, Orbell also notes that in some traditions Uenuku is the name of “a great rangatira [chief] in Hawaiki” who forced many people to migrate (198–99).
  58. 58. See, for instance, Te Awamutu Museum online at www.tamuseum.org.nz.
  59. 59. Sullivan develops the idea of the planet as both the earth mother and a waka moving through space in “Waka 57: El Nino Waka”: “The planet, as you are aware, / is not only our mother, but the mother of all / living creatures here, from the latest computer virus / to the greatest of the primates. She carries us / through the universe” (64).
  60. 60. In Orbell’s version, “The world is made up of Rangi the sky and Papa the earth, but it was their son Tāne who pushed them apart and gave the world its proper form” (Concise Encyclopedia, 145).
  61. 61. Sullivan begins “Waka 57: El Nino Waka”: “Among the compasses of navigators—/ star compass, wind compass, solar compass—/ a compass based on currents, such was / the reliability of the sea” (64). And in “Waka 100,” the final poem in the book’s core, Sullivan writes in the penultimate stanza: “And you, Urizen, Jupiter, Io Matua Kore, / holder of the compasses—/ wind compass, solar compass, / compass encompassing known / currents, [. . .]” (111).
  62. 62. Sullivan evokes the pun on arc and ark and the connection of the waka to the biblical Noah in “Waka 83,” which begins: “I ask you, waka, ark, high altar / above the sea, your next destination?” (93).
  63. 63. In Christian contexts the story of Noah can be read as prefiguring the sacrament of baptism.
  64. 64. Orbell notes that “birds singing loudly at dawn are ‘Tāne’s mouth’ [Te waka o Tane]” (Concise Encyclopedia, 146).
  65. 65. In “Waka 60: Dead Reckoning,” Sullivan writes: “The heights and shapes of waves, flotsam / and jetsam, indicate the direction of currents. // Lewis says that a line of jetsam clearly delineates / the meeting point of two currents—” (68). In poem “ix,” Sullivan includes the line “following birds across an Ocean” (13), and in “Waka 67: from We the Navigators,” he follows Lewis to describe in more detail how “Boobies, noddies, terns—these and other birds / indicate the presence of land, most particularly / in the early morning and the evening when // they return home. They fly straight / to their perches” (76).
  66. 66. Uenuku is positioned directly above the word “Leaf” on the left side of the lower arc, which can be read as invoking the contemporary practice of placing leaves at the base of the Uenuku stone as a sign of aroha (affection). See www.tamuseum.org.nz.
  67. 67. The phrase is from the seminal 1993 essay “Our Sea of Islands” by Oceanic scholar Epeli Hau’ofa.
  68. 68. See John Donne’s “Meditation 17” in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624).
  69. 69. Orbell relates this story in her entry “Wairaka: The woman who acted like a man” (Concise Encyclopedia, 202).
  70. 70. The map created in “53” may refer to the system of “etak” Lewis describes (133–45).
  71. 71. Sullivan refers to his mother’s home village as Te Kaaretu in poem “xv: Sullivan Whanau” (Sullivan Family). As a noun, kāretu refers to a species of sweet-smelling grass.
  72. 72. DeLoughrey exploits this pun on the navigational technique of dead reckoning in chapter 3 of Routes and Roots.
  73. 73. See poem “xxx,” which begins, “in three weeks I turn 30” (34).
  74. 74. Nanny is commonly used in New Zealand for either “grandmother” or “grandfather.”
  75. 75. We can link the imagery of the sea anchor here also to Sullivan’s depiction of his maternal homeland, Karetu, in poem “52” and especially in poem “xv: Sullivan Whanau,” where he writes, “We move around / like the four winds, but when we gather / at Te Kaaretu, we are anchored / and hold fast to one another” (19).
  76. 76. Sullivan reveals the nature of the storm in the poem that follows, “Waka 75: A Storm”: “a storm so violent / waka and coracles [Irish boats] slam into each other / tohunga [Māori “experts”] and filiddh [Irish poets] swap notes / sing each other’s airs / and before you know it the bloodlines / race in and out at crazy angles” (84). As in other poems, the speaker acknowledges mixed descent—“my Irish and Scottish inheritance” (90)—but ultimately reconfirms his Māori identity. “Waka 75: A Storm” ends with the lines “again the wave slaps his face / try harder / slaps him again / portray me as I am.” The poem that follows, “Waka 76,” then asserts a Polynesian understanding of the human–ocean connection based in whakapapa (genealogy). Humans are related to the sea god Tangaroa because they are his brother “Tane’s kids” (85).
  77. 77. See “xxii: Te ao marama II” (The world of light II) and “Waka 62: A narrator’s note.”
  78. 78. These dates correspond to the first European sighting and naming of New Zealand in 1642 by the Dutch captain Abel Tasman; the first voyage to and mapping of New Zealand in 1769 by the English Captain James Cook; and the declaration of formal sovereignty in 1835 by northern Māori rangatira (chiefs).
  79. 79. Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law within the philosophy of the Romantic poet William Blake; Jupiter is the Roman equivalent of the Greek god Zeus; and Io Matua Kore (Io, Father of the Void) is the first principle in some versions of Māori cosmology.
  80. 80. Sullivan imagines future waka as “rocket ship[s]” in “iv: 2140 AD” and as “spacecraft” in “46” and “Waka 62: A narrator’s note”; he also imagines future waka as “submarines” in “49 (environment I).”
  81. 81. For extended biographical accounts of each author, see Parker, Singing an Indian Song, and Condliffe, Te Rangi Hiroa. McNickle (1904–1977) significantly expanded They Came Here First and published a revised edition in 1975. Buck (1877–1951) added an epilogue to The Coming of the Maori and published a second edition in 1950.
  82. 82. McNickle published They Came Here First as the first volume in the popular Peoples of America series edited by Louis Adamic for the U.S. commercial press the J. B. Lippincott Company. The book runs 300 pages in the original hardback edition, plus a series of eight photographic illustrations, source notes, acknowledgements, and an index. Buck arranged publication of The Coming of the Maori through the Maori Purposes Fund Board of the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs, and it was distributed in New Zealand by the commercial press Whitcombe and Tombs. It runs 538 pages in its original hardback edition, plus a foreword written by the minister of Māori affairs, a bibliography, an index, and a series of twenty-four photographic illustrations. Buck was already well known for his earlier book-length study of Polynesian voyaging, Vikings of the Sunrise, first published in 1938. In his prologue to Vikings, Buck writes, “This work is an attempt to make known to the general public some of the romance associated with the settlement of Polynesia by a stone-age people who deserve to rank among the world’s great navigators” (v).
  83. 83. In his foreword to The Coming of the Maori, the minister of Māori affairs, the Rt. Hon. P. Fraser, writes, “Sir Peter has infused into his writing much of his own compelling and charming personality and his quick, incisive humour. Many readers will wonder which they more appreciate—the ever interesting, indeed fascinating subject-matter of the volume, or the captivating and delightful style in which it is written” (n.p.). Early reviewers, all of whom were non-Native professional anthropologists and historians, were more hesitant about the explicitly literary aspects of either Buck’s or McNickle’s work and described them as “speculative,” “imaginative,” and even “picturesque.” These readers reserved their highest praise for those sections of the books that are based in each author’s acknowledged areas of professional expertise: Buck on Māori and Polynesian material cultures, which he had documented in extensive and precise detail over a long career that included directing the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and lecturing in anthropology at Yale University; McNickle on twentieth-century federal Indian policy and especially on the legacies of the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, legacies he had worked to secure as an official in the Bureau of Indian Affairs under John Collier. See, for example, reviews of The Coming of the Maori by Ralph Linton in American Anthropologist (1950) and by Raymond Firth in Man (1951) and reviews of They Came Here First by Joseph Green in American Historical Review (1950), by William Fenton in American Anthropologist (1950), by Robert Raymer in Pacific Historical Review (1950), by Ruth Underhill in Western Folklore (1951), and by E. E. Dale in Americas (1951).
  84. 84. For a more detailed discussion of McNickle’s They Came Here First, see Allen, Blood Narrative, 94–102.

Annotate

Next Chapter
Bibliography
PreviousNext
A section of the Introduction originally appeared in “A Transnational Native American Studies? Why Not Studies That Are Trans-Indigenous?,” Journal of Transnational American Studies 4, no. 1 (2012). An earlier version of chapter 1 originally appeared as “Unspeaking the Settler: ‘The Indian Today’ in International Perspective,” American Studies 46, no. 3–4 (Fall–Winter 2005), and in Indigenous Studies Today 1 (Fall 2005–Spring 2006): 39–57. An earlier version of chapter 3 originally appeared as “Engaging the Politics and Pleasures of Indigenous Aesthetics,” Western American Literature 41, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 146–75. An earlier version of chapter 4 originally appeared as “Rere Kē/Moving Differently: Indigenizing Methodologies for Comparative Indigenous Literary Studies,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 19, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 1–26, and in Journal of New Zealand Literature 24, no. 2 (2007): 44–72. A section of chapter 5 originally appeared as “Serpentine Figures, Sinuous Relations: Thematic Geometry in Allison Hedge Coke’s Blood Run,” American Literature 82, no. 4 (December 2010): 807–34.

“Burial Mound” by Allison Hedge Coke is reproduced courtesy of the poet and Salt Publishing. “Sad Joke on a Marae” by Apirana Taylor is reproduced courtesy of the poet. “Blood Quantum” by Naomi Losch is reproduced courtesy of the poet. “Comparatively Speaking, There Is No Struggle” by Jacq Carter is reproduced courtesy of the poet. “Celebrators ’88” by Kevin Gilbert is reproduced courtesy of his estate. “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” by N. Scott Momaday is reproduced courtesy of the poet. “When I of Fish Eat” by Rowley Habib, with illustrations by Ralph Hotere, is reproduced courtesy of the Maori Purposes Fund Board. “Waka 29: waka taua,” “51,” and “53” by Robert Sullivan are reproduced courtesy of Auckland University Press. “The buffalo grass is still” from Indians’ Summer by Nasnaga reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers; copyright 1975 by Nasnaga.

Every effort was made to obtain permission to reproduce material in this book. If any proper acknowledgment has not been included here, we encourage copyright holders to notify the publisher.

Copyright 2012 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
Powered by Manifold Scholarship. Learn more at
Opens in new tab or windowmanifoldapp.org