Pictographic, Woven, Carved

For my primary text I have chosen the poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” by the acclaimed, sometimes controversial Kiowa and Cherokee author N. Scott Momaday. I find myself repeatedly drawn to these twelve lines.⁴ In terms of literary, historical, and social contexts, the brief poem invites sustained attention as one component in a series of four related texts produced by Momaday that can be divided into two sets—each set composed of a poem and a piece of prose—published nearly twenty years apart. Each text performs a meditation on the poet’s relationship to his Kiowa grandfather, Mammedaty, as well as on his relationship to ceremonial grounds near Carnegie, Oklahoma, that are used by the Kiowa gourd dancers and where, in 1919, Mammedaty was honored in a ritual giveaway. The dates of publication for these texts mark signal events in the U.S. and global commemoration of New World conquest, what in chapter 2 I describe as the “settler celebration.” Momaday published the first set of texts in 1976, the year of the U.S. bicentennial observances: a four-part, complex lyric and prose poem, “The Gourd Dancer,” which he explicitly dedicates to Mammedaty, and a six-page section of his innovative memoir, The Names, that includes a photograph of Mammedaty posed in his gourd dance regalia. Momaday published the second set of texts during and immediately after the Columbus quincentenary: the poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” in 1992, followed in 1993 by the essay “Sacred Places,” which includes the 1992 poem (without its title) and offers a second prose version of the giveaway ceremony that honored Momaday’s grandfather.

Read together, these works create a highly charged intertext that demonstrates Momaday’s theories about how memory is passed down the generations within families and communities through storytelling and acts of imagination. Momaday imagines himself into his father’s memory of how his grandfather was honored in 1919 by focusing on two details of the event: that his father was a young boy when he witnessed the giveaway ceremony and that another Kiowa boy was charged with presenting the gift, a beautiful horse, to his grandfather. Over the course of the four texts, Momaday constructs his narrative subjectivity so that his “I” occupies various vantage points within and outside the scene of the giveaway, including those of the two Kiowa boys, imagining himself as participant, witness, and chronicler of the event. “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” offers the most condensed version of the giveaway and the most condensed assertion of its ongoing significance. I am interested in Momaday’s insistent return to particular personal and familial biographical details in these reimaginings of an auspicious event in his family and community history, as well as in the productive irony of the publication dates for these provocative American Indian texts. They highlight the potential relationships among assertions of Indigenous biography, autobiography, history, and aesthetics and ongoing battles in the United States over the recognition of Native sovereignty.

In terms of form and specific content, several features of “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” immediately garner attention, but these cannot be fully accounted for by conventional contextualization or dominant understandings of aesthetics. For convenience, I have numbered the lines of the poem:

Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919

This afternoon is older

than the giving of gifts

and the rhythmic scraping of the red earth.

My father’s father’s name is called,

and the gift horse stutters out, whole,

the whole horizon in its eyes.

In the giveaway is beaded

the blood memories of fathers and sons.

Oh, there is nothing like this afternoon

in all the miles and years around,

and I am not here,

but, grandfather, father, I am here.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

(In the Presence of the Sun, 136)

Note, first, that although the title of the poem establishes a specific geographical location and date—a straightforward framework for the action of the poem—the final lines evoke a paradox of space and time.⁵ Line 10 sets up this paradox by yoking together “miles and years,” while lines 11 and 12 play on the repeated adverb of space and time, here. The speaker states in line 11 that he is “not here” (not in this specific geographical location and not in this specific time) but also, in line 12, that, simultaneously, he is “here” (in this place and in this time). Second, note that in line 3 the poem locates this paradox at the site of sacred space, specifically at the site of ceremonial dance grounds where a ritual giveaway was celebrated in 1919. The phrasing designating the rhythmically scraped “red earth” echoes the “Oklahoma” of the title in its implicit reference to the original Choctaw derivation for Indian Territory’s new name, Okla-houma, “people-red earth” or “red earth people.” Third, note that the poem explicitly invokes not only the Indigenous ritual of the giveaway but also, in the central metaphor for the giveaway developed in lines 7 and 8, an Indigenous art form, beading. And fourth, note that the poem deploys at least two and possibly three instances of provocative language that draw attention and that seem intimately linked to the poem’s central paradox: the phrase “blood memories” in line 8, which completes and complicates the metaphor of beading; the three-part genealogical sequence “grandfather, father, I” in line 12, which is placed between the paradoxical claims of “not here”/“am here”; and the duplicative adjectival phrase “father’s father’s” in line 4, which upon completion of the brief poem, can be read retrospectively as an anticipatory echo of the genealogical sequence in line 12. Finally, note, as well, that these instances of provocative language are located in lines 4, 8, and 12, creating a regular pattern of association in the structure of the poem, as well as in its themes and specific diction.

The remainder of this chapter could be devoted to unpacking these early observations in conventional literary-critical terms, and undoubtedly, such work would be productive. In moving to a series of engagements with the poem based in understandings of Indigenous systems of aesthetics, it is not my intention to suggest that dominant critical methodologies are inappropriate or ineffective for this material. Like other scholars, I understand that Indigenous writers appropriate and innovate both Indigenous and settler (in some cases, colonial) artistic and rhetorical traditions to produce texts in all genres. Scholarship on Momaday’s own works, especially his Pulitizer Prize–winning first novel House Made of Dawn (1968), has made this point abundantly clear. For convenience and to aid my larger argument, the readings I offer are divided into sections and organized around understandings of Kiowa, Navajo, and Māori aesthetic systems, respectively. While each designation indicates the central focus of a particular engagement with the poem, each is related to and builds on the others, and I do not suppress insights that may originate in additional Indigenous traditions or in dominant Western aesthetics and literary-critical modes. My purpose, which I believe is embodied in Momaday’s poem and in the work of other contemporary Indigenous writers, artists, and scholars, is to forge productive connections rather than to enforce rigid boundaries. The point is not to denigrate the dominant but to demonstrate the literary and political power of the Indigenous.

Although he is best known as a poet, novelist, and essayist, Momaday is also a visual artist, and since the mid-1970s, he has integrated his own drawings and paintings into his published written works. His father, Al Momaday, was a well-known Kiowa artist, and both father and son can be viewed as working within a tradition of Kiowa and Plains Indian pictorial art that art historians often divide into three basic genres: narrative art, visionary art, and pictorial record keeping (Greene, “Changing,” 15). Much attention has been paid in American Indian literary and art history studies to the wide range of Plains Indian art traditions, but especially to the communal and personal pictographic calendars commonly referred to as “winter counts” and to the innovation of the pictographic tradition into pictorial “ledger art” during the so-called reservation period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁶ Scholars are especially interested in these art traditions as Indigenous representations of “written” history, biography, and autobiography.⁷ Momaday himself describes at some length the calendars and ledger books of the Kiowa and meditates on their contemporary significance in his 1976 memoir.⁸

One way to engage Kiowa and, more broadly, Plains Indian aesthetics for a reading of “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” is to conceive the poem as a contemporary, literary version of the kind of pictographic marker used in the customary Kiowa winter and summer counts. Unlike in some other Plains Indian pictographic record traditions, such as those of the Lakota, the Kiowa historians inscribed two pictographs for each year, dividing time into two annual seasons (Boyd, 2:145; Greene, “Calendars,” 300). Conceived as a pictographic marker, the poem can be analyzed as a mnemonic device designed to help organize an event of communal, familial, and personal importance within a temporal framework and to aid in the production of more expansive and necessarily richer oral accounts of this same event. Within the conventions of this aesthetic system, the straightforward title of the poem can be understood to function as a caption for the literary pictograph. I am thinking of the kinds of “captions” Plains Indian artists often added to ledger drawings, written either in English or an Indigenous language or, sometimes, in both, that give basic orienting details, such as the time and location of the event depicted. Alternatively, the entire poem can be conceived as an extended “year name.”⁹ The condensed, abbreviated, and opaque qualities of the form and language of Momaday’s poem can be understood as idiosyncratic to the author-artist, but idiosyncratic within a highly schematic and stylized aesthetic tradition. These features also can be understood as being inextricably linked to other, more detailed and more explanatory texts, but not necessarily in the ways that scholars typically understand instances of literary allusion or intertextuality.

Interpreting the poem in terms of an innovated pictograph or year name invites us to move beyond questions about how the meaning of the poem might be affected by its location as the third component within a sequence of four related and published texts. We can now ask more nuanced questions about how the poem operates as a particular kind of component within a matrix of related texts that includes but is not limited to the published four. For certain audiences this poem can function, in the way that a drawn pictograph on a Kiowa winter or summer count can function, as the basis for a multimedia event of (re)telling Indigenous history.¹⁰ Lakota scholar Craig Howe describes American Indian history presented from an “indigenous tribal perspective” as having four main aspects, all of which are present in Momaday’s poem: it is recited in relation to specific landscapes, waterscapes, and/or skyscapes; it is event centered; it is organized around narrators rather than abstract themes or predetermined sequences; and it often employs drawing so that the telling of history is actually planned as a “multimedia event” (162, 166). Howe focuses especially on what he describes as the four dimensions of an “event-centered” history—spatial, social, spiritual, and experiential—an apt description for Momaday’s approach in “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” (162).¹¹ Thus, for audiences familiar with Momaday’s larger body of work, part of the aesthetic pleasure of the poem—part of its “beauty,” “power,” or “excellence”—is located not in its position within a sequence but rather in its iconicity within a matrix. Momaday’s essay “Sacred Places,” for instance, can be understood as demonstrating one version of such an event of multimedia storytelling. Here, “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” without its distinguishing title/caption, is explicitly embedded within an expanded version of the narrative of the giveaway that honored Momaday’s grandfather and within an expanded explanation of the ceremony’s evolving significance for Momaday’s community, his family, and himself. The brief and highly condensed poem, in other words, operates pictographically.

Similarly, if we place “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” in conversation with the earlier and more descriptive poem “The Gourd Dancer”—part of the literary and extraliterary matrix discussed above—we can better understand how the later poem distills Momaday’s broad knowledge of the events of 1919 and his evolving interpretation of their significance into a single ideographic image for the paradox “not here”/“am here.”¹² The earlier poem is structured as a narrative, and it organizes its main plot elements into four numbered and named parts.¹³ These vary in terms of the number of stanzas per part and the number of lines per stanza, and they alternate in genre between lyric and prose poem: (1) “The Omen” (lyric, two stanzas of four lines each); (2) “The Dream” (prose poem, one stanza of nine lines); (3) “The Dance” (lyric, two stanzas of seven lines each); and (4) “The Giveaway” (prose poem, two stanzas, the first of nine lines, the second of thirteen). Together, the four parts illustrate Mammedaty’s experiences leading up to and during the gourd dance of 1919, including his being singled out to be honored by the gift of a black horse. The title of the poem, with its limiting definite article, refers specifically to the historical Mammedaty; this is emphasized by the dedication line immediately following the title, which names Mammedaty explicitly as “The Gourd Dancer” and thus as the subject of the narrative. The dedication line also lists the inclusive dates for Mammedaty’s life, 1880–1932, further specifying the subject and, for readers aware that Momaday was born in 1934, marking the events of the narrative as outside the personal memory of the author. The final lines of part 4 reinforce the idea that the poem is meant to commemorate both the life and the name of the poet’s deceased grandfather by reimagining how he was honored in his own lifetime: “And all of this [the details of the giveaway] was for Mammedaty, in his honor, / as even now it is in the telling, and will be, as long as / there are those who imagine him in his name” (37).

In its original publication, the poem is preceded by Momaday’s evocative, dynamic line drawing of Mammedaty dancing in his regalia, so that the stylized image on the left page of the open book faces the early parts of the poem on the right. Significantly, the drawing is not an image that can stand in for the entirety of the four-part poem; rather, it serves the local purpose of illustrating either the poem’s title, “The Gourd Dancer,” or, more specifically, the content of part 3, “The Dance.” The illustration may be based, in part, on the photograph of Mammedaty that Momaday includes on page 95 of his 1976 memoir, The Names. In the sepia-colored photograph, Mammedaty stands in a parlor or photographic studio, posed to display his gourd dance regalia, feet planted firmly on the carpeted floor, arms relaxed at his sides, eyes directed forward into the camera. In contrast, in Momaday’s stylized line drawing Mammedaty floats in indeterminate white space in the motions of the gourd dance, his knee bent and his foot raised in midstep, his arms lifting his rattle and eagle feather fan, his blanket and belt swinging about his waist, his gaze directed to the viewer’s left to a location beyond the horizon of the page.

Although “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” was also published in a collection that includes examples of Momaday’s visual art, the later poem stands on its own, without illustration. Emphasis is shifted away from the historical person Mammedaty and his particular experience of the gourd dance and giveaway performed in 1919 to the contemporary speaker and his experience of connecting to his father and grandfather. This shift allows the poet to evoke a paradox of space and time (“not here”/“am here”). The earlier poem inscribes the name of the honored ancestor six times, drawing repeated attention to his specificity, whereas the later poem assiduously avoids inscribing the personal name of this or any ancestor, substituting in place of the personal name the kinship markers “grandfather” and, more precisely, “father’s father.” The term “giveaway” no longer names the particular ritual that honored Mammedaty in 1919, as it does in “The Gourd Dancer,” but a more abstract process of commemorating genealogical bonds. The genealogical sequence in the final line, “grandfather, father, I,” now can be understood both as a transgenerational address—the “I” speaking across the generations to the deceased “father” and “grandfather”—and, simultaneously, as an extended nominal phrase for the speaker of the poem that collapses distinctions among three generations of family members—these three classifications within a kinship system—and asserts their equivalence in this particular moment and at this particular location. Read this way, “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” functions as an iconic pictograph not only for the year 1919, as its title/caption announces, but also for “now,” the contemporary moment of this connection to the ancestral, what the speaker describes in lines 1 and 9 as “this afternoon”: “older / than the giving of gifts” and “like” nothing else “in all the miles and years around.” The poem functions, in other words, as a complex pictograph for a significant event that occurred in a named moment in time, 1919, and for a significant event that occurs in a moment outside ordinary, named time in which distinctions among the past, the present, and possibly the future are collapsed.¹⁴

Understanding the “afternoon” of the poem as both inside and outside ordinary time, we can turn our attention to one of the central features of “classic” Kiowa culture evoked in lines 5 and 6, the horse that is made a gift with which to honor Mammedaty. In this reading, the horse stands in, ideographically, for nineteenth-century Kiowa horse culture.¹⁵ When, in line 4, Mammedaty’s name is called by an unnamed Kiowa ancestor, this iconic horse “stutters out.” The verb is immediately provocative: its tense locates this significant action in an ambiguous present, and its primary definition suggests that the horse’s halting performance within the dance arena is also a form of repetitive speech. “Stutters” can evoke the legacy of the Kiowa’s subjugation at the hands of the U.S. cavalry and the U.S. government at the end of the nineteenth century, which effectively put an end to classic Kiowa horse culture, a legacy that was felt already in 1919 and was ongoing in 1992. But despite this hobbled and tentative “stutter,” the “gift horse”—a fully operational Kiowa culture—arrives in the ritual space of the giveaway “whole / the whole horizon in its eyes.”

The repetition of “whole” is suggestive of the primary definition of the verb “stutter”—this action is a form of speech—but it also links thematically to the words “horizon” and “eyes.”¹⁶ The process of this “giveaway” offers the poem’s speaker an intact worldview, a distinctly Kiowa way of perceiving the whole world. Moreover, this worldview is located not in the “stutter” of the gift horse, in its history of subjugation, but in its “eyes.” This word evokes the obvious pun on the “eye” of perception and the “I” of subjectivity, a pun Momaday exploits in other texts.¹⁷ Here, the pun links lines 5 and 6 to lines 11 and 12, where the “I” of the speaker asserts the poem’s paradox of space and time. If we are aware that in the Kiowa language the same word is used for both the first-person singular and first-person plural pronouns—for both “I” and “we” (Boyd, 1:28)—we can link the pun on the plural “eyes” also to the genealogical sequence in line 12, “grandfather, father, I.” Kiowa culture and Kiowa worldview, these lines assert, are located not in the discrete past of some golden age, such as Kiowa horse culture, or even in discrete ancestors, such as Mammedaty. Rather, the “whole horizon” of Indigenous identity is available to the speaker in a transgenerational conception of self, in all of these “I’s” understood as “beaded” together. We can now recast the final lines’ paradox of space and time: “and I [understood in the singular] am not here, / but, grandfather, father, I [understood in the plural] am here.”¹⁸

Scholarship on Momaday’s literary works and biography has investigated the influence of not only Kiowa and Plains Indian traditions but also Navajo and other Southwestern Indian traditions on his experiments with symbolism, allegory, and allusion, especially in his two novels.¹⁹ Such influences can be explained, in part, by the fact that Momaday spent periods of his childhood living on or near the Navajo reservation and that he has been a lifelong student of Navajo history, language, and culture. In addition, we know that, historically, Kiowa and other Southern Plains Indians, who in their own pictorial art demonstrate a strong preference for graphic patterning and a frequent use of patterned repetition, highly valued Southwestern Indian arts as trade items, especially Navajo weaving in the form of richly patterned blankets (Berlo, “Artists,” 30). The pictorial work of nineteenth-century Kiowa and Cheyenne ledger artists often depicts men proudly displaying robes fashioned from distinctive Navajo textiles (Berlo and Phillips, 65; Berlo, “Individuality,” 37). In this way, Navajo weaving, which has a long history of borrowing and refashioning materials, techniques, and ideas from other cultural and artistic traditions, also has a long history of participating within other semiotic systems, including other Indigenous semiotic systems, such as that of the Kiowa. At least since the nineteenth century, Navajo weaving has participated in multiple and trans-Indigenous signification.²⁰

Less critical attention has been paid to the possible influence of Navajo worldview and aesthetics on Momaday’s poetry. Critics of the poetry have noted, however, Momaday’s frequent use of syllabics, a poetic technique in which the number of syllables per line is consciously manipulated into legible patterns. An attention to syllabics allows the poet to embed one or more patterns within a poem’s line structure, depending on whether he maintains a consistent number of syllables per line, alternates these, or creates a more complex system of relationships. In this section, I investigate Momaday’s use of syllabics by analyzing the patterns he establishes in the number of syllables per line through understandings of Navajo worldview and aesthetics, particularly as these are expressed in Navajo weaving. By engaging both syllabics and understandings of Navajo aesthetics, we become aware of several distinct but complementary systems of patterning in the structure of “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919.” In effect, we can read Momaday’s Kiowa poem as though it were conceived as—or fashioned from—a Navajo textile.

Navajo weaving has been the subject of a great deal of critical attention and writing by anthropologists, art historians, museologists, buyers and traders, weavers from various traditions, and Navajo and other Indigenous intellectuals. In several of the more recent studies, different kinds of scholars and practitioners have worked collaboratively to produce accounts of Navajo textile production, appreciation, and interpretation that is bi- or multicultural and multiperspectivist. While space does not permit an extended discussion of Navajo systems of aesthetics and their historical development, briefly stated, following the work of innovative ethnographers and their Navajo collaborators, including practicing weavers, we can say that Navajo aesthetics are based in understandings of the term hózhó, a complex philosophical concept that “expresses the intellectual notion of order, the emotional state of happiness, the physical state of health, the moral condition of good, and the aesthetic dimension of harmony” (Witherspoon and Peterson, 15). Hózhó typically is translated into English as “beauty” (often capitalized as “Beauty”), but the English word does little to convey hózhó’s sense, in the realm of aesthetics, of what the non-Native linguist and anthropologist Gary Witherspoon describes as “holistic asymmetry” or “dynamic symmetry.” Unlike static symmetry, which creates a mirror image and absolute balance of its elements, dynamic or what is sometimes called “near” symmetry expresses motion and energy in its use of opposites, contrasts, and disequilibrium (Witherspoon, Language, 172, 198). Dynamic symmetry is undergirded philosophically by a basic “complementary dualism” that divides all parts of the universe into the categories “static” (or complete) and “active” (or incomplete and creative). One model for this binary is the understanding of male and female as “complementary aspects of a whole, and this whole might appropriately be described as holistic asymmetry” (Witherspoon and Peterson 24).²¹

This basic Navajo binary is extended in multiple ways. The “static” category includes the male gender, even numbers, the east (dawn) and north (night) directions, thought, choreographed undertakings such as ritual and ceremony, the “inner” forms of things, and both the origins and culminations of things. In contrast, the “active” category includes the female gender, odd numbers, the west (twilight) and south (daylight) directions, speech, creative undertakings such as weaving, the “outer” forms of things, and processes of growth and change (Witherspoon, Language, 141–42). Similar to male and female in Navajo understandings of holistic asymmetry, static and active are inseparably connected, and the tension between them is productive. Witherspoon describes the Navajo intellectual style as “dynamic synthesis.” He describes Navajo aesthetic style in similar terms:

It is not simple or static, but dynamic and active. It is binary and dualistic, but it is not opposed or mirror imagery. Although it often has an axis or axes, it is not split or fragmented. The total impact of Navajo works of art is a unity of diversity, a synthesis of differences, a harmony of divergence, and a confluence of contrast. (Language, 200)

The Navajo art of weaving, which is considered “active” and gendered female, is understood as “an act of creative transformation” (Witherspoon, “Cultural Motifs,” 372, 373). In some accounts weaving is described as functioning as a language, and the process of weaving is seen as analogous to the process of thought (McLerran, 11, 9). Moreover, many accounts emphasize the importance of the transformative process of the act of weaving itself over the importance of the finished textile (Berlo and Phillips, 67; Bonar, 9; Thomas, 33). Witherspoon points out that in contrast to ceremonial sand painting, which employs fixed designs that must be re-created by the artists as closely as possible in order to be used in rituals of restoration and healing—and which is thus considered “static” and gendered male—“in each [textile] composition, the weaver seeks a personal, unique expression of a universal theme” (“Cultural Motifs,” 373). Classic Navajo textile designs are distinctive, in part, for the way they hold “static” and “active” elements in productive tension. Static conditions, for instance, are depicted through the use of straight lines and horizontal and vertical stripes, by “static” colors (such as white, black, and gray), and by squares and rectangles. Movement and activity, in contrast, are depicted through the use of diagonal and zigzag lines, by “active” colors (such as yellow/brown, blue/green, and red/pink), by appendages extending from various “static” centers, and by diamond shapes. Motion in these designs is oriented in one of two directions: either linear, continuative, and incomplete or circular, repetitious, and complete (cyclical) (Witherspoon, Language, 162). And contrary to the typical expectations of dominant Western aesthetics, in Navajo textiles “most individual design elements mean nothing by themselves”; in other words, individual design elements are not “symbolic” in the conventional sense. Rather, as Witherspoon explains, “they take on their meaning only as a part of a holistic composition. The complete composition is a unique and abstract rendering of hózhó” (“Cultural Motifs,” 372). For our purposes of engaging Navajo aesthetics to read Momaday’s poem, the important point is that Navajo weaving emphasizes “semiotic geometry” over iconicity, patterning over symbolism (“Cultural Motifs,” 369). Different types of repetition, including repetition with variation, are therefore essential to Navajo design, and these types of repetition represent energy, activity, and movement that is balanced and under control (Witherspoon and Peterson, 66).²²

Several kinds of patterning become evident in Momaday’s poem if we concentrate not only on the number of syllables per line (syllabics) but also on the placement of end punctuation (the division of the poem into statements) and the presence and forms of verbs (the linguistic representation of activity), especially verbs and verbal forms that indicate language, kinds of speech, and/or physical motion.²³ Figure 2 helps make these patterns more visible. We can begin by noting that all of the lines have an even number of syllables except lines 1, 11, and 12, the beginning and end of the poem, suggesting a basic representation of dynamic symmetry. We can also note that although certain numbers of syllables per line repeat—8 and 10—there is no regular pattern, certainly no design as an absolute balance or mirror image.

This basic dynamic symmetry at the level of syllables per line becomes more complex when we group the lines into sequences, creating “active” and “static” blocks or spaces, as in Navajo textile designs. The twelve lines of the poem are divisible in multiple ways, and Momaday’s sequences of odd- and even-numbered syllables per line lend themselves to multiple patterns. Most obvious is to divide the poem “evenly” into four sets of three lines each. Thus we have the sets 7-6-10 (active), 8-8-8 (static), 8-10-10 (static with variation), and 8-5-9 (active), as seen in Figure 3. This pattern corresponds to one of the typical patterns from the classic period of Navajo weaving identified by Witherspoon: active-static-static-active. Witherspoon explains that this pattern represents thought (static and male) as the inner form of speech (active and female), as well as its complement, speech as the outer form of thought. As opposed to its inverse, static-active-active-static, this pattern “is often found in Navajo weaving and other art forms where creativity and activity are emphasized” (Language, 163).

Other divisions of “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” offer variations on the active-static-static-active pattern and illustrate the complexity of the Navajo sense of dynamic symmetry. For example, we can subtly regroup the lines into the sets 7-6-10 (active), 8-8-8-8 (static), 10-10 (static), and 8-5-9 (active), as seen in Figure 4. More elaborately, we can regroup the lines as the sets 7-6 (active), 10 (static border dividing active and static spaces), 8-8-8-8 (static), 10-10 (static), 8 (static border dividing static and active spaces), and 5-9 (active), as seen in Figure 5. These divisions demonstrate the Navajo idea of the power of asymmetry, oppositions, contrasts, unequal pairing, and disequilibrium to produce variety, tension, and dynamism within an overall design. They also suggest multiple ways of dividing the poem into “blocks” and transitional spaces of specific language and thematic content.

The final, more elaborate division in Figure 5, for instance, suggests a significant connection between line 3 (“and the rhythmic scraping of the red earth.”) and line 10 (“in all the miles and years around,”), each of which is static in terms of the number of syllables per line (10 and 8, respectively) and each of which provides a transition between “blocks” of lines that are static and active. In terms of statement structure, syntax, and specific language use, both line 3 and line 10 appear midstatement, their first words beginning with a lowercase letter. Line 3 opens with a coordinating conjunction (“and”) and includes a subsequent preposition that indicates the object of an action (“of”); line 10 inverts and extends this structure by opening with a preposition that indicates spatial relations (“in”), including a subsequent coordinating conjunction (“and”), and ending with a second preposition that indicates spatial relations (“around”). Each line emphasizes a particular kind of connection to the lines that precede it, and internally, each line connects aspects of space and time: “rhythmic scraping” (suggesting time through the gerund’s indication of continuous activity) is linked to “red earth” (suggesting space); “miles” (suggesting space) is linked to “years” (suggesting time). These connections potentially intensify our experience of the poem’s central paradox of space and time, “not here”/“am here.”

Another striking feature of this method of grouping the lines into active and static blocks is that it draws our attention to the fact that the number of syllables in the six lines that compose the active blocks at the beginning and end of the poem never repeat. Each of these six lines has a different number of syllables: 7, 6, and 10 syllables in lines 1, 2, and 3 and 8, 5, and 9 syllables in lines 10, 11, and 12. When we group these numbers of syllables together, we recognize a reordered version of the sequence 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 (or its reverse, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). The poem’s particular ordering of these numbers of syllables per line appears, at first glance, random. However, we can align these active blocks in at least two ways, both of which make visible the possibility of complex relationships. We can either match first, middle, and last lines of the blocks so that line 1 is matched with line 10, line 2 with line 11, and line 3 with line 12, as in Figure 6A, or align the sets as mirror images so that line 1 is matched with line 12, line 2 is again matched with line 11, and line 3 is matched with line 10, as in Figure 6B. If we draw a line connecting the numbers of syllables in these configurations, in either ascending or descending order, in A we produce a circular spiral figure; in B we produce a pair of inward-facing triangles, or a butterfly figure, as seen in Figure 7. The first figure can be associated with the Navajo concept of movement from the center outward (Witherspoon, Language and Art, 165), with the Navajo cultural habit of proceeding clockwise/sunwise (Worth and Adair, 176), as well as with the Navajo idea that circular motion is “complete” and therefore “static” and “male.” The last aligns the spiral figure with Navajo ceremonial activity (more about this later), as well as with the poem’s theme of connection across three generations of men in a Kiowa family. The second figure can be associated with an emphasis on the triangle as the “generative basis” of Navajo semiotic geometry (Witherspoon, “Cultural Motifs,” 369). In this Navajo conception various combinations of bipolar triangles are used to represent “the dynamic, holistic asymmetry found in the Navajo universe, as well as [to provide] the basic design elements from which many of the patterns of Navajo weaving are derived” (Witherspoon and Peterson, 34).

Three of these combinations of bipolar triangles are especially central in Navajo design. The diamond shape, which consists of two triangles pointing outward, is associated with the primary creator deity Changing Woman and suggests “the idea of infinite extension from a center point” (Witherspoon, “Cultural Motifs,” 369). The bow pattern, which consists of two triangles pointed in the same direction, is associated with one of the twin sons of Changing Woman, Monster Slayer. And the butterfly pattern, which consists of two triangles pointed inward, is associated with the other twin, Born for the Water. This last figure, when rotated 90 degrees into an “hourglass” figure, is also associated with the Navajo hair bun, first worn by Changing Woman, which is part of girls’ puberty rites and is still worn by Navajo men and women today (Witherspoon and Peterson, 33–38, 44). In other accounts, the hourglass-shaped hair bun is associated specifically with women’s “disciplined thought” during weaving (McLerran, 23).

These alignments of the opening and closing active blocks of lines in Momaday’s poem are also potentially suggestive of Plains Indian artistic practice. We might conceive of the poem’s syllabic structure not exclusively in terms of a Navajo textile, then, but also in terms of Plains Indian art production. In particular, we might look to Plains Indian parfleche, which are “containers of folded or sewn rawhide elaborated with painted images on their exposed surfaces” (Torrence, 19).²⁴ Produced in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries by women artists from over forty different tribal groups located across the northern, central, and southern plains and into the Southwest—the Kiowa and their allies among them—parfleche were designed for packaging and transporting a variety of everyday and special items, including ceremonial regalia and sacred objects. Like textiles produced by Navajo women, parfleche produced by plains women were highly prized across cultures and thus, through exchange, imitation, and occasionally remaking or repurposing, they participated in multiple and trans-Indigenous systems of signification.

Typically, parfleche are decorated with abstract geometric designs, often brightly painted. The art historian Gaylord Torrence, who has conducted the most extensive comparative study of extant parfleche, describes their “fundamental vocabulary of visual forms” as consisting of “geometric motifs, both straight edged and curved, organized into complex compositions within some type of rectangular frame. These images were based on highly elongated triangles, hourglass shapes, diamonds, rectangles, lines, and circular forms” (30). Perhaps not surprisingly, a number of these figures resonate with the Navajo semiotic geometry discussed above. And similar to the productive tension created in Navajo juxtapositions of active and static spaces, Torrence notes that parfleche paintings “are animated by an active tension arising from the subtle interplay of the highly formal, symmetrical structure of their forms and spatial divisions combined with the dynamic and improvisational quality of their drawing” (51). Parfleche can be divided into four primary forms: folded envelopes, flat cases, cylinders, and boxes. Folded envelopes and flat cases are of particular interest in thinking about how we might conceive the two active blocks of lines in “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919”—and perhaps Momaday’s poem as a whole—in terms of parfleche design.

Both folded envelopes and flat cases are constructed from a single rectangular piece of rawhide. In the envelope form, two side flaps are folded inward to create a long, vertical rectangle; the top and bottom ends of the rectangle are then also folded toward the center, where they meet, forming the “closure flaps” and “covering the seam formed by the inner flaps” (63). In the flat case form, the piece of rawhide is folded once, and then its sides are sewn shut; the single fold becomes the bottom edge of the case (65). In both forms, but especially in the folded envelope, a significant portion of the pattern of the parfleche’s abstract geometric design becomes visible—and complete—only when the single flat piece of rawhide is folded into a three-dimensional package (McLerran, 27; Torrence, 64). Many extant folded envelopes display a three-part vertical division in their design patterns, with the top and bottom flaps completing the center part of the design when they are folded inward to close the container. As Torrence notes, “It was possible for artists to achieve two very different effects utilizing the same basic format” (78): the overall composition lying flat and the overall composition once folded. In addition, artists created designs that were sensitive to the volumetric capacity of the parfleche, since the folded envelope, especially, was “capable of considerable expansion when filled” (61).

In interpreting Momaday’s poem, we can think of the “matched” active blocks of lines in A, in which a curvilinear “spiral” figure is created when the syllables per line are connected in numerical sequence, as working similarly to the folded envelope form of parfleche, with its double folding of the top and bottom flaps toward the center, which results in a three-part vertical design. And we can think of the “mirror image” alignment of the active blocks of lines in B, in which a “butterfly” or “hourglass” figure is created when the syllables per line are connected in numerical sequence, as working similarly to the single-fold flat case form of parfleche. In both a more complex and complete pattern becomes visible only when the separated sections of the poem—the opening and closing active blocks—are brought together and aligned through a kind of metaphoric “folding.”

Additional correspondences and productive tensions become apparent when we consider such patterning at the level of syllables per line in relation to other elements in the poem, including marks of punctuation and kinds of verbs, as well as specific linguistic and thematic content. One complementary kind of patterning is evident, for example, at the level of end punctuation. The poem makes four discrete statements, each a full, grammatically complete sentence that begins with a capital letter and ends with a period. The first statement is composed of lines 1, 2, and 3; the second, of lines 4, 5, and 6; the third, of lines 7 and 8; and the fourth, of lines 9, 10, 11, and 12. Thus, we have the pattern three lines, three lines, two lines, four lines, odd-odd-even-even, or active-active-static-static. This pattern is something of a surprise, given the patterning that is produced at the level of syllables per line: active-static-static-active.

The first and last statements in the poem are connected, at the level of language and theme, by the phrase “this afternoon,” the significance of which we began to explore in the earlier Kiowa section. The phrase appears first as the beginning of line 1 and, thus, as the beginning of the three-line (active) first statement; “this afternoon” reappears at the end of line 9, which begins the four-line (static) fourth statement, creating another instance of repetition with variation and holistic asymmetry. The first statement offers readers a condensed but complete rendering of the poem’s primary theme—namely, that orthodox Western conceptions of time and space cannot account for the speaker’s experience of this particular “afternoon.” Although the moment occurs in the speaker’s present, it is both caught up in the year 1919 announced in the poem’s title/caption and “older” than even this date and thus outside ordinary understandings of time. The fourth statement returns to the first but offers a fuller, deeper articulation of its central idea. This explanatory role is announced by the interjection “Oh” that begins line 9. Non-Native anthropologists Sol Worth and John Adair argue that this structure of returning to the beginning in a different form resembles the structure of Navajo healing rituals, often referred to as chantways: “This going back to the beginning, to where the action started, is basic to Navajo cognition and is manifested in their mythology and their ritual and visual arts” (205). Further, they argue that “suspense of ending is not the point. The process of becoming, of eventing, of moving toward completion, is what we are made to feel is important; not what will happen, but how it happens” (207). In Momaday’s poem the intervening statements, statements two and three, describe specific actions that illustrate the central idea expressed in the first and final statements—that is, the details of the giveaway, as understood historically (statement two) and as understood in the speaker’s present (statement three). Together, the four statements move the speaker (and potentially the reader) rapidly in and out of ordinary time.

The discrete statements, as opposed to the syllables per line, follow the patterning evident in Navajo chantways, active-active-static-static. The purpose of such healing ceremonials is to restore the patient to a state of wholeness and balance.²⁵ Or put another way, such rituals work to move the patient from discord to harmony, often from a damaging state of psychological and/or spiritual fragmentation to a more positive state of psychological and/or spiritual reassemblage. One of the primary methodologies of such chantways is to place the patient in the role of the protagonist in an extended narrative of encountering and overcoming some form of discord. The potential ceremonial functions of Momaday’s poem become even more apparent if we pay particular attention to the use of terms that either name or suggest circular shapes and concepts: “earth” (line 3), “whole” (lines 5 and 6), “horizon” (line 6), “eyes” (line 6), “beaded” (line 7), “Oh” (line 9), and “around” (line 10). All of these references to circles are suggestive of ritual control, as well as of the way that during Navajo ceremonials ritual grounds become a microcosm for the entire universe. Thus, the invocation of the sky and earth in lines 1 and 3, with the description in line 2 of ceremonial activity occurring literally between them, takes on greater significance as the opening of the poem. Further, the repetition of “whole,” which links the “gift horse” to “horizon” and “eyes,” centers the poem’s ceremonial energy onto the figure of the gift both as a living being and as a symbol: “whole” and with the “whole horizon in its eyes,” the horse becomes another microcosm. This is the gift of a worldview. As I began to suggest in the Kiowa section, we can read “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” as a kind of ceremony, with the speaker positioned as the patient in a ritual of restoration. He moves from a fragmented and isolated sense of self—from an “I” understood exclusively in the singular—to a more communal and transgenerational sense of self—to an “I” understood in the plural. In the paradox of the final statement, the speaker articulates an understanding of what we might call the self-in-genealogy or, more broadly, the self-in-narrative. At the conclusion of this ritual, the speaker is able to name his place within an ongoing story of the Kiowa.

We can now shift our focus from the number of syllables per line and the placement of end punctuation to the presence and form of verbs in the poem’s four statements—that is, to the linguistic markers of activity. Worth and Adair argue that in Navajo aesthetic systems power accrues from motion (206). In “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” we can locate such motion in the poem’s verbal forms. We notice that although every statement and all but three lines in the poem contain some verbal form, the poem includes only a single active verb: “stutters.” As noted above, “stutters” occurs in line 5 (statement two) and is marked by the fact that it is not only active and present tense but a verb of motion that specifies, in relation to the gift horse, a particular kind and quality of movement. “Stutters” also can refer to a particular kind and quality of speech, and this sense of the verb potentially adds another dimension to our understanding of the significance of the horse’s movement within the context of the ritual giveaway. Although the active verb occurs within a statement of the poem that is also active, it occurs within a specific line that is static (8 syllables); it is preceded and followed by verbs that are passive, both of which are part of statements that obscure agency. The passive verb that precedes the active verb, “is called” in line 4 (also part of statement two), indicates a specific kind of speech. The line does not indicate agency, who called, and thus focuses attention on the disembodied act of calling. The comma and line ending that immediately follow the passive form only intensify this effect. The use of the unattributed passive verb can be associated with two related Navajo conventions: the general avoidance of speaking a person’s name when he or she is present and the more specific avoidance of speaking a person’s name when he or she is deceased (Witherspoon, Language, 84, 88).

The passive verb that follows the active verb, “is beaded” in line 7 (statement three), indicates a specific kind of artistic practice and a specific kind of patterning. This patterning is most obviously associated with Plains Indian arts but also can be associated with Navajo weaving. In Navajo textiles “beading” can refer to “a narrow band in which tiny blocks of color alternate” (Kent, 17). In lines 7 and 8 (statement three), this sense of the term beading reinforces the idea of the integration of the “memories of fathers and sons.” If there is agency in this statement, the suggestion is that the giveaway itself, or perhaps its ritual agent, is responsible for this “beading.” Here, it may be useful to note, as well, that the passive verb “is beaded” appears to be iterative, indicating repeated or recurrent action: unlike the grandfather’s name, which “is called” once, in a specific moment in named time and designated space, this metaphorical “beading” takes place every time the “giveaway” is performed. Maurice Boyd, writing in consultation with the Kiowa historian Lynn Pauahty, describes Kiowa “sacred time” in similar terms, as including not only “the past” but also the “present and future.” He argues that “relationships presented in Kiowa oral literature reveal a mythical ordering of life that is perennial” (2:21; emphasis added). Boyd argues further that “the stories are both a part of and about the tradition they describe. In the Kiowa oral tradition, individuals are important, but not primary. The tribal stories are already known; it is the traditional function or purpose that bears repetition” (21). Line 8 then completes the third statement. The provocative adjective “blood,” here associated with male activities (the ritual of the giveaway and the memories of fathers and sons), echoes the “red” of line 3, associated with the fertility of the female earth, again producing a complementary tension.

In contrast, the opening and closing statements in “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” employ forms of the verb “to be.” These linking verbs isolate and draw even more attention to the poem’s one active and two passive verbs. The other verbal forms are gerunds: “the giving” and “the scraping.” Like the active and passive verbs in the poem, these gerunds also can be associated with speech, in a broad sense, and with kinds of action. “Giving” indicates specific action in the poem with the power to put people and things in motion; “scraping” indicates an action that manipulates the physical environment, either in preparation for the ceremony or during the ceremony itself. The gerund form is suggestive of repetitive, cyclical motion, indicating as well the ritual context of the giveaway and of the poem as a whole.

Overall, such complementary or asymmetrical tension along a male-female axis is suggestive of the potential impact of these types of patterning on reading, interpreting, and enjoying Momaday’s poem. Although “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” appears to be focused entirely on male elements—the male speaker, his father and paternal grandfather, ritual activity—attention to the patterning described above reveals that female elements are in fact present in multiple forms throughout the poem. For instance, if we understand the first three lines as active (female), we can note how the poem begins with a juxtaposition of “afternoon” (static and male) and the “red earth” (active and female). The first line, containing the static image, is composed of an odd (active) number of syllables, while the third line, containing the active image, is composed of an even (static) number of syllables. Moreover, although the sky is considered static and male, the specific word “afternoon” indicates a time of daylight when the sun is positioned to the west of its zenith, both of which (daylight and the west) are associated with the active and the female. Similarly, although the earth is considered active and female, with the color red intensifying these designations in its association with menstrual blood, the line’s detail of the “rhythmic scraping” suggests either the creation of ceremonial grounds through clearing or the actual ceremonial dancing itself, and in Navajo systems ceremonial activity is considered static and male. Within this “active” set of lines, active and static elements are held in productive tension.

The same is true for the poem as a whole. Its complex patterning on multiple levels transforms its structure into a metaphor for—and a demonstration of—dynamic tension, equally applicable to the semiotic geometry of Navajo and Plains Indian designs. The speaker articulates the paradox of “not here”/“am here” through the specific language of his male descent line, “grandfather, father, I,” but the energy of even this, the most thematically male statement in the poem, derives, in part, from the “active,” female nature of its number of syllables per line (9, the square of 3) and its three-part genealogical sequence. These odd numbers suggest linear, continuative, and as yet incomplete motion. This transgenerational address and sense of self, this process of understanding the self-in-narrative, does not end with the contemporary speaker of the poem but extends into his familial and communal future.

Kiowa and Navajo systems of aesthetics can be connected to Momaday’s biography and poetic process, and their use in the interpretation of his work can be justified by appealing to the tribal affiliation, family history, and personal experience of the author. But what about other systems of Indigenous aesthetics, systems that originate in other parts of North America or in other parts of the globe? Can these, too, elicit productive readings of “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919”? In this section I extend my analysis of Momaday’s poem by engaging understandings of New Zealand Māori aesthetics, which are part of a larger family of Polynesian aesthetic systems. These derive from worldviews and worldly experiences that are in many ways distinct from those of the Kiowa or the Navajo. And yet in their articulation of key relationships among artist, art practice, art object, viewer, and material, social, and spiritual worlds, Māori aesthetics offer another useful analytic tool and another useful language for better understanding how Momaday’s poem can produce meaning and pleasure for multiple audiences, including multiple audiences who identify as Indigenous. In this way, I argue for the possibility of a trans-Indigenous literary criticism—a literary criticism that reads across national and geographical borders to engage a broad spectrum of Indigenous conceptions of aesthetic power and pleasure.

As applied particularly to whakairo, the art of carving in wood, stone, and bone (and, in contemporary times, in various other media), customary Māori aesthetics are based in the concepts of ihi, wehi, and wana: power, fear, and authority. In “Nga Timunga Me Nga Paringa O Te Mana Maori: The Ebb and Flow of Mana Maori and the Changing Context of Maori Art,” one of the several articles commissioned for the handsome catalog that accompanied the Te Maori exhibit, Māori artist and art historian Sidney Moko Mead (Hirini Moko Mead) writes that the Māori artist “strives to imbue his work with ihi (power), wehi (fear), and wana (authority)” (23). These qualities give Māori art its “beauty.” An art object or taonga (prized possession) is aesthetically beautiful, Mead explains, “because it has power (ihi), that is, power to move the viewer to react spontaneously and in a physical way to the work of art” (24). Since ihi derives from the gods, Mead argues that within this customary Māori aesthetic system, “an artist is merely a vehicle used by the gods, to express their artistry and their genius” (25). Mead develops this spiritual significance of taonga further by defining these art objects as a bridge between the living and the dead. He emphasizes the ideas of “taonga tuku iho” (taonga “handed down from the ancestors”) and “he kupu kei runga” (objects “invested with interesting talk”); the korero (discourse) associated with taonga during their production and use—particularly their ceremonial use—gives them imminent power (21). In a second article included in the Te Maori catalog, Māori art historian Piri Sciascia similarly emphasizes the importance of understanding “taonga in their totality—the physical art form, the associated korero [discourse], and, therefore, the resultant dialogue” (164). Sciascia goes on to argue, “When whakairo (carving) is embraced with whaikorero (oratory), the combination has greater mana [power, prestige], it is a fuller expression of the available mauri [life force]” (164).²⁶ (These ideas are useful for articulating how Momaday’s poem functions as a literary pictograph within a larger matrix of texts, as discussed in the earlier Kiowa section.) More recently, Māori scholar and museum curator Paul Tapsell has argued that “taonga are time travelers, bridging the generations, allowing descendants to ritually meet their ancestors, face to face” (13).

It is precisely this power described by Mead, Sciascia, and Tapsell—derived from ancestors and ultimately from the gods—that the viewer responds to emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Pakeha anthropologist Anne Salmond, in her contribution to the Te Maori catalog, describes this quality of Māori art objects, this capacity to bridge between the living and the dead, as the “alchemy of taonga” (120). The past is renewed in the taonga by becoming an integral part of the viewer’s present reality. Salmond writes that taonga possess the capacity to bring about “a collapse of distance in space-time” and thus “a fusion of men and ancestors” (120). Similarly, Pakeha historian Judith Binney has demonstrated that in Māori oral traditions the telling of history involves “a continuous dialectic between the past and the present” (17). Structured around kin, the traditional telling of Māori history is concerned not with mimetic or historical accuracy but rather “with the holding and the transference of mana [power, prestige] by successive generations” (18). History is seen, in other words, as “an extension of mythology” into contemporary times (20). Similar to an encounter with powerful taonga, in the Māori oral tradition the telling of history “rests on the perceived conjunction between the past and the present, and between the ancestors and the living” (26). In fact, one’s right to speak in the present often derives from the mana of specific ancestors, and the contemporary narrator may tell history as though he or she participated in significant past events. Borrowing an evocative phrase from the Danish anthropologist J. Prytz Johansen, the historian Binney refers to this form of storytelling persona as the “kinship I.” One aspect of Māori aesthetics, therefore, for both carving and oratory, is the taonga’s intersection with whakapapa (genealogy). Art objects and oral narratives enable the viewer or listener to participate in the power of transgenerational address, the power of speaking across generations, and in the understanding of the self-in-genealogy.

We can read “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” as narrating and, potentially, as performing a function similar to, if not identical with, the alchemy of taonga, a collapsing of distance in space-time, a bridging of the living and the dead. Situated on ceremonial grounds, Momaday’s speaker experiences the past in the present and is enabled to experience ancestors as part of his sense of self. The particular moment of the poem’s alchemy—this crucial artistic and spiritual “activity”—occurs in lines 7 and 8 (which, as noted in the Navajo section, are static with variation in terms of their syllables per line [8 and 10] and which form statement three, also static): “In the giveaway is beaded / the blood memories of fathers and sons.” Here, in the central metaphor of the poem, we can locate yet another complementary tension, and we can see the significant juxtaposition and compressing of Indigenous ceremony, Indigenous art, and the provocative phrase “blood memories.” The genealogical sequence in the poem’s final line—“grandfather, father, I”—enunciates this collapse of space-time. The poem’s apparent paradox, “not here”/“am here,” is undone in the collapse of distinctions among the kinship terms “grandfather,” “father,” and “I.” In the moment of connection, these genealogical terms are rendered equivalent, and the speaker claims a viable contemporary Indigeneity by speaking with and in an ancestral tongue.

The speaker of Momaday’s poem, however, never actually speaks within the poem. The only character who does speak is an unnamed Kiowa ancestor. In line 4 the speaker notes, “My father’s father’s name is called,” invoking but not articulating the name of the speaker’s grandfather. Mammedaty’s name, so prevalent in “The Gourd Dancer,” is in fact unnamed and unspoken in “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919.” Yet it is the action of “call[ing]” this unnamed name that brings forth the ceremonial “gift horse.” And it is this horse—this taonga, this prized possession—that represents for the poem’s speaker the heretofore unavailable vitality of Indigenous culture and worldview. In a second apparent paradox, the presence of Indigenous language—the calling of Mammedaty’s name—is marked in the poem by its absence, and the speaking of the unspoken Indigenous name effects the process of Momaday’s version of the alchemy of taonga, which he subsequently designates with the provocative phrase “blood memories.” This “blood memory,” this alchemy of taonga, responds to the colonial imposition of the West’s alienating fiction of (absolute) individual autonomy by rendering space-time as a palimpsest, a genealogy in the Māori sense of a whakapapa, which means not only to recite in proper order but to place in layers, to lay one generation upon another. In place of an understanding of genealogy as a strictly linear sequence that isolates each generation from its predecessors (“I” understood in the singular), it offers the speaker an understanding of genealogy as a vital, enabling, and, in the end, demanding superimposition (“I” understood in the plural).

Elsewhere, I have argued that Momaday’s phrase “blood memory,” which appears throughout his works published over the past forty years, is a trope that names both a process of claiming an Indigenous identity and the product of that process.²⁷ Such understandings confer gifts but also responsibilities. The moment of recognition of this power of the ancestral, this ihi, occurs for the speaker of “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” in the moment of his articulation of the interjection “Oh” that begins line 9 and statement four, set off by a comma and addressed to himself, to his ancestors, and finally to his audience. If the alchemy of this taonga works, the poem becomes an opportunity not only for the speaker but also for readers to recognize ihi and to respond emotionally, spiritually, and physically.

It should go without saying that contemporary Indigenous literatures written in English or primarily in English are the products of complicated aesthetic genealogies. Drawn from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources, they potentially speak to many audiences. Often, like other contemporary Indigenous arts, these literatures are also the products of complicated and evolving networks of exchange. Writing about the North American context, non-Native art historian and museum curator David Penney explains, “Native artists have always made things for other people, as gifts to forge relationships and for exchange” (54). With the introduction of a Western market economy, the range of “other people” thus engaged expanded. The basic “dialogue between creator and customer,” however, continued: “educating the consumer, on the one hand, to the values of the craft; adapting the craft, on the other hand, to the demands of the marketplace” (54). Penney notes that since the mid-1970s, non-Native anthropologists and art historians have rethought their initial dismissal of so-called Indigenous tourist art and reassessed its value, and he himself promotes the use of a more positive alternative term for such creations, coined by Anishinaabe artist and writer Lois Beardslee: “market art” (54). As Penney points out, there are many traditions of Indigenous market art—pottery, baskets, beadwork, carving, painting, sculpture—and the art objects produced typically represent “multigenerational endeavor[s], culturally based, but individually created, traditional yet capable of startling innovation, often rooted in local environments, but globally relevant in [their] insistence upon the value of local knowledge” (56).

We can conceive contemporary Indigenous literatures produced for regional, national, and international markets in similar terms. Scholars have long been interested in how Indigenous literatures educate non-Indigenous readers and how they respond to the demands of the dominant, non-Indigenous literary marketplace. Less attention has been paid, thus far, to how particular Indigenous literatures might educate—and delight or provoke—not only non-Indigenous readers but also readers from other Indigenous communities. Similarly, little attention has been paid to the expansion and diversification of the global literary marketplace over the course of the final quarter of the twentieth century, in part through the development of new print and other media technologies but also through the development of new networks of intellectual and artistic exchange. As the Māori artist and curator Darcy Nicholas remarked in relation to the 2006 Manawa exhibit, “We [Māori] are physically connected to our Canadian and American First Nations people by the sea and more recently by modern technology” (8). This expansion and diversification has created more opportunities for Indigenous peoples to publish their works in internationally accessible venues, including not only in print texts, audio recordings, and film and video but also in web-based digital media, and to present their works at international readings, performances, symposia, and academic conferences.

Engaging multiple Indigenous systems of aesthetics expands our appreciation and refines our understanding of how these texts produce meaning and pleasure for multiple audiences, including multiple audiences who identify as Indigenous. In distinct but related ways, Kiowa, Navajo, and Māori conceptions of aesthetic engagement—“beauty,” “power,” and “excellence”—help explain how Momaday’s highly condensed poem both names and overcomes a contemporary anguish over Indigenous separation from ancestors, cultural traditions, and worldviews. Part of the activist power of the poem, within the specific context of its publication during the Columbus quincentenary, is that it voices its political protest, its counterclaim of Indigenous continuity, not exclusively at the level of its language and themes—its “message”—but also at the level of its artistic conception, form, and structure. Its claim that distinctly Indigenous modes of cultural and artistic expression persist into contemporary times actively demonstrates their vitality.

While drafting the early versions of this chapter, I was fortunate to spend the first half of 2005 in Aotearoa New Zealand, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship and hosted at the Turnbull Library, part of the National Library of New Zealand/Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa. As part of my Fulbright duties, I gave a number of invited talks to different academic and community audiences. For four of these, I delivered working versions of my then draft essay. The audiences and contexts for the four talks were diverse, and the experience of interacting with such distinct audiences helped to shape the present version of my analysis and argument.

I gave the first of these talks to the Department of English at Otago University, located in Dunedin on the South Island. I had been invited to Otago by the department head, a Renaissance scholar from the United States who was a recent arrival to Aotearoa. North Americans may be surprised to learn that many on the academic faculty at New Zealand universities are not New Zealanders by birth and did not earn their degrees in New Zealand institutions but come predominantly from Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States. Only departments of Māori studies and perhaps Pacific studies are likely to have a majority of New Zealand–born and perhaps New Zealand–trained faculty. Neither my American host nor many on her staff had much of a relationship with the university’s Department of Māori Studies, and as a result, my talk was scheduled—unintentionally—at a time when the Māori studies staff was unable to attend. My audience was composed almost entirely of non-Māori staff and students and, of its faculty members, was largely non-New Zealand born or raised. Few in the audience had any kind of Māori or Indigenous studies framework for evaluating my experimental approach to Momaday’s poem.

It was the first time out with my draft essay, and although I read an abbreviated version, it ran too long. Because we had to vacate the classroom in which I had been scheduled to speak for the next period, the question-and-answer session had to be cut short. Out in the hallway, my host and several students complimented my presentation, but what was most memorable were brief comments from one of the junior members of the English faculty who, like my host, was an American recently arrived in Aotearoa. He was polite, but his critique of my methodology was intense and ultimately dismissive. The main problem, I gathered, was that although my analysis might have momentarily decentered dominant literary traditions and modes of inquiry, it had not disproved them. He had felt no significant shift of paradigm. He found my attempt at engaging Indigenous aesthetics quaint and perhaps a little naïve (my paraphrase, not his actual words); certainly, it was of little genuine importance to literary studies in English.

Undaunted, I delivered a second version of my analysis of Momaday’s poem in June 2005 at Massey University, located in the town of Palmerston North on the North Island, roughly halfway between Wellington and Auckland. I had been invited not by the English department but by a faculty member in the Department of Communications who happened to be of Ngai Tahu descent (Ngai Tahu are the predominant Māori iwi from the South Island) and who was well connected to Massey’s Māori studies faculty and students. Massey’s Department of Māori Studies specializes in Māori arts production and criticism, so I was especially pleased that its faculty and students, as well as Māori faculty and staff from other parts of the university, attended my talk in full force. They composed over half the audience in the large seminar room. In contrast to my experience at Otago, where I was introduced by the chair of English in standard Western academic fashion, at Massey I was given a mihi (formal greeting) in Māori by a member of the Māori studies faculty, followed by a waiata (song) performed by the speaker and other Māori faculty who stood with him in support. One of the purposes of this type of typical Māori ceremonial greeting is to establish connections between hosts and visitors and to properly open a space for the exchange of discourse and ideas. Only then was I introduced in more typical academic fashion in English by my Māori host.

The talk appeared to go well. I decided beforehand not to read my paper but to speak from notes, using an overhead projector to display Momaday’s poem and examples of Plains Indian pictographs and Navajo weaving, and this strategy seemed appropriate for my Massey audience, which represented a diversity of academic training and scholarly interests. During the talk, I felt that Māori in the audience were especially supportive. When I finished speaking, however, the first hand to be raised for a question belonged to a Pakeha graduate student who sat in the front row. Like the American junior faculty member at Otago, the Pakeha graduate student at Massey wanted to discuss how my work fit within the Western Tradition—capital W, capital T—of literary studies. He was not happy when I refused, politely, to answer the question on his terms and, instead, directed my response to the historical and ethical, as well as the artistic and scholarly, importance of clearing space within the dominant academy for (more) Indigenous-centered approaches to studying Indigenous literatures. (My answer did score visible and vocal points, however, with the Māori scholars and students in the room, which I think says less about my specific response than it does about the typical contemporary experiences of Indigenous people in the academy, which are often overwhelmed by dominant interests.) And where at Otago my talk had ended abruptly with the literal ringing of the class bell followed by hurried exchanges in the hallway, at Massey the conversation begun in the seminar room continued over a casual lunch organized by the Māori studies faculty and staff. Sharing a meal, like sharing the mihi and the waiata, was an integral part of the event.

Although I was pleased with my Massey experience, I felt somewhat nervous about presenting the third version of what I had come to think of as my “Indigenous aesthetics” talk in early July 2005 at Victoria University in Wellington. This talk was cosponsored by the single Māori faculty member in the Department of English and by the Department of Māori Studies, and it was scheduled to take place inside the carved wharenui (meeting house) on the campus marae. The setting of a Māori ceremonial space (the marae complex as a whole and the meeting house in particular) placed a certain added pressure on my performance. The talk attracted a small number of faculty and graduate students from the English department and a larger number from Māori studies, as well as the university’s vice chancellor for Māori affairs, who happened to be a Māori cultural specialist and art historian, the Pakeha chair of the university’s writing program, and several Māori professionals from the National Library and Archives New Zealand. There was some miscommunication about how I would be introduced, given that I was speaking inside the meeting house but would not be formally brought onto the marae, so I was not fully prepared for the formal mihi I received from a member of the Māori studies faculty and the waiata that followed (although I have attended enough Māori events to know that even though I was told beforehand that no formal mihi would be given, it was likely one would be given nonetheless). I fumbled through an appropriate response in Māori and English. I was then given a more standard academic introduction by the Māori studies faculty member in charge of the event.

For this third version of my analysis of Momaday’s poem, I discussed the main points of my essay from memory, again using an overhead projector and screen to display the poem and several images. As is customary on most marae, I had removed my shoes before entering the wharenui, and as I spoke I padded around the warm space of the meeting house in my socks, and I gestured toward the house’s taonga (prized possessions)—its whakairo (carvings of ancestors and their stories) and tukutuku (woven wall panels of key cultural symbols)—as illustrations of several of the points I was trying to make about how pictographs, textiles, and carvings work as mnemonic devices and serve as the bases for multimedia presentations of narrative. Unlike at the first two talks, here I took some time to explicitly contextualize the field of Indigenous literary studies, its dominant methodologies, and some potential limitations of these methodologies for interpreting—and fully enjoying—Indigenous texts. The talk went well, as did the question-and-answer period. Inside the wharenui there were no questions about recentering dominant Western literary and cultural traditions. The Māori vice chancellor used the question-and-answer period as an occasion to promote his own projects and to comment on his own ongoing feuds with the dominant academy (as was to be expected), and the Pakeha chair of the writing program, who happens to be a New Zealander by birth, a celebrated poet, and no stranger to Māori gatherings, made his own subtle political statement by having not removed his shoes. After the talk everyone moved into the adjacent wharekai (dining hall) for good food and for wide-ranging discussion about Māori understandings of literary and artistic genres and the paucity of articulated Indigenous methodologies for use in humanities research and writing. In other words, although my talk had gone well, in the marae setting I was not the (only) center of attention (and did not expect to be).

Finally, I gave the fourth version of my talk about Momaday’s poem several days before I left Aotearoa to return to the United States, at the end of July 2005. I was invited to speak at the Whariki Research Unit in Auckland, an organization that conducts research on issues affecting Māori health and wellness. Whariki is associated with Massey University, and one of its leaders had heard about my talk at Massey in Palmerston North in June. I was surprised to be invited to speak to them, but I was intrigued. I was told that, among other factors, the Whariki research team is interested in how Māori health and wellness are affected by issues of identity and representation. My talk was attended by a Māori physician and the entire Whariki staff, which included Māori and Pakeha public health researchers and mapping specialists. In addition, at my invitation, a prominent Pakeha New Zealand studies scholar from Auckland University also attended, as did a Māori anthropologist who conducts research on land claims. It was probably the most diverse audience for my “Indigenous aesthetics” talk; only one person in the room other than me was equipped with specialized knowledge about literary scholarship.

I again delivered the talk from memory and used an overhead projector. As I had in the meeting house at Victoria University, I contextualized the field of Indigenous literary studies to set up my specific project. The talk went well, and my diverse audience appeared genuinely interested—and perhaps a little relieved that I spoke a language they could understand. Not surprisingly, however, the first hand raised during the question-and-answer period was that of the Pakeha New Zealand studies scholar from Auckland University. He asked a smart, sympathetic, and well-intentioned question. It was more than appropriate for a Western academic setting, but its effect, had I accepted it, would have been to bypass discussion of the Indigenous approaches I had described and, instead, would have refocused attention on the broader and more abstract issue of literary aesthetics in general. Having completed my close analysis, he asked, what did I now have to say about aesthetics with a capital A? My response, which also was well intentioned, was to refuse to engage his question and its invitation to universalize my conclusions based on a single experiment of close reading and contextualization. Instead, I asked him to be satisfied, at least for the moment, with the local, to understand what local conclusions might have to say to multiple audiences, before moving up the rungs of the ladder of abstraction and demanding larger claims in the specific realm of literary scholarship within the dominant academy. The remainder of the question-and-answer period was driven by Whariki team members, and the conversation ranged widely as they—and we—attempted to articulate how the issues I had raised in relation to “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” might intersect with the work they do. Afterwards, to my surprise, the Whariki team leader presented me with a koha (gift) before we continued our conversation over a late lunch and coffee.

Is there a portable lesson to be gained from the metanarrative of presenting early versions of my work on Momaday’s poem? Thus far, what it has taught me is that the project of engaging multiple Indigenous aesthetics is not exclusively a project of developing new methodologies for close reading and literary interpretation. It is also necessarily a project caught up with better understanding the related issues of audience and context for both literary and critical reception. What kinds of primary and secondary audiences do we imagine for the literary works we read and interpret when we approach them with specific methodologies? Which potential audiences for our critical work are privileged by the methodologies we take up and by the critical languages we speak? Which audiences might feel valorized by our practices and which audiences might feel marginalized? Moreover, how are certain kinds of audiences formed, nurtured, and perpetuated through institutions such as undergraduate and graduate programs in literature or in academic and commercial publishing? And how do certain kinds of spaces come to be marked as appropriate or inappropriate contexts for specific modes of inquiry and exchange?

The idea of multiple and multiply informed Indigenous audiences has not often occurred to literary scholars in the dominant academy, including those who have devoted their careers to the study of Native American and other Indigenous literatures.²⁸ And why should it? In all of their—in all of our—training within dominant structures, what could possibly have suggested that such audiences deserve critical attention?

The current system of graduate education in literature and culture studies, especially as these are enacted in most U.S. departments of English, is not designed to enable the kind of engagements with Indigenous aesthetics I am proposing. Quite the contrary.²⁹ In fact, our greatest challenge in formulating new models for Native American and Indigenous literary criticism may well be to overhaul graduate training so that it will be possible for future scholars to meaningfully engage Indigenous aesthetics and, thus, to more fully engage Indigenous intellectual and artistic sovereignty. We will have to push ourselves to think beyond the typical needs and desires of English literature studies, and we will have to conceive of programs and opportunities that are of interest not only to literary scholars and students within the dominant academy but also to individual Indigenous artists and to Indigenous communities—and we will have to insist that such programs and opportunities be of obvious benefit to both. We have barely begun to imagine what such collaborations might look like within the Indigenous literary and culture studies curriculum. Their potential impact on the future of the field may prove nothing short of revolutionary.