essay

Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

The Uses of Indigenous Literatures

Author(s): Joshua B. Nelson

Source: World Literature Today , Vol. 88, No. 5 (September/October 2014), pp. 28-32

Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7588/worllitetoda.88.5.0028

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special section Native Lit

I n a lecture on pragmatism, William James discerned a foundational split in philo-sophical perspectives between those that esteem “the one” and those that delight in “the many.” In focusing exclusively on my own tribe’s literary corner of the world, my work on Chero- kee literature and culture in one sense puts me in the camp of “the one,” although I try to make the case for “the many” groups that make up that one. Indigenous literature, too, might seem to some a narrow field, but as the examples in this special section demonstrate, its diversity makes Cherokee literature seem monolithic by com- parison. In both cases, I’m reminded of James’s challenge: “Philosophy has often been defined as the quest or the vision of the world’s unity. . . . But how about the variety in things? . . . Acquain- tance with reality’s diversities is as important as understanding their connexion” (Pragmatism).

Coming to that awareness, of course, much less the totality of both perspectives that James sought, risks entanglement when we take into account the diversity within the diversities of indigeneity. Besides belonging to distinct tribal groups across Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Australia (just stopping at the continental A’s for now), the world’s three hundred some–odd million Indigenous people belong also to com- munities rural and urban, impoverished and affluent, and anarchistic and bureaucratic, to say nothing of their spiritual practices and configu- rations. Our present optimism in transnational studies in indigeneity is enthusiastic about the potential for this globalized identity to recognize

empathetic others after generations of fragmen- tation and isolation, to forge alliances among fellow communities long marginalized, and to consolidate voices frequently dismissed as incon- sequential given their small populations. An imagined community of three hundred million could change all that. Forging it, however, won’t be easy, if the tensions sometimes seen among Native peoples, even just in North America, are any indication. How we (by which I here mean Native North American nations) level the ground with others who reckon indigeneity by measures other than ours, with their potential to unsettle the structures upon which we have come to depend despite our frequent critiques of them, will determine how far a global sense of indige- neity can take us and how long it will endure.

Indigenous peoples are found across the globe, including places with scores of Indigenous groups like China or India as well as in Euro- pean areas thought empty of Indigenous people— Greece and the Faroe Islands are represented in this issue. The character who stands in for Simon Ortiz in The Last of the Ofos, by Cherokee novelist Geary Hobson, might have been speak- ing of Indigenous people more broadly when he recounts his travels to “all places where there’s not supposed to be any, or at least a very few, Indian people. But, you know, I find Indians all around— Indians are everywhere.” So, too, for indigenes. But how to speak of such an expansive identity and literature? Since the dawn of Native American studies, scholars have warned that generalizations about the more than five hundred tribes in the

For many of the writers in these

pages, if there is a bankable feature

of indigeneity, it concerns the abiding relationship

between people and place.

The Uses of Indigenous Literatures Joshua B. Nelson

How to speak of such an expansive category as “Indigenous literatures”? Are they defined by place? By language? The author explores how various strategies of boundary-drawing both unite and separate Native cultural practices.

28 worldliteraturetoday.org

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September – October 2014 • 29

United States alone can hardly hope to reliably say much specific or substantive about peoples so different in language, belief, and custom.

Despite these differences, “American Indian” as a category endures. With the attention building from increased scholarly research, widespread activ- ist movements such as Idle No More, the United Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it’s a safe bet that “Indigenous” as a category of identity, too, will manage the inaccuracies surrounding it. That it is here to stay is a safe bet, even if, as scholar Ronald Niezen suggests in his book The Origins of Indigenism, it extends primarily from politi- cal, scholarly, and activist doings. Although few people would lead off an introduc- tion of themselves as “Indige- nous,” critical interest in indi- geneity continues to grow, as the titles of several new releases attest. Keeping pace with the turn toward transnational perspectives, recent noteworthy titles on Indigenous literature include Mapping the Ameri- cas, by Shari Huhndorf; Trans-Indigenous: Method- ologies for Global Native Literary Studies, by Chad- wick Allen; Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas, edited by M. Bianet Castellanos, Lourdes Gutiérrez Nájera, and Arturo Aldama; and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature, edited by James Cox and Daniel Justice.

For these scholars and for many of the writ- ers in these pages, if there is a bankable feature of indigeneity, it concerns the abiding relationship between people and place—a connection whose significance is understood by some as established by supernatural order; by others as the source of psychological, physical, social, and cultural well- being; as rooted in history and ancestry; or as a home cherished, longed for, or irrecoverable. This is ground we’re accustomed to, so to speak, in Ameri- can Indian literature. In the moving thematic cli- max to N. Scott Momaday’s 1968 novel House Made of Dawn, the link between the land (specifically, the black mesa at Jemez Pueblo) and the seasonal ceremonial life of the people is so intimate it is writ- ten directly on the body, for the people must know the mesa “as they knew the shape of their hands,

always and by heart.” Beaten and abused through- out the novel, the protagonist’s hands, if they come to embody this knowledge, hold the key to Abel’s healing. In Gloria Martínez Carrera’s poem “Nguían ko tjo (Wind and Shadow),” a similar union makes possible a similar healing, if the spiritually ailing might learn to “Interpret the veins on your hands / with the leaves’ words. / Demand the return of your spirit / with the water’s force.” With com-

munion between people and place, nature and the enig- matic traces it has left upon the self can be called upon to aid in restoration.

The familiarity of the questions about land for American Indian literature suggests similar questions for Indigenous literature. What kinds of relationships develop in what kinds of places? Do urban places or those subsumed under set-

tler colonial control retain their sacred quali- ties? Can Indigenous people also be diasporic, voluntarily leave a homeland, or never have been to it? Can traditional relationships to place be maintained in the aftermath of removal? Are relationships to place necessary and essential to being Indigenous? Mikeas Sánchez’s “Nereyda Dreamed in New York” explores the profit and loss when relationships between speaker and home are disrupted, even when the home’s mate- rial conditions are far from ideal. (Martínez Car- rera’s and Sánchez’s poems are both featured in the online audio supplement to this issue.)

As long as I’ve broached the question of essentialism, we might consider whether other hallmarks theorized for Native identity pertain to indigeneity. We hear people describe them- selves as spiritual but not religious—can you be neither and still be Indigenous? Or not speak a word of a heritage language, not meet a mini- mum blood quantum, not know who your family members are, not put community values before those of the individual? Too hard a line on any of these—still very important—characteristics can define identities right out of existence. Rather than try to pin down indigeneity to a controlling definition, it’s better to understand it as a shifting matrix of many such cultural

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30 worldliteraturetoday.org

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practices and beliefs. Taken together, the various ways that a people relate to a place they originally occupied, to one another in kinship and language, and to history and political structures can provide a robust appreciation of Indig- enous identities, with emphasis on the plural. We might also get at some of the uses to which such identities and the literatures that come out of them might get put. (I’ll come back to this cynical-sounding bit about “uses.”)

The challenge, as Chadwick Allen notes, is how to arrive at anything like an encyclopedic knowledge of even a fraction of the world’s Indig- enous peoples that we’d like to have in order to say something deductive rather than inductive about Indigenous people’s history, culture, or literature. (I’m not claiming this for myself—I’ve had Cherokee literature and culture in the middle of my thinking for over a decade now, and every one thing I learn reveals three things I don’t know.) Allen’s suggestion that readers call upon their training in formalist criticism is well taken, but we might also have to admit that induction about cultural knowledge is just something we’ll have to live with in broaching a body of literature so expansive. Perhaps there are (revisable) cat- egorical similarities that we can enlist to enrich our readings. Perhaps, too, from the examples with which we’re familiar, we can identify some of the tendencies or prejudices that threaten the future of transindigenous collectivity.

The barriers to the political efficacy of Indigenous positions put up by mainstream political structures may be sufficient unto the day, but it’s worth considering, too, what blocks Native peoples have constructed for ourselves. In Native North America, several federally rec- ognized tribes have demonstrated an alarming willingness to lobby against others seeking to enter the family of domestic dependent nations, as tribes were called in the unfortunate prec- edent set by the US Supreme Court in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. My own Cherokee nation’s government over the past several years opposed the expressed desires of formerly adopted Shaw- nee and Delaware members to separate from the Cherokee Nation and constitute independent bodies, even as it forcefully disenfranchised the Cherokee Freedmen, who are descendants of

former slaves. It also lobbies against any tribes seeking state or federal recognition that it sus- pects of any trace of illegitimacy—according to measures it approves—by appearing before legislatures and the public, via delegations, web- sites, and well-produced videos. In such efforts, the Cherokee Nation is not alone. The Eastern Band of Cherokee urged Congress to withhold recognition from the Lumbee people in North Carolina, and the Navajo Nation resisted the secession of the San Juan Paiutes. Examples from across the nation evidence how closed a shop many American Indians would like to keep the official arrangements for recognizing indi- geneity.

The “shop” metaphor may be more apt than it seems—we would likely find that tribes’ desires to safeguard casino profits motivates much of their opposition to other groups’ recognition, along with the reasonable general sense that they would see their shares of federally funded resources drop with every increase of eligible entities. Although this protectionism may be grounded in a desire to assure their constituents’ futures, several collateral effects work against it. They include, externally, reinforcing the idea that Indians are people thoroughly known to the state, and knowable by them according to the measures it decrees; and, internally, cultivating suspicion and antagonism among tribes and undermining the spirit of alliance necessary to effective negotiation from a position of sufficient representational strength. Whether or not tribes that campaign against the indigeneity of others intend it, they propagate chauvinisms that bear uncanny resemblances to self-authorizing narra- tives that allow nations to consider themselves above reproach. They thus authorize the very marginalizing that Indigenous people struggle against. They further communicate that con- solidating the power of the tribal state outweighs other concerns—worthwhile concerns that are

Rather than try to pin down indigeneity to a controlling definition, it’s better to understand it as a shifting matrix of many cultural practices and beliefs.

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September – October 2014 • 31

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worth foregrounding, such as advocating for the use of natural resources according to Indigenous principles of sustainability or promoting greater structural and economic equality for Indigenous peoples generally.

Scholars of Indigenous literature, too, occa- sionally lean on the side of exclusivity, as seen in the frequently skeptical response to Chicano/a claims of indigeneity that several authors note in Comparative Indigeneities of the Américas. It’s true that laying claim to the southwestern US for an imagined Aztec homeland of Aztlán is far from uncomplicated in its disregard for the rights of the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people already there. We should not, however, discount out of hand the Native descent of Hispanic people in the US or ignore the kinship we share with our cousins past the US’s northern borders, in the cases of Métis and First Nations peoples. To do so buys into American exceptionalism and acquiesces to the colonialist narratives which hold that people’s ideas of themselves as Indig- enous, if not indigenes themselves, were success- fully stamped out. It also fails to recognize, once more, the alliances that might come from organic relationships.

Forging abiding relationships among Indig- enous groups won’t be easy, not least because it is liable to require of North American Native nations many of the same things we ask of settler colonial governments—that the legitimacy of other Indigenous peoples’ claims as first inhab- itants of a place sacred to them be recognized; that the economic privilege that we enjoy at their expense be admitted; that our structural systems and measures of identity that marginalize others arbitrarily and divisively be revisited; and that some measure of power accrued through the advantages of our particular historical structural circumstances be relinquished. These are threat- ening proposals, and already-abounding uncer- tainties about the terms of global Indigenous identity, the slab on which political agendas are constructed, make the foundations appear a lit- tle sandy. Given North American Native nations’ current lack of influence and understanding vis- à-vis the US government, asking them to give up some of their gains seems like an unreasonable demand. And there is still validity in the distinc- tions to be made among Indigenous peoples, not least the rights that extend from ongoing treaty

Jesus Never Understood My Grandmother’s Prayers Mikeas Sánchez

My grandmother never learned Spanish was afraid of forgetting her gods was afraid of waking up in the morning without the prodigals of her offspring in her memory. My grandmother believed that you could only talk to the wind in Zoque but she kneeled before the saints and prayed with more fervor than anyone. Jesus never heard her my grandmother’s tongue smelled like rose apples and her eyes lit up when she sang with the brightness of a star. Saint Michael the Archangel never heard her my grandmother’s prayers were sometimes blasphemies jukis’tyt she said and the pain stopped patsoke she yelled and time paused beneath her bed. In that same bed she birthed her seven sons.

Translation from the Spanish By David Shook

Visit the WLT website to listen to a biligual

(Zoque/English) recording of this poem.

Mikeas sánchez was born in Chiapas, Mexico

in 1980. She writes in her native language,

Zoque, spoken by about seventy thousand

indigenous Mexicans in the southern state

of Chiapas. In addition to her work as a

poet, she is a translator and director of the

Indigenous radio program XECOPA. She earned a master’s in education at the

Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has published two books of poetry,

produced several bilingual albums, and contributed to many anthologies of

Indigenous poetry.

For a bio of David shook, turn to page 15.

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32 worldliteraturetoday.org

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relationships that form the basis of US Native sovereignty. It’s unreasonable to ask that tribal nations give those up, nor to advocate opening up those rights and the resources they entail to any and everybody, given that they extend from specific histories and sacrifices.

Reimagining what it means to be Indigenous by situating ourselves more equilaterally among peers is a little scary, too, when we think of increasingly favored yardsticks of identity other than blood quantum, where many US tribes would not compare well to others. Heritage language use is a case in point. North American Native nations are undertaking great efforts to preserve and revive our languages, understand- ing how integral they are to Native thought itself. Things are much different in Mexico, where speaking an Indigenous language was req- uisite to establish Native identity until the year 2000. In The Red Land to the South, James Cox notes that half of the eleven million indigenes in Mexico currently speak a tribal language.

Despite the relative strength of Indigenous languages there, Chiapas poet Mikeas Sánchez’s “Jesus Never Understood My Grandmother’s Prayers” (page 31) reveals some anxiety over the fit between the speaker’s ancestors’ language, a tongue corporally connected to the spiritual forc- es of the natural world, and the contemporary environments of grandmother and granddaughter alike that are shaped and bounded by Christian- ity’s influence. Yorgos Soukoulis’s “Language of Stone,” too, fears the eroding effects of time upon the building block of language, and worries to the point of reticence that even a single block might be mislaid: “If I cannot quite remember the word I will not write it. / I do not want there to be one in a hundred chances that I might get the word wrong” (page 33). I once got to eavesdrop on a group of Cherokee speakers who were correcting one among them according to this same principle. At stake for them, I believe, was not the loss of a word but a piece of the collective past, a past we are account- able to. Against this loss, so far advanced for so many Indigenous peoples, we must be on guard to the best of our abilities. The speaker in “Language of Stone” works at this with the paper at his side.

Among the many indigeneities, how might such pieces of culture and identity as heritage language and connection to place fit together, with their potential to both divide by contrast

and unify by comparison? The potential uses of Indigenous literatures that I alluded to earlier might offer some prospects. These are not the uses of ethnology or cultural tourism against which David Treuer cautions. They rather run in a counter direction, in the sense that Indigenous literature can potentially put us as readers to use. Laying claim to Indigenous identity invites cer- tain obligations. If indigenism was born in poli- tics, as Niezen suggests, political responsibility is its birthright. As we increasingly draw strength from the international Indigenous community, reciprocity demands that we remain vigilant on behalf of the communities with which we affili- ate against the threats posed to their autonomy.

At a basic level, this means we should find out from each other our histories, beliefs, and practices; our successes, challenges, and our fail- ures; our needs, expectations, and, perhaps above all, what we can offer in the way of help to those who need and want it. Pursuant to these ends, we should learn, too, of the conditions in which other groups stand relative to the entities in their circum- stances that are more powerful, less powerful, and adjunct (e.g., states, minorities within the group, and other tribes, respectively). From this we might glean all sorts of effective strategies, from political representation arrangements, to social inclusiv- ity, to language and ceremony preservation. Other Indigenous peoples might profit by learning some- thing of our histories as well: for instance, what did we discover in the aftermath of allotment, and what would we tell others about it? If we could go back and reject blood quantum as the measure of identity, what would we substitute for community boundary-drawing? Of the things we lost, what would we have worked harder to keep?

Besides connections between people and place, questions like these weave a common thread uniting Indigenous communities across the globe. These common concerns need not crowd out others more particular, so long as we remain committed to principles of mutual aid and respect for others’ differences, goals we have long been advocating for our own sakes. While Indigenous peoples are indeed many, exploring the contours of this one appellation we share may help us appreciate crucial commonalities among the varieties of literary expression.

University of Oklahoma

Joshua B. nelson (Cherokee)

is Assistant Professor of

English at the University of

Oklahoma. He is the author

of Progressive Traditions:

Identity in Cherokee

Literature and Culture

(University of Oklahoma

Press, 2014) and other

pieces on American Indian

literature and film. He also

helps organize the Native

Crossroads film festival at OU.

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