Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies, 70, Band 70) - Hardcover

Wieser, Kimberly G.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0806157275 ISBN 13: 9780806157276

Verlag: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

For thousands of years, American Indian cultures have recorded their truths in the narratives and metaphors of oral tradition. Stories, languages, and artifacts, such as glyphs and drawings, all carry Indigenous knowledge, directly contributing to American Indian rhetorical structures that have proven resistant—and sometimes antithetical—to Western academic discourse. It is this tradition that Kimberly G. Wieser seeks to restore in Back to the Blanket, as she explores the rich possibilities that Native notions of relatedness offer for understanding American Indian knowledge, arguments, and perspectives.

Back to the Blanket analyzes a wide array of American Indian rhetorical traditions, then applies them in close readings of writings, speeches, and other forms of communication by historical and present-day figures. Wieser turns this pathbreaking approach to modes of thinking found in the oratory of eighteenth-century Mohegan and Presbyterian cleric Samson Occom, visual communication in Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, patterns of honesty and manipulation in the speeches of former president George W. Bush, and rhetorics and relationships in the communication of Indigenous leaders such as Ada-gal’kala, Tsi’yugûnsi’ni, and Inoli.

Exploring the multimodal rhetorics—oral, written, material, visual, embodied, kinesthetic—that create meaning in historical discourse, Wieser argues for the rediscovery and practice of traditional Native modes of communication—a modern-day “going back to the blanket,” or returning to Native practices. Her work shows how these Indigenous insights might be applied in models of education for Native American students, in Native American communities more broadly, and in transcultural communication, negotiation, debate, and decision making.
 

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Kimberly G. Wieser is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and coauthor of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective.

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Back to the Blanket

Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies

By Kimberly G. Wieser

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2017 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8061-5727-6

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Preface, 
Introduction, 
1. "I Speak like a Fool, but I Am Constrained": Emancipating Samson Occom's Intellectual Offspring with American Indian Hermeneutics and Rhetorics, 
2. Vision, Voice, and Intertribal Metanarrative: The Amerindian Visual-Rhetorical Tradition in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, 
3. The "Great Father's" Tongue Is Still "Forked": The Fight for American Indian Resources and Red Rhetorical Strategies in Settler Colonial Politics, 
4. "That Little Savage Was Insolent to Me Today": Ada-gal'kala, Idle No More, and the Perennial Problem of "Our Mad Young Men", 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"I Speak like a Fool, but I Am Constrained"

Emancipating Samson Occom's Intellectual Offspring with American Indian Hermeneutics and Rhetorics

When outsiders can read between every stitch of beadwork, every wrap of quillwork and every brushstroke, then our stories will be told.

— Dakota artist Del Iron Cloud on his philosophy of art

In 1997, I was sitting on a panel at the Native American Symposium in Durant, Oklahoma, listening to one of the other presenters, Clifford Crane Bear (Blackfoot), then director of the Glenbow Museum in Calgary. He said some words that I keep returning to in my ongoing theorizing about American Indian literatures: "Theories are somebody's guess. Through our oral history, we were told never to use theories. We were told to use what we were taught. The first thing my grandfather taught me was that the Earth is our Mother. Respect her." In the intervening years, very little has changed in the academy or in Indian Country regarding theory. Academics, Native or not, have been pressured to "jump on the theory bandwagon," as retired University of Oklahoma Native literature professor and my longtime mentor Geary Hobson (Cherokee/Quapaw descendant) puts it, and many of us have subsequently learned to appreciate, use, and subscribe to the work of non-Native theorists and thinkers — Bakhtin, Foucault, Freire, Bhabha, Said, and many, many more. Moreover, in that twenty-year period, an increasing number of American Indian and tribally descended scholars have authored and are still producing a significant body of theory and criticism. If people were ever under the false impression that there was only one "Native perspective" on American Indian literatures, surely they have been disabused of this notion by now. Clearly, we have multiple Native perspectives about multiple Native ways of reading and writing about American Indian literatures, and traditionally speaking, making room for a multiplicity of voices and perspectives is a positive value in American Indian cultures. As Craig S. Womack (Creek/Cherokee) pointed out in Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, "There is such a thing as a Native perspective and ... seeking it out is a worthwhile endeavor. ... Native perspectives have to do with allowing Indian people to speak for themselves ... with prioritizing Native voices" (4). The field of American Indian literary and cultural studies has come a long way in that regard.

But theory, typically framed in circumlocuting, obfuscating, philosophical discourse, tends to feel alienating to those outside the academy. Grassroots American Indians, who quite arguably feel a more vested relationship in the work of the discipline of American Indian studies than the general populace does in other areas of the academy, have a similar relationship to theory, or rather the idea of theory. While Crane Bear disavows the idea of theory, theories themselves are certainly implicit in languages, ways, artifacts, and stories, and moreover, a theory is implicit in his statement. Scholars outside the field of Native studies may see no problem with this disconnect between community and academy. While many academics view their work as separated from communities outside the "ivory tower" of the university, Native and Native-descended scholars, among them myself, have in recent years staked a claim in the academy for pragmatic approaches to our research that have application for Native peoples and communities. If we are to follow the call that Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith set forth in 1999 in her foundational text Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples — by "'reporting back' to the people and 'sharing knowledge'" (15) — then we need to find theory that is appropriate for Native studies subjects from the perspectives of the Native peoples and communities for whom we attempt to be useful. As Anishinaabe critic Kimberly Blaeser suggested in "Native Literature: Seeking a Critical Center," we need

a way to approach Native Literature from an Indigenous cultural context, a way to frame and enact a tribal-centered criticism ... [to] seek ... a critical voice which moves from the culturally-centered text outward toward the frontier of "border" studies, rather than an external critical voice which seeks to penetrate, appropriate, colonize, or conquer the cultural center, and thereby, change the stories or remake the literary meaning. (53)

Traditional literary criticism posits both the artist and the product as objects to be analyzed, rather than recognizing the artist as an agent negotiating meaning with an audience, placing the critic in the role of archeologist or anthropologist, a role that historically has led, in the opinion of many Indigenous people, to cultural imperialism and exploitation. This "anthropologism" happens when well-meaning critics explain cultural aspects of American Indian texts, attempting to catalog discrete chunks, fostering misrepresentation of the whole in the same manner as museum exhibits of artifacts, and leading to the same sense of transferred ownership: the artifacts now belong to the exhibitors, to the viewers, and the cultural "knowledge" now is the "intellectual property" of the critic.

Though a great deal of the cultural literacy necessary for outsiders to understand Native American texts has come from critics writing in the mainstream, and though the scholarship has been done with honorable intentions, the appropriation, the cutting away, the splaying necessary to mainstream modes of criticism, is offensive to many Native people. Hobson says, "The assumption seems to be that one's 'interest' in an Indian culture makes it okay for the invader to collect 'data' from Indian people when, in effect, this taking of the essentials of cultural lifeways, even if in the name of Truth or Scholarship or whatever, is as imperialistic as those simpler forms of theft, such as the theft of homeland by treaty" (Hobson et al. 101). A good number of non-Indian scholars who have been part of the American Indian literary critical community for years have begun to see themselves as allies, acknowledging and adopting Native-centered theoretical approaches as they have recognized the validity of their colleagues' frustrations. Senior scholar David Payne's description of his experiences with American Indian literatures is a good example:

Like most scholars old enough to worry about their cholesterol, I was taught to believe that good criticism spoke with the anonymous voice of a master...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Oklahoma Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0806157275
• ISBN 13: 9780806157276
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar