Tribal theory in Native American literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee writing and indigenous worldviews

Tribal Theory in Native American Literature

TRIBAL THEORY IN

NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURE Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews PENELOPE MYRTLE KELSEY

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

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LINCOLN AND LONDON

© 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as “A ‘Real Indian’ to the Boy Scouts: Charles Eastman’s Role in American Indian Resistance Literature of the Early Twentieth Century,” Western American Literature 38, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 30–48. Reprinted with permission. An earlier version of chapter 3 appeared as “Narratives of the Boarding School Era from Victimry to Resistance,” Revista Atenea 23, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 123–38. issn 0885-6079. Reprinted with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kelsey, Penelope Myrtle. Tribal theory in Native American literature : Dakota and Haudenosaunee writing and indigenous worldviews / Penelope Myrtle Kelsey. p. cm. This book attempts to show how we might use tribal knowledges as theoretical frameworks for reading Native American texts. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8032-2771-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—Indian authors— History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Knowledge, Theory of, in literature. 3. Indian philosophy—North America. 4. Indians in literature. I. Title. ps153.i52k46 2008 810.9'897—dc22

2007051820

Set in Minion by Kim Essman. Designed by Ashley Muehlbauer.

Some text has been masked due to copyright limitations.

To Levi General and those yet unborn whose faces are coming from beneath the ground

Contents List of Tables | viii Acknowledgments | ix Author’s Note | xi Introduction: Indigenous Knowledge as Tribal Theory | 1 1. Pictographs and Politics in Marie McLaughlin’s Myths and Legends of the Sioux: A Dakota Storyteller in the Ozaƒ Tradition | 21 2. Charles Eastman’s Role in Native American Resistance Literature: A “Real Indian” to the Boy Scouts | 43 3. Zitkala Öa, Sentiment, and Tiožpaye: Reading Dakota Rhetorics of Nation and Gender | 62 4. Ella Deloria’s Decolonizing Role as Camp Historian in Waterlily: Sisters, Brothers, and the Hakata Relationship | 76 5. A Gendered Future: Wi and Haƒwi in Contemporary Dakota Writing | 93

6. Tribal Theory Travels: Kanien’kehaka Poet Maurice Kenny and the Gantowisas | 112 Notes | 131 Bibliography | 147 Index | 159 Illustrations 1. William Kelsey, Viola Vivian Kelsey Cooke, and Ira Edwin Cooke | 19 2. Cora Maud Myrtle Vivian Wetzel | 19 3. “The Donkey Refused to Carry Kitchen Utensils” | 30 4. “The Maiden Who Gave the Pipe of Peace to the Sioux Nation” | 32 5. “The Mysterious Butte” | 34 6. “The Tipi in Summer and in Winter” | 37 7. “Sioux Games” | 39 Tables 1. Dakota Kinship Terms | 83

Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge the vital assistance provided to me at critical stages in the conception and writing of this book. Both Dakota and Haudenosaunee community members have contributed essential insights at various stages in the process. Franklin Firesteel, Bob Brown, Joyzelle Godfrey, Neil McKay, Sheila Schunk Jensen, and Henry Skywater have been invaluable readers of rougher versions of the manuscript. Both Franklin and Bob are sorely missed by members of the Minneapolis and Mendota Dakota communities. Pida to Clarence Rockboy, Charmaine Thin Elk, and Natalie and Dave Medicine Bear for starting me in Dakota language studies; nya:weh to Jane Doctor, Marcheta Davidson, Jaré Cardinal, Ray Cook, Tom Porter, and Ellen Gabriel for inspiring me through their lived examples; and thanks to my Mohawk readers Ron Freeman and Mary Hess. For encouragement along the way I am very grateful to my committee members and other readers: Jo Lee, Carol Miller, Ed Griffin, Tom Augst, Brenda Child, Susan Gardner, and especially Don Ross for reading when he really didn’t have to. For critical help in the publication process, I also owe a tremendous thanks to Janet Zandy, my colleague in Working Class Studies. Others who offered encouragement are Lisa Brooks, Cheryl Savageau, Allison Hedge Coke, Siobhan Senier, Alan Trachtenberg, Eric Gansworth, and Erika T. Wurth. The Rochester Institute of Technology also provided ample support in the form of course releases and the Miller Fellowship that allowed me to complete this book.

Author’s Note Drafts of this manuscript were submitted for review and comment to all of the bands of the Dakota Nation in Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Manitoba. I would especially like to thank Bob Brown, Franklin Firesteel, Joyzelle Godfrey, and Sheila Schunk Jensen for responding thoughtfully and extensively in this capacity. The final chapter regarding Mohawk writer Maurice Kenny was submitted to all bands and divisions of the Kanien’kehaka in New York, Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta. Nya:weh sgeno.

Tribal Theory in Native American Literature

Introduction Indigenous Knowledge as Tribal Theory

Language lies at the core of the study of all literatures, and Indigenous languages—whether visibly present or no—influence the composition and worldviews of all tribal texts. Historian Angela Cavender Wilson observes that “our language and the stories perpetuated within that language are not only about telling stories that have some historical data, they are about the perpetuation of a worldview that has its own distinct theories about the past and its significance to the Dakota of today and tomorrow. . . . Language, stories, and epistemology are connected to who we are and where we will go in the future.” Underpinning these languages are unique tribal knowledges, epistemology, and philosophy, and Indigenous writers repeatedly and mindfully invoke and deploy these tribal worldviews in their English, French, Spanish, and tribal language publications.1 These worldviews and their theoretical bases become vehicles for Indigenous resurgence, resistance, and survival; they are tribal theory. In her 1992 novel Almanac of the Dead, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko places the story of a book, an almanac in the tradition of the Mayan codices, its prophecies, and its tribal

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caretakers, at the heart of the narrative’s movement. The almanac predicts nearly every event in the unfolding of the novel, although the book itself is ageless, literally undatable. The almanac and its hieroglyphic writing, as well as the translation that the twin sisters Lecha and Zeta undertake, rest upon Mayan traditions of writing, record, and book fashioning.2 While current research indicates that Almanac may be read as having postmodern sympathies and affinities with European narrative, much more might be revealed in a reading of Silko’s masterpiece by considering, for instance, the Grolier Codex. This Codex is the fragmentary remain of a much larger Mayan huun and bears a strong resemblance to Silko’s almanac in its incomplete state and its containing of a list of dates that might stand in for the prophecies in the novel’s narrative.3 Also noteworthy in a consideration of the novel are the only three Mayan codices that exist intact: the Paris, the Madrid, and the Dresden codices. By reflecting upon the specific tradition of Mayan bookmaking and epistemic record and situating Almanac within that tribal literary inheritance, an understanding of Silko’s novel is achieved that is only possible with such tribally grounded criticism. In fact, by closely considering Mayan hieroglyphs and codices and their creators and surrounding culture vis-à-vis Almanac of the Dead, a novel whose very existence is predicated upon these Mesoamerican written traditions, we as readers are practicing tribal theory by allowing the tribal foundation of the text to emerge and motivate our theoretical praxis. Over the last two decades as more Native Americans gained doctorates in literature and some non-Native scholars have grown disenchanted with piecemeal methods of interpretation, a number of critical voices have emerged in Native American literature calling for a set of critical frameworks appropriate to this unique body of texts.4 For many years the most politically accountable approach has been that advocated by a few historical materialist critics who called for a literary critical practice grounded in the history, biography, and specific tribal culture of an individual writer; however, most of these practitioners barely scratched the surface of deeper

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Indigenous knowledges. For example, an article on Simon Pokagon might acknowledge his Potawatomi identity and yet fail to read his distribution of “The Red Man’s Rebuke” as birchbark-bound pamphlets at the 1893 World Columbian Exposition in Chicago within the context of eastern woodlands method of recordkeeping and within their epistemic function. As a graduate student, with the exception of Gerald Vizenor’s continental-inspired trickster theory, I often found that this historical materialism was simply the best approach available for practicing a criticism that was responsible to tribal peoples in its potential to approximate an Indigenous perspective. Vizenor’s introduction of key concepts such as “survivance,” “postindian,” and “tribal striptease” represents a critical first step in the evolution of Indigenous literary frameworks, however one that is notably dated by its reliance on postmodern and poststructuralist theory. Kimberly Blaeser’s landmark study of Vizenor, Writing in the Oral Tradition (1996), praises Wordarrows (1978), Earthdivers (1981), The People Named the Chippewa (1984), and Dead Voices (1992) for their promotion of Anishinaabe oral tradition and knowledges (and rightly so). Although Vizenor succeeds in “writing in the oral tradition” through his use of reader-response theory in his fictional and critical works, the bulk of his theoretically oriented essays still take Eurowestern theory as their foundation, despite his attempts to indigenize them. Vizenor’s greatest critical success thus far remains the chapter entitled “Native Transmotion” in Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (1998), which engages Ojibwe language and its worldviews as deeply as it wrangles with Eurowestern political philosophy and geography. This chapter marks a significant, though not thorough, change in Vizenor’s posture. In 1995 Robert Allen Warrior published Tribal Secrets, which issued a call to scholars to look to Native traditions as a way of understanding Indigenous texts. Warrior insisted that “Native writers be taken seriously as critics as well as producers of literature and culture.”5 It is my intention to grasp, articulate, and critique

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previous critical work by Indigenous and non-Native scholars keen to alter the status and relationship between Native voices and the literary elite. Warrior was followed by Craig Womack who in Red on Red (1999) picked up the thread of intellectual sovereignty and focused on the gains made possible by studying one tradition specifically, in this case, Creek authors. Womack states that his critical “process [is] based on the assumption that it is valuable to look toward Creek authors and their works to understand Creek writing.”6 Jace Weaver, writing with Warrior and Womack, has furthered tribal apparatus centered upon nationalism with American Indian Nationalism (2006), and new voices such as Daniel Justice have begun the process of individual studies of tribal traditions with such groundbreaking work as Our Fire Survives the Storm (2006). Concomitantly, Chadwick Allen and Malea Powell have sought out more global approaches to critical frameworks, engaging notions of blood/land/memory complexes and retooling Vizenor’s categories for defining Native experiences, respectively. What seems to be missing from all of these conversations is a thoroughgoing or even confrontational accounting with the Western academy’s method of engagement with theory.7 Native knowledges are legitimate and commensurate with Eurowestern traditions in ways not fully acknowledged by these approaches, and the few Native American English PhDs who have long thought so have not possessed a vocabulary with which to articulate Native epistemologies in recognized ways nor an audience ready to listen. American Indian scholars have continually struggled with the institutionalization of knowledge, both against the opening up of tribally sensitive materials and for the inclusion of supposedly nonacademic languages that better articulate a tribal agenda. In the field of literary study critical theory is such a rarified area that any pretense to it on the part of scholars critically informed by tribal viewpoints and whose rhetoric is not that of the academy is often dismissed as unsophisticated and essentialist. Both criticisms strike me as evidence of the disjuncture between the texts studied and those writing them and being depicted in them.

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A case in point is Elvira Pulitano’s study Toward a Native American Critical Theory (2003), which provides an overview of critical theoretical approaches modeled by Paula Gunn Allen, Craig Womack, Robert Warrior, Greg Sarris, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor. Pulitano’s order of chapters from Allen to Vizenor represents a ranked continuum from worst to best, with scholars such as Allen, Womack, and Warrior who have firmly advocated for a tribal-focused scholarship and eschewed Eurocentric perspectives labeled as suffering from a “Nativist nostalgia” that threatens “to ossify Native American literary production, as well as Native identity, into a sort of museum culture.”8 As Susan Bernardin notes, Pulitano’s critique of Womack and Warrior and praise for Vizenor’s Euro-inspired trickster moves “would seem to deny the Indigenous intellectual traditions drawn on by so many contemporary Native writers,” and non-Native scholar James Cox contends that “in Pulitano’s theorizing, the West always sanctions a Native’s right to exist, to speak, to theorize.”9 Pulitano’s insistence upon Eurocentric frameworks and her dismissal of scholarship emphasizing Native epistemologies as essentialist mark her as a kind of “academic gatekeeper,” as defined by Devon Mihesuah, and shows how “gatekeepers’ opinions representing the status quo emerge at the forefront of discussions about how Indigenous histories and cultures [and literary criticism—my inclusion] should be written and for what purpose.”10 In contrast, many postcolonial theorists have been able to gain legitimacy for their projects by using the strategies afforded by Eurowestern traditions for the purpose of colonial critiques. (Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Frantz Fanon come to mind here.) While the radical approach embodied by these scholars comes under fire from conservative elements, mainstream scholars appear to find their work more palatable than the work of someone such as Gregory Cajete, who defines Native scientific knowledge systems with a theoretical vocabulary entirely outside of the dominant academic discourse and based on Indigenous epistemes. For example, Cajete terms Native practices of collecting first impressions as an

6 | introduction

initial stage in scientific practice as “first insights,” study techniques for the tribal absorption of data about the environment as “immersion,” creative technologies as “creation,” and tribal scientific method as well as implications for the interweaving of science and spirit as “presentation.”11 The practice of these Indigenous scientific concepts is discussed and depicted in Native American literature from traditional orations by Red Jacket and Handsome Lake to contemporary works by LeAnne Howe and Peter Blue Cloud. Cajete’s study Native Science (2000) breaks crucial interdisciplinary ground in sketching a tribally founded science, yet remains completely overlooked in the field of Native American literary study, an area which remains a kind of vacuum from the communitybased agendas that inform much of the research done in the larger multidisciplinary field of Native American Studies.12 Simultaneously, numerous contemporary tribal writers such as Vine Deloria Jr. and Leslie Marmon Silko invite us to engage a tribally scientific mode in considering their work. In his essay “Ethnoscience and Indian Realities,” Deloria exhorts scholars to unearth the wealth of tribal knowledges hitherto unstudied. This study applies that charge to the larger project of identifying tribal theory.13 Postcolonialists have had a tendency to overlook Native Americans, as Louis Owens and countless others have lamented. Exceptions to this truism might include Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai’s Decolonizing Methodologies that by its very subject matter invites discussion with other global Indigenous critics and researchers. In “As if an Indian Were Really an Indian” Owens observes, “Those of us working in the field of what we call Native American literature can and undoubtedly will chafe at the ignorance and erasure of Native American voices within the metropolitan center and within what at times appears to be the loyal opposition to that center called postcolonial theory.”14 Thus, postcolonial theory has enjoyed a wider audience than Native American criticism, and simultaneously there are a number of factors that trouble any easy adaptation of postcolonial theory to Native texts. While much can be learned from projects that unpack the parallel universes of

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the postcolonial and the neocolonial, the material circumstances of “Fourth World” existence determine Native American literary texts in ways completely different than literatures from the former colonies as has been observed by scholars such as M. Annette Jaimes. The discipline of postcolonial studies, in fact, needs to acknowledge alternate conceptions of the nation and nationalism as configured in tribal experience because its practitioners’ insistence upon the linkage between national identity and imperialism does not account for tribal ways of being. Thus far in this introduction the attentive reader will note that my genealogy has explicitly focused on Native scholars and those whose work emphasizes tribal viewpoints as well as postcolonial critics and their relative failure to include Native American literature in academic discussions. I have intentionally excluded scholars whose criticism emphasizes Eurowestern theory and dialogue about what Native American literature can teach those at the center because I am most concerned with privileging Native knowledges in this study. I will briefly encapsulate the kinds of criticism I intentionally neglect by way of explaining their relative unsuitability for this project. Arnold Krupat, for instance, has been a champion of combining “post-structuralism and the oral tradition,” and he has advocated for an “openness” in reading Native American texts based on the theory of the trace. Krupat acknowledges that his own “work to date has attempted to understand the place of Native American history and culture in relation to Euroamerican culture,” and in fact, much of Krupat’s criticism is primarily focused upon what Native American literature can tell the dominant society about itself.15 In a similar vein Krupat has advocated at length for a practice he terms “ethnocriticism,” which “require[s] real engagement with the epistemological and explanatory categories of Others, most particularly as these animate and impel Other narratives,” and yet in For Those Who Come After (1985) Krupat discovers major discrepancies in Paul Radin’s versions of the autobiographical narratives of Sam and Jasper Blowsnake (Winnebago) while dismissing

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any in-depth discussion of this misattribution by stating “these notebooks do not have interlinear or facing page translations, and I cannot read Winnebago.”16 Granted that gaining fluency in Ho„ak for the purposes of one chapter in a book on authors from multiple tribal traditions might be overly demanding, Krupat’s reading of Radin’s ethnographies provides us with little substantive revelation without any consultation with a Ho„ak speaker and embodies a larger failure to realize a true ethnocriticism to any extent.17 By taking a position predicated upon deep knowledge of an individual tribal tradition, I do not mean to deny the interplay of multiple traditions in Native American literature as we know it. Clearly, with some notable exceptions, nearly all Native texts that we have access to are influenced by the process of colonization. Nonetheless, nearly all of these texts use tribal strategies and value systems (i.e., tribal theory) as a way of creating meaningful literature. Critic James Ruppert has drawn our attention to the epistemic complexity of contemporary Native American literature in Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (1995), and yet like Krupat, he also retains a focus on Eurocentric discourse. Ruppert asks scholars to heed “how Native goals and tribal discourse can coexist with more Western goals in the text and texture of these works.”18 I would reframe this request as “how Native goals and tribal discourse can coexist with more Western discourse in the text and texture of these works.” Again, for the purposes of this study I will attempt to focus on tribal-oriented scholarship and discussion and will necessarily exclude criticism that is concerned with and emphasizes Eurowestern theory. What I would like to suggest is that Native American epistemologies and worldviews might be used for the purposes of reading Native texts in culturally appropriate ways and that a sophisticated reading of this sort that explores the contours and minutiae of key cultural concepts constitutes a legitimate theoretical practice that has hitherto remained unrecognized. I also want to affirm that by centering readings in tribal experience and lifeways a theoretical gloss is achieved that is organic to Native writing: Native writ-

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ers continually invoke these epistemes with a host of strategies, and that knowledge base is therefore organic to these Indigenous texts. By culturally appropriate I designate a set of interpretive strategies that ground tribal texts in their specific backgrounds, histories, and cultures. By doing so, my study stands in contrast to other scholarship that focuses on non-Native frameworks and/or glosses over the individual traits of authors from specific tribes. By bearing witness to the relative dearth of tribally specific studies of texts, I do not want to suggest that these other approaches are not helpful. However, the field of Native American literary studies presently requires a substantive connection between community perspectives and knowledges and critical practice. If part of the reticence of Native American literary scholars in using Western-derived theory has been a concern for recolonizing Native texts, then looking to the sources of a Native theory would seem to amend this problem. For example, when Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) poet Maurice Kenny invokes concepts of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and its embodiment in pictorial wampum belts, does it seem more appropriate to consider Derrida’s palimpsest or to historicize the use of wampum in Haudenosaunee communities and the cultural imaginary in which they are constituted? Derrida’s assistance is culturally inappropriate in some regards and, more troublingly, likely to reenact violence perpetrated against the Haudenosaunee’s concept of nation from the sixteenth century forward. The palimpsest favors a particular kind of text (i.e., papyrus) and the Western method of recordkeeping, not the strings of shells that form the wampum nor pictorial writing familiar to the Iroquois. Because there is a worldview or theoretical mindset that is layered over the use of wampum belts, we might begin to translate the literary, linguistic, material, legal, and other aspects of wampum discourse to responsibly engage the framework to which Kenny’s own writing invites us as readers. There are a number of arguments for accruing more importance to these Indigenous theoretical models than has been allowed before. Myaamia rhetorician Malea Powell has argued that theory

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is nothing more than an individual culture’s worldview or way of understanding its surroundings. Powell asks us to turn to these “other ways of knowing” to “both honor the knowledge that isn’t honored in universities and do so in a way that interweaves these stories with more recognizable academic ‘theorizing’ as well.” 19 This present study considers further what we might gain from focusing primarily upon tribal knowledges rather than Native ways of knowing in combination with Western theory. It asks that we continually consider the larger Native cultural framework that Indigenous authors are constantly invoking, describing, engaging, and remaking in their writings, and as such, how this cultural and linguistic (re)tooling stands on its own as Indigenous theory. Theory is merely an extension of epistemology, which is the science of ways of knowing. Similarly, Onondawaga (Seneca) scholar John Mohawk has asserted that the Native American tradition is a “thinking” tradition, and any assertions or hidden assumptions otherwise are pure falsity.20 In “Encountering the Native Dialogue,” Greg Sarris explores the contours of what a Native theoretical approach might constitute with a particular focus on oral Kashaya Pomo texts. Sarris defines the Kashaya oral tradition as “dynamic, as having an independent life that is at the same time dependent on all life around it for existence and meaning” and contrasts this definition with Eurowestern perceptions of story as “texts each containing the sum total of all their possible meanings. . . . One party may write a story, but one party’s story is no more the whole story than is a leaf the tree.”21 Sarris emphasizes the particular cultural lens(es) that we each employ: “We sort what we hear, unconsciously and consciously, and how we sort has to do with our cultural and personal histories and the situation of our hearing. Critical theory, then, might be considered as the conscious use of an approach or paradigm in an encounter with the text that is heard or read [emphasis mine].”22 If we take theory to mean a lifeway or way of considering one’s world, suddenly the field for studying Native American literature possesses a far wider range of theoretical strategies. How many Indigenous scholars have at their fingertips

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a body of knowledge about their specific tribal tradition that they might now employ legitimately as a theoretical framework for considering a given text? Until quite recently the study of Native American literature has been troubled by a reticence to legitimize and promote Native knowledges as the best possible ways to read tribal texts as well as a lack of direction in knowing how to engage those knowledges. Angela Cavender Wilson’s “Reclaiming Our Humanity” makes articulate claims for the field of history that are equally vital to the development of tribal theory. She contends that “a reaffirmation of Indigenous epistemological and ontological foundations . . . offers a central form of resistance to the colonial forces that have consistently and methodically denigrated and silenced them.”23 Tribal theory thus functions as part of the larger process of “indigenizing the academy” as Cavender Wilson phrases it and is intricately linked to the decolonization movement that her research helps express. In Remember This, Cavender Wilson’s book-length study of her Dakota uƒaƒna’s stories on Dakota identity, this Dakota historian purposefully flouts a number of historical disciplinary conventions surrounding oral traditions in order to privilege Dakota perspectives and worldviews. Specifically she comments that “[t]he history of an Indigenous people cannot be cut from its roots. The Indigenous perspective is holistic and inescapably linked to language. Language is linked to systems of thought, which are linked to history and identity.”24 For this reason my theoretical approach in this study will be based in part on key cultural concepts as they are embodied in the Dakota language because tribal theory necessitates involving Indigenous language’s entwinement with worldview(s).25 Concomitantly, while I view my work as invested in larger efforts in decolonization, as a non-Dakota person reading Dakota texts with Dakota worldviews, I do not possess the greater cultural acuity a tribal-trained and focused Dakota literary scholar would bring to this study. Yet not pursuing training in an Indigenous language as a methodology for studying a given Indigenous literature constitutes a sort

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of scholarly copout for which Cavender Wilson rightly criticizes celebrated historian Richard White and an error that I do not care to duplicate.26 For the purposes of this book I am defining culture as the individual expression of a given tribal worldview, a way of knowing and understanding predicated upon an identifiable number of qualities specific to a tribal group. These qualities change and transform over time, but a person conversant in a given worldview will be able to identify those unique features. Simultaneously, one given individual’s understanding and expression of Dakota culture and worldview, for example, will vary understandably based upon her background, locale, tribal and/or Eurowestern education, band identity, audience, venue of publication, editor, and so forth. For this reason I am careful to always acknowledge the possible existence of multiple Dakota worldviews that are based in the same common culture but potentially at variance across time and place, from contact to the present and from Minnesota to Manitoba. I would define culture more widely than it is commonly understood within the discipline of anthropology, and I would include all expressions of art, history, literature, spirituality, and science within a given tribal lifeway. This engagement of culture treats tribal ways of knowing not as static entities or objects to be studied and categorized but rather as evolving strategies and understandings of life that tribes modify and alter over time. For each of the writers I examine, I contextualize him or her as specifically as possible in a given moment (i.e., Ihaƒktuƒwaƒ Dakota woman born at the Yankton agency in 1876 to a Dakota mother and white father) and look to the text itself for what it tells us about how the author understands his or her culture at that moment. Theory is so deeply entwined with culture that a failure to engage it in the reading of literary texts closes off any sort of narrative about how we understand it as literature. Similarly, applying an inappropriate theoretical apparatus to a colonized text can have the effect of revictimizing the peoples whose experiences are represented in that text. The proliferation of a body of critical essays

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in Native American literature that engages a set of predictable and stale theoretical moves clearly indicates how inadequate current academic resources and training are: Bahktin’s dialogic, Ong’s orality, and Bourdieu’s cultural capital. What more might be learned by reading some of these texts on their own tribal-defined terms? In this book I show how we might use tribal knowledges as theoretical frameworks for reading Native American texts. In the examples herein, I look primarily at the Dakota tradition and a limited set of texts within that tradition; however, in the conclusion I suggest how we might apply these strategies to other traditions. I chose this particular body of texts because, in comparison with Lakota authors, these writers have received comparatively little attention, and as a result few literary scholars, beyond Kelly Morgan, have considered in print what Dakota intellectual and literary traditions might be. I am also taking liberties by claiming two Ihaƒktuƒwaƒ women, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin and Ella Deloria, for the Dakota tradition because the Yankton lost the N-dialect in the nineteenth century before these writers were born and because Yankton people generally identify themselves as Dakota, not Nakota. I want to acknowledge other scholars whose work parallels or anticipates my own or that has otherwise influenced mine. In particular, Greg Sarris’s Keeping Slug Woman Alive is a methodical, self-reflexive model for practicing tribal theory, even though Sarris’s approach also borrows from anthropological theory. Sarris gives us the speech and stories of Pomo elders and glosses these stories at points where an outsider might not understand, but he also endeavors to fully explore how Pomo culture is inflected in the stories and what that worldview has to say, as well as how it differs from Eurowestern ways of knowing. Sarris focuses particularly on Mabel McKay’s verbal art and the way “her speech activities . . . point to the frames her [non-Indian] interlocutors are using to understand her”: in essence, McKay, whose oratory forms the backbone of Sarris’s study, makes explicit the theoretical underpinnings of non-Indian knowledge while explaining the Pomo worldview.27

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In a more global study, Blood Narrative, Chadwick Allen compares a body of Native American and Maori texts from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s and their theoretical engagement with a concept he refers to as the “blood/land/memory complex.” Allen’s approach draws attention to parallel circumstances and strategies in Fourth World literature, and he carefully traces how each individual writer expresses and uses this complex in different ways. He also makes a clear distinction between the situation of third world and Fourth World writers: if Homi Bhabha defines colonial mimicry as ¿Áalmost the same, but not quite,’ we might define Indigenous re-recognition [of treaties and Indigenous sovereignty] as ‘exactly the same, but then some.’”28 Other scholars are also doing important work. Lisa Brooks has contributed significantly to the field with her research on Wabanaki uses of awikhigans and wampum, as in “Two Paths to Peace.” Writers as yet unpublished who use Native theoretical approaches grounded in cultural knowledge include Vera Bauer Palmer and Kelly Morgan. The former’s research focuses on reading Kanien’kehaka saint Kateri Tekawitha’s hagiographies as the enactment of the Haudenosaunee condolence ceremony, while the latter’s dissertation centers on reading Dakotapi women’s literature within the Dakota oral tradition. Central to the transformation of the field is more engagement of Indigenous texts with these sorts of theoretical strategies and with the clear claim to using these Native knowledges as theory. In this book I try to combine Dakota knowledges as a textual gloss with an ambitious understanding of this way of seeing the world as a type of theory. The particular examples I have chosen represent a range of Dakota authorship over time with a multiplicity of types of congruity with a Dakota worldview, Dakota cultural values, and Dakota language; thus, writers from Marie McLaughlin to Elizabeth Cook-Lynn are instructive in the commonalities and differences of Dakota strategies in narrative. In chapter 1 I consider Marie McLaughlin’s Myths and Legends of the Sioux (1916), a collection of Dakota legends that McLaughlin

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illustrates with a series of pictographic drawings by Devils Lake and Standing Rock Sioux author/artists. I argue that, by considering the role of pictography among the Dakota and the cultural values that its practice embodies, we may use pictography as a theoretical frame for understanding McLaughlin’s writing. In chapter 2 I focus on the writing of Charles Eastman, a Sisituƒwaƒ, and his use of Native knowledges as a methodology for defending the interests of Native peoples. Although Eastman has often been read as a conflicted figure who was unable to reconcile the differences of Anglo and Dakota worlds, if we consider how he engages Dakota epistemology in his writing, we clearly see his writing emanating from a tradition of Dakota theoretical knowledge. In chapter 3 I reexamine Zitkala Öa, an Ihaƒktuƒwaƒ Dakota, who has often been read as a tragic mixed-blood figure, similar to Eastman. I contend that, although Zitkala Öa engages the familiar modes of sentimentalism and regionalism, she is consistently advocating via encoded tribal narrative strategies for the primacy of the Dakota way of life throughout her autobiography. In fact, from the vantage point of Dakota cultural values, Zitkala Öa constantly defends a Dakota worldview and thereby its theoretical underpinnings throughout her self-narrations. In chapter 4 I reflect on Ella Cara Deloria’s Waterlily, a historical novel that began originally as an ethnographic study of the Lakota. Deloria bases Waterlily on her ethnographic work among the Lakota as well as her N/Dakota upbringing. Throughout Waterlily Deloria instructs her reader in the ideals of Dakota civilization, particularly that of kinship, and as a result she affirms Dakota knowledge and worldviews. In chapter 5 I compare the fictional works of two contemporary Dakota writers, Philip Red Eagle and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. In considering Red Earth and Aurelia, we find Red Eagle and Cook-Lynn engaging with Dakota theoretical models of gender, as embodied by the oral traditional figures of wi and haƒwi. Both authors reach stunningly similar conclusions with different fictional prototypes:

16 | introduction

both genders are integral to Dakota existence, and both must be in balance for the survival of the people. Each author, however, first pursues some salvage that recovers aspects of the masculine and feminine principles. In chapter 6 I segue to broader concerns in tribal theory by proposing an example of a tribal theoretical model for Haudenosaunee literature. I compare master poet Maurice Kenny’s Tekonwatonti: Molly Brant (1992) and Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues and examine how these works are shaped by principles of Good Mind and Evil Mind as embodied in the story of the twins Sapling and Flint. I also investigate the underpinnings of longhouse philosophy and gantowisa (clanmother) identity that inform these works. In this book I attempt to make a definitive statement about how we might undertake the study of Native American texts, but my assertions are far from proscriptive. More than anything, I intend to spark conversations about how Native knowledges were excluded from the study of Native American literature to begin with and about who has the right to reclaim those knowledges and with what means and for what purposes. As an Onondawaga woman writing about Dakota texts, I bring a definitively “outsider” approach to reading these works, but I aspire to demonstrate that a responsible and well-informed person from outside a given community can conduct insightful and helpful scholarship on tribal literatures. By “helpful” I mean research that works for, not against, a given community’s goals of resistant, sustaining representations of their tribe and its identity. As a result of this research design, my writing process has involved consulting with Dakota cultural, linguistic, and literary experts at every stage, from dissertation to draft to final manuscript. I have submitted drafts of the manuscript for review to all of the bands of Dakotapi in Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Manitoba as well as all of the Kanien’kehaka bands in New York, Quebec, Ontario, and Alberta. The end goal is for all profits from this book to go to a Dakota language scholarship at the University of Minnesota in Franklin

introduction | 17

Firesteel’s name. Franklin Firesteel (Ižna Hokžina) was a Santee Dakota with tremendous knowledge of Dakota culture and history, and he was my Dakota language instructor at the University of Minnesota. Franklin played a critical role in helping me bridge my experiences living and working on the Yankton Sioux reservation from 1994 to 1995 and my graduate studies. In my struggles as a PhD student who wanted to connect community knowledge and issues with my work in the academy, Franklin provided necessary respite and insight into an otherwise grueling process. Furthermore, the presence of his expertise and wisdom within the university along with my coursework encouraged me to believe that responsible and useful scholarship on Native peoples and their literatures was possible. Ihaƒktuƒwaƒ (Yankton Sioux) tribal elders in Lake Andes, South Dakota, were vital to my initial interest in Dakota language studies, and my thanks go to Clarence Rockboy, Charmaine Thin Elk, and Dave and Natalie Medicine Bear for their generosity and instruction. In the final stages of my graduate work Bob Brown, Tribal Chairman of the Mendota Mdewakaƒtoƒ, also played an important role as a reader of early versions of this manuscript. Unfortunately, Bob and Franklin passed within months of each other in 2003. I am grateful to all of the Dakota people who generously gave their time and effort to instruct me in Dakota perspectives on history, literature, and culture. My own experience and identity converge with this project in family histories and the desire to have tribal narratives validated in the academy or to decenter current discussions so that validation is moot. The last four centuries of contact between Haudenosaunee people and Europeans nearly squelched tribal voices and certainly delegitimized those who were still able to speak. My own family has struggled with the poverty and forced relocation that characterized much of Onondawaga and Haudenosaunee history from the slashand-burn campaigns of the American Revolution to the Oka Crisis of 1990 and today’s occupation of Caledonia, Ontario. The Seneca

18 | introduction

branch of my family moved into central western Pennsylvania to work in the coal mines in order to survive in the new economy. It is the story of my great-great-grandmother Cora Maud Myrtle Vivian Wetzel whose story inspires me to continue my work. Grandma Maud worked as a domestic and traditional midwife to women in the mining town of Pardus, Pennsylvania. In 1898, at fifteen, she married William Vivian, an older non-Native miner of English and Irish descent, and they had eleven children together, the ninth being my great-grandmother, Viola Vivian, born in 1909. In 1921 William Vivian was killed in a mining accident when a pump exploded, and Grandma Maud was left on her own to support the children still at home. These children eventually included my grandfather William Kelsey, born in 1928. His parents, Viola and Leon, married when Viola was four months pregnant with my grandfather and divorced soon after his birth. My great-grandmother Viola, a diabetic, quickly remarried to a man who either did not want to or was financially unable to raise my grandfather. Grandma Maud persisted and found a way to support her own children and several grandchildren until 1933. Family history says that Maud wrote my great grandfather Leon, then living in Indiana, and asked him to retrieve my grandfather from Pennsylvania, a decision that broke her heart. My grandfather was raised in and out of foster homes and occasionally was in the care of his alcoholic, non-Native father. Maud came to Indiana to see my grandfather as an adult, and she clearly expressed her distress at having lost him as a child and her frustrated desire to have raised him. Despite the disruption of cultural continuity caused by the Iroquoian diaspora and despite not seeing his grandmother for over twenty years, Maud was able to impart a persistent enough sense of Indigenous identity to my grandfather that he actively incorporated Native identity in his life. My grandfather chose to marry a woman of mixed Native descent, and he actively pursued tribal traditions whenever possible. Grandma Maud lived in an era when her Onondawaga identity made her a target, most specifi-

1. This picture shows my grandfather William Kelsey at approximately three years of age (1931) with his mother Viola Vivian Kelsey Cooke and stepfather Ira Edwin Cooke. This was the last year William saw his mother, who was already blind from complications related to diabetes. 2. This picture was taken of my great-great-grandmother Cora Maud Myrtle Vivian Wetzel near Reynoldsville, Pennsylvania, in the early 1930s. (Photos courtesy of the author; photo editing by Lesa Van Son)

cally for violent death as the numerous family stories of drowning, mining mishaps, and suicide by train or gun from her generation painfully illustrate, and yet all of her children knew that they were quarter bloods through their mother and shared what survived of tribal tradition with their children despite constant migration to find employment and its attendant poverty. In the end, then, although my great-grandmother was unable or unwilling to raise my grandfather, my Grandma Maud did a suitable enough job of it in the five years that my grandfather lived with her to ensure the continuance of Onondawaga identity for my parents’ generation and mine. There is much in the dominant historical record to cause a dismissal of the stories my Grandma Maud told: for example, many of the local histories one reads of Pennsylvania claim that Natives

20 | introduction

had “disappeared” by the time Europeans arrive. This claim is an absolute falsity and a colonial erasure. Despite the constraints of dominant understandings of Indianness, Grandma Maud persisted in storytelling and in practicing traditional midwifery, and her efforts produced a legacy to which I am heir whether I write as an academic or work in either a tribal business or nonprofit organization. Though their stories have been excluded from the academy, voices such as my great-great grandmother’s should be included in our wider discussions of Native American literature; in fact, our success in analyzing Indigenous writing depends upon it. My goal as a scholar has always been to read, teach, and write about Native American literature in a way that would be useful to Native American people, and my hope is that by calling attention to what Louis Owens has termed the “other destinies, other plots” of tribal literature as embodied in Native epistemological practices, I will do just that.

CHAPTER ONE

Pictographs and Politics in Marie McLaughlin’s Myths and Legends of the Sioux A Dakota Storyteller in the Ozaƒ Tradition

Born December 8, 1842, in Wabasha, Minnesota, Marie McLaughlin (Aƒpetu Wažte Win), was the child of a Mdewakaƒtuƒ DakotaScotch mother, Mary Graham, and a French father, Joseph Buisson. She would spend the first fourteen years of her life in Dakota territory before attending a convent school in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, for a brief time. In January 1864, at the age of twenty-two, she married Major James McLaughlin in Mendota, Minnesota, a town at the source of the Minnesota River and the center of the Dakota world. Explorer Joseph Nicollet wrote that “the Mdewakanton people considered the mouth of the Minnesota River to be the middle of all things—the exact center of the earth.”1 This placement at the heart of Dakota cosmology would foreshadow McLaughlin’s life path and her work’s entwinement with Dakota epistemology. The couple lived for four years in Owatonna, Minnesota, where McLaughlin gave birth to three children, Mary Prince in 1864, Clara Louise in 1866, and James Harry in 1868, of whom the two girls died in infancy. The couple then relocated for three years to Faribault, Minnesota, site of the famous woolen mills and the birthplace of their fourth child, Marie Imelda, born 1870. In 1871

22 | pictographs and politics

McLaughlin moved with her husband to the Devils Lake Agency, where he would serve as the agency blacksmith and then as Indian agent for the next ten years and where McLaughlin would live “in most friendly relations with the Indians of that agency.”2 Their three remaining children were born here: Charles Cyprian in 1872, John Graham in 1874, and Rupert Sibley in 1876. In 1881 James McLaughlin was transferred to Standing Rock Agency in order to organize the agency after its recent influx of Lakota veterans of the Battle of Little Big Horn who had fled to Canada but later surrendered due to hunger. Having retained her childhood Dakota language, at both of these agencies Marie McLaughlin was able to communicate freely with the Dakotas and to socialize with them, despite her position as the agent’s wife. In her opinion she enjoyed the confidence of the Dakotas, and this familiarity provided her with “exceptional opportunities of learning the legends and folk-lore of the Sioux,” an exercise in traditionkeeping facilitated by McLaughlin’s having learning most of these stories from her mother as a child.3 This forty-two-year conversation between traditionalist Dakota peoples and McLaughlin resulted in Myths and Legends of the Sioux, a collection of Dakota stories that McLaughlin prepared for publication by 1913 and published in 1916 with the Bismarck Tribune firm in North Dakota.4 In 1923 James McLaughlin died, leaving Marie McLaughlin a monthly stipend of $100 for her support in addition to dividing a third of his estate among Charles and Rupert. He had a large funeral in McLaughlin, South Dakota, which according to Louis Pfaller, was well-attended by whites and Natives alike owing to his popularity throughout the region.5 Marie McLaughlin died the next year on August 5, and she was buried in the family plot in McLaughlin. Unfortunately, none of McLaughlin’s children were very long-lived. The most vital among them were Rupert and Charles who lived to 1924 and 1927, respectively, Rupert narrowly outliving his mother by three months and Charles by three years. Although Marie McLaughlin has been overlooked by nearly all scholars of Native American literature, her book Myths and

pictographs and politics | 23

Legends of the Sioux is critical to our understanding of early Native American literature and to developing strategies for comprehending the theoretical bedrock of those texts. McLaughlin acknowledges these epistemological underpinnings in her foreword: The “timbre” of a people’s stories tells of the qualities of that people’s heart. It is the texture of the thought, independent of its form or fashioning, which tells the quality of the mind from which it springs. In the “timbre” of these stories of the Sioux . . . we recognize the very texture of the thought of a simple, grave, and sincere people.6 Timbre becomes a musical trope for McLaughlin in describing the parameters of a worldview that she attempts to capture in Myths and Legends, and these statements illustrate that she saw herself as a conduit for communicating these narratives to a non-Dakota readership. Although McLaughlin chose to focus on her Dakota heritage in the writing of Myths and Legends, she was commonly understood as an assimilated Indian who abandoned her people. The primary source of the belief that Marie McLaughlin somehow held herself above the Dakotas at Devil’s Lake and Standing Rock, however, has been a fundamental confusion of her husband’s opinions with hers. James McLaughlin most assuredly saw the eradication of the Dakota culture as a necessity for racial uplift. In a letter to Bishop Rupert Seidenbush in 1875, McLaughlin made the following promises about his possible tenure at Indian agent at Devil’s Lake: “Accordingly, if ever agent, I will do my best to abolish polygamy [sic] & eradicate from my agency all kinds of Superstitions there existing, viz., medicine dances or feasts, Sundances, &c., for I know that polygamy & Superstitious practices are not only adverse to political, but also to Christian civilization, this last being the only true, real & efficacious civilization.”7 Clearly this friend of the Indian had biases against traditional Dakota culture that his wife may or may not have shared.

24 | pictographs and politics

James McLaughlin viewed the struggle between savagery and civilization in such stark relief that he had the Lakotas of Standing Rock literally stage a “March of Civilization” on July 4, 1889. He organized and transported over five hundred Lakotas to Bismarck to celebrate Independence Day, and he choreographed a five-part march that was divided into groups of orators: representatives of the “old way,” the “Indian police” who now answered to him, the tribal judges, and the “New Indians.” Each group was defined by its costume or clothing, whether traditional dress, citizen’s clothes, or police uniforms, and traditional chief Hairy Chin led the first group dressed as Uncle Sam. James McLaughlin was intent on dramatizing the supposed passing of the old way of life, although casualties on the side of civilization were evident when Hairy Chin died several days later.8 Despite James McLaughlin’s attitude toward Dakota culture, there is significant evidence to believe that Marie McLaughlin had a very different attitude toward tribal worldviews, and in fact, the example of the couple’s relationship and their public perceptions of this difference provide a dramatization of the gap between Euroamerican and many Native American understandings of women’s roles and the construction of marriage. Marie McLaughlin, although she was the agent’s wife, seems to have seen herself as a member of the Dakota communities at Devil’s Lake and Standing Rock based on the way she comported herself and the way that others responded to her. When she served as an interpreter for the Sitting Bull Combination in 1884, one of the rare instances when James McLaughlin caved in to pressure and allowed Sitting Bull off the reservation, members of Sitting Bull’s group affectionately referred to Marie McLaughlin as “Mother,” or Ina, a clear indication that they viewed her as a relation and thus a good Dakota. On another occasion a young man was on the verge of shooting James McLaughlin in the back, presumably as a result of the latter’s policies toward the Dakota, and Marie McLaughlin was able to persuade him to drop the gun and leave by referring to him as tako¼a, or grandchild. Numerous records of Dakota rhetorical practices illustrate the entwinement

pictographs and politics | 25

of family in addressing each other, such as Sitting Bull’s address to the Lakotas at council meetings on the Sioux Bill of 1889: “Friends and relatives: our minds are again disturbed by the Great Father’s representatives, the Indian Agent [James McLaughlin], the squaw men. . . . My friends and relatives, let us stand as one family as we did before the white people led us astray.”9 Marie McLaughlin found blood relatives at Standing Rock and Devil’s Lake, made social relatives in addition, and brought her own Dakota relatives to live with her there. These latter included her siblings Antoine and Mary Jane Buisson and her niece Agnes Lariviere Witzleben. Marie McLaughlin’s involvement in Dakota social networks at both reservations was so pivotal as to inspire jealousy in her husband’s employees. An enemy of James McLaughlin, a Thomas Stewart, the agency harnessmaker who attempted to have McLaughlin deposed, made the following claim to Commissioner Morgan in 1891: “I know this agent has a great reputation on paper but it is only through his half Breed Wife and the secret organization she has Established among the Indians which keeps him in his position.”10 While Stewart is more than likely exaggerating, his claim makes clear that Marie McLaughlin exercised a vital influence on the Dakotas at Standing Rock, one that operated upon Dakota principles of right relationship and reciprocity, values that James McLaughlin himself was ostensibly intent on eradicating. Perhaps the most compelling evidence supporting an understanding of Marie McLaughlin as strongly self-identifying as a Dakota woman is her choice to remain at Standing Rock after 1895 when James McLaughlin took the position of U.S. Indian Inspector, a job he would perform with different titles until 1923. James McLaughlin biographer Louis Pfaller writes that Marie McLaughlin “preferred to stay near her relatives and friends around Fort Yates rather than spend lonely months in Washington when James would be on inspection tours.”11 It is impossible to tell whether there was actually some estrangement between the McLaughlins that also motivated this choice, but Marie McLaughlin’s decision to remain among

26 | pictographs and politics

the Dakota until her death firmly indicates that her allegiance to Dakota people was hardly ambivalent. McLaughlin’s Dakota worldview is apparent throughout Myths and Legends of the Sioux, and she expresses it most prominently through her mindful inclusion of pictographic illustrations that challenge her readers’ understanding of Native peoples. These pictographic drawings are the equivalent of Dakota writing and for that reason should be understood as an assertion of Dakota equality and civilization as well as a competing or conspiring text. As a result we can “open” up Myths and Legends by reading McLaughlin as possessing a resistant agenda. By collecting these stories, furthermore, McLaughlin performs a particular gender act, that of culture bearer. Among the Dakota women are traditionally seen as carriers of the culture and the primary figures responsible for imparting Dakota values to children and others. While some critics may find this role confining, restrictive, or stereotyping, many Dakota women take pride in staging this gender act. Among a colonized people whose culture has been the primary target for eradication through conversion and education, moreover, women’s actions as culture bearers take on a politically charged power, one that cannot be easily collapsed into a mainstream feminist reading.12 By continuing to perform as culture bearers in the face of forced assimilation, women resist colonial hegemony by defending Dakota knowledges and the lifeway they inform. By collecting these traditional stories in Myths and Legends of the Sioux and by intentionally invoking Dakota written discourses, Marie McLaughlin crafts her own space as a knowledge worker and a defender of a Dakota worldview as she mediates the differences between her Eurowestern reading audience and the tribal spoken-word audience that is the source of these stories. Pictographs were commonly used as methods of recordkeeping among the Dakota people. Winter counts, one of the most commonly known forms, recorded the events of a given year in an individual band. Years were signified by the most dramatic or unusual event affecting the band: the year when the pregnant

pictographs and politics | 27

women died, the year of shooting stars, the year of the black robe, and so on. The band historian would keep this record and recount it when telling the history of the band. While winter counts are discussed most often, Dakota people also kept pictographic records on ozaƒpi, or tipi dew curtains. Ella Deloria traces the history of ozaƒpi in Speaking of Indians: The people began to make ingenious adaptations of some elements in their old life to the new. For instance, at one period they transferred the art decorations of the tipi to the loghouse. Out of G.I. muslin they made very large wall-coverings, a carry-over from the dew-curtain of a tipi and called by the same term, ozaƒ. On these they painted beautiful designs and made lively black-and-white drawings of historical scenes of hunting or battles or peace-making between tribes, and courtship scenes, games, and suchlike activities of the past. People went visiting just to see another’s pictographs and to hear the stories they preserved.13 The ozaƒ functions here as a record of a band, or tiožpaye, of events commonly understood as foreign and domestic, nationbuilding and mundane. In this case and in others, the practice of pictography is wedded to conceptions of the Dakota nation, history, culture, and identity as a people. Similarly significant is the recounting of the events recorded in the ozaƒ, in addition to the communal aspect of the “reading” of this document. While concepts of nation and sovereignty are relatively recent introductions to most tribal traditions, the Dakota clearly had a form of precontact identity that was formed through relationships and relationality: the tiožpaye, or extended family. This social unit forms the core of band affiliation and its larger interweaving with other bands of Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota. Because the three branches of the “Sioux Nation” viewed themselves as being part of the same people whose existence was predicated upon establishing their relationship to each other, there is a nascent discourse of nation, or in this case band or tiožpaye identity, at work in the ozaƒ. I am in agreement

28 | pictographs and politics

with Kanien’kehaka political scientist Taiaiake Alfred who asserts that Eurowestern concepts of the state are inappropriate and limiting to Indigenous conceptions of power and political organization and that Indigenous peoples should focus on traditional Native political structures.14 Like the creators and narrators of tipi dew curtains, Marie McLaughlin includes numerous pictographic representations of Dakota life in Myths and Legends of the Sioux. With each pictotext there is a story that relates some significant event or legend from Dakota history. Subsequently we can use the concept of the ozaƒ and its theoretical underpinnings, such as its assumptions about the integrity of Dakota life and the viability of the Dakota tiožpaye, as a way to gloss McLaughlin’s collection. As we shall see, McLaughlin is not alone in this literary practice: Sican§u D%Dakota author Luther Standing Bear also included pictographs as part of a Lakota critical discourse in My People the Sioux (1934). Wherever present in Dakota life, pictographs do important work. They record events; they codify Indigenous epistemology; they instruct; and they remind. In many ways they function like Western writing, but one key difference is that pictographs are often cultural knowledge writ large on tipis, on tipi dew curtains, on shields, on robes, on winter counts, and so forth. Pictographs record and express Dakota knowledges, history, and literature. Pictographs form the underlayer that Dakota culture rests upon, thus, the ozaƒ, a critical pictographic record, can function as a theoretical framework to unpack the Dakota worldview that McLaughlin affirms in these stories. One of the most critical values in Dakota life is that of kinship, a value that guarantees survival in a harsh plains environment whether in the eighteenth or the twenty-first century. Ella Deloria underscores the centrality of kinship in Speaking of Indians: “The ultimate aim of Dakota life, stripped of accessories, was quite simple: One must obey kinship rules; one must be a good relative. . . . In the last analysis every other consideration was secondary—property, personal ambition, glory, good times, life itself.”15 Although

pictographs and politics | 29

McLaughlin clearly straddled two worlds in her day-to-day life, throughout Myths and Legends of the Sioux she continually underscores the value of kinship, a value we see consistently embodied in the practice of the ozaƒ, in which the reading of this object becomes a social occasion and a storying of a people. For example, in “The Pet Donkey,” the first story to include a pictograph, McLaughlin recounts a tribal story in which a valued donkey is promised that it will carry the chief ’s twin grandsons, but at the last moment it is denied this honor. Every element in the story emphasizes the value of relationship. The twins are the children of the chief’s daughter, “who had a great many relations so that everybody knew she belonged to a great family”; the twins’ grandmother presents them with the donkey as a steed so that they can “ride as is becoming to children having so many relations.”16 On the day that the family is making ready to move camp, the chief proudly presents the twins with a pony to ride, and his wife loads the donkey with pots and pans. The donkey is distressed and kicks and protests until he destroys the cooking utensils and tent he carries. The grandmother, knowing the reason for his anger, replaces the pots and pans with the twins. The camping party leaves, but on the second day they are attacked by enemies. The donkey and twins are missing after the battle, but when the family returns to the grandmother’s tipi, they find “the good donkey with the two babes in the saddle bags.”17 While “The Pet Donkey” focuses on the good deed of the donkey, the pictographic illustration portrays the donkey at the height of its anger, kicking the pots, pans, and tent poles into the air as the grandmother struggles with its reins (see figure 3). The grandmother’s free hand is lifted with fingers splayed, reflecting exasperation or movement caused by the donkey jerking her about. What the pictograph suggests is that this story is very much about relationship, in this case the relationship between the donkey and the grandmother. It is the grandmother who honors not just the donkey but foremost her grandsons with the donkey as a gift. The donkey is promised the honor of carrying them as proof that they have many relations, but he is ousted from his beloved post by

3. “The Donkey Refused to Carry Kitchen Utensils.” (Reprinted from McLaughlin, Myths and Legends of the Sioux)

the pony. The mother then denies this relationship by loading the donkey with the household goods, and the donkey must protest this breach of right relationship. When the grandmother is told about the donkey’s rage, she laughs and quickly rectifies the situation; thus, the grandmother instructs the younger generation about kinship. In the end the donkey proves his goodness by saving the twins and returning them to the grandmother who has consistently honored him. The valuing of the donkey over the horse suggests to the reader that the Dakota must seek their own values, not those of an external order. The lower rank of the donkey is something the Dakota would have learned from non-Indians, but as the story shows, for practical purposes the donkey is far superior to the much-revered pony. Additionally, in the context of the story these two animals are gendered with the pony as male and the donkey as female (in ownership and association), and in the end McLaughlin shows us the value of the feminine in this situation. Through the story’s moral of valuing donkey and pony equally, McLaughlin may additionally be invoking and destabilizing the historical process by which Dakota and Lakota women lost status with the rise of the

pictographs and politics | 31

horse.18 Like the owner of an ozaƒ who narrates the story captured by the pictographs it displays, McLaughlin shows her audience the representation of the donkey upsetting the pots and pans and glosses the story for us by way of sharing band history. A number of the stories that Marie McLaughlin shares in Myths and Legends of the Sioux examine Dakota cosmology and the supporting worldview that informs these narratives. These stories are important for the window into Dakota life that they provide their readers in addition to McLaughlin’s use of picture writing as a way of underscoring their importance. For example, McLaughlin includes the legend of the White Buffalo Woman, a central cultural story to the Dakota that is the equivalent of the narrative of Jesus Christ, insofar as parallels can be drawn. By and large, McLaughlin’s version follows the story as it is commonly understood. Two young men are out walking in the hills when they meet a beautiful young woman. One man desires her sexually, and she rejects him for his impurity while rewarding the other young man with the gift of the sacred pipe. She gives the Dakota instructions on how to use the pipe and departs, transforming into a buffalo cow. In McLaughlin’s version the two young men are talking about love affairs before they happen across the White Buffalo Calf woman, and this discussion makes the one man’s lust for the woman more contextually sensible. Perhaps most significantly McLaughlin differs in the treatment of the lusty young man. Traditionally the White Buffalo Calf woman destroys him, and he is reduced to a skeleton for his misbehavior. In McLaughlin’s version, however, the woman merely chastises him and tells him that she can see his true nature. He is still included in the reception of the pipe and the instructions for its use. This version may be the one with which McLaughlin was most familiar, but the death of the wicked man is germane to nearly all recorded versions of this story. McLaughlin may omit his death so that non-Indian readers will clearly understand the positive nature of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman. Pictorially this story is represented by the woman’s parting gift (see figure 4). McLaughlin shows the two young men walking to-

4. “The Maiden Who Gave the Pipe of Peace to the Sioux Nation, and When She Departed She Turned into a Gray Cow.” (Reprinted from McLaughlin, Myths and Legends of the Sioux)

ward the village with the pipe to the right of the illustration as the buffalo cow departs to the left. In the latter’s wake we see the corpse left in her stead. Interestingly, the body is gender neutral, making it possible that it represents the evil man killed in the dominant version of this story or the human body the White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman inhabits when she speaks to the young men. The two men walk into a line of tipis that surround three of the four sides of the drawing; thus, they bring the pipe to the Dakota nation. The first man leads with a bow and arrow, perhaps suggesting the dissension that has troubled the Dakota people up to this point in time. The representation of this story is significant because of its centrality to the Dakota culture and its connection to concerns with identity and nation. McLaughlin writes to a mainstream audience, and through this story she draws parallels between Eurowestern civilization and Dakota life. Here is a savior made manifest on the earthly plane who brings a spiritual gift that is woven into the fabric of society and leaves once the gift is received. Here is a religious narrative made legitimate through its representation in writing. Here is a woman acting as a culture bearer much in the same way

pictographs and politics | 33

that McLaughlin as author performs: the White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman also brought specific cultural instruction to women with the pipe. Unlike “Story of the Peace Pipe,” “The Mysterious Butte” falls into the category of hituƒkaƒkaƒ±i, which Cavender Wilson defines as “stories from the elders that teach about the past and often involve things of a mysterious nature, not easily explainable.”19 “The Mysterious Butte” is particularly noteworthy because the pictograph that accompanies it includes conventions from the era of Ceremonial which ends in 1700 ce.20 Ceremonial art is distinguished by its V-neck and rectangular-body humans, boat-shaped animals, ceremonial paraphernalia, rigidity of form, and lack of discernable action.21 During the “protohistoric” period,22 which James Keyser designates as 1600–1750 ce, narratives and action begin to emerge in Northern Plains pictographs, indicating a shift toward a biographic or communographic tradition. Through the story of “The Mysterious Butte,” McLaughlin fashions a trope for Dakota writing that differentiates itself from more finite variations on narrative that her readers would find familiar. In “The Mysterious Butte” a young man discovers a butte with interior caves used for ceremonial purposes. On the sides of the door to the butte, he finds numerous figures drawn, and inside the cave there are a variety of bracelets, pipes, and other ornaments left as offerings. What is unique about the butte is that the drawings on the door change regularly and can be used as a type of oracle by the band for divination. When the young man returns to the butte with a party of four warriors, he refuses to enter when he finds the figures have changed since his last visit. Inside the cave the other men find several successively smaller rooms, the smallest of which has a hole in the floor through which a sweet-smelling odor enters. One of the young men tempts fate by taking away one of the offerings as proof of their discovery, and he later suffers a broken wrist as a result. Sometime shortly thereafter, a young man passes by the butte and finds a new drawing of a woman with a rack of meat that has

5. “The Mysterious Butte.” (Reprinted from McLaughlin, Myths and Legends of the Sioux)

broken due to its extreme weight. On the next day a large herd of buffalo enters the area, and the tribe is able to kill numerous animals. At this time a woman breaks a tent pole under the weight of the meat she is drying on it and has to support it with another pole much as it was portrayed on the butte. McLaughlin writes, “Ever after that the Indians paid weekly visits to this butte, and thereon would read the signs that were to govern their plans.” This story offers an example of earlier Dakota spirituality that her husband was bent on eradicating along with what he termed “medicine dances.”23 The illustration that McLaughlin includes with this story shows an outline of an opening to the butte covered with numerous pictographic drawings that conform to or at least evoke the style of Ceremonial Art (see figure 5). This representation strikes me as significant for a number of reasons. To begin with, unlike other pictographs commonly published and displayed during the early twentieth century (i.e., ledger art), many of these pictographs re-

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semble an earlier era of tribal record of which by all accounts scholars can find few examples since most were on perishable items that have not survived, thus making them extremely rare.24 Although McLaughlin’s narrative suggests that the pictographic representation of the woman with the broken pole includes action, a characteristic of the Biographic tradition in pictography, the actual pictograph included in the book does not indicate action, showing simply a plain straight-line pole with meat hanging from it. The sole element of movement in this pictograph is the marks of the buffalo hooves around the drying meat. This pictographic plate therefore combines Ceremonial and Biographic Art elements, placing it in the protobiographic period. Given the numerous pictographic plates in Myths and Legends as well as her personal expertise in Dakota art and culture, McLaughlin seems likely to have known that this illustration was stylistically unique. In this story writing and representation are entwined with divinity or the wakaƒ (“mysterious”), and pictographs move from the realm of record to the realm of predetermination and prediction. This story defies Eurowestern understanding of textuality by rendering a text that continually evolves and offers an opportunity for further reading. The very age of the techniques used in its rendition trouble notions of Native Americans as somehow ahistorical and show that McLaughlin uses the Dakota recording tradition as a way of continually recreating Dakota narratives with a tribal perspective. Like Marie McLaughlin, Luther Standing Bear employs pictographs with a Eurowestern written text in his autobiography My People the Sioux (1928) as a means to assert a Lakota/Dakota worldview and its epistemological viability vis-à-vis the dominant society. Born in the 1860s to Lakota/Dakota parents in what is now South Dakota, Standing Bear’s Western education consisted solely of four years at the Carlisle Industrial School where he was a member of its first class in 1879. In his seventh decade Standing Bear turned to writing after holding nearly every job open to a Native American man in the 1930s

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with the exception of soldier: he was a scout for the U.S. government, inventory clerk, bookkeeper, assistant teacher, Indian agency clerk, storekeeper, assistant minister, rancher, Wild West entertainer, and film actor. In his career as an author Standing Bear published four major works crucial to the American Indian Studies canon but exempted from the mainstream American literary canon. My People the Sioux, Standing Bear’s first book, was published in the same year as the influential Merriam Report, an investigation of epic proportions that exposed the mistreatment of Native Americans at the hands of the federal government. My People the Sioux was “a milestone in the development of American Indian literature,” according to Richard Ellis, because it “broadened the public’s knowledge of American Indians and the Sioux in particular” and “deepened public sympathy for Indian people.”25 In 1931 Standing Bear published My Indian Boyhood, his second autobiography, which focuses upon his traditional upbringing, and in 1933 The Land of the Spotted Eagle, which he considered to be his most important work. His final book-length work was Stories of the Sioux (1934), a collection of traditional Lakota tales that he uses a vehicle for treating some of the political issues directly addressed in Land of the Spotted Eagle. Like McLaughlin, Standing Bear’s works have been overlooked in literary studies perhaps owing to the overwhelming Lakota sensibility of his writing. As a hereditary chief to his people Standing Bear has a specific investment in Lakota tiožpaye, and thus much of his work can be read as an explication and defense of the Dakota lifeway. Similar to McLaughlin, Standing Bear’s narratives are encoded with gender in specific ways that reflect his complex position as a traditionally raised Lakota/Dakota who is speaking to a non-Indian audience. This encoding is seen, for instance, in his use of the bravery narrative as a way to defend his right to speak or in this case write. In My People the Sioux Standing Bear employs Lakota forms of oral and material self-narration as strategies for equalizing status between Lakotas and Euroamericans; specifically, he makes use

6. “The Tipi in Summer and in Winter.” (Reprinted from Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press)

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of the Lakota/Dakota pictographic and sketchbook traditions as a means to demystify Indian life for his non-Indian audience. All of these techniques work to create an image of the Lakota as culturally sophisticated and possessive of a rich political tradition and worldview. In “The Tipi,” the second chapter of My People the Sioux, Standing Bear uses two self-illustrated hand drawings of tipis to convey the humanity and domesticity of the Lakota (see figure 6). In fact, the drawings work to demystify Lakota life, redressing issues of misrepresentation that concerned Standing Bear when he worked in the film industry. Standing Bear reflects upon his struggles to change the film portrayal of American Indians from within the industry: “I have seen probably all of the pictures which are supposed to depict Indian life, and not one of them is correctly made. . . . I have gone personally to directors and stage managers and playwrights and explained this to them, telling them that their actors do not play the part as it should be played, and do not even know how to put on an Indian costume and get it right; but the answer is always the same, ‘The public don’t know the difference, and we should worry!’”26 In light of this history of frustration, the elaborate description of tipi construction that Standing Bear provides his readers clearly speaks to a particular agenda that he has. In contrasting the Lakota tipi to inaccurate Hollywood-style tipis that his readers would know, he typifies the true Lakota home as “very comfortable . . . nice and warm,” stressing the comparability between European and Lakota homes.27 Standing Bear’s drawings of Lakota tipis in summer and winter underscore his point: both tipis convey the domestic atmosphere of cleanliness and comfort that middle-class Euroamerican readers would presumably prize. From the sizeable pile of wood that serves as a windbreak to the homey curl of smoke issuing from the tipi vent, Standing Bear’s illustrations affirm the basic humanity of the Lakota to his readers by showing the common domestic virtues they share with middle-class Euroamericans: cleanliness, industry, and comfort.

7. “Sioux Games.” (Reprinted from Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press)

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In chapter 3, “Games,” Standing Bear includes pictographic sketches as a method of explaining and legitimizing Lakota life to his readership; these pictographs conform more closely to traditional pictographs depicting tribal life on hides and robes than do his tipi illustrations (see figure 7). Standing Bear portrays four different types of games: three are boy’s games (Ta-hu-ka-can-kle-ska, Huta-na-cu-te, Pte-hes-te) and one a women’s game (Pa-slo-han-pi). Three are winter games, one a summer game. Standing Bear sketches his players with common conventions of pictographs, such as presenting his subject in profile and creating movement from right to left. Most important, however, is the subject matter: games were outlawed in 1890 after the massacre at Wounded Knee. Because these games were so deeply tied to Lakota group identity as well as warrior traditions, the U.S. government viewed their eradication as necessity for quelling Indian resistance. Of course, by depicting games, Standing Bear invokes the ozaƒ tradition and its concomitant narration of Lakota/Dakota identity, much like McLaughlin. Standing Bear also uses the ozaƒ as an entrée to asserting the primacy of Lakota/Dakota identity as the first Americans through their claim to the invention of baseball, a powerful trope in Americana: Now for American baseball. Remember, I say American baseball—not English. We were the only real Americans. This game makes me laugh, as so few white people had any idea we ever had such a game. First, let me relate a little incident: One time I made a bow and arrow for a little white boy. His aunt grew quite indignant that her nephew wanted to play Indian. He came to me and said his aunt did not want him to play with a bow and arrow. She wanted him to play a real American game, like baseball. Poor little fellow! How hard it would have been for him to play the Real American baseball, because it was so different from the English (or the white man’s) way of playing the game.28

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In this passage Standing Bear effectively questions his readership’s understanding of American identity through his stress upon the Lakota as the “real” Americans, and he asserts the expression of Lakota identity that was and is embodied in the playing of tribal games, an identity federal Indian policy was intent upon eradicating in Standing Bear’s time. Like Standing Bear, Marie McLaughlin works to destablize assumptions about Dakota identity, culture, and worldview(s) through the use of pictographs in her writing. Both authors use Dakota pictography as a way of affirming Dakota knowledges and narratives, and they both claim a certain equivalence for the epistemic practice picture writing embodies. McLaughlin begins Myths and Legends of the Sioux with a brief story about “The Forgotten Ear of Corn,” which portrays an ear of corn that cries until the forgetful harvester returns to claim it. The female protagonist in this story is Arikara, as several of McLaughlin’s characters are, suggesting that she may have sought stories from the Arikara tradition, a more heavily corn-centered culture, as a way of connecting with her eastern Dakota heritage. The moral of the story, however, resonates with both buffalo (Oyate Tatanka) and corn culture peoples as well as with Standing Bear’s writing: “this is why all Indian women have since garnered their corn crop very carefully, so that the succulent food product should not even to the last small nubbin be neglected or wasted, and thus displease the Great Mystery.”29 The value of thrift in the harvesting of foods is common to the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples. Using this story from the Arikara tradition to represent “Sioux” experience illustrates the fluid and pragmatic nature of McLaughlin’s writing strategies. As the donkey and pony are adopted into Dakota culture and thus into McLaughlin’s stories in ways that still express a uniquely Dakota perspective on their doings, so too does she gloss an intertribal story to enmesh it in a Dakota value system. Another example of McLaughlin’s narrative adaptations include her employment of a Victorian-era discourse of sentimentality and religiously colored verbiage in which the Dakota equivalents would

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be far different. (Examples include the substitution of “wicked” and “good” for caƒte žica (bad-hearted) and caƒte wažte (stronghearted) in stories such as “The Peace Pipe.”) Like the mysterious butte, which combines elements of ceremonial and biographic art, McLaughlin here takes elements from Dakota sources as well as non-Indian genres in order to create a new narrative that affirms Indianness and Dakota identity for her reading audience. Through retelling Dakota stories to her Eurowestern audience, McLaughlin recreates the moment of narration of the ozaƒ, employing pictographic elements as part of fashioning a Dakota world in a discourse of equivalences and claiming Dakota (picture) writing as part of that story. Similarly, through the use of the ozaƒ to represent illegal gaming traditions, Standing Bear is able to wield the threat they embody to assert the power of Dakota/Lakota identity. In the end through these narratives both McLaughlin and Standing Bear continually transcribe, as it were, Dakota narratives that the two find representative of the timbre of a people’s thinking or their epistemological practices.

CHAPTER TWO

Charles Eastman’s Role in Native American Resistance Literature A “Real Indian” to the Boy Scouts

Recent revisionist efforts in American Indian literary criticism have sought to reframe our understanding of such early Native American authors as Alice Callahan (1868–94) and George Copway (1818–63) as ambivalent spokespersons for their tribes. As participants in turbulent eras, these authors have often been faulted for the equivocation that they practice: they advocate for Indigenous rights while sometimes apologizing for the demands they make and/or their ethnic and racial difference. American Indian studies scholar Tom Holm comments that as a result of this phenomenon “no Indian who attempts to capture tribal ideas in the English language is free from misinterpretation. Many white-educated American Indians who write about tribal precepts have been written off as totally separated from ‘real’ Indians and therefore unreliable sources of information about tribal values. . . . In truth, however, the presumed chasm in ideology between tribal traditionalists and educated Indian writers has been very slim.” Scholars are now beginning to reconsider previous readings of these authors’ works and question the subversive potential of their projects in light of the following questions: Is an engagement

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with the dominant discourse around racial identity a necessity for publication in their era? Does the use of this rhetoric equal a belief in its racial hierarchy? Is these writers’ ability to publish dependent upon their use of this discourse of identity? Does an engagement with the dominant rhetoric and aesthetic necessarily undo their attempts at “talking back” to Euroamerican civilization and resisting its hegemony?1 Critics increasingly are finding that early American Indian authors who sometimes advocated for assimilation invariably also had tribal-centered agendas that contradicted these arguments for acculturation. American Indian literary critics now are beginning an archaeological effort in excavating the subversive potential of these writings and reformulating our paradigm for understanding them. A prime example of such a dismissed and sometimes maligned author is Charles Eastman (1858–1939), a Sisituƒwaƒ Dakota. In this chapter I examine Eastman’s engagement with tribal thought and his strategies of resistance.2 Critics of American Indian literature historically have understood Eastman as an assimilated Native American who acquiesced to Euroamerican claims of cultural superiority, a designation embodied by his role as the Boy Scouts’ Indian. These arguments are based on his deployment of nineteenth-century racialist discourse; however, they overlook the complexity of Eastman’s rhetorical strategies.3 The dominant discourse Eastman utilized was produced by an understanding of race as a hierarchical progression from savagery to civilization, with the European race placed at its pinnacle. While Eastman engages a racialist discourse, he nevertheless does not use it to narrate the disappearance of Native peoples but to resist it. Although Eastman fails to promote the militant sensibility that his contemporary Zitkala Öa favors, scholars should avoid the monumental misstep of reading his life and works as the products of a stereotypical tragic mixed-blood caught between two cultures that he or she can never reconcile. David Brumble’s arguments regarding Eastman’s use of racialist rhetoric, which I will explore later in this chapter, embody this sentiment most fully. A number

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of other critics, including Dexter Fisher, Bo Schöler, and Arnold Krupat, have put forward the argument that Eastman typifies an assimilated, Progressive Indian, but these claims overlook the subversive potential of his publications and life. Rather than considering Eastman’s writings the products of a conflicted figure, his work deserves to be reconsidered in light of how he utilizes the dominant rhetoric of racial identity, in addition to tribal and Euroamerican genres, to secure a better place for sovereign tribal nations in a new era. As Malea Powell describes in her article “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing,” Eastman mediates two lifeways, which are embodied by the two selves he visually presents at the beginnings of The Soul of an Indian (1911) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916).4 The portrait at the beginning of Soul of an Indian is entitled “The Vision” and features Eastman shirtless in a Dakota headdress, while the Eastman in the frontispiece of Deep Woods sports a shirt, tie, and suit. Each portrait presents a performed self that has been somehow compromised by past interpretations of Eastman. These interpretations necessarily view these Eastman identities as conflicted, and yet a reconsideration of his autobiographies establishes Eastman’s ability to refuse racial confusion and to advocate for tribal livelihood while claiming a competence in each culture. In particular, an examination of how scholars have understood Eastman’s writing relationship with his wife Elaine Goodale Eastman illustrates how his role as a resistance author has been devalued. In his publications Eastman had a specific agenda in terms of asserting Indigenous equality and Dakota nationhood in the face of assimilation. In Indian Boyhood, his boyhood autobiography, Charles Eastman utilizes traditional forms of self-narration, such as the educational narrative, naming conventions, and the story of the acquisition of shamanic powers, in order to create counterrepresentations of Native Americans for non-Indians. He simultaneously affirms the values and contributions of Dakota culture and shows how Dakota children become socialized.5 In contrast, in Deep Woods, the narrative of Eastman’s movement between

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Dakota and Euroamerican culture, Eastman employs many Dakota tropes but few traditional self-narrative conventions. This difference may arise from the varying purposes these texts serve: the first is a vindication of Dakota culture to a largely juvenile audience, while the second is an exposition of a “progressive” Native American’s attempt to assimilate into Euroamerican society. There was little to suggest from Charles Eastman’s childhood as a Dakota exile in Canada that he would become the best known of the early Native American authors and an advocate of acculturation. At the age of four he fled with his grandmother and uncle to the Northwest Territory to escape the ensuing violence and backlash of the 1862 Dakota Conflict, an Indigenous protest against white encroachments upon Dakota land and against starvation from the government’s failure to honor treaty agreements. When Eastman was fifteen, his father Jacob, whom the family had presumed dead as a result of the Mankato mass execution, reappeared to claim his son and take him to attend school at a tribal settlement in Flandreau, South Dakota. Having experienced a religious as well as cultural conversion while in prison, Jacob had decided that his sons should “learn this new way” of life.6 This surprising turn of events forced Eastman into a major shift in attitude. Assuming his father to be dead, he had determined, and was encouraged by his uncle, to avenge the death by seeking revenge upon the whites. Now he found himself encouraged by his father to turn from that revenge. Eastman quickly excelled in his new environment. After Flandreau he attended Santee Normal Training School, Beloit College, Knox College, Kimball Union Academy, and Dartmouth College. In 1890 he graduated from Boston University with a degree in medicine, making him one of the first licensed Native American physicians. From Boston he accepted a post as agency physician at Pine Ridge reservation, where he arrived in early November, less than two months before the Wounded Knee massacre. At this time he met Elaine Goodale, a New Englander who was the supervisor of American Indian education in the region,

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and they were engaged shortly before the massacre occurred. They married several months later in New York. Eastman held a variety of positions after he was forced to leave Pine Ridge in 1893 as a result of poor relations with the Indian agent. Plagued by financial difficulties and seeking a solution to them, he began writing short pieces about his Dakota boyhood, which his wife used her literary contacts to get published.7 These first sketches for St. Nicholas magazine eventually grew into his first autobiography Indian Boyhood (1902), which was quickly followed by a succession of other book-length works: Red Hunters and the Animal People (1904), Old Indian Days (1907), Wigwam Evenings (1909), The Soul of an Indian (1911), Indian Child Life (1913), Indian Scout Talks (1914), The Indian Today (1915), From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916), and Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (1918). Historian David Miller writes that, aside from the financial stability his writing could provide, Eastman wrote to convince “his White readers [that if they] could only understand the beauty and truth of the Indian way of life and learn to emulate the quality of truth found in it, a higher, more sensitive morality would eventually prevail in the larger American society.”8 Like many collaborative writing relationships between American Indians and Euroamericans, Elaine Goodale Eastman’s editing of Charles Eastman’s writing has been subject to a great deal of scrutiny and speculation. Reviewing the Eastmans’ writing relationship illustrates the controversy surrounding these texts: Who is their true author? Did Eastman or his wife write them in their entirety? How did any collaborative effort shape them? Whose purposes do they serve? As I claim Eastman’s publications serve his tribal-centered agenda, I would like to problematize the predominating belief that Goodale Eastman authored Eastman’s texts. Historian Raymond Wilson’s dissertation, for example, provides a prime instance of the questions raised by the Eastmans’s collaboration and one scholar’s endeavor to answer them. Wilson contends that Elaine Eastman “did most of his [Eastman’s] writ-

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ing.”9 He further notes that a relative remarked that Eastman “deeply resented the way Elaine would rewrite and change the meaning of his manuscripts.”10 Wilson later claims that in a letter by a family member “she served as his editorial assistant, a fact Ohiyesa [Charles Eastman] recognized. . . . In other words, the original ideas were Ohiyesa’s, and his wife polished his writings for publication.”11 Wilson’s position—that Elaine Goodale Eastman significantly altered the works of Charles—prevails among most scholars who have studied the question, but at least two critics present countertheories to the prevailing belief. In I Remain Alive Ruth Heflin points out that critics believe that Charles Eastman may not have written his own work because they continually return to Wilson’s work—not to any representative monographs—which asserts that Elaine at least influenced her husband’s texts significantly. In fact, one of the greatest mysteries about Eastman’s publishing career is why he stopped writing after his 1921 separation from Elaine. Heflin suggests that Eastman ceased publishing after his separation because his publishing contacts were Elaine’s and that these contacts may have remained true to her after the couple parted ways rather than that he no longer could write without her aid. Heflin goes on to question how Elaine might have had such an influential hand in Charles’ writing when all of her publications after the separation were “completely unrelated, or only indirectly related, to the Sioux.”12 Heflin emphasizes the fact that Elaine herself “seems to be the principal source of information for the view that she had an extensive hand in developing Eastman’s writings”; furthermore, she doubts that the authenticity of Eastman’s work would be so questioned were he Euroamerican.13 Of paramount significance is Eastman’s increasing disenchantment late in life with Euroamerican civilization, an attitude that may have led him to cease writing; moreover, after the separation, he was plagued by health problems that may have prevented him from writing.14 In sum, there are as many reasons to believe that Eastman authored his own work as to suppose that Elaine Goodale Eastman contributed significantly to his writing beyond “polishing.”

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What we do know is that the Eastmans were not of one mind on the question of whether the Dakotas should retain their culture. While Elaine had cultivated an appreciation for Dakota culture during her time living among the nation, she was a staunch assimilationist who saw the passing of the Dakota culture as the only choice possible for survival. Charles, on the other hand, “spent much of his life trying to prove that an Indian could have pride in both his native culture and his accomplishments in the dominant white society; but at the end of his life he renounced a society” in which his acceptance was an exception.15 Whether Elaine’s opinions about assimilation were ultimately voiced in Charles’ texts, surely this difference of opinion affected the editing of texts and the significance decades later. Another controversy surrounds Eastman’s public appearances and the politics surrounding them, which constitute another type of performative text that I prefer to read alternatively. One outgrowth of Charles Eastman’s writing career was his appearance on the lecture circuit. For many years he gave talks on as many as twenty-five different occasions, with Elaine managing all the arrangements for these events. One of the issues raised by scholars regarding his lectures is his use of quasi-traditional costumes in that context. In particular, Philip Deloria (Dakota) raises concerns about authenticity in this performance: “When Eastman donned an Indian headdress, he was connecting himself to his Dakota roots. But he was also—perhaps more compellingly—imitating nonIndian imitations of Indians. . . . By channeling both a Dakota past and an American-constructed Indian Other through his material body—from mind to pen to paper to book to Boy Scout—Eastman made it ever more difficult to pinpoint the cultural locations of Dakotas and Americans, reality and mimetic reality, authenticity and inauthenticity.”16 Eastman’s performance on the lecture circuit therefore becomes a dramatization of the layering of identities that Luther Standing Bear (Lakota/Dakota) would articulate so succinctly in My People the Sioux (1928). Reflecting upon the shock of losing his traditional

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haircut and clothes for a Carlisle coiffeur and uniform, Standing Bear observes, “Now, after having had my hair cut, a new thought came into my head. I felt that I was no more Indian, but would be an imitation of a white man. And we are still imitations of white men, and the white men are imitations of the Americans.”17 Standing Bear’s thoughts illuminate the complicated nature of identity in a postcontact world and suggest that the simplicity of a discussion of authenticity is deceptive. Accordingly, we may need to reframe how we understand Eastman’s public performances of Indianness. Eastman wrote many of his works for juvenile audiences, and beginning in 1910, he authored several texts that were intended for the Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts took the American Indian as the prototype for their ideal, in this case, masculine development, reflecting a larger phenomenon in U.S. camps for boys and girls in the early twentieth century.18 Eastman wrote articles for Boy Scout publications, as well as the book-length guide Indian Scout Talks, that were used in activities and programs. He also spoke with troops, possibly in regalia, and acted in various official capacities for the organization. He and Elaine went on to found an American Indian-themed camp for girls in 1915 and boys in 1916. For both camps Charles was the focal point as the “Real Indian” who gave instruction to the campers.19 Eastman clearly had a sense of the performative nature of race and ethnic difference, and he manipulated it when necessary in order to achieve a desired effect upon his audience. For example, in Deep Woods he dresses in a jacket and fez in order to sell Armenian goods door-to-door.20 Eastman “recognized the way American families accepted the Boy Scout movement,” and he viewed it as an opportunity, like his books for juvenile audiences, to gain further acceptance for the American Indian through a younger, more impressionable generation of Euroamericans.21 Philip Deloria presents the argument that in the early twentieth century there was a predominant Anglo American angst that urban life threatened white middle-class masculinity by separating man from nature. This concern led to the creation of summer camps such as the Boy Scouts that were

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geared to dispel effeminacy by providing an American Indianthemed adolescent rite of passage.22 Thus, Eastman’s success in the summer camp circuit appears to be the result of larger cultural shifts in understanding white masculinity. The Eastmans obviously benefited financially from these endeavors, as many people in the movement for American Indian rights did and do. The cases of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, as well as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin and Raymond Bonnin, illustrate this phenomenon, although these monies were never a primary source of subsistence for the Bonnins. Eastman’s efforts in the summer youth-education circuit, nonetheless, illustrate an acculturated man who retained a sense of his own native pride by seeking a place and a way for American Indian cultural practices to live on within the dominant society. Such a project contradicts the assumption of old wave critics that Eastman viewed his upbringing as exotic and felt grateful to be a participant in “civilization.” He apparently envisioned American Indians retaining some form of resilient nationhood and cultural continuity. To a certain degree Eastman reversed the process of deculturation and enculturation enacted upon Indigenous youth in boarding schools by trying to acculturate Euroamerican children to Dakota ways through writing and camps, albeit in significantly different circumstances. Malea Powell observes that in Deep Woods “Eastman’s commentary about Christianity and capitalism” has “a single argument running underneath—that the Indian way was better,” and Eastman’s promotion of the camps indicates a similar bias.23 Eastman would write that “we will follow the Indian method, for the American Indian is the only man I know who accepts natural things as lessons in themselves, direct from the Great Giver of life. Let us return to the normal attitude of trust in our surroundings for the laws of the wilderness must necessarily be just.”24 Without necessarily arguing overtly for American Indian superiority, Eastman certainly assumes the equality of the two cultures and the benefit that campers might gain from receiving a traditional Indigenous education. His use of Indigenous knowledge as a legitimate basis

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for educating “modern,” non-Indian children asserts a form of cross-cultural sovereignty. Rather than viewing Eastman’s involvement in the camp industry as an unfortunate concession, finding how he took advantage of his position to advocate for American Indian equality may be more helpful. In a review of Chadwick Allen’s Blood Narrative Elizabeth CookLynn has nonetheless argued that activist literary tactics seem to be attributed [by Allen] to any Indian, writing anything, during the twentieth century. It is distracting . . . to compare the works of an Indian writer who portrays Indians in a positive light (like Charles Eastman and Ella Deloria, for example) with those who are trying to make the distinction between the cultural and the political voice (Vine Deloria Jr., for example). It is not useful for critics to point to anything and everything Indians have written as subversive, activist, or as participating in resistance literature. Some of it simply accepts the political status quo.25 Cook-Lynn identifies a number of vital issues intersecting in Eastman’s work; however, the rigidity with which she holds Eastman to the standard of “a reconstruction of the Sioux Nation in political terms” negates his larger engagement of resisting rhetorics and the building of a literature of resistance as seen in his strategic inclusion of a Dakota worldview in his works.26 In his autobiographies Charles Eastman deploys a refracted version of the dominant racialist rhetoric as a method for deconstructing contemporary beliefs in Euroamerican racial superiority, and he counterbalances this familiar language with Dakota literary strategies and cultural values. In the remainder of this chapter I discuss how Eastman enriches the autobiographical genre by including a range of tribal genres in his self-fashionings. In addition to using Indigenous autobiographical conventions in his life story, Eastman engages aspects with anthropological discourse through using the ethnographic mode to refigure Dakota culture and experience, showing how children become socialized into Dakota life

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on Dakota terms; like Deloria, Eastman uses Dakota tropes and genres to practice a native-centered ethnography. In Indian Boyhood Eastman includes an educational dialogue with his uncle about “the language of feathers” and the meaning of how a warrior wore his feathers. Feathers represented a material cultural expression of autobiography for Dakota men as they communicated nonverbally a man’s history and accomplishments as a warrior. By including this educational dialogue, Eastman shows how the young Ohiyesa becomes socialized as a Dakota male; this move simultaneously affirms Dakota cultural identity and dispels the stereotype of the warbonnet-wearing “chief.” Furthermore, by including this form of narrative—one that is linked to extratribal affairs—Eastman asserts a Dakota nationhood based upon Dakota standards. In “Evening in the Lodge,” an episode which explores protocol regarding Dakota epistemology, the young Ohiyesa stumbles across an unidentifiable feather while out playing, and he brings it home for his grandmother to identify. His grandmother refuses to answer him and chastises him for not knowing this information. “It seemed,” he wrote, “a reflection on me that I was not ambitious enough to have found all such matters out before.”27 His grandmother’s rebuke of Ohiyesa for not already knowing this information highlights the rigorous nature of Indigenous education and epistemology. Chided by his grandmother, Eastman says he “felt mortified by this reminder of [his] ignorance.”28 His uncle reminds Ohiyesa of the meaning of feathers that sit upright, hang downward, have a round mark, paint, or tipping, thereby establishing the sophistication and subtlety of communication through feathers. Through his explanation of this Dakota self-narrative form, Eastman increases his readers’ knowledge and undercuts possible romanticization of Native Americans by articulating the depth and complexity of this staple of stereotypical representation. While feathers constitute the stuff of racial stereotype, Eastman seeks to demystify and deromanticize this “quaint” exotic practice by explaining its pragmatic import.

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Other questions remain regarding Eastman’s interaction with stereotypes of his era. For example, in American Indian Autobiography David Brumble contends that Eastman’s choice of vocabulary in Indian Boyhood reveals that he viewed reservation American Indians as “the sad survivors of the Darwinian struggle” and that he agreed with Spencer’s belief that “contemporary primitive societies were sometimes retrograde.”29 In the dedication to Indian Boyhood Eastman writes, “The North American Indian was the highest type of pagan and uncivilized man. He possessed not only a superb physique but a remarkable mind. But the Indian no longer exists as a natural and free man. Those remnants which now dwell upon the reservations present only a sort of tableau—a fictitious copy of the past.”30 Eastman’s use of racialist vocabulary is problematic, but other rhetorical stances within Indian Boyhood trouble the conclusion that deploying racialist discourse makes Eastman a believer. How does one reconcile statements that affirm a type of Vanishing Americanism (symbolic past tense) within an autobiography that praises and affirms traditional Dakota life in the face of cultural genocide (symbolic present tense)? In Indian Boyhood Eastman gives us his grandmother Uncheedah, who is “the wisest of guides and the best of protectors” in addition to being a tremendous repository of tribal knowledge.31 He introduces us to Smoky Day, “a preserver of history and legend” and “a living book of the traditions and history of his people,” whose significance is so great that Eastman will dedicate another book to the knowledge handed down to him by this tribal historian.32 Eastman also recounts the history of his uncle Mysterious Medicine’s worldly accomplishments in hunting, war, and natural knowledge. In addition to the value of these figures’ accomplishments, he portrays Dakota society as a sovereign civilization on par with those of the West by detailing his traditional education, imparting stories of creation, describing the Maiden’s Feast, and sharing Dakota humor. His efforts to affirm the worth and prestige of Dakota culture are at work in his texts that portray traditional tribal life.

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In light of this contradictory evidence, reading Eastman as capitulating to Social Darwinist thinking seems questionable: he does not characterize the Dakota as somehow flawed and doomed to an immediate demise. More likely, as a highly educated man, Eastman understood racial discourse in his era, and he implemented it as a necessary tool for discussing race. Hence, words such as “pagan” and “savage” differentiate American Indians from Euroamericans in the manner commonly accepted by the scholars of his day. Furthermore, other terms he uses, such as “superstition” (common belief), had different, more neutral meanings in Eastman’s era than they do now.33 (Another example of this difference in usage is Eastman’s description of his dog Ohitika as wagging his tail “promiscuously.”) He also sometimes uses the rhetoric of “savagery” in order to criticize Euroamerican behavior, such as the instance when “gangs of little white savages” in Beloit, Wisconsin, greet him with “imitation war whoops.”34 Finally, given the contradiction between the value Eastman places upon Dakota peoples and his use of racialized rhetoric, perhaps he employs this discourse in an ironic fashion; certainly a number of examples of reversed rhetorics of dominance and moral superiority in Deep Woods suggest this might be the case. In addition to the language of feathers, Eastman employs several traditional forms of self-narration, including educational, naming, spiritual, and bravery narratives. These forms of self-narration establish continuity between his childhood cultural identity and the identity he cultivates in his autobiographies. Specifically the employment of these methods of self-narration communicates a Dakota cultural and intellectual equality to his readership in a concrete, material manner. In Indian Boyhood Eastman’s precontact autobiography, he explains how he received his birth and childhood names, thus affirming Dakota cultural practices, identity, and tiožpaye to a presumably misinformed audience. Many masculine names are signifiers of nationhood to the extent that they were often earned in war and therefore necessarily involved contact with nations

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beyond the Dakota. Because Eastman is the fifth-born child of a Dakota woman who dies giving birth to him, he is given the “humiliating” name Hakadah, or “the pitiful last,” which he will bear until he earns a new name. Normally a fifth-born male child would take the name “Hake,” meaning “last”; consequently Eastman’s name also translates as “little last,” the “dah” or “dan” word ending commonly forming a diminutive of any noun.35 When Eastman is four years old, he receives a new name as a result of a lacrosse match between the Kaposia and WaŸ±etuƒwaƒ bands. Significantly, Eastman chooses to narrate this event in third person, a choice that may reflect a traditional Dakota desire for privacy in revealing one’s name. Structurally this choice allows Eastman to focus on the exciting details of the lacrosse game, which he realistically may not have remembered as a small child. The focus of the chapter, however, does seem to be upon Eastman himself. In its closing lines the medicine man Chankpee-yuhah issues a charge to the boy to pursue the rest of his life: “Ohiyesa (or Winner) shall be thy name henceforth. Be brave, be patient and thou shalt always win! Thy name is Ohiyesa.”36 With the chapter’s emphasis clearly upon Eastman’s naming ceremony, Eastman is able to accentuate the centrality of community to his own identity through the use of third person. He provides the reader enlightening details about the struggles of the match and the victory’s impact upon his band the WaŸ±etuƒwaƒ. The cultural matrix of group identity that surrounds this event of individual achievement, the bestowal of a new name, drives home the importance of group and kinship relationships to Dakota life. Such relationships are a critical component of tiožpaye existence as kinship forms the fabric of Dakota society. Furthermore, this episode illustrates how children’s identity becomes gendered, for the lacrosse match is played by men who choose to celebrate their achievement by giving a new name to a male child, another masculine rite of passage in Dakota society. In Indian Boyhood Eastman also shares a tale of the acquisition of powers from his eighth year. Like names, which occupy a central

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position in the scheme of masculine accomplishment, the particular rite of passage that he describes is part and parcel of Dakota male experience and consequently of national identity. Although this genre is largely the province of shamans, certain ceremonies, such as the vision quest, to acquire spiritual aid were common to all Dakota men regardless of their vocation. While common to many tribes, this genre’s expression varies considerably from nation to nation; thus, in the case of the Dakotas this supplication of Wakaƒ Taƒka, or the Great Mystery, would be a leitmotif in many men’s lives. Black Elk’s retelling of his vision to his band in Black Elk Speaks is a classic example of the “how-I-got-my-powers” genre that many readers have encountered. Eastman’s first sacrifice to the Great Mystery constitutes a type of acquisition of powers, and his grandmother’s purpose in having him offer a sacrifice is to “make him a warrior and a hunter as great as [the Great Mystery did] make his father and grandfather.”37 Presumably other Dakota boys made similar sacrifices in order to gain success in the hunt and in war. On the day of the sacrifice Eastman’s grandmother calls him from playing and informs him what he is about to do: she entreats him to sacrifice that which is dearest to him. After he contemplates a range of items, from paints to his bear claw necklace to his pony, Uncheedah tells him that he must sacrifice his dog Ohitika. The boy has difficulty not crying at first, but he remembers his grandmother’s “oft-repeated adage: ‘Tears for woman and the war-whoop for man to drown sorrow!’”38 Thus, Hakadah’s ideal conduct is channeled into gender complementary behavior. Throughout this story Eastman provides an exceptionally descriptive progression of events, and this stylistic choice reflects the nature of the acquisition-of-powers genre. Details were important because “such narratives were designed to call forth . . . courage, endurance, and self-sacrifice [which] were essential attributes in warriors and leaders” in tribal societies. Eastman remains faithful to the conventions of the genre to cultivate these qualities in his young readership or at least to build their appreciation for Dakota

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cultural practices.39 Simultaneously he amends the genre by omitting a critical part of the ceremony, avoiding stereotypes then in circulation: the eating of the dog. Through the use of the acquisition of powers genre, Eastman encodes his text with a particular brand of masculinity, one that channels male emotional expression into prescribed forms. This practice differs from moments in Deep Woods when, as Powell argues, he claims a “rugged preparedness [that] would have marked him clearly as masculine, both in terms of their [his readers’] imaginings of what Indian people value as well as in terms of their own Euroamerican gender values.”40 Instead, in this instance Eastman reformulates a Dakota masculinity in the Euroamerican autobiography, translating tribal genres and sensibilities to his new audience. Further, Eastman uses this episode to illustrate American Indian religious practice in order to make such practice understandable to his readers. While examples of Dakota self-narrative practices abound in Indian Boyhood, Eastman only once overtly employs a tribal selfnarrative genre in Deep Woods; however, this one instance becomes the defining trope of his narrative. In this case in point he modifies the bravery narrative to imply a cultural continuity between his precontact life and his life among whites, thereby asserting a continued Dakota identity and self-determination. When he leaves for Santee Normal Training School from the Flandreau settlement, his father Jacob tells him, “Remember, my boy, it is the same as if I sent you on your first war-path. I shall expect you to conquer.”41 Here “Eastman puts the most powerful equivalences between Indianness and white-ness into his father’s voice” and asserts Dakota equality through them.42 The “path” or “trail” becomes a leitmotif throughout the autobiography, resonating with a powerful Dakota trope, caƒku, a road, path, or trail.43 At the beginning of this “war-path” Eastman leaves for school with his young uncle Peter who abandons the trip within a couple of days. Symbolically casting aside his traditional life, Eastman leaves his Canadian gun, the basis for much of his training in hunting

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prior to returning to the United States with his father, to Peter, whom he advises to “tell my father . . . that I shall not return until I finish my war-path.”44 Now Eastman is truly in the “civilized” economy, and he is reliant upon using sign language and offering money for food at random farmhouses as he makes the 150-mile walk to Santee, Nebraska.45 When Eastman arrives at the school, he works steadily to learn everything possible, although he laments that he prefers his grandmother and uncle’s instruction.46 After two years at Santee Eastman reaches the level of those students who had studied several years longer than he had, and the school superintendent offers to send him to preparatory school at Beloit College. Eastman consents. Not long before his departure, however, he learns that his father has died and decides that “it was clear that he [Jacob Eastman] who had sought me out among the wild tribes at the risk of his life, and set my feet in the new trail, should be obeyed to the end.”47 Eastman accepts the charge given to him by his father and pursues it to its successful completion: a medical degree and beyond. This construction of equivalences, equating Euroamerican education with a Dakota warpath, is a unique characteristic of Eastman’s writing, and this particular deployment highlights the continuity between Eastman’s “civilized” and Dakota lives. Rather than displaying the tragic ambivalence that most critics ascribe to him, he clearly works in this passage in order to build connections between the two ways of life he mediates. Eastman also incorporates familiar Euroamerican genres in the writing of Indian Boyhood and Deep Woods. In his first autobiography he utilizes the ethnographic genre.48 In his second he uses familiar conventions of Euroamerican autobiography.49 Of particular interest is Eastman’s deployment of ethnography, which Ruth Heflin argues Eastman uses to parody anthropological writing, to distance himself from his audience, and to portray sympathetically other persons’ motives.50 Heflin writes that Eastman only uses the anthropological third person “exclusively” in the sacrifice of Ohitika in Indian Boyhood.51

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Yet Eastman also uses this mode when he tells how he received the name “Ohiyesa” as a result of his band’s victory at the lacrosse game.52 Both instances involve Dakota spiritual practice and thereby suggest that Eastman distances himself from the events out of respect. Both of these episodes portray Eastman’s involvement in a ceremony especially for him: the ceremony with Ohitika is his first sacrifice to the Great Mystery, and the ceremony at the lacrosse game confers a new name upon Hakadah. Heflin suggests that Eastman may have used the third-person anthropological mode in order to describe his sacrifice, owing to the possibility that “an individual’s personal ceremonies would also [like names] be considered sacred.”53 Although Eastman employs explicit detail in his description of other, nonpersonal ceremonies, his choice to use third person only when describing his sacrifice and naming supports the conclusion that he held these individual ceremonies in particularly high regard; furthermore, he makes a direct statement in Deep Woods about the personal nature of names and the Dakota reticence to reveal them.54 (In traditional Dakota etiquette one queries where a new acquaintance is from and who his or her relatives are, not what the person’s name is). Eastman also intentionally uses the name Hakadah in Indian Boyhood after he acquires the new name “Ohiyesa” because the latter is now his personal name and the former is primarily a birth-order name. Whether Eastman uses the anthropological mode in a parodic manner is debatable insofar as he appears in both of these episodes to be seeking to generate an appreciation of Dakota culture among his readership rather than to mock Euroamerican social-scientific portraits of that culture. Eastman utilizes the anthropological mode to the extent that he uses the third person and explains the significance of Dakota practices, such as the motivation for a sacrifice to the Great Mystery. Although he may deploy the language of savagery and civilization ironically, he does not take ethnographic description to the extreme in which knowledge dominates the text, nor are his accounts as “objective” as are the anthropological texts of his time (i.e., the works of Clark Wissler, Alice Fletcher, and others). Ultimately, Eastman appears invested in portraying emotional

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expression such as responding to his traditional upbringing instead of material expression such as obsessing over the minutiae of how that education is imparted. While he was undoubtedly highly aware of his deployment of the anthropological mode, the texts themselves fail to offer substantial evidence of parody. Through the use of the educational, naming, acquisition-ofpowers, and bravery narratives, Eastman both defeats stereotypes of American Indian lifeways in his autobiographies and shows how he is socialized to be a Dakota man. Although he is commonly categorized as an “assimilated” Indian, his writings reflect the complexity of his cultural position. Eastman draws upon Euroamerican writing traditions when it suits his purpose, as when he utilizes the ethnographic genre, but he also implements Dakota self-narrative conventions when deploying tribal identity as a normative standard within the text is useful. In considering Eastman’s literary career, Gerald Vizenor queries, “What did it mean to be the first generation to hear the stories of the past, bear the horrors of the moment, and write to the future? What were tribal identities at the turn of the last century?”55 By examining Eastman’s autobiographies, we can begin to piece together answers to these questions. Only through fully engaging with the complexity of Eastman’s position will we begin to understand the full spectrum of his alliances with and disavowals of the “deep woods” and “civilization.” Vizenor asserts that Eastman “wrote to teach his readers that the tribes were noble; however, he would be reproached as romantic and censured as an assimilationist. Others honored his simulations of survivance.”56 Eastman’s critical standing is changing at this moment as scholars begin to recognize his complex strategies for conveying a message predicated upon Dakota tiožpaye identity and worldview rather than upon Eurowestern literary criticism and theory. Reading his autobiographies as examples of Indigenous engagements with the colonial idiom in order to create representations on tribal terms reveals how Eastman positions himself as an agent of resistance within the prevailing tribal and Euroamerican worldviews of his time.

CHAPTER THREE

Zitkala S˙a, Sentiment, and Tios˙paye Reading Dakota Rhetorics of Nation and Gender

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CHAPTER FOUR

Ella Deloria’s Decolonizing Role as Camp Historian in Waterlily Sisters, Brothers, and the Hakata Relationship

Ella Cara Deloria, who shares the name Aƒpetu Wažte Win with Marie McLaughlin, was born in 1889 in Dakota Territory in the village of White Swan, South Dakota. Her father, Philip Deloria, was the second Dakota to be ordained as an Episcopal minister, but she also enjoyed a strong traditional influence from her mother’s sisters and paternal grandmother. Deloria attended All Saints School in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and eventually won a scholarship to Oberlin College in 1910. Three years later, she transferred from Oberlin to Columbia University, where she studied with Franz Boas. She completed her bs in 1915 and, under Boas’s supervision, went on to complete a number of ethnographic manuscripts on the Lakota and Dakota. In 1932 she published Dakota Texts, a collection of Dakota traditional tales provided in Dakota and translated into English. She also published Dakota Grammar (1941), a seminal work that remains a primary reference for any serious student of Dakota, although the reference is now long out of print. In the 1940s she wrote an ethnography of the D/Lakota alternately entitled Camp Circle Society, Dakota Home Life, and Dakota Family Life that she was unable to publish, so she went on to write the

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novel Waterlily, based on the same material which was eventually published in 1988, seventeen years after her death and forty years after the manuscript’s completion. In 1944 she published Speaking of Indians, which explored the culture of the Dakota while speaking to the broader concerns of tribal people as a whole in the United States. She was active as a scholar until her death, serving as assistant director of the W. H. Over Museum and publishing briefer anthropological pieces such as Dakota Treatment of Murderers. Julian Rice has edited and published posthumously a number of her manuscripts, including Deer Women and Elk Men (1992), Iron Hawk (1993), and The Buffalo People (1994). The influence of Franz Boas has come under a great deal of scrutiny in the study of Deloria’s writing, but we can learn equally as much about her writing by paying attention to the ways in which Deloria’s Dakota heritage informs her ethnographic persona and her strategies for (self)representation. In “All My Relatives Are Noble” Latina studies scholar Maria Eugenia Cotera convincingly argues that Deloria’s Waterlily is rife with “evidence of a decolonizing imagination at work,” and she contends that “Deloria’s pedagogical role [in Waterlily] must be envisioned as having relevance not only for the project to decolonize dominant knowledge about Indians but also for the intellectual and political formation of Indian communities themselves.”1 Specifically Cotera argues for understanding Deloria’s role as a harbinger of contemporary tribal feminism. This argument has ample evidence to support it, but Deloria’s strategies for metaphorically reviving the tribal grandmothers should not be limited by gender. Although Deloria surely invokes and rearticulates traditional Dakota understandings of women as culture bearers, the vastness and breadth of her efforts as a traditional keeper of the Dakota expands far beyond the purview of women’s experience, and thus identifying the roles that Deloria remakes as a decolonizing agent (and simultaneously a practicing ethnographer and novelist) must also move beyond traditional Dakota gender roles. A consideration of the Dakota oral traditional role of camp historian, which Deloria explores extensively in her own writing,

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suitably provides the basis for a reading of Deloria’s Waterlily that encompasses the broad scope of what Cotera has termed Deloria’s “national project of remembering.”2 Deloria’s “communitarian” revival of national identity, as Tsalagi critic Jace Weaver terms it, can more clearly be identified when contrasted with another decolonizing narrative with a traditional individualized scope, Angela Cavender Wilson’s Remember This, which contains WaŸ±etuƒwaƒ Dakota elder Eli Taylor’s autobiographical and historical narratives. Taylor’s narratives provide a reference point that is predicated upon an individual tribal member’s life and that, while ambitious in its decolonizing strategies, limits its scope largely to a retelling of Taylor’s life and the knowledge of the Dakota lifeway he has acquired rather than the historiography and cultural record of the entire Dakota nation. Like Remember This, Deloria’s texts depict a broad spectrum of Dakota worldview and philosophy. Although critics have not always agreed as to whom Deloria might be speaking, as Cotera has already convincingly argued, previous “critical approaches [to Waterlily] presume that Deloria was speaking to a non-Indian audience” and therefore “do not address the significance of [the novel] to the internal politics of Indian communities in the 1930s and 1940s.”3 My study of Deloria also focuses on conversations she is having that are internal to a Dakota worldview and not necessarily dependent upon cultural brokering, and I extend this argument beyond Waterlily to include the as-yet-unpublished Camp Circle Society along with such published works as Dakota Grammar and Dakota Texts, which serve as reference points for contemporary Dakotas intent on tribal revitalization and decolonization. I mindfully exclude Speaking of Indians, a tract written for missionaries, as Deloria herself criticized it for its tendency to be “informal and sugar-coated, so that people who read it might be interested enough to study Indians.”4 Previous considerations of the cultural value of Deloria’s work have often focused on the “culture broker” aspect, as Bea Medicine has termed it, of Deloria’s camp historian role: Medicine observes

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that Deloria “wished to convey the human character of Lakota life to a non-Native audience.”5 In fact, in Blood Narrative literary critic Chadwick Allen expresses deep concern about the anthropological bent of previous critical studies of Waterlily: “Thus far, critics have focused primarily on its [the novel’s] wealth of ethnographic information, particularly its details about the everyday lives of Sioux women. Deloria is praised foremost as a valuable native informant, but that characterization underestimates the novel’s construction as a work of literature and ignores its activist potential in either its original or contemporary contexts.”6 Allen then focuses on how his concept of the blood/land/memory complex elucidates aspects of Waterlily that have remained largely ignored or when examined have simply been noted as another example of ethnographic abundance. I am also interested in examining Deloria’s ethnographic fiction from one of the most significant perspectives to which she writes, that of a reader with preexisting knowledge of American Indians. For Deloria the role of camp historian is central to understanding a Dakota worldview, and in her writing, research, and community engagement, she performs a function similar to this critical community member. In Waterlily Deloria explores this important role through the character of Woyaka, a highly respected tribal historian and storyteller who trained for this role from his youth. His grandfather chose him at birth to be trained as a storyteller and historian, and when Woyaka was a child, his grandfather traveled with him to Woyaka’s birthplace to entreat the Great Mystery to grant him the ability to “forever hold captive everything [Woyaka] heard.”7 Woyaka remembers the extraordinary privation he endured as a boy, neglecting play and lighthearted pursuits in order to take on this revered role. His grandfather’s motivation is the preservation of the Dakota way of life: ¿ÁYou owe it to our people,’ he would say. ‘If you fail them, there might be nobody else to remind them of their tribal history.’”8 The character of Woyaka, in turn, seems to be modeled upon Makula, a Gopher band Oglala who was an unparalleled infor-

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mant for Deloria in her ethnographic research. In Lakota studies scholar Joyzelle Godfrey’s words, Makula was “considered the tribal historian” and “knew something about everything,” and Deloria wrote to Franz Boas that Makula “was the best historian on Pine Ridge. . . . I haven’t found another such, good, reliable and heady informant.”9 Makula’s input was particularly invaluable because, as Julian Rice notes, “his life spanned the most dramatic events recorded in Lakota history. . . . The storytelling tradition he passed on through Deloria must be at least two hundred years old.”10 Deloria’s body of works, from collections of traditional tales to language studies to fiction, articulates and records Dakota knowledge and understanding much as Woyaka’s wintertime storytelling and Makula’s narration; scholar Susan Gardner even terms Deloria “her People’s biographer,” a label that connects her to both the fictional character and the real man.11 Like the figure of Woyaka, Deloria expressed an early interest in collecting stories: “I . . . sometimes ran away to the camp to hear stories till they had to send out an alarm to locate me.”12 She also remembered her father’s interest “in having men come and talk of the past; and he himself was a capital story-teller; and I listened. More than the other Deloria children, I listened.”13 Like Woyaka, Deloria devoted herself to “study[ing] everything possible of Dakota life, and see[ing] what made it go” “whatever the cost to her personally,” as Gardner observes.14 An example of Deloria’s adaptation of this role to meet the demands of the printed word is her as-yet-unpublished ethnographic study of Lakota camp life. At Lower Brule Community College Joyzelle Godfrey, a social granddaughter of Deloria, has used her own transcription of Deloria’s unpublished manuscript to teach Lakota college students about their culture and to extend the decolonizing project that Deloria began with it. Deloria’s Dakota Grammar has served a similarly vital role in the Dakota language revitalization movement in Minnesota, and only recently has another work been published that functions similarly, Harlan LaFontaine and Neil McKay’s 550 Dakota Verbs (2005). Corroborating the ways in which Ella Deloria’s pursuit of Dakota traditional knowledge superceded

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gender, Vine Deloria reflects in his introduction to Speaking of Indians that “Ella, during her formative years, became the inheritor of the traditions of the family and was treated as if she were the son to whom Philip could pass down the stories.”15 Deloria’s project of “national remembering” clearly spanned activities of both genders and often conformed to Dakota gendered norms, such as her learning of stories from her paternal grandmother and from the female relatives of her mother who were Sans Arc and thus keepers of the pipe, and “the many old women informants” whose experiences shape Waterlily.16 Like Charles Eastman’s boyhood instructor Smoky Day, whose stories Eastman immortalizes in several of his books, Deloria takes on the role of camp historian (and culture bearer) in her work as an ethnographer, and given the implication of much of her writing, it is likely she viewed this work as an expression of her abiding affection for Dakota peoples and more specifically an expression of kinship. As numerous scholars have noted, everywhere in Deloria’s writing we find the lesson of treating one’s relations correctly writ large, and nowhere is this more explicit than in her own biography. As the oldest child in a blended family, Deloria was a source of sustenance to her younger siblings, for whom she acted as a mother as well as a caretaker for her ailing father. For all of her life Deloria’s sister Mary Susan, a semi-invalid was dependent upon Deloria for support, and Joyzelle Godfrey speculates that Deloria never married as a result of this relationship; Deloria would never have chosen to do otherwise. According to Godfrey, Deloria felt a sense of duty to care for her ailing sister. Like the character of Woyaka, whose work as camp historian Deloria remade in the twentieth-century, Deloria “walked alone” and eschewed “ordinary human camaraderie” by never marrying.17 Like Woyaka, Deloria also focused on the understanding and perpetuation of kinship practices as the heart of her life’s work: for Woyaka this emphasis is metaphorically indicated by his longest story, that of the Dakota people’s kinship with the buffalo as the source of all life.18

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The importance of kinship in Dakota life is perhaps most easily illustrated by the numerous kinship terms (see table 1). Of these terms I am aware of numerous synonyms for such terms as grandmother, grandfather, mother, and father, further establishing the critical role of kinship in lived and spoken life. As the limited examples of the vocabulary for designating relatives in table 1 suggest, each of these relationships had clear expectations for the kinds of behaviors a person should display toward a given individual. Some relationships were respect or avoidance relations, while others were joking relations. Deloria tells us that before a child was even able to speak, parents would put the correct phrases and responses into the child’s mouth by way of beginning her or his training. This message of the importance of kinship is a constant theme throughout Deloria’s writing. She devotes a section of Speaking of Indians to “Kinship’s Role in Dakota Life” and explores such expressions of kinship as generosity throughout the rest of the book. Deloria underscores the pervasiveness of kinship with the following statement: “It is not instinctive to be unselfish, kind, and sincere toward others, and therefore courteous. Those are traits that have to be learned. And they can be learned, but only by scrupulous repetition, until they become automatic responses; until, in the case of the Dakotas, the very uttering of a kinship term at once brought the whole process into synchronic play—kinship term, attitude, behavior—like a chord that is harmonious.”19 That the centrality of kinship was expressed by Deloria in her way of living as well as in her academic treatises is apparent through her caretaking of her younger siblings and ailing father and through her lifelong support of her sister Mary Susan. Deloria was commonly known as Aunt Ella to Native youth and non-Native ethnographers alike, the former reinscribing Dakota identity with every interaction and the latter showing that she would make relatives of unknown people much as traditional Dakotas did. Despite this sobriquet, she still clearly made distinctions between different kinds of kinship relations as she once told her grandnephew Vine Deloria Jr.:

Table 1. Dakota Kinship Terms

(His/her) older sister My older sister Your older sister (His/her) younger sister My younger sister Your younger sister (His/her) older brother My older brother Your older brother (His/her) younger brother My younger brother Your younger brother (My) father Your father His/her father (My) mother Your mother His/her mother (My) grandfather Your grandfather His/her grandfather (My) grandmother Your grandmother His/her grandmother Female cousin Male cousin

Women’s language

Men’s language

cuƒwe micuƒ nicuƒ taƒka mitaƒka nitaƒka tibdo mitibdo nitibdo suƒka misuƒka nisuƒka (mi)ate niyate atkuku ina (mihuƒ) nihuƒ

huƒku okaƒna nituƒkaƒži tunkaƒžitku kuƒži nikuƒži kuƒžitku icepaƒži i„eži

taƒke mitaƒke nitaƒke taƒkži mitaƒkži nitaƒkži ciƒye miciƒye niciƒye suƒka misuƒka nisuƒka (mi)ate niyate atkuku ina (mihuƒ) nihuƒ huƒku okaƒna nituƒkaƒži tunkaƒžitku kuƒži nikuƒži kuƒžitku haƒkaži taƒhaƒži

Source: Flute, Schommer, Dunnigan, and Rynda, Dakota Language, 30-32. I am using this text as a standard for Dakota language throughout this book, with conversions to the Dakota syllabary that were not possible during its publication (i.e., “ƒ” for the nasalized “n”); Dakota language expert and instructor Neil McKay is currently updating the original publication to reflect these orthographical preferences.

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“I am really your grandmother in the Lakota way, but you can call me ‘Aunt Ella’ too.”20 Without question kinship exemplified all that was good about the Dakota life to Ella Deloria. As she writes in Speaking of Indians, “In the last analysis every other consideration was secondary [to kinship]—property, personal ambition, glory, good times, life itself. Without that aim and the constant struggle to attain it, the people would no longer be Dakotas in truth. They would no longer even be human.”21 For Deloria, then, kinship is interwoven with humanity and with Dakota identity, and any deviation from kinship represents a separation from what she defines as the Dakota way of life. Because of the centrality of the concept of kinship to Dakota worldviews, Deloria wrote Waterlily, which is a transformation of her ethnographic study of the Dakota and which is devoted entirely to an exploration of kinship and its ramifications. All aspects of the complex plot of Waterlily are driven by kinship obligations and what both female and male characters must do to fulfill them. Kinship acts as a standard for civilization by which Deloria measures the Dakota. It is a measure that is defined by the Dakota themselves. Set on the cusp of contact with whites, Waterlily portrays a young Dakota woman Blue Bird’s unhappy marriage, which results in the birth of a daughter, Waterlily, and her eventual happy remarriage to a new man. Deloria traces the upbringing of Waterlily until her early adulthood, with the author using Waterlily’s family as exemplars of good Dakota kinship behavior. According to Deloria, the perfection Waterlily’s family achieves in fulfilling kinship obligations is not anomalous: “I can honestly say that hardly one in a hundred dared to be thought of as deviating from the rule, although there were always a few naturally heedless persons who persistently or occasionally disregarded it.”22 Waterlily’s biological father Star Elk is such a heedless person, and he becomes a bad example for the rest of the community and most especially for Deloria’s readers. Star Elk is generally thought of as an unworthy young man, and when Blue Bird elopes with him, her grandmother is devastated:

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“Star Elk was lazy and petulant and given to fits.”23 In the end Star Elk “throws away” Blue Bird before the entire band in a jealous rage, and he is despised by all as a direct result. Deloria writes that “[h]e left immediately, his destination unknown.”24 By degrading his wife and insulting the dance then in progress, Star Elk thus breaks with his relations and denies his own identity as a Dakota and a human. At the other end of the continuum from Star Elk is the “kinship appeal,” the adoption of a murderer by the victim’s family that Yankton the storyteller relates.25 Like this incident, every other major event in the novel is determined by kinship obligations: Waterlily’s birth during a camp move, in which Blue Bird tells no one she is giving birth because the only relatives near her at the time are avoidance relatives; the young Leaping Fawn’s choice to keep the ghost of her departed grandmother; and Waterlily’s decision to forgo marriage to the man of her choice in order to be a good relative and marry a man her parents have selected for her, among others. It should be noted that despite this self-mortification Waterlily ultimately marries the man of her original choice, who happens to be a social husband as a cousin to Sacred Horse. Deloria thus tries to show us that kinship does work for the benefit of all and that what is good for the whole is good for the individual. Two types of relationships, hakata and koda/kola, are particularly illustrative of the ways in which Deloria uses kinship to determine the Waterlily’s plot and to explore the nature of kinship as a concept central to Dakota life. The nature of these two relationships also spans both genders and consequently illustrates how Deloria moves beyond the confines of women’s experience to define Dakota national identity. Hakata is used to designate the collateral relationship between brother and sister, including male cousins from one’s paternal family and female cousins from one’s maternal family. Hakata is considered by some to be the mortar of Dakota life: the relative to whom one owes the greatest devotion is the sibling of the opposite sex. Sisters are expected to treat their brothers with the utmost respect and

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honor, and brothers are expected to do the same. Noted scholar of Lakota studies Julian Rice has observed that the hakata relationship is “one of particularly intense respect and devotion.”26 Deloria illustrates the importance of hakata among adults through the characters of Dream Woman and Rainbow, who are aunt and father to Waterlily, respectively. Dream Woman, a renowned artisan, constantly makes unique gifts for Rainbow and for those whom he admires by way of honoring him. When Little Chief, Rainbow’s first born son, is honored for his entrance into manhood with a gift horse, Dream Woman “promptly produced some elaborate riding things for him—a bridle, a whip, and a blanket, all worked with brilliantly colored quills as fine as any, so that at the coming celebration he could ride with the other little boys and look as fine as the best.”27 Deloria notes that Dream Woman is Little Chief ’s “special aunt,” thus designating the hakata relationship between Dream Woman and Rainbow that motivates this and other generous acts on Dream Woman’s part. Hakata that Deloria spends the most time exploring are Waterlily and Little Chief whom the readers meet from an early age so that Deloria may show how this kind of kinship behavior is inculcated from childhood. As discussed above, she then shows how hakata is embodied in maturity in the relationship between Dream Woman and Rainbow. When Blue Bird returns to her family’s camp circle after being cast out by Star Elk, Deloria reflects that “it was important for her daughter [Waterlily] to grow up with backing, in informal association with the girls—her cousins and sisters—and in a respect relationship with her brothers and male cousins, who would stand back of her, ready if she should need help [emphasis mine].”28 Deloria tells the reader that particular attention was paid to these relationships: “brothers and sisters, and boy cousins and girl cousins must be very kind to each other. That was the core of all kinship training.” She proceeds to illustrate this rule by portraying an incident in which three year old Waterlily throws dirt into the much older Little Chief ’s eyes.29 Their grandmother Gloku scolds Waterlily severely, but “in after years Waterlily could say

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that this was the only time she was stern with her.” This incident and its aftermath show the importance of her relationship with Little Chief.30 Gloku also reprimands Little Chief for reacting so emotionally to Waterlily’s inadvertent assault. In another passage in which a pregnant Blue Bird is reflecting on needing to restrain herself from complaining about discomfort to her sisters-in-law, Deloria makes this explicit statement: “the sisters could not help it; it was the way they had been trained: brothers and sisters must always place one another above all else.”31 Hakata plays an important role in the climax of the novel that centers around Waterlily’s decision to marry and her eventual choice to fulfill kinship obligations, including that of hakata. Waterlily is very much taken with a young man named Lowanla, but another suitor, Sacred Horse, offers “to buy” Waterlily with two horses at a time when her family desperately needs horses for a giveaway to honor her grandmother. Waterlily wonders if she should “accept so that her devoted brother Little Chief could have those handsome horses? That would be one way of showing her high regard for him.”32 Waterlily’s cousin Prairie Flower dismisses this concern by sharing Little Chief ’s belief that “our sister [Waterlily] does not have to marry against her will for our sake!”33 When Waterlily shares this information with her mother that Little Chief emphasized that “men should get their own horses and not depend on the marriage of a hakata,” Blue Bird demures and then reminds Waterlily of the kindness of her uncle and her dead grandmother, telling her that “[y]ou are no longer a child. You know how these kinship matters run. If you are able to do your own thinking, you will see what a good relative would want to do . . . but that you have to decide.”34 In the end Waterlily decides to accept the horses and the marriage as a result of kinship obligations of which hakata is foremost. Kola relationships in Waterlily underscore, though less pervasively, the importance of kinship more dramatically than hakata because these relationships are chosen as adults. Men become kolapi when they decide to form a brother-to-brother relationship with each other as a result of a preexisting friendship, and this

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relationship demands the same support and generosity as that of a blood brotherhood. Rainbow and Palani are the kolapi whom Deloria highlights and uses to show the equivalence with primary kinship relations. Palani suffers and recovers from a tremendous illness, and he asks that Rainbow visit him as soon as he is able. When Rainbow and his family arrive, they are nearing the time of the Sun Dance celebration, and Palani takes advantage of this opportunity to honor Rainbow. Waterlily, Prairie Flower, and Blue Bird decide to observe the preliminary rites of the Sun Dance, including the cutting of the sacred tree, but they have difficulty because of the large crowd. Palani quickly intervenes and helps them find a spot near the front, and when the time comes for the cutting of the tree, Waterlily and Prairie Flower are chosen as two of the eight “beloveds” who will help fell it. Deloria observes that Palani “had been planning it all the while, as still another way of complimenting his special friend, Rainbow, and was prepared to make the necessary gifts for the privilege of entering his daughter and niece. For them personally it was a conspicuous honor. Those who were caused by their relatives to cut the holy tree in their youth had something to recall with pride all their days.”35 The drama of Palani’s commitment to fulfill kinship obligations to his kola Rainbow serves to show the ingrained nature of kinship in Dakota life as well as Deloria’s determination to portray its significance regardless of traditional gender restraints. Another set of narratives that can be compared with Deloria writings are those of Eli Taylor, which were recorded by Dakota historian Angela Cavender Wilson in 1992 and published in Remember This in 2005. Wilson recorded Taylor’s narratives over a period of several years as part of her dissertation. Taylor told his stories in Dakota, necessitating that Wilson’s relatives with greater fluency translate the recordings. The result is a body of traditional Dakota narratives that, although confined largely to Taylor’s experiences as an individual and a man, still share larger decolonizing ambitions with Ella Deloria’s Waterlily, Camp Circle Society, Dakota Grammar,

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and Dakota Texts that sometimes require crossing gendered boundaries of knowledge to achieve political ends. Born in the first decade of the twentieth century on the Sioux Valley reserve in Saskatchewan, Eli Taylor endured and negotiated many experiences that were hallmarks of his generation: forced residential school attendance, disruption of traditional education and worldview as a result of non-Indian education, economic privation as a result of confinement to the reserve, and a return to Dakota traditional ways after a period of struggle with internal colonization. These experiences are all part of the narratives found in Remember This, which consists of historical essays on decolonization and Dakota history by Cavender Wilson, Taylor’s narratives in their original Dakota with literal English translations, and Cavender Wilson’s responses to his remembrances. Taylor’s narratives consist of autobiography and stories that he was told and that he wants to pass along to the next generation of Dakota. Both Wilson and Taylor clearly view this project as part of an ambitious undertaking in Dakota decolonization, an attempt to recover “a precolonized state of mind.” In defining this envisioned consciousness in Dakota terms, Wilson calls it “tawacin su¡a waƒ hi±i itokab, or a strong mind before they came.”36 Taylor’s contribution to this effort is particularly important because of his identity as an individual and what can be learned from his experience: “The values and traditions of mainstream contemporary society are often difficult to reconcile with those we consider to be Dakota values and traditions. However, the oral-history project with Uƒaƒna Eli Taylor provides great hope in this area that maintaining Dakota identity in the face of colonialism is a recurring theme throughout his testimony. Story after story shows not only how the Dakota once lived but also how this Dakota elder incorporated these values and ways of being into his everyday life.”37 Without question the stories do have a transformative power that attests to decolonization and Dakota understandings of how one incorporates knowledge. In reflecting on Taylor’s own struggles with knowledge he ac-

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quires in residential school, Cavender Wilson notes “that there exists an almost physical aspect to the absorption of teachings. . . . Again, this suggests not only listening to the guidance provided in the teachings but also having them become a part of our bodies.”38 Taylor’s mother sees the changes caused in her older children by the residential school system and chooses to keep Taylor at home as long as possible, so he can be “depended” on. 39 Taylor refers to the conflict that arises within him as a result of his residential school years as “liv[ing] in two worlds,” and he carries this struggle between Eurocanadian and Dakota value systems into his adulthood when his eventual shift to Dakota traditional ways results in the end of his first marriage to an acculturated Dakota woman.40 Taylor’s sharing of his own journey through Euro-focused and tribal-focused phases in his life in the Dakota language functions immeasurably as a tool for decolonization and are an individual expression of the political work Deloria attempts in her storying of the Dakota. Although largely focused on his autobiography, Taylor also crosses gender boundaries as part of his decolonizing strategies. Taylor’s choice of a female amanuensis in Cavender Wilson diverges from more traditional approaches for recording Dakota life histories, but it remains entirely in keeping with Deloria’s own strategies that sometimes required that she speak to older Dakota men in order to acquire particular histories. Cavender Wilson observes that she was unsure whether Taylor would be willing to have her in the role of recorder as Dakota people “have some cultural norms about men relaying certain kinds of information only to other men, and women sharing only with other women.”41 Taylor’s own agenda in choosing an appropriate recorder of his decolonizing stories results in his choice, and the nature of his traditional education as a Dakota that required new strategies in order to circumvent the colonial situation acts as a precursor to this larger trend. Taylor observes that, when his mother and aunt die prematurely, his uncle steps into their role as traditional educators and culture bearers to the young Taylor. The uncle then mindfully

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imparts a body of traditional Dakota stories to Taylor so that the latter will be suitably informed of his identity. His uncle’s retelling of Dakota history and stories and the adaptation to the colonial situation that this retelling represents are critical to Taylor’s narratives as attested to by the use of the uncle’s command, “remember this,” in the book’s title. Taylor and Cavender Wilson also cross gender boundaries in the interest of providing a body of decolonized knowledge by speaking to the Dakota tradition of wiƒk¡a, or two-spirit men, and like Deloria, they cross gender boundaries in the service of decolonization. In a larger sense, Taylor’s narratives perform much the same function as Deloria’s Waterlilly, Dakota Texts, and Dakota Grammar, as well as her yet-unpublished manuscripts. Waterlily is determined in every way by the function of kinship, and Deloria fashions it as such by way of exploring all of the manifestations of kinship in order to instruct her readership as part of a decolonizing agenda. As a key cultural concept, we can easily see that kinship theoretically informs every aspect of this novel, and this epistemic function is significant because Deloria is engaged in a project of cultural recovery and revitalization. Rather than defining the self or humanity with Eurowestern terms, Deloria presents key aspects of Dakota life and painstakingly defines and reformulates humanity with a distinctively Dakota methodology, thereby engaging and fulfilling her role as a modern camp historian. So closely aligned is her work with the figure of Woyaka from Waterlily and all he embodies to Deloria that as the children of Black Eagle’s tiožpaye depart for the evening and ask him what the next stories they will hear will concern, his reply more or less encapsulates Deloria’s publications: “They will be about many different things: of how the birds taught the Dakotas to play; of how West Wind and North Wind struggled for supremacy until West Wind emerged victorious. You shall hear also the story of Iron Hawk, the wonder-man of the east, and of Falling Star, the hero, and of the first man

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and woman to inhabit our world.” He added, with one of his rare chuckles, “And such a time as their son had in managing his wives, Corn-woman and Buffalo-woman! For they were jealous of each other. It is from the son of the Buffalo-woman that we roving Tetons come. Is it any wonder that we love our buffalo brothers who sustain us so patiently? While they live we shall not die.” And the children went home singing, “While the Buffalo live we shall not die!”42 Many of these stories are recorded, of course, in Dakota Texts and the Rice-edited collections such as Deer Woman and Elk Men, The Buffalo People, and Iron Hawk, and Deloria clearly aligns herself with Woyaka’s embodiment of the tribe’s history and bodies of knowledge. This affiliation can be seen in Woyaka’s final words that invoke the Teton kinship with the buffalo. This relationship underscores Deloria’s own vital cultural work in exploring and studying the critical implications of a life of kinship. As Rice writes of Woyaka, “by reciting winter counts, myths, legends, and true stories, he creates the tribe in words,”43 by extension so does Ella Deloria in her revitalization of keeping camp histories for the purposes of decolonization.

CHAPTER FIV E

A Gendered Future Wi and Haƒwi in Contemporary Dakota Writing

Concepts of masculine and feminine principles are emic to numerous Indigenous oral traditions from the Haudenosaunee Sky Woman and Holder of the Heavens to Grandmother Moon and Grandfather Sun in Aztec tradition. These principles inform many traditional and contemporary Native American texts, as Kimberly Roppolo has suggested in “Collating Divergent Discourses.” Among contemporary Dakota authors, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Philip Red Eagle particularly invoke and deploy aspects of these gendered principles in their decolonizing narratives of healing, and these feminine and masculine archetypes are remembered and vivified in their epistemic debt to the Dakota oral tradition of creation. According to the Dakota oral tradition, in the beginning there was iƒyaƒ, the rock, who was all alone except for haƒhepi, the darkness, which surrounded iƒyaƒ. Iƒyaƒ wanted another entity to exercise its power over it, but the rock had to create that entity from its own lifestuff, and therefore iƒyaƒ took its own power and blood and formed a disk called maka, the earth. Iƒyaƒ also formed the waters and the sky maŸpiyato, with its blood. The creation of maka and maŸpiyato required so much blood that iƒyaƒ was

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drained completely and became hard and shriveled. After quarrels between maka and haƒhepi, maŸpiyato banished haƒhepi to the underworld and made aƒpetu, or day. Maka was unhappy because she was attached to iƒyaƒ perpetually, so in order to assuage her distress, maŸpiyato created wi, sun or moon, to clothe and warm maka. Marla Powers writes that the term Wi is essentially a female marker, and even today the term wi stands for both sun and moon, the two being distinguished by the qualifiers Anpetu Wi “sun,” that is day or light wi, and Hanhepi Wi “moon,” that is, night or dark wi. Here we see a symbolic replication: just as Inyan, in the beginning sexually undifferentiated, created out of itself both male and female properties [maka and maŸpiyato], we later see in the origin myth, the creation of the sun and the moon, again out of an undifferentiated wi. But wi signifies female and is in fact terminologically related to winyan “woman.” In the Dakota oral tradition the roles of wi and haƒwi are fundamentally interrelated. Aƒpetu wi rules the daytime, and haƒwi predominates during the night. It is aƒpetu wi who is celebrated each August in the Sun Dance, and it is haƒwi who rules the women’s monthly cycles that in turn determine women’s ability to participate in ceremonies such as the Sun Dance. At the root we see that these two figures represent masculine and feminine principles, although their original source is without gender.1 Given the imposition of Eurowestern education and religion on the Dakota people, the fundamental balance between wi and haƒwi has been upset. Eurowestern influence has served to displace the role of women in Dakota society and has encouraged the proliferation of a number of practices that fly in the face of traditional values: domestic violence, elder abuse, child abuse, and alcoholism. At heart many of these societal ills are linked to the denial of the feminine principle by the missionaries and educators who infiltrated Dakota lands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are

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numerous efforts to rectify this imbalance, including domestic violence shelters and tribally centered treatment programs, and these efforts to heal and return to traditional understandings of gender are mirrored in many contemporary Dakota writers’ fiction. In Sacred Hoop (1986) Laguna/Lakota scholar Paula Gunn Allen defines and historicizes the gynocracy that organized most Native American societies prior to contact. She observes that “[t]raditional tribal lifestyles are more often gynocratic than not, and they are never patriarchal.” She then describes the characteristics of tribal gynocracy from nurturing and pacifism to even distribution of goods and social responsibility.2 Sacred Hoop was and is a landmark study of Native American women’s central roles in tribal society, and Allen correctly draws attention to the gendered cultural genocide committed in the flesh and in the historical record. Simultaneously, the figure of the Native male also has been a consistent source of settler anxiety, and Dakota fiction writers, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Philip Red Eagle, address the interplay between Native women and men’s oppression in ways not fully elucidated by a strictly gynocentric approach. Allen’s concept of gynocritical readings constituted a vital intervention in Native American literary studies that continues to provide useful readings particularly of dominant narratives of Indigenous identity and experience; however, increasing numbers of works by Native American writers from Leslie Marmon Silko and LeAnne Howe to Susan Power and Gordon Henry draw our attention to a greater need for gender balance in readings that aspire to undo colonialism. In an essay that addresses the American fascination with lone pubescent female Indian figures (i.e., Pocahontas, Sacajawea, and so forth), Cook-Lynn makes a critical observation about the connections between feminine and masculine principles in Indigenous thinking: For myself, I am reluctant to forget about anpetu wi (just as I am reluctant to talk of Wounded Knee in terms of metaphor), for I know that without anpetu wi, the Indigenous male presence, Mother Earth is a silent, barren place of death. . . .

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I want to ask about the utter disregard of this maleness as it is dismissed by the colonists of the past and the present in favor of the mother goddess as lone repositor of history. For those who have prayed to tunkashinayapi, or grandfathers, there is the certain knowledge that the earth’s survival is not possible without those Indigenous male figures, those rights of possession, that occupancy, that vision. . . . I would like to suggest, also, that there are at least two unexamined moral axioms in this argument that have kept the audience we have clamoring to hear more of the theory of the female-Indigenous receptacle of the colonist’s seed. The first is that there is no male seed which is Indigenous; it has, as expected, vanished. The second is that even if there were such a survivor, he is not deserving, and he must not, therefore, be allowed to compete for his own life either historically or imaginatively.3 While the presence of aƒpetu wi was uncontested at one point in time, the Dakotapi masculine principle has suffered from harsh colonial policies as much as its feminine counterpart, which has received far greater mainstream recognition. While Eurowestern eyes more readily perceive the sublimation of the female in Dakota life, few are able to acknowledge the ways in which Dakota men have suffered too; this acknowledgement of the displacement of the feminine has its roots in historical arguments that understood the supposedly elevated, yet truly disempowered status of Eurowestern women as a marker of true civilization. As part of revitalizing these masculine and feminine principles on a continuum of Dakota thought, a number of Dakota fiction writers have picked up on the images of aƒpetu wi and haƒwi in their recent works by way of seeking restitution to power for both figures. In Red Earth Philip Red Eagle addresses the attacks on Dakota masculinity in two novellas that portray the experiences of Vietnam veterans, and Red Eagle struggles to rebuild these male characters’ psyches and thereby aƒpetu wi while attending to

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the linked colonial devastation of Indigenous women. In Aurelia Elizabeth Cook-Lynn traces the struggles of the title character, an allegorical figure for Corn Woman, who resists taking on the role of an adult woman in Dakota society because of its colonial complications and concomitant devaluation. As Cook-Lynn stills Aurelia Two Heart Blue’s yumni, or whirlwind nature, erasing a near-unstoppable pattern of avoidance set in motion by Aurelia’s childhood rape by her mother’s white husband, Cook-Lynn insistently writes from a perspective sympathetic to Dakota masculinist concerns and crafts an adult lifepath for Aurelia that does not destabilize an already battered Dakota manhood. Red Eagle’s formula for resuscitating Dakota masculinity is critically dependent upon simultaneously rectifying colonial injustices against Indigenous women, and he positions himself as an author speaking from his own experience as a Vietnam veteran. Born in Tacoma, Washington, on February 16, 1945, to Philip Red Eagle (Mdewakaƒtoƒ/Yankton/Sisituƒwaƒ-WaŸ±etuƒwaƒ) and Mary Ann Steilacoom (Steilacoom/S’Klallam), Red Eagle grew up in the Pacific Northwest and graduated from high school in Sitka, Alaska, in 1963. He served in the army from 1969 to 1972, first in the West Pacific on the uss Sommers and next as a riverboat mechanic in Vietnam. He later pursued two degrees at the University of Washington, a bfa in metal design (1983) and a ba in editorial journalism with minors in Native American studies, art photography, and photojournalism. His photos have appeared in numerous publications as well as in gallery exhibits. Red Eagle has published poetry, essays, fiction, and reviews in numerous venues, and in 1990 he cofounded The Raven Chronicles: Multicultural Journal of Art, Literature, and the Spoken Word. In 1997 he published Red Earth that takes a candid look at the brutal experiences of Native American Vietnam veterans and their struggles to heal psychologically and spiritually from the war in an era when tribal ceremonies of return have fallen into disuse. Scholar Karren Baird-Olson has lauded Red Eagle’s first book as the Indigenous equivalent of The Red Badge of Courage, her praise suggesting the

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vitality and insight this collection brings to the existing body of Native American literature.4 The concept of traditional culture as healer is one that is woven throughout Red Eagle’s two Vietnam novellas, “Red Earth” and “Bois de Sioux.” In a 1998 review of Red Earth Craig Womack writes that Red Eagle’s “search for meaning lies . . . in tribal vision,” not in “battle experience” or “consolation in war.”5 In fact, recovery through reconnecting to traditional culture and spirituality is the primary method by which Red Eagle’s characters are able to heal themselves and thereby rectify the abuses to the masculine principle or aƒpetu wi, perpetrated by colonialism. For Red Eagle his protagonists’ primary motivation is to heal themselves, to rid themselves of their psychospiritual war wounds, and their success in recovery depends entirely on their ability to rebalance masculine and feminine principles: women are essential to the warrior’s recovery. In “Race, Feminine Power, and the Vietnam War in Red Earth,” Scott Andrews argues that the novella “Red Earth” differs from other Vietnam-era literature in acknowledging “the necessary interdependency between male and female roles” and “avoid[ing] the misogynistic dynamics” common to these war narratives; this prescient argument can easily be extended to the second novella “Bois de Sioux.”6 In “Bois de Sioux” Red Eagle tells the story of two men, Clifford Goes First, a full-blood Dakota, and James Hailstone, a full-blood of mixed Dakota and Salish descent nicknamed Stoney. Clifford serves as an example of a warrior who is unable to reconcile with haƒwi as a result of war atrocities he is forced to commit during his service in Vietnam. As Baird-Olson succinctly observes, “Although Red Eagle recognizes the important role of traditional spirituality in rebuilding lives, he does not fool himself or his readers by pretending that this path has been enough in every man’s life.”7 Clifford Goes First truly walks ahead of James Hailstone in the role of cultural expert and trainer: he bears culture for Stoney who has been separated from his Dakota ancestry through such actions as being taught how to traditional dance to “Satisfaction.”8 He is

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also the “Mojo-man” for his unit, “the guy they counted on to get them through the shit.”9 Simultaneously, Clifford is deeply wounded as a result of a terrible event during his time in Vietnam. We learn with Stoney that Clifford was forced by his commanding officers to shoot Vietnamese women and children, a terrible crime by Dakota standards. Clifford instructs Stoney, “if they tell you to kill the kids, don’t do it. I did it and it felt like shit killin’ them kids. . . . Don’t kill them women neither. . . . No one knows, Stoney. They put the hush on.”10 In many ways the greatest violence perpetrated against Clifford is this silence: his commanding officers force him to be silent about the crimes he committed. When Clifford returns home, he finds little help. His father refuses to talk with him about his experiences in WWII, and his grandfather, who had promised to help him return to Dakota society and who had taught him the old ways, is ill and dies within days of his arrival. On his death Clifford’s grandfather, who represents a holistic approach to returning after war, takes the traditional strategies for reentry and healing with him, leaving Clifford with no one to hear the stories he desperately needs to tell. Clifford’s problem is made clear by Red Eagle at the novella’s beginning: “Clifford Goes First was in a dilemma. Home was not what he hoped it would be. . . . The connections were not working. He tried everything that he could, all of the old rituals and ceremonies. . . . It was those damn women and children. It was those damn Wažicus that made him do those terrible things in Nam.”11 The remainder of the novella explores numerous variations of this sentiment: Clifford tries to recover, but he has no avenue for rectifying his crimes against the feminine principle. Although James is involved with a Vietnamese woman during his time in Vietnam, which seems to foreshadow his eventual reintegration into mainstream life, Clifford himself has no substantive ties to women in Vietnam or at home in Wahpeton. The end of the story, after Clifford’s suicide, leaves the reader with the suggestion that

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James is now ready to begin his healing, but Red Eagle implies that his road may be long. In contrast, in the other novella “Red Earth” Red Eagle creates a character, Raymond Crow Belt, who survives Vietnam and is able to reintegrate masculine and feminine principles and to refuse the victimry offered by colonialism. Like Clifford and James, Raymond is clearly damaged as a human and as a man by his Vietnam experience: Red Eagle thoroughly explores the dehumanizing process that Raymond must endure. Raymond feels both exhilarated and marred by battle, and when he returns to the Other World after the war, he cannot forget the fighting or rejoin mainstream society. Like Clifford Goes First, Raymond Crow Belt has a significant grandfather figure who represents traditional thought and warrior reintegration and who passes before Raymond can seek his assistance in reentering the tribal circle. Unlike Clifford, Raymond is able to meet his grandfather in a visionary state and to receive guidance from him from that helps him heal in the present. (When Clifford sees his grandfather in a vision, the latter is calling the veteran to the other side, which seems to be Clifford’s only hope for peace.) Additionally, three female characters provide vital assistance in Raymond’s recovery from the war: Phoung, his Vietnamese lover whose death haunts him; Annabelle LeBeaux, an Anishinaabe nurse who tends him on two occasions during his service; and the Blue Sky woman, a Dakota spiritual figure who visits him in dreams and intervenes on his behalf in day-to-day life. There is a possible fourth female, a spiritual figure that strongly resembles Blue Sky Woman, though she is dressed in white rather than her original blue, and because of her role, I assume her to be another manifestation of Blue Sky Woman. Illustrating the centrality of women to a warrior’s return, Raymond is unable to forget Phoung’s execution at the hand of Arvins, and he crafts his own healing ceremony by returning to Vietnam under an alias, Gary Ghost Bear, and travels across time and space in an attempt to change the course of events. Part of Raymond’s ability to heal is his own entwinement and commingling of Vietnamese and Oklahoman “red earth”; he envi-

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sions the red circles of the helicopter landing pads as portals between the worlds of war and home and is able to travel across time through them. His own recognition of the shared fates of “Indian country” in North America and Southeast Asia also differentiates him from Clifford, for Raymond is able to see beyond the war.12 In fact, Blue Sky Woman instructs Raymond to utilize these chopper circles as a ceremonial space, representing “another way” instead of “break[ing] into pieces” like the other men, and she gives him specific instructions for how to pray, thus further supporting the link between the feminine and masculine recovery: “On his knees he prayed to the Grandfather, the Sun, Wi, when he rose to the east, and to his Grandmother, Maka, the Earth.”13 Because Phoung is brutally murdered by Arvins who interrogate her during Tet in her home village, when Raymond returns as Gary Ghost Bear, he entreats her not to go home for Tet. During his visit with Phoung, they have a phenomenally healing lovemaking session that seems to rectify all the wrongs perpetrated in Vietnam: “It was as if all that time hadn’t passed. It was as if all that pain hadn’t happened. He felt reborn and he cried.”14 Raymond nevertheless recognizes that he will never know what truly happens to Phoung after he returns to the present, twenty years after his return from Vietnam. For Red Eagle Phoung and the other “red clay girls” of Vietnam are equivocated both with Native women from home, with the Vietnamese earth which has been wounded and marred by the war, and with Indigenous lands in the United States; however, the red earth of Vietnam can kill and thus alienates Raymond from the Indigenous feminine principle that pervades Raymond’s experience at home and abroad until he is able to travel across time and see Phoung once more.15 While in Vietnam as Ghost Bear, Raymond also meets the Anish nurse Anna LeBeaux, and she becomes one of the connecting threads that allows him to return fully to the United States. Although Raymond has no memory of her, she cares for him and cries beside him during the night while he is unconscious from his injuries. She tells Raymond when he returns as Ghost Bear

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that “I would come over here and sit at night and cry. Not for him, for me. For being here. He [Raymond] laid there and listened. I needed that; to be next to someone that looked like him, like me, someone from my world.”16 Anna makes it her special mission to take care of the Native American gis who come through the hospital because she knows they will probably be overlooked by white nurses, but she herself needs support and respite, which Raymond unconsciously provides. Part of the resuscitation of the masculine principle, therefore, also involves healing the feminine principle. She needs someone to serve as a spiritual anchor, to take on the role of inyan, and Raymond is able to do this for her, although when they first meet in Vietnam she dismisses him as “weird” for practicing traditional spirituality.17 Ultimately, Anna desperately needs the connection to the Dakota worldview and spiritual sustenance that Raymond’s prayer and ceremony represent, as is evidenced by Anna showing Gary Raymond’s prayer bundles hanging from a tree when he returns. Raymond’s ability to reintegrate is also foreshadowed by the figure of Blue Sky Woman, as Raymond names her, who comes to Raymond in dreams and teaches him how to smoke tobacco and make offerings. She is a counterpart to Raymond’s grandfather, who stands for all of the Dakota tunkashinayapi and her presence affirms the feminine principle’s role in Raymond’s life. At the same time, because she is a female figure associated with a masculine Dakota symbol, the sky, or maŸpiya, she represents the healthy reintegration of masculine and feminine principles. Andrews argues convincingly that Blue Sky Woman dually symbolizes woŸpe, daughter of žkan, as well as the White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman.18 One of woŸpe’s most important roles is that of harmonizer as she is the one who originally brought the four directions into proper relationship to her. Here I would add that the feminine principle has many articulations and figures in Dakota epistemology, and Red Eagle clearly pulls from a wealth of cultural material in exploring how Dakota veterans need to seek balance upon return. At the end of

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the novella Raymond returns from his time travel to Vietnam and finds Anna, completing the circle and signaling that the healing is complete for both of them. Like Red Eagle, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has also explored this concern with rectifying imbalance between the masculine and feminine principles in her fiction. Also of Dakota descent, Cook-Lynn was born in 1930 in Fort Thompson, South Dakota, into a family of tribal politicians and educators. She attended undergraduate at South Dakota State College, and earned a ba in English and Journalism in 1952. She later pursued graduate studies at University of South Dakota where she earned a master’s in educational psychology and counseling in 1971. She was a professor at Eastern Washington University, where she taught English and Indian studies until she retired to write full-time in 1990. Cook-Lynn has been a crucial force in Native American studies, helping found the Wicazo Sa Review, a scholarly journal devoted to privileging the emic perspective in Native studies and serving as a consultant for such projects as building a Native American studies curriculum at Arizona State University. She also has published several collections of critical essays on American Indian topics: Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner (1996), The Politics of Hallowed Ground (1998), and Anti-Indianism in Modern America (2001), among others. Her first book was Then Badger Said This (1977), a satiric response to N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968), which includes poems, stories, and songs. She has published two poetry collections, Seek the House of the Relatives (1983) and I Remember the Fallen Trees (1998), and a short story collection The Power of Horses (1990). Her work has been marked by a commitment to community and a desire to make scholarship relevant to the Dakota people, and her collaboration with other Dakota writers on Woyake Kinikiya: A Tribal Model Literary Journal (1994) illustrates her passions. Like Red Eagle, Cook-Lynn is concerned with the damage perpetrated by colonialism against Native Americans, but she focuses upon the wreckage on reservations rather than abroad and on

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colonialism at home, not in diaspora, although she clearly hopes to generate an international awareness of the crimes against the Dakotas. These concerns are present in Aurelia, a trilogy that follows the life of Aurelia Two Heart Blue, a Crow Creek Dakota, across the decades of her youth to her motherhood and maturity. As reviewer Cheryl Bennett notes, the trilogy “both portrays the harsh realities of reservation life and demonstrates how the stabilizing force of family and love can sustain a woman and a community through their darkest hours.”19 The first novel of the trilogy, From the River’s Edge (1991), centers around the crisis of the theft of John Tatekeya’s cattle and the intransigence of the federal government in dealing equitably with this loss. Aurelia plays a prominent role as Tatekeya’s lover, but she will leave him by the end of the novel. In Circle of Dancers (1999), the second novel, Aurelia becomes pregnant with Jason Big Pipe’s child, and she faces a major internal conflict over accepting the young Jason as her husband and taking on the adult Dakota role for women. Aurelia eventually submits to this role, but by the end of the novel her relationship with Jason is clearly doomed to end. In the third novel, In the Presence of River Gods (1999), attempts to salvage some hope for the Dakota in the face of the damage chronicled by Cook-Lynn in the earlier novels. Aurelia takes her two children, Blue and Sarah, and leaves Jason on the pretense of caring for her dying grandmother. Aurelia finally confronts Jason with the admission that she has no plans to return to him, and she appears to be forging the foundation for a new relationship with Hermist Grey Bull, a single father who is Aurelia’s contemporary. Woven throughout these three novels are concerns with the destruction of the mni sose, or Missouri River, the lifeline of the Dakota peoples, and the concomitant depredations against Dakotas by the local white community. The end result is an equation of the river and its history with the survival of the Dakota people as embodied by the assaulted Dakota women whose violators will one day be punished. Cook-Lynn is consistently clear that Dakota women are degraded by outsiders and by some insiders, and while this matter is

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a pressing concern, Dakota men have also been assaulted and need to be assisted in recovering as well. In an essay on From the River’s Edge critic James Stripes observes that the novel’s “complexity is easily missed by readers who lack exposure to legal discourse or Indigenous traditions [emphasis mine], and I would extend that comment to include the whole of Cook-Lynn’s trilogy as well as Red Eagle’s novellas.”20 Consequently, a consideration of both sets of texts in the larger context of Dakota masculine and feminine principles will elucidate their meaning in a neocolonial era. In the Cook-Lynn’s trilogy Aurelia is the central figure around which a number of significant events occur. The author tells us early in Circle of Dancers that Aurelia is a carrier of culture, of history, and that she is never a central actor in larger events but instead is a witness: “Aurelia grew up with many such memories of a changing world, as a rather isolated member of a large and cumbersome Dakotah family, individually noted as one who remembered things ‘far back,’ things that could sometimes be called the simple minutiae of uneventful lives. . . . During the better times, she could recall the things that were of the most historical and profound interest to her people.”21 As a further expression of her role as witness and conduit of history, Aurelia comes to stand for the Dakota Corn Mother through her role as a tribal historian and storyteller. In Circle of Dancers Aurelia has a seminal memory of her yellow taffeta eighth-grade graduation dress that becomes interwoven with a memory of an assault on her cousin Corrine who is wearing a similar dress. When Aurelia is eight years old, she witnesses her newlywed cousin Corrine being assaulted by her husband Stanley: “Indelibly, Aurelia’s vision of the grim event placed itself in her consciousness, but she did not know then that it would stay there forever, a clinging abomination that would feed unreasonable fears for years and years. She did not know then that her future relationships with others would bear the knowledge of this silent image.”22 With a desire to avoid this horrible relationship pattern, Aurelia vows “to be an old maid, unmarried and alone, free and isolated, unsurrendered to passion.” This desire fuels the impulse

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that leads her to the affair with Tatekeya by way of avoiding her role as a Dakota woman and thereby a wife. Aurelia reflects, “A woman’s childbearing and marriage were serious, serious business to the Dakotahs. She knew now that it was sacred business from which only a few escaped.”23 Aurelia’s relationship with Tatekeya becomes a symbol of her yumni nature, although he is paradoxically “her strongest link to the communal past,” as noted by Kathleen Danker,24 and although CookLynn only reveals the fundamental trauma underlying Aurelia’s haunting by the yellow dress memory. Midway through Circle of Dancers, in a rare passage, Aurelia speaks directly to the reader: When I visited the Two Hearts [her mother’s people], I hid behind the bed in the back room as the drunken parties went on, and on, sometimes for days. Eventually, I would get thirsty and would have to come out. Slowly. Carefully. I would creep carefully around the kitchen table to avoid the rough, grasping hands of the man at the table, boozing with my mother. One time, I did not escape the fat, freckled hands. It was then that I found out that prayers are not answered. . . . I have come to see myself as “the one who cannot pray.” I have told no one of this event. . . . At the time of the old Two Heart woman’s funeral [Aurelia’s grandmother’s funeral] so many years ago, then, it must be said that Aurelia had been a young woman with many secrets. Secrets that made her an orphan. Wayward. The yumni child, going around in circles.25 Aurelia’s recitation of her childhood history with her mother, Myrna Two Heart Blue, who left Aurelia’s tribal father to live in “the scrubby little cow and turkey towns nearby, which were filled with white people whose ancestors had always hated Indians,” shows that her avoidance of a traditional relationship with a Dakota man depends not so much upon witnessing domestic violence perpetrated by Native men but by surviving sexual assault at the hands of her mother’s white husband. This rape annuls her ability to

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take on her traditional role until she is physically trapped by her pregnancy with Blue. As a child Aurelia’s grandmother reminds her of her role as a Dakota by saying, “The woman with the yellow dress, you know, talked the people into come here to the Big Bend in the Missouri River. And she give them corn seeds. . . . You cannot hide beneath your dress, you know. You have to do your part.”26 The woman who brings the Dakota to the Big Bend is the Corn Woman, and the yellow dress that Aurelia so fears becomes entwined, not just with Corinne and Stanley’s failed marriage, but with Aurelia’s larger role as a woman in Dakota society, a successful, living embodiment of the Corn Woman. The Corn Woman connects the Dakota to the river and thereby to their life source and history. The Corn Woman also functions as an exemplar of the unique habitat of river life that has been destroyed by the damming of the river; she is associated with a lifeway firmly intact before the Pick-Sloan Act, one embodied in the planting of corn and other crops in the rich floodplains of the mni sose. Equally important to the Corn Woman and the feminine principle, however, are the role of men and their relationship to the masculine principle. John Tatekeya, the old man whom Aurelia takes as a lover, is a symbol of the old ways and knowledge because he remembers stories that only Aurelia’s grandmother knows and teaches to her. Very few other characters in the trilogy share this same carefully tended wisdom. Tatekeya’s name translates to “windbelongs-to-him,” according to Cook-Lynn, or “wind speaker,” as Barbara Feezor Buttes translates it.27 The theft of his cattle and his subsequent struggle to attain just compensation for their loss thus wed him to the land and its fate, and his name suggests that he moves over the land much as Tate, the wind, does. Although Tatekeya no longer possesses his cattle, he has the powers and the strength of the winds and therefore the Four Directions, and his connection to the winds also make him a suitable tender to Aurelia as she recovers from her yumni avoidance. The trilogy also suggests a positive resolution to the conflict that

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Tatekeya presents: he is a man who has been “dehorned” by the theft of his cattle. He is replaced in Aurelia’s life by Jason who is the brother to the cattle thief and who helps protect that brother from punishment. Although Aurelia meets community expectations to some degree by marrying Jason, matters are still not entirely righted by this act. Aurelia fulfills her role in the community by marrying a man who has left the river’s edge and the river gods; as a result there is foreshadowing that she will eventually leave him. Although Jason is not so estranged from Dakota life that he has ceased to be a relative like his brother Sheridan, who literally disappears to a secret new life in Houston, Jason is marred by a silence that has been imposed by his service in Vietnam: he, to some degree, upholds colonial victimry through his silence. Hence, Aurelia inevitably leaves Jason, a silent and mysterious man, who contrasts sharply with Tatekeya, a repository of the oral tradition and a man with something to say, although he is certainly compromised by his liaison with Aurelia. Eventually Aurelia finds in Hermist Grey Bull someone who is not too much her senior or her junior. Hermist is a unique man insofar as he “had proven himself a sort of reluctant role model as a single father for years. People respected him because he had not just given up his two boys to his female relatives to raise.”28 Hermist thus represents a fully present and developed manifestation of the masculine principle. Although Cook-Lynn is clear that woman-raised children still have the influence of their uncles and grandfathers, Hermist forges a role that few men around him are able to claim. He in turn foreshadows the likelihood that more men will. In considering the theme of communication and silences, Hermist’s name is also very significant as he bears a message and is therefore strongly associated with the realm of words in which Aurelia, the storyteller, feels most comfortable. Jason, on the other hand, is surrounded by troubling silence; there is no communication between Aurelia and Jason that is substantive, and this lack of communication links Jason with larger societal ills caused by

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colonialism. Aurelia’s connection to the Dakota oral history, lifeway, and epistemology demand that her partner be able to pose the relevant questions, as Tatekeya once was able to do: “The trial and the [setting fire to Tatekeya’s home], events which seemed to be, in her mind, as inevitable as any of the events she had ever witnessed, rendered the questions she and John had posed together irrelevant. . . . [T]he questions no longer mattered.”29 This passage marks Aurelia’s ultimate disillusionment at the end of From the River’s Edge. However, by the end of In the Presence of the River Gods she has recovered enough to engage Hermist in the vital and primary dialogue she once enjoyed with Tatekeya. Nevertheless, as Elaine Jahner contends, Aurelia does not view “any part of the traditional heritage as some sort of formulaic pat answer to contemporary questioning.”30 In reflecting on the disappearance of a young Indian woman that dominates In the Presence of River Gods, Cook-Lynn clearly entwines silence and colonial oppression when the body of a missing young woman is found: “They all knew who it was. They all knew it was the missing Indian girl, missing all winter, since last May. . . . In a way, it represented the kind of crime well known to Indian people all across America: the thefts of land that are never acknowledged nor settled, the claims that fall into deep silence for decades, the failures in attempting to find answers to the simplest questions, the lack of appropriate solutions. Mysterious deaths and silences were nothing new here.”31 The river of life and origin that the girl is found in is also the river that has been murdered by the Pick-Sloan Act. The Missouri carries the history of the people, and when the girl’s body is tossed into it, her murderers provide the ultimate sign that the white South Dakotans are a people without history or, as Cook-Lynn puts it, a people without fathers. This act, too, constitutes a profound insult to a people originally known as ho§anasinsinotonwan, which “connected the Sissetons to the fish, suggesting shiny fish-like scales,”32 and its related, modernized term Sisitonwan, literally translating as “dwellers of the fish ground.”33

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Jason’s nephew Philip reflects upon fatherhood: “The Sioux must find our origins by looking ahead, not behind us. We know who our mothers and our fathers are. We’re not like some who claim not to know who their father are. . . .” He had been talking to his fellow tribesmen about the nature of the Sioux world and its connection to the fathers of the Sioux universe. “We know our fathers. . . . We do not seek them like these immigrants do and like their descendants do. Our fathers are all around us.” Knowing one’s identity and one’s history are firmly equated here with knowing one’s relations and specifically with knowing one’s fathers. Thus, any recovery of history is dependent upon the full integration of the masculine principle, and for Philip, having a direct relationship with one’s literal biological father is not what most matters but rather having substantive relations with other father figures. Cook-Lynn observes, “To some it may have seemed like an odd paradox, since his mother, Clarissa, had rid herself of his father years ago and he, Philip, was one of the many who grew up with uncles and grandfathers instead of a father. . . . It was no paradox to him, though. He knew the men in his family as intimately as he knew any familial relationship, and he held that knowledge in great regard.”34 According to Cook-Lynn, Aurelia and those around her, while embattled by struggles with a colonialist government and a predatory non-Indian community, are able to recover a sense of identity by reviving the feminine and masculine principles. Blue, the name of Aurelia’s son, affirms that this revivification is true: his name MaŸpiyato means “blue sky” and is a masculine symbol in the Dakota cosmology. His circumstances illustrate that the coming generation will continue to struggle, but his name affirms that they will have recovered a firmer sense of who their fathers are. Jason’s generation, though scarred by the Vietnam War experience, will have some survivors, and they will serve as the fathers

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for this coming generation. Boys such as Blue will grow into men and bring their own sense of balance to the community as adults. The placement of hope for resolution and recovery in the hands of the coming generation marks what Elaine Jahner refers to as Cook-Lynn’s hesitance to “imply easy solutions to very real contemporary problems.”35 Both Red Eagle and Cook-Lynn clearly view the resuscitation of masculine and feminine principles as firmly entwined with a resistant agenda. The damage incurred to traditional understandings and embodiments of these elements was caused by colonialism. Red Eagle’s project provides a masculine perspective on this process, whereas Cook-Lynn’s novels provide a feminine perspective. Both writers, however, agree that both genders have been attacked by colonialist notions of Nativeness, and the rebuilding of these knowledges and the way they are realized in day-to-day living is dependent upon attending to both: mothers and fathers must both be included. Over the last decade Red Eagle has been deeply involved in Northwestern Native cultural recovery projects, including a program called Canoe Nations that focuses on reclaiming traditional canoe artisanship and use. Red Eagle is “primarily concerned with using the canoe as a mechanism in which to bring about cultural change among the tribes and to bring the notion of traditional ideas to bring about healing and pride among Native youth.”36 Both Red Earth and Aurelia clearly seek to effect this sort of social healing through the rebalancing of Indigenous feminine and masculine principles in their narratives.

CHAPTER SIX

Tribal Theory Travels Kanien’kehaka Poet Maurice Kenny and the Gantowisas

By examining in this study a body of Dakota texts from different times and places across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have tried to establish a relationship of internal coherence between each author and the Dakota intellectual tradition as she or he understands it. My intention has not been to delineate a monolithic, ever-present, and unchanging Dakota worldview, nor to present a comprehensive study of all Dakota literature but instead to show that, particularly for the early authors, while we may focus on the Euroamerican generic strategies that are most familiar to those trained in the academy, each of these authors is consistently articulating a connection to Dakota modes of thought and expressing her or his understanding of that traditional lifeway and its storied existence as a counternarrative or even as a canonical narrative. Each author, moreover, uses these Dakota epistemological threads to create arguments about Dakota tiožpaye, survivance, worldviews, lifeways, and ways of knowing and to affirm the continuity of these traditions vis-à-vis his or her own narrative. The range of these expressions is truly stunning in its variety and positionalities, but what I have tried to demonstrate is that our understanding of

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these texts is enriched by placing these authors within their own tribal intellectual traditions in ways not fully explored in the past. Contemporary scholars are quick to recognize that Cook-Lynn and Red Eagle are demanding that we read them on these terms, but the acknowledgement has been slow in arriving that Marie McLaughlin, for instance, insists on the same kind of gloss or that her writing makes these kinds of demands upon us as readers. While this culture-centered approach has been established as vital to a particular set of Dakota texts, I would like to argue that we might pursue similar readings of works by other Native American authors. This type of reading is not exclusive, does not claim an absolute superiority over other approaches, but this kind of Indigenous framework irrefutably opens up intellectual territory that has been ignored in the past. For early writers such as Eastman, Bonnin, McLaughlin, and Deloria, placing their intellectual practices along a Dakota continuum is a critical part of understanding their work because they have so often been assumed to be at one far pale end of that spectrum of tribal thought. The time has come to recognize, as Tom Holm has argued, that “progressive” and “traditional” thinkers at the turn of the century simply did not diverge as dramatically as previously believed.1 An example of a parallel project might be an investigation of Haudenosaunee authors Pauline Johnson, Jesse Cornplanter, and Daniel LaFrance, with a consideration of how their work invokes and reformulates treaty discourse through wampum tropes or affirms Indigenous knowledges through its discussion of traditional medicines. A more contemporary approach might include Ongwe Onwe writers Roberta Hill, Beth Brant, and Maurice Kenny and might consider how longhouse philosophies are inflected in their writing. The publications of accomplished poet, autobiographer, and publisher/editor Maurice Kenny provide a unique illustration of tribal theory’s manifestations in non-Dakota traditions. Abenaki author Joseph Bruchac has observed that “it would be difficult to imagine the shape of contemporary Native American writing without the presence of Maurice Kenny,” a statement that under-

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scores the rationale for choosing Kenny from a sizeable corpus of Haudenosaunee literature.2 Maurice Kenny was born in 1929 in Cape Vincent, New York, just outside of Watertown, to Andrew and Doris Kenny. Kenny was the youngest in a family of three children and suffered considerably from allergies as a child, which resulted in a constant feeling of being an outsider. Despite this malaise, Kenny’s father, who was simultaneously a proud Mohawk and an Irish nationalist, instilled a Kanien’kehaka worldview in Kenny from an early age. As Kenny describes it, Andrew Kenny took him everywhere hunting and fishing, and he literally “taught [his son] the rivers and streams.”3 Kenny showed a predilection for writing by the age of ten, publishing extensive letters to the editor in the local newspaper The Watertown Daily. In these letters he engaged in political debates with the publication’s owner, John Johnson. Kenny later attended Butler University and published his first collections of poetry during the following years: The Hopeless Kill (1956), Dead Letters Sent and Other Poems (1958), and With Love to Lesbia (1960). These early collections reflected his traditional study with Douglas Angus and were modeled after Euroamerican literary masters such as John Crowe Ransom. Kenny would, however, eventually encounter Louise Bogan at New York University as a master’s student, and this meeting would forever alter the vein in which he wrote. Bogan encouraged Kenny to write about what he knew, his own life experiences. This new direction necessarily led Kenny to Kanien’kehaka territory and familial identity. Writing from a Kanien’kehaka worldview, Kenny produced a number of volumes of verse, including I Am the Sun (1976), Dancing Back Strong the Nation (1979), Only as Far as Brooklyn (1981), Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues (1982), The Mama Poems (1984), Is Summer This Bear (1985), Between Two Rivers (1987), Greyhounding This America (1988), Rain and Other Fictions (1997), Last Mornings in Brooklyn (1991), Tekonwatonti: Molly Brant (1992), On Second Thought (1995), Backward to Forward (1997), In the Time of the Present (2000), Tortured Skins and Other Fictions (2000), and Carving Hawk (2002). This far-ranging oeuvre encompasses themes

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of genocide, Indigenous resistance, urban Indian-experienced Two Spirit identity, Plains to Eastern Woodlands cultures, historical revision, environmental concerns, and tribal economic critique. All of these concerns converge in Tekonwatonti: Molly Brant (1992) and Blackrobe: Isaac Jogues (1982), two collections of persona poems that function as veritable companion pieces, with a decidedly Haudenosaunee epistemic lens. An examination of Kenny’s invocation of the Haudenosaunee story of the Twins as a theoretical gloss to his corpus of writings and a specific consideration of Tekonwatonti and Blackrobe shows the prescience of this set of tribal strategies for understanding the conflict of worldviews each biographical narrative embodies. This theoretical approach also follows a trend in Haudenosaunee studies begun by Taiaiake Alfred in his political treatise Peace, Power, Righteousness (1999), which uses the Rotinoshonni condolence ritual as the epistemic basis for his research. In interviews with Maurice Kenny, he has explained that the story of the Twins is fundamental to his writing and constitutes a telling example of the ways that Kanien’kehaka or Mohawk thinking has influenced his writing.4 Blackrobe, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, portrays Isaac Jogues’s mission to the Wendat and Kanien’kehaka in the seventeenth century and the cultural disconnect that informed his missionizing and eventual execution, and Tekonwatonti tells the story of Mohawk political leader Molly Brant—her life, struggles, and demise in poverty—and the story of her community. The story of the Twins is an extension of the longer narrative of Sky Woman who is alternately known as Iotsitsisen or Ataensic (Mature Flower(s)), Awenhai (Fertile Earth), Otsitsa (Corn), and, later, Iagentci (Ancient One or Grandmother). I am going to recount briefly the story of the Twins and the larger creation story of which they are a part; the version I am giving is based upon Joanne Shenandoah and Doug George’s telling of it in Sky Woman (1998). This choice is strategic because the more commonly anthologized versions of this story are heavily influenced by Christianity and Eurowestern thinking whereas the Shenandoah/George version is

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heavily dependent upon the original Haudenosaunee understanding of the figures of the Twins, although some non-Native influence persists.5 The reader should bear in mind that countless versions of this story exist and that they vary widely in detail from the names of characters to which plants were brought from the Skyworld to the identity of the father of the Twins. In the Skyworld that precedes this one live a different people who, though much like humans, know no hunger or pain. Among them is a young woman, Iotsitsisen, who grows ill and whose parents take her to a powerful man, Taronhiawakon (Holder of the Heavens), to see if he can heal her. He promises to make Iotsitsisen well if in return he can marry her; her father agrees. Taronhiawakon accordingly restores Iotsitsisen to good health, and she becomes pregnant shortly thereafter. One night Taronhiawakon has a dream that his wife must leave their home and travel to a new world found beneath the roots of the Great Tree of Light, so although he is greatly saddened, he pushes the tree over and places the mournful Iotsitsisen through the hole beneath the tree. She lands on Turtle’s back with the help of waterbirds, and through Muskrat’s gift of earth, this land eventually forms Turtle Island. Iotsitsisen later gives birth to her daughter Tekawerahkwa (Gusts of Wind), who eventually becomes pregnant with twin boys by the West Wind. While they are in utero, the boys begin arguing. One of them, known in colonial versions of this story as Evil-Minded but in the Haudenosaunee oral tradition as Tawiskaron (Flint or Ice Skin), is tired of his internal existence and wants to force his way out through his mother’s armpit. The other, whose colonial title is Good-Minded but known to the Haudenosaunee as Okwiraseh (Sapling or New Tree), refuses and tries to talk his brother out of pursuing this destructive course. Ice Skin, however, does force his way out, his unnatural birth killing his mother. New Tree eventually emerges through the hole made by Ice Skin. Their grandmother Iotsitsisen discovers them and her now dead daughter and interrogates Ice Skin about what has occurred. Ice Skin lies and says that the other twin wanted to force his way out through Tekawerahkwa’s

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armpit and that he tried to dissuade New Tree but failed. Greatly angered and misinformed, Sky Woman grabs New Tree and throws him out into the cold to starve. New Tree survives, though, through the help of Taronhiawakon, his grandfather and husband to Sky Woman, who is oblivious to his intervention. Later, in the afterworld New Tree meets Taronhiawakon who explains to his grandson how to go about creating the new world Sapling is to inhabit and how to form fish, birds, animals, human beings, plants, rivers, mountains, and so forth. Taronhiawakon tells New Tree that one of his primary responsibilities is “to bring beauty into the world.”6 New Tree returns to the world of Turtle Island and begins creating the landscape and peopling it with creatures. Flint eventually discovers his brother’s creations and attempts to imitate Sapling, but he is only successful in spawning bats, mice, storms, river rapids, poisons, and other undesirable things. Finally, the strife between the siblings becomes so great that New Tree proposes that they play a game of chance, now known as the Peach Stone Game, in order to determine which one of them will rule the night and which will govern the day. Ice Skin tries to cheat New Tree but is thwarted. New Tree wins the game, but the conflict devolves into a physical struggle that lasts for days. New Tree attacks Ice Skin with deer antlers, which break the latter’s skin, and Sapling is victorious, with Flint being banished to caves beneath the earth. In some versions of this story, Sapling is instructed by his grandmother to actually kill Flint because the latter threatens human existence on Turtle Island, and Sapling does kill his brother. Clearly each ending has different implications for how we interpret the brothers’ relationship. As previously stated, early missionaries to the Haudenosaunee cast this story in the fashion of Cain and Abel and the Eurowestern classic struggle between good and evil. In Words That Come before All Else Paul Williams cautions against this colonized interpretation: In recent times, it has been suggested that the Right-Handed Twin [Sapling] was Good and the Left-Handed Twin [Flint] was

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Evil. We do not think things are that simple. All the things the Twins created are part of the circle of life. Living things are not capable of being judged in moral terms. To the Haudenosaunee, the world is not Good or Evil, it is subtler than that. Instead, life seeks a balance. For example, we may think that the thorns on a rose are there to prick us. Instead, they are there to protect the rose from animals harming it.7 Ultimately then the story of the Twins instructs in the principle of “cosmic equilibrium,” as Seneca scholar Barbara Mann terms it. Mann contends that “separating the Twins from one another to present them as enemies cruelly betrayed the true meaning of their bonded relationship, for Flint was not a ‘destroyer,’ nor Sapling a lone ‘Creator.’ Instead, both Twins were creators of life abundant—as were their female elders before them.”8 Even in Mann’s version of the creation story in Iroquoian Women, Flint ultimately loses his mind when his creations do not equal Sapling’s, and Sky Woman instructs Sapling to stop Flint before he destroys all human life. Thus, although the Twins embody principles of balance and reciprocity cast outside of a European binary of good and evil, Flint’s tendency toward challenge and destructiveness must be countered by Sapling in order to sustain human life. This story underscores the importance of intention and the values of peace and condolence to the Haudenosaunee, and we can easily see this story’s influence in the persona poems of Blackrobe and Tekonwatonti. The balance the Twins represent through their constant negotiation between comfort and challenge is central to much Haudenosaunee literature, and these values are embodied in Kenny’s narratives of Kiosaeton and Bear in Blackrobe and Tekonwatonti and Everywoman in Tekonwatonti. Isaac Jogues and the historical figures of Kiosaeton and Bear, who were Wendat and Kanien’kehaka leaders, respectively, exemplify the classic struggle between Ice Skin and New Tree. The persona poems begin with the immediate juxtaposition of Native and

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European viewpoints. In the two opening poems, “Peacemaker” and “Aionwatha,” Kenny imagistically tells the story of the Peacemaker’s message and Aionwatha’s aid in bringing the Great Law of Peace and in establishing the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. These poems are quickly followed by a poem succinctly articulating Jogue’s closing thoughts to his noble patron as he leaves for North America to save “those lost souls for God.”9 The poems’ proximity also indicates that Jogues’s journey will parallel the pathway the Great Law of Peace took from Wendat territory to Kanien’kehaka country, and the pairing or twinning here is profoundly ironic. The elliptical convergence of the Haudenosaunee worldview and Eurowestern cultural chauvinism rearticulates the fundamental conflict between the Twins. Kenny clearly intones that civilization arrived via the Peacemaker to the Haudenosaunee in the 1100s, long before the French had established their own distinctive identity let alone dreamed of propagating their religion and economy among the Natives of the “new world.” Isaac Jogues first arrives among the Wendat in 1642 to convert them, and the tribal peoples initially ignore his cultural chauvinism in a good-natured fashion. Kenny describes figures such as Kiosaeton and Bear continually glossing Wendat and Haudenosaunee values of the Great Law of Peace. Kiosaeton addresses Jogues as Ondessonk, or Bird of Prey: The ground where we stand does not pulse from the war dance, nor does it thirst for your blood. In keeping with Wendat hospitality, Kiosaeton feeds Jogues and says, my people . . . will respect your customs and invite you into the lodge if you maintain respect for ours.10 Jogues, however, continually fails to grasp the nature of the Native worldview he is encountering because it falls so far from

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his cosmological world map. He claims to “bring peace / to the breasts of these wildies,” and he “openly refute[s] their foolish tales / that the world was built on a turtle’s back.”11 As a transfiguration of Ice Skin, Jogues clearly dismisses the philosophical grounding for which New Tree and the Kanien’kehaka stand, even when a clanmother, or gantowisa, named Wolf Aunt adopts him before the people of the Bear could strike a tomahawk into his shaven head.12 This passage foreshadows Jogues’s eventual demise. As Kenny defines Jogues, he is consumed with religiously inspired guilt, warped ambition, and emotional disconnect. The intransigence and perversion of Jogues’s position is best embodied in his alternate disgust and fascination with Native bodies, to which he refers as “savage” and “fetching” in nearly the same breath.13 Ultimately Jogues meets his end when the Kanien’kehaka leaders such as Bear can no longer brook his insensitivity. They execute him one night when he refuses to follow their instructions and remain in his adopted family’s lodge: Jogues must be removed once he threatens the balance of peace in the Kanien’kehaka village. As historian Doug George-Kanentiio explains, the goal of Haudenosaunee justice was to “restore balance among the clans,” and while leaders tried to avoid execution, the problem Jogues posed as a failed adoptee with little affinity for the Kanien’kehaka lifestyle inevitably merited this undesirable remedy.14 Kenny describes the ominous finality of the Kanien’kehaka position and the pervading impact of Jogues through the commentary of the contemporary personage Rokwaho: He dropped names on the land . . . ticks sucking the earth . . . De Feriet, LeRay, Herrick, and Brown, Chaumont, Malone, Pulaski. Out of his black robe came Kraft, feedmills, blight, Benson Mines.

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From his prayers flowed the death of salmon and trout in mercury pools. From letters home to his mother settlers followed soldiers behind hooded priests. In his pouch he carried raisins to cure the influenza his people brought to the shores of the lake. His raisins have not flourished though his influenza remains raging like a torrential river flooding the banks, swallowing fields and woods and whatever animal standing in the way.15 The imagery of Isaac Jogues’s creations, such as pestilence, disease, destruction, poison, and even the “torrential river,” allude directly to the malformed creations of Ice Skin. Doug George-Kanentiio observes that “when Okwiraseh made the powerful eagle, Tawiskaron could only form the bat; if the good twin formed smooth-flowing rivers, his brother threw in rocks to make dangerous rapids.”16 Woven throughout Blackrobe thus is this foundational struggle between the twins and the quest for the Great Law of Peace in order to gain an advantage over the cannibalism embodied in Eurowestern capitalism, consumption, and Christianity. In fact, Barbara Mann suggests that Sapling is reincarnated as the Peacemaker and Flint as the infamous cannibal Adodaroh in the second epoch of Haudenosaunee history.17 Molly Brant, in contrast to Jogues, embodies the principles set forth by New Tree and his mother, and Kenny casts the American revolutionaries and her husband William Johnson in the role of Ice Skin.18 While Craig Womack presents a convincing argument for a Freudian understanding of Molly and William as Kenny’s parents in a review essay in American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Tekonwatonti and Sir William Johnson dramatically emerge as

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the cultural hero(ine) and adversary of the Twins when given a Haudenosaunee epistemic framework.19 Born in 1735, Molly Brant, or Tekonwatonti, was a Kanien’kehaka military leader who led Mohawk warriors in the Revolutionary War. Brant and other Mohawks had resisted engaging in the war, preferring to pursue the precepts of the Great Law of Peace and maintain Kanien’kehaka cultural ideals. Forced through starvation and attack to join the British, Brant and others were promised continual protection from the British for supporting the Crown against the colonists. Tekonwatonti’s reputation was so well known that historian James Flexnor writes of her that a contemporary colonel said that “one word from her . . . goes further with them [Mohawk warriors] than a thousand words from any white man without exception.”20 Ultimately the British lost, and the Americans under Washington pursued a policy of exterminating the Haudenosaunee by burning their towns. Brant, who sacrificed her own welfare to the British cause, died in 1795 in poverty and obscurity in Kingston, Ontario. In “He Walks in Two Worlds” Elizabeth Grant observes that Tekonwatonti is written on “an epic scale,” and part of this achievement is its beginning “with the waters of New York State flowing with the cycle of life, flowing with the movement of people through history.”21 In his poem’s opening Kenny outlines the Kanien’kehaka worldview and epistemology that informs his telling of Tekonwatonti’s life by beginning with creation, retelling New Tree’s making of the next world with the help of his grandfather Holder of the Heavens when animals appeared. . . . Birds swept across the waters. . . . Feet touched the earth on turtle’s back the great Tarachiawagon and the giant shook . . . and finally at last words echoed through the forest.22 As in Blackrobe Kenny also recounts the story of the Peacemaker’s conversion of Aionwatha:

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speak my tongue, embrace my signs and sounds; be the father of mighty peace, allow the club to create health and power through peace to protect the spirit of the central fire of life.23 Kenny clearly contextualizes Tekonwatonti’s prowess as a war leader as predicated upon the harshness of the times in which the Kanien’kehaka then lived, from starvation in New Amsterdam in the 1650s to Denonville’s attacks on the Senecas in the 1680s. In the poem “Passions” Tekonwatonti explains her rationale for pursuing war and breaking with the Great Law of Peace: I have passions for baby gurgles, giggles, sour currants, honey, moose meat, fried corn mush with maple syrup, Willie rubbing my back. All sort of things: green woods, black rivers, redbirds, corn soup steaming late winter afternoons. . . . They think my passions are anger. They accuse me of demanding his head and kicking it across the parlor floor. . . . I loathe war and blood; I think constantly of spring. . . . young possums sucking life into their jaws. I was taught to keep love in my heart, honor my leaders, bring wood to the fire, respect the smallest insect and the furthest mountain. . . . I hate war, but love this earth and my kin more than I hate battles and bravery. This is my passion . . . to survive with all around me.24

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Here and in the poem immediately following it in the collection, Tekonwatonti qualifies her decision to go to war in order to preserve the Great Law of Peace, which paradoxically depends upon the need to fight in order to sustain the Kanien’kehaka way of life. Only through retaliation against the colonists and the French does she believe she will be able to protect and to continue a Kanien’kehaka existence, all the time lamenting that “in death their [the Mohawk warriors’] blood / will scar my hands forever.”25 Kenny continually aligns Tekonwatonti with Haudenosaunee longhouse philosophy, as with her role in recounting the Kanien’kehaka encounter with smallpox through the scars that she bears. Conversely, the colonists, the British, and even Europeans such as William Johnson and George Croghan, who identify themselves with the Kanien’kehaka, clearly come to embody a particular brand of vicious consumption of the Native land and people that can be most clearly defined as a form of cannibalism in the Haudenosaunee worldview. Their destructive actions and desires plainly allegorize Ice Skin, and the resulting effect is a remaking of this myth for a new age in which Ice Skin’s destructive nature is seen in a new breed of people, the Euroamericans, whose assault on the Haudenosaunee is not only on a Nation but also on a Nation’s way of life. In military engagements the French, British, and Americans attack Haudenosaunee warriors and villages and starve Haudenosaunee civilians, but they also insist upon a European patrilineage that by its own assumptions seeks to erase the roles of the clanmothers in a holistic sense. Both Molly and the Everywoman figure who is killed in New Amsterdam in 1652 for stealing a peach for her starving children (“Call Me . . . Woman”) embody a Mohawk philosophy that male European figures from William Johnson to George Washington seek to undo. Both Johnson and Croghan marry Kanien’kehaka women and adopt a Kanien’kehaka identity their families and the other immigrants; yet, they both are adamant regarding the necessity of having male children to whom they can

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pass along their new estates. Johnson refers to his “half-blood sons by Molly” as “added protection, / insurance.” He elaborates: Should I not have rights, land rights, then my sons shall. . . . If I must bed every Indian woman on this entire continent to satisfy needs, obtain and retain land, then I shall exhaust my flesh on the bed. . . . My sons shall possess in the name of their people, the Mohawk, this land, this vast territory I shall title.26 Johnson may capitulate to the clan system by marrying a Kanien’kehaka woman, but all of his assumptions about who now owns his land, always held by women in Haudenosaunee society, illustrates his insistence upon disrupting and negating the epistemic foundation that is the basis of Tekonwatonti’s life. Johnson’s dying act is to bequeath his estate to his white wife by whom he fathered one child, John Johnson, who Molly describes as foppish John! Willie knew he’d rather hold lace than the reins to an estate. Yet now he has stolen [my children’s] due and right thrust out of Willie’s mansion, the house we built together in joy and sweat.27 Despite his professions of love for Tekonwatonti elsewhere in the poem, this final act, the dispossession of a woman who made the acquisition of land a possibility for him, shows William Johnson’s predatory nature and hence aligns him with the figure of Ice Skin and imbalance. His possession and dismissal of other women, like his slave Jennie, who was only a child when he raped her, or his

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white wife Catherine, whose name scarcely conjures a memory as he nears death, also lead to this conclusion.28 Other figures in Tekonwatonti heighten the allegorical tension between Ice Skin and New Tree, that is, the destructive, unchecked consumption of westward expansion and the life-affirming, peacedesiring longhouse philosophy. These figures include the Flintlike George Washington and Joseph Brant and the Sapling-like Cornplanter and Red Jacket. In a poem entitled “George Washington: ‘Town Destroyer,’” Kenny paints Washington exactly as he is commonly understood to have been in Haudenosaunee histories as an inhuman, genocidal thief: Flames river the low valleys. Their music crackles like a kettledrum. Vines, stalks, orchards on fire. Melons explode, apples spit sweet juice on broken boughs of dying trees. Horseflesh and pig fume in the morning air. Barns wither and topple as insane cows run wild, flames snorting out their nostrils and lambs bleat, their wool a coat of fire. Log huts and houses crumble beneath the forest. The valleys rise in smoke.29 The images of annihilation that Kenny sketches constitute a poetic capturing of a campaign on Haudenosaunee country that leveled dozens of Native towns, killed thousands of longhouse people, and burned fields of crops, orchards, and tons of stored corn. The earthy, visceral images resonate with Ice Skin’s obtuse attempts to imitate New Tree’s creation and overtly signal Washington’s equivalence to this cultural demon. Tekonwatonti’s reflection on

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the devastated landscape after the genocide confirms Washington’s similarity to Ice Skin and the most powerful Haudenosaunee pejorative, the cannibal: General George, town destroyer, you have won. Won and accomplished more in your victory than you ever dreamed. Our blood is your breakfast. The flames of our village smoke the ham you carve and bring to your lips. General George. . . . our blood stains your flag.30 This final accusation visibly encodes Washington as a consumer of human flesh, a cannibal, the most reviled personage in the Haudenosaunee worldview.31 Washington and the other European newcomers actively seek to destroy the longhouse way of life as embodied in women such as Tekonwatonti and then feast upon the remains. Kenny also alludes to Washington’s investment in the Ohio Land Company and the president’s potential personal material gain that motivated this original “hollocaust,” as Arthur Parker terms it in An Analytical History of the Seneca Indians.32 In the final poems that chronicle Tekonwatonti’s removal and her last days in Kingston, Ontario, she continues to affirm the longhouse matrilineal lifeway in the face of possible destruction. She entreats the Crown to build her “a house of rock” and “create [her] daughters who will / forever carry [her] blood in death.” Tekonwatonti’s request indicates her desire to continue her lineage with her daughters, as all clanmothers do, and to do so in the Mohawk way, as they are the People of the Flint.33 Although Tekonwatonti has been driven from her homelands and dies in obscurity, her story, Kenny affirms, will be remembered and passed down by tribal historians such as Dan George and Kenny’s own aunt Jenny. As the collection closes, Kanien’kehaka poet Beth Brant, a

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descendant of Molly Brant, also acknowledges her grandmother’s vitality to her own contemporary life. The previous discussion seeks to highlight the importance of a foundational cultural narrative, the story of the Twins, sons of First Woman, and its relationship to Maurice Kenny’s Blackrobe and Tekonwatonti. In both collections of persona poems the title characters and the tribal and European historical figures that surround them take on equivalent roles in this fundamental struggle between life-affirming and destructive forces in a reenacting of a Mohawk drama. In Tekonwatonti the gender of the primary character highlights how this allegory of the history of white expansion brings disruption of the Haudenosaunee matriarchy into relief as part of a life-destroying agenda. I hope to have established a relationship of internal coherence between Kenny’s poems and the Kanien’kehaka oral tradition as he outlines it in these collections. My intention has not been to delineate a monolithic, ever-present, and unchanging Haudensaunee worldview but instead to show that Kenny is consistently articulating a connection to Haudenosaunee modes of thought and expressing his understanding of that traditional lifeway as a counternarrative in Blackrobe and Tekonwatonti. Kenny, moreover, uses these Haudenosaunee epistemological threads to create arguments about Kanien’kehaka self-determination, survivance, worldviews, lifeways, and ways of knowing and to affirm the continuity of these traditions vis-à-vis his poetry. The range of these expressions is truly stunning in its variety and positionalities, but what I have tried to demonstrate is that our understanding of these texts is enriched by placing Kenny’s work in the context of the tribal intellectual traditions within which he invites us to read his writing. While part of the value of tribal theory in unlocking early Native texts is establishing the authors’ engagement with tribal thought, contemporary Indigenous writers who declare their relationship to those traditions are equally elucidated in terms of how they designate those relationships and to which of many different formulations of an individual tradition they lay claim, as I hope this

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discussion of Maurice Kenny has illustrated. Tribal cultures have their many manifestations, and individual understandings of them are continually encoded with aspects of an individual writer’s positionality. Beyond the teasing out of overlapping and contested definitions of tribal thought, contemporary Native American authors deserve readings of their texts that are truly grounded in their individual traditions because for many of them this kind of reading has not yet been attempted. Tribal theory opens up a multiplicity of critical frameworks that might be engaged in a new era of Native American literary studies, and with a growing contingency of Native American PhDs and non-Native scholars who understand their academic roles as requiring a substantive role in tribal communities, a new outpouring of Native American literary criticism is just around the corner.

Notes Introduction 1. For an Indigenous perspective on separating the predisposition toward tribal worldviews stimulated by tribal languages in contrast to Sapir-Whorf ’s linguistic determinism, see White, “Introduction: Language and Literature.” 2. For instance, Eva Cherniavsky argues for viewing Almanac of the Dead, its central text (the almanac), and those who gloss the almanac (the twins) through a postmodern and postnational lens. However, Silko herself seems to suggest that the knowledges that inform Almanac of the Dead’s boundary-busting, drug-running, capitalism-upending narrative ultimately are informed by specific ancient tribal traditions and storytelling that have long foretold of the postnational epistemology that Cherniavsky catalogs. For more information, see Cherniavsky, “Tribalism, Globalism, and Eskimo Television.” 3. Some critics have argued that the almanac most closely resembles the Popol Vuh. 4. I would like to note that what follows is a selective genealogy of scholars whose work I found most influential and stimulating and not an exhaustive history of the last two decades of scholarship in American Indian literature. There are several critics whom I include even though I find their work counterproductive because readers of earlier versions of my manuscript found this criticism too central to exclude. 5. Warrior, Tribal Secrets, xvi. My position is one that invites participation from Native and non-Native scholars who work to problematize, dismantle, and reconfigure predatory relationships between academics and Indigenous communities. See Annette Kolodny’s work on Nicolar’s Life and Times of the Red Man for an academic seeking to remake scholarship in an equitable and reciprocal fashion.

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6. Womack, Red on Red, 4. 7. Womack anticipates the current move toward a more tribal-centered theoretical practice in his chapter from Red on Red entitled “Lynn Riggs as Codetalker: Towards a Queer Oklahomo Theory and the Radicalization of Native American Studies.” 8. Pulitano, Toward a Native American Critical Theory, 13, 9. On a related note, including Warrior in Tribal Secrets, have already faulted Paula Gunn Allen’s work for essentializing tendencies. In contrast, Reder notes that Pulitano fails to consider “how revolutionary and inspiring this [Sacred Hoop] was in its historical context only two decades ago as American Indian studies became established in North America and as English departments began to teach the occasional Native American literary text” (Reder, Review, 322). 9. Bernardin, Review, 111; and Cox, Review, 320. 10. Mihesuah, “Academic Gatekeepers,” 32. 11. Cajete, Native Science, 5. 12. There are a few notable exceptions to this practice, among them the Native American Literature Symposium held every spring at a tribal venue and organized by a cadre of Native American scholars committed to community issues. 13. Vine Deloria, “Ethnoscience and Indian Realities,” 70–71. Mihesuah incisively and eloquently decries the lack of accountability in Native American literary studies in “Finding Empowerment through Writing and Reading.” 14. Owens, “As if an Indian Were Really an Indian,” 23. 15. Krupat, “Post-structuralism and Oral Literature,” 122, 126. Karl Kroeber makes a similarly problematic argument for combining “deconstructionist criticism and American Indian literature” in his eponymous article, with his primary justification for this incongruent pairing being that “Indians had no literary critics” (79). Oral literary critiques were and are practiced in institutional and informal venues since time immemorial by clanmothers and through consensus. 16. Krupat, Ethnocriticism, 113; and Krupat, For Those Who Come After, 96. 17. Gikuyu writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o is explicit in naming the challenges that African writers composing in tribal languages face: “Problems of literacy. Problems of publishing. Problems of the lack of critical tradition. Problems of orthography. Problems of having very many languages in the

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same country. Problems of hostile governments with a colonized mentality. Abandonment by some of those who could have brought their genius— demonstrated by their excellent performance in foreign languages—to develop their own languages” (Thiong’o, Moving the Centre, 21). 18. Ruppert, Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, 4. 19. Powell, “Listening to Ghosts,” 12. 20. Mohawk, “Indian Way,” 22–23. 21. Sarris, “Encountering the Native Dialogue,” 127–28. 22. Sarris, “Encountering the Native Dialogue,” 128. 23. Angela Cavender Wilson, “Reclaiming Our Humanity,” 71. 24. Angela Cavender Wilson, Remember This, 51. 25. Angela Cavender Wilson, in fact, draws our attention to scholar Anna Wierzbicka’s contention that “culture-specific words are conceptual tools that reflect a society’s past experience of doing and thinking about things in certain ways; and they help to perpetuate these ways” (Angela Cavender Wilson, Remember This, 60). 26. In addition to Dakota, I also have studied Mohawk (Ongwe Onwe), and this knowledge informs my final chapter on Maurice Kenny’s work. 27. Sarris, Keeping Slug Woman Alive, 19. 28. Chadwick Allen, Blood Narrative, 19. 1. Pictographs and Politics 1. Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community, “Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota Community History” (accessed October 19, 2006). 2. McLaughlin, Myths and Legends, i. 3. McLaughlin, Myths and Legends, 2. 4. The Mdewakaƒtuƒ band at Mendota were one of the earliest Dakota groups to begin trade with non-Indians. As a result the Mdewakaƒtuƒ often served as intermediaries between the whites and the more resistant and/or remote groups. 5. Pfaller, James McLaughlin, 374. 6. McLaughlin, Myths and Legends, 10. 7. James McLaughlin to Bishop Rupert Seidenbush, 1875, in Pfaller, James McLaughlin, 28. 8. See Barrett, Major McLaughlin’s March of Civilization. 9. Barrett, Major McLaughlin’s March of Civilization, 21–23. 10. Thomas Stewart to Commissioner Morgan, 1891, in Pfaller, James McLaughlin, 181.

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11. Pfaller, James McLaughlin, 193. 12. I borrow this term from Judith Butler who uses “gender act” to avoid the reification and naturalization of gender suggested by the term “role.” 13. Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 93. 14. Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness, 56. 15. Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 25. 16. McLaughlin, Myths and Legends, 15. 17. McLaughlin, Myths and Legends, 17. 18. For more information on Lakota women and the rise of the horse in Plains society, see Klein, “Political-Economy of Gender.” 19. Angela Cavender Wilson, Remember This, 63. 20. Keyser, Five Crows Ledger, 7–9. 21. Keyser, Five Crows Ledger, 7–8. 22. I am troubled by Keyser’s use of a term that suggests that Native Americans, and in this case Dakotas, were somehow ahistorical when their own accounts of the institutionalization of band historians indicate that they practiced tribal history. 23. McLaughlin, Myths and Legends, 107. 24. Keyser, Five Crows Ledger, 8. 25. Ellis, Introduction, xvi. 26. Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 285. 27. Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 13–14. 28. Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 43. 29. McLaughlin, Myths and Legends, 11. 2. Charles Eastman’s Role 1. In Talking Back bell hooks defines talking back as a strategy for African American feminist resistance. 2. Tom Holm anticipated this change in our assessment of Eastman as early as 1981 in an article entitled “American Indian Intellectuals and the Continuity of Tribal Ideals.” 3. For the purposes of this discussion, I define racialism as an activity or belief that essentializes a race by assuming a particular set of traits, strengths, and weaknesses to be exclusive to that group. 4. Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance,” 426. 5. The presence of these Dakota traditional genres problematizes the oral/literate binary so frequently reified in discussions of Native American

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literature. Much critical effort has focused upon Eastman’s use of nonIndian forms while Dakota influences have remained overlooked, despite their ramifications for understanding how Eastman positions himself vis-à-vis his readership. 6. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 246. 7. Eastman had long held the desire to record his childhood experiences for his children; thus, Elaine’s discovery of his writing and her suggestion to publish it was a natural extension of a preexisting project (Raymond Wilson, “Charles Alexander Eastman,” 131). 8. Miller, “Charles Alexander Eastman,” 64. 9. Raymond Wilson, “Charles Alexander Eastman,” 48. 10. Raymond Wilson, “Charles Alexander Eastman,” 55n. 11. Oandasan, “Cross-disciplinary Note on Charles Eastman,” 76. 12. Heflin, I Remain Alive, 54–55. 13. Heflin, I Remain Alive, 54–57. 14. Powell explores these two concerns in her dissertation, “I Write These Words in Blood and Bones.” 15. Clark, “Charles Eastman,” 274. 16. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian, 123–24. 17. Standing Bear, My People the Sioux, 141. 18. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian, 108. 19. Raymond Wilson, “Charles Alexander Eastman,” 151. 20. Eastman, Deep Woods, 70. 21. Raymond Wilson, “Charles Alexander Eastman,” 151. 22. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian, 96. 23. Powell, “Imagining a New Indian,” 221. 24. Eastman, pamphlet, in Raymond Wilson, “Charles Alexander Eastman,” 152. 25. Cook-Lynn, Review, 406. 26. Cook-Lynn, Review, 406. 27. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 122. 28. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 122. 29. Brumble, American Indian Autobiography, 153. 30. Eastman, Indian Boyhood. 31. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 17. 32. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 100. 33. Heflin, I Remain Alive, 49; and Ella Deloria, Waterlily, vi. 34. Eastman, Deep Woods, 53.

136 | notes to pages 56–59

35. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 4. Children born thereafter typically had to “suffer” with numerical names, such as ižakpe (number six) and ižakowin (number seven). I don’t know that the children conceived it as suffering, but as Eastman feels especially sensitive about his name as the last born, the possibility exists. 36. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 37. 37. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 96. 38. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 92. 39. Brumble, American Indian Autobiography, 44. 40. Powell, “Imagining a New Indian,” 216. 41. Eastman, Deep Woods, 31–32. 42. Powell, “Rhetorics of Survivance,” 419. 43. Dakota and especially Lakota peoples talk about living in balance as “walking the good red road.” The image of the road is pervasive in the culture; for example, a successful Native-centered twelve-step program is the Red Road Approach. 44. Eastman, Deep Woods, 34. 45. Eastman only tells of his first visit to a farmhouse where he offers money for food and the hosts refuse to take it. Eastman never clarifies whether he actually must pay for food at each farmhouse or whether it is simply given to him. He so dramatizes the generosity of the family at the first house, however, that his simple statement about the remainder of the trip (“I stopped now and again at a sod house for food”) suggests that he paid for the food he received. 46. Eastman, Deep Woods, 44. 47. Eastman, Deep Woods, 50. 48. Unlike Eastman and Standing Bear, Zitkala Öa avoided using the anthropological style. Susan Bernardin observes that “[r]efusing the position of native informant, Zitkala Öa does not provide the detailed ‘ethnographic’ descriptions of her home culture that mark the autobiographies of contemporaries Charles Eastman and Luther Standing Bear. Instead, she offers the highly stylized sketches of typical domestic scenes that privilege the values underlining her early education as a Dakota girl” (Bernardin, “Lessons of a Sentimental Education,” 221). 49. Heflin, I Remain Alive, 58–59. While Heflin argues that Indian Boyhood is more linear than Deep Woods and can be considered “a sort of bildungsroman where the young man, to discover his individuality, leaves home,” (59) I would argue that Deep Woods is more linear/chronological

notes to pages 59–63 | 137

than Indian Boyhood and is a more adequate candidate for inclusion in this genre. The young Eastman does actually leave home in order to find his individuality in Deep Woods, and the autobiography follows this quest. In Indian Boyhood Eastman leaves his home in Canada to go to a different home with his father and to fulfill his father’s goals for his son. 50. Heflin, I Remain Alive, 58–62. 51. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 61. 52. Eastman, Indian Boyhood, 30–37. Heflin writes that “Hakadah’s First Offering” is “the only autobiographical story in Eastman’s entire oeuvre written exclusively in the more anthropological third-person points of view” (Heflin, I Remain Alive, 61). It is true that “Hakadah’s First Offering” is a chapter unto itself in Indian Boyhood, whereas “A Midsummer Feast,” the naming episode, is part 5 of chapter 1. Nonetheless, each part in chapter 1 is devoted to its own story, entirely different from those of the other sections. These discrete units are reflected in the individual titles: “Hakadah, the Pitiful Last,” “Early Hardships,” “My Indian Grandmother,” “An Indian Sugar Camp,” and “A Midsummer Feast.” For this reason I would argue that Eastman uses the third-person anthropological mode exclusively in “A Midsummer Feast,” which is a separate episode or section from the rest of the chapter. 53. Heflin, I Remain Alive, 64. 54. Eastman, Deep Woods, 22. 55. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 51. 56. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 50–51. 3. Zitkala Öa, Sentiment, and Tiožpaye 1. Adams, Education for Extinction, 29. 2. Child observes that “students shared not only pencils and books but also soap, towels, washbasins, beds, and even bathwater. Students who complained of sore and oozing eyes [from trachoma, a common disease in boarding schools] could be found working in the school’s laundries, preparing food in kitchens, and milking the school’s cows” (Child, Boarding School Seasons, 58). 3. Recent studies on the Blackfeet show that the method of English instruction commonly used in boarding schools, forbidding the use of any native languages in the school, has created a major handicap in Blackfeet tribal members’ linguistic skills. Reading skills have been severely harmed

138 | notes to pages 63–65

as a result of this practice. On an international level Canada has agreed formally to compensate residential school survivors through an Aboriginal healing fund designated in the Kelowna Accord. 4. Child, Boarding School Seasons, 8. 5. Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light, xii. 6. In American Indian Children Coleman differentiates between student resistance, which meant “those forms of pupil opposition to the school and to the staff that were compatible with continued attendance, often compatible with impressive achievement as a student,” and rejection through student actions that disrupt attendance, such as running away, setting fire to the school, or simply refusing to participate (146). 7. Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, a federal off-reservation boarding school, opened in 1884 and enrolled students from over twenty-four tribes, although the Five Civilized Tribes predominated. Using student testimony, Lomawaima studies how students indigenized the institution and used it to their purposes, thus subverting the larger federal agenda whenever possible. 8. LaFlesche’s Middle Five, his memoir of his education in a Presbyterian mission school for the Omaha, particularly exemplifies student creation of a “third culture.” 9. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 44. 10. Velikova, “Troping in Zitkala Öa’s Autobiographical Writings,” 49. “Why I Am a Pagan” resolves many of the issues of spiritual and cultural dislocation that “The School Days of an Indian Girl” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” raise. Zitkala Öa actually renamed this essay “The Great Spirit” and changed its ending to symbolically address American Indians’ right to vote when she republished it in American Indian Stories in 1921. 11. Spack, “Re-visioning Sioux Women,” 26. 12. Bernardin, “Lessons of a Sentimental Education”; and Lukens, “The American Story of Zitkala-Sa.” Citing Frank Mott’s A History of American Magazines, Lukens also notes that the Atlantic Monthly “through the mid1890s . . . began to include politically and socially controversial material” and “to ‘approach . . . that wide interest in the problems of the modern world which characterized the magazine under later management.’” (“American Story of Zitkala-Sa,” 163–64). Zitkala Öa apparently enjoyed creative freedom in composing her three autobiographical pieces for their publication in the Atlantic as then editor Bliss Perry’s “typical approach was to let writers

notes to pages 65–68 | 139

design their own projects, and he gave them final say over his editorial comments” (Spack, “Re-visioning Sioux Women,” 28). 13. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 55–56. 14. Meisenheimer, “Regionalist Bodies,” 117. 15. Wexler, “Tender Violence,” 179. 16. Wexler, “Tender Violence,” 179. 17. I present these concerns not to critique Wexler in particular but to show some of the common pitfalls to which scholars have been susceptible in their examinations of the presence of Euroamerican elements in Zitkala Öa’s writing. A thorough inventory of the body of critical work on Bonnin’s writing will illustrate these troublesome assumptions as a general tendency. 18. Bernardin, “Lessons of a Sentimental Education,” 217. 19. Diana, “Hanging in the Heart of Chaos,” 155. 20. Bernardin, “Lessons of a Sentimental Education,” 223. 21. Bernardin, “Lessons of a Sentimental Education,” 218. 22. Powers, Oglala Women, 57. 23. Samuel Pond, a nineteenth-century missionary, further describes children’s roles among the Dakota: “Parents did not commonly treat either their sons or their daughters harshly, and both boys and girls were taught to cultivate a self-reliant, independent spirit. Infants were tenderly cared for. . . . There was no efficient family government among the Dakotas, and severe measures were seldom resorted to for the maintenance of parental authority. The parents gave advice to their children, but fathers did not often lay their commands upon them. . . . Fathers rarely, if ever, inflicted corporal punishment on their children. The mothers chastised them only when so provoked as to lose all command over their temper” (Pond, Dakota or Sioux, 142–43). 24. While the mother/child bond was certainly important to the Dakota, I do not want to minimize the centrality of men in parenting, particularly because traditional education was imparted primarily through same sex instruction. 25. Bernardin, “Lessons of a Sentimental Education,” 221. Articulating the commonalities between these gendered forms of narration should not lead to a conflation of Euroamerican and Dakota women’s gender roles as they differed in significant ways (Paula Gunn Allen, Spider Woman’s Granddaughters, 30). Paula Gunn Allen neatly summarizes the tension

140 | notes to pages 68–73

that Zitkala Öa must have felt between these differing norms: “The delicacy of the ladies of privilege whom she knew must have been in stark contrast to the ideals of womanhood she had been raised with, and for which her life, and that of her mother, must have been models.” Bonnin encodes this cultured and classed difference into her writings through the physical freedom that Dakota women and girls enjoy, as well as the labor they perform. 26. Heflin, I Remain Alive, 137. 27. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 6. 28. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 10. 29. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 93–94. 30. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 10; Spack, “Re-visioning Sioux Women,” 29. 31. Powers describes this tendency in Oglala Women: “The terms ‘full blood’ and ‘mixed blood’ are cultural rather than biological designations; that is, they are based not on blood quantum but rather on the group a person identifies with socially and culturally” (144). Given her history as an activist for Native Americans on reservations, surely Bonnin identified as full-blood in light of this definition. 32. Brumble, American Indian Autobiography, 40. 33. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 28. 34. This relationship is explained by traditional Dakota people as owing to children and the elderly’s close ties to the spirit world because of their proximity to birth and death. 35. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 29. 36. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 63. 37. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 12. 38. Although Brumble has presented the argument that references to imitation in Dakota works, notably Eastman’s Deep Woods, reflect an internalization of Social Darwinist theory that associates primitive peoples with imitation, I contend that the prevalence of Dakota authors’ mention of imitation seems to suggest that it truly was a staple of traditional education. 39. Women occasionally would gather in the council tipi to give their quill counts, in which they would recount the items that they had quilled or beaded. 40. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 21. 41. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 22.

notes to pages 73–85 | 141

42. See Ella Deloria’s Waterlily and Speaking of Indians for an extended explanation of the function of Dakota kinship. 43. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 62–63. 44. Spack, “Re-visioning Sioux Women,” 31. 45. Zitkala Öa, American Indian Stories, 25. 46. Fisher, “Transformation of Tradition,” 26–27. 4. Ella Deloria’s Decolonizing Role 1. Cotera, “All My Relatives Are Noble,” 53, 55. 2. Cotera, “All My Relatives Are Noble,” 69. 3. Cotera, “All My Relatives Are Noble,” 53. 4. Ella Deloria to Margaret Mead, biographical statement, July 17, 1952, in Gardner, “Speaking of Ella Deloria,” 668. 5. Medicine, Learning to Be an Anthropologist, 280. 6. Chadwick Allen, Blood Narrative, 87. 7. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 51. 8. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 51. 9. Gardner, “Speaking of Ella Deloria,” 468. Ella Deloria to Franz Boas, August 25, 1935, in Gardner, “Speaking of Ella Deloria,” 479. 10. Rice, Ella Deloria’s Iron Hawk, 3. 11. Gardner, “Though It Broke My Heart,” 2. 12. Ella Deloria to Margaret Mead, biographical statement, July 17, 1952, in Gardner, “Speaking of Ella Deloria,” 685. 13. Ella Deloria to Margaret Mead, biographical statement, July 17, 1952, in Gardner, “Speaking of Ella Deloria,” 685. 14. Ella Deloria to H. E. Beebe, December 2, 1952, in Afterword, Waterlily, 218; and Gardner, “Speaking of Ella Deloria,” 688. 15. Vine Deloria, Introduction, xi. 16. Gardner, “Though It Broke My Heart,” 675, 667. 17. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 51. 18. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 54–56. Rice draws attention to the length of this story in Deer Women and Elk Men, 121. 19. Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 37. 20. Medicine, Learning to Be an Anthropologist, 277. 21. Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 25. 22. Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 37. 23. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 14.

142 | notes to pages 85–96

24. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 16. 25. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 191–94. 26. Rice, Deer Women and Elk Men, 125. 27. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 65. 28. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 20–21. 29. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 34. 30. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 35. 31. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 59. 32. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 150. 33. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 150. 34. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 153. 35. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 116. 36. Angela Cavender Wilson, Remember This, 15. 37. Angela Cavender Wilson, Remember This, 8. 38. Angela Cavender Wilson, Remember This, 219. 39. Angela Cavender Wilson, Remember This, 103. 40. Angela Cavender Wilson, Remember This, 116. 41. Angela Cavender Wilson, Remember This, 2. 42. Ella Deloria, Waterlily, 56–57. 43. Rice, Deer Women and Elk Men, 121. 5. A Gendered Future 1. Powers, Oglala Women, 36–38. As my previous discussion of Gardner’s interview of Joyzelle Godfrey (“Speaking of Ella Deloria”) indicates, much of the original fieldwork done on Lakota and Dakota cosmology was flawed, and these mistakes have been reinscribed without corroboration in subsequent publications. Godfrey identifies Powers as among the subsequent group of scholars whose work rests upon the unsure foundation established by Walker and others. Nonetheless, conceptions of masculine and feminine principles are pervasive in Indigenous cultures, including Dakota culture as illustrated by Cook-Lynn’s and Red Eagle’s fiction, so Powers’s description of these gendered principles serves as a starting point for discussing Dakota authors’ invocation and articulation of these principles. For more information on the broader issues of gender principles in Indigenous literature, see Paula Gunn Allen’s Sacred Hoop and Roppolo’s “Collating Divergent Discourses.” 2. Paula Gunn Allen, Sacred Hoop, 2–3. 3. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, 146–48.

notes to pages 98–111 | 143

4. Baird-Olson, Review, 274. 5. Womack, Review, 93. 6. Andrews, “Race, Feminine Power, and the Vietnam War,” 103. Like Andrews, I have chosen to omit hyphens and other nonstandard notations found in Philip Red Eagle’s Red Earth in favor of notations in common usage in Dakota Studies in order to bring Red Eagle’s text into conformity with the other works under discussion. 7. Baird-Olson, Review, 273. 8. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 96 9. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 81. 10. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 99. 11. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 81. 12. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 25. 13. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 20–21. 14. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 63. 15. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 17–18. 16. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 58. 17. Red Eagle, Red Earth, 57. 18. Andrews, “Race, Feminine Power, and the Vietnam War,” 99. 19. Bennett, Review, 103. 20. Stripes, “We Think in Terms of What Is Fair,” 175. 21. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 154. 22. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 153. 23. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 171. 24. Danker, “Violation of the Earth,” 92. 25. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 220. 26. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 154–55. 27. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 427; and Buttes, Review, 161. 28. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 411. 29. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 137. 30. Jahner, Review, 130. 31. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 437. 32. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 421. 33. Flute, Schommer, Dunnigan, and Rynda, Dakota Language, iii. 34. Cook-Lynn, Aurelia, 402–3. 35. Jahner, Review, 132. 36. Red Eagle and Strom, “Philip Red Eagle.”

144 | notes to pages 113–127

6. Tribal Theory Travels 1. Holm, “American Indian Intellectuals,” 350. 2. Bruchac, “As Sharp as Flint,” xi. 3. Personal interview with Maurice Kenny, February 3, 2003. 4. Personal interview with Maurice Kenny, February 2, 2003. 5. The details of the Haudenosaunee creation story vary greatly. For a comprehensive historical overview of the many versions of this story, particularly those that are Christianized, see Elm and Antone, Oneida Creation Story. 6. Shenandoah and George, Skywoman, 32. 7. Williams, “Creation,” 4. 8. Mann, Iroquoian Women, 61–62, 89. 9. Kenny, Carving Hawk, 119. 10. Kenny, Carving Hawk, 124. 11. Kenny, Carving Hawk, 128–29. 12. Kenny, Carving Hawk, 130. 13. Kenny, Carving Hawk, 120–21. 14. George-Kanentiio, Iroquois Culture, 99. 15. Kenny, Carving Hawk, 144. 16. George-Kanentiio, Iroquois Culture, 142. 17. Mann, Iroquoian Woman, 36–37. 18. In some versions of the creation story, Sky Woman is aligned with Flint, not Sapling. 19. Womack, “Spirit of Independence.” 20. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 49. 21. Grant, “He Walks in Two Worlds,” 24, 18. 22. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 20. 23. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 28. 24. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 144–45. 25. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 146. 26. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 82–84. 27. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 125. 28. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 86, 90, 122. 29. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 142. 30. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 152. 31. There is much controversy in Iroquoian studies (versus Haudenosaunee studies) about the true meaning and institutionalization of can-

notes to page 127 | 145

nibalism. Certainly early colonial accounts record incidents of purported Haudenosaunee cannibalism during war, epidemics, and other atypical events. The narrative of Kaianeraserakowa, or the Great Law of Peace, reflects a negative view of cannibalism from as early as the eleventh century, thus contradicting the colonial records. 32. Parker, Analytical History, 126. 33. Kenny, Tekonwatonti, 159.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abenaki Indians, 113 acquisition-of-powers genre, 56–58, 61 Adams, David, 62 “Aionwatha” (Kenny), 119, 122–23 Alfred, Taiaiake, 28; Peace, Power, Righteousness, 115 Allen, Chadwick, 4; Blood Narrative, 14, 52, 79 Allen, Paula Gunn, 5, 139n25; The Sacred Hoop, 95, 132n8 “All My Relatives Are Noble” (Cotera), 77 All Saints School, 76 Almanac of the Dead (Silko), 1–2, 131nn2–3 American Indian Autobiography (Brumble), 54 American Indian Children (Coleman), 138n6 American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 121 American Indian Nationalism (Weaver), 4 American Revolution, 17

An Analytical History of the Seneca Indians (Parker), 127 Andrews, Scott, 102; “Race, Feminine Power, and the Vietnam War in Red Earth,” 98 Angus, Douglas, 114 Anish oral tradition, 3 aƒpetu wi, 94–98. See also men; gender anthropology. See ethnography Anti-Indianism in Modern America (Cook-Lynn), 103 Arapaho Indians, 62 Arikara tradition, 41 Arizona State University, 103 “As if an Indian Were Really an Indian” (Owens), 6 assimilation, 23–25, 34, 43–46, 49, 51, 59, 61–63 Ataensic. See Sky Woman Atlantic Monthly, 64–65, 71, 138n12 Aurelia (Cook-Lynn), 15, 97, 104–11 autobiography: of Charles Eastman, 59–61, 136nn48–49; of Eli Taylor, 89, 90; and feathers, 53; in literary scholarship, 15; of Zitkala Öa, 64, 68, 70, 74–75. See also self-narration

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Awenhai. See Sky Woman awikhigans, 14 Aztec oral tradition, 93 Backward to Forward (Kenny), 114 Baird-Olson, Karren, 97, 98 balance, 94–96, 98–103, 111, 118, 120 baseball, 40–41 Basso, Keith: Wisdom Sits in Places, 68 Battle of Little Big Horn, 22 beadwork, 73, 140n39 Bear (Kanien’kehaka), 118, 119, 120 Beloit College, 46, 59 Beloit wi, 55 Bennett, Cheryl, 104 Bernardin, Susan, 5, 65, 136n48; “Lessons of a Sentimental Education,” 66 Between Two Rivers (Kenny), 114 Bhabha, Homi, 5, 14 Big Pipe, Jason (character in Aurelia), 104, 108–9 Biographic Art, 35 Bismarck sd, 24 Black Eagle (character in Waterlily), 91–92 Blackfeet Indians, 137n3 Blackrobe (Kenny), 16, 114, 115, 118–21, 128 Blaeser, Kimberly: Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, 3 blood/land/memory complex, 4, 14, 79 Blood Narrative (Allen), 14, 52, 79 Blowsnake, Jasper, 7–8

Blowsnake, Sam, 7–8 Blue (character in Aurelia), 104, 110–11 Blue Bird (character in Waterlily), 84–88 Blue Cloud, Peter, 6 Blue Sky Woman, 100, 101, 102 boarding schools: assimilation at, 51, 62–63; comparison of, to traditional education, 72, 73; Eli Taylor at, 89, 90; illness at, 63, 137n2; instruction methods at, 63, 137n3; resistance to, 63–64, 138nn6–8; in Zitkala Öa’s dream narrative, 74 Boarding School Seasons (Child), 63 Boas, Franz, 76, 77, 80 Bogan, Louise, 114 “Bois de Sioux” (Red Eagle), 98–101 Bonnin, Gertrude. See Zitkala Öa (Ihaƒktuƒwaƒ Dakota) Bonnin, Raymond, 51 Boston University, 46 Brant, Beth, 113, 127–28 Brant, Joseph, 126 Brant, Molly: background of, 122; “Call Me . . . Woman,” 124; legacy of, 127–28; “Passions,” 123; portrayal of, by Maurice Kenny, 118, 121–24, 127; on son, 125; on war, 123–24 bravery narratives, 36, 55, 58, 61 Brooks, Lisa: “Two Paths to Peace,” 14 Brown, Bob, 17 Bruchac, Joseph, 113–14

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Brumble, David, 44, 140n38; American Indian Autobiography, 54 buffalo culture, 41, 81, 92. See also White Buffalo Woman The Buffalo People (Rice), 77, 92 Buisson, Antoine, 25 Buisson, Joseph, 21 Buisson, Mary Jane, 25 Butler, Judith, 134n12 Butler University, 114 Buttes, Barbara Feezor, 107 Caddo Indians, 62 Cain and Abel story, 117 Cajete, Gregory, 5–6; Native Science, 6 Caledonia, Ontario, 17 Callahan, Alice, 43 “Call Me . . . Woman” (Brant), 124 Camp Circle Society (Deloria), 76, 78, 88 camp historians, 77–81, 91–92 Canada, 137n3 caƒku, 58–59, 136n43 cannibalism, 121, 124, 127, 144n31 canoes, 111 Carlisle Industrial School, 35, 50, 62–65 Carving Hawk (Kenny), 114 Ceremonial Art, 33–35, 34 ceremonies, 14, 60, 115 Cherniavsky, Eva, 131n2 Cheyenne Indians, 62 Child, Brenda: Boarding School Seasons, 63 children: Charles Eastman’s performances for, 50–51; crimes

against, 94, 99; imitation by, 73; and kinship, 82; naming of, 55–58, 61, 136n35; reverence for, 67, 72, 139n23, 140n34. See also mother/child relationship Chilocco Indian Agricultural School, 64, 138n7 Christianity, 115, 117–18, 121 Circle of Dancers (Cook-Lynn), 104–9 clanmother identity, 16, 120, 124, 127 Clarissa (character in Aurelia), 110 Clifford Goes First (character in “Bois de Sioux”), 98–101 Coleman, Michael C.: American Indian Children, 138n6 “Collating Divergent Discourses” (Roppolo), 93 colonization: Elizabeth CookLynn on, 103–4, 109, 110; and gender roles, 111; Philip Red Eagle on, 96–98, 100; and Twin story, 117–18; women’s resistance to, 26, 97; and Zitkala Öa, 74, 75. See also decolonization Columbia University, 76 Comanche Indians, 62 communo-bio-oratory, 73 consumption, 121, 124, 126 Cooke, Edwin, 19 Cooke, Viola Vivian Kelsey, 18, 19 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth: on colonialism, 103–4; education and professional life of, 103; and gender, 93, 95–97, 103; and Native American authors, 52,

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Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth (cont.) 75; theoretical approach to, 15, 111, 113 — Works: Anti-Indianism in Modern America, 103; Aurelia, 15, 97, 104–11; Circle of Dancers, 104–9; From the River’s Edge, 104, 105, 109; In the Presence of the River Gods, 104, 109; I Remember the Fallen Trees, 103; The Politics of Hallowed Ground, 103; The Power of Horses, 103; Seek the House of the Relatives, 103; Then Badger Said This, 103; Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, 103; Woyake Kinikiya, 103 Copway, George, 43 Cornplanter, Jesse, 113, 126 Corn Woman, 97, 105, 107 Corrine (character in Aurelia), 105, 107 Cotera, Maria Eugenia, 78; “All My Relatives Are Noble,” 77 Cox, James, 5 Creation story. See Twin story Creek Indians, 4 Croghan, George, 124–25 Crow Belt, Raymond (character in “Red Earth”), 100–103 culture brokers, 78–79 “The Cutting of My Long Hair” (Zitkala Öa), 65 Dakota Conflict (1862), 46 Dakota Family Life (Deloria), 76 Dakota Grammar (Deloria), 76, 78, 80, 88, 91

Dakota Home Life (Deloria), 76 Dakota identity: Angela Cavender Wilson on, 11; Eli Taylor and, 89–91; Ella Cara Deloria and, 13, 78, 85; and family relationships, 27–28, 71–73, 81–88, 110; and naming, 55–56; and pictographs, 41; in writings of Marie McLaughlin, 32, 42; of Zitkala Öa, 13, 66–69, 71–73, 75 Dakota Indians: and band relationships, 27; Elizabeth CookLynn on, 103–5, 109; Ella Cara Deloria on, 76; kinship terms of, 83; relationship of Marie McLaughlin with, 22; and status of women, 30–31; stories of, 22; tribal history of, 33, 134n22, 142n1 Dakota knowledge: in Aurelia, 109; Charles Eastman on, 53–54; Eli Taylor and, 89–90; Ella Cara Deloria and, 80–81; and feminine principle, 102; in intellectual tradition, 112; Marie McLaughlin and, 21; and pictographs, 28, 41; as theory, 14–16 Dakota oral tradition, 14, 93–96, 107–9 Dakota Texts (Deloria), 76, 78, 89, 91, 92 Dakota Treatment of Murderers (Deloria), 77 Dakota worldview: Charles Eastman on, 49, 52–61; differences in, 12; Ella Cara Deloria on, 77–79, 91; and kinship, 84; in literary scholarship, 15; and

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pictographs, 28, 35–42; in “Red Earth,” 102; and White Buffalo Woman legend, 31–33; in writings of Marie McLaughlin, 23– 26, 41–42; in writings of Zitkala Öa, 71, 73–74. See also racial identity; tribal worldview Dancing Back Strong the Nation (Kenny), 114 Danker, Kathleen, 106 Dartmouth College, 46 Dead Letters Sent and Other Poems (Kenny), 114 Dead Voices (Vizenor), 3 decolonization: Angela Cavender Wilson on, 11; authors’ roles in, 113; Ella Cara Deloria and, 77–78, 80, 88, 91–92; and gender roles, 94–96, 100; Philip Red Eagle on, 96–98, 100. See also colonization Decolonizing Methodologies (Tuhiwai), 6 deconstructionist criticism, 132n15 Deer Women and Elk Men (Rice), 77, 92 Deloria, Ella Cara: audience of, 78; as camp historian, 77–81, 91–92; comparison of, to Eli Taylor, 90, 91; education and professional life of, 76–77; family life of, 81; on history of ozaƒ, 27; on kinship, 28–29, 81–84; theoretical approach to, 15, 113 — Works: Camp Circle Society, 76, 78, 88; Dakota Family Life, 76; Dakota Grammar, 76, 78, 80,

88, 91; Dakota Home Life, 76; Dakota Texts, 76, 78, 89, 91, 92; Dakota Treatment of Murderers, 77; Speaking of Indians, 27–29, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84; Waterlily, 15, 76–77, 78, 79, 81, 84–88, 91 Deloria, Mary Susan, 81, 82 Deloria, Philip, 49, 50–51, 53, 76, 80–82 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 81–84; “Ethnoscience and Indian Realities,” 6 Denonville, Marquis de, 123 Devil’s Lake Agency, 22–25 Diana, Vanessa Holford, 66 domestic violence, 94–95 donkeys, 29–30, 31 dream narratives, 68, 73–75 Dream Woman (character in Waterlily), 86 Earthdivers (Vizenor), 3 Eastern Washington University, 103 Eastern Woodlands culture, 115 Eastman, Charles: as Boy Scouts’ Indian, 44, 49–51; childhood of, 46, 81, 135n7; criticism of, 44– 45; education and professional life of, 46–47, 59, 61; and imitation, 140n38; and names, 55–56, 60, 136n35; public appearances of, 49–52; relationship of, with wife, 45, 47–49; and resistance strategies, 44–45, 51–52, 61, 134n2; and sacrifice to Great Mystery, 57–60; techniques of, 45–46, 52–53, 55–61, 134n5;

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Eastman, Charles (continued) theo-retical approach to, 15, 113 — Works: From the Deep Woods to Civilization, 45–47, 50, 51, 55, 58–60, 136n49, 140n38; Indian Boyhood, 45–61, 136n49, 137n52; Indian Child Life, 47; Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, 47; Indian Scout Talks, 47, 50–51; The Indian Today, 47; Old Indian Days, 47; Red Hunters and the Animal People, 47; The Soul of an Indian, 45, 47; Wigwam Evenings, 47 Eastman, Elaine Goodale, 45–49, 135n7 Eastman, Jacob, 46, 58–59 education, 94. See also boarding schools; educational narratives educational narratives, 51–52, 55, 58–59, 61, 68, 71–75, 88–90 elderly, 94, 140n34. See also grandparents Ellis, Richard, 36 “Encountering the Native Dialogue” (Sarris), 10 environment, 6, 115 epistemology, 10 ethnocriticism, 7–8 ethnography, 52–53, 59–61, 76, 77, 79–81, 84, 136n48, 137n52 “Ethnoscience and Indian Realities” (Deloria), 6 Eurowestern worldview: Charles Eastman and, 44, 45, 48, 49, 52, 55, 58–61; and Dakota gender roles, 94–96; and Dakota tex-

tuality, 35, 42; and education, 62; Eli Taylor on, 90; Gerald Vizenor and, 3; and intellectual tradition, 112; Luther Standing Bear and, 35, 38, 40–41; Native authors’ engagement with, 4, 5, 7–8; and Twin story, 115, 117–19, 121; Zitkala Öa and, 65–68, 71, 139n17. See also assimilation; whites Everywoman figure, 118, 124 Evil-Minded. See Tawiskaron Fanon, Frantz, 5 Faribault mn, 21 fathers, 109, 139nn23–24. See also kinship feathers, 53 Felker (father of Zitkala Öa), 70, 71, 74 feminism, 77. See also women film, portrayal of American Indians in, 38 Firesteel, Franklin, 16–17 “first insights,” 5–6 Fisher, Alice Poindexter, 75 Fisher, Dexter, 45 Five Civilized Tribes, 138n7 550 Dakota Verbs (LaFontaine and McKay), 80 Flandreau sd, 46, 58 Fletcher, Alice, 60 Flexnor, James, 122 Flint. See Tawiskaron “The Forgotten Ear of Corn,” 41 For Those Who Come After (Krupat), 7–8 Fort Marion, 62

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Fort Yates, 25 Fourth World literature, 14 From the Deep Woods to Civilization (Eastman), 45–47, 50, 51, 55, 58–60, 136n49, 140n38 From the River’s Edge (CookLynn), 104, 105, 109 Fugitive Poses (Vizenor), 3 games, 39, 40–41, 42 gantowisa. See clanmother identity Gardner, Susan, 80, 142n1 gender: and Anglo identity, 50–51; balance of, 94–96, 98–103, 111; and children, 56–58, 61, 71–72; in Dakota oral tradition, 93–96; and decolonization, 94–96, 100; in donkey story, 30; and narration forms, 68, 88–91, 139n25; theoretical approach to, 15–16, 142n1; in writings of Luther Standing Bear, 36, 40; in writings of Zitkala Öa, 66–68. See also men; women gender acts, 26, 134n12 George, Dan, 127 George, Doug: Skywoman, 115–16 George-Kanentiio, Doug, 120, 121 “George Washington” (Kenny), 126–27 Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (Blaeser), 3 Ghost Bear, Gary, 100–102 Gloku (character in Waterlily), 86–87 Godfrey, Joyzelle, 80, 81, 142n1

Goodale, Elaine. See Eastman, Elaine Goodale Good-Minded. See Okwiraseh Graham, Mary, 21 grandparents, 72–73, 93, 99, 100, 102 Grant, Elizabeth: “He Walks in Two Worlds,” 122 Great Law of Peace, 119, 121–24, 145n31 Great Mystery, 57–60 “The Great Spirit” (Zitkala Öa), 138n10 Great Tree of Light, 116 Greenwood sd, 69 Grey Bull, Hermist (character in Aurelia), 104, 108, 109 Greyhouding This America (Kenny), 114 Grolier Codex, 2 Hailstone, James “Stoney” (character in “Bois de Sioux”), 98–100 Hakadah. See Eastman, Charles hakata, 85–87 Handsome Lake (Seneca), 6 haƒhepi, 93–94 haƒwi, 15–16, 94, 96, 98 Harry Chin (Lakota), 24 Haudenosaunee Confederacy: in Blackrobe, 119–20; and cannibalism, 144n31; condolence ceremony of, 14, 115; extermination policy against, 122; gender in oral tradition of, 93; history of, 17; longhouse philosophy of, 124–27; portrayal of, by

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Haudenosaunee Confederacy (continued) Maurice Kenny, 128; in tribal scholarship, 9, 16, 113–14, 118–21; and Twin story, 115–18, 144n5 Heflin, Ruth, 59–60, 136n49, 137n52; I Remain Alive, 48 Henry, Gordon, 95 “He Walks in Two Worlds” (Grant), 122 Hill, Roberta, 113 history, 3, 11, 33, 134n22, 142n1 A History of American Magazines (Mott), 138n12 hituƒkaƒkaƒ±i, 33 Holder of the Heavens. See Taronhiawakon Holm, Tom, 43, 113, 134n2 honorific speech, 68, 73–75 hooks, bell, 134n1 The Hopeless Kill (Kenny), 114 Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca, 51 horses, 30–31 House Made of Dawn (Momaday), 103 Howe, LeAnne, 6, 95 Iagentci. See Sky Woman I Am the Sun (Kenny), 114 Ice Skin. See Tawiskaron imitation, 73, 140n38 “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (Zitkala Öa), 64, 69 Indian Boyhood (Eastman), 45–61, 136n49, 137n52 Indian Child Life (Eastman), 47 Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains (Eastman), 47

Indian Scout Talks (Eastman), 47, 50–51 “An Indian Teacher among Indians” (Zitkala Öa), 64, 138n10 The Indian Today (Eastman), 47 In the Presence of River Gods (Cook-Lynn), 104, 109 In the Time of the Present (Kenny), 114 iƒya, 93, 102 Iotsitsisen. See Sky Woman I Remain Alive (Heflin), 48 I Remember the Fallen Trees (Cook-Lynn), 103 Iron Hawk (Rice), 77, 92 Iroquoian studies, 144n31 Iroquoian Women (Mann), 118 Is Summer This Bear (Kenny), 114 Jahner, Elaine, 109, 111 Jaimes, M. Annette, 7 Jogues, Isaac, 118–20 Johnson, Catherine, 126 Johnson, John, 114, 125 Johnson, Pauline, 113 Johnson, William, 121–22, 124–26 Justice, Daniel: Our Fire Survives the Storm, 4 Kanien’kehaka Indians: Isaac Jogues and, 119–20; and war, 123–24; worldview of, 114–15, 122, 124–25, 128 Kaposia band, 56 Kashaya Pomo oral tradition, 10 Keeping Slug Woman Alive (Sarris), 13

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Kelowna Accord, 137n3 Kelsey, Leon, 18 Kelsey, William, 18–19, 19 Kenny, Andrew, 114 Kenny, Doris, 114 Kenny, Maurice: Craig Womack on, 121; early life of, 114; portrayal of Molly Brant by, 118, 122–24, 127; technique of, 128– 29; theoretical approach to, 16, 113–14; in tribal scholarship, 9 — Works: “Aionwatha,” 119, 122–23; Backward to Forward, 114; Between Two Rivers, 114; Blackrobe, 16, 114, 115, 118–21, 128; Carving Hawk, 114; Dancing Back Strong the Nation, 114; Dead Letters Sent and Other Poems, 114; “George Washington,” 126–27; Greyhouding This America, 114; The Hopeless Kill, 114; I Am the Sun, 114; In the Time of the Present, 114; Is Summer This Bear, 114; Last Mornings in Brooklyn, 114; The Mama Poems, 114; Only as Far as Brooklyn, 114; On Second Thought, 114; “Peacemaker,” 119, 122–23; Rain and Other Fictions, 114; Tekonwatonti, 16, 114, 115, 118, 122, 126, 128; Tortured Skins and Other Fictions, 114; With Love to Lesbia, 114 Keyser, James, 33, 134n22 Kimball Union Academy, 46 Kingston, Ontario, 122, 127 kinship: Charles Eastman on,

56; Dakota identity through, 27–28, 71–73, 81–88, 110; and Ella Cara Deloria, 81–82; and right relationships, 71–73; terms of, 82, 83; value of, in Dakota life, 28–30, 82, 104; in Waterlily, 84–88, 91. See also tiožpaye Kiosaeton (Wendat), 118, 119 Kiowa Indians, 62 Knox College, 46 koda, 85, 87–88 kola, 85, 87–88 Kroeber, Karl, 132n15 Krupat, Arnold, 45; For Those Who Come After, 7–8 LaFlesche, Francis: Middle Five, 138n8 LaFontaine, Harlan: 550 Dakota Verbs, 80 LaFrance, Daniel, 113 Lake Andes sd, 17 Lakota Indians: band relationships of, 27; and children, 67; Ella Cara Deloria on, 76; and pictographs, 28, 35–42; at Standing Rock, 22, 24; and status of women, 30–31; tribal history of, 80, 142n1 The Land of the Spotted Eagle (Standing Bear), 36 landscape narrative, 68–70, 75 language: and challenges of publishing, 7–8, 132n17; Dakota scholarship on, 16–17; and decolonization, 90; history and identity through, 11–12, 133n25; instruction of, at boarding

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language (continued) schools, 137n3; of Ojibwes, 3; revitalization of, 80; of savagery, 55, 60; and tribal knowledge, 1 Last Mornings in Brooklyn (Kenny), 114 Leaping Fawn (character in Waterlily), 85 LeBeaux, Annabelle (character in “Red Earth”), 100–103 “Lessons of a Sentimental Education” (Bernardin), 66 Little Chief (character in Waterlily), 86–87 Lomawaima, Tsianina, 63–64, 138n7 longhouse philosophy, 16, 113, 124–27 Lowanla (character in Waterlily), 87 Lower Brule Community College, 80 Lukens, Margaret, 138n12 maŸpiya. See maŸpiyato maŸpiyato, 93–94, 102, 110 Maiden’s Feast, 54 maka, 93, 101 Makula (Oglala), 79–80 The Mama Poems (Kenny), 114 Mankato mass execution, 46 Mann, Barbara, 121; Iroquoian Women, 118 Maori texts, 14 “March of Civilization,” 24 marriage, 24 Mayan tradition, 1–2

McKay, Mabel, 13 McKay, Neil: 550 Dakota Verbs, 80 McLaughlin, Charles Cyprian, 22 McLaughlin, Clara Louise, 21 McLaughlin, James, 21–25, 34 McLaughlin, James Harry, 21 McLaughlin, John, 22 McLaughlin, Marie: and Dakota worldview, 23–26; marriage and family of, 21–22, 25; “The Mysterious Butte,” 33–35, 34, 42; Myths and Legends of the Sioux, 14–15, 22–23, 26, 28–31, 41–42; name of, 76; “The Pet Donkey,” 29–31; theoretical approach to, 14–15, 22–23, 113; use of, of pictographs, 28; and White Buffalo Woman legend, 31–33 McLaughlin, Marie Imelda, 21 McLaughlin, Mary Prince, 21 McLaughlin, Rupert Sibley, 22 McLaughlin sd, 22 Mdewakaƒtuƒ band, 133n4 Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (Ruppert), 8 Medicine, Bea, 78–79 medicine, traditional, 113 Medicine Bear, Dave, 17 Medicine Bear, Natalie, 17 “medicine dances,” 34 Meisenheimer, D. K., 65 men: as culture bearers, 90–91, 98; Elizabeth Cook-Lynn on, 105, 107–8, 110; and kinship, 87–88; white, 50–51, 124–25. See also aƒpetu wi; gender Mendota mn, 21, 133n4

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Merriam Report, 36 Middle Five (LaFlesche), 138n8 Mihesuah, Devon, 5, 132n13 Miller, David, 47 Minnesota, 80 Missouri River, 104, 107, 109 mixed-blood heritage, 65–66, 70–71, 140n31 mni sose. See Missouri River Mohawk, John, 10 Momaday, N. Scott: House Made of Dawn, 103 Morgan, Kelly, 13, 14 mother/child relationship, 66–68, 139nn23–24. See also kinship Mott, Frank: A History of American Magazines, 138n12 My Indian Boyhood (Standing Bear), 36 “My Mother” (Zitkala Öa), 69 “My Mother’s Curse upon White Settlers” (Zitkala Öa), 69 My People the Sioux (Standing Bear), 28, 35–42, 49–50 “The Mysterious Butte” (McLaughlin), 33–35, 34, 42 Mysterious Medicine (Dakota), 54 Myths and Legends of the Sioux (McLaughlin), 14–15, 22–23, 26, 28–31, 41–42 Nakota Indians, 27, 41 naming, 55–56, 60, 61, 136n35 nationalism, 4, 7, 27–29, 32, 45–46, 55–57, 70–73 Native American Literature Symposium, 132n12

Native Americans: as authors, 3–4, 43–44, 128–29; equality of, 45–46, 58; in films, 38; policy toward, 36, 64–65, 67–69. See also specific groups Native Science (Cajete), 6 New Amsterdam, 123, 124 New Tree. See Okwiraseh Oberlin College, 76 Oglala Women (Powers), 67, 140n31, 142n1 Ohio Land Company, 127 Ohiyesa. See Eastman, Charles Ojibwe language, 3 Oka Crisis (1990), 17 Okwiraseh, 16, 116–18, 121, 126, 144n18 Old Indian Days (Eastman), 47 Ondessonk. See Jogues, Isaac Ongwe Onwe authors, 113 Only as Far as Brooklyn (Kenny), 114 Onondawaga Indians, 17–19 On Second Thought (Kenny), 114 oral tradition: Arnold Krupat on, 7, 132n15; Charles Eastman and, 134n5; of Dakotas, 14, 93–96, 107–9; Eli Taylor and, 89; Gerald Vizenor and, 3; Greg Sarris on, 10; of Kanien’kehakas, 128 Otsitsa. See Sky Woman Our Fire Survives the Storm (Justice), 4 Owatonna mn, 21 Owens, Louis, 5, 20; “As if an Indian Were Really an Indian,” 6

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ozaƒ, 27–29, 40, 42. See also tipis Palani (character in Waterlily), 88 Palmer, Vera Bauer, 14 Pardus pa, 18 Parker, Arthur: An Analytical History of the Seneca Indians, 127 “Passions” (Brant), 123 Peace, Power, Righteousness (Alfred), 115 “Peacemaker” (Kenny), 119, 122–23 Peach Stone Game, 117 Pennsylvania, 18–20 The People Named the Chippewa (Vizenor), 3 Perry, Bliss, 138n12 “The Pet Donkey” (McLaughlin), 29–31 Pfaller, Louis, 22, 25 Philip (character in Aurelia), 110 Phoung (character in “Red Earth”), 100, 101 Pick-Sloan Act, 107, 109 pictographs: action in, 35; of donkeys, 29–31, 31; Luther Standing Bear’s use of, 35–42; Marie McLaughlin’s use of, 28, 41, 42; of “The Mysterious Butte,” 33–35, 34; of “protohistoric” period, 33; purposes of, 26–28, 41; as theoretical framework, 15; of tipis, 37, 38; of White Buffalo Woman, 31–33, 32 Pine Ridge reservation, 46–47, 80 pipes, 31–33, 42 placemaking, 68–69

Plains culture, 115 Pokagon, Simon: “The Red Man’s Rebuke,” 3 The Politics of Hallowed Ground (Cook-Lynn), 103 Pomo Indians, 10, 13 Pond, Samuel, 139n23 Popel Vuh, 131n3 postcolonial theory, 6–7 Powell, Malea, 4, 9–10, 51, 58 Power, Susan, 95 The Power of Horses (CookLynn), 103 Powers, Marla, 94; Oglala Women, 67, 140n31, 142n1 Prairie du Chien wi, 21 Prairie Flower (character in Waterlily), 87, 88 Pratt, Richard Henry, 62–64 Pulitano, Elvira: Toward a Native American Critical Theory, 5 quill counts, 140n39 “Race, Feminine Power, and the Vietnam War in Red Earth” (Andrews), 98 racial identity, 43–45, 49–52, 54–55, 134n3. See also Dakota worldview; tribal worldview Radin, Paul, 7–8 Rain and Other Fictions (Kenny), 114 Rainbow (character in Waterlily), 86, 88 Ransom, John Crowe, 114 The Raven Chronicles (Red Eagle), 97

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“Reclaiming Our Humanity” (Wilson), 11 Red Eagle, Philip: “Bois de Sioux,” 98–101; education and professional life of, 97; and gender, 93, 95–103, 111; on healing, 98–103; The Raven Chronicles, 97; Red Earth, 15, 93, 97–98, 100–103, 111; theoretical approach to, 15, 105, 113 Red Eagle, Philip (senior), 97 Red Earth (Red Eagle), 15, 93, 97–98, 100–103, 111 Reder, Deanna, 132n8 Red Hunters and the Animal People (Eastman), 47 Red Jacket (Seneca), 6, 126 “The Red Man’s Rebuke” (Pokagon), 3 Red on Red (Womack), 4, 132n7 Red Road Approach, 136n43 regionalism, 15, 65–68, 75 religion, 62, 94. See also religious narrative; spirituality religious narrative, 32–33, 41–42. See also religion; spirituality Remember This (Wilson), 11, 78 resistance: bell hooks on, 134n1; of Charles Eastman, 44–45, 51–52, 61, 134n2; and gender, 26, 97, 111; Maurice Kenny on, 115; of Zitkala Öa, 68 Revolutionary War, 122 Rice, Julian, 80, 86; The Buffalo People, 77, 92; Deer Women and Elk Men, 77, 92; Iron Hawk, 77, 92 road trope, 58–59, 136n43

Rockboy, Clarence, 17 Rokwaho (Mohawk), 120 Roppolo, Kimberly: “Collating Divergent Discourses,” 93 Rotinoshonni condolence ritual, 14, 115 Ruppert, James: Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction, 8 The Sacred Hoop (Allen), 95, 132n8 Sacred Horse (character in Waterlily), 85, 87 Sanford, Jenny, 127 Sans Arc Lakota Indians, 81 Santee Normal Training School, 46, 58–59 Sapling. See Okwiraseh Sarah (character in River Gods), 104 Sarris, Greg, 5; “Encountering the Native Dialogue,” 10; Keeping Slug Woman Alive, 13 savagery, language of, 55, 60 Schöler, Bo, 45 “The School Days of an Indian Girl” (Zitkala Öa), 64, 138n10 scientific knowledge, 5–6 Seek the House of the Relatives (Cook-Lynn), 103 Seidenbush, Rupert, 23 self-narration, 15, 45, 55–61, 66–68, 71, 73–75, 134n5. See also autobiography self-sacrifice, 57–60 Seneca Indians, 17–18, 123 sentimentalism, 15, 41–42, 65–68, 75

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sex education, 71 shamans, 57 Shenandoah, Joanne: Skywoman, 115–16 Sheridan (character in Aurelia), 108 silence, 99, 108, 109 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 6, 95; Almanac of the Dead, 1–2, 131nn2–3 Simmons, Ellen, 64, 69–70, 74 Sioux Indians, 27, 36–42, 110 Sitting Bull (Dakota), 24–25 Sitting Bull Combination (1884), 24 žkan, 102 Sky Woman, 93, 115–18, 144n18 Skywoman (Shenandoah and George), 115 Skyworld, 116 smallpox, 124 Smoky Day (Dakota), 54, 81 The Soul of an Indian (Eastman), 45, 47 South Dakota State College, 103 Spack, Ruth, 70, 74 Speaking of Indians (Deloria), 27–29, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84 spirituality, 34, 55–58, 60, 61, 98, 102. See also religion; religious narrative Spivak, Gayatri, 5 Standing Bear, Luther, 136n48; The Land of the Spotted Eagle, 36; My Indian Boyhood, 36; My People the Sioux, 28, 35–42, 49–50; Stories of the Sioux, 36 Standing Rock Agency, 22–25

Stanley (character in Aurelia), 105, 107 Star Elk (character in Waterlily), 84–86 St. Augustine fl, 62 Steilacoom, Mary Ann, 97 stereotypes, 53–54, 61, 74–75 Stewart, Thomas, 25 St. Nicholas magazine, 47 Stories of the Sioux (Standing Bear), 36 Stripes, James, 105 Sun Dance, 88, 94 Talayesva, Don, 71 “talking back,” 44, 134n1 Taronhiawakon, 93, 116, 117, 122 Tatekeya, John (character in Aurelia), 104, 106–8 Tawiskaron, 16, 116–18, 121, 124–27, 144n18 Taylor, Eli, 78, 88–91 Tekawerahkwa, 116–17 Tekawitha, Kateri, 14 Tekonwatonti. See Brant, Molly Tekonwatonti (Kenny), 16, 114, 115, 118, 122, 126, 128 textuality, Dakota, 35 Then Badger Said This (CookLynn), 103 Thin Elk, Charmaine, 17 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 132n17 timbre trope, 23 tiožpaye, 27–28, 31, 36, 55–56, 61, 66–67, 69, 73. See also kinship tipis, 37, 38. See also ozaƒ Tortured Skins and Other Fictions (Kenny), 114

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Toward a Native American Critical Theory (Pulitano), 5 trace, theory of, 7 trail. See road trope treaty discourse, 113 tribal knowledge, 10–11, 13–16. See also Dakota knowledge Tribal Secrets (Warrior), 3–4, 132n8 tribal theory: and colonization, 6–8; and culture, 12; and intellectual tradition, 3–5, 112–13, 128–29; and scientific knowledge, 5–6; strategies of, 8–14; theoretical approach to, 16 tribal worldview: and Charles Eastman, 45, 47, 52, 58–59, 61; definition of, 12; and healing, 98–103, 111; in literary scholarship, 13–14. See also Dakota worldview; racial identity trickster theory, 3, 5 Tuhiwai, Linda: Decolonizing Methodologies, 6 Turtle Island, 116, 117 Twin story, 115–18; and Blackrobe, 118–21, 128; and Tekonwatonti, 118, 121–28; theoretical approach to, 16; versions of, 144n2, 144n18 Two Heart Blue, Aurelia (character in Aurelia), 97, 104–10 Two Heart Blue, Myrna (character in Aurelia), 106 “Two Paths to Peace” (Brooks), 14 Two Spirit identity, 91, 115 Uncheedah (Dakota), 53, 54, 57

University of Minnesota, 16–17 University of South Dakota, 103 University of Washington, 97 uss Sommers, 97 Vietnam veterans, 96–103, 108, 110 vision quests, 57 Vivian, Viola. See Cooke, Viola Vivian Kelsey Vivian, William, 18 Vizenor, Gerald, 3–5, 61; Dead Voices, 3; Earthdivers, 3; Fugitive Poses, 3; The People Named the Chippewa, 3; Wordarrows, 3 Wabanaki Indians, 14 Wabasha mn, 21 WaŸ±etuƒwaƒ band, 56 wakaƒ, 35 wakaƒhe¼a. See children Wakaƒ Taƒka. See Great Mystery wampum, 9, 14, 113 war path. See road trope Warrior, Robert Allen, 3–4, 5, 75; Tribal Secrets, 3–4, 132n8 Washington, George, 122, 124, 126–27 Waterlily (character in Waterlily), 84, 86–88 Waterlily (Deloria), 15, 76–77, 78, 79, 81, 84–88, 91 The Watertown Daily, 114 Weaver, Jace, 78; American Indian Nationalism, 4 Wendat Indians, 119–20 Western Apache Indians, 68 Wetzel, Cora Maud Myrtle Vivian, 18–20, 19

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Wexler, Laura, 65 White, Richard, 12 White Buffalo Woman, 31–33, 102 White Manual Labor Institute, 74 whites, 45–47, 49–51, 58, 74, 109, 124–26, 133n4. See also Eurowestern worldview White Swan sd, 76 W. H. Over Museum, 77 “Why I Am a Pagan” (Zitkala Öa), 64, 138n10 Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner (Cook-Lynn), 103 wi, 15–16, 94–96, 101. See also men; women Wicazo Sa Review, 103 Wierzbicka, Anna, 133n25 Wigwam Evenings (Eastman), 47 Williams, Paul: Words That Come before All Else, 117–18 Wilson, Angela Cavender, 1, 33, 88–91, 133n25; “Reclaiming Our Humanity,” 11; Remember This, 11, 78 Wilson, Raymond, 47–48 wiƒk¡a. See Two-Spirit identity winter counts, 26–28 Wisdom Sits in Places (Basso), 68 Wissler, Clark, 60 With Love to Lesbia (Kenny), 114 Witzleben, Agnes Lariviere, 25 woŸpe, 102 Womack, Craig, 5, 98, 121; Red on Red, 4, 132n7 women: and corn, 41; crimes against, 99; as culture bearers, 26, 32–33, 68, 77, 81, 90–91, 105, 139n25; Elizabeth

Cook-Lynn on, 104, 106–8; in Haudenosaunee society, 125, 127, 128; and honorific speech, 73; Native understandings of roles of, 24; Philip Red Eagle on, 97, 100, 101; and pictographs, 30–31; quill counts of, 140n39; in Twin story, 118; and wi, 94. See also clanmother identity; gender; mother/child relationship Wong, Hertha D., 73 Wordarrows (Vizenor), 3 Words That Come before All Else (Williams), 117–18 World Columbian Exposition (1893), 3 Wounded Knee, 40 Woyaka (character in Waterlily), 79–81, 91, 92 Woyake Kinikiya (Cook-Lynn), 103 Yankton Sioux Indians, 13, 17 Zitkala Öa (Ihaƒktuƒwaƒ Dakota): dream narrative of, 73–75; educational narratives of, 71–73; and ethnography, 136n48; goals of, in autobiography, 74–75; mixed-blood heritage of, 65–66, 70–71; performances of, 51; resistance of, 44; sentimentalism of, 65–68, 75; theoretical approach to, 15, 113 — Works: “The Cutting of My Long Hair,” 65; “The Great Spirit,” 138n10; “Impressions

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of an Indian Childhood,” 64, 69; “An Indian Teacher among Indians,” 64, 138n10; “My Mother,” 69; “My Mother’s

Curse upon White Settlers,” 69; “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” 64, 138n10; “Why I Am a Pagan,” 64, 138n10