On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession
Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason University
Abstract:
This essay argues that mainstream, familiar concepts
of a bordered South and a recognizable southernness, however permeable
and flexible, are mostly dysfunctional when it comes to American Indian
literatures. "Native southern ground" can nevertheless be located and
described. For example, captivity narratives written before and during
Indian removal, though narrated by Europeans or Euro-Americans, reveal
non-utopian ways in which "the South" works as Native ground. From a pointedly
sovereign Native perspective, contemporary Native texts such as Shell
Shaker (2001) by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) reaffirm what various Indians
in early captivity narratives say and "say" and do as they work against
the impositions of a proto-regional colonial demarcation. In radically
repossessing the very experience and practice of captivity, removing it
from its western generic place and casting it as primarily a tribal affair
conducted on Native ground, Howe stands with various other contemporary
southeastern Native writers in working to repossess homelands that they
rearticulate not as "the South" but as Native ground.
Essay Sections:
Introduction:
I borrow only my title from Alfred Kazin's 1942
study On
Native Grounds, an influential reading of modern American prose in
which Kazin never, by "Native," means American Indian writing from any region
of the Americas. My new book project, On Native Southern Ground,
sets out to demonstrate that the South has long been a thriving locus
of American
Indian thinking and writing. I hope to supplement but also expand the
field
of Native Studies, which did not exist in 1942 and in which the vast
majority of critical work today (including my own first book) resists
regionalism but often homes in on Native writers and texts associated
with particular
regions, whether the American Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, or the
plains.
It is true that Native southern writers often choose to "talk about the
South" tacitly,
casting aside notions of a bounded southern region or culture area and
embracing a sense of home place that they define in their own terms as
Native southern
ground. But this point does not adequately explain why Native and Southern
Studies are such strangers.
Neither does my next point, which is that American Indians are in no way relegated to "the South before 'the South.'" Native southern ground is not lost (or preliterate) ground, not simply a mistily nostalgic pre-southern place, situated in some other culture's bracingly chronological order and largely defined against the canonical non-Native South, the post-southern non-Native South, and the most recent manifesto-driven incarnation, the New (but still pretty much non-Native) South. Instead, I argue that the South before the South remains very much a living presence, a transcultural complex that, geographically as well as rhetorically, operates on Native ground.
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Neither does my next point, which is that American Indians are in no way relegated to "the South before 'the South.'" Native southern ground is not lost (or preliterate) ground, not simply a mistily nostalgic pre-southern place, situated in some other culture's bracingly chronological order and largely defined against the canonical non-Native South, the post-southern non-Native South, and the most recent manifesto-driven incarnation, the New (but still pretty much non-Native) South. Instead, I argue that the South before the South remains very much a living presence, a transcultural complex that, geographically as well as rhetorically, operates on Native ground.
Why, then, do Indians
continue to be mostly absent from the critical and institutional
conversations about southern literature? In a 1991
study that comments on the relationship between Native Studies
and American Studies, Lucy Maddox begins to articulate one of
the
major reasons why these fields—and, by extension, subfields
such as Southern Studies—have not converged as richly and
productively as they might: "It is still difficult . . . to find
a place for the Indians in the 'civilized' texts we [i.e. non-Natives
who do American Studies] produce as critics; and the alternative
to finding a place there is still, it seems, removal" (178).
But there are other alternatives; for one, American Indians
are perfectly
capable of finding places for themselves—and for non-Indians—both
within and beyond the confines of academic structures. |
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Conferences such as the one featured above investigate
the relatively unexplored relationship between Native Studies
and the American South.
|
But as Maddox's observation perhaps
inadvertently points up, these places are not necessarily accessible
to non-Natives. For example, American Indian literature and criticism
that has to do with the South often does without "the South" as an explanatory
category, focusing instead on particular southeastern tribal nations
or on intellectual paradigms—such as Native American literary separatism—that,
for obvious reasons, do not rely on non-Native notions of regionalism.
Maddox is right, in other words, to see removal as a crucial, vexing
part of the
institutional and intellectual problem she discusses; but more attention
needs to be given to the diverse, creative, at times subversive ways
in which American Indian literatures and cultures of the South devise
countercolonial strategies that help them find places for themselves
in relation to the
South.
As it turns out, American Indians have not only been made separable from the South, very much including its literature; American Indian literature of the South also makes itself both separable and inseparable from southern literature and "the South." Native theories and practices of intellectual sovereignty, self-determination, and literary separatism emphasize Native cultural identities, looking to Muskogee Creek, Cherokee, Osage, and other tribal-national southern homelands and, in the process, operating as a form of strategic counter-removal. In these and other ways, this body of indigenous literary work continues to speak indigenous truth to colonial power, giving the lie to any suspicions that anti-Indian colonialism, persistent as it is, has succeeded in silencing, assimilating, speaking for, and otherwise colonizing Indians out of existence in the South, however broadly defined and whomever does the defining.
As it turns out, American Indians have not only been made separable from the South, very much including its literature; American Indian literature of the South also makes itself both separable and inseparable from southern literature and "the South." Native theories and practices of intellectual sovereignty, self-determination, and literary separatism emphasize Native cultural identities, looking to Muskogee Creek, Cherokee, Osage, and other tribal-national southern homelands and, in the process, operating as a form of strategic counter-removal. In these and other ways, this body of indigenous literary work continues to speak indigenous truth to colonial power, giving the lie to any suspicions that anti-Indian colonialism, persistent as it is, has succeeded in silencing, assimilating, speaking for, and otherwise colonizing Indians out of existence in the South, however broadly defined and whomever does the defining.
Essay Sections:
