Colonial Study of Indigenous Women Writers in Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean

ABSTRACT NATIVE AMERICAS: A TRANSNATIONAL AND (POST)COLONIAL STUDY OF INDIGENOUS WOMEN WRITERS IN CANADA, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE CARIBBEAN Elizabeth M. A. Lamszus, PhD Department of English Northern Illinois University, 2015 Dr. Kathleen J. Renk, Director In the current age of globalization, scholars have become interested in literary transnationalism, but the implications of transnationalism for American Indian studies have yet to be adequately explored. Although some anthologies and scholarly studies have begun to collect and examine texts from Canada and the United States together to ascertain what similarities exist between the different tribal groups, there has not yet been any significant collection of work that also includes fiction by indigenous people south of the U.S. border. I argue that ongoing colonization is the central link that binds these distinct groups together. Thus, drawing heavily on postcolonial literary theory, I isolate the role of displacement and mapping; language and storytelling; and cultural memory and female community in the fiction of women writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Pauline Melville, and Eden Robinson, among others. Their distinctive treatment of these common themes offers greater depth and complexity to postcolonial literature and theory, even though independence from settler colonizers has yet to occur. Similarly, the transnational study of these authors contributes to American Indian literature and theory, not by erasing what makes tribes distinct, but by offering a more diverse understanding of what it means to be a Native in the Americas in the face of ongoing colonization. NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY DEKALB, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2015 NATIVE AMERICAS: A TRANSNATIONAL AND (POST)COLONIAL STUDY OF INDIGENOUS WOMEN WRITERS IN CANADA, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE CARIBBEAN BY ELIZABETH M. A. LAMSZUS © 2015 Elizabeth M. A. Lamszus A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Doctoral Director: Kathleen J. Renk ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply indebted to my dissertation director, Dr. Kathleen J. Renk. She has been instrumental in my development as a scholar and teacher, influencing my research interests and honing my writing skills. I am especially grateful for her prompt and insightful guidance and continual encouragement throughout the dissertation process. I also need to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Dr. Ibis Gόmez-Vega and Dr. Melissa Adams-Campbell, who have also shaped this project and supported me throughout it. I would also like to thank Melina Probst Martin, fellow graduate student and dissertator. I am so thankful for the countless hours we have spent at Starbucks and Panera, working, commiserating, and pushing each other to keep moving forward. She has reminded me of deadlines and what is important in life, and I am so appreciative of her positivity and friendship. I want to thank my husband, John Lamszus, who has sacrificed so much so I could pursue this dream. He has been a steadfast comfort and encourager throughout the high and low points of graduate school, and I could not have done this without him. I would also like to thank my parents for their love and support throughout my many years of school. They taught me so much about the value of hard work that has helped me achieve this goal. Finally, I would like to thank my previous mentors, Dr. Diephouse, Dr. Vander Weele, Dr. Jones, and Dr. Reppmann, all of whom inspired in me a love of learning and a desire to pursue this path. Many thanks are also due to my family and friends-who-are-family for their love and prayerful support over the years. Soli Deo Gloria. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 1 Theoretical Framework ..................................................................................... 4 Chapter Outlines ............................................................................................... 10 2. CROSSING BORDERS AND DRAWING NEW MAPS ........................................... 15 “Spreading sickness of the empire”: Home Invasion by Blind Skeletons ........ 19 Consequences of Forced Removal from Indigenous Land ............................... 28 Connection to Lost Indigenous Land beyond the Grave .................................. 47 Mapping Colonized Land and Bodies ............................................................... 53 Approaching Some Conclusions ....................................................................... 66 3. DECOLONIZING LANGUAGE AND STORY .......................................................... 68 Word of Mouth and the Written Word: A Shifting Hierarchy of Power .......... 77 Learning One’s Name, Accepting One’s Identity ............................................. 89 Erasing the Binary: The Interdependence of Orality and Textuality ................ 110 Approaching Some Conclusions ....................................................................... 129 4. WOMEN ON THE RUN: STRENGTH AND STABILITY IN FEMALE COMMUNITY ....................................................................................... 131 Memories as a Vehicle for Facilitating Reconciliation ..................................... 140 Achieving Relationship and Solidifying Identity without Living Forebears .... 160 Undermining Assumptions in Isolation ............................................................ 179 iv Chapter Page Approaching Some Conclusions ....................................................................... 198 5. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 200 WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................................... 204 INTRODUCTION “The term post-colonial…re-reads colonization as part of an essentially transnational transcultural global process--and it produces a decentered, diasporic or global rewriting of earlier, nation-centered imperial grand narratives… It obliges us to re-read the binaries as forms of transculturation, of cultural translation, destined to trouble the here/there binaries forever.”1 “Although our diversity remains, there is more intertribalism among the Native nations of this continent today than at any other time in our histories.” 2 “Rather than stand on the periphery, Native women are at the center of how our nations, both tribal and nontribal, have been imagined.”3 In the current age of globalization, it is no small wonder that scholars have developed a recent interest in transnational studies, which encourages attention for “forms of cultural production that occur in the liminal spaces between real and imagined borders” (Jay 1). For indigenous groups, these real and imagined borders include national borders and reservation borders, but also the borders of cultural expectations and stereotypes. The movement across these borders, especially in cases of cross-cultural contact, has tremendous implication for identity as customs and ideas are exchanged, but for indigenous people who have had additional borders imposed on them against their will, the implications for cultural identity are that much more pressing. 1 Stuart Hall 247. 2 Bruchac 9. 3 Goeman 2. 2 The combined interest in literary transnationalism in the scholarly community and the implications for Native American studies has prompted some scholars to suggest the need for a transnational study of indigenous writers in the Americas. Inés Hernández-Avila, for example, asserts that "One of the specific ways that boundaries need to be remapped, or better still transformed, in the study of Native American literature is in the si(gh)ting of 'Indianness' and 'Americanness' with respect to this hemisphere rather than simply with respect to the United States and Canada. Connections should also be renegotiated regarding issues of identity and mixed-bloodness that is of other combinations besides native and white" (173). Similarly, Simon Ortiz argues that “Throughout the Americas, issues and concerns about land, culture, and community abound especially where Indigenous communities have resisted physical removal and annihilation, destructive assimilation and acculturation, and the outright loss of land, resources, and human capital” (xii, emphasis added). Ortiz goes on to speak about the commonality among indigenous people “throughout the Americas from North to Central to South America,” namely that they are “wealthy with many languages, Indigenous tribal histories, experience; [they] have no lack of cultural resources; [they] are enduring and resilient communities,” and that colonialism has affected them in serious ways (xiii). Despite an apparent agreement that a transnational study of indigenous literature in the Americas is justified and important, until now there have been only small steps in the direction of that work. A number of scholars have collected creative work by indigenous writers from Canada and the United States into anthologies4, but there has not been any significant collection of work that also includes 4 Reinventing the Enemy’s Language edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird is one such example. It anthologizes indigenous women writers in North America, taking survival as its unifying theme. Native North American Literature edited by Janet Witalec, Jeffery H. Chapman, and Christopher Giroux

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