Download Phrases and Fonts from Indig- Enous Languages

volume 17 . number 4 . winter 2005 Studies in American Indian Literatures editor malea powell Michigan State University Published by The University of Nebraska Press subscriptions Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL ISSN 0730-3238) is the only scholarly journal in the United States that focuses exclusively on American Indian literatures. SAIL is published quarterly by the University of Nebraska Press for the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures (ASAIL). Subscription rates for individuals are $30 and $75 for institutions. Single issues are available for $20. For subscriptions outside the United States, please add $20. Canadian subscribers please add 7% GST. To subscribe, please contact the University of Nebraska Press. Payment must accompany order. Make checks payable to the University of Nebraska Press and mail to: Customer Service 1111 Lincoln Mall Lincoln, NE 68588-0630 Telephone 800-755-1105 (United States and Canada) 402-472-3584 (other countries) www.nebraskapress.unl.edu All inquiries on subscription, change of address, advertising, and other busi- ness communications should be addressed to the University of Nebraska Press. For information on membership in ASAIL or the membership subscription discount please contact: Siobhan Senier University of New Hampshire Department of English Hamilton Smith Hall 95 Main Street Durham, NH 03824-3574 submissions The editorial board of SAIL invites the submission of scholarly, critical, peda- gogical, and theoretical manuscripts focused on all aspects of American Indian literatures as well as the submission of poetry and short fiction, bibliographi- cal essays, review essays, and interviews. We define “literatures” broadly to include all written, spoken, and visual texts created by Native peoples. Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the most recent edi- tion of the MLA Style Manual. Please send three clean copies of the manu- script along with a self-addressed envelope and sufficient postage to permit the return of the reviewed submission, or you may submit by e-mail as an attachment (preferably in Rich Text Format [RTF]). SAIL observes a “blind reading” policy, so please do not include an author name on the title, first page, or anywhere else in the article. Do include your contact information, such as address, phone number, and e-mail address on a separate sheet with your submission. All submissions are read by outside re- viewers. Submissions should be sent directly to: Malea Powell MSU Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures 235 Bessey Hall East Lansing, MI 48824-1033 [email protected] Rights to the articles are held by the individual contributors. All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America SAIL is available online through Project MUSE at http://muse.jhu.edu. Cover: Photo courtesy of Bonita Bent-Nelson © 2003, design by Kimberly Hermsen Interior: Kimberly Hermsen general editor Malea Powell book review editor P. Jane Hafen creative works editor Joseph W. Bruchac and Janet McAdams editorial board Chadwick Allen, James Cox, Dean Rader, and Lisa Tatonetti editorial assistants Tina Urbain and Angela Haas editors emeritus Helen Jaskoski Karl Kroeber Robert M. Nelson John Purdy Rodney Simard contents articles 1 Refiguring Indian Blood through Poetry, Photography, and Performance Art elizabeth archuleta 27 Widening the Circle: Collaborative Reading with Louis Owens’s Wolfsong blake hausman and john purdy 79 From Trickster Poetics to Transgressive Politics: Substantiating Survivance in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen sam mckegney 114 Witchery, Indigenous Resistance, and Urban Space in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony david a. rice review essay 144 Rhetorical Removals daniel heath justice creative piece 153 Song to Tsuguntsalala raven hail vi sail . winter 2005 . vol. 17, no. 4 book reviews 154 Patrice E. M. Hollrah. The Old Lady Trill, The Victory Yell: The Power of Women in Native American Literature kathryn w. shanley 157 LeAnne Howe. Evidence of Red: Poems and Prose craig s. womack 163 Contributor Biographies 165 Major Tribal Nations and Bands Refiguring Indian Blood through Poetry, Photography, and Performance Art elizabeth archuleta One of the most provocative issues facing American Indians today concerns the competing definitions of Indian identity.1 Significant questions asked about identity include, Are there characteristics associated with Indianness? Does Indian identity originate from genet- ics or from cultural affiliation? Finally, Is Indian identity static, or can it change? American Indians and non-Indians have defined Indian identity through law, biology, and culture. All three overlap in spe- cific ways, but more significantly, all have ties to outdated blood quantum standards associated with nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century theories of race. While the dominant culture has largely dis- credited and discontinued the use of the “one-drop rule” historically used to determine a legally codified African American identity, Indi- ans and non-Indians alike continue to foreground blood as the stan- dard for determining American Indian identity. Blood quantum standards divide and alienate American Indian communities and perpetuate a colonial discourse that promotes internalized self-hatred, alienation, and fractionation. This internalized oppression appears in the work of mixed-blood authors Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna/Sioux/Lebanese) and Sherman Alexie (Spo- kane/Coeur d’Alene). At the same time, other full- and mixed-blood poets and artists such as Elizabeth Woody (Warm Springs/Wasco/ Yakama/Pit River/Navajo), Teresa Iyall-Santos (Coeur d’Alene/ Yakama), James Luna (Luiseño/Diegueño), Marie Annharte Baker (Anishinabe/Irish), and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Seminole/Muskogee/ Diné) create oppositional models of representation that challenge 2 sail . winter 2005 . vol. 17, no. 4 current paradigms of Indian identity and, at the same time, challenge Indigenous audiences to create alternative understandings of what it means to be Indian. They use their poetry and photography, as well as their own bodies, to create images that either refigure the binary of blood and identity that adds up to “Indian” or reinforce the strength of multifarious Indian identities that cannot be measured by blood. In Paula Gunn Allen’s poem “Dear World,” a mixed-blood identity causes internalized oppression and racial self-loathing that manifests itself through an illness that is figured in physical, mental, and spiritual terms. Allen’s poem illustrates how blood quantum standards tend to promote internalized self-hatred, forcing the mixed-blood person to blame herself or himself, rather than the va- garies of history and prevalence of non-Indian violence against Indi- ans, for the effects of internalized racism. In the poem, a daughter talks to her mother, who has lupus, about what the mother feels is a connection between her mixed-blood status and her illness. The mother describes lupus as “a disease / of self-attack,” similar to “a mugger” who breaks into “your home,” and when the police arrive, she tells her daughter, “they beat up on you / instead of on your at- tackers” (56). In medical terms, lupus is a chronic autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks normal tissue. In other words, one’s own immune system fights itself, literally setting one’s own body on fire by creating inflammation as a protective process designed to eliminate a foreign body and protect itself. The daughter recognizes the logic in her mother’s analogy. She tells her mother, that makes sense. It’s in the blood, in the dynamic. The daughter realizes, A halfbreed woman can hardly do anything else but attack herself, her blood attacks itself. (56) Archuleta: Refiguring Indian Blood 3 She believes, “There are historical reasons for this [the blood attack- ing itself]” (56). While the daughter positions her mother’s illness in a historical context, she also implies that her mother has learned to hate herself, which explains why she “can hardly do anything else but attack herself.” The history of white–Indian relations is written in the blood of the mother’s body, exhibiting itself as physical illness and dysfunc- tion. The narrator unites illness and history through blood whose “Indian” side inevitably attacks a foreign intruder, meaning the white, Euramerican blood contained in her mother’s body, a foreign blood that has colonized and assumed power over the “Indian coun- try” that is her mother’s body. The dominant culture’s construction of and American Indians’ tendency to adopt “authentic” Indian identity based on blood quantum standards leave the mother unable to “make peace / being Indian and white” (56). Her racially mixed body no longer signifies clearly within either system of identification, which leaves a question about how her being is constituted. Conflict- ing definitions of self render her invisible, because, she says, her blood’s varied strains “cancel each other out. / Leaving no one in the place” (56). No one accepts her as white or as Indian, leaving her to feel that she is “attacked by everyone,” and thus, her body becomes “conquered, occupied, destroyed / by her own blood’s diverse strains” (56). The rhetoric the mother uses to describe her illness grounds it in historical violence and social injustice against Ameri- can Indians; yet, she still blames herself for circumstances beyond her control. The poem’s framing of blood quantum also focuses on metaphors of invasion and attack. Using the language of war and colonization provides the daughter with a model for helping her understand the devastation her mother has experienced as a mixed-blood woman. Her mother’s body cannot make peace with itself, a statement reflect- ing Indigenous peoples’ ongoing struggles with the United States. At the same time, her use of war metaphors also serves a political func- tion. To say that her mother’s body is conquered, occupied, and destroyed implies that enemies with battle plans and strategies for victory must exist, which begs the question, Who is the enemy and what 4 sail .

Load more