Writing Counter-Histories of the Americas: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac Of The Dead A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree Doctor of Philosophy University of Wollongong by Glenda Moylan-Brouff, B. A. Hons. School of Social Sciences, Media and Communications 2004 i This thesis is all my own work and has not been submitted for a degree to any other institution or university. Glenda Moylan-Brouff December, 2004. ii Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 Chapter One: Re-evaluating Dominant Representations of Geronimo and the Apache Nation; Mapping the Politics of Colonial 14 Recuperation Chapter Two: Re-figuring Geronimo: Story/History and the Politics of Cultural Difference 71 Chapter Three: Photography and the Politics of Visual Representation 122 Chapter Four: Native American Interventions in the Politics of Photographic Representation 168 Chapter Five: Writing Indigenous Histories: The Politics of Genre and Cultural Difference in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac Of The Dead 218 Chapter Six: Re-articulating the Politics of Native American Prophecy: Temporality and Resistance in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac Of The Dead 261 Conclusion 308 Appendix 315 Works Cited 327 iii Abstract Writing Counter-histories of the Americas: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac Of The Dead This thesis stages a critical interrogation of the colonial politics that have shaped and continue to shape representations of Native Americans in a North American context. This critical interrogation is based on a reading of Leslie Marmon Silko's landmark text Almanac Of The Dead. I argue that Silko's deployment of Native American counter-discourses of history and story-telling contests Eurocentric epistemologies and ideologies and their entrenched colonial relations of power/knowledge. In the course of this thesis, I focus on the complex representational economies that constitute Silko's text in order to draw attention to Native American histories of resistance to material and symbolic practices of colonialism. Silko's text, I argue, is distinguished by an extraordinary range of representational practices that cut across Eurocentric epistemological categories and taxonomies. Drawing on a rich repertoire of genres and cultural practices -- including the novel, history, photography, the almanac, political manifesto, prophecy and oral story-telling -- Silko effectively challenges dominant, Eurocentric representations of Native Americans whilst, importantly, staging a project of cultural and historical reclamation. The complexity of Silko's text, I argue, cannot be appreciated unless it is contextualised within the colonial economies of power/knowledge that have shaped the Americas post the invasion of 1492 and the tactics of resistance maintained by Native Americans in the face of ongoing colonial practices. As such, throughout the course of this thesis, I rigorously map the complex intertextual relations that constitute the fabric of Silko's text. At every level of her text, I conclude, Silko stages contestatory interventions that challenge and critique dominant colonial systems of representation whilst simultaneously marking, re-articulating and valorising Native American epistemologies and cosmologies that overturn these same colonial systems. iv Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the encouragement and support of many people. I am particularly indebted to my supervisors, Joseph Pugliese and Guy Davidson, whose intellectual mentorship and dedication to this project ensured its completion under often trying circumstances. I want to also thank my close friend and colleague, Colleen McGloin for her moral and intellectual support over the duration of the thesis. In the U.S context, I am grateful to Gerald Vizenor for his patient responses to my relentless questions about Native American Studies and the politics of representation. Especial thanks also to Chris Eyres for opening my eyes to the diversity and complexity of Native American participation in the visual arts arena. Similarly, I would like to thank Tim Troy and Marcia Tiede from the University of Arizona library for their good humoured assistance towards my research on contemporary Native American photography and on photography in general. Several people provided technical support in the final stages of this thesis. I want to particularly acknowledge the always warm and generous assistance and encouragement of Lynell Ratcliffe. I also want to thank Gaye Brayley and Becky Walker for their help in formatting the thesis and Eric Maldonado and Byron MacFarlane for their IT support. Finally, I want to thank the following members of my family whose constant love and support have enabled me to persist with and ultimately complete this project; my father, Charles Brouff, my partner, Chris Bartlett, my son Blake Elliott, and lastly, Boris, Tyson, Barbara, Bella and Donna. v “The story never stops beginning or ending. It appears headless and bottomless for it is built on differences. Its (in)finitude subverts every notion of completeness and its frame remains a non-totalisable one."1 Introduction I begin this thesis on the cultural politics of knowledge and Indigeneity in North America by invoking the critic and film maker, Trinh T. Minh-ha, whose ground-breaking text, Woman, Native, Other profoundly influenced my critical thinking on issues of colonialism, representation and cultural difference in my undergraduate years. In her introduction to this text, which is centrally concerned with dismantling the Western epistemological and discursive hierarchies marked out in the binaries history/story, fact/fiction and writing/orality, Minh-ha poetically evokes the power of story to articulate cultural differences in a continuous process of unfolding which implicitly contests the fixity and closure inscribed in Western discourses of history and the regimes of truth that authorise their production. Minh-ha's creative critical project is one that, through a process of generic interweaving, overturns the violent Western colonial hierarchies which have classified "story" as "tale, legend, myth, fiction, literature" and "history" as "fact," "reality" and "truth" (148). I cite her in order to mark my indebtedness to her work which, crucially, introduced me to the writings of the Laguna poet and novelist, Leslie Marmon Silko, whose text, Almanac Of The Dead: A Novel, constitutes the critical and political focus of this thesis. Silko's passionate analysis of the politics of colonialism, history and cultural difference in Almanac crystallises in a compelling way precisely those issues around history/story, fact/fiction, and writing/orality raised by Minh-ha in her work. 1 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989), 2. 1 The Cultural Politics of Unlearning Given the colonial history and politics which inflect the representation and appropriation of Native Americans and their cultural practices and productions in Western scholarly discourses, my decision as a non-Native American to base a dissertation around a specific Native American text requires further elaboration. The cultural politics that I am attempting to elaborate have been addressed by Wendy Rose (Hopi/Mihawk) in her essay "The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on Whiteshamanism," where she asserts: "We accept as given that whites have as much prerogative to write and speak about us and our cultures as we have to write and speak about them and theirs. The question is how this is done and, to some extent, why it is done" (416). Bearing Rose's critical qualifications in mind, and without subscribing to the colonial politics which produce Native Americans as exotic objects to be read/consumed by the Western gaze, I nevertheless want to acknowledge how my initial reading of Silko's Almanac constituted a turning point in my intellectual life. Reading Almanac generated a transformation in my understanding of the relationship between colonialism, history, epistemology and Indigeneity. In thinking through these issues, Silko's text compelled me to "do my homework" (Spivak 62). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's phrase encapsulates the idea of a respectful engagement with the discourses and practices of other cultures. Spivak advocates a critical orientation and practice which necessarily abrogates the Western colonial privilege of speaking for or as those cultures (52). It also problematises the Western anthropological fiction which deems the cultural modes and practices of non-Western peoples to be transparent and thus automatically legible to the gaze of the Western investigating subject. In the context of my own project, this fiction of transparency was rapidly undermined by my initial reading of Silko's text which, among other things, 2 inscribed a Native American epistemological and cosmological universe radically different from my own. The effect of this non-transparency was to situate me as other in relation both to the text and the Native American cultures it inscribed. The novel made me aware of how, in a very concrete way, issues about cultural difference and cultural legibility necessarily challenged my relationship to the academic protocols and practices I had taken for granted, and that an ethical engagement with the issues raised by Silko's text required me to undergo a process of learning and unlearning. The imperative of re-educating myself in the politics of history and historiography sent me on a journey to the U.S.A. to research Native American cultures