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1 Toni Morrison's Representation of Native TONI MORRISON’S REPRESENTATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS IN A MERCY, BELOVED, AND PARADISE By ALYSSA HUNZIKER A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2014 1 © 2014 Alyssa Hunziker 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Debra King Walker for her extensive guidance and encouragement, as well as Dr. Malini Johar Schueller for her mentorship and support throughout this process. I would like to thank my professors and colleagues, each of whom has contributed greatly to my growth as a scholar. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their continued encouragement and support. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………………….3 ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………..5 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….7 2 DEPICTING THE SURVIVING INDIAN: REPRESENTATIONS OF SETTLER COLONIALISM IN A MERCY, BELOVED, AND PARADISE………………………13 3 TONI MORRISON’S BLACK PARADISE: BUILDING A BLACK HOMELAND IN INDIAN TERRITORY…………………………………………………………………..32 4 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………..46 REFERENCE LIST……………………………………………………………………………...49 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………….52 4 Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts TONI MORRISON’S REPRESENTATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS IN A MERCY, BELOVED, AND PARADISE By Alyssa Hunziker May 2014 Chair: Debra Walker King Major: English Until the release of Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel, A Mercy, which features a Native American slave as one of its most prominent characters, there had been little scholarship on the ways in which Native American presence is signified in Morrison’s collective body of work. For the most part, critiques of the novels from an American Indian Studies standpoint surround the lamentable lack of Native characters or Native voice in narrative settings that, outside of Morrison’s fictitious universes, would be heavily populated by Native Americans. And while this quantitative lack of Native or African-Native American characters in Morrison’s oeuvre is troubling, one cannot discount the way that Morrison weaves Native presence through her texts through her references to Native lands and to Native crops, such as corn. In my first chapter, I discuss the ways in which the publication of A Mercy addresses the settler colonial history of the United States and allies the struggles faced by both Native American slaves (through the character, Lina) and imported African slaves in order to trace the intersection of these two communities at the nation’s inception. I suggest that Lina’s role as a protagonist in A Mercy subverts what the commonly cited trope of the vanishing Indian, as 5 Morrison depicts the inception of settler colonialism in the United States in order to suggest that Native American survival in the colonial system serves as a powerful act of resistance. In doing so, I highlight the way Morrison’s subsequent use of Native American cultural signifiers, such as corn, acts as evidence of continued Native survival into the twentieth century. My second chapter explores the way Morrison continues to represent Native presence in Paradise. I suggest that as a historical novel reflecting on all-black Oklahoma towns built post- reconstruction, which were admittedly built in Indian Territory, the text relies on a contemporary Native American presence. Because many late-nineteenth century advertisements for all-black towns advertised Indian Territory as an edenic, black paradise the title of the novel reveals the complicated racial make-up of Ruby and suggests the possible presence of Black Indians (which explains the reversed one-drop rule Ruby upholds), as well as Native residents of the Convent. More importantly, the novel’s publication date occurs in a tumultuous time for the two communities as Black Indians were often thought of as evidence of a lost Indian bloodline. As such, Ruby’s reverse one-drop rule also serves as a critique of the conflict occurring between Native Americans and Black Indians in the mid to late 1990s. Ultimately, my project identifies Native presence, not just through the lens of actual characters, but through Morrison’s employment of corn and Native land as a signifier of the parts of Native American culture that are often overshadowed by the looming divide between blacks and whites. The project attempts to uncover the historical intersections of the African American and Native American communities that exist throughout Morrison’s work in order to demonstrate the ways in which she addresses trans-communal issues. 6 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Native American characters appear in Toni Morrison’s novels throughout her oeuvre. In Song of Solomon, the protagonist, Milkman, learns that his grandmother is Native American while he travels across the American south in order to learn his family’s history. In Beloved, Sixo and the Thirty Mile Woman frequent a cave that previously served as a hideout for Cherokees avoiding relocation, and in Paradise the text engages with an all-black town that is constructed in Indian Territory. With the release of the novelist’s 2008 novel, A Mercy, Morrison creates a Native American protagonist named Lina who serves as the author’s most prominent Native American character thus far. In each of these depictions, we find representations of Native Americans from a wide variety of tribes who come into contact with Morrison’s African American characters for varying reasons. In each of these episodes, the relationships between African Americans and their Native American counterparts are varied and diversified. Because Morrison is a novelist who writes primarily historical fiction, looking at the ways in which she represents Native Americans, even while she writes from a uniquely African American perspective, can yield a rich understanding of her conceptions of their overlapping histories. In her discussion of early Afro-Cherokee interactions, Tiya Miles states that “Cherokees had been aware of Africans at least since the sixteenth century when Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto beached in the Americas, carrying in tow West Indian and African slaves…[these slaves] were likely the first Africans that Cherokees encountered” (Miles, Ties That Bind 28). This explanation of early Afro-Native interaction illustrates what Miles describes as the triangular relationship between Euro-American colonizers, African slaves, and Native Americans, in which African-Native American interactions exist as a result of Euro-American 7 colonialism and slavery. African American and Native American slaves worked side by side during plantation slavery, and, as a result, their complicated intergroup history comes about as a result of settler colonialism and the trauma of the Middle Passage. In the introduction to When Brer Rabbit Meet Coyote, a text that discusses the influence of Native American characters in the works of writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Sherman Alexie, Jonathan Brennan argues that as a result of European-won battles with Native American nations, those indigenous peoples who remained were often sold into slavery (Brennan 5). And although Native slavery proved to be far less popular than the enslavement of Africans, due to the popular assumption that “The Indian slave was inefficient” as “one Negro was worth four Indians,” and that “attempting to get Native Americans to carry out the work largely failed,” these two groups, along with white indentured servants, were used as colonial sources of labor nonetheless (Northrup 4-5, Morgan 7). Brennan’s introduction provides substantial evidence of African- Native American interaction through slavery as he states: There is substantial documentation showing that large numbers of Native Americans were not exempted nor released from slavery but instead were merged into a mixed African-Native American slave community…The conditions for the creation of African- Native American communities also existed outside the parameters of plantation slavery. African-Native American communities resulted from runaway African American or African-Native slaves. Many slaves bolted from the plantations to create separate maroon communities and nations that were often African-Native American (Brennan 8). Thus, the creation of African-Native American communities serves as another reminder of the ways in which these two groups have come into contact through Euro-American slavery. Despite the two groups’ shared experience within the construct of plantation slavery, interactions between Native Americans and Africans in the early colonial system was varied and complicated. Miles suggests that because many enslaved Native Americans were women, and many enslaved Africans were men, the joining of these two groups through marriage and familial 8 structures was common within plantation slavery. However, just as African-Native American slave communities built inter-group familial alliances and many escaped African slaves found refuge in Native American communities, a history of Native American enslavement of Africans complicates the way scholars view Native African interactions. Miles explains that “When colonists abandoned the Indian slave trade and demanded black slaves instead…Cherokees and other tribes, whose appetites for European goods was swelling, became hunters and traders of Africans” (Ties That Bind, Miles 31). As a result, early and foundational
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