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Red Feminist Literary Analysis: Reading Violence and Criminality in Contemporary Native Women‘S Writing

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Red Feminist Literary Analysis: Reading Violence and Criminality in Contemporary Native Women‘S Writing Red Feminist Literary Analysis: Reading Violence and Criminality in Contemporary Native Women‘s Writing By Dorothy Ann Nason A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Patricia Penn Hilden Professor José Davíd Saldívar Professor Hertha D. Sweet Wong Fall 2010 Abstract Red Feminist Literary Analysis: Reading Violence and Criminality in Contemporary Native Women‘s Writing by Dorothy Ann Nason Doctor of Philosophy University of California, Berkeley Professor Patricia Penn Hilden, Chair This dissertation argues for the development of a red feminist literary analysis in the context of recent calls for a more ethical literary criticism in Native Studies and the more recent articulations of Indigenous feminisms. As a contribution to the field of Native literary analysis, it seeks to intervene in the gaps of literary nationalist approaches by reading the works of Zitkala-Sa, Janet Campbell Hale and Linda Hogan from a red feminist perspective which makes central considerations of gender. Using contemporary Indigenous feminist theory and history as the foundation of such a literary approach, this dissertation asserts that these texts offer important insight into the ways in which Native women‘s experience under colonialism has been shaped by gender oppression and colonial violence. In particular, this dissertation focuses on these Native women writers‘ gendered critiques of sexual violence and criminality as the organizing themes through which these works describe, and also attempt to unravel, the ideologies which normalize such conditions. Beginning with the early twentieth century non-fiction writing of Zitkala-Sa, followed by the short fiction of Janet Campbell Hale set during termination and the Red Power era, and ending with the contemporary fiction of Linda Hogan which evades specificities of time and nation, it also makes the historical claim that such feminist considerations of gender oppression and gender justice are not a ―recent‖ focus for Native women who have theorized the conditions of colonialism or the politics of decolonization throughout contemporary literary practice. 1 For my mother, Cecilia Marie Cantú Nason i Table of Contents Acknowledgements iii Chapter One 1 Introduction: Native Women‘s Feminist Organizing in the Red Power Era, Laying the Groundwork for Contemporary Indigenous Feminisms Chapter Two 18 Red Feminist Literary Analysis: On the Intersections of Indigenous Feminisms and an Ethical Native Literary Criticism Chapter Three 33 Human Rights Discourse and Reading the Red Roots of Red Feminism in Zitkala-Sa‘s Non Fiction Prose: 1919-1926 Chapter Four 58 Criminality and the Native Woman ―Outlaw‖ in D‘Arcy McNickle‘s The Surrounded and Janet Campbell Hale‘s Women on the Run Chapter Five 84 ―I will no longer be dissolved salt:‖Uprooting Discourses of Disempowerment in Linda Hogan‘s novel Power Conclusion 109 Works Cited 111 ii Acknowledgments It is difficult to capture the amount of gratitude and love I have for the people who supported me through the many years of research and writing of this project. I offer these humble words of thanks to the following people. To my dissertation supervisor, Dr. Patricia Penn Hilden, I thank you for your unwavering support, intellectual fierceness, and endless faith. To my committee members, Drs. José Davíd Saldívar and Hertha D. Sweet Wong, I am eternally grateful for your mentorship, patience and guidance through my coursework, fellowships and research. I must also acknowledge those friends and mentors whom have been invaluable to my growth as a scholar and Indigenous feminist: Drs. Shari Huhndorf, Cheryl Suzack, Kathryn Shanley, Victoria Bomberry and the Red Feminist Collective. At UC Berkeley, I owe much to my friends and colleagues who helped me through these many years of struggle. First and foremost, to the American Indian Graduate Program, especially Carmen Foghorn, you provided me with more than an office; you gave me a sanctuary. I also want to acknowledge the many friends I met through the American Indian Graduate Student Association for being a cohort of indigenous scholars of the highest order. At my current institution, my deepest thanks to my colleagues, Dr. Linc Kesler, Dr. Glen Coulthard, Dr. Sheryl Lightfoot, Karrmen Crey and Amy Perreault for their constant encouragement, intellectual generosity and fast friendship. To my closest friends and colleagues, Drs. Iyko Day and Danika Medak- Saltzman, you are my sisters. I especially thank you for the insights you have shared with me so generously all these years as we make our way through research, writing and life. I also owe much gratitude to my dear friends, Drs. Sylvia Chan and David Hernandez. To my brothers and sisters, father and mother, you are why I do what I do. To my mother-in-law, Lyn Shaw, you are my rock. And finally, to my husband Quinton Lowry Shaw, your patience, love, friendship and faith are what keep me going. iii Chapter One Introduction: Native Women‘s Feminist Organizing in the Red Power Era, Laying the Groundwork for Contemporary Indigenous Feminisms Let your women hear our words. --Nancy Ward, Speech to US Treaty Commissioners (1781) The women know as much as the men do, and their advice is often asked. We have a republic as well as you. The council-tent is our Congress, and anybody can speak who has anything to say, women and all. If women could go into your Congress I think justice would soon be done to the Indians. --Sarah Winnemucca, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) For spite I feel like putting my hand forward and simply wiping the Indian men‘s committee into nowhere!! No—I should not really do such a thing. Only I do not understand why your organization does not include Indian women. Am I not an Indian woman as capable to think in serious matters and as thoroughly interested in the race as any one or two of you men put together? --Zitkala-Sa, Letter to Carlos Montezuma (1901) This project engages contemporary Indigenous feminist thought and practice and current discourses in Native literary criticism which ground literary analysis within the context of Native peoples‘ political efforts for self-determination and decolonization. As demonstrated in recent scholarship by Indigenous feminists Cheryl Suzack, Shari Huhndorf, and others, Indigenous feminism is an intervention in the nationalist turn in Native literary studies and an important contribution to the discussion of ethical literary analysis. Specifically, Huhndorf argues in her most recent work, Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture, that Native literary nationalisms, which have dominated the field in recent decades, have been inadequate in addressing many aspects of contemporary Native cultural production. In particular Huhdorf argues that Native literary nationalists ―have devoted little attention to writing by Native women, especially those works that attend to issues of gender, and they have thereby reinforced the marginalization and political containment of indigenous women under colonialism‖ (4). Cheryl Suzack has argued that in seeking an ethical literary criticism, the subject of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (2008), critics must be attendant to the various ways Native peoples‘ identities and social relations have been remade by the discursive power of colonial law and policy, which produce the colonial subject not only through categories of race but also through redefining gender relations. In order to do so, Suzack argues that ―an ethical Native literary criticism must 1 remain vigilant to the conditions of cultural production from which emerge the identity categories we inhabit and employ in our cultural criticism;‖ as such those conditions require an intersectional approach that, for Suzack, feminist analysis and standpoint theory offers (171). This dissertation addresses the lack of critical attention to Native women‘s literature that Huhndorf notes in a way that locates these works within a critical discourse specific to Indigenous women‘s experience and identities as feminists and activists. For as Suzack notes, ―the study of Native American literature must be constituted through the terrain of political representation in order to transform the relationship between theory and practice‖ (171). However, exactly how to conduct such analysis, or rather what gives form to an Indigenous feminist literary practice must not be the work of one person or one project. Indeed, theoretically, literary critics might avoid such an undertaking because the terms of what constitutes Indigenous feminism are necessarily open and contested. Moreover, any project which claims to offer a definitive Indigenous feminist literary approach is more likely to produce its own exception rather than a sustainable or viable critical practice. This project therefore takes a humble position as it attempts to, on the one hand, lay the groundwork for a ―red feminist‖ literary practice, and on the other, avoid asserting that its analytical moves are the quintessential method of Indigenous feminist literary analysis. While what constitutes a red feminist literary analysis will be more fully discussed in Chapter Two, this dissertation‘s most basic claim is that gender as a field of social relations and power must be at the center of literary analysis that claims to unlock the political
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