Cutting Into Diane Glancy's Ghost Dance
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Cutting into Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance Rob Appleford University of Alberta Those of my children who doubt will be left in undesirable places, where they will be lost and wander around until they believe and learn the songs and dances of the ghosts. “I Bring You Word From Your Fathers the Ghosts.” Kicking Bear Occasionally Shosoni Indians visited [Ghost Dance] congers in Nevada. One such visitor was Egon Edmo Bonatsie (1872–1939). He went on horseback to […] western Nevada to take part in sprinting races, and afterwards attended a Ghost Dance, led by a woman. This dance terminated in what he considered a fraud: a supposed dead woman appeared in buckskin clothes and moc- casins and shook hands with the dancers. However, a young man peeped into the leader’s tent after the ceremony and saw how her daughter took off the dead woman’s clothes. Belief and Worship in Native North America Åke Hultkrantz hen asked in a 2002 interview to comment on indigenous lit- Werary criticism, the Cherokee-identified writer and critic Diane Glancy responded, “I could give you one statement about the American Native, which is that we do not agree on anything.[…] Who can write, and who ESC 39.2–3 (June/September 2013): 251–275 can’t, and what you can write—these are very debatable questions. We, as writers, get into big arguments. It’s war in Indian Country, it is!” (Andrews 658). Glancy’s characterization of the debate in 2002 seems good-natured, Rob Appleford is but it elides her own already-polarizing role in this debate. While her Associate Professor in career has been distinguished by many awards and honours,1 her work the English and Film has also provoked an extreme range of critical response: from puzzled Studies Department at non-engagement (Krupat 2005),2 to damning faint praise (Justice 2004), the University of Alberta. to outright character assassination and charges of ethnic fraud (Rathbun His work on film and 1997). The polarizing effect of Glancy’s work, I will argue, is largely due performance has been to the vexed subjectivity that she explores outside or against collective published in Social Text, cultural revitalization. To illustrate her handling of this subjectivity, this American Indian Culture paper will focus on the use Glancy makes of the nineteenth-century Ghost and Research Journal, Dance movement as a metaphor for indigenous identity. The paradox Modern Drama, Theatre that Glancy refuses to resolve, and one that I will focus on here, is that Research in Canada/ the nineteenth-century Ghost Dance’s revelation, its divine certainty, is a Récherches Théâtrales story woven out of performances, texts, and ghosts: three things that are au Canada, Canadian inherently ambiguous in their expression of what it means to be human. Literature, and several Diane Glancy would be, according to Kicking Bear’s opening admon- anthologies of criticism. ishment, a particularly doubtful “child.” Her critical and creative explora- He is the editor of tions of mixed-blood identity often focus on indeterminacy and doubt Critical Perspectives on as states of being, and her right to speak for indigenous peoples has fre- Canadian Theatre in quently been (and continues to be) challenged by critics and other art- English, Volume One: ists.3 As someone who was raised “white” and who later came to explore Aboriginal Drama her Cherokee heritage as an adult, she has frequently been criticized as and Theatre (Toronto: someone whose ideas about indigenous subjectivity are more imaginative Playwrights Canada than born of experience. And, admittedly, some of her more playful pro- Press, 2005). nouncements about her own creative process can leave her open to these charges: “As I traveled over the land those [Cherokee] voices were there. I never heard them with my ear, but in my imagination. For all my books 1 See “Diane Glancy: Awards, Fellowships, and Grants.” 2 I say this because Krupat’s analysis of Glancy’s 1996 novel Pushing the Bear is little more than a fact-checking exercise, with some brief head-scratching over Glancy’s editorial choices and use of historical sources (Krupat 2005). 3 In a 1991 letter to Paul Rathbun, Oklahoma poet Frank Parman calls Glancy “a fraud”: “When she found out how much easier it was to get published as an Indian she started writing about her ancestral memory. I know of several Na- tive American writers … who want to denounce her” (quoted in Rathbun 381). As recently as June 2012, an anonymous commenter on a blog post about a recent production of one of Glancy’s plays charged that Glancy is “fraudulently violating the 1990 Native American Arts and Crafts law” by claiming Cherokee heritage (“offstage”). 252 | Appleford I drive and pick up rocks. I have a wonderful collection of rocks, and I have a wonderful collection of voices in all of my books” (Andrews 651). If there is a common thread to the negative or skeptical criticism of Glancy and her work, it is the charge that she is overly fond of “absence.” While acknowledging that Glancy’s 2002 novel The Mask Maker was “provocative in content and richly textured in form,” Cherokee-identified critic Daniel Heath Justice ultimately felt that “the book is itself something of a mask. […] fundamentally defined more by absence than presence” (“Review” 74). In a far more ad hominem vein, non-indigenous critic Paul Rathbun,4 in his 1997 discussion of Glancy’s theatrical work, attacks Glancy as an eth- nic charlatan: “Glancy’s own authority hinges explicitly upon unfounded assumptions, assumptions which present Native dramaturgy as an absence rather than an ideologically obscured invisibility. Having identified that absence, she inserts herself and her interests into the space of the other, thereby to profit economically” (348). If both Justice and Rathbun com- plain that Glancy seems fixated on absence, what might we learn about Glancy and her work if we consider this complaint directly? With what does she fill these absences? Or to reframe the question: If nativist crit- ics like Justice and Rathbun advocate that indigenous writers fill absence with presence, why is the presence that Glancy explores in her writing unsatisfying or even offensive to these critics? What links the criticisms of Justice and Rathbun beyond their use of the term “absence” is the shared assumption that the individual writer must write to restore connections between indigenous individuals and the tribal group. These connections are presumed to be both positive and material. Justice’s review of Glancy’s The Mask Maker wonders why “tribal nationhood and tradition [are] relegated only to the margins of this story” in favour of the “individualistic mixed-blood angst […] which ultimately undermine[s] the communitistic ethos implied by the other stories inter- spersed throughout [the novel]” (“Review” 74). Elsewhere, Justice affirms that while positive (and collective) tribal stories “expand or narrow our imaginative possibilities,” negative (and, by implication, individualistic) stories that focus on “corrosive pain eat away at our humanity or [make] us destructive and violent” (Our Fire 206). Rathbun is even more blunt in 4 I had to do some Googly detective work to establish Rathbun’s biography. He does not state if he is indigenously—or non-indigenously—identified in his 1997 doctoral thesis. However, in a 2011 interview on a different topic, Rathbun implies that he is not indigenous but has “close ties” to the Lakota people on the Pine Ridge Reservation (Esper). It is important to note this here because it indicates that a tribalist critical position is an ideological rather than a narrowly genetic or filial one. Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 253 his conflation of art and life than Justice: “If a play, poem, story, interview, or material artifact defers or supplants the interests of Indigenous peoples, then it acts colonially, against the interests of Indigenous peoples” (367). This is mimesis-as-sympathetic-magic: stories make and change the world as much as relate to it or reflect on it. That these stories must transcend the self-absorption of personal doubt is a sentiment typically associated with “tribalist” or “nativist” critics, many of whom advocate a nation-centric model of mimetic indigenous “interest” or “tradition.” While there are many examples of this rhetoric in indigenous criticism, two will suffice here: the first from Métis scholar Howard Adams and the second from Assiniboine scholar Kathryn Shanley: Aboriginal consciousness cannot be a façade; it is an intrinsic or inner essence that lies somewhere between instinct and intuition, and it evolves from the humanness and spirituality of our collective, Aboriginal community. (38) An Indian can write about a teapot or a blue balloon or a day at the Field Museum of Natural History, but he or she must situate himself or herself in relation to Indian people. (696) Along this line of thinking, the writer has an unavoidably tribal responsi- bility. Expression must fill the absences made by the colonial project with storied presence and must counter the centrifugal spin of indigenous ano- mie with a centripetal spin back toward a tightened communal purpose. As both Justice and Rathbun (and other tribalist critics) warn, there is little place for deferral in this tribal context, unless it is clearly used as a weapon against colonial oppression. When nativist literary critic Craig Womack (Muscogee/Creek) asks for an indigenous literary approach “that at least lets me dream” (101), we can assume that this dream is not an isolating nightmare, that this dream is more Martin Luther King than Stephen King. This conscription of the indigenous writer into community service might puzzle critics and readers accustomed to freedom of literary speech and to the diversity that presumably comes from this freedom.