A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick Permanent WRAP URL:http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/85416 Copyright and reuse: This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. For more information, please contact the WRAP Team at: [email protected] warwick.ac.uk/lib-publications Violence and Frontier in Twentieth Century Native American Literature by Paul Charles Whitehouse A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies 2016 Contents Acknowledgements iii Declaration iv Abstract v Introduction 1 A Note on Terminology 20 Chapter 1: An Undeclared War on Indigeneity: Frontier 23 Ideology and Transcendent Violence Responses to Frontier Part I: Frontier as Fantasy-Making Apparatus 25 Responses to Frontier Part II: The Enduring Spectre of Frontier Ideology in 31 US Culture and Policymaking Beyond Spectacle: Puncturing the Transcendent Myth in Sherman Alexie’s 41 Indian Killer Responses to Frontier Part III: Re-Conceptualising Frontier as a Site of 51 Intercultural Contact and Conflict Responses to Frontier Part IV: Boundary Transgressions and the Third 77 Space in Momaday and Vizenor Chapter 2: Putting the Violence Back In: Reimagining 84 Frontier in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead Almanac of the Dead as Anti-Western 94 United States of Damage: Silko’s Pre-Apocalyptic Wasteland 103 Unmaking Myth: Extreme Violence and Forensic Overexposure in 124 Almanac Silko: Conclusion 148 Chapter 3: ‘The World Was Like That, Full of Hidden, Half- 150 Forgotten Things’: Systemic Violence and Louis Owens’s Uninterrupted Frontier Violence and the Uninterrupted Frontier in Owens 159 Violence in Owens’s Provincial Borderland 189 Owens: Conclusion 205 Chapter 4: Extreme Violence, Obscene Violence, and Terminal 209 Creeds: Gerald Vizenor’s New Frontiers Institutionalised Violence and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Bearheart 240 Institutionalised Violence in the Case of Thomas White Hawk 248 Vizenor: Conclusion 268 Conclusion 270 Bibliography 278 iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to so many people who have helped me along the way in producing this thesis. First of all, to my amazing wife, Deborah Toner, to whom I owe my greatest happiness, thank you for all your loving reassurances and for consenting to marry me while this project was still just a muddle of notes on an untidy desk. To my mother, Christine, thank you for your love and boundless generosity. To Dr Nick Monk, my supervisor, thank you for your good humour, understanding, and careful guidance throughout this project. I would also like to thank Dr Helen Dennis, who supervised me during the first year of my PhD prior to her retirement. To friends and colleagues who have had to listen to me waffle, thank you for your continuing patience. To Robin White, Sharon Holm, and Anne Jobin, thank you for your friendship and the many excellent conversations we have had over the past few years. I would also like to thank the Native Studies Research Network for providing a welcome and supportive forum in which to discuss my work. Finally, I would like to dedicate this doctoral thesis to my late father, Malcolm John Whitehouse, who sadly passed in 2008. I miss you buddy. We all do. iv Declaration This thesis does not contain material that I have used before. The thesis is my own work and has not been submitted for a degree at another university. v Abstract The central argument of my work is that authors Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor, working in the latter half of the twentieth century, use violence as a literary device (literary violence) for exposing and critiquing modes of systemic violence inherent in the formative originary myths of dominant US culture, specifically the mythic frontier and West. I argue that they engage with questions arising out of the systemic and normative violence required to sustain exceptionalist and supremacist Euramerican myth, which in turn sanitise the unspeakable violence of settler colonialism. This sanitising effect produces a form of transcendent violence, so called because the violence it describes is deemed to be justified in accordance with dominant ideology. In addressing this, Silko rewrites the mythic legacies of frontier and the West, rearticulating the unspeakable violence of conquest and domination, resulting in an anti-Western, pre-apocalyptic vision that turns away from European modernity and late twentieth century capitalism, looking instead to an Indigenous worldview. Owens similarly proposes an alternative reading of frontier where binaries of racial and cultural difference become malleable and diffuse, producing unexpected breaks with established ideology and narratives of dominance. The unseen systemic violence of the provincial town, in many ways the American societal idyll in microcosm, emerges during key confrontations between Native and non-Native characters in the liminal spaces and boundaries of the provincial town. Bringing these different threads together, Vizenor critiques systemic and institutionalised violence in his fiction and non-fiction work. His breakthrough novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart shares key characteristics with the work of Silko and Owens in this regard. Transgressing borders of taste, binaries of simulated Indianness, and notions of Euramerican cultural dominance, Vizenor’s mocking laugh destabilises the notion of completed conquest and closed frontiers as the final word on Euramerican supremacy. 1 Introduction Civilizations which fail to recognize the violence at their own core—fail to acknowledge that there is that at the heart of human culture which is profoundly antithetical to it –are likely to suffer hubris, overreach themselves in the pursuit of their enemies, and bring themselves to nothing.1 Terry Eagleton We should never forget that the very existence of indigenous literatures, not to mention the decolonization imperative of indigenous peoplehood, is a rebellion against the assimilationist directive of Eurowestern imperialism. Empire is driven as much by expedience and simplification as by hunger for power or resources. Simplification is essential to the survival of imperialism, as complications breed uncertainty in the infallibility of authoritative truth claims. Empire contains within it the insistence on the erasure of the indigenous population, through overt destruction or co-optation; indeed, the very memory of an unbroken Native presence is often furiously repressed by the colonizers.2 Daniel Heath Justice Incorporating the nature of the American Myth between the covers of any novel is admittedly a gigantic task, and is made almost impossible by the fact that so many versions of the same myth are used for so many warring purposes. Which America will you have?3 James Baldwin To offer an examination of violence and frontier in the context of twentieth century Native American literature, is to engage with systems and legacies of violence that oscillate between what is real, imagined, and mythogenic. Defining those positions, which stray between what Slavoj Žižek calls ‘subjective violence,’ – real, visible, tangible violence – and other more symbolic modalities, recognises that violence, as it is expressed in works of literature, must be regarded as semiotically restless. It therefore requires a multifaceted approach if it is to be decoded. As an imaginative 1 Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 2007), p. xii. 2 Daniel Heath Justice, ‘“Go Away, Water!” Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative’, in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, ed. by Craig S. Womack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Christopher B. Teuton (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), pp. 147-168 (p. 155). 3 James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-Fiction 1948-1985 (London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1985), p. 14. 2 medium, literature can produce unique insights into how the rendering of violence into myth can have a sanitising effect, inviting new readings that seek to extrapolate what has been obscured or excised from the dominant narrative account, be that literary or historical. To examine violence in this way is also to cast the critic’s net in an extremely wide arc, recognising that of the many remarkable works of fiction to which terms like Native American, American Indian, Indigenous, mixedblood, Mestizo, crossblood, or Métis might be applied, to say nothing of the many tribally specific designations, the subject of violence is certainly not in short supply. That is not to suggest that Native authors practice a unique brand of what might erroneously be called ‘Native violence’. Rather, this study offers a four part examination of the function of violence as a literary device, what I will refer to as ‘literary violence’, in several important novels that tell stories located in Native American and mixedblood experiences. Modes of literary violence can be characterised in several different ways. My purpose in using this term is to draw attention to the discursive role of violence in works of literature that exceed its use as mere spectacle or that of standard narrative plot device. Literary violence draws attention to itself, provoking a deeper analytical reading