University of Alberta The Im/possibility of Recovery in Native North American Literatures by Nancy Lynn Van Styvendale A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Department of English and Film Studies ©Nancy Lynn Van Styvendale Spring 2010 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Examining Committee Teresa Zackodnik, English and Film Studies Daphne Read, English and Film Studies Stephen Slemon, English and Film Studies Chris Andersen, Native Studies Shari Huhndorf, Ethnic Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Oregon Dedication To Aloys Neil Mark Fleischmann, for love, cats, dinners and questions, always the questions. Abstract Recovery is a ubiquitous theme in Native North American literature, as well as a repeated topic in the criticism on this literature, but the particulars of its meaning, mechanics, and ideological implications have yet to be explored by critics in any detail. Other than natural/ized telos, what precisely is recovery as it is constructed in Native literature? How might we describe the recovered subject(s) of this literature? To what ends is recovery, as both literary genre and discourse of Native identity, enacted and re-enacted? The Im/possibility of Recovery in Native North American Literatures explores classic and counter recovery narratives, a genre the study coins, and highlights how recovery, defined as “homecoming” by the genre, is characteristically im/possible. Providing in depth readings of four representative recovery narratives, Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash, Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen, and Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road, as well as an overall survey of the recovery narrative tradition, Im/possibility argues that recovery is re-formulated through its melancholic introjection of those for whom recovery is impossible. The study is divided into four main sections: the first explores the historical production of recovery as literary tradition in the late 1960s and 70s in the wake of termination and relocation policies in Canada and the United States. The second section brings together trauma theory rooted in Holocaust Studies with indigenous literary articulations of the trauma of displacement to argue that recovery narratives craft a distinctly Native North American understanding of trauma as “trans/historical.” The third section turns to the question of agency, re-evaluating the subversive potential of colonial discourses of subjection. Rather than continuing to perceive such discourses as repressive of “authentic” Native identities, Im/possibility uses poststructuralist analyses of subject formation to focus on the productive aspects of subjectification. The final section fleshes out recovery’s mechanics, the way recovery works—that is, both operates and succeeds—returning via a psychoanalytic analysis of discourse to theorize its melancholic composition. Acknowledgements Over the course of my degree, I have had the privilege of working with a number of outstanding scholars. Without them, this project would not have been possible, and I would not be the scholar, teacher, and person I am today and aim to be in the future. My sincere gratitude goes out to the following persons: Rob Appleford, who helped strengthen my knowledge of the field; Daphne Read, from whom I first learned the intricacies of trauma theory; Stephen Slemon, whose questions have stayed with me long after they were asked; and Chris Andersen, whose questions about the material conditions of textual reception I continue to revisit. I would also like to thank Cheryl Suzack, valued mentor, for asking tough questions and creating the space for my intellectual and ethical growth. And finally, I would like to thank my supervisor Teresa Zackodnik for her compassionate mentorship and sophisticated readings of my work. Her guidance has been invaluable; without it, I would be a much lesser scholar. Table of Contents Introduction.........................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Locating Recovery: Home, Dis/placement, and Identity in Recovery Narratives ........................................................................22 “Regressing” to the Reservation?: Temporality, Geography, Recovery...............................................................................................29 “Transmotion”: Indigenous Histories of Journeying and Return...................................................................................................42 Historicizing Recovery in the Context of Termination and Relocation.............................................................................................63 Chapter 2: The Trans/historicity of Trauma in Jeannette Armstrong’s Slash and Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer............................................87 The Meeting Place: Trauma Theory and Native North American Peoples..................................................................................96 The Trans/historicity of Native Trauma..............................................102 Redefining Trauma, History, and Event: Jeannette Armstrong and Sherman Alexie............................................................................106 Carrying the Weight of the People: Final Thoughts...........................131 Chapter 3: Recovering Agency and Subjection: Reading the Cannibal Subject in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen.......................142 Trauma, Subjection, and the Question of Agency..............................148 Constitutive Consumptions in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen.....................................................................................153 Chapter 4: Recovery’s Melancholia: The Subject of Loss in Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road..................................................................188 Melancholic Subjects and the Discourse of Recovery........................189 “This is simply what this place and these conditions have done to him”: Windigo Madness in Three Day Road.........................197 “Obviously A Huge No-No”: Recovery as Introjection of the Windigo Other.............................................................................222 Conclusion: Contributions and Next Steps....................................................239 Recovering the Urban........................................................................243 Exploring the Conversation Model: The “Coercive Power” of Language Meets Performativity.......................................246 Rethinking the Possibilities of Colonial Discourse...........................251 Works Cited...................................................................................................257 Introduction: The Im/possibility of Recovery in Native North American Literatures One of many, a compelling scene of return and recovery exists in Richard Wagamese’s Keeper ‘N Me. The novel tells the story of a young Ojibway man, Garnet Raven, who comes home to his land, community, and indigenous identity after having been fostered out to a series of white families and thus displaced, physically and psychically. Removed from his family at three years old, Garnet leaves the foster care system at sixteen and ends up living on the streets, alienated from his Ojibway heritage. The scene in question sees Garnet travel past the borders of the White Dog reserve, to which he has returned at the novel’s beginning, to an even more autochthonous homeland, the trapline on which he and his family lived before they were displaced by a hydroelectric dam, their land flooded. Containing traces of this past, the land is now home to the remains of his grandfather’s cabin and its non-human inhabitants. While this return home is, for Garnet, a fulfilling one which helps restore his connection to ancestral land, community, and traditions, the dilapidated cabin underscores the impossibility of his quest; as Garnet attempts to move ever-closer to the origin of his indigenous identity—to authenticity—the novel confronts us with its absence. The possibility of a return to the origin appears phantasmatic, dependent on the shutting out of an outside world omnipresent in the cabin’s remains. However, at the same time as the cabin marks the profound loss suffered by Garnet and his community, its decomposition signifies the return of the land to its natural state and, hence, the possibility of recovering a space ostensibly before the trauma of displacement. And yet, ironically, this recovery is inseparable from the very trauma it seeks to 2 overcome; indeed, the cabin remains, and its remains are a part of the land’s return to its indigenous identity. Metaphorized in the cabin’s “skeleton,” as Garnet calls it, loss remains at the heart of recovery. The scene is reminiscent