English Studies Forum

The “Cosmopolitan Consciousness” of Gerald Vizenor and Native American Literary Separatism

Ben Carson

Cultures are not impermeable; just as Western science borrowed from Arabs, they had borrowed from India and Greece. Culture is never just a matter of ownership, of borrowing and lending with absolute debtors and creditors, but rather of appropriations, common experiences, and interdependencies of all kinds among different cultures.

                                                                        --Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism[i]

In 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted, as a side effect of capitalism, a worldwide transformation of the modes of cultural production. More than one hundred and fifty years later, their words still resonate:

In place of the old local and national seclusions, and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (84)

But as the United States and indeed the world become increasingly culturally heterogeneous and integrated, as peoples and cultures increasingly come into contact with one another and become inter-dependent, intellectual production in the U.S. generally and the literary scene in the American academy more specifically have become increasingly segregated. While, as Guillermo Gómez-Pena argues, in Dangerous Border Crossers, “nomadism and migration have become central experiences of millennial postmodernity” (11), American literature, ironically, is growing more and more balkanized as a new “garrison mentality” takes hold (Vizenor, Earthdivers 11), one which breaks literature and life up into “ethnic, religious, sexual, class, and regional franchises” (Crouch 18).[ii]  The American academy, unfortunately has become a space of “bizarre eclecticism where everyone must know their place […] Artists and activists spend more time competing for attention and funding than establishing coalitions with other individuals and groups” (Gómez-Pena, New World 15).[iii]

Speaking in terms of race, Paul Gilroy, in Against Race, argues this separatist mentality may be due to what he calls a “crisis of raciology,” or the “lack of confidence in the power of the body to hold the boundaries of racial differences in place” (22). While Gilroy, here, speaks of a crisis of race and raciology, this crisis of representation certainly extends to ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and nation, as it is no longer easy to take recourse in these categories as stable signifiers or arbiters of identity. The deliberate fragmentation of American literature and the retreat of America writ large into mono-ethnic neighborhoods are reactionary responses to this crisis of representation. The difficulty of representing “Others,” and the anger that results from the (mis)representation of “Others,” has resulted in an enforced monologic-mentality that finally smacks of narcissism. Stanley Crouch succinctly describes this attitude: “If I don’t write about you, you won’t write about me., I’ll stick with my favorite subject—myself—and I suggest you do the same” (18; emphasis original). Because in millennial postmodernity the “subject” is fragmented,[iv] representation becomes increasingly difficult; so by retreating into enclaves, various “ethnic” or “racialized” groups can monitor the way in which they are represented.

            While such a crisis, as Gilroy suggests, opens up the possibility of disabusing ourselves of racial and ethnic categories (and concomitantly the abuse suffered at the hands of those who benefit from their enduring legacy), paradoxically, “in this anxious setting, new hatreds are created not be the ruthless enforcement of stable racial categories but from a disturbing inability to maintain them” (22). Gilroy goes on to argue, for those who fear miscegenation, “crossing as mixture and movement must be guarded against. New hatreds and violence arise not, as they did in the past, from supposedly reliable anthropological knowledge of the identity and difference of the Other but from the novel problem of not being able to locate the Other’s difference in the common-sense lexicon of alterity” (105-06). It is not homogeneity, then, that leads to violence towards or the (often violent) exclusion of the “Other,” but the very heterogeneity (the result of “mixture and movement”) that—as a result of proximity to or the inability to recognize an “Other”—was to temper, if not entirely prevent, violence and exclusion.[v] Cultural integration was to bring about a sense of solidarity with those who were formerly seen as “Other.” As Richard Rorty argues, solidarity is “thought of as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation—the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’” (192). Solidarity, as Rorty imagines it here, has much in common with what Derrida calls “unconditional hospitality” (Borradori 128).[vi]

            And yet, the very dialogue with the “Other” that heterogeneity and proximity were to bring about has not occurred to any great effect within the literary and academic world.[vii] In fact, as Crouch observes,

as life in America becomes an ever more intriguing mix of styles, relationships, alliances, and even combinations of cuisine, things have gotten so mucked up and segregated in the world of literature that one does not expect American writers to tell us about anything other than themselves, their mono-ethnic neighborhoods, their own backgrounds, the narrowest definitions of the class from which they come, their erotic plumbing and its meaning, how much or how little melanin is in their skin, and so forth. (19-20)

            Rather than risk the “challenge of writing across the color,” gender, sex or class line (23), writers have increasingly turned inward toward their own territory, their own little corner of the world; and those who are highly invested in their particular corner of the world—for their sense of identity—have posted sentries at the “territorial limits” to guard against intruders (25). As Gómez-Pena argues, “in reaction to the transculture” Marx predicted would arise as capitalism transforms cultural production (New World 11),

a new essentialist culture is emerging, one that advocates national, ethnic, and gender separation in the quest for cultural autonomy, “bio-regional identity,” and “traditional values.” This tendency to overstate difference, and the unwillingness to change or exchange, is a product of communities in turmoil who, as an antidote to the present confusion, have chosen to retreat to the fictional womb of their own separate histories. Even our so-called “progressive” communities are retrenching to a fundamentalist stance. (11)

            The result of this retrenchment is that identity—racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, class, human/non-human—has become a kind of property, a cultural possession.[viii] And within the putatively progressive community of academia, the view of culture as “property” is rather widespread. Following this logic, African Americans “own” Nat Turner, and William Styron’s crime, according to certain African American scholars, was not necessarily that he wrote a bad novel about Turner, but that he, a white man, dared to write a novel about Turner at all.[ix] Styron dared to cross the color line. He, like William Faulkner in Go Down, Moses, Cormac McCarthy in The Stone Mason, Kazua Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day, Richard Price in Clockers, and James Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room, chose to “leave home,” to “step outside of what he or she happens to be in terms of class or sex or ethnicity or sexual persuasion” (Crouch 25), and to test himself by “finding out if [he had] the imagination to render vividly and believably people unlike the ones [he] grew up next door to” (50). Rather than encouraging such cross-cultural encounters in literature, which is part and parcel of “the creation of a multiparticipatory society” (Gómez-Pena, New World 15), “anyone who steps outside of what he or she happens to be in terms of class or sex or ethnicity or sexual persuasion receives a scolding” from those who have designated themselves “the border guards of identity” (Crouch 25; Gómez-Pena, Dangerous 12).

            The dream of a proper world literature, and what Gilroy calls a “cosmopolitan utopia,” has given way to enclaves (284). Not surprisingly, in these enclaves the discourse is monologic, and it is often “one-sided” and “narrow-minded” (Marx 84). Writers talk to their own “people,” and they together construct “their” history. Those “people’s history,” then, is inevitably and often purposefully constructed in isolation, separate and free from outsiders—those “others” who have, one would assume, “their” own “people” and “their” own “history.” Group and individual identity is tied to this particular enclave. Who “I” am and what “I” am is defined within given parameters, and these parameters, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues, must be guarded.[x] “We” define who “we” are, not “them.”   

            Some may find such a Manichean mentality useful. But writers like Styron, Faulkner, McCarthy, Price, Ishiguro, Baldwin, and Gerald Vizenor, among others, who risk leaving home, who risk transgressing territorial limits to disrupt spatial boundaries in order to create a cosmopolitan consciousness rooted in dialogue with “others,” view such thinking as pernicious and dangerous. Rather than turning inward toward his own ethnic neighborhood, Gerald Vizenor uses fiction to address the “epic complexities and appetites” of a whole host of characters from a variety of cultural locations (Crouch 28). But more than that, his “stories”—like his “tricky” characters—seek to disrupt his readers’ mental categories that delimit experience and sap the “life energy” that fuels their imaginations (Coltelli 165). Vizenor’s fiction invites readers to change and to “imagine themselves always and in a new sense” (164). He invites them to move out of their mono-ethnic neighborhoods and to go out into the world, to meet, greet, and apprehend “the other in terms of mutual humanity” (Crouch 29).

Because of five hundred years of cultural contact with non-indigenous peoples, within the discursive space of Native American discourse the authenticity and integrity of the Native “subject” is a central concern. The Native American mixed-blood novelist and critic Louis Owens argues that “for the contemporary Indian novelist—in every case a mixedblood who must come to terms in one form or another with peripherality as well as both European and Indian ethnicity—identity is the central issue and theme, and, as Clifford has suggested, ethnic identity is always ‘mixed, relational, and inventive’” (Other 5). The “worldview reflected in novels by American Indian authors,” he writes, can be “defined primarily by a quest for identity: What does it mean to be ‘Indian’—or mixedblood—in contemporary America” (20)?

While what it means to be—and how we are to define—black, Chinese American or Chicana in contemporary America is certainly a central issue to African American, Chinese American, and Mexican American writers, for example, the vehemence with which the issue of what it means to be “Indian” is raised within the discursive space of Native American literature is unparalleled in any other Ethnic American discourse. As Owens rightly claims, “today there is more wrangling over diverse issues (identity, authenticity, essentialism, critical colonization, appropriation, and so forth) in this arena of American literature than in any other nook or cranny of contemporary writing” (Mixedblood xv).

This vehemence arises out of a particular area within Native American discourse, namely the area dominated by literary separatists like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Robert Allen Warrior, Annette Jaimes, Karen Swisher, and Craig Womack, among others. These critics argue that Native American (oral and written) literary traditions, Native American (oral and written) history, and Native American culture, in its numerous tribal varieties, are independent of those of the West, that these traditions and the discourse about these traditions are the property of natives, and that non-native scholars, even those who want to work with and empower Indian people, should step aside (Swisher 192). Their frustration at the infiltration of whites into Native Studies echoes Ann DuCille’s discomfiture with white critics trespassing on the scholarly turf of African Americans. In “The Occult of True Black Womanhood” DuCille examines “some of the consequences of the current explosion of interest in black women as literary and historical subjects” (86-7). Among other things, she explores “the ways in which this interest—which seems to [her] to have reached occult status—increasingly marginalized both the black women critics and scholars who excavated the fields in question and their black feminist ‘daughters’ who would further develop those fields” (87).

The current explosion of interest in Native American literature by non-natives has separatists seeking out their own space away from what appears to be an academic-colonialist deluge of Western and, therefore, non-indigenous, scholarship. Separatists seem to be asking the same question Barbara Christian, in “The Race for Theory,” posed concerning African American literary criticism: “For whom are we doing what we are doing when we do literary criticism” (61)? If the answer for Christian, as it would be for DuCille, was/is African Americans, the answer for Native American separatists, not surprisingly, is unequivocally Native Americans. Certainly, though, not all Native American artists and scholars share the nationalist view propagated by Native American literary separatists any more than all African American critics agree with the position held by Christian and DuCille. Within Native American discourse, Gerald Vizenor, an anishanaabe poet, novelist and critic, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the separatist position.

In this essay I will argue that Gerald Vizenor’s fiction, which is heavily indebted to anishanaabe[xi] oral, mythic, and cultural (and therefore “nationalist”) traditions, as well as the Western philosophical tradition, moves beyond the strictures of Native American epistemology to embrace a cosmopolitan worldview that draws on and integrates anishanaabe, Western and Eastern philosophic traditions. A cosmopolitan perspective, as I use it here, embraces a perspective “consistent with a recognition and legitimation of heterogeneity (rather than homogeneity) as the social and cultural norm” (Krupat, Ethnocriticism 3). Vizenor’s theoretical position, as evidenced in the two novels I will be discussing, Griever: An American Monkey in China (1987) and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003), has much in common with what Paul Rabinow calls a “critical cosmopolitanism.” By Rabinow’s definition, “critical cosmopolitanism” is an “oppositional position, one suspicious of sovereign powers, universal truths, overly relativized preciousness, local authenticity, moralisms high and low” (258). “What we share as a condition of existence,” Rabinow argues, “is a specificity of historical experience and place, however complex and contestable they might be, and a worldwide macro-interdependency encompassing any local particularity. Whether we like it or not, we are all in this situation” (258). Rabinow defines “cosmopolitanism” more specifically “as an ethos of macro-interdependencies, with an acute consciousness […] of the inescapabilities and particularities of places, characters, historical trajectories, and fates” (258; emphasis mine). “Although we are all cosmopolitans,” Rabinow suggests, we have “done rather poorly in interpreting this condition” (258). Critical cosmopolitanism, as Arnold Krupat makes clear, opposes foremost the “determinations of monoculturalists” (Ethnocriticism 243), like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn,[xii] who have not only “done rather poorly in interpreting this condition,” but have rejected it outright.   

Before I look at certain of Vizenor’s postmodernist fictions in terms of a “cosmopolitan consciousness” that is part and parcel of a “critical cosmopolitanism,” in Part I of this essay I will discuss the issue of who can and who cannot speak about Native American issues. The need to announce one’s social location before engaging in scholarship on indigenous issues necessitates that I alert readers to my own social position, i.e. my cultural background, my present location vis-à-vis the academy, tribal nations, etc.

In Part II I will articulate the argument for and the limitations of a separatist literary tradition by focusing primarily on the arguments put forth by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux) and Craig Womack (Oklahoma Creek-Cherokee). These critics, along with scholars like Robert Allen Warrior (Osage), have directly or indirectly attacked Vizenor’s fiction because it lacks a “nationalist” focus. They argue it is too broad and encompassing in its thematic concerns. Unlike Vizenor, the separatists resist, if not denounce outright, the use of literary theories grounded in Western epistemology to interpret Native American literature, arguing, in effect, that “critical theory represents little more than a new form of colonial enterprise” (Owens, Mixedblood 51). Cosmopolitans like Vizenor and fellow mixedblood critic and novelist Louis Owens, by contrast, not only celebrate Western critical theories, but employ them often.[xiii] In Part III I argue that, while critics like Womack have very little to say about critical theories not arising out of a native episteme, Vizenor embraces the language and style of postmodernism, and his most important influences, other than the anishanaabe woodland trickster figure Naanabozho, are Bakhtin, Baudrillard,[xiv] and Derrida.  

Beginning Part III with a discussion of Vizenor’s Bearheart, I claim Vizenor’s novels are simply fictionalizations of his theoretical methodology, that is, his postmodern trickster hermeneutic. Vizenor’s novels The Trickster of Liberty (1988) and Chancers: A Novel (2000), for example, read very much like Manifest Manners, his first full-length theoretical work. Trickster of Liberty opens and concludes with a theoretical essay, citing Kundera and Kristeva, and Barthes is cited in the body of the novel itself. Vizenor’s “sources,” he admits, “are part of my work” (Postindian 125). Fiction and a Vizenor-style literary criticism explicitly overlap in Hiroshima Bugi, wherein each chapter is immediately followed by a section called “Manidoo Envoy, which consists of analysis and explication. By turning fiction into theory and theory into fiction, Vizenor renders them indistinguishable. While I won’t address Vizenor’s theoretical works specifically, it should be clear that all of Vizenor’s novels enact theory.[xv]  

In Part IV, I argue that because Vizenor’s work pushes beyond the boundaries of Native American discourse and embraces a view of the world where cultural boundaries are always fluid, always mutable, a “nationalist” reading is too limited in scope. I go on to suggest that mixedblood critics like Louis Owens and non-native critics like Alan Velie, David Murray, and especially Arnold Krupat, apply methodologies that are more conducive than those the separatists offer to navigating the labyrinth that is Vizenor’s oeuvre.[xvi]  These critics have been receptive to Vizenor’s turn toward postmodernism and away from nationalist concerns and the nationalists’ investment in “terminal creeds,”[xvii] one of which is that Native Americans have an “inborn Indian consciousness” (Konkle 151). Arnold Krupat, for example, has been especially receptive to Vizenor’s work and has used it often to put forth his own theory of “ethnocriticism.” But while Krupat’s work is indeed important and has done much to illuminate Vizenor’s work, I will argue, finally, that Krupat’s attempt to rescue Vizenor from postmodernism, which Krupat at times admits to loathing, is misguided. That Vizenor has fully embraced postmodernism is beyond question,[xviii] and in this sense, he doesn’t need rescuing.

For Vizenor the Native American “trickster is postmodern” (Vizenor, “Postmodern” 9), and mixedbloods or “crossbloods are a postmodern tribal bloodline” (Vizenor, Crossbloods vii). If Harold Bloom’s cultural hero is the “strong poet” and Richard Rorty’s is the “liberal ironist,” Vizenor’s hero is the “mixedblood,” a “cultural breaker, break-dancing trickster-fashion through all sign, fracturing the self-reflexive mirror of the dominant center, deconstructing rigid borders, slipping between the seams, embodying contradictions, and contradancing across every boundary” (Owens, Mixedblood 41).

Vizenor’s work, like the trickster figure, simply cannot be contained within the borders of a tribal nation, and mixedblood critics and non-Native critics seem more willing to leave the idea of a “sovereign nation” (one defined by land or territory) behind and move toward a “new mixedblood nation” and what Vizenor calls “a new consciousness of coexistence” that is transnational and transcultural (Vizenor, Earthdivers ix). Unlike the literal sovereign “nation” that nationalist critics call for, Vizenor’s “mixedblood nation” is less a particular place—a fixed territory—than it is an imaginary space. And this space is necessarily inclusive. In Earthdivers, alluding to the tribal creation myth in which “the cultural hero or tribal trickster asked animals and birds to dive for the earth” upon which a new “turtle island” (or a new earth) would be built, Vizenor writes:

[…] in the metaphor of the Métis [the French word meaning “mixedblood”], the white settlers are summoned to dive with mixedblood survivors into the unknown, into the legal morass of treaties and bureaucratic evils, and to swim deep down and around through federal exclaves and colonial economic enterprises in search of a few honest words upon which to build a new urban turtle island. (x-xi)

In other words, white scholars are summoned to dive with mixedblood survivors into the unknown, into Native American literature, and to swim deep down and around through Native American scholarship in search of a few honest words upon which to build anew urban turtle island. By rewriting Vizenor’s words in this way, the current dilemma within the dialogically agitated discursive space of Native American discourse in the academy becomes readily apparent.

While mixedblood scholars like Vizenor and Louis Owens dive “in search of a few honest words” with white and other non-native scholars into the “unknown”—the world of Native American literature in all its tribal and individual varieties—a number of Native American separatists has assumed the role of coast guard or border patrol. If Vizenor and Owens, among others, want to break down cultural barriers and open up borders, if Vizenor and Owens champion the métis and celebrate what Clarence Major calls the “many forces at work” constituting complex and multifaceted identities (Shepperd 3), Native American separatists champion “purists,” and the “monoculturalists of America” (Cook-Lynn, “American Indian” 131). In “What is an Author?” Foucault examines the relationship between “an author and a text” in order to determine “the manner in which a text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it” (115). While Foucault, like Barthes, concludes that “the form, the complexity, and even the existence of this [author-]function are far from immutable,” and can “imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author” (138), Native American separatists, even while conceding as they do that indigenous texts derive from a community, are finally unwilling to cut the umbilical cord that attaches author(s) and text, a move which could open the door to non-Native scholarship on Native Americans. So Native American purists, like Cook-Lynn et al., continue to pose “the tiresome repetitions”: “Who is the real author?” “Have we proof of his authenticity and originality” (Foucault 138)? Postmodernists, who follow Foucault’s lead, conclude that it doesn’t matter who is speaking—there’s simply no way to know. But separatists, heavily invested in the politics of identity, argue, in no uncertain terms, it matters.

It is the case, though, that Vizenor, too, worries over authors who pose as “authentic” Native Americans when they lack any tribal connection. In “Native American Indian Identities: Autoinscriptions and the Cultures of Names,”[xix] he openly attacks writers like Jamake Highwater, William Least Heat-Moon, Kenneth Lincoln, and Hertha Wong as “‘wannabe’ romantics” who “pursue an obscure tribal connection, an adoption, a passive wisp of ancestral descent in a document or name,” in order to make a name for themselves as “authentic” native writers (119). The hard-line separatist stance, though, goes beyond the critique of these “autoposers” or “penenatives” (Vizenor, Fugitive 15). As Vizenor argues, separatist critics are often just as guilty of adopting a “romantic,” “nativist” view of “Indians” as these autoposers, because they, like faux “Indians” (Highwater, et al.), tend to reinscribe “essentialist versions of Native history and identity” (Vizenor and Lee 3). “Even native resistance,” Vizenor writes, “is a romantic conversion of cultural dominance” (38). In any case, when it comes to those who subscribe to “terminal creeds,” or “beliefs that seek to impose static definitions upon the world,” Vizenor is an equal opportunity critic (Owens, Afterword 249).[xx] 

Part I: “A Nice [yoneg] Boy among the Indians”[xxi]

If the discursive space of Native American literature and theory[xxii] can be described as a veritable “contact zone,” a “space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (Pratt 6), the separatist solution to this “colonial encounter”—which, to separatists, is the source of “intractable conflict”—is, in effect, to push out the colonists, to neutralize the “zone” by making it not a contact zone, but a postcolonial, monocultural, native zone. Entering this zone, the discursive space of Native American culture and scholarship, demands identifying oneself. Entering means answering the question, “who’s speaking?” When reading Native American scholarship by natives and by non-natives, the importance of identification is made readily apparent by what seems a basic requirement: the need to announce one’s status as a native or a non-native, and if the former is applicable, one’s tribal affiliation. Take the following line from “Seeing (and Reading) Red” by Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice: “The work by Maurice Kenny (Mohawk), Craig Womack (Muskogee Cree/Cherokee), Tomson Highway (Cree), and others gives young Queer Natives, like myself, a richer understanding of our places in the world” (104). In a footnote found in this same essay, Justice references a conversation with “poet/activist/scholar Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee Two-Spirit/Queer, also of African, Irish, Lenape, and Lumbee ascent)” (119; emphasis original).

This need to announce one’s “social location” or emphasize specific cultural markers speaks to the importance of “authenticity” within the context of Native American discourse, a discourse still heavily wedded to identity politics. It also speaks to the desire (by some) to safe-guard the borders of Native American scholarship from the encroachment of non-natives (meaning, of course, “whites”), those whom Justice, in “Seeing (and Reading) Red,” liberally refers to as “yonegs” (100, 101,105, 106; emphasis original). While Vizenor, “a storier of tricky scenes and tragic wisdom,” is busy breaking down identities, separatists, or what Vizenor might call “native reactionaries,” are actively shoring them up (Vizenor and Lee 37, 38). Because the matter of who’s speaking is of paramount importance within Native discourse, entering this particular contact zone demands an identification card that announces whether you are one of “us” or one of “them.” As Krupat writes, “In our current ‘age of [bad] experience,’ we know it is impossible to proceed without some reference to one’s own ‘positionality’ or ‘social location’: the instantiation of personal bona fides as being one of ‘us,’ the offer of apologetic admission for being one of ‘them’” (Turn 2).

It is interesting to note that such a requirement does not seem as pressing in other discursive arenas, say, in the discourse of African American, Chinese American, or Chicano/a scholarship. While it is true that Barbara Christian raised this issue in “A Race for Theory,” it is not standard form for a white scholar to announce (and then apologize for) her/his “whiteness” before proceeding with a reading of Beloved or Corregidora.         And non-white scholars are not required to announce their social location before writing about “white” writers. Nowhere, for example, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s study of Yeats, Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats, does she pause to speak of her “positionality,” her “Indianness,” and no one has questioned her ability to “speak for” or “speak about” a modern Irish writer.[xxiii] And yet, in our current age, the need to assert one’s social location persists because it is believed a “speaker’s location […] has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker’s claims and can serve either to authorize or disauthorize one’s speech” (Alcoff 7). But as Linda Alcoff argues: “To the extent that location is not a fixed essence, and the extent that there is an uneasy, underdetermined, and contested relationship between location on the one hand and meaning and truth on the other, we cannot reduce evaluation of meaning and truth to a simply identification of the speaker’s location” (17).

Despite the difficulty of “positioning” oneself, due to the slipperiness and fluidity of an ever-shifting “social location,” I will, however, pause momentarily to position myself, recognizing, with Vizenor, that “I [am] not an isolated self and [cannot] think about myself without the presence of many others” (Vizenor and Lee 58),[xxiv] and that, while my “location” does not “determine meaning and truth,” my “location bears on meaning and truth” (16; emphasis original). By doing so I am, following Spivak, attempting to avoid the pitfalls of “speaking for” and/or “speaking about” others. I, like Spivak, prefer “speaking to” others. By “speaking to” others, “the intellectual neither abnegates his or her discursive role nor presumes an authenticity of the oppressed but still allows for the possibility that the oppressed will produce a ‘countersentence’ that can then suggest a new historical narrative” (Alcoff 23). Scholars, Alcoff writes, “should strive to create wherever possible the conditions for dialogue and the practice of speaking with and to rather than speaking for others” (23). While “speaking with” certainly sounds diplomatic, it is not always easy to do when the “other” is asking you—because you are not “one of them”—to step aside. And yet, as Krupat writes, “cosmopolitans will choose solidarity knowing full well that those whom we have chosen to support may not always be overjoyed to find us marching with them” (Red 18).

Having grown up in a middle-class family in a small town in southeast South Dakota, a town which, for all intents and purposes, was 99.9% “white,” I have always identified myself as “white.” And yet my great great grandmother on my father’s side (my grandmother’s grandmother), was a full-blooded Native American, a fact which my father was loathe to disclose. My paternal grandmother attempted, to my father’s dismay, to register her three grandchildren (all boys) with the Santee Sioux tribe in Santee, Nebraska—the small town in which she was raised and, after marrying my grandfather, outside of which she bought a farm and raised her own family. That my brothers and I possessed native blood was not something my father was proud of, and he did not support my grandmother’s decision to register us with the Santee Sioux tribe.

Growing up, I learned little of my native ancestry because it was clear my father was ashamed of it. He spoke of natives as “them” or “those people,” so inquiring about my great grandfather never seemed like a good idea, knowing my father’s reaction wouldn’t be anything but negative or evasive. I did know, though, with some certainty that my grandmother had indeed registered us with the tribe despite my father’s objections. So even though I identified as “white,” I always knew that that wasn’t exactly the case, and, while in my teens, I often wondered (though little more) about my native heritage, and even considered pursuing Native Studies at the University of South Dakota. But because that part of my genealogical history was never sufficiently nurtured by my parents, I was unable, for whatever reason, to sustain an interest in that part of my background, even after taking a course in Native American Thought at the University of South Dakota. But because of my native heritage, upon turning eighteen, I was “awarded” $700 as my “share of the judgment funds derived from the Mississippi Sioux Award, Act of October 25, 1972.” This was money distributed by the Enrollment and Claims Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the United States Department of the Interior to individuals with native blood (blood quantum being the U.S. government’s measure of Native identity). And this money, in my mind, was evidence of my enrollment in the Santee Sioux tribe.  

In subsequent years I discovered that my grandmother’s request to enroll my two brothers and me in the Santee Sioux tribe had been denied because we lack sufficient blood quantum, and that the money from the BIA was proof only of lineal descent and not enrollment. The tribe gave my grandmother and, of course, my parents an opportunity to appeal the tribe’s decision but an appeal was never filed. While, according to documents I’ve received from the U.S. Department of the Interior, I do possess “at least 1/16 degree Santee Sioux Indian blood,” the Bureau of Indian Affairs argues that “one must possess one-quarter Indian blood” to qualify for enrollment in a tribe (Swann xx).[xxv] By such a measure, I simply do not qualify. And if, as Brian Swann has argued, “Native Americans are Native Americans if they say they are, if other Native Americans say they are and accept them, and (possibly) if the values that are held close and acted upon are values upheld by the various native peoples who life in the Americas” (xx), again, I simply do not qualify as Native American. I speak, then, as a non-native, an outsider.[xxvi]

But if I am not, by either Swann’s or the BIA’s definitions, a Native American, what am “I”? My great great grandfather on my father’s side came from Ireland, and my great grandparents on my mother’s side came from Holland, which, it could be argued, makes me only a third generation American. How then do Holland and Ireland affect my positionality? What do they say about my “social location”? Am I, because of what Cook-Lynn calls “the reality of race memory,” in a better position to write on Yeats than Spivak (“American Indian” 82)? Am I in a better position to research and write on Van Gogh than Arthur Danto? If, as Rabinow suggests, “we are all cosmopolitans” and “we live in-between” identities, from what specific social location am I speaking, and how would I know? Does being a cosmopolitan erase the significance of “social location,” or does it simply point to the idea that we are all bound up with one another by the very reality of hybridity and the complexity of genealogy and identity formation?

While these questions might seem tangential, within the discourse of Native American separatism, these kinds of questions are very important. In her introduction to Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians, a collection of essays on the question of who should and who should not be involved in Native American scholarship, Devon A. Mihesuah writes, “although I do not profess expertise on my tribe’s history or culture, as a biracial Choctaw/French female I feel more at ease—and more useful—writing about my own tribe, writing about larger issues that affect all Indians such as repatriation and stereotypes, or writing fiction” (12).

Given my own background and academic training in ethnic American literature, I too feel more at ease writing about ethnic issues generally and Native American issues particularly than I do writing about W.B. Yeats, for example. But this ease derives not from race-memory but from personal and scholarly interests conscientiously pursued over a number of years. Consciousness of my own hybridity drives my interest in cultural hybridity and transculturation, that is, the degree to which cultures resist and absorb other cultures.[xxvii] Because hybridity is the reality of millennial postmodernity, it is important that scholars resist the urge to sequester certain parts of their identity in the interest of purity and separatism.  

On this point, it is tempting to ask Mihesuah if she has adequately theorized the ways in which her French ancestry shapes her scholarship, which, incidentally, isn’t always about her “own tribe” at all.[xxviii] While she mentions her own hybridity, she chooses not to explore it, making it easier to make claims about Native separatism. For example, despite her “nagging feeling that” she was “being nosy when writing about Others,” Mihesuah wrote her first book, Cultivating the Rosebuds: The Education of Women at the Cherokee Female Seminary, “on the Cherokee Female Seminary because its sociopolitical aspects are intriguing and because five of my ancestors attended the Male Seminary” (12). “But,” in a surprising admission, Mihesuah writes, “Cherokee is not the tribe in which I am enrolled, nor are they the people with which I identify” (12). I say “surprising” because Mihesuah goes on to argue, “if Cherokees want information about their traditions and thoughts published, let them write it themselves or recruit someone to write it for them” (12). In other words, Cherokees should write only about Cherokees, and Choctaws should write only about Choctaws, advice Mihesuah dispenses but does not heed. Mihesuah’s own work exposes one of the contradictions not only of separatism but of essentialism. In what way do Cherokees have privileged access to “Cherokeeness,” given “race-memory” and Cherokee blood, if a Choctaw can do a legitimate (because well researched and historically grounded) study of Cherokee women? Despite Mihesuah’s admonition, I, with Louis Owens, “do indeed insist upon my privilege to write of experience outside my immediate ethnic tribal heritage and outside my gender as well” (Owens, Mixedblood 21). 

The argument that “Indian people should be the ones to write about Indian” people (Swisher 193), and that “tribal people need to safeguard the borders of their cultural domains against research and publishing incursions” (American Indian Science 6), is most forcefully propagated by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. For Cook-Lynn, safeguarding the borders of “Native American Studies as an academic discipline” is of paramount importance (Cook-Lynn, “Radical” 10-11). She argues, “the integrity of what we do comes from the sober understanding of, and the regulating, and defending of the parameters of that discipline, parameters which may be either tribally specific or global or panindian” (11).  Like Daniel Heath Justice, Cook-Lynn imagines barbarian “yonegs” at the gate, “invad[ing] every genre” (“Intellectualism” 113). “American writers,” she claims, “have never hesitated to plunge into literary fields of exotic origin and call them their own. Thus, the borrowing and trading of literary kinds has flourished” (113).

The goal of separatists is to shore up the borders of Native American discourse, to make it the exclusive domain of authentic natives who have a genuine relationship to the land. And for scholars like Cook-Lynn, Justice, and Womack, authentic native scholarship and literature must have ties to the land. As Womack writes, “as a baseline requirement, narratives that claim to be tribal, it seems to me, must demonstrate some kind of connection to tribes. If a story has no connection to a specific landscape, in what sense can it be an Indian story” (“Alexander” 61)? And Justice asks, “who is better qualified to understand the land than the peoples who have shared life with her for untold ages? We belong to this land; we’re not guests of the Invaders, to be given access to their whim. The knowledge of Native peoples is the voice of Turtle Island that speaks closest to all of humanity. This is our inheritance” (“Seeing” 102).

It is clear that separatists see the incursion of non-natives into the space of Native American discourse as analogous to the colonization of Indian land by Westerners.[xxix] In both cases, invoking sovereignty means claiming the right to self-determination—freedom from the influence of non-natives. According to Womack, sovereignty is “inherent as an intellectual idea in Native cultures, a political practice, and a theme of oral traditions; and the concept, as well as the practice, predates European contact” (Red 51), and this inherent right must be recognized and respected by outsiders. But, according to Cook-Lynn, “Euro-American scholars have always been willing to forego discussion concerning the connection between literary voice and geography and what that means to Indian nationhood” (“American Indian” 89). Therefore, literary sovereignty, nationhood, and native identity are inextricably linked through their relationship with the land. Because Euro-American scholars have no ties to the land—they do not belong to the land, as native peoples do—the relationship between Euro-American scholarship and native literature, rooted as it is in a specific tribe, a specific place, a specific language, and tribally specific mythology, is always, in effect, one of alienation.

But it is not only Euro-American scholars who are alienated from native land and literature. Cook-Lynn, in “Intellectualism and the New Indian Story,” levels her sharpest critique at what she calls “the mixed-blood movement” (“Intellectualism” 128). For Cook-Lynn, mixedbloods—like Louis Owens, Wendy Rose, Maurice Kenny, Michael Dorris, Diane Glancy, Thomas King, Paula Gunn Allen, and, of course, Gerald Vizenor—are complicit with Western colonialism because their work offers “few useful expressions of resistance and opposition to the colonial history at the core of Indian/White relations” (124): “Instead,” she goes on to write:

            there is explicit and implicit accommodation to the colonialism of the

“West” that has resulted in what may be observed as three intellectual

characteristics in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry: an aesthetic that is

pathetic or cynical, a tacit notion of the failure of tribal governments as

Native institutions and of sovereignty as a concept, and an Indian identity

which focuses on individualism rather than First Nation ideology. (128-

29)

Because the writings of mixedbloods do not focus on “resistance and opposition to […] colonial history” (128), and because the ideas in the work of mixedbloods “are not generated from the inside of tribal culture” (129), they are not legitimate or authentic. Mixedbloods, in terms of blood and scholarship, have been watered down.[xxx] Insufficient blood quantum equals a lack of investment in indigenous struggles. Cook-Lynn argues that mixedblood literature that does not engage tribal politics or ground its ideas in native culture and mythology can be “characterized by excesses of individualism” (128). And when mixedbloods “articulate a private vision with little or no interest in understanding the national conscience,” she writes, “their voices seem shamefully inauthentic” (“American Indian” 95).

            Cook-Lynn’s critique of the mixedblood stems from her nativist approach, which argues that “colonialism needs to be replaced by the recovery and promotion of pre-colonial, indigenous ways” (Ashcroft et al. 159). For her, the “mixed-blood literary movement is signaling that a return to tribal sovereignty” and indigenous ways “on Indian homelands seems to be a lost cause, and American individualism will out” (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism” 128). What Cook-Lynn wants to recover is a “real Indian past” (134), but she argues “that the mixed-blood movement is led by those whose tribal past has never been secure” (128). A “real,” “authentic,” “Indian past,” then, depends on a “pure” identity, one grounded in pre-colonial, indigenous ways, and, of course, blood. But Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, has articulated the paradox of the nativist approach: “The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one’s own people. When a people undertake an armed struggle or even a political struggle against a relentless colonialism, the significance of tradition changes” (224). What Cook-Lynn calls “First Nation ideology” must take into consideration the reality of five hundred years of European contact (“Intellectualism” 130). Furthermore, by championing “the purists” (131), Cook-Lynn idealistically invokes what amounts to a “Native essence,” a pre-contact, pure identity (Pulitano 62).

            Cook-Lynn’s argument is, in effect, grounded in identity politics. She attempts to circumscribe a monocultural space in which a pure identity can emerge free from Western influence. The presence of mixedbloods complicates and therefore threatens the purity of this space because they infuse native culture, “through biology and intermarriage,” with a non-native “otherness” (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism” 129). And it is this non-native influence which draws attention away from the need to address “tribal nation hopes and dreams” (128). The mixedblood literary movement, then, because it does not “develop ideas as part of an inner-unfolding theory of Native culture” and does “not contribute ideas as a political practice connected to First Nation ideology,” is “a literary movement of disengagement” (130-31). Authentic native writers, or those writers whose tribally specific writings are connected to the land and First Nation ideology, engage communal values, while mixedblood writers, who because of that “otherness” within have directed their energies away from indigenous communities, have adopted a politics of “individualism.” Cook-Lynn writes:

The mixed-blood literature is characterized by excesses of individualism. The “I,” the “me” story, and publishing projects by university and commercial presses in the “life story” genre are the result more of the dominance and patriarchy most noted in American society than of tribalness. Mixed-blood literary instruction may be view as a kind of liberation phenomenon or, more specifically, a deconstruction of a tribal-nation past, hardly an intellectual movement that can claim a continuation of the tribal communal story or an ongoing tribal literary tradition. (128)

Cook-Lynn’s use of the word “deconstruction” here is hardly unintentional. Like other separatists who eschew the Western philosophic traditions prevalent within the academy, Cook-Lynn links deconstruction/post-structuralism with postmodernism and a politics of individualism. Deconstruction is fundamentally a critique of the humanist subject, which is, then, by extension, a critique of bourgeois individualism. This seemingly deliberate conflation, however erroneous, allows her to attack mixedblood writers—like Louis Owens and Gerald Vizenor—who have made use of post-structuralism and postmodern theory in their own work.

Yet it is obvious that Cook-Lynn’s articulation of postmodernism, like Womack’s and Justice’s, betrays misunderstanding. Rather than recognizing that “the idea that all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic and legitimate is essential to the pluralistic stance of postmodernism,” a stance which might buttress her own, Cook-Lynn attacks both pluralism and postmodernism (Harvey 48). She argues that a “‘tolerant’ national climate with resourceful diversity curricula have forged the apparatuses through which the study of aesthetics, ideology, and identity in native thought have flourished to the detriment of autonomous models in Native Studies” (“Intellectualism” 127). Similarly, Justice, in “Seeing (And Reading) Red,” opposes “autonomy of community and self-within-community” to “postmodern individualism” (117).

Interestingly enough, while the pluralistic stance of postmodernism opens a space for “difference and otherness, as well as the liberatory potential it offers for a whole host of new social movements (women, gays, blacks, ecologists, regional autonomists, etc.),” it is “difference and otherness” that Cook-Lynn and Justice oppose (Harvey 48). While Cook-Lynn sees postmodernism as a politics of individualism, her desire to foreclose or circumscribe a native identity is itself a gesture of individualism: it is the desire to create a space in which “otherness” is excluded. It could be argued that separatists like Cook-Lynn, Justice and Womack rightfully oppose postmodernism but do so for the wrongs reasons. Like separatists, postmodernists oppose individualism at all levels, arguing that the “individual” or “subject” exists at the nexus of a multitude of complex and often contradictory intersecting forces. As Hilary Weaver argues, “identities are always fragmented, multiply constructed, and intersected in a constantly changing, sometimes conflicting array” (240). In this sense, the individual or subject always already, in Walt Whitman’s words, “contain[s] multitudes.” The postmodern self always already exists as a “self-within-community,” making Justice’s distinction between “self-within-community” and postmodernism a false one (Justice, “Seeing” 117).

But the critique of the subject goes straight to the heart of Cook-Lynn’s resistance to mixedbloods and their interest in postmodernism. The philosophic tradition out of which postmodernism arose is Western, and, therefore, according to separatists, the critique of the subject is itself a Western notion. The rejection of postmodernism is a rejection of the notion that the self is multiple—that there is no “pure,” uncontaminated self, no self that isn’t already a “contact zone.” That the self is always already multiple is an idea that mixedbloods like Vizenor have whole-heartedly accepted. Again, for Vizenor, “crossbloods are a postmodern tribal bloodline” and crossbloods are tricksters (Crossbloods vii), and “the trickster is a communal sign” (“Postmodern” 9). Cook-Lynn’s critique of postmodernism and mixedbloods is a critique of the trickster and trickster discourse, because the trickster and trickster discourse transgress boundaries and reject any claim to purity. By celebrating trickster discourse and not what Cook-Lynn sees as an “aesthetic of traditional stories,” crossbloods represent cultural degeneration (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism 125).

Because Vizenor is a “major voice in this mixed-blood discourse,” Cook-Lynn singles him out for criticism (125). After quoting from Vizenor’s “The Ruins of Representation,” in Manifest Manners, she writes, “the postmodern conditions, [Vizenor] says, are found in aural performance, translation, trickster liberation, humor, tragic incoherence, and cross-causes in language games. Almost all of the current fiction being written by Indians is created within these aesthetics in contradistinction to the hopeful, life-affirming aesthetic of traditional stories, songs, and rituals (125). Mixedblood literature, in other words, is too messy, too performative to be hopeful or life-affirming. Too many boundaries are crossed. Identities are called into question. And yet, regrettably, in pluralist, postmodern America, “mixed-bloodedness [has become] the paradigm of preference” (125).

Cook-Lynn’s assertion amounts to suggesting that what might be called postmodern tricksterism has become hegemonic in and outside of the American academy. Theory in the U.S. was in its hay-day in the 1980s and early 1990s, and postmodernism, as a cultural zeitgeist, no longer holds the appeal it had even a decade ago. At the risk of speculation, I would argue that, while pragmatism, which rejects the notion of an essential, transcendental subject, has had a long intellectual history in the U.S., from William James, C.S. Pierce, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty, liberal humanism is still the “paradigm of preference” not only in the American academy but, ironically among Native American separatists.[xxxi] Separatists critique deconstruction on the grounds that it is too individualistic, yet the position that Justice, Cook-Lynn, and Warrior take is heavily indebted to liberal humanism, which posits “human nature” as being “essentially unchanging” (Barry18), and “individuality is something securely possessed within each of us as our unique ‘essence’” (18). Justice, for example, speaks freely about “all humanity” (“Seeing” 102), and Warrior praises John Joseph Mathews for his humanism. “Mathews,” he writes, “gives us an example of intellectual sovereignty deeply committed to humanism […] [H]e avoids slipping into rhetoric that separates American Indians either from the rest of humanity or from their own past” (103, 102).[xxxii] So while separatists reject the putative individualism of postmodernists, they re-embrace individualism by taking refuge in humanism, and the notion that the (indigenous) subject is “antecedent to, or transcends, the forces of society, [and] experience […]” (Barry 18).    

 In response to the rise of the mixed-blood as a kind of Western cultural topos, then, Cook-Lynn embraces a separatist stance rooted not in performance—the idea that identity is culturally defined and then performed—but in individual biology (“Fiction” 87). Cook-Lynn has made it clear that being authentically native means having native blood—that “being native” is not a question of performance but of blood line. “Behavior alone,” she argues,

does not make one a Lakota. One cannot be a Lakota unless one is related by the lineage (blood) rules of the tiospaye. While it is true that the narrow definition of biology was not accepted by the Lakotas, since they are also related to the animal world, spirit world, and everything else in the world, biology was never dismissed categorically. On the contrary, it is the overriding concern of the people who assiduously trace their blood ties throughout the generations. (94; emphasis original).

Because performing identity is one of the hallmarks of postmodernism, it is not surprising that Cook-Lynn takes refuge in blood lineage to ground native identity. She rejects outright the “idea that if you act like a Lakota you are a Lakota” (94; emphasis original). She critically attributes the argument that “whoever wants to be tribal can join the tribe” to Gerald Vizenor (85), arguing that, by doing so, Vizenor, and writers like Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and Scott Momaday, “seem to leave American Indian tribal peoples in this country stateless, politically inept, and utterly without nationalistic alternatives” (85). Being mixedblood, then, leads to a kind of cultural betrayal: impurity of blood equals impurity of culture, and concomitantly, the devaluation and eventual eradication of an authentic indigenous way of life. In a passage worth quoting at length, Cook-Lynn writes,

A great deal of the work done in the mixed-blood literary movement is personal, invented, appropriated, and irrelevant to First Nation status in the United States. If that work becomes too far removed from what is really going on in Indian enclaves, there will be no way to engage in responsible intellectual strategies in an era when structures of external power are more oppressive than ever. Moreover, no important pedagogical movement will be made toward those defensive strategies which are among the vital functions of intellectualism: to change the world, to know it, and to make it better by knowing how to seek appropriate solutions to human problems. Teaching is the mode intellectuals use to reproduce, and their reproduction should be something more than mere self-service. How long, then, can mixed-blood literary figures teach a Native American curriculum in literary studies of self-interest and personal narrative before they realize (and their students catch on to it) that the nature of the structural political problems facing the First Nation in America is being marginalized and silenced by the very work they are doing? (130-31)

            Vizenor’s betrayal comes in the form of “appropriating” non-native philosophies and playing on—or “inventing”—tradition. Vizenor’s work, in typical postmodern fashion, makes use of whatever intellectual ideas are at hand. His highly imaginative works form a collage or even a pastiche of indigenous, Western, and Eastern ways of thinking and knowing. While Cook-Lynn maintains that Vizenor’s fiction is apolitical, by combining the anishanaabe trickster figure, Naanabozho, and poststructuralist theory, Vizenor breaks out of “traditional” literary forms to create new ways of seeing and being in the world. In this sense, the kind of imaginative literature Vizenor creates is, in fact, deeply political. Like African American novelist and poet Clarence Major, Vizenor believes that “imaginative […] freedom precedes social liberation” (Klinkowitz 155).[xxxiii]

Vizenor’s use of poststructuralist theory, though, has alienated separatists like Cook-Lynn and Robert Warrior. Because Vizenor’s writings “enact” poststructuralist theory—in the way that Derrida’s Of Grammatology can be said to perform “deconstruction”—they are often rather difficult to comprehend, and do not lend themselves to easy interpretation. It is not only the content of Vizenor’s writings, then, that frustrates someone like Cook-Lynn, it is also the form. “Indian stories, traditions, and languages,” she writes, “must be written, and they must be written in a vocabulary that people can understand rather than the esoteric language of French and Russian literary scholars that has overrun the lit/crit scene” (137). Because Vizenor’s work draws as much from Continental theory as it does from indigenous traditions, in terms of both content and form, separatists argue that it does nothing to promote First Nation ideology or draw attention to the problems facing First Nations. As Robert Allen Warrior writes:

Vizenor replicates the conclusions and praxes of French theory. Like Foucault, he is resigned to allowing power and knowledge to play out their own control. Like Baudrillard, he is resigned to there being only more simulation underneath simulacrum of the world that modernism and capitalism has produced. Like Derrida, difference becomes the only politics that the creative artist or intellectual can offer. While he opens tremendous avenues at the level of creativity and critical reflections, at the level of program, Vizenor offers us little. (17)

Rather than offering a political response to “what is really going on in Indian enclaves” (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism” 130), Vizenor’s writings emphasize creativity, the play of language and its role in expanding consciousness, that is, its role in loosening “the seams in the coarse shrouds of imposed identities” (Vizenor, Interior 262). Whereas Cook-Lynn, Warrior and Womack argue that, in order to ensure native survival, literature needs to serve native cultures, play its part “at the level of program” (Warrior 17), and function didactically in a native “pedagogical movement” (Cook-Lynn, “Intellectualism” 130), Vizenor contends that “survival is imagination, a verbal noun, a wild transitive word” (Interior 263). For Vizenor, though, opening “tremendous avenues at the level of creativity and critical reflections” is itself a political act of native survival, what he calls native “survivance,” which is “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence” (Fugitive 15). Indeed, “the visionary literature that transforms what we once thought of as a native presence becomes a literature that heals, and a literature that liberates” (Vizenor and Lee 63).

            Craig Womack, like Vizenor, believes that literature is important because it has the power to transform and to liberate. But unlike Vizenor’s, Womack’s vision, as we have seen, is necessarily tied to the land, and, in terms of literature, a circumscribed native literary tradition:

Native artistry is not pure aesthetics, or art for art’s sake: as often as not Indian writers are trying to invoke as much as evoke. The idea behind ceremonial chant is that language, spoken in the appropriate ritual contexts, will actually cause a change in the physical universe. This element exists in contemporary Native writing and must be continuously explored in building up a national body of literature and criticism—language as invocation that will upset the balance of power, even to the point, as Zebolsky argues, where stories will be preeminent factors in land redress. (Red 16-7; emphasis original)

The critique here of “art for art’s sake” is a fairly common one among Native separatists. For example, in “Intellectualism and the New Indian Story” Cook-Lynn writes, “Today, American Indian artists, novelists, poets, and scholars who are publishing their own works seem to take an art for art’s sake approach […] Publishers want to take on only what will have a reasonably wide readership, and it is thought that the purists will not be read. Few discussions about the moral issues in producing art are taken seriously” (131). To “art for art’s sake,” Daniel Heath Justice, in “Seeing (And Reading) Red,” opposes “art for Life’s sake” (109). He argues that the aesthetic view of art for art’s sake centers on the “artist’s individual personality” and that “such a view […] frequently brings with it a hypernarcissism and self-centered conceit that contributes to the destabilization of the basic values and kinship ties of tribal communities” (108). The issue here is the function of imaginative literature and, of course, native identity.

For Womack, Cook-Lynn, Warrior, and Justice, native writers have an obligation to native culture, an obligation that transcends the “self.” Ironically, while separatists critique the modernist notion of art for art’s sake, separatists like Womack often sound a lot like modernists. Echoing a sentiment T.S. Eliot expressed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—that what happens in the process of writing poetry “is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable” (762)—Womack writes, the storyteller “reminds us that she is not the author of the story but the vehicle of a tradition. The individual artistic ego is subsumed by the will of the community” (Red 90).[xxxiv]

            This critique of art for art’s sake is a back-handed critique of Vizenor and other native writers who have embraced postmodernism, which, according to Justice, “transcends petty politics, morality, and even human life” while making “individual self-expression […] the ultimate value of art” (Justice, “Seeing” 108). For Womack, Cook-Lynn, Warrior, and Justice, Vizenor’s works are about Vizenor. They are simply self-centered expressions of his private vision, written in inaccessible language, and they contribute nothing to the continuation of native culture and the fight for land redress, the basic components of native sovereignty. What separatists want is a literature that addresses these issues and does so in authentic “Native voices” from an authentic “Native perspective” (Womack, Red 4). And for separatists there “is such a thing as a Native perspective” (4; emphasis original). As Womack writes, “I do not subscribe, in other words, to the notion that a Native perspective is, at best, problematic, if not impossible. I feel that Native perspectives have to do with allowing Indian people to speak for themselves, that is to say, with prioritizing Native voices” (4). Authentic Native voices are crucial if there is to be an authentic, sovereign Native American literary canon and if there are to be sovereign Native American nations (the two being interdependent). While scholars like Arnold Krupat have consistently argued for the inclusion of native literature in the Western canon, Womack argues that

tribal literatures are not some branch waiting to be grafted onto the main trunk. Tribal literatures are the tree, the oldest literatures in the Americas, the most American of American literatures. We are the canon. Native people have been on this continent at least thirty thousand years, and the stories tell us we have been here even longer than that, that we were set down by the Creator on this continent, that we originated here. For much of this time period, we have had literatures. Without Native American literature, there is no American canon. (6-7; emphasis original)

Womack makes clear that the Native American canon “predates” the American canon. He sees “them as two separate canons” (7). While this isn’t the place to rehearse the debate for or against Native inclusion in the canon, the important point to be made here is that for separatists, Native voices—embodied in Native literature—can be separated out of the heteroglossia that is contemporary culture in the United States. As Womack argues,

whatever we might say about the inherent problems concerning what constitutes an Indian viewpoint, we can still reasonably assert that such a viewpoint exists […] Whatever one might argue about postmodern representation, there is the legal reality of tribal sovereignty, recognized by the U.S. Constitution and defined over the last 160 years by the Supreme Court, that affects the everyday lives of individuals and tribal nations and, therefore, has something to do with tribal literatures as well. (6)

Again, Womack links “an Indian viewpoint” and “tribal sovereignty.” Separating Native voices from non-native or Western voices is an act of sovereignty, an act of de-colonization. And only a sovereign Native literature, one not influenced by non-native voices, can contribute to “tribal sovereignty” or land redress. As Elvira Pulitano writes, Womack “does not envision any moment of dialogue with Western critical discourse, claiming that ‘the primary purpose of [his] study is not to argue for canonical inclusion or opening up Native literature to a broader audience’ but to develop a theoretical discourse that will allow Native people to decolonize themselves” (79). In other words, “Native literatures deserve to be judged by their own criteria, in their own terms, not merely in agreement with, or reaction against, European literature and theory” (Womack, Red 243).

But as with the argument for native sovereignty over certain areas of land, the argument for literary separatism necessarily ignores the reality of five hundred years of contact with “the West,” which, it must be said, is hardly a homogenous, monolithic entity. The central problem with the separatist position is how one might go about “separating” out Native voices, Native perspectives (whether religious or philosophical), and Native literature from the cacophony of non-native voices.[xxxv] As Krupat writes, “Native philosophical and religious thought and Native literary expression are available for study and commentary only insofar as they exist in texts. And Native American writing, whether in English or in any indigenous language, is in itself testimony to the conjunction of cultural practices, Euramerican and Native American; it is inconsistent with any claim to a radical cultural independence or autonomy” (Turn 17). Pulitano echoes Krupat, writing, “the term Native perspective is itself problematic and contradictory. Once the oral tradition enters into dialogue with the rhetorical systems of the Western tradition, once it forcefully enters a book such as Red on Red, a product of the conjunction of cultural practices and hybridized discursive modes, an authentic Native perspective, such as the one promoted by Womack, becomes an ironic contradiction” (81; emphasis original). And yet writers like M. Annette Jaimes, following Womack, Cook-Lynn and Justice, insist there is such a thing as an “Indian voice.” In her introduction to The State of Native America, Jaimes claims it “can be said” that the contributors to this collection who are Native American “speak with an ‘Indian voice’” (10). Krupat rightfully criticizes such a claim, arguing, “Jimmie Durham does not sound like Wendy Rose; neither of them sounds like John Mohawk, and both of them on occasion sound at least a little bit like Jim Vander Wall, a non-Native contributor” (Turn 8).

            The insistence that there is such a thing as an “authentic” Native voice is based on the assumption that there is a Native essence that can be expressed in writing, what Womack, among others, calls “Red English.” If a native writes in the colonizer’s language, their rhetorical strategies—their uses of “Red English”—function oppositionaliy. As Bakhtin argues: “He can make use of language without wholly giving himself up to it, he may treat it as semi-alien or completely alien to himself, while compelling language ultimately to serve all his own intentions” (299). So the “voice” of the native can, in effect, be used against the colonizer’s language. But, at the same time, “the intentions of the prose writer are refracted, and refracted at different angles […]” (300; emphasis original). So “language,” “voice,” and “being” are ineluctably bound. To claim that Jimmie Durham and Wendy Rose speak in an “Indian voice,” as separatists do, is to argue that “to be an Indian (whatever that may mean) is always and everywhere to be this, that, or the other foreknown and fixed thing, that to be of European background (whatever that may mean) is to be this, that, or the other foreknown thing” (Krupat 5; emphasis original). But the separatist position is only “made possible by […] rhetoric” (7). As Krupat argues, “to assert the existence of ‘an “Indian voice”’ discernible in critical writing, is to argue rhetorically, not logically” (Turn 8). He goes on to write,

one may fantasize that in the history of the Americas, Columbus’s three little boats sank shortly after setting out, but the fact remains that from 1492 on, neither Euramerican intellectuals nor Native American intellectuals could operate autonomously or uniquely, in a manner fully independent of one another, for all the differences in power relations […] And Native American writing, whether in English or in any indigenous language, is in itself testimony to the conjunction of cultural practices, Euramerican and Native American; it is inconsistent with any claim to a radical cultural independence or autonomy. (18, 17)

As James Clifford argues in “Diasporas,” how “long […] it take[s] to become indigenous” is a political question, open for dispute, and not simply a given (309; emphasis original). If this is the case, then, what an indigenous “voice” is, and what an indigenous “perspective” might be, is open to question rather than transparently obvious.

Similarly, when Karen Gayton Swisher asks non-native scholars to “[step] aside” or “defer to Indian authors,” because non-natives lack the “passion from within and the authority to ask new and different questions based on histories and experiences as indigenous people,” she is reinscribing an essentialist notion of native identity: in this case, the rather strange notion that only natives have the necessary passion “within” to do native scholarship. In effect, “all” white scholars, because they are white, lack the requisite passion to write about “others.” A white scholar (whatever that might mean) can apparently write passionately about Thomas Pynchon but not Ray Young Bear. But, as Krupat argues, echoing Linda Alcoff,

to know that a particular scholar is a white male is not necessarily to know what he thinks—about white males, about Indians, or about anything else. The case is the same if a particular scholar is an Indian, male or female     […] [H]istorical indigenousness is not the same as mythical autochthony: there is no essence of America that Native people automatically incarnate, just as there is no essence of Europe (or elsewhere) inherent in people or groups with near or distant ties to those places. This is why there can be no guarantee that Indian journalists will write ‘better’ or more accurate or more sympathetic stories about Indians than will non-Indian journalists. (Turn 4).

Such a view, of course, does not sit well with scholars like Justice who believe Native Americans are “better qualified to understand this land” because they’ve lived on it for “untold ages” (“Seeing” 102). Justice here succinctly articulates the separatist notion “of purity and geopiety, in which the earth and Nature are used as sources of spiritual value uniquely accessible to Indians,” a view Vizenor finds particularly abhorrent (Murray 31). 

            Like Krupat, who argues that “to be Indian—whatever the (vexed) criteria for Indianness might be—provides no guarantee of any particular journalistic or scholarly or critical perspective or expertise” (Turn 4), Duane Champagne, in “American Indian Studies Is for Everyone,” argues that “one does not have to be a member of a culture to understand what culture means or to interpret a culture in a meaningful way […] The mere presence of Indian blood within a scholar […] does not ensure better or more sensitive historical or cultural understanding of Indian people” (182-83). While Womack believes “educating white folks about Indians […] [is] like teaching hogs to sing: it wastes your time and only frustrates the hog” (Red 21), Champagne argues that “as in all human groups, culture, institutions, and social and political processes are usually understandable to most anybody who is willing to learn and who at least may observe, if not participate, in the process” (182). In other words, you don’t have to “be” native to know and understand native beliefs, cultural practices, and traditions. One learns to “be” native in the same way that one learns to “be” Catholic. The young native and the young Catholic are both catechumens.[xxxvi]

Non-natives, separatists claim, are ignorant of and indifferent to native concerns, and yet when a “white” person attempts to educate him or herself about those concerns, he or she is met with hostility and the directive to “step aside” and leave native culture to the natives. Non-natives then are faced with what Krupat calls “the problem of the double bind”: “To take seriously the advice of many native scholars that if America is to survive, it had better learn something from the Indian—and then find a wide range of attempts to learn categorized as intellectual tourism, cultural imperialism, or the imposition of an unjust burden on the Indian—is to find oneself in a double bind” (Turn 12). One of the scholars to whom Krupat undoubtedly refers, even if he doesn’t mention him by name, is Louis Owens who, in “‘Everywhere There Was Life’: How Native Americans Can Save the World,” argues that “everything in existence is dependent upon and related to everything else […] This is a lesson Native Americans and all indigenous peoples really do have to teach, and it is time the world began listening carefully” (Mixedblood 226, 236). The relationship, then, between Native Americans and indigenous peoples and non-natives should be one of reciprocity, a dialectic of give and take, a transaction best described as sharing.

The idea of reciprocity must be extended to scholarship as well. If natives have much to teach non-natives, then it is safe to assume non-natives have something to teach natives, and one of the ways in which this “teaching” takes place is through the process of reading scholarship by “others.” In “Seeing (And Reading) Red,” Justice admits to having “given up reading anything by yoneg scholar Arnold Krupat,” arguing that “the core of his critical philosophy seems to be an insistence on seeing contemporary Indian writing as an expression more of white influences than as the vibrant artistry emerging from adaptable tribal traditions” (105; emphasis original). While Justice’s criticisms of Krupat are as often off the mark as they are acute,[xxxvii] his decision to ignore Krupat doesn’t bode well for the near future when a thoughtful and measured dialogue between natives and non-natives will be more important than ever as “cross-cultural encounters […] will increasingly mark the future” (Krupat, Ethnocriticism 31). But Justice’s decision to stop reading Krupat is consistent with the separatists’ decision not to read non-native scholarship about natives. As Haunani-Kay Trask asserts: “a choice has been made for things native over non-Native” (43). And yet this move is a dangerous one. As Mihesuah writes,

Many Indians would be satisfied if only Indians wrote about Indians. Some prefer not to read anything written by white men and women, not under understanding that having a command of the canon of the field is the only way to establish a point of departure. If there are problems with previous works about Indians, how can one correct these histories if one hasn’t read them? Conversely, how can the reader recognize incorrect works if she or he doesn’t know the correct versions? (14)   

Native scholars who ignore the work of non-native scholars run the risk of misrepresenting certain critical positions, e.g. Justice’s and Womack’s erroneous claim that postmodern literature is individualistic,[xxxviii] in the same way that non-native scholars who do not read primary texts by natives make themselves vulnerable to stereotyping or making generalizations about native peoples and their complex histories.

            It may surprise, if not totally dismay, separatists scholars to know that James Welch, a “highly esteemed Blackfoot-Gros Ventre author raised squarely within Blackfoot country and intimately familiar with what it means to be Indian in Montana today, has admitted to not only depending upon family or tribal oral stories but also reading a large number of books about the Blackfeet—books by on-Indian authors—in order to write his historical novel Fools Crow” (Owens, Mixedblood 19). “Since he was drawing rather heavily upon writings by white authors for his factual details,” Owens asks, “does this undermine the ‘authenticity’ of the only historical novel yet written from within an Indian perspective by an Indian author” (19)? For Owens, the answer is obviously “no.” Like Duane Champagne, Owens and Welch recognize that “one does not have to be a member of a culture to understand what culture means or to interpret a culture in a meaningful way” (Champagne 182). And because cultures are not homogenous but highly variegated, no one, not even cultural insiders, has access to every aspect of his or her own culture.[xxxix]

In terms of “Indians,” then, Krupat writes, “Indians, simply by being Indian (and I note again that what it means to be Indian is not always and everywhere the same thing), are [not] automatically and inevitably the best people to consult for every task involving the interpretation and understanding of Indian history, literature, and culture,” as James Welch’s reliance on non-native scholarship to write Fools Crow attests (Turn 10). While separatists cling to the notion that there is an “Indian viewpoint” that grants privileged access to the “truth” of Native experience (Womack, Red 6), the position of Krupat, Owens and Welch, on this point, echoes James Clifford’s argument regarding “partial” truths. For Clifford, “ethnographic truths are […] inherently partial—committed and incomplete […] In this view, more Nietzschean than realist or hermeneutic, all constructed truths are made possible by powerful ‘lies’ of exclusion and rhetoric. Even the best ethnographic texts—serious, true fictions—are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control” (“Partial” 7).  The separatist position is one of exclusion, a deliberate attempt to safeguard the borders of native literature, land, and experience from outsiders.

            Vizenor, of course, recognizes the reality of the United States as a veritable “contact zone,” in which “radical independence or autonomy” is impossible (Krupat, Turn 17). Having come to terms with this, Vizenor writes from a “‘contact’ perspective,” which “emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other” (Pratt 7). “[A contact perspective], Pratt explains, “treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” (7). Refusing to adopt the separatist stance of exclusion, Vizenor welcomes responsible scholarship about natives written by non-whites. In an interview with Laura Coltelli, Vizenor admits to being

greatly impressed by non-Indian teachers, writers, and critics because they’re very dedicated […] I’m so pleased that so many people and more and more take [Native literature] seriously, and it’s a very serious scholarship, which is impressive—doesn’t mean I agree with it, but it’s impressive. It’s the kind of stuff you can argue with, honestly, respectfully, and not come up feeling raped or victimized. It is really serious and it’s good stuff, and it’s open [to] play, in the best sense. (177, 178)

Similarly, Vizenor refuses to cordon off a space within the broad area of American literature or even World literature for something called “Indian literature.” Taking a position that mirrors Clarence Major’s on the subject of a recognizably “black aesthetic,” Vizenor argues that “if we speak of Indian literature, then we reduce the rich complexities of human experience of every tribal group, of every writer coming from a uniquely, distinctly identifiable experience” (Isernhagen 84).[xl] What Vizenor opposes is the notion of a monolithic entity called “Indian literature” that subsumes singular artistic expressions under a fixed rubric. What, after all, does Womack’s Drowning in Fire have in common with Vizenor’s Bearheart or Hyemeyohsts Storm’s Seven Arrows? This is not to say, though, that Vizenor celebrates individualism or the authority of the author. Having fully embraced the “death of the author”[xli] and the postmodern “self”—nomadic, fluid, anti-representational—he resists categories that seek closure through representation. For Vizenor, “nothing is closure” (Coltelli 178). Whereas Vizenor rejects categories that seek to delimit “uniquely, distinctly identifiable experience,” Womack and M. Annette Jaimes, for example, are content to classify disparate narrative “voices” under the category of “Native voice” (Womack, Red 6), which amounts to saying, as Krupat points out, that the voice of Wendy Rose (a Hopi) and the voice of Jimmie Durham (a Cherokee) both represent an “Indian viewpoint,” all distinct cultural traditions, histories, etc., aside. While Natives differ in terms of specific tribal traditions, have various historical relationships to dominant culture (with, say, the British or the French), have assimilated into or rejected dominant culture in varying degrees, speak radically different languages, etc., somehow, according to separatists, an “Indian viewpoint” and a “Native voice” has arisen from the efflux of history, survived intact, and can be articulated.

Part II: “What we had was a basic misunderstanding, a thunder storm, you might

     say we had a good argument.”[xlii]

            While Vizenor’s oeuvre is enormous, the issues with which he has concerned himself over the years have been surprisingly consistent.[xliii] In this section I will look at the way Vizenor’s fiction challenges notions of static identity and moves, finally, beyond the boundaries of a specifically Native American discourse and towards a transcultural, cosmopolitan perspective. In an interview with Neal Bowers and Charles L. P. Silet that took place on April 18, 1980, Vizenor succinctly articulates the ideas that were and continue to be at the center of his work:

About Indian identity I have a revolutionary fervor. The hardest part of it is I believe we’re all invented as Indians […] So what I’m pursuing now in much of my writing is this idea of the invented Indian. The inventions have become disguises […] There is another idea I have worked in the stories, about terminal creeds […] It occurs, obviously, in written literature and totalitarian systems. It’s a contradiction, again, to balance because it’s out of balance if one is in the terminal condition. This occurs in invented Indians because we’re invented and we’re invented from traditional static standards […] Some upsetting is necessary. (45-47)[xliv]

Indian identity, invented Indians, terminal creeds: In Vizenor’s writings, these three issues are inextricably linked and are at the heart of his critique of separatism. If any of these three can be said to have a privileged position in Vizenor’s works, if there is one that seems to encapsulate the other two, it is “terminal creeds,” or “beliefs that seek to impose static definitions upon the world” (Owens, Afterword 249). As Louis Owens writes, “such beliefs are destructive, suicidal, even when the definitions appear to arise out of revered tradition” (249). This desire to impose a static definition upon the world best characterizes the separatist position, and Vizenor sets out with “a revolutionary fervor” to dismantle it. 

            Separatists seek the right to sovereignty: the right to self-representation, to present a “native identity,” a “Native perspective” (Womack, Red 6). As Womack writes: “Native literature, and native literary criticism, written by Native authors, is part of sovereignty: Indian people exercising the right to present images of themselves and to discuss those images […] A key component of nationhood is a people’s idea of themselves, their imaginings of who they are” (14). Yet as Pulitano rightfully argues: “To insist, as Womack does, that seeking out a Native perspective is ‘a worthwhile endeavor’ […] amounts to a dismissal of the mutual interdependencies that more than five hundred years of history have thrust on the American continent. More significantly, it means turning Native identity into a textual commodity that continues to perpetuate fabricated versions of Indianness” (81), what Vizenor calls “the invented Indian.”[xlv] In Red on Red, to make his case for Native sovereignty and native identity, Womack, like Cook-Lynn and Daniel Heath Justice, takes a romanticized and, ultimately, nativist approach to native history.[xlvi] In other words, he invokes terminal creeds. He writes: 

Through imagination and storytelling, people in oral cultures reexperience history. This concept of ancestral memory relates to nationalism in that sovereignty is an intersection of the political, imaginary, and literary. To exist as a nation, the community needs a perception of nationhood, that is stories (like the migration account) that help them imagine who they are as people, how they came to be, and what cultural values they wish to preserve […] Within the telling, the event is reexperienced so that the people are reconstituted as a nation as they hear about their origins in ancient stories and journeyings. (Red 26)

The implication is that there is a static and recoverable history—and thus, an authentic cultural identity—that can be “reexperienced.” Womack, here, “appeals to a supposedly authentic past in terms of one shared culture, a sort of collective one true self to reinforce the idea of nationhood” (Pulitano (83). And an authentic, Native national literature, according to Womack, will tap into the traditions and rituals that arose out of this “authentic past.” But as Silko writes, in Ceremony, “after white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong” (126). While Womack suggests, then, “that the oral tradition can be reimagined and reexpressed owing to the living quality of language,” and argues that “by redirecting the language of the oral tradition, Native people concentrate   […] on ‘cultural survival rather than cultural disintegration’” (Pulitano 83), what he

seems to overlook is the danger that occurs when oral stories are used as an avenue to legitimate identity and authenticity. Given the ongoing transformation of stories, and given the extraordinary vitality and adaptability of the oral tradition, the attempt to fix traditions through the use of names conceived as markers of authenticity leads to a perpetuation of the dominant discursive modes. (83)

In this sense, rather than opposing Western colonialism, Womack, by appealing to “authenticity,” is perpetuating it. As Betonie in Silko’s Ceremony says,

things which don’t shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won’t make it. We won’t survive. That’s what the witchery is counting on: that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power will triumph, and the people will be no more. (126)

So while Womack claims to oppose those who perpetuate the “vanishing [tribes] mentality” (Red 65), and argues that the oral tradition is a “living literary tradition” (66), he does so by employing a “nativist” approach that “cling[s] to the ceremonies the way they were.” Womack, in a gesture consistent with the nativist approach, wants to “forget Europe” and the reality of five hundred years of contact and Euroamerican-Indigenous intercultural exchange (Appiah 72). As Kwame Anthony Appiah writes, in In My Father’s House:

Nativism invites us to conceive of the nation as an organic community, bound together by the Sprachegeist, by the shared norms that are the legacy of tradition, struggling to throw off the shackles of alien modes and thought. ‘Here I am,’ Senghor once wrote, ‘trying to forget Europe in the pastoral heart of Sine.’ But for us to forget Europe is to suppress the conflicts that have shaped our identities; since it is too late for us to escape each other, we might instead seek to turn to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us. (72)                  

But rather than “turning to our advantage the mutual interdependencies history has thrust upon us,” Womack advocates turning away from Western philosophical thinking and “recover[ing] and promot[ing] pre-colonial, indigenous ways” (Ashcroft, et al 159). Womack and Justice, dismissive as they are of non-native critics who, as they argue, do not seem to recognize the ongoing “cultural survival of the [Native] communities” (Justice, “Seeing” 111), ironically “fix” what it means to be “Indian” by calling for an “authentic” Native identity rooted not only in land, but a recuperable Native past, one that is recoverable through “oral stories” and “fix[ed] traditions” (Pulitano 83).

The positions put forth by separatists like Cook-Lynn, Womack and Justice are thoroughly critiqued by Vizenor, who, as David Murray argues, is “committed to rejecting any view of traditional Indian cultures as fundamentally centered and fixed” (34). What Vizenor advocates is “loosening the seams in the coarse shrouds of imposed identities” (Interiors 263). And there is nothing he does not subject to a “loosening of the seams.” Identity, texts, race, ethnicity: All are deconstructed, shown to be inventions. And Vizenor finds the tools of his trade anywhere he can find them. He is “as likely […] to invoke a French Michel Foucault as a Sioux Vine Deloria, an American John Rawls as a Chippewa Harold Goodsky, each contributing piece might best be thought the expression of what Vizenor calls ‘new survivance’” (Lee 269). Vizenor argues “we meet at the seams” (Interior 263), or at what Anzaldua calls the border, a place “of contradictions,” a place of “shifting and multiple identit[ies]” (Preface).  Because Vizenor “operates at the frontier site of various discourses, in the border zone in which identities are conceived as multiple, shifting, and fluid,” he is “uncomfortable with issues of allegiance” (Pulitano 113). There is, for Vizenor, something fascistic in the desire to fix identity. For him, “there are no ‘pure’ identities as there are no ‘pure’ races or cultures” (Krupat, Red 109). The separatist worldview, in this sense, is indeed fascistic.[xlvii]

In a discussion with Laura Coltelli about “America’s attitude toward skin color,” and the issue of the “full-blood and the mixed-blood,” Vizenor says, “that’s the ultimate tragic worldview—a terminal single-minded fascistic formula for the world is terminal   […] And to try to come up with a single idealistic definition of tradition in a tribal culture is terminal. Cultures are not static, human behavior is not static” (172).[xlviii] And Vizenor opposes those who wish to “control the definitions, the symbols, and the masks they’ve constructed about culture” (161). Because “Native identities are more chance” or contingent “than the inheritance of an organic culture” (Vizenor, Fugitive 35), as separatists argue, Vizenor rejects “eugenic blood counts and other fascist certitudes of identity” (69). In Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (1998), his most theoretically sophisticated work to date, Vizenor quotes Pizer’s Toward a Radical Origin to counter the separatists’ claim to authentic origins, which is subsequently used to ground an authentic identity: “Authentic origins are inherently plural and divergent, and an extended mediation upon them both reinvigorates attention to history and subverts the supremacist claims of particular groups by showing that their ethnicity, religion, or discipline is ‘always already’ […] entangled with others” (27; Pizer 15). “The native persona is mediation,” Vizenor writes, “and always ‘entangled with others’” (Fugitive 28). Recognizing this, Vizenor rejects individualism—or the notion of an authentic, monadic, humanist self—and nationalism, suggesting that both are totalitarian and fascistic,[xlix] because they set limits, close off possibilities and regulate experience. In short, they circumscribe a territory.

Vizenor’s project, then, following Deleuze and Guattari’s, is one of deterritorialization—the deterritorialization of the individual and the “politics of nations” (Vizenor and Lee 125). Deterritorialization, as Deleuze and Guattari use the term, is synonymous with what Vizenor calls “loosening the seams” (122); and like Deleuze and Guattari, Vizenor sets out to “[loosen] the seams of culture,” of identity and of nations (122). For Vizenor, the self and the nation do not exist in isolation, and are anathema to separatism. The self and the nation instead are “transcultural zones of contact” (Owen, Mixedblood 26). Louis Owens refers to this zone of contact as the “frontier” (26), which he contrasts with the notion of territory:

“Frontier” stands, I would further argue, in neat opposition to the concept of “territory” as territory is imagined and given form by the colonial enterprise in America. Whereas frontier is always unstable, multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate, territory is clearly mapped, fully imagined as a place of containment, invented to control and subdue […] Territory is conceived and designed to exclude the dangerous presence of that trickster at the heart of the Native American imagination, for the ultimate logic of territory is appropriation and occupation, and trickster defies appropriation and resists colonization. (26)

The separatist argument is one for containment, for a territory “conceived and designed to exclude” non-natives. But for Owens and Vizenor, separatism—of self and nation—is impossible, and Vizenor succeeds in refashioning these concepts in a way that eludes circumscription. Owens writes, “for those of use who […] are mixedbloods, the hybridized, polyglot, transcultural frontier is quite clearly internalized” (27). In other words, the “I,” like the nation, is not monadic or monocultural. It is a transcultural frontier. The “I” lives in and with others. In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Bakhtin argues, “the I hides in the other and in others, it wants to be only an other for others, to enter completely into the word of others as an other, and to cast from itself the burden of being the only I (I-for-myself) in the world” (qtd. in Vizenor, Manifest 103).[l]

In a passage that Vizenor is fond of quoting, George Gusdorf writes: “Throughout most of human history, the individual does not oppose himself to all others; he does not feel himself to exist outside of others, and still less against others, but very much with others in an independent existence that asserts its rhythms everywhere in the community. No one is rightful possessor of his life or his death; lives are so thoroughly entangled that each of them has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere” (qtd. in Manifest 95). Ironically, as separatists are working to shore up the borders of “Indian country,” “Euroamerica remains involved in an unceasing ideological struggle to confine Native Americans within an essentialized territory defined by the authoritative utterance ‘Indian’” (Owens, Mixedblood 27). By advocating exclusion, separatists and Euroamerica, it seems, are colluding in the project of colonialism, while mixedbloods like Vizenor “resist this ideology of containment and […] insist upon the freedom to reimagine themselves within a fluid, always shifting frontier space” (27). On this point Vizenor quotes Danilo Kis, who, in Homo Poeticus, writes, “nationalism is the ideology of ba