American Indian Culture and Research Journal

We’ve been stuck in place since House Made of Dawn. --Sherman Alexie As Louis Owens suggests, the term American Indian Renaissance conveys both short-sightedness and an overstatement of the obvious. If American Indian writers and scholars feel their hackles rising at the moniker, it is because the notion of an American Indian Renaissance “denigrates both the incredible richness of American Indian oral traditions and the contributions long made by American Indian writers to American letters.” Overstatement of the American Indian literary renaissance is likewise misplaced, if nevertheless accurate to some degree: “It is impossible to argue that a renaissance in the American Indian novel has not occurred since the publication of N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn in 1968.” The use of the double negative represents as indisputable fact the prolific output of American Indian writers since Abel’s celebrated journey home, while at the same time seeking to distance this phenomenon from the scholarly reflex to canonize. Owens is himself a leading figure among those American Indian artists producing fiction in terms only uneasily labeled “rebirth” from a quattrocento and Anglo-European point of view. This caveat aside, Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) aggressively disputes the Native American Renaissance through the juxtaposition of Indian subjectivity and mental illness. In particular, the psychotic experiences of the protagonist in Alexie’s novel, John Smith, constitute a categorical denunciation of American Indian canon formation based upon modernist precedents.

As Leslie Marmon Silko was preparing to publish her first novel, Ceremony (1977), she faced serious interventions from her editor at Viking Press, Richard Seaver. Most notably, in the final proofs sent to Silko before Ceremony went to press, Seaver had eliminated much of the author’s most challenging literary and cultural material, particularly her representations of the world-historical forces connected to her protagonist’s personal quest. Seaver’s battery of revisions suggested a discomfort with the globalizing aspirations of Silko’s novel and a preference for a more contained narrative of reservation life. According to Silko, Seaver was so committed to his changes that he “made ominous sounds about ‘not being able to support the book’ unless [she] gave in.”l Fortunately, Silko stood by her original manuscript, replying to her editor with a letter entitled “A Commentary on the Galleys,” in which she defended the “unconventional” elements of her novel as essential to her fictional and cultural vision. Although Silko succeeded in convincing Seaver to restore her text, it is important for scholars to consider her conflicts with her editor, as this episode offers a cautionary tale about the dangers Native American authors face from a literary establishment that seeks to shape their works into more familiar representations. In this essay I use previously unpublished archival evidence from Silko’s papers at the Beinecke Library to document her conflicts with Seaver, reconstructing the “horizon of expectations” against which the author had to struggle in order to realize her innovative vision. My reading of Ceremony refocuses critical attention on Silko’s global aims because most of her readers, like her editor, have tried to minimize the globalizing aspects of her work. Many scholars have employed structuralist paradigms for interpreting the text, reading the healing process in the novel as the realignment of intracultural vectors, such as a rebalancing of the power of the sun in the east with the power of the mountains in the north.

Don Paco Mendez owns and operates one of the strings of general stores that line the calk commercial, or commercial street, of Puerto Cabezas, the port capital of Nicaragua’s recently formed North Atlantic Autonomous Region (la Raan as it is known locally). One afternoon I stopped by his store for an informal interview with him. He told me that his family was one of the founders of Puerto Cabezas during “company time.”’ His Costa Rican mother and Nicaraguan father migrated from the Pacific side of Nicaragua to establish a commercial outlet in the burgeoning Caribbean port city that in the 1920s was converted from a small Indian village called Bilwi to the Nicaraguan headquarters of the largest employer in Nicaragua-the Standard Fruit Company. He was quick to remind me that although he had been born and raised en la costa, on the Mosquito Coast, he was, in an existential sense, profoundly del Pacifico, from the Pacific. Although he referred to himself as an indigma and an indio, he explained to me, with more than a trace of prejudice, the fundamental superiority of the Pacific Indian vis-a-vis the Moscos de aqui (Moscos). Don Paco explained that he had spent some time in the campesino (small-scale agricultural) villages of the mountainous Nicaraguan interior, an area that, in the national mental map of Nicaraguans, is part of “the Pacific.” In the Segovian mountains he had witnessed the vigor and skill with which the Indian campesinos rendered harvests from marginal and relatively dry lands. In his opinion the land’s suitability for agriculture and the climate of the Pacific interior were far inferior to that of the Mosquito Coast, Nicaragua’s relatively sparsely populated and heavily forested Caribbean lowlands. Don Paco’s perception of the absence of ideal geographical, climatic, and social conditions for agriculture in the Pacific vis-A-vis the Atlantic stood in sharp contrast to his perception of the disparity in productivity between the inhabitants of each region.

This paper focuses on how constructions of Native American drinking serve to reinforce and reproduce colonial images of the Indian.’ I am not so much concerned with colonialism as “the conquest and direct control of people’s land,”‘ as much as with a related process: the conquest and control over people’s images of themselves and others. Thus, I will not direct my efforts toward exploring the settlement of alien people in a new environment, but will examine the settlement of alien ideas into areas where they were previously unknown. My basic premise is that most of what we know regarding Native American drinking is a form of colonial knowledge that emerges from a process wherein cultural beliefs and practices, biological entities and processes, and social interactions and pathologies are constructed through various institutions, disciplines, and intellectual images. As Bernard Cohn notes, a crucial characteristic of colonial knowledge is that it creates standardized categories and oppositional differences that distinguish the colonizers from the colonized. In addition, colonial knowledge functions to keep the colonized in a subjugated position relative to the colonizer. It does so primarily by attributing devalued characteristics and features to a specific group of people that is recognized as somehow distinct, usually in racial, cultural, or historical terms. In deliberately highlighting this form of knowledge in this way I am attempting to underscore a disturbing tendency I see in much of the social science and biomedical research on Native American drinking in the hope that future research will not uncritically reinforce and reproduce these existing colonial categories and perceptions of Native American people. This paper is based on a number of my varied experiences with Native American drinking. These have ranged from anthropological field and library research to living and working in a reservation setting as well as a border town

For countless ages Nature had been preparing America for her new tenant. Stores of metal and beds of coal had been laid down; inland seas had deposited fertile plains; river valleys and mountain chains had fixed highways for settlement; forests had stretched over the land, and waterfalls foretold the rumble of mills. All was ready for sentient life. -Fredrick Jackson Turner, “American Colonization”’ Much like the legendary historian Frederick Jackson Turner, famed wordsmith William Safire understands the power of language in public affairs. His widely admired Sujire’s New Political Dictionary: The Definitive Guide to the New Language of Politics not only delineates our political vocabulary, but also announces its own presence with authority. No self-respecting Euro-American can resist such a title; new is, after all, better than old and nothing could be better than a new dictionary for a new language. The name plays upon the quintessential Euro-American desire to begin again, to leave the Old World and make of the New a “shining city upon a hill,” and to disdain that city, in turn, and “light out for the Territory.” Inhabiting Safire’s “new” language, however, are the same peoples that populated Frederick Jackson Turner’s America, John Winthrop’s City, and Huck Finn’s Territory. Safire discusses sachem, a term used to connote political power among the nations of the Haudenosaunee (People of the Longhouse-often called the Six Nations Confederacy or the Iroquois League), as follows: “Take me to your leader,” a bromide used in dealing with savages, is reflected in the first recorded use of “sachem.” . . . The braves and warriors of Tammany named their leader the Grand Sachem, who presided over meetings held at the “wigwam.”