American Indian Culture and Research Journal

“If slavery made race, its larger purpose was to make class,” historian Ira Berlin argues, “and the fact that the two were made simultaneously by the same process has mystified both.” The European and Euro-American conquest of Native American peoples and lands is analogous. Conquest did create a race; the English names—Indians, First Peoples, and Native Americans—are evidence. However, race was not the motivation for exploration and expropriation even if racism was a key enabling factor. Although the cultural consequences were devastating, the goal of that devastation was primarily economic: the acquisition of land. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn makes a similar claim when she states, “The oldest racism in America was about the economically motivated, government-sponsored theft of lands occupied by others.” With a similar focus on economics, Bill Mullen asserts that slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass’s are texts about social class, particularly the working class. He argues that “the value of Douglass’s economic analysis and critique is often obscured for literary critics by the phenomenon of its subjectivity.” I see a related pattern in interpretations of modern Native American literature. Critics have given more attention to identity and culture than economics and social relations. Without recognizing the structural hierarchies that shape Native Americans’ lives, critics who analyze identity in isolation can only develop “a reading bled dry of its most troubling and contradictory meanings.” A number of factors militate against the development of socioeconomic readings of Native American literature. Critics and teachers often share the dominant cultural ideology, which evades structural problems with individualistic rhetoric. Having found liberal humanism a satisfying standpoint from which to view the world, too often we have used critical approaches that give little recognition to characters’ (or our own) socioeconomic situations.