American Indian Culture and Research Journal

In the opening pages of Marilou Awiakta’s Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother’s Wisdom, the author offers a metacommentary on her delightfully hybrid text, likening it to a “double-woven basket (Cherokee-style).” The image resonates on many levels with the author’s tribal traditions and thus serves to foreshadow the text’s wealth of material on Cherokee culture and history, but readers soon discover that Awiakta actually integrates the design of the double-woven basket into the very form of her text. In so doing she produces a book that through its combination of circularity and quadratic symmetry resists the linearity of traditional Western narrative and challenges many of the epistemological assumptions that follow from that tradition. My reading of Selu builds on a recognition and appreciation of the form of the text by examining a less explicit but, I argue, equally significant manner in which the double-weave basket structure serves as a metaphor for the text’s complex autobiographical dimensions. In particular, the double-weave design of traditional Cherokee basketry is replicated not only in Awiakta’s affirmation of both her Celtic-Appalachian and Eastern Band Cherokee roots but also in her simultaneous expression of a collective tribal identity and an individualistic artistic identity. Throughout Selu Awiakta demonstrates her ability to weave back and forth between autoethnography, on the one hand, in which her representation of selfhood is collective, virtually inseparable from her insider’s explanations of Cherokee myths, history, and cultural practices, and conventional Western autobiography, on the other hand, in which she gives a narrative account of the development of an autonomous, in this case artistic, identity. This autobiographical double-weave of relational and autonomous modes of subjectivity, of identification and individuation, underscores Mick McAllister’s observation that “an American Indian autobiography is by its nature a bicultural document.” It also serves as a good example of what Arnold Krupat has called, in a different context, a cosmopolitan critical perspective, in which American Indians and members of other historically marginalized groups are negotiating with increasing deftness competing socially constructed definitions of selfhood to find discursive freedom in the cultural borderlands.