Picture revolution: Transnationalism, American studies, and the politics of contemporary native culture

American Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 359-381

  Huhndorf, Shari M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OREGON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 69249161977     PISSN: 00030678     EISSN: 10806490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/aq.0.0073     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) 57, 79.
2. Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 714-715
3. Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xvi.
4. Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity Ibid., 23.
5. Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London: Routledge, 1997), 143.
6. Relevant works on Almanac's uses of cartography and its challenges to U.S. nationalism include Ann Brigham, "Productions of Geographic Scale and Capitalist-Colonialist Enterprise in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead," Modern Fiction Studies 50.2 (2004): 303-31; and
7. Virginia Bell, "Counter- Chronicling and Alternative Mapping in Memoria del fuego and Almanac of the Dead," MELUS 25.3-4 (2000): 5-30.
8. Michael A. Elliott, "Indians, Incorporated," American Literary History 19.1 (Spring 2007): 157, 159.
9. David E. Wilkins, American Indian Politics and the American Political System, 2d ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 45.
10. For a recent history of this period, see Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: New Press, 1996).
11. Roger Maaka and Augie Fleras, The Politics of Indigeneity: Challenging the State in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Otago Press, 2005), 228.
12. This is the title of Kenneth Lincoln's 1983 book analyzing literary production of the period (Native American Renaissance [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983]).
13. Arnold Krupat, The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 39-42.
14. See also Red Matters: Native American Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), chap. 1.
15. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 85, 89.
16. Craig Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 14.
17. See also Daniel Heath Justice, Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
18. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can't Read Stegner, 85.
19. Here, for example, is Jace Weaver: "[Native American studies] is more than any text or class about Indians or in which Indians play a part. It must seek to understand the material from the perspective of the Natives. . . . History of white/Native interaction told largely or exclusively from the perspective of the settler colonizers is not NAS. As important as exposing and deconstructing non-Native representations of Indians is . . ., ultimately the story being told is about white people. It has little or nothing to do with Natives." Weaver, "More Light than Heat: The Current State of Native American Studies," American Indian Quarterly 31.2 (2007): 236.
20. The patriarchy of Red Power activism has also increasingly come under scrutiny. See, for example, Devon Abbott Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women: Decolonization, Empowerment, Activism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).
21. I discuss this problem in Huhndorf, Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming 2009).
22. M. Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey, "American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in North American," in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 331.
23. See also Haunani-Kay Trask, "Feminism and Indigenous Hawaiian Nationalism," Signs 21.4 (Summer 1996): 906-916
24. See, for example, J. Rick Ponting and Gladys L. Symons, "Environmental Geo-Politics and the New World Order: Cree Empowerment, La Grande Baleine, and Hydro-Québec," in First Nations in Canada: Perspectives on Opportunity, Empowerment, and Self-Determination, ed. J. Rick Ponting (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1997), 206-221
25. The dramatic increase in the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) associated with the United Nations marks the growing importance of transnational organizing. In 2000, the U.N. listed 441 NGOs dedicated to indigenous affairs. See Niezen, Origins of Indigenism, 42-44, and
26. Guillermo Delgado-P., "The Makings of a Transnational Movement," NACLA Report on the Americas 35.6 (May/June 2002): 36-38.
27. On related activist forms of indigenous feminism, see R. Aída Hernández Castillo, "Zapatismo and the Emergence of Indigenous Feminism," NACLA Report on the Americas 35.6 (May/June 2002): 39-43.
28. Delgado-P., "Makings of a Transnational Movement," 38.
29. Examples of Native American studies scholarship that scrutinize the nation-state include Luana Ross, Inventing the Savage: The Social Construction of Native American Criminality (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); and
30. Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2005).
31. It is significant that both works take up questions of gender; see also the American Quarterly forum "Indigenous Feminism without Apology" (June 2008). Nevertheless, such works remain rare, and this is even truer in Native literary studies, where nationalism remains the dominant scholarly paradigm.
32. For emerging work on transnationalism in Native literary studies, see Enrique Lima, "Forms of Conquest: Indian Conflict and the Novel in the Americas" (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2007); for a study that examines the importance of gender in literary and activist contexts,
33. see Victoria Bomberry, "Indigenous Memory and Imagination: Thinking Beyond the Nation" (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2001).
34. Amy Kaplan, "'Left Alone with America': The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture," in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 4-5.
35. Barbara Brinson Curiel, David Kazanjian, Katherine Kinney, Steven Mailloux, Jay Mechling, John Carlos Rowe, George Sánchez, Shelley Streeby, and Henry Yu, introduction, in Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 11.
36. Because indigenous peoples cannot be considered a single, homogeneous group, this is true even of indigenous migrations, as the ongoing Navajo-Hopi land dispute, to take only one key example, attests. On the complicated interrelationships between Native and African American communities, see, for example, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, ed. Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).
37. John Carlos Rowe, "Post-Nationalism, Globalism, and the New American Studies," in Post-Nationalist American Studies, ed. John Carlos Rowe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 23-24.
38. See Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).
39. Kaplan, "Left Alone," 4.
40. David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 8.
41. Philip J. Deloria, "American Indians, American Studies, and the ASA," American Quarterly 55.4 (2003): 678-679
42. I am grateful to Carol Ann Lorenz at the Longyear Museum of Anthropology, Colgate University, for making available photographs of Niro's installation and to Rachel Adams for bringing them to my attention. Adams's astute analysis in Continental Drift: Remapping the Cultures of North America (University of Chicago Press, 2009) influenced my reading here.
43. These concerns with stereotypical representations of Native people, especially women, and contemporary indigenous identities and politics also inform Niro's other works. See, for example, her films It Starts with a Whisper (1993),
44. Honey Moccasin (1998), and
45. The Shirt (2003).
46. For an influential analysis of the problematical place of indigenous women in colonial national origin stories, see Rayna Green, "The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture," Massachusetts Review 27.4 (1975): 698-714.
47. Shelley Niro, "The Border: Artist's Statement," The Contemporary Native American Photoart of Shelley Niro (Hamilton, N.Y.: Longyear Museum of Anthropology, Colgate University, 1997), 8-9.
48. Silko, Almanac of the Dead, 316, 431.
49. Timothy J. Reiss, "Perioddity: Considerations on the Geography of Histories," MLQ 62.4 (December 2001): 442-43; and
50. Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), xvi.
51. Carter, Road to Botany Bay, xxii.
52. Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 106-107
53. Gordon Brotherston, Book of the Fourth World: Reading the Native Americas through Their Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 4, 90, 83.
54. Curiel et al., introduction, 3.