Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature

ISBN-13: 9781496207685

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Nebraska

Publication Date: 11-01-2018

Pages: 270

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Christopher B. Teuton (Cherokee Nation) is a professor of American Indian studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of the American Book Award–winner Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars and the coeditor of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective.

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CHAPTER 1

The Oral Impulse, the Graphic Impulse, and the Critical Impulse

Reframing Signification in American Indian Literary Studies

On a warm July afternoon north of Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of the Cherokee Nation, I sit with Sequoyah Guess and Sam Still under a shady canopy of trees telling stories. Sequoyah and Sam, Cherokee language teachers and cultural traditionalists, are teaching me the language of my family's kinship. As my nephew, Matt, divides his time stalking birds with his blowgun and tending the fire that keeps the mosquitoes off us, my elders share the language with me through conversation.

The sun slides under the Sky-Vault and talk turns to the one Sequoyah Guess's family still calls "Grandpa," the famed nineteenth-century Cherokee linguist Sequoyah. A sixth-generation direct descendant of his namesake, Sequoyah Guess knows well the differences between the written history of Sequoyah's work with the Cherokee syllabary and the oral stories that recount his accomplishments. Commonly referred to as the "American Cadmus," Sequoyah, whose English name was George Guess, is thought to be the only person in human history to have created a written language from scratch, albeit through "idea diffusion" (Diamond 1999, 228). Although he was illiterate, Sequoyah saw the value in writing and created his "talking leaves," a system that culminated in the eighty five signs of the Cherokee syllabary. When interviewed by Jeremiah Evarts, Sequoyah was asked "why and how he invented the alphabet," to which he replied that "he had observed, that many things were found out by men, and known in the world, but that this knowledge escaped and was lost, for want of some way to preserve it. He had also observed white people write things on paper, and he had seen books; and he knew that what was written down remained and was not forgotten" (Foreman 1938, 28). "Things on paper," I imagine, is not a reference to Romantic poetry but to treaties or, even more likely, trade accounts. Sequoyah saw his people's need to record their knowledge in writing and so he created the system.

By the light of the fire Sequoyah Guess explains the contrasts between the Sequoyah of record and the man his family recalls. The first Sequoyah's father, a man named Guess, was not English but a Cherokee. His mother, Wuteh, married Guess, who left for whence he came soon after Sequoyah's birth. Sequoyah's original name was Jisquaya, or There's a Bird Inside, which was given to him because there was a bird in his family's home when he was born. Before he became a farmer he was a mercenary and fought with a group of warriors for hire. He was a traditionalist and a Cherokee patriot, not an advocate of acculturation. The syllabary project took him nearly twenty years to complete, not twelve, as scholars commonly claim. Sequoyah was willing to risk all that he had for this project. He neglected his farm to such an extent that people began to make fun of him, changing his name from Jisquaya to Sequoyah, meaning There's a Pig Inside. Most important, Sequoyah did not create or invent the Cherokee syllabary. His family claims that he developed the syllabary from a much older language, one used by an ancient priesthood called the Ani-Kutani.

Though the Cherokee have seven clans today, the old ones say we once had eight. The Ani-Kutani were the eighth clan, sacred medicine people who wielded tremendous power in their maintenance of the ceremonial cycles and rituals that ordered the Cherokee year and society. They were the most powerful clan, and they governed the Cherokee. But their power corrupted them, and they began taking greater and greater liberties with their fellow Cherokee. The priest Nicotani (whose very name became synonymous with the priests) led a group of Ani-Kutani to kidnap Cherokee wives. The Cherokee rose up against the priests, and a civil war ensued. The Ani-Kutani were destroyed, every remaining member of the clan killed. The vengeful Nicotani cursed the Cherokee, and with his last breath unleashed a powerful form of witchcraft that is with the Cherokee to this day, an ever present temptation to control others through spiritual medicine.

This moment in Cherokee history is looked back upon somberly. Although the Cherokee populace won its freedom from hierarchical control, with the destruction of the Ani-Kutani they lost the great body of their spiritual traditions and sacred knowledge. What remains of that ancient tradition, it is said, are remembered pieces of what once was a complete cosmology and ritual system. Since the civil war with the Ani-Kutani, Cherokee culture has carried deep within it an anxiety regarding the means of communication that was the guarantor of their authority, the source of their knowledge, and the impetus for their arrogance: writing.

It is argued that pre-contact North American Indians had many forms of expressing thought graphically, but they did not have the technology of writing, defined as recorded speech. In that context this story of Cherokee writing is bound to face skepticism, if not outright dismissal; the lack of corroborating documentary evidence makes it apocryphal. However, Cherokees have been telling this story for a long time, and it gains its authority and meaning within a Cherokee cultural context. Rather than trying to prove the veracity of the story using Western historiographic methods, I want to imagine what this story means from a Cherokee cultural perspective. Weaving together the story of the Ani-Kutani, Sequoyah, and the Cherokee relationship with writing, I use what Robert Warrior calls "synchronicity," an "imaginative tool" that "helps in a consideration of the gaps of what documentary history doesn't reveal." As Warrior argues, in many cases of Native American historical investigation a researcher will need to "grasp from the shreds and shards of evidence significant aspects of a Native intellectual patrimony" (2005, 6). Considering oral traditional stories allows me to reinterpret the historical record, coming to new conclusions regarding the ways knowledge was encouraged to exist in Cherokee society.

The story of the Ani-Kutani sheds light on both the historical context of Sequoyah's introduction of the syllabary and why he may have taken the risk in reintroducing it to the Cherokee community at large. Historians remark that when Sequoyah introduced the syllabary to the Cherokee people they accused him of practicing witchcraft (Bender 2002, 29). This was not a primitive response to a new technology; Sequoyah's development of writing worried the Cherokee people because it evoked the Ani-Kutani, whose sole access to Cherokee ceremonial tradition through writing led to their abuse of power. Far from being irrational, the Cherokee had reason to fear the power of writing. Although literacy is usually portrayed as a democratizing force, scholars of writing are well aware that throughout history writing has been used as a tool of the consolidation of power and societal control. The treaty-making era of conflicts with Europeans and Americans might have strengthened the perception of those Cherokee who knew the story of the Ani-Kutani that writing was indeed witchcraft.

The story of the fall of the Ani-Kutani and the story of Sequoyah's reintroduction of the Cherokee syllabary are in fact parts of a larger story. The subject of that story is the relationship the Cherokee people have had with writing, and it continues to this day. In the context of the war with the Ani-Kutani, the Cherokee made a choice to abolish the use of writing as a means of recording thought; they asserted control over their means of communication.

It is telling that the Cherokee writing system surfaced only after three hundred years of contact with Euro-American forms of writing. This suggests that although the Cherokee were aware of writing, and were in fact literate in European languages, it was considered taboo to write the Cherokee language. Sequoyah's reintroduction of the syllabary to the Cherokee people as a form of communication is a deeply symbolic gesture in a Cherokee cultural context. A foundation of Cherokee thought is that the universe divides into complementary pairs: man/woman, sun/moon, and night/day, among many others. Imbalances develop when complementary pairs are separated or not relating properly with one another. Undoubtedly, there were practical reasons for having a Cherokee written language in the first decades of the nineteenth century, but from a Cherokee cultural perspective the deployment of the syllabary addressed a crucial imbalance.

The advent of a Cherokee form of writing established a symbolic balance between Euro-American forms of writing and Cherokee writing. With the fear of the Ani-Kutani as a backdrop, writing, Sequoyah's development suggests, is a tool that in a literate world must be mastered by the community as a whole. Through their use of writing Euro-Americans had become, symbolically, the successors of the Ani-Kutani. For the Cherokee to maintain control over their own cultural knowledge it was necessary to reestablish a form of their own writing. Sequoyah must have known the challenge that faced him when he brought Cherokee literacy to light once again. He had to convince the Cherokee people that writing did not corrupt. If used by all the Cherokee writing could help maintain cultural, if not political sovereignty. Tellingly, to this day Cherokee writing is used most often in spiritual matters, either in the form of the Christian Bible and hymns or in recording traditional medicine practices.

In key ways the history of writing in Native America mirrors the Cherokee conflict with the Ani-Kutani. From first contact European writings have been used as a form of control to colonize, proselytize, and subjugate Native America. The study of the oppressive uses of writing in the form of treaties and laws is a part of the intellectual foundation of Native American studies, and the critique of the argument that writing establishes authority while the oral tradition is ephemeral has been well established. Recently scholars such as Robert Warrior, Maureen Konkle, Lucy Maddox, Sean Kicummah Teuton, and Lisa Brooks have shown that since at least the eighteenth century Native American writers have used Euro-American forms of writing to defend Indigenous lands, cultures, and nations. That trend continues today, with the battles over Indian Country playing out in the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, Native American and U.S. court systems, tribal newspapers, academic scholarship, and literary arts. Native American communities and those involved in the struggle for Indigenous political sovereignty, cultural autonomy, and social justice have established critical spaces by mastering the literacies of colonialism and modernity. We engage these discourses in the hopes that we may change them, for writing is here to stay.

American Indian literary studies has led the field of American Indian studies in drawing on the range of discourses that have been labeled "critical theory" to help examine Indigenous experiences with Euro-American colonialism and its ramifications on Indigenous life. Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of work, scholars have developed subdisciplines that address particular areas of political, scholarly, and theoretical interest. Decolonial studies, sovereignty studies, literary nationalism, tribal theory, red feminism, and environmental studies are proving to be fertile ground for the cultivation of Native American textual studies and will undoubtedly shape the future of American Indian critical studies. American Indian literary studies is doing many things at once: pushing the boundaries of decolonial discourse, recovering intellectual traditions and texts, engaging critical theory, and, often most passionately, making a case for the values, cogency, and applicability of traditional Indigenous thought as a form of autochthonous critical theory. As the field of American Indian literary studies develops, however, there is a need to evaluate the critical vocabulary it has borrowed from Western discourse because that vocabulary impacts the way Native American literary studies is theorized and will develop in the future.

No two terms are more central to Native American literary studies than orality and writing. The idea that pre-contact Indigenous cultures were nonliterate peoples who passed on knowledge almost exclusively through oral storytelling traditions provides the standard cultural context for studying the contemporary literate texts Native American writers produce. Whether a critic advocates cosmopolitan, tribal theoretical, or literary nationalist approaches to the study of Native American literature, oral tradition remains the central expression of traditional Indigenous thought. The development of Native American written literature marks the appropriation of a Western form of communication (writing) which may be used as a tool to engage the colonial center. How American Indian literary studies defines oral tradition and writing matters deeply, for these terms carry an intellectual genealogy into their critical usage today. Their definitions delimit the current boundaries and future possibilities of Native American literary discourse.

Writing, Orality, and Figuring Native America

Historically, the study of Native America has been shaped by ideologically loaded binaries that privilege the West and denigrate the Indigenous Other. Beginning in the pre-Enlightenment era, when a culture's affiliation with Christianity determined whether it was ideologically inside or exotically Other, Native American cultures have continued to be a foil for Western cultural self-definitions (Li 2006, 4). The binary of Christian European–Indian heathen underwent a series of changes in the nineteenth century as social evolutionary typologies and their cultural hierarchies came to dominate European thought (4). The Indian was no longer exotically strange and different but was now "primitive," existing at an earlier point on an imagined evolutionary scale. The Indian was constructed as savage and irrational, in contrast to the civilized, rational Euro-American, and the perceived inferiority was used to justify colonialism and racial hierarchies.

Today the word primitive has been largely replaced in academic studies with more politically aware terms, such as individual culture, traditional culture, and ethnic group, but in the study of Native American societies the term oral as a descriptor of Indigenous cultures, societies, and peoples remains the status quo (Li 2006, viii). Whereas cultural relativism has flattened most other markers of primitivism, oral cultures remain defined in relation to that which they lack: the ability to write.

Native American societies never defined themselves as oral cultures. Yet definitions of oral and written discourses intimately linked to social evolutionary thought are entrenched and veiled within the study of Native America. Michael D. Wilson states in Writing Home: Indigenous Narratives of Resistance that "authentic representation" in Native American literature is commonly marked by "correct cultural information, historical details, and oral traditions" (2008, 52). This "culturalist" approach to the study of Native American literature, which sets out to "account for the cultural beliefs and practices through which Indians demonstrate their difference," is problematized by the fact that writing itself is often figured as not a "culturally 'Indian' practice" (Konkle 2004, 28). As Maureen Konkle observes, "According to the literary criticism, the main difference between Native peoples and Europeans is that Native peoples are 'oral' and white people write" (28). Konkle argues that Native American literature is alternately defined as "an authentic oral tradition, which anthropologists (and proto-anthropologists before them) began to write down in the nineteenth century," and as literature written by Indians, which, as it depends on the adoption of a non-Native form of communication, is less culturally Native American (28–29).

Native American literary studies scholars have challenged the characterization of oral cultural traditions, arguing that Native writing has been crucial to Indigenous expression and political survival. Craig S. Womack has called for an end to "the oppositional thinking that separates orality and literacy wherein the oral constitutes authentic culture and the written contaminated culture" (1999, 15). Recent studies such as Konkle's Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863 (2004), Robert Warrior's The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (2005), and Sean Kicummah Teuton's Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (2008) have continued the work of historicizing Native American literature as politically important to Native Americans in the past and present. But no matter how many examples are given of Native Americans writing in support of their nations, communities, and traditional ways of life, orality continues to be invoked as a marker of authenticity. Ironically, this formulation has become part of Native American studies through the reification of oral tradition. The source of this notion of authenticity exists in the oral-literate dynamic, which has yet to be completely destabilized in Native American literary studies.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 

Introduction: Diving into Deep Waters    

1. The Oral Impulse, the Graphic Impulse, and the Critical Impulse: Reframing Signification in American Indian Literary Studies

2. N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain: Vision, Textuality, and History   

3. Trickster Leads the Way: A Reading of Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles     

4. Transforming "Eventuality": The Aesthetics of a Tribal "Word-Collector" in Ray A. Young Bear's Black Eagle Child and Remnants of the First Earth   

5. Interpreting Our World: Authority and the Written Word in Robert J. Conley's Real People Series     

Epilogue: Building Ground in American Indian Textual Studies     

Notes

Works Cited

Index