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"Sean Kicummah Teuton offers a powerful vision of American Indian literary studies and its dialogue with contemporary literary criticism. He understands how to connect theoretical discussion to the practical politics of Indian culture and literature. Every scholar in the field will want to read this book."--Robert Dale Parker, author of "The Invention of Native American Literature"

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RED LAND, RED POWER

GROUNDING KNOWLEDGE IN THE AMERICAN INDIAN NOVELBy Sean Kicummah Teuton

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4241-0

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................xiPreface................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction: Imagining an American Indian Center......................................................11. Embodying Lands: Somatic Place in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn.............................432. Placing the Ancestors: Historical Identity in James Welch's Winter in the Blood.....................793. Learning to Feel: Tribal Experience in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony...............................1194. Hearing the Callout: American Indian Political Criticism............................................157Conclusion: Building Cultural Knowledge in the Contemporary Native Novel...............................197Notes..................................................................................................235Bibliography...........................................................................................257Index..................................................................................................281

Chapter One

EMBODYING LANDS: SOMATIC PLACE IN N. SCOTT MOMADAY'S HOUSE MADE OF DAWN By making Alcatraz an experimental Indian center operated and planned by Indian people, we would be given a chance to see what we could do toward developing answers to modern social problems. Ancient tribalism can be incorporated with modern technology in an urban setting. Perhaps we would not succeed in the effort, but the Government is spending billions every year and still the situation is rapidly growing worse. It just seems to a lot of Indians that this continent was a lot better off when we were running it. -Vine Deloria Jr., March 1970

You can forget about everything up there. We could see all the lights down below, a million lights, I guess, and all the cars moving around, so small and slow and far away. We could see one whole side of the city, all the way to the water, but we couldn't hear anything down there. All we could hear was the drums and singing. There were some stars, and it was like we were way out in the desert someplace and there was a squaw dance or a sing going on, and everybody was getting good and drunk and happy. - Ben Benally, in House Made of Dawn

This book grew out of my own experience of being displaced from my ancestral homeland. I am a Cherokee Indian from Appalachia, even though I was an adult when I first saw the old Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi. To say I am from a place where as a young person I had never been might confuse some readers, and it might even invite criticism. Many Indigenous people, however, understand themselves and their attachment to land through tribal stories about the history of that land, contained in the oral tradition. Listeners come to understand such stories in the context of many other related stories; such narratives of self, nation, and homeland are the inspiration for this book. I grew up in a large, low-income family, and I was the first ever to attend college. When I left for the east to enter graduate school, I found myself on the exciting yet fearful edge of a transformation in myself as an intellectual and as an Indian. I departed from the only Cherokee community I knew-that of my relatives in Oklahoma-to return for the first time to our ancestral homeland in the Smoky Mountains, and finally to set eyes on the holy places that I knew only from stories. Wondrous supernatural beings and their exploits-which took place on the very ground beneath me-began to live for me. These stories had kept our culture alive even after we suffered "removal" from these lands on which we had lived for centuries. In 1838, the United States dispossessed Cherokees of their land in the Southeast and marched them to present-day Oklahoma. It was a bitter trek and it took at least a fourth of the lives of our tribe. Upon arrival, Cherokees began to form a relationship with this strange land and to rebuild their community of social relations through their oral tradition. By recounting the tribal histories and legends that occurred on the peaks of certain mountains and at the banks of well-known rivers, and by creating new narratives of new lands, Cherokee elders provided the people with a moral and spiritual education. This is how the oral tradition continues to bind Natives to landscapes they have inhabited for centuries.

When I first set foot in the Smokies, I was startled by my sudden sense of outrage at the injustice of being restricted from our ancestral home, for I realized that without our lands it becomes difficult to hold the body of knowledge we use to maintain our cultural identity. In an odd mixture of anger and joy, I discovered that we had truly been kept from our motherland, its verbal art, its narrative history. From this awakening to Indigenous exile, I sought to understand the connection between identity and geography, and to explain how political awareness aids in the recovery of this connection. In those Cherokee lands, I began a long process to recover a relationship with the very earth to which our oral tradition refers, because I was now better able to attach the stories to the land. In theoretical terms, my new understanding of place and self was neither a given always waiting for me to uncover (as essentialist scholars tend to hold) nor merely invented and thus arbitrary (as skeptical theorists often claim). Rather, in tribal realist terms I began to discover a deeper sense of myself by reinterpreting my experiences of American Indian displacement and subjugation in the new yet ancient story-laden land. In the following chapters, I examine this process of cultural identification with tribal lands and its attendant claims. Part 1 of this book thus begins with "Red Land" to consider a central social construction in Native thought: that Indigenous people, by definition, grow from the land, and that everything else-identity, history, culture-stems from that primary relationship with homelands. In this chapter, I consider how the interactive components of oral tradition and bodily wellness mediate an ethical relationship with American Indian lands in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. In the next chapter, I extend this understanding of Native geography to explain the interpretive connection between Indian land and identity in the context of community and memory in James Welch's Winter in the Blood.

In 1969 N. Scott Momaday stood on the shores of Alcatraz Island. Though the author has always officially kept politics away from art, his novel House Made of Dawn gathers its greatest energy in portrayals such as that offered in the epigraph above, when Indians from various tribes drum, sing, and pray in the hills above Los Angeles. It is a scene surprisingly reminiscent of the Alcatraz occupation and the spirit of Red Power, in which Native people across Indian Country gathered to revalue their cultures and emerge politically. When House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, some critics announced that American Indian...