Matter, Magic, and Spirit: Representing Indian and African American Belief/Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact/Native American Life-History Narratives: Colonial and Postcolonial Navajo Ethnography

Matter, Magic, and Spirit: Representing Indian and African American Belief. By David Murray. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Pp. 216, introduction, notes, bibliography, index, acknowledgments. $59.95 cloth); Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact. Edited by John Sutton Lutz. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007. Pp. ? + 238, acknowledgments, introduction, maps, notes, bibliography, contributors, index. $85.00 cloth, $35.95 paper); Native American Life-History Narratives: Colonial and Postcolonial Navajo Ethnography. By Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pp. xxx + 258, introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 cloth.)Three new publications focus on constructed knowledge and reappropriation of subaltern voices of subjugated in Americas. Riding wave of postcolonial studies, these works share a common debt to Edward Said's Orientalism (1979) , whereby yesteryear's scholarship is criticized for a unilateral vision of other, and where power is consolidated by controlling information about other via standardized academic research. The conclusion that these works make is predictable but well reasoned. Simply put, we must reread existing scholarship and question mediods that produce unbalanced bothes of knowledge.The most visually attractive and far-reaching of three, John Sutton Lutz's anthology Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact, stuthes a variety of first-contact moments, primarily on American West Coast, but also touches on instances in Africa, New Zealand and Virginia. Editor Lutz characterizes firstcontact narratives as depicting a mythic moment, epoch and joining of providing an story and an opening paragraph of a long rationale for displacing indigenous peoples ( 1 ) . However, first encounters do come with prejudgments about the other. A first encounter is not necessarily an idyllic, open-minded meeting: What we instead is that Europeans did not discover unexpected. They went into new territories full of expectations, ideas, and stereotypes: what they found was - in large measure - what they expected to find (2). While Europeans were encountering stereotypes about new people as much as actual new people, histories of origin were being created regardless of subdeties and nuances of each contact between cultures. The value of Myth and Meaninghes in counterbalance of European stories of first contact put in juxtaposition with indigenous narratives that often tell a different story.The collection is organized around four main themes of first contact: currency, performance, ambiguity, and power. Currency works as a metaphor for legitimation of power, as money is given a value that people validate by believing in it. Edward Chamberlin's chapter on Canadian two-dollar coin highlights paradox that currency builds ideas of nation by (in this instance) providing one side of coin for Queen and other for a picture of an Inuit drum dance. As a symbol of Canada, coin validates both histories while denying neither. Yet these stories are separated and contrary. Performance encompasses problems of communication without language, where cultures must represent themselves through song, dance, flags, masks, and pantomime to demonstrate their identity. Michael Harkin's chapter shows how performances retell and reinvent first-encounter stories in order to understand and create past. The linked theme of ambiguity concerns interpretation of culture that watches other's performance, including unintentional signals sent due to a lack of cultural knowledge. The final theme of power addresses postcolonial displacement and discrediting of indigenous forms of knowledge through scientific superiority of European culture.Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez begins Native American Life-History Narratives: Colonial and Postcolonial Navajo Ethnography on a similar theoretical premise - that Native Americans have rarely been able to control information disseminated about their own people and culture. …

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