Reading Native American Women: Critical/Creative Representations

Hernandez-Avila, Ines (Ed.), Reading Native American Women: Critical/ Creative Representations. Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2005. 275 pages. ISBN 0-7591-0372-0. US$29.95. Reading Native American Women is a welcome contribution to Native American Women's Studies. Its collection of essays, both scholarly and creative, covers a range of topics: past colonization and present colonialism, issues of politics, law, and sovereignty, the study of religion and the appropriation of Native spirituality, and the work of individual writers and artists. Native American Women's Studies is an emerging area of scholarship. Historically, the study of Indigenous peoples has been dominated by anthropology. In her contribution to the collection, Mary Churchill relates the experience of Hopi-Miwok writer Wendy Rose, who was required to pursue her study of American Indian literature in anthropology rather than in English or comparative literature. Native women, however, were long overlooked by anthropology. Churchill tactfully suggests that this neglect might be due to the limited opportunities of male anthropologists to observe and speak with Native women, but she also locates the source ofthat neglect in underlying epistemological reasonsan epistemology that Churchill then shows as informing her own discipline, Religious Studies. Other contributors also discuss the failure of academia to recognize the importance of Indigenous knowledge and the value of Native women's experience. In Personalizing Methodology: Narratives of Imprisoned Native Luana Ross draws a powerful parallel between two closed institutions: the prison and the university. She relates how, while preparing a qualitative rather than quantitative study of imprisoned Native American women, she increasingly identified with the prisoners she interviewed, thereby producing a self-styled Indigenous methodology that also made it suspect in the eyes of her fellow sociologists. They the objectivity and generalizability of my study. They question whether the prisoners were telling me the 'truth.' I wonder: What truth? Whose truth?... I feel small, brown, stupid, ugly. (56) Although Ross does not equate the constraints placed on her scholarship with those literally imposed on her imprisoned subjects, she concludes that Indigenous women are subjected to various forms of institutional violence. Reid Gomez likewise notes how the regulation of methodology coexists with the regulation of behaviour. As with most essays in Reading Native American Women, hers analyzes the continued presence of colonialism. Observing that Native American authors are still expected to distil! …

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