Afterword: The Native American Nineteenth Century: Rewriting the American Renaissance

E. PaulineJohnson. From Flint and Feather (Collected Verse), Iy E. PaulineJohnson (Tekahionwake), 2nd. ed. (Toronto: Musson Book Co, 1913), facing xxiv. AFTERWORD The Native American Nineteenth Century: Rewriting the American Renaissance RENEE BERGLAND This issue ofESQforegrounds literary studies, placing the Native Am.erican nineteenth century in the priInary context of literature. Literature, letters, history, tiIne, nativity, and nation are key terInS in the discussions undertaken here. But this is a probleInatic endeavor. Writing about nineteenth-century Native Am.erican letters can be hazardous: there are theoretical and ethical pitfalls at every turn. First, the idea of the literary is liable to harIn efforts to understand Native American culture because of literacy's long history as an exclusionary principle. Indians scarcely figure as authors and as readers ofthe literary. Rather, they tend to haunt U. S. literary history as characters-roInantically ghostly figures that foretell their own dOOIns. Just as iInportantly, writing is probleInatic in a Native Am.erican context. Insistence on written records (as opposed to reIneInbered words) works against Native cultures in insidious ways. Unwritten histories can seeIn illegitiInate, while at the saIne tiIne, because Indians are iInagined as unlettered, and their culture as "oral," the Indians who do write can seeIn inauthentic. Writing about Indians (as a nonIndian , or as a questionably authentic one) adds insult to injury. On top of the writing probleIn, there is the tiIne probleIn. Situating Native.America and Native.Americans in the nineteenth century risks displacing theIn froIn the present. The past is a great vexation to NativeAInerican studies. Five hundred years ofNative resistance to colonialisIn cannot be ignored. History is central to ESQ I II. 52 I1ST-2ND QUARTEI?S I2006 141 RENEE BERGLAND Native American identity, but "history" itself, ArifDirlik argues, is fundamentally Eurocentric.I When timelines are framed around Europe, linear time is colonialist time; and so, some tribal people resist the whole idea oflinear time. As N. Scott Momaday puts it: ((According to the native perception, there is only the dimension of timelessness, and in that dim"ension all things happen. The earth confirms this conviction in calendars of (geologic time. "'2 Momaday insists on the primacy ofgeology over chronology, place over time. This is an anticolonialist idea, in large part because colonialist discourse relentlessly pushes Native people out oftheir home places and into an imagined past. Momaday's idea of geologic time as anticolonialist time has great resonance for literary studies because of the conversation that Wai Chee Dimock has initiated about the relation between deep time and nonabsolute space. Like Momaday, Dimock advocates a diachronic approach to literature, reading through layers of time into a place where realities overlap. Her approach offers a new strategy for understanding NativeAmerican writing in particular, reminding us that the past is always here (rather than elsewhere), and that it will continue to be new in each new time.3 As helpful as Momaday and Dimock are in offering us paradigms that cOlnplicate and layer the narrative frameworks of literature and history, these paradigms remain embedded in a linguistic web of exclusion and limitation" In daunting layers of complexity, the frameworks ofliterature and history exclude Native people. Indeed, the very system of reference, the term "Native American," is paradoxical, c.ontradictory, and difficult to study. Consider the problems with the "nat" wordsNative , nation, and even Renaissance-good examples of colonialist discourse at work. These words derive from natus, the Latin word for birth. In a Native American context, birth is no less problematic than writing or history. Although Native American identities are always attached to birth stories, the connections are not always simple. Native Americanness is a racial identity constructed from cultural memory and geography as well as genealogy: adoption, encounter, removal, return -many pre- and postnatal circumstances-shape Nativeness . Tying Nativeness to birth, as the word does, creates a psycholinguistic and metaphysical maelstrom. 142 THE NATIVE AMERICAN NINETEENTH CENTURY And then, nation. Some Indian scholars (most notably Elizabeth Cook-Lynn) embrace the language of nation, calling for an authentie Native American nationalism that opposes United States nationalisln.4 Some celebrate United States nationalism as a long-standing part of tribal histories. But there are other Native scholars (such as Taiaiake Alfred...

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