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Carrying the fire home: performing nation, identity, indigenous diaspora and home in the poems, songs, and performances of Arigon Starr, Joy Harjo and Gayle Ross

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Carrying the fire home: performing nation, identity, indigenous diaspora and home in the poems, songs, and performances of Arigon Starr, Joy Harjo and Gayle Ross

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Content CARRYING THE FIRE HOME: PERFORMING NATION, IDENTITY, INDIGENOUS DIASPORA AND HOME IN THE POEMS, SONGS, AND PERFORMANCES OF ARIGON STARR, JOY HARJO AND GAYLE ROSS by Carolyn Marie Dunn A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2010 Copyright 2010 Carolyn Marie Dunn ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project, in its essence, is about community. It is about the sense of place, the sense of identity that comes from place, community, home, and family. It is a labor of love that without community, it would mean next to nothing. I would like to take a moment and thank the people who make my community. To the scholars who have mentored me throughout this project: John Carlos Rowe, David Román, William Handley, Roberto Lint-Sagarena, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, George Sanchez, Jane Naomi Iwamura, Ari Berk, Carla Kaplan, Patricia Clark Smith, Craig Womack, Randy Reinholz, Carol Zitzer-Comfort, Cindi Alvitre, Roseanna Henare Solomona, Barbara Feezor-Buttes, Ines Hernandez-Avila, Andrew Jolivette, Patricia Clark Smith, Kenneth Lincoln and Paula Gunn Allen: your support and encouragement have been the fire that got lit under me to keep going. To the James Irvine Foundation of California, for providing research funds in order to develop and complete the project, the Autry National Center, including Native Voices at the Autry, the Southwest Museum; and the American Indian Research Library at the UCLA American Indian Studies Center for providing research support and access to the collections, including archival collections, which informed very early on the direction in which this project would, and will, take on. To the academic communities of the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity, Department of English, the School of Religion, Department of Anthropology and School of Theater at the University of Southern California, especially Jungmiwha iii Bullock, Araceli Esparza, Perla Guerrero, Michelle Commander, Sionne Neely, Anton Smith, Jesus Hernandez, Nisha Kunte, Michaela Smith, Imani K. Johnson, Laura Sachiko Fugikawa, Luis Carlos Rodriguez, Lata Murti, Anthony Sparks, Calysta Watson, Laura Harjo, April Ruth Peck, Jacob Peters, friends and colleagues and scholars who supported this project, mvto. To Jujuana Preston, Sonia Rodriguez and Kitty Lai, it would never have happened without your support and encouragement. To colleagues, friends and students at the American Indian Studies Program at California State University, Long Beach, especially Troy R. Johnson, Craig Cree Stone, Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, Cindi Alvitre, Griselda Suarez, and Gabriel Estrada; thank you for reading, support, encouragement, and timely feedback. To the members of my own local community, especially Cindi Alvitre, The Moreno family, Helen Herrera Anderson, Lauralee Brown Hannes, Laura and Hotulkvce Harjo, Sabrina Ivon, Carole and Vernon Lewis, the O‘Rourke family, Lyn Risling and Julian Lang, Cheryl Seidner, Irma Amaro, Michon Eben, Maggie Escobedo-Steele, Tina Toledo Rizzo, Kristy Orona-Ramirez, Dr. Sawar Cha-lutch Young, April Carmelo, Valerie Estrada, Genevieve Markussen, Dove Jeude, Danielle Estrada, Jodie Estrada, Geneva Shaw, Rain Archambeau-Marshall, Grandma Germaine Tremmel, Auntie Sharon Bird Mountain, Teresa Hendrix-Wright, Paula Tripp Allen, Jean Bruce Scott, Randy Reinholz and the staff of Native Voices at the Autry, Eli Grayson, the members of the California Muscogee Association, Kay Cope and Terri Sue Restivo: thank you for keeping the fires burning. iv To my family: my husband, James Anderson, and our children, James, Jordan and Kathlyn have had to share Mama with so many in this world and they are very much a part of this project; my cousins Alice Martinez, Kim Genelle Bledsoe, Angela Colwell, Christopher Linscomb, David Linscomb, and Mark Linscomb, for their strong support; and my aunt and uncle, Dr. Phillip Linscomb and Miyoko Janet Linscomb for their love and encouragement. My late father, Aubrey H. Dunn and my late sister, Kathleen A. Dunn, were early supporters of this project when it started and I honor them as well. My late aunt, Celestine Dunn Ware, saw the project through to its end and her love and devoted prayer kept us all going. During the course of this project, I also lost three other women without whom there would be no guiding voice and inspiration: my mother, Dora G. Dunn, my aunt, Dorothy Gilmore, and my mentor, Paula Gunn Allen. My heart was truly broken when you all left and will never be the same without you. To you I sing ―Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above, Don't fence me in. Let me ride through the wide open country that I love, Don't fence me in. Let me be by myself in the evenin' breeze and listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees, Send me off forever but I ask you please, Don't fence me in…” and you know why and how. And finally, to the women I write about in this project, Arigon Starr, Joy Harjo, and Gayle Ross: I am truly blessed to have you as sisters, friends, collaborators, and partners-in-crime. Thank you for your belief in this project, your kind words, patience, and forgiveness, especially when I get it wrong. Mvto, este cvte hoktes, mvto. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract vi Introduction: The Sacred Fire: A Preface 1 Chapter 1: Following the Trickster: Toward a Theory of Indigenous 12 Aesthetics and Ethics Chapter 2: Those Long, Lonely Nights at the Diner: Specificity of Place, Community and Home in Arigon Starr‘s The Red Road 75 Chapter 3: The Return of Redbird: Joy Harjo and the Narrative of Sovereignty in Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light 104 Chapter 4: Stories Carried Upon Our Backs Like Turtles: Gayle Ross and the Building of Nation 144 Bibliography 194 Appendix: Interviews 206 vi ABSTRACT This project addresses the cultural work of nation building (political, spiritual, social) performed by narrative practices in diasporic Cherokee and Muskogee Creek communities. The overarching question of the project is: how has the concept of ―home‖ in American Indian writing (―home‖ meaning a physical geography, a narrative history, and a social identity) been reconceptualized by artists in the face of widespread diasporization? I am interested in how work by Cherokee and Creek women writers, specifically Joy Harjo, Arigon Starr, and Gayle Ross, has recreated the concept of ―home‖ as a decolonizing project of nation building within the Cherokee and Creek diasporas. The interdisciplinary fields of performance studies, literary history, American Indian Studies, gender studies, and landscape studies guide this project and its examination of poetry, storytelling, fiction, plays, and performance of the writers/artists. I am interested in how these writers utilize indigenous epistemologies and bicultural competence in their work, and how they reinvent, re-imagine, and reconceptualize the concepts of ―home‖ apart from the physical landscape but within the body as well. I suggest that these writers—Harjo‘s How We Became Human, Ross‘ How Rabbit Tricked Otter and Other Stories, and Starr‘s The Red Road—write against the romanticized trope of ―American Indian identity‖ and call into question stories and performance of identity that not only rewrites non-Indian invented histories but is at the same time, self-critical. Historical writers, such as Alexander Posey, John Ross and John vii Rollin Ridge each contribute to national narrative in historical moments of crisis in Creek and Cherokee history - Removal and the Trail of Tears; Oklahoma statehood and the destruction of tribal governments. How do Posey, Ridge and Ross‘ literal and literary descendants address these same issues under the rubric of nationalism? How does each contemporary writer define herself by her identity categories: woman, native, tribal, Creek, Cherokee, citizen, writer, actor, musician, storyteller? How do all of these identities form a decolonizing project for each writer? How are these writers writing against stereotypes of American Indians that have been and still are perpetuated by media images of ―the‖ Native American? How are these writers influenced by the American Indian societies in which they live, work, and write? How do these writers reconcile political citizenship and cultural citizenship within their respective nations? How has their writing/performance/cultural critique addressed nation building in crucial periods of American Indian history: during; and in the era of pan-Indian tribalism and the survival of native nations and how these nations re-imagine themselves in the 21 st century? What are the larger political and cultural issues: sovereignty, land struggles, gaming, gender issues, native wellness, language survival, ceremony, dance, that the writers are addressing in their work? 1 THE SACRED FIRE: A PREFACE There is a small mist at the brow of the mountain, Each leaf of flower, of taro, tree and bush shivers with ecstasy. And the rain songs of all the flowering ones who have called for the rain Can be found there, flourishing beneath the currents of singing. Rain opens us, like flowers, or earth that has been thirsty for more than a season. We stop all of our talking, quit thinking, to drink the mystery. We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing. This is how the rain became rain, how we became human. The wetness saturates everything, including the perpetrators Of the second overthrow. We will plant songs where there were curses. Joy Harjo, ―It‘s Raining in Honolulu‖ Joy Harjo‘s poem, ―Raining in Honolulu‖, is a lovely example of a relationship to landscape. The growing of taro root grounds the poet (pun completely intended) within the landscape of Hawaii in its cultural and political meaning for native Hawaiian peoples. The subtlety in which the poet recalls the very visual of raindrops upon broad, shiny leaves recalls the struggles of Native Hawaiians to reclaim their cultural history and sovereignty in continuing colonization (―the second overthrow‖). The poet is familiar 2 with the living landscape of this particular region and how the landscape supports, nourishes, and is cared for by its native peoples, whose myths, legends, and ceremonies are interwoven within the fabric of land, people, deity, identity. Yet this poet isn‘t native Hawaiian by blood: she is a Muskogee Creek citizen of Creek, Cherokee, Irish, and English ancestry living in Hawaii with a native Hawaiian partner. She is an American Indian woman completely, if I can argue, at home in the world. A bicultural poet, strongly connected to her red-earth Oklahoma identity, seeing the beauty of the rain in the red earth of Oahu, thousands of miles away. ―Planting songs where there are curses‖ tells us that there will be songs sung in languages previously thought extinct that will be reborn and sung again. The songs, like the taro, will renew, and connect us to the living landscape of home, wherever that home may be. This from a transplanted American Indian living far away from home? What can this woman, this poet, this musician, the Creek Indian, tell us about renewal and rebirth in Honolulu when the rain comes from heaven to nourish the living ecosystem? Away from the Sacred Fire of the ancestral landscape of the Creek Nation, in a place where fire and rain erupt from sky and earth, how does she speak to the world of the local epistemology, that of the native Hawaiians who inhabit the lands she inhabits, with still an eye to the Sacred Fire at the Hickory Stomp Dance Grounds at home in Oklahoma? What does it mean to be an Indian living far away from the place where they emerged? How can these words connect other American Indians living far away from home, from family, from community, to not only ―home‖, but the adopted ―home‖ as well? This project started as I asked myself questions of my own work as a poet, playwright, storyteller, and musician. My American Indian blood comes from the Creek, 3 Cherokee, Seminole, Choctaw, and Tunica-Biloxi tribes of the southeast, from Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama. My creative work has focused on the myths, legends, and ceremonial life of the ancestors and of the contemporary tribal life of my family, relatives, and friends. I grew up listening to the family stories and the creation stories of how we came to be, and how we traced our lineage all the way back to the Old Country: the Old Country being the old national, tribal boundaries and into the new nations after Removal. As I began my own journey as a poet, as a playwright, as a storyteller and a singer, learning from family and friends, I knew that as a second generation Californian, the Old Country to us was not another continent but a place that was just east of our modern homeland of Los Angeles, California. The stories of ―home‖: became a lifeline for me, a connection to my immediate past and a connection to my ancestors who survived the unimaginable so that I could live. So, I began to write about what I knew of my family stories, with the knowledge that while I was an Indian from California, I wasn‘t a California Indian. I came from somewhere else. The metaphor of the Sacred Fire is the method with which I have entered into the conversations of what it means to be a modern Creek and Cherokee Indian in the world today. The Sacred Fire connects us to the ancestral landscape from which we emerged: modern day Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina. The Sacred Fire traveled with the ancestors to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. Along with the Sacred Fire traveled the stories of its emergence and appearance on the earth. Our ancestral stories tell us that Grandmother Spider, the water spider who can travel over water safely and quickly, brought back the fire from the sun so that the world would no longer be cold. From this 4 Sacred Fire that Grandmother Spider brought, ceremonial fires are lit for the coming year and the fire that Grandmother Spider brought has never gone out. It is through the fire that we trace our ancestry to the origins of the world, from the emergence of the mounds to the red earth of Indian Territory, Oklahoma, to the modern nations that have emerged after years of dispossession, theft, loss, and grief. The fire was carried on the Trail of Tears by our ancestors and that fire has never gone out, that fire that came from the sun. This is the metaphor that teaches us continuance and survivance, and it is from these fires that warm our homes and ceremonial grounds I take the title of this treatise on nation- building through metaphor: how we make our worlds through story, poem, song, and dance. I surrounded myself with other Indians from other places, and when I met family and friends from ―home‖, it was as if we had never been apart. We began to share our stories and saw the similarities between and the root of all these stories were about home. So, in an attempt to understand why I do what I do in my own creative work, I began to look at other Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw and Seminole artists who, like me, had a connection to a homeland that was part of the American south. What were/are the similarities in our work? What are the questions of southeastern American Indian identity that surface through our creative lives? What do our poems, stories, songs, plays say about the world in which we live in- that is the home world where we live (the local) and the home world from where we emerged (the national)? What are, as Karuk scholar/storyteller/musician Julian Lang calls local knowledges, and how do they relate to national knowledges? 1 1 Julian Lang, Karuk storyteller, artist, and musician, spoke about the importance of local native knowledge and stressed the connectedness of local tribes to their landscapes of emergence. Local knowledges, Lang 5 Los Angeles boasts the largest urban American Indian population in the United States. With nearly 300,000 American Indians residing in the city, Los Angeles remains a city of disjointed gathering places for Indians. Those who come to the city tend to gather around cultural events such as pow wows, theater events, and church groups, he latter especially true for southeastern Indians. Joan Weibel Orlando notes in Indian Country, L.A., that northern plains tribes will congregate around pow wows and at the Southern California Indian Center, while southern Indians tend to gather around monthly sings, where folks gather to sing Baptist hymns in the Creek, Choctaw, or Cherokee languages. ―Community building among the Indians of Los Angeles,‖ Weibel-Orlando posits, ―has been a kind of cultural patchwork, a bricolage, a highly creative and dynamic endeavor.‖ 2 The bricolage of which Weibel-Orlando refers to comes from Claude Levi-Strauss‘ process of building something from older sociocultural forms. Methods of building community in Los Angeles among the diversity of its American Indian citizens has certain challenges of space and landscape that preclude there being an actual physical space, or city center, which lends itself to building an Indian community in a central location. American Indian community building revolves around events, such as pow wows, and other intertribal events. Rarely will members of the larger American Indian community gather at the sacred or ceremonial sites of the local tribes---the Chumash or the Tongva, for example--- for Chumash or Tongva ceremonies. I have observed on asserts, are the knowledges that come from a native world view that is also tied into the landscape and world view of local tribes. I, as a Creek/Cherokee/Seminole living in Los Angeles and later Karuk/Yurok/Hupa country as a teenager into young adulthood, became exposed to the local, traditional knowledges of the tribes I was living near. I then became a bicultural Indian, involved in the ceremonial and social life of the local tribes as well as the ceremonial and social life of my own tribe, by virtue of birth. 2 Joan Weibel-Orlando, Indian Country, L.A: Maintaining Ethnic Community in Diverse Society, p 8. 6 many occasions this handful of non-Tongva or Chumash citizens, and in general these small groups of non Tongva and Chumash--- that is Indians from California that are not California Indians--- tend to be those who are involved in pan-tribalism on a cultural literacy level. These are the storytellers, the language revitalizationists, the environmental activists who are actively engaging with the local communities in Los Angeles, all the while maintaining connections to their ancestral tribes and homelands. Chumash storyteller, poet, and professor Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez and I produced a radio program for KPFK-FM‘s American Indian Airwaves/Coyote Radio in which we examined cultural literacy in American Indian communities in Los Angeles. 3 In the program we interviewed Julian Lang, Cheryl Seidner, and Arigon Starr as to what every Indian, and every non-Indian, should know about not only their own culture, but the culture of the indigenous people whose space and place they inhabit. ―There‘s local knowledge,‖ Julian Lang answered, ―and that is how one interacts with one‘s environment. The local knowledge of the local people, their language, ceremonies, songs and dances, is what everyone should know, in addition to their own.‖ 4 It is a concept that remains with me today, five years later, and a concept that I have practiced in my years as an Indian who is from California, but not a California Indian. Indians that have that connection then to a local landscape, as well as a home landscape, traverse a bicultural native landscape that is inclusive of other languages, cultures and religions outside of their own. These American Indians live in a diaspora within national boundaries, a disapora that is, like many native landscapes, a nation within a nation. 3 American Indian Airwaves/Coyote Radio, KPFK-FM (Pacifica Radio), Los Angeles, California. www.kpfk.org 4 Ibid. 7 As I further investigated the concept of local knowledge and national knowledge, I began my quest define and establish the definition of a diaspora within national borders. As American Indians, we are a people of national and ethnic origin that live within the boundaries of another nation-state, a nation-state that continues to oppress and deny our right to sovereign status as self-governing bodies. While diaspora studies scholars focus on international borders and dialogues of nation to nation dispersal, we, as American Indians, remain dispersed peoples within the boundaries of our ancestral homelands. I have learned songs in many languages as a singer, in Blackfoot, Lakota, Paiute, Towa (Jemez Pueblo), Wintu, Ojibwe and Cree. I have made songs in Choctaw and Creek, and passed those songs onto others. As American Indians, our languages and religions and ceremonies encompass over five hundred distinct nations and groups, yet we reside within a specific national border. The sharing of local and national knowledges, that is the sharing of indigenous epistimologies, is as fluid and ever-changing as it ever was, when communities came together because of dispersal and diasporization in the old nations as well as in the new ones. The diversity of Indian Country could represent its own mini United Nations. In this project, I examine the notion that native peoples in the United States are living in diaspora. I examine theories of bicultural competence, something that was introduced to me at a conference in New Zealand by Maori social worker Roseanna Henare Solomona, living in Queensland, Australia and working in both a Maori and Aboriginal community. American Indians in the diaspora, those involved with local communities as well as communities back home, are bicultural in the sense that like Solomona and other Maori living in Aboriginal communities in Australia, experience 8 both the stories, songs and ceremonies of local communities as well as those ―back home‖. The sharing of songs, stories, and ceremony not as commodity but as cultural history is what prompted me to first investigate, as a project, indigenous epistemologies that interact with one another on the sociocultural level. The actual term that I am in conversation with ---―bicultural‖--- comes from Solomona‘s research, and she describes it as such: Nonetheless I stand firm in my decision to put pen to paper in this fashion, purely because this work is written for Maori who have not enjoyed the privilege of a traditional upbringing, especially those who have lived away from the language, the people and the culture. This mahi or work is for the new generation of Maori, half-castes, quarter-castes or those who left the homeland as children. They are our young contemporaries who have been raised knowing they inherit a rich tradition, yet understand very little about it. It is also for Maori who remain on the fringes of our culture and who stand as a reminder of our colonial past, a generation who longs to reconnect with their Maoritanga. Finally it is for those people for whom we share this country with, first nation people and multicultural Australia. 5 In describing the tribal culture in which she was raised, Solomona is returning to her traditions to share them with those who were not raised as she was, attending ceremony, an event that connected her to the ancestral political, cultural, linguistic, and spiritual foundations of her Maori (Ngatihine and Ngapuhi) identity 6 . Solomona‘s attempts to reach Maori who have been separated from their traditional culture by circumstance of birth and Maori who have been separated by land base, e.g. living in a foreign landscape (in this case Australia) is in itself a project of decolonization. In an attempt to reach across cultures--- Maori, English, Aboriginal--- Solomona describes the actual writing of 5 Roseanna Henare Solomona, Whakaaro-rua: A Bicompetent Approach to Inquiry. Honors Thesis, University of Western Sydney, Australia. 2004. p 28. 66 Ibid. 9 her thesis as a multicultural event. The term ―bicultural‖ to me is not representative of a duality in terms, e.g. white/Indian, black/Indian, black/white, but the concept that native peoples are schooled in duality since birth in the United States. Duality comes from the understanding of a fluency in cultures; there is a dualism that must be negotiated for native peoples that I have expressed as ―bicultural‖ rather than ―multicultural‖ or‖ multi- literate‖. I favor Solomona‘s term because it expresses the dual nature or function of cultures within the native consciousness that is always present for native peoples, whether in the Indian world only, or the non-Indian world. Bicultural, or bicompetent, reflects the constant nature of negotiating between worlds, a state in which indigenous people around the world must constantly traverse. I also refer to what the late Laguna Pueblo scholar, poet and critic Paula Gunn Allen called ―the universe of medicine‖. Gunn Allen spent considerable time in her academic and creative work referring to the universe of medicine, that is the collective and creative unconscious of tribal peoples in the Americas. In her introduction to Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women, Gunn Allen describes the universe of medicine: Native writers write out of tribal traditions, and into them. They, like oral storytellers, work within a literary tradition that is at base connected to the ritual and beyond that to tribal metaphysics or mysticism. What has been experienced over the ages mystically and communally—with individual experiences fitting within that overarching pattern—forms the basis for tribal aesthetics and therefore tribal literatures. 7 7 Paula Gunn Allen, Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, Boston: Beacon press, 1989. p 5. 10 The communal experience of the tribal reality is at the core what comprises an essential connection to the tribal world view. Storytellers reference the tribal aesthetic and modern literary writers, tapping into the traditional story, are referencing ages of experience and indigenous epistemologies. Indigenous knowledge, or ways of learning and knowing, are replicated in the story over and over, in performance, in practice, and now, in theory. In native epistemologies, in native realities, the practice comes first before the theory. This is what I spend conservable amount of time addressing. Paula Gunn Allen‘s influence upon me, personally and professionally, began in 1986 when she was doing a book tour for her groundbreaking book, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. I was the host of a public affairs news radio program in Arcata, California called Native Voices, and I interviewed Paula in the home of the show‘s producer, Irena Quitiquit. Coming from the Laguna Pueblo perspective, a tribe which had been, like my own, matrilineal and matrilocal, her assertation that the feminine principle in American Indian cultures had long been ignored resonated with me as a then twenty-year-old Indian woman from Los Angeles, living in the diaspora of Northern California, where I was very active in the local community. Paula gave me a signed copy of her novel The Woman Who Owned The Shadows (Spinsters Ink/Aunt Lute Books, 1983) and I would later say that the novel saved my life. Six years later, while at graduate school in the American Indian Studies program at UCLA, my thesis chair Kenneth Lincoln suggested I work with Paula, who would be coming from UC Berkeley to join UCLA‘s English department. I was her research assistant for two years and she was a member of my thesis committee. We formed a close bond that would remain for the rest of her life. She promoted my work as a scholar and as 11 a poet, publishing my first book of poetry in 2001 and continuing to support me artistically and academically. I was honored to have been asked to sing at her funeral by her daughter, Lauralee Brown Hannes and her son, Sulieman Russell Allen, to send her on her journey home. To say that she influenced me personally, professionally, and politically is a great understatement. The theme of the universe of medicine is a connecting thread that carries through the discussion of diaspora, home, storytelling, humor, healing, and sovereignty, and that ties these concepts to the larger issue of nation- building and narrative-within-national boundaries that ghost this project. 12 CHAPTER 1. FOLLOWING THE TRICKSTER: TOWARDS A THEORY OF INDIGENOUS AESTHETICS AND ETHICS The term American Indian identity is problematic, at best. A socially constructed ethnic identity in the United States and abroad, the term ―American Indian‖ (and later ―Native American‖) signified a unified racial category to describe thousands of peoples of varying languages, cultures, religions, and world views. Of all racial categories in the United States, only one racial category is defined legally and enforced by the federal government; that is the racial category ―American Indian.‖ The essentializing strategies employed by the federal government to divide and conquer the tribal power of the indigenous peoples inhabiting the United States created further legislation which allowed the federal government to forcibly remove tribal peoples from their ancestral homelands into urban areas with promises of jobs and security. Urban relocation in the 1950‘s and 1960‘s was the culmination of a series of government policies designed to assimilate Indians into mainstream culture, isolating Indian families and communities. However, tribal peoples continued to make connections with one another in urban areas and created a network of community that would later give birth to the pan-Indian movement. For the native diaspora, the pan-Indian movement allowed for a creation of communal space in urban areas in which an urban ―Indian identity‖ flourished. Community centers, pow- wows, and urban health clinics became the places in which native peoples congregated 13 and shared stories of home: the ancestral home left behind as well as the adopted urban home. Cultural production that came out of urban areas, such as Spiderwoman Theatre and American Indian Theatre Project in New York, addressed the concerns affecting the native diaspora. 8 Novelists and poets explored questions of identity and authenticity, writing on subjects of alienation, loss, and survival in urban areas, with an abject longing for ―home‖. In this project, I will examine responses of Native artists to the following questions: once removed from the ancestral landscape, how does the longing for home create community in new spaces? As ―home‖ becomes a memory to an intergenerational diaspora, how is ―home‖ a created space? How is nation building achieved by tribes whose members are scattered diasporically? How do artists incorporate the idea of ―home‖ into their work? Are there multiple sites of home, of community, and of nation? Where do these spaces, both imagined (as a contested site of removal, of resistance, of domestication) and physical (as a place of emergence and connectedness to its physical boundaries), occur in the imagination of the artist? How must the native artist navigate within nations, with an eye to the home nation, and with respect and responsibility to the local nation? And finally, in seeking out other natives and living among native communities who still live in their ancestral homelands, how does ―home‖ become both spaces, the diasporic as well as the ancestral? This project enters into ongoing intellectual conversations in American Indian studies primarily, with interdisciplinary reference to American Studies, Performance Studies, Geography, and Literary History. It seeks to address questions asked by scholars 8 Cultural issues such as poverty, drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide, feminism, colonization, identity, and stereotypical images of Indians were addressed by these artists. 14 such as Robert Warrior, Phillip Deloria, and John Carlos Rowe as to why American Studies has for so long ignored Native American studies as a method of inquiry into American Studies. 9 It builds upon Craig Womack‘s argument that in order to examine a work of native literature, regarding the author‘s identity, that scholars must access the vast amount of knowledge and intellectual traditions of the author‘s primary nation or tribe. This project seeks to articulate an argument for and investigate the American Indian diaspora by examining the historical moments in which federal policy legislated Indian Removal and the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory that set in motion future forced migrations to foreign nations. Upon arguing for the inclusion of an American Indian diaspora in examining dispersed populations, I argue that in modern times, methods of nation building are utilized by native nations in the era of self determination. These methods are based upon non-indigenous knowledge systems; I argue that traditional indigenous knowledge systems, using storytelling and performance, are ways in which indigenous nations can reference traditional knowledge systems as native-based nation building. The concept of tribal sovereignty, which still is a contemporary topic of great relevance in the modern Cherokee Nation 10 , is not a traditional tribal concept and therefore must be reexamined in light of the long struggle of tribes for self-determination in the modern era of Indian Country politics. 9 Rowe, The New American Studies; Deloria, American Quarterly Volume 61, Number 1, March 2009, pp. 1-25 10 The Cherokee Nation voted in national elections in 2006 to disenroll citizens who are Freeedman descendants, that is descendants of black slaves and free people of color living in the Cherokee Nation, citing that tribal enrollment becomes an issue of establishing sovereignty ―Cherokees File Federal Suit in Freedmen Dispute‖, Tulsa World, February 3, 2009. World Publishing: Tulsa, Oklahoma. 15 This project takes into question theories of landscape--- space and place---and the relationship of native peoples to ―home‖, both the physical landscape of the adopted home country as well as the ancestral space. It also addresses nation building through narration: the building of communities in modern times through written narrative rather than the oral and the use, by modern nations such as the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and the Muskogee Creek Nation, of ceremony, history, outreach, and the written word as methods of nation building. This project also asks critical questions affecting American Indian, or Native American Studies today: that we are a bicompetent, bicultural people whose languages, literatures, folklore, and ceremonial life are vital and representative of cultural survival as a diaspora and in ancestral homelands. Is it possible to create a cohesive, unilateral vision of what Native American, or American Indian, Studies should be? Paula Gunn Allen, Phillip Deloria, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Robert Warrior, among others, have argued for American Indian Studies inclusion in diverse fields such as American Studies, Women‘s Studies, history, literature, but yet it is difficult to come to some sort of consensus on just what the discipline should look like. Of course this difficulty comes out of a discipline that is at its very core interdisciplinary. Yet Craig Womack argues for a return to national models of what AIS should look lie. A national model that looks to over five hundred nations and communities for its ethic. Each nation has its own aesthetic, its own ethic. Paula Gunn Allen argued in 1986 that in order to understand cultural contexts within tribal literary and performative practices, one must have an understanding of the cultural aesthetic from which the literature arises: 16 TRIBAL AESTHETICS ―Literature is one facet of a culture. The significance of a literature can be best understood in terms of the culture from which it springs and the purpose of the literature is clear only when the reader understands and accepts the assumptions on which the literature is based. A person who was raised in a given culture has no problem seeing the relevance, the level of complexity, or the symbolic significance of that culture‘s literature. We are all from early childhood familiar with the assumptions that underlie our own culture and its literature and art. Intelligent analysis becomes a matter of identifying smaller assumptions peculiar to the locale, idiom, and psyche of the writer.‖ 11 The cultural aesthetic follows logical assumptions that in studying national literatures that one must look to the culture from which these literatures arises. Cultural touchstones, for example, are imperative in understanding the great canonical works of western literature. Do literary critics and scholars assume knowledge of western thought and practice when it comes to understanding the great canonical works? The assumption that western epistemology is a given in this context, but to study native literatures using a non-native aesthetic makes no sense in examining the works of native peoples. Yet the practice of employing western assumptions and a western aesthetic to native knowledges is a colonial practice that Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues must be acknowledged and addressed if scholars are to decolonize the study of native peoples and bring cultural context into the study of native cultures. American Indian history and culture remain a footnote in history, however, to many resident aliens of this country who are of European non–American Indian descent. Resident aliens, a term favored by the majority regarding persons who have immigrated 11 The Sacred Hoop, p 54-55 17 here from elsewhere, is a phrase that should be used self-reflexively by the powers that be in this country—but sadly it is not—since the descendants of the original resident aliens have seized power here from its original inhabitants and continue to misappropriate history, culture, and political power from the continent‘s aboriginal inhabitants. In literary and scholarly circles, this misappropriation continues. Literary critics, with few notable exceptions, have virtually ignored the importance and value of American Indian literature in contemporary canonical American works. For that matter, in the larger scope of things, American Indian history and culture remain a footnote in history to many Americans. How can we be identified as sovereign nations or distinct peoples with our own history, our own art, our own music, and our own spiritual practices if the larger society still believes we ceased to exist after Wounded Knee over one hundred years ago? Commentator and columnist Andy Rooney so eloquently stated in his newspaper column six years ago that (I‘m paraphrasing here) there is no great Indian literature, no great art, unless you consider a few totem poles worthy of artistic note. Our fight to gain acceptance, Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards notwithstanding, within the field of canonical literature seems trivial compared with the struggles Indian people face daily: the right to practice traditional religions, the right to wear hair long due to religious practices, access to traditional homelands integral in our spiritual and social practices, access to quality health care and prevention programs, poverty, alcoholism, suicide, and day-to-day matters that some members of society take for granted. Stories traditionally were handed down in Native life to be used as teaching tools among tribal societies. Creation myths and rituals were taught through vast oral traditions that kept culture alive and vibrant, generation to generation. Perhaps in looking to some 18 of these stories we, as Native peoples, can form our own aesthetic, our own canon that informs and signifies that which is truly unique about our cultures. Perhaps, in forming our own literary criticism, our own anthropological studies, our own religious institutes, we can heal the vast schisms that seek to threaten our families, our communities, our tribes, our nations. Perhaps works such as this anthology are the first steps to define ourselves on our own terms, and those of us struggling in academia can create a methodology for contextualizing our aesthetic. Paula Gunn Allen notes that American Indian literature is classified in generic culture- and language-specific terms by most Anglo- and Euro-American critics. 12 Applying a Western template to literature based firmly in non-Western traditions steals the work‘s meanings, recasts it, and in a word, colonizes it. To understand a native aesthetic, in general, one must have an understanding of a native ethic, of a native aesthetic. After much thought and discussion on alternative forms of criticism, especially within my own work in regard to American Indian literature, I feel it is necessary to address spiritualism and myth in American Indian literature, especially the presence of archetypal tribal spirits in American Indian women‘s writing. Chickasaw writer and poet Linda Hogan describes the presence of such spirits in her work: As my interest in literature increased, I realized I had also been given a background in oral literature from my father‘s family. I use this. It has 12. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions, 2nd ed. p, 54. 13. Interview with Linda Hogan, 1985, conducted and transcribed by Laura Coltelli, Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak (University of Nebraska Press, 1990). P 71. 19 strengthened my imagination. I find that my ideas and even my work arrangement derive from that oral source. It is sometimes as though I hear those voices when I am in the process of writing. 13 It is important to note that in the Indian world, there is no division between the sacred world of spirits, deities, myth, ritual, and cosmology and the secular world of political structure, economics, family life, and personal life. Our religion, our culture, and our traditions are seamlessly woven together and cannot be separated. Our religions are part of our social lives, and our social lives are connected to our spirituality. In this regard, ethnobotanist Dr. Wade Davis, author of The Serpent and the Rainbow and Passage of Darkness, speaking at a pharmaceutical conference in Germany, notes: 14 For the people of these societies, there is no rigid separation of the sacred and the secular. Every act of the healer becomes the prayer of the entire community, every ritual a form of collective preventative medicine. The fluidity of boundaries Davis comments on is echoed in the words of Gregory O‘Rourke, a young man from Northern California deeply rooted in his Yurok spiritual traditions. I asked Greg about the state of mind of both participants and spectators in the healing Brush Dance traditions of the Northern California coastal Indian communities: The spectators are quiet between songs out of respect for the singers and dancers, as well as for the healing ceremony itself. When the dancers and singers are directing our thoughts toward the health and well-being of the baby the dance is for, then the 14. Shamans Drum, Spring 1991 20 community prays along with us, until all the prayers become one and are focused directly upon the child. 15 Davis points out that there are aspects of politics and familial structure in tribal societies that are directly related to the sacred world through ritual prayer and storytelling, shamanistic healing, and re-creations of certain tribal myths pertinent not only to the individual but to the entire society as well. Gunn Allen calls this process, or worldview, ―tribal aesthetics‖—a view echoed by Greg O‘Rourke in regard to the Yurok Brush Dance. According to Gunn Allen, The aesthetic imperative requires that new experiences be woven into existing traditions in order for personal experience to be transmuted into communal experience. 16 John (Fire) Lame Deer, in his narrative recorded by Richard Erdoes, explains further the idea of the sacred and the secular void of divisions: These things are sacred. Looking at that pot full of good soup, I am thinking how, in this simple manner, Wakan Tanka takes care of me. We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things, which in our mind are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us many symbols that teach us the meaning of life. . . We Indians live in a world where the spiritual and the commonplace are one. 17 15. Personal interview with Gregory O‘Rourke, July 3, 1991. The Brush Dance is a healing ceremony given for an ill child, be it physical or emotional illness, in which the prayers of the dancers, singers, and medicine woman combine with the prayers of the spectators and community members to heal illness. This ceremonial ritual is practiced by the Yurok, Hupa, Karok, Tolowa, and Klamath Indians of Northern California. 16. Paula Gunn Allen, ed., Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 7. 17. Richard Erdoes, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, p. 86.Simon & Schuster, NY: 1972. 21 Tribal aesthetics renders in structural and transcendent form the commonly held reality by a group of people: a community is a group that shares a common reality. To the tribal societies and community members, spirits simply exist, and there is no way to articulate the presence of these spirits using scientific reasoning or theory. These spirits not only exist, they are also seen as kin—relatives to all. Inanimate objects such as a rock, a tree, or a cloud are all seen as relatives. The chemical or scientific composition of these objects is not important, but the relationship of these objects to the natural living world is. It is difficult, then, for literary critics, especially those of Indian blood, to explore the possibilities of an Indian literary criticism that excludes the presence of these spirits, a presence acknowledged and alive in the work of writers today. While Native myths and legends have been trivialized, seen as ―pagan‖ or ―childlike‖ 18 or as part of the new mysticism currently sweeping the New Age movement, or given one-dimensional characteristics as portrayed in the film and book Dances with Wolves, they are as viable and vital to our literary production as to our lives. The modern world has been divided between the sacred and the secular, and into this division fall the myths and legends and rituals of Native peoples all over the world. Our myths, in the world of Western empiricism and logical positivism, are viewed as falsehoods, trivialities, quaint curiosities. The Western world seeks to destroy its own myths and those of indigenous cultures because the Western tendency to secularize requires the separation of the ―ordinary‖ from the ―extraordinary,‖ the sacred from the description of 18. Gunn Allen, Sacred Hoop, p. 127 19. R. J. Stewart, Elements of Creation Myth (Longmead, UK: Element Books, 1989). 22 reality, the intellect from the emotion. We, as tribal peoples viewing the world from an aesthetically different viewpoint, have been unable to see our myths and traditions as truth in the scientific world of Western literary criticism. In his book Elements of Creation Myth, author R. J. Stewart discusses the Western tendency to negate spiritualism with science: This urge to reduce the power of a mystery by labeling it, by filing it into a little box assembled from a dogmatic or pre-contrived system, is one of the most dangerous and inherently weakening or disabling aspects of Western culture. 19 While Euro-Americans have decidedly divided both their own and others‘ worlds into the sacred and the secular, they have also categorized Indians; in turn, Western literary critics have categorized Indian literature. Kenneth Lincoln, in Indi‟n Humor, draws attention to this mode of classification: The American Indian, to recapitulate, seems mythically our fresh origin in the new world: a romantic paradox that images ancient, beginnings mythopoetically new, Adam and the fallen angel superimposed on Caliban. 20 So we have been doubly reclassified, reconceptualized. It is time to strip off these alien classifications and develop a critical approach that can illuminate our literature, both oral and written, in which the presence of spirits is acknowledged, welcomed, and accepted within the parameters of everyday life. I suggest an approach I call ―secular spiritualism‖: 20. Kenneth Lincoln, Indi‟n Humor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 113. 23 a discussion on how the beings of the spirit world inhabit the writer‘s consciousness and manifest themselves in the writer‘s work. American Indian writers are at the crossroads, the juncture of these two worlds; and at that crossroads, lines become blurred and no longer distinct. The spirit world pervades the physical world; in that rock, tree, or cloud there exists a presence, definable not by science but as a physical, literal being who exists within the framework of a tribal society. The writer, or storyteller, then becomes the mystic who can see into both worlds and report on the activities in the boundaries, record them, shape them, and point to a meaning, a significance that transcends the petty mundanities of secular preoccupations. The tribal community understands that spirit is part of the community, understands that spirit is part of the world, in both its spiritual and physical dimensions. Things may not appear extraordinary, but people and things are healed when the spirit world is approached correctly—that is, in a very ordinary, commonplace manner. Sacred and secular are seen as intertwined, woven, and laced together with great care and purpose, great respect for life and death, and an understanding that goes beyond mysticism as seen by modern Western society: spirits simply exist. There is indeed an acknowledged spiritual presence in American Indian poetry and prose. The concept of tribal consciousness 21 becomes important while studying spiritualism and myth in American Indian literature, and the concept of tribal aesthetics, as defined by Gunn Allen in Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, shows the reader and critic alike the collective vision of Indian peoples. The Western Euro-American critic 21. Carl Gustav Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster (from Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious) (Bollingen Series, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 24 first must be aware of the tribal concept of aesthetics when discussing American Indian literature. What motivates the Indian writer is not the sense of self and individuality but working for goals that are common within the community. It is a shared consciousness, working for the whole of the community rather than the whole of the self. Analytical work has been done on the trickster figure in American Indian mythology. This is where Carl Gustav Jung‘s ideas of tribal consciousness combined with Gunn Allen‘s concept of tribal aesthetics becomes important in the research of this article. In his essay ―The Trickster,‖ from Four Archetypes, Jung discusses tribal consciousness: ―It is a personification of traits of a character which are sometimes worse and sometimes better than those the ego personality possess. A collective personification, like the Trickster is a product of an aggregate of individual as something known to him, which would not be the case if it were just an individual outgrowth. 22 ‖ Jung‘s work, like Gunn Allen‘s, focuses on tribal beliefs, which she sees as of value to the community as a whole rather than to the individual as an isolate entity. Gunn Allen writes in her introduction to Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, ―The aesthetic imperative requires that new experiences be woven into existing traditions in order for personal experience to be transmuted into communal experience, that is, so we can understand how today‘s events harmonize within the communal experience. . . . We use aesthetics to make our lives whole, to explain ourselves to each other, to see where we fit into the scheme of things (Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, 7). 22. Ibid. 25 Following our own aesthetic becomes vital when looking to our own traditional cultures for illumination and contextualization of our own canon. Our world shifts between the sacred and the secular effortlessly yet without ease; in this duality of life, we become the trickster figure within our own context. TRICKSTER ASPECTS IN AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE Henry Louis Gates‘ contribution to the study of the trickster figure and the mythological return to that trickster in The Signifying Monkey is impressive and useful for understanding tribal aesthetics and aspects of the trickster figure in American Indian mythology and sacred stories, although Esu Elegbara/Legba is an African tribal figure. Building on Gates‘ critical example and using his culture-specific method, we can look at the pan-Indian tribal trickster figure Coyote, here Coyotesse 23 when speaking of American Indian women, as a way to an American Indian literary criticism. We can discuss Coyotesse as trickster, as spirit, as re-integration of tribal concepts, and using Jung‘s trickster essays, as a precedent in the study of the collective (tribal) spirit presence in American Indian women‘s literature. While Gates uses Esu/Legba as the central trickster figure or spirit at the crossroads in the African American cultural psyche, Coyote can be the archetypal—in Jungian terms—trickster in American Indian consciousness. 23. Ibid, p 4-5. 24. The term Coyotesse is applied as a feminine derivative of coyote. Ken Lincoln gives an Italian reading to the origin of the actual word coyotesse; in my opinion the word is French in origin, the meaning remains the same as a feminization of the word coyote. However, Gunn Allen asserts that coyotesse is a feminine derivative of the original Aztec coyotl. 26 In Indi‟n Humor, Kenneth Lincoln gives extensive biographical information on just who Coyote/Coyotesse is: ―Coyote is a tricky personage—half creator, half fool; he (or she in some versions) is renowned for greediness and salaciousness. . . . S/he is a marginal figure who scavenges the leftovers and here s/he somehow assembles the edges toward the tribal center. Indeed at times the Trickster serves as the Comic Hero or the Culture Bearer, bringing fire or foodstuffs or survival skills. . . . S/he‘s all too human . . . animal at his [sic] best, godlike in dreams.‖ 24 ‖ If we are to discuss the trickster-like qualities of the Indian author, then it should begin here, at the juncture where Lincoln stands. Lincoln writes that Coyote Old Man is also Coyote Old Woman: ―She has been slighted, if not slurred, in the mythmaking of America, and now she snaps back as a bushy tailed, non-conformist trickster Indian feminist‖ 25 . Yet we must note that feminism is not an ethnic woman‘s concept but an Anglo middle-class woman‘s struggle. Indian women‘s power comes from and through home and hearth, our place in the natural world—its ritual center; its continuance of existence, rebirth, and survival—not in reaction to any presumed powerlessness. In returning to the storytelling traditions, we affirm our ancient place with our words and provide in them our continued existence, simply by telling the traditional stories. We therefore become tricksters at the crossroads—and in so doing evoke the presence of the spirits alive around us. We become Coyotesse, and, as Leslie Silko says, simply by telling the stories we resist. ―In contradistinction,‖ Lincoln says on page 170 of Indi‟n Humor, ―to Anglo feminists, she was never without gender power, essential tribal work, self definition, an equal vote 25 Kenneth Lincoln, Indi‟n Humor, pp. 176–78 27 (though this varied from tribe to tribe), or generally the physical and cultural respect of the other sex.‖ In her story ―Yellow Woman,‖ Silko embodies many characteristics of the author as trickster, or Coyotesse: the use of tribal consciousness, with the application of the modern Yellow Woman story to the traditional tribal concepts and values (Yellow Woman/Evil Katsina stories), and the act of retelling the story in the face of Anglo- or Euro-American onslaught. In the invoking of the spirit Evil Katsina as the tall Navajo Silva and giving the narrator‘s identity as ―Yellow Woman,‖ Silko demonstrates how an Indian literary work is grounded firmly within a spiritual tradition. In this modern story, Silko‘s Yellow Woman asks Silva if he is indeed Evil Katsina: ―But I only said that you were him and that I was Yellow Woman—but I‘m not really her—I have my own name and I come from the pueblo on the other side of the mesa. Your name is Silva and you are a stranger I met by the river yesterday afternoon.‖ He laughed softly. ―What happened yesterday has nothing to do with what you will do today, Yellow Woman.‖ ―I know—that‘s what I‘m saying—the old stories about the ka‘tsina (kachina) spirit and Yellow Woman can‘t mean us.‖ 26 ‖ Silko invokes the presence of the traditional Yellow Woman spirit several times in her story. In looking at the traditional Yellow Woman stories, especially Gunn Allen‘s translation/adaptation of ―Whirlwind Man Steals Yellow Woman‖ (SWG, 187), we can see how Silko ties a modern love story to Laguna consciousness. As in the old stories, 26. Leslie Marmon Silko, ―Yellow Woman,‖ in Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, ed. Paula Gunn Allen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), p. 190. 27. Paula Gunn Allen, ―Whirlwind Man Steals Yellow Woman,‖ in Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, p. 187. 28. Gunn Allen, Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, p. 190 28 Silva spirits the narrator away. Whenever any woman within the community disappears, Silko suggests that the woman was spirited away by the mountain spirit, like Silko‘s Yellow Woman and Gunn Allen‘s Irriaku: ―…Brought her up when some woman was missing for a while. Said she ran off with a Navajo, or maybe a mountain spirit, like Kochinennako. 27 ‖ The presence of the ―Navajo‖ Silva in Silko‘s story evokes Evil Katsina/Sun/Whirlwind Man. Silva himself knows the Yellow Woman stories, and it is implied by Silko in her story (not just inferred but believed and accepted—of course that implies the sacred and the ordinary are perceived as a seamless whole 28 ) that Silva really is Evil Katsina, the mountain spirit: ―I‘m leaving.‖ He smiled now, eyes still closed. ―You are coming with me, remember?‖ He sat back up now, with his bare dark chest and belly in the sun. ―Where?‖ ―To my place.‖ 29 In Silva‘s non-response to Yellow Woman‘s question, Yellow Woman truly knows she has stepped into the story. Has she become the traditional Irriaku of the old stories, she wonders? She is confused because ―she is from out of time past and I live now and I‘ve been to school and there are highways and pickup trucks that Yellow Woman never saw.‖ 29. Gunn Allen, Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, p. 191 29 It is Yellow Woman‘s connection within a specific tribal framework or consciousness that motivates her in the contemporary version of the story. The part of her that lives in the modern world that went to school and travels the highways in pickup trucks refuses to believe their story is also hers: ―You must be a Navajo.‖ Silva shook his head gently. ―Little Yellow Woman, you never give up, do you? I have told you who I am. The Navajo people know me too.‖ And later, ―You don‘t understand, do you, little Yellow Woman? You will do what I want.‖ 30 But Yellow Woman knows the stories, the connection between Irriaku and the spirit of the mountains. Yellow Woman has heard the stories all her life and so wonders if she is the story. She knows the one person who would understand her predicament is her grandpa, who long since has passed: ―But if Grandpa weren‘t dead he‘d tell them what happened—he would laugh and say, ‗stolen by a ka‘tsina, a mountain spirit. She‘ll come home—they usually do.‘‖ 31 And Yellow Woman does go back, after she acknowledges the spirit power in Silva: ―I looked at Silva and for an instant there was something ancient and very dark—something I could feel in my stomach—in his eyes‖ (196). 30. ibid, p 193. 31. ibid, pp. 191; 196-97 30 Silko‘s narrator wonders, early on in the story, if the Yellow Woman of the traditional stories had another name she was known by to her children and family and husband (191). By the time the white rancher arrives, Yellow Woman accepts her own belief in the story she is part of: ―And I told myself, because I believe it, he will come back sometime and be waiting by the river,‖ . . . and ―I decided to tell them some Navajo had kidnapped me, but I was sorry old Grandpa wasn‘t alive to hear my story, because it was the Yellow Woman stories he liked to tell best.‖ (197) It her acceptance of her Laguna identity and her connection to the stories of her ancestors and the stories of the land from which the Laguna are born from that Silko‘s protagonist understands her part in the Laguna story that is ongoing. The study of Laguna traditional narratives in modern Laguna narrative cultural context decolonizes the literature because it focuses the study from the tribal center. Of course, Silko‘s story has elements that will have Western feminists up in arms, most notably the captivity elements and the decidedly cultural female act of Yellow Woman‘s cooking after her ―abduction.‖ But such objectives are most likely to be confused by non-Indian academics. Some women of color feel excluded by the modern Western feminist renaissance. In the third stage of feminism, the ―engendering of differences‖, feminist scholarship began to acknowledge difference among women, including racial and class differences, varying degrees of masculinity and of femininity, and religious differences as well. Interrogating the intersections of race, gender, class and region underscored the differences between women that Gubar asserts ails feminist criticism today. Out of this engendering of differences as well as the recuperative 31 paradigm, identity politics began to take hold in feminist scholarship and as a result early feminist practices and theories were seen as privileging white middle class women. ―Although feminists of racial identity politics and of postructuralism did not always aggress with one another,‖ Gubar states, ―their words combined to make ―women‖ an invalid word.‖ 32 The genealogy of racial identity politics is grounded firmly in the recuperative imperative, as more scholars of color began their own recuperative projects on little known writers and artists, underscoring the intersections of race and class that had not been as ably articulated without the definition of woman. The unmasking or reemergence of works by women of color previously forgotten or purposefully oppressed began to find their way into a feminist scholarship which allowed for the questions of race and class to be addressed. The ―silenced voice‖ of women now included the silenced voice of black, indigenous, Asian, postcolonial voices. Yet scholars began to question the practice of feminist criticism because it did not adequately address the issues and concerns of women of color. Feminism, in theory, privileged white middle class women‘s struggle against white middle class men. The definition of identity politics is fluid and changing. In her essay ―A Chapter on the Future‖ Gubar defines identity politics as ―…the agency made possible by lending political clout to hyphenated collectives has been qualified by reliance on illusory or reductive categories which erase or censure alternative identifications and of connections between people.‖ 33 Just what illusory or reductive categories is Gubar addressing? That gender trumps race and class? That issues and struggles facing poor women are the same 32 Gubar, 118. 33 Contending Forces, p 155. 32 as they are wealthy women? That the rape and forced sterilization against Native American women was not a systemized tool of racial and ethnic cleansing? That African American women‘s sexuality was defined by African American women or by white men who used those bodies to increase economic holdings and keep systems of slavery in place, generation upon generation? In these instances, race and gender are so mutually intertwined that they cannot be separated in a critique of the role(s) of women in American history. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) was one of the first writings advocating the importance of theorizing a social location of feminism, specifically African American women. The intersections of race, class and gender as a vehicle for understanding specifically black women in America and theorizing an identity based upon racial politics. The women of the Combahee River Collective asserted that the personal is the political, and that ―the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us.‖ 34 No other politically progressive movement had addressed specifically the needs of black lesbians, so the assertion of the Collective that only black lesbians could articulate the needs of black lesbians becomes especially relevant in a discussion on identity politics. Sometimes criticized as reactionary and separatist, the Collective paved the way for other feminists whose work analyzed the intersections of race, gender, and class and felt excluded from western forms of feminism were able to articulate a need for race based identity politics. The Collective is expressively not separatist; they maintain ties to progressive black men. Their solidarity 34 Combahee River Collective, p 1 33 with black men articulates of a dialectic of race that does not exist between white men and white women. Black women remain members of two oppressed castes, intersecting with race and gender that does not occur with white women: Black women‘s extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes. As Angela Davis points out in ‗Reflections on the Black Woman‘s Role in the Community of Slaves‘, black women have always embodied, if only in their physical manifestation, an adversary stance to white male rule and have actively resisted its inroads upon them and their communities in both dramatic and subtle ways. 35 The Combahee River Collective demanded western feminism to address issues of black women and their historical racial and gendered oppression by white men and white women. Sexual and racial identity made ―the whole life unique‖ for black women. 36 Hazel Carby theorizes that the collective voice in mainstream feminism excludes black women in both the U.S. and in Britain. 37 The identity of black women as Other has been constructed by outside colonial forces—white men--- and by white women as well. Carby argues that while de Beauvoir and other earlier feminist theorists posited that the private sphere was a site of oppression for women, for black women the home is a site of familial structure that is firmly grounded in black women‘s identity. ―The black family has been a site of political and cultural resistance to racism,‖ Carby writes, ―Ideologies of black female sexuality do not stem primarily from the black family.‖ 38 There are indeed 35 Combahee, p 1. 36 ibid 37 Hazel Carby, ―What Do You Mean We, White Woman?‖ (1981) 34 similarities in oppression as women oppressed by men, however, historical violence against black women acknowledges a certain complicity by black women in the racialzed struggle for black women‘s equality. Black women‘s stories are interwoven with white women‘s stories, but as Carby states, black women do not need white women to write black women‘s histories. Carby is also very clear on the goal of black feminist critique: to define black women‘s historiography as separate from white women. ―The black woman‘s critique of history has not only involved us in coming to terms with ‗absences‘; we have also been outraged by the ways in which it has made us visible, when it has chosen to see us. History has constructed our sexuality and our femininity as deviating from those qualities with which white women, as the prize objects of the Western world, have been endowed. We have also been defined in less than human terms. Our continuing struggle with history began with its ―discovery‖ of us.‖ 39 Carby argues that black feminism has much to offer white feminism, to allow black women to speak from absences rather than presences. 40 She maintains that for all feminists to be on equal footing, with race and class added to the female/male binary that privileges western feminism that white feminists must allow for their complicity in the rewriting of black women‘s herstories. Black women must be allowed to speak and write for black women in acknowledging the unique struggle of black women in a movement born out of imperial and colonial practice. Carby‘s argument black women‘ roles in the 38 Carby, 79. The historical black family also represents a site of oppression by American white males against African American females; children were considered property and were bought and sold at very young ages, taken from their mothers. While white mothers and children were considered property in the legal sense, ―legal age‖ and ―freedom‖ take on different definitions by race. 39 Hazel Carby, ―White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,‖ p 1. 40 Ibid. 35 family are a site of resistance to both western feminism and imperialism can be applied to American Indian women‘s lives as well. American Indian women face similar struggles in western feminism born out of western imperialism. One of the most influential texts in Native American feminist thought was Paula Gunn Allen‘s The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (1986). At the time of the intial publication of the first edition, the Laguna Pueblo poet and scholar was living in the San Francisco Bay Area, heavily influenced by both the American feminist movement and the women‘s poetry movement in the 1970‘s that included Audre Lorde, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich and Judy Grahn. Recognizing the call in feminist thought for a recuperative paradigm as well as recognizing in her Laguna Pueblo tradition role for Laguna women that did not include oppression by Laguna men, Gunn Allen set out in the 1970‘s as a graduate student in the American Studies program at the University of New Mexico what she later called her own ―recuperative project‖ 41 : that Native American women‘s histories are very different than white women‘s histories and therefore need to be reclaimed by feminist theorists as early feminism in the Americas. Contesting Sherry Ortner‘s premise that all cultures in some way practiced female subordination, Gunn Allen asserts that female deities abounded in Native America and that women and men lived in complimentary cultures in which each gender was valued and respected. Many Native cultures, including southeastern native cultures (Creek, Cherokee), Hopi, Pueblo, and Navajo, believe that women share a reciprocal relationship with men in their socially sanctioned roles within 41 Paula Gunn Allen, keynote address at the Native American Women‘s Studies Conference, Humboldt State University, April 19 th , 1993. 36 social, political, and ceremonial life. In general, Gunn Allen argues that many Native American traditions were essentially ―gynocratic, woman-centered, mother-right people‖ 42 , and therefore many Native cultures in America practice feminist traditions. The ideal of tribal womanhood, specifically in Gunn Allen‘s case in Laguna Pueblo womanhood, is that women‘s roles as caregivers and nurturers within the home was seen as a place of honor. The native woman in traditional societies shared equal political, religious, domestic and cultural power with men, and Gunn Allen argues, ―is in no way perceived in the same way as are women in industrial and postindustrial cultures.‖ 43 Whereas the feminist critique in the western world (European-American, European and American) sought to define women as separate from men, and sought liberation based upon domestic first then public spheres, native women‘s issues were not based upon these same arguments. When examining native women‘s issues, from a feminist perspective, one has to address race within that axis, because native women‘s oppression is clearly and consistently based within racialized sexualized confines. And, as Andrea Smith argues, ―The reason Native women are constantly marginalized in male-dominated discourses about racism and colonialism and in white-dominated discourses about sexism is the inability of both discourses to address the inextricable relationship between gender violence and colonialism.‖ 44 42 The Sacred Hoop, p 41. 43 Ibid. 44 Andrea Smith, ―Rape and the War Against Native Women‖, from Reading Native American Women, edited by Inez Hernandez-Avila 37 The formation of tribal identity is problematic at best. Traditionally, tribal clan systems defined tribal membership and identity. When the United States government recognized American Indian tribes as sovereign yet dependent nations 45 it entered into a trust relationship with Indian nations, reverberations that today are still felt in Indian country. The United States government has insinuated itself in determining membership in American Indian tribes. 46 Congress, in its dealings with American Indian nations over the last two hundred or so years, has had to continually redefine the notion of nationhood in its legal definition of Indian Country. 47 American Indians have become refugees within their own landscape, according to Ward Churchill and other Native writers who offer political critiques of the state of native America. Colonization has created a diaspora of American Indians within the borders of the mainland United States as well as Hawaii, Alaska, and beyond. The notion of identity politics takes on another dimension when discussed within the context of American Indian identity and racial formation. According to Judith Butler, 45 See the Marshall Trilogy of Supreme Court cases (Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia, Worcester vs. Georgia, McIntosh vs. Georgia) in which the federal government, in a decision written by Chief Justice John Marshall, determined that Indian nations could cede land only to the federal government and not individuals and remaining Indian land would be held in trust for Indian Nations with the federal government as the Trustee for Indian nations, thereby making decisions for Indian nations based upon the Trust or/Trustee relationship, conferring upon Native nations the sovereign yet dependant status, similar to a ―ward to his guardian‖. 46 An Indian may apply for membership in his or her tribe but the federal government determines final say in membership, legally determining the blood quantum and identity of an Indian person in this country. 47 The current legal definition of Indian Country comes from Sec. 1151. as follows: - Indian country defined : Except as otherwise provided in sections 1154 and 1156 of this title, the term ''Indian country'', as means: (a) all land within the limits of any Indian reservation under the jurisdiction of the United States Government, notwithstanding the issuance of any patent, and, including rights-of-way running through the reservation, (b) all dependent Indian communities within the borders of the United States whether within the original or subsequently acquired territory thereof, and whether within or without the limits of a state, and (c) all Indian allotments, the Indian titles to which have not been extinguished, including rights-of- way running through the same 38 The foundational reasoning of identity politics tends to assume an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. 48 The formation of ―the‖ American Indian culture is a notion wholly formed by the ―other‖ in this instance. The self being first of all the familial identification, second the clan identification, then tribal or national identification, all of which is defined by not only the individual Native self but the Native community to which the ―self‖ is related to, and part of. ―the‖ American Indian ―culture‖ is a racial formative designated upon a group of individuals by ―the other‖ outside the particular tribal or ethnic identity, the ―other‖ that is a colonizing power therefore has determined the racial formation and subjection of the Native ―other‖ in this instance. The term ―American Indian‖ is not a term an Indian person tends to identify him or herself as; for example within the Muskogee (Creek) Nation, one identifies oneself by tribal town, clan affiliation, tribal affiliation, then Native ancestry; one rarely defines oneself as ―American Indian‖ only. Muskogees have become defined and subjected as ―American Indian‖ by the colonizing ―other‖, a la Althusser‘s doctrine of interpellation. 49 The American Indian tribal and clan identity was formed long before colonization and that identification formation still informs the identity of tribal and clan members today, yet birth into the nation interpellates tribal identity. The native Hawaiian people have a long tradition of when meeting others in a group setting, an individual relates, through song/chant, the ancestral formation of identity in the repetition of names and deeds of ancestors, identifying place 48 Gender Trouble, p. 181 49 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p 1 39 of birth, ancestor‘s place of birth, and sense of relationship to the place of birth and to the landscape from which one is formed. The connection between the inter-relationship of ancestral identity, through language, landscape, and genealogy, becomes imperative in the formation of identity of the native Hawaiian without the racial formation or designation of ―native Hawaiian‖ as given in subjection by the colonizing power. The traditional native Hawaiian, and the traditional Muskogee, therefore have a formation of identity that predates the formation of subjection by the colonizing power. Butler, in her discourse on subjection in The Psychic Life of Power, posits ―…Power imposes itself upon us, and, weakened by its force, we come to internalize or accept its terms. What such an account fails to note, however, is that the ―we‖ who accept such terms are fundamentally dependant on those terms for our existence‖ 50 Butler‘s argument is especially provocative in American Indian circles on many complex levels. I argue that racial formation of Native peoples whose ancestors are indigenous to the Americas is multi-layered and complex and cannot be defined only in its relationship to power and to the colonizing power. The colonizing power, the United States, has indeed contributed to Althusser‘s outside ―call of identity‖ and subject formation in regards to America‘s Native peoples. The tribe, in this case, the Muskogee Nation, interpellates Muskogee identity, predating the call of the colonizing power. Native peoples are subjects first in tribal terms, colonizing second. First is the traditional formation of identity I mentioned earlier that within Muskogee society, as well as Laguna Pueblo society, is based upon clan and familial identification, genealogical identification that posits itself outside of the theory of interpellation and subject/object formation by the 50 ibid., p 2 40 colonizing/power hierarchical other Both Muskogee and Laguna societies are matrilineal, matrifocal, traditionally gynocratic societies whose identity is formed within societal structures, rather than by an outside colonizing power. Native Hawaiian identity has also been formed long before current power structures were hammered into place; racial formation is once again based upon genealogy and ancestral landscape identification. However, placing traditional methods of identity formation and modern interpellation, following Butler and Althusser, has thereby formed the identity of the contemporary American Indian. Further complicating the formation of identity is the intermarriage between tribes and non-tribal members that have created the new ―mixed-blood‖, ―pan- Indian‖ tribal identity that has formed in urban areas in the United States far away from ancestral homelands, which played a role in identity formation. Where do these questions of identity, as a racialized and gendered notion, leave us in the discussion of feminism and race? As Catherine MacKinnon argues in her short essay ―From Practice to Theory, or What Is A White Woman Anyway?‖, white women have suffered sexual and political oppression which is based on gender differences. MacKinnon argues that white women do suffer sexual violence, as do women of color. However, white women have not suffered forced sterilization in the same way American Indian women have; the violence against American Indian women has been legally sanctioned by the federal government since the beginning of colonial America, and it continues today. The subjugation of American Indian women under white women goes back to boarding school era in which roles were very clearly defined for Indian people by whites. As Andrea Smith argues, ―For most part, schools prepared Native boys for manual labor or farming and Native girls for domestic work…. The primary role of this 41 education for Indian girls was to inculcate patriarchal norms into Native communities so that women would lose their place of leadership in Native communities.‖ 51 Upon matriculation out of the boarding schools, young women were often employed as domestic servants in white middle class homes, never to return home to their respective nations and, according to K. Tsianina Lomawaima, ―developing a habitus shaped by domestic messages of subservience and one‘s proper place.‖ 52 The legalized genocide practiced upon American Indian women is based upon race and gender and membership in this particularly constructed American identity. White women were not legally forced into boarding school situations in which their language, their culture and their religion were systematically and emphatically taken away. Sexual abuse at the hands of boarding school employees was commonplace; government funded health programs sterilized Indian women without their consent. The sterilization of Indian women at government funded and government run Indian Health Services further continued the subjugation of and genocide against American Indian women through sexual and reproductive means. If Indian pregnancies were prevented, no more Indian children would be born, therefore eliminating the race altogether. The discussion of identity politics and the recuperative paradigm is imperative when talking about indigenous women‘s writing. Like black women, native women‘s roles in the family are not historically a site of oppression, but a site of political and cultural resistance to colonization and racism. Historical roles of domestic space have also encompassed political spheres as well. For example, in traditional matriarchal 51 Andrea Smith, Conquest, p 37, 52 K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light, p 11 42 societies such as the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Navajo, Pueblo tribes, women and men had equal or shared political power which stemmed from their gender roles within kinship systems. 53 Nearly every project in the recuperative paradigm in native women‘s writing, including Paula Gunn Allen‘s ―La Malinche to Cortes, Her Spanish Husband‖, Beth Brant‘s ―Molly Brant, Iroquois Maiden, Speaks‖, Wendy Rose‘s ―Julia Pastrana‖, among many, take indigenous women whose stories have been handed down in history and retell them in a decolonizing context. Gunn Allen, Brant and Rose have theorized women‘s poetry as politics, as regenerative, and as recuperative. Their conversations within the discourse on lesbian, feminist, and Third World scholarship are well documented. When the Combahee River Collective says ―we,‖ they are speaking for themselves as racially, politically, and sexually oppressed black lesbians; when Hazel Carby says ―we‖ she is speaking of a community of de-colonial women theorizing at the intersections of race, class and gender; when Gunn Allen, Brant and Rose say ―we‖ they are inclusive of the voices of colonized indigenous women. The historical figures they represent, La Malinche, Molly Brant, and Julia Pastrana are indigenous tribal women whose herstories, to quote Carby, have been taken from history and recuperated into the voices of indigenous women firmly entrenched in the language of the decolonizing woman: one that speaks to white feminists utilizing the recuperative imperative; to indigenous women 53 See The Sacred Hoop and Grandmothers of the Light (Paula Gunn Allen), Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change 1700-1835 (Theda Perdue); Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother‟s Wisdom (Marilou Awiatka), and Choctaw Women In A Chaotic World: The Class of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (Michaelene Pensantubbee); as well as the wide ranging Reading Native American Women: Critical/Cultural Representations, edited by Inez Hernandez-Avila. 43 by bringing herstories out of history and into modern narrative; and to the communities of women these storyteller poets represent. While modern middle-class academic feminists try to regather and remember the power they once had, we women of color never forgot our power. Kenneth Lincoln talks extensively of the female role in some Indian nations in the ―Feminist Ind‘ins chapter from Indi‟n Humor. Citing Mary (Brave Bird) Crow Dog in her autobiography Lakota Woman, Lincoln notes that ―…a volunteer white nurse berates Indian women on ‗feminist‘ grounds but Mary answers the war at hand must be fought, then the warrior‘s machismo can be deconditioned—for the moment every effort counts under fire, and the pecking order is irrelevant. ‗We told her that her kind of women‘s lib was a white, middle class thing and at this critical stage we had other priorities. Once our men had gotten their balls back, we might start arguing with them about who would do the dishes.‘ The old gender loyalties bond her with the tribe as a whole, beyond new social definitions, and she is renamed Ohitika Win or Brave Woman after the siege. 54 ‖ To the Indian woman, Silko‘s story and the traditional Cochiti and Laguna Pueblo stories are not what could be considered as traditional Western captivity narratives but rather as the sacred stories detailing the relation of the tribe to the lands and the sacred gifts of corn to the people—the Yellow Women or Irriaku—to the tribes. What may be seen as antifeminist in regard to the content of Silko‘s story by some in the white world is irrelevant to its tribally derived meaning. When discussing a tribal story, we must look at the context of tribal aesthetics rather than the dominant worldview and aesthetics. 53. Lincoln, Indi‟n Humor,Oxford, 1993. p. 166; Mary Brave Bird Crow Dog with Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman, Grove Press, 1990. p. 137–38. 44 In Lincoln‘s terms, Silko, as trickster, is the scavenger who turns the leftovers of a culture of storytelling, long abused by many years of Anglo- and Euro-American domination, into a meal that returns to the tribal center. In so doing, her gender role is clear. Coyotesse, that ―bushytailed, non-conformist Indian feminist,‖ wears many hats and is called many names—Gunn Allen, Silko, Harjo, Hogan, Erdrich, Walters, TallMountain but she still remains the storyteller and pieces the tribe together again, given her power and vision of the stories collected at the center of the tribal world. ―Home for the Coyotesse involves placing herself in collaboration with her origins,‖ Lincoln writes. 55 Silko‘s ―Yellow Woman‖ places Silko, as Coyotesse, at home. She is in ―collaboration with her origins‖—the retelling of an Irriaku story is itself an affirmation of the storytelling tribal traditions of the Laguna Pueblo people. Silko‘s Coyotesse quest takes us back to the traditional Pueblo land, to the connection of Yellow Woman (the Irriaku)—yellow ears of corn to the Laguna people. The Irriaku are a gift to the people; and once the Irriaku have been stolen by Evil Katsina, the people lose their connection to Iyetiku, their connection to the divine. The people and the land are no longer one because once the corn is gone, there can be no longer a sacred connection between people, land, and goddess. To make a further connection to the archetypal Coyotesse and the writer or storyteller, we must further examine aspects of the Coyotesse, or trickster character. In the male form, Coyote, the trickster is many things to many tribes. To the Pueblo, Coyote tales are spun to teach the Pueblo children correct forms of behavior; thus Coyote is 54. Lincoln, Indi‟n Humor, p 117. 45 oriented toward a negative aspect of Pueblo reality and is the antithesis of the ideal Pueblo character. ―He mediates between the way of the tribe and the way of the unrestricted ego.‖ 56 Jarold Ramsey, in Reading the Fire, further explores Coyote‘s identity: ―Enter the Trickster as mediator. His outrageous sexual antics, his thorough selfishness, his general irresponsibility, his polymorphous dedication to the perverse in the stories that must have allowed the ―good citizens‖ of the tribe to affirm the system of prohibitions and punishments . . . at the same time they could vicariously delight and find release in his irresponsible individualism. 57 Gender roles become blurred when speaking of Coyote/Coyotesse, especially in the Laguna society where gender roles are not those of the Western majority. Confusion enters in because of conflicts within Anglo and Laguna ways of life. Within gynocratic tribes, asserts Paula Gunn Allen, 58 males are nurturing, pacifist, and transitory; females are self-definitive, assertive, decisive, and continuous. Thus, gender roles are reversed in Pueblo society—so perhaps what Lincoln gives as ―Coyote‖ traits are ―Coyotesse‖ traits. The trickster is not only distinctly female in Laguna Pueblo culture, but she‘s also male as well, blurring the definitive crossroads of gender. Thus, both Gunn Allen and Silko can not only cross over between the worlds of the divine and the mundane but also as tribal women, as Coyotesse, continue to blur the lines, Anglically speaking. The 55. Ernest G. Wolfe Jr., ―Coyote: A Contrary Character‖ (Unpublished paper, Department of Anthropology, UCLA, 1990). 11. 56 Jarold Ramsey, Reading the Fire, University o Nebraska Press, 1983. p. 32 57. Gunn Allen, Sacred Hoop, pp. 2, 82 46 feminism in these stories is tribal: telling the story is female because it centers upon tribal tradition—the gynocratic Pueblo tradition. The Yellow Woman in Silko‘s story has no choice but to return to her family, just as the Yellow Woman of the traditional stories must return to her people. She is a gift of that tribe, bringing sacred knowledge from the wilderness back to the people, strengthening the connection between Iyetiku and her people. Silko also has no choice but to return to the tribal traditions because she is a storyteller, and as that storyteller, she is inexorably tied to the storytelling traditions of her people. The acts of Coyotesse, the storyteller in a Laguna Pueblo context, then, are distinctly female: self-definitive, assertive, decisive, continuous. According to the late Ernest G. Wolfe Jr., in his paper ―Coyote: A Contrary Character,‖ one of Coyote‘s aspects is representative of the sinister and destructive side of Pueblo life. ―He roams alone in the dark; the time for an evil person begins at sundown. Called an ass barker by the Hopi, his howling near a village portends evil events to come. . . . his self-deceptive and credulous nature usually leads to destruction.‖ 59 However, the sinister and destructive side of life may be considered the knowledge the landscape has to offer. As Coyote/Coyotesse walks that fine line between the spirit world and the secular world, the land embodies several spirit beings, Evil Katsina being one of them, who have knowledge to offer the people as well. In the traditional stories, Yellow Woman is abducted by Evil Katsina and is taken outside of the community to the wilderness beyond. There, she is given gifts of knowledge that she brings back to the people, thus cementing the relationship once again between land, 58. Wolfe citing Ekkehart, ―Coyote,‖ p. 8. 47 people, and deity. According to Patricia Clark Smith in her essay ―Earthly Relations, Carnal Knowledge‖ in the anthology The Desert Is No Lady, ―Southwestern Indian cultures do not approach wilderness as something to be either raped or domesticated. . . . in both traditional and contemporary literature wilderness often appears not as a mere landscape-backdrop but as a spirit being with a clearly sexual aura.‖ 60 In the Silko retelling of the Yellow Woman stories, Silva represents the land, embodied in the river that flows past on the mountain and in the translation of his name (silva means ―river;‖ and even the Latin derivative sylvan, meaning woods). To the Pueblos, Navajos embody aspects of the wilderness, freedom, the sense of wandering and wilderness. The Navajos are perceived as ―beautiful and free.‖ 61 Silva is the wilderness: beautiful, nonpredictable, the perfect metaphor of the spirit in the real world. The modern Yellow Woman takes some aspect of knowledge back to the people upon her return: the aspect that the spirits do exist and the stories of the people and the land continue; the stories never end. ―The human protagonists,‖ Smith goes on to state, ―usually engage willingly in literal sexual intercourse with the spirits. . . . this act brings the land‘s power, spirit, and fecundity in touch with their own and so ultimately yields benefit for their own people.‖ 62 Sexuality is a celebration of life and the continuous act of life, and in the world 59. Patricia Clark Smith, ―Earthly Relations, Carnal Knowledge,‖ in The Desert Is No Lady, ed. Vera Norwood and Janice Monk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 178. 60. Interview with Paula Gunn Allen, Seal Beach, California, 22 October 1991. Allen related that as children Lagunas are taught the mystery and allure of the Navajo. She remembers the first time she ever saw a Navajo in her father‘s store in Cubero, New Mexico, and saying, ―I want him to take me with him. Oh, please, can I go into the wilds with you?‖ She went on to say, ―Identifying Silva as a Navajo was a perfect metaphor within Leslie‘s story.‖ 61. Smith, ―Earthly Relations,‖ p. 178 48 where there is no division between the sacred and the secular, spirits, land, people, and Iyetiku are one. Procreation brings life; and the tribal traditions and rituals are passed on through generations. Thus sexuality becomes survival, interwoven within the fabric of all things at the tribal center. Silko, as the storyteller, as Coyotesse, embodies the spirit who translates the power of the land to the people. It is Coyotesse who must venture into the darkness to bring back the knowledge to the tribe. These are shaky crossroads Coyotesse walks, as the spirit world is treacherous, but the knowledge gained and brought back will benefit the tribe and survival, -, in the face of devastation, becomes the knowledge received in these modern times. ―The coming together of a person and spirit may lead to magical children,‖ Smith tells us, ―the discovery of rich sources of food or water, or the gift of a specific ceremony.‖ 63 Silko, again as Coyotesse, is telling the story and in so doing gives birth to the text as a magical child, metaphorically speaking; the story gives credence to ceremony and ritual (stories are part of the larger ritual); stories are sources of spiritual sustenance; and the child is Coyotesse‘s story, given from an encounter with the spirit world. The storyteller is Coyotesse, creatrix and mother, who through ritual and ceremony with the land gives birth to an ongoing dialogue between Iyetiku, the tribe, and the spirit world. What then is the trick Coyotesse possesses? What is her function in society, and as the storyteller, what must she do to maintain her tribal role? Lincoln points out that Coyote is infinitely regenerative—a possessor of wisdom and ironic wit. 64 Coyote is the 62. Ibid. 63. Lincoln, Indi‟n Humor, p. 114. 64. Ibid. 49 Yurok man who lives high on a hill in a big white house that resembles the White House; Coyotesse is the Laguna Pueblo woman storyteller in academia who receives recognition and accolades for her critical theoretical approach to modern literature—modern American Indian literature—in a university system that refuses to recognize the very aspect of tribal aesthetic literature the storyteller embodies. Yet she continues to do what she does best: telling stories. As the storyteller must go into the wilderness and bring back a story, she reforms it, gives it life, and regenerates the spiritual life of the people. She takes a story from the traditions, the spiritual center, and reforms it to suit a modern context and a modern tribe. Coyotesse negotiates the borders between the spirit world and the mundane world, forms a story, and must bring it back to the tribe in a nonmalevolent manner. She must face the wilderness and not only return a whole tribe to its traditions but also trick the nontribal world into her world as well. She must trick the Western world, in its division of sacred and secular, into believing that the character of Silva, the tall Navajo, is a wilderness spirit and that the modern Yellow Woman really has stepped into the story that was left behind long ago. Whereas Coyote, to paraphrase Lincoln once again, is ―infinitely regenerative—a possessor of wisdom and ironic wit,‖ Coyotesse becomes that and much more: the weaver of stories and of life that illuminates tribal life, urban life, and signifies those aspects of our lives by telling the stories she brings back from the wilderness to the tribal center. It is Coyotesse‘s humor (―ironic wit‖) that allows her to be a signifier. By reworking the language and calling it her own, she has stolen from the language what the language had stolen from her: her tribal identity. It is Coyotesse‘s own mulitplicitous 50 nature that ties this all together. Coyotesse is a feminist whether she accepts that label or not: by writing about women‘s experiences she takes on the cause. Her reworking of language makes her the trickster. She steals back the fire, the fire being language, and makes it her—the tribe‘s—own. Because she walks tenuously between the spirit world and the ordinary world, she transcends both sacred and secular, becoming both sacred and secular. TRIBAL CITIZENSHIP: CULTURAL OR POLITICAL, HERITAGE OR IDENTITY Native people have been dispersed through legal means by the United States government for over three hundred years. Forced removals have been endured during periods of federal Indian policy that separated families, communities and nations from places of emergence that connected these tribal peoples through story, song, language and culture to the place from which they come. We have carried stories with us as we have been relocated upon relocations; the stories that native peoples tell and the landscapes in which we inhabit influence us our own ancestral home landscapes have. Therefore, in examining narrative and performative practices of native peoples, we must also examine the native narratives and performance practices not only of the places in which we inhabit currently, but of the places of which we call ―home‖. As Paula Tripp Allen (Karuk, Yurok) once said, ―Indians always find other Indians.‖ 65 So as the stories have been 65 At the California Indian Conference in October of 2005, I asked my dear friend and former student Pimm Allen how things were for the Karuk, Yurok, Hupa and Wiyot peoples of northern California in the years since I have lived there. Pimm answered that things were basically the same; that non-Indians never know anything about day to day Indian life. I answered that I have always felt at home in that community as a young undergrad in the early 80‘s until now, to which Pimm replied, ―but you‘re an Indian. Indians always 51 carried in the memory of the people, archived in traditional tribal stories, songs, languages, and literatures, how can these tribal knowledges be used to rebuild nations that have been decimated by genocide? What are tribal nations and communities doing to address the loss of languages and culture among its citizenry? Nation building in Indian Country, as theorized at the Harvard School of Government, was developed to examine current issues facing Native American communities -- among them, sovereignty, economic development, land and water rights, and constitutional reform. Coursework was developed around these political paradigms that sought a shift in American Indian policy from ―domestic, dependant nation‖ status to self-sufficient national government. "We see the course as an opportunity to deepen the understanding of the Native American community in a forward-looking, positivist perspective, not as a narrow, historical perspective," said FAB co-chair James Austin, John G. McLean Professor of Business Administration. "Its starting premise is dealing with sovereign nations' political structures and economic development." 66 This focus on political systems of governance has been adopted by many tribes in the era of self- governance; I argue that this methodology has led tribes to foreclose on cultural competency and fails to address how nations must revitalize language, ceremony, arts and lifeways that are still in danger of extinction. I argue that the cultural competence of native nations must be addressed; through language revitalization, myth, ceremony, ritual, songs, stories native nations can address the political as well as the cultural. Historically, native nations have been able to address the political through the cultural find other Indians, no matter where we all are.‖ I would have to say, as this part of northern California is a second ―home‖ to me, that this is the case. 66 Harvard Gazette, December, 1996. 52 and vice-versa; the trend now in tribal nations is to address the political rather than address the cultural. Many tribal nations have adopted, in this era of tribal self- sufficiency, this model of government that seeks to rebuild nations in the onslaught of war, famine, and genocide. One forecloses the other; I argue that to privilege one over the other is a dangerous road that the Cherokee Nation and the Creek Nation could follow. Citizenship is defined through blood quantum in federally recognized tribal nations; yet with intermarriage and interracial mixing within the Cherokee Nation, over half of tribal citizens are less than 1/16 th degree of Cherokee blood. 67 So then does a nation who is defined by its citizenship stand upon the legalized blood quantum status of its citizens, many of whom are not culturally Cherokee, growing up outside of Cherokee towns and communities, but are legally Cherokee based upon degree of Cherokee blood? I am not arguing here that blood quantum defines ‗Cherokee-ness‖; I am arguing that cultural knowledge, Cherokee epistemology, should equally define Cherokee identity as does blood quantum. Indulge me in a slight shift in thinking at this moment in this essay, in which I examine the role of culture in identity, rather than legalized racial formation and American Indian identity. Cultural identity, rather than legal identity, is at the core of this project and I want to unpack what I am speaking about when I discuss cultural identity and how cultural identity encompasses both the speaking of language, singing of songs, 67 Intermarriage and interracial mixing was very common among Cherokee ancestors during periods of early contact, throughout removal, and into the 20 th and 21 st centuries. Circe Strum points to Russell Thornton‘s 1996 study that determined the intermarriage and interracial mixing within Cherokee citizens occurring at such a fast rate that by 2080 there will be only 8% of Cherokees with documented (read: legal) Indian blood of one-half or over. Strum points out that the nation will defined by its legal status rather than its cultural identity. This is one of the central questions of this dissertation: does legal identity trump cultural identity? If one is not legally a Cherokee but culturally a Cherokee, what does that say about their status as a Cherokee? 53 and political grounding of a nation that does not foreclose on all aspects of native identity. In The Sacred Hoop, Paula Gunn Allen writes that there are two basic forms of Indian literature, ceremony and myth. Ceremony is a ritual reenactment of a specialized perception of a cosmic relationship, while myth is a prose record of that relationship. 68 Each time ceremonies are performed, a reenactment of tribal stories further cements the connection between tribal people, their ancestral landscapes, and the people who came before them. According to Gunn Allen, the literary tradition within American Indian cultures forms an unbroken line in the oral tradition from "time immemorial to the vital now." 69 These stories, many of which are part of ritual traditions---creation stories and myths--- are a means of survival and recognition of self and community in the face of the Western stereotype of the "vanishing/ed race". In telling these stories American Indian writers prove that all of us who are peoples of sovereign nations and societies are indeed still alive. Creation stories and myths 70 preserve tribal identity. Tribal literature, in turn, preserves modern tribal identity in modern times. Craig Womack has argued that in order to develop a critical theory of Native American literary studies, and Native American, or American Indian Studies in general, critics must look to the original sources--- the tribal sources---in examining works by Native authors. ―Basic institutions of any nation,‖ Womack argues, ―include government 68 Allen, The Sacred Hoop, introduction. pp xi 69 ibid, pg 96. 70 The term "myth" has come to signify a falsehood in American language. When I use the term myth, I mean sacred stories and legends that have true meaning to a culture or a people, not necessarily a falsehood or a lie. The negative connotation tends to trivialize the myths---sacred stories and legends---of a people and reduce a culture, a way of thought or being, to something of non-importance. 54 and tradition, as well as a body of literature that defines a people‘s national character.‖ 71 Womack eloquently asserts that through citizenship, that is cultural citizenship and political citizenship (in of itself traditional forms of Creek and Cherokee governance), native peoples subvert a prevalent idea that native peoples simply disappeared from the landscape through assimilation and aculturization. The Creek Nation and the Cherokee Nation had their own concepts of nationhood before American political governances entered into the native landscape in the Americas; however, in this era of political self governance and self determination, the danger for Indian nations is to ascribe to a certain political process that forecloses on the cultural. I argue that cultural citizenship--- that is a native epistemology that is inclusive of traditional political structures and cultural structures--- language, literature, ceremony--- should be at the forefront of any method of nation building and that the cultural must carry equal weight with the political. In looking to the traditional stories, ceremonies, songs and language, we have a road map of how to be Creek or Cherokee citizens in a modern world. The formation of tribal identity is problematic at best. Traditionally, tribal clan systems defined tribal membership and identity. When the United States government recognized American Indian tribes as sovereign yet dependent nations 72 it entered into a trust relationship with Indian nations, reverberations that today are still felt in Indian country. The United States government has insinuated itself in determining membership 71 Craig Womack, Red on Red: Native Literary Separatism, p 49. 72 See the Marshall Trilogy of Supreme Court cases (Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia, Worcester vs. Georgia, McIntosh vs. Georgia) in which the federal government, in a decision written by Chief Justice John Marshall, determined that Indian nations could cede land only to the federal government and not individuals and remaining Indian land would be held in trust for Indian Nations with the federal government as the Trustee for Indian nations, thereby making decisions for Indian nations based upon the Trustor/Trustee relationship, conferring upon Native nations the sovereign yet dependant status, similar to a ―ward to his guardian‖. 55 in American Indian tribes. 73 Congress, in its dealings with American Indian nations over the last two hundred or so years, has had to continually redefine the notion of nationhood in its legal definition of Indian Country. 74 American Indians have become refugees within their own landscape, according to Ward Churchill and other Native writers who offer political critiques of the state of native America. Colonization has created a diaspora of American Indians within the borders of the mainland United States as well as Hawaii, Alaska, and beyond. The notion of identity politics takes on another dimension when discussed within the context of American Indian identity and racial formation. According to Judith Butler, The foundational reasoning of identity politics tends to assume an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. 75 The formation of ―the‖ American Indian culture is a notion wholly formed by the ―other‖ in this instance. The self being first of all the familial identification, second the clan identification, then tribal or national identification, all of which is defined by not only the individual Native self but the Native community to which the ―self‖ is related to, 73 An Indian may apply for membership in his or her tribe but the federal government determines final say in membership, legally determining the blood quantum and identity of an Indian person in this country. 74 The current legal definition of Indian Country comes from Sec. 1151. as follows: - Indian country defined : Except as otherwise provided in sections 1154 and 1156 of this title, the term ''Indian country'', as means: all land within the limits of any Indian reservation under the jurisdiction of the United States Government, notwithstanding the issuance of any patent, and, including rights-of-way running through the reservation; all dependent Indian communities within the borders of the United States whether within the original or subsequently acquired territory thereof, and whether within or without the limits of a state, and all Indian allotments, the Indian titles to which have not been extinguished, including rights-of-way running through the same 75 Gender Trouble, p. 181 56 and part of. ―the‖ American Indian ―culture‖ is a racial formative designated upon a group of individuals by ―the other‖ outside the particular tribal or ethnic identity, the ―other‖ that is a colonizing power therefore has determined the racial formation and subjection of the Native ―other‖ in this instance. The term ―American Indian‖ is not a term an Indian person tends to identify him or herself as; for example within the Muskogee (Creek) Nation, one identifies oneself by tribal town, clan affiliation, tribal affiliation, then Native ancestry; one rarely defines oneself as ―American Indian‖ only. Muskogees have become defined and subjected as ―American Indian‖ by the colonizing ―other‖, a la Althusser‘s doctrine of interpellation. 76 The American Indian tribal and clan identity was formed long before colonization and that identification formation still informs the identity of tribal and clan members today, yet birth into the nation interpellates tribal identity. The native Hawaiian people have a long tradition of when meeting others in a group setting, an individual relates, through song/chant, the ancestral formation of identity in the repetition of names and deeds of ancestors, identifying place of birth, ancestor‘s place of birth, and sense of relationship to the place of birth and to the landscape from which one is formed. The connection between the inter-relationship of ancestral identity, through language, landscape, and genealogy, becomes imperative in the formation of identity of the native Hawaiian without the racial formation or designation of ―native Hawaiian‖ as given in subjection by the colonizing power. The traditional native Hawaiian, and the traditional Muskogee, therefore have a formation of 76 Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, p 1 57 identity that predates the formation of subjection by the colonizing power. Butler, in her discourse on subjection in The Psychic Life of Power, posits ―…Power imposes itself upon us, and, weakened by its force, we come to internalize or accept its terms. What such an account fails to note, however, is that the ―we‖ who accept such terms are fundamentally dependant on those terms for our existence‖ 77 Butler‘s argument is especially provocative in American Indian circles on many complex levels. I argue that racial formation of Native peoples whose ancestors are indigenous to the Americas is multi-layered and complex and cannot be defined only in its relationship to power and to the colonizing power. The colonizing power, the United States, has indeed contributed to Althusser‘s outside ―call of identity‖ and subject formation in regards to America‘s Native peoples. The tribe, in this case, the Muskoke Nation, interpellates Muskoke identity, predating the call of the colonizing power. Native peoples are subjects first in tribal terms, colonizing second. First is the traditional formation of identity I mentioned earlier that within Muskogee society, as well as Laguna Pueblo society, is based upon clan and familial identification, genealogical identification that posits itself outside of the theory of interpellation and subject/object formation by the colonizing/power hierarchical other Both Muskogee and Laguna societies are matrilineal, matrifocal, traditionally gynocratic societies whose identity is formed within societal structures, rather than by an outside colonizing power. Native Hawaiian identity has also been formed long before current power structures were hammered into place; racial formation is once again based upon genealogy and ancestral landscape identification. However, placing traditional methods of identity formation and modern interpellation, 77 ibid., p 2 58 following Butler and Althusser, has thereby formed the identity of the contemporary American Indian. Further complicating the formation of identity is the intermarriage between tribes and non-tribal members that have created the new ―mixed-blood‖, ―pan- Indian‖ tribal identity that has formed in urban areas in the United States far away from ancestral homelands, which played a role in identity formation. Consciousness, according to Butler, ―makes subjects of us all‖ 78 , however tribal consciousness was formed long before the consciousness of colonization and the colonizing American power put the call out to indigenous peoples. The term of colonization, or the call, is the term ―American Indian‖ or ―Native American‖, the umbrella term that classifies as multi-lingual, multicultural, whole into a homogenous consciousness that before colonization was not recognized. However, tribal and clan identity was formed long before the call, and in acknowledging the call tribal identity performs consciousness and the call of subjection becomes the antecedent of American Indian identity for the modern indigenous American. Tribal and clan identity, therefore, precede the call to subject formation by the colonizing power and thus the formation of tribal and clan identity is the call which ancestrally speaks the self into being. The late Louis Owens, in his essay ―Beads and Buckskin: reading Authenticity in Native American Literature‖ posits his theory of mixed blood identity in American Indian literature: ―For Native Americans, the term in ‗Indian‘ is a deeply contested space, where authenticity must somehow be forged out of resistance to the authentic representation…since the simulated Native ‗Indian‘ is a Euramerican invention.‖ 79 78 ibid, p 106. 79 Louis Owens, Mixed Blood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. 59 The modern ―American Indian‖ identity is interpellated through centuries of ancestral identification, through landscape identification and the sense of place from which the tribal center has emerged. Power centers, through the colonizing power and through tribal power, further informs the sense of self and identity for the modern American Indian. Years of forced relocation and genocide contributed to the formation of American Indian racial identity. 80 Owens‘ thesis reveals forms of resistance through literature and art of American Indians, of tribal peoples, of clan members, of familial organizations. Writing (and art) is a mode of resistance to the American ideal of the ―American Indian‖. Writing is an act of being an indigenous person, of being Muskogee, Cherokee, Laguna, Native Hawaiian, each tradition coming from the landscape and cultures of which one is born. The role of the storyteller, in its traditional form, puts forth the call to tribal and clan consciousness in which the subject turns and responds to from a place of tribal identity. Language is the call, but language that precedes current colonizing power structure and therefore interpellates identity prior to colonizing subject formation. The result of colonization and government policies of termination and relocation have resulted in a substantially large, multi-tribal population of young indigenous peoples 80 The genocide perpetuated against American Indians by the United States is well documented. Ed and Bonnie Duran, in Native American Post Colonial Psychology, put it succinctly: ―For over five hundred years, Europeans have attempted to subjugate, exterminate, assimilate, and oppress Native American people. The effects of this subjugation and extermination have been devastating both physically and psychologically. Whole tribal groups have been devastated both physically and psychologically….The policies of the U.S. government toward Native American people are shameful, particularly as they have been enacted by a government that preaches freedom and democracy. Even more shameful is the fact that this government has maintained a policy of termination of Native American people until recently.‖ (p 28- 29) 60 existing as second and third generation urban American Indians, some with or without tribal relations ―back home‖ intact. The role of the traditional and modern storyteller is the role that forms the subject ancestrally and represents ―the call‖ from home. The late Lee Francis III wrote about his son, Lee IV‘s experience as an urban Indian in the essay ―We The People: Young American Indians Reclaiming Their Identity‖ 81 : ―My son was born in Fairfax, Virginia. He is an urban. Since infancy, my spouse and I told our son story. We told story about all of creation, seen and unseen. We told him about the People. We told him story about the People of Fairfax, Virginia. He learned about the civil war and the pogroms committed against the People. We told him stories that incorporated that values, attitudes and beliefs of the People. We told stories about hummingbird and coyote and the tree people and the cloud beings…―It is a sad reality that a majority of urban Native students do not have a clue about the trials, tribulations, joys, and hopes of the People.‖ 82 For many young urban American Indians, the concept of the landscape of home is a faraway image told of only in story from those who left it behind. Home is also problematic in the sense that as a result of colonization, it is not always the ―safe place‖ in the traditional sense of ―home‖. It is not ―safe‖ due to cause and effect of colonization, externalized and internalized oppression. 83 Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Guillory Duran‘s theories of intergenerational post traumatic stress disorder that leads to domestic violence, substance abuse, and suicide, are often located in a trajectory that begins with and ends with the sense of home: home encompassing domestic space, land base, tribal center, language, literature, and economic struggles. Home also represents environmental and political struggles: the struggle for an ever decreasing land base which is still ―held in 81 From Genocide of The Mind, edited by MariJo Moore. 82 Ibid, p. 80-81. 83 Duran and Duran, Native American Postcolonial Psychology, p 32-35. 61 trust‖ by the American government 84 ; land that is used by others for toxic waste disposal on or near reservation water and agricultural systems; the desecration of sacred places such as Puvungna (the Tongva place of emergence in Southern California)and Puthidiim (Ajachumen place of emergence present at San Juan Capistrano Mission). Many young Indians have no concept of their tribal identity, and an outside ―other‖ constructs that identity for them. The return home, then becomes an important aspect to a ritual of remembrance for many young urban American Indians. The role of story takes on the role of call, of prior subject formation, of identity and of the performative of modern tribal and clan identity. This return home informs what has become the Native American or American Indian canon: the writings of many contemporary writers, from Mourning Dove on through Dawn Karima Pettigrew, 85 reflect this sense of home: a contested space. In Red on Red: Native Literary Separatism, Craig D. Womack asserts that the need to return home to illuminate the artistic contributions of mixed blood artisans to the Native canon is imperative. The return home, Womack argues, is what illumines the work in critical studies of American Indian literature. Womack also argues that the mixed blood urban Indian must stop apologizing for his/her mixed-blood Native status and embrace their heritage(s); critics must also look to the home country of the artist to 84 Suzan Shown Harjo, Statement of Suzan Shown Harjo, President, The Morningstar Institute, For the Oversight Hearing On Native American Sacred Places Before the Committee on Indian Affairs, United States Senate, Washington, D.C., June 18, 2003. http://thenativepress.com/sacred_statement.html 85 A mixed blood Muskogee/Cherokee/Seminole/Chickasaw/African and Anglo American, Dawn Karima Pettigrew‘s first novel/memoir/poetry volume, The Way We Make Sense, was one of the first published works in the 21 st century dealing with issues of the contested home space. 62 discuss their work(s). The connection between literature and landscape forms a criticism of its own that Womack argues for in his own critical work: ―I will seek a literary criticism that emphasizes Native resistance movements against colonialism, confronts racism, discusses sovereignty, and native nationalism, seeks connections between literature and liberation struggles, and, finally, roots literature in land and culture.‖ 86 This relationship between landscape and literature is imperative to the critical study of American Indian literature and the cultural production of American Indians; it is especially relevant to second-third-fourth generation urban American Indians whose ancestry is tribally, and non-tribally, mixed. As critics, we must look to the mountain, as Gregory Cajete posits 87 , and yet we must also look to the ancestral landscape of the adopted country in order further illumine the artist‘s production. We must recognize the importance of ancestral landscape as well as the adopted landscape in American Indian performativity. We must look to the tribal aesthetic of the ancestral and adopted landscape to recognize what performing Indian, performing tribal, performing indigenousness, is all about. We must recognize the modern storyteller and the performative act of storytelling in identity formation that represents both the ―call‖ and the ―performance‖ of ―American Indian‖ identity in post-structuralist and post-modern terms. The indigenous Trickster archetype and that role the indigenous storyteller embodies as indigenous performance calls subject formation into being. The storyteller‘s performance in as Trickster figure in tribal and clan society is what ―the call‖ to identity formation is. 86 Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, p 11. 87 Cajete, Look To The Mountain: The Ecology of Indigenous Education. 63 Following Womack, It is evident that if as critics of literature we are to fully understand the text then we must immerse ourselves in the culture from which the text derives. Following Jung it is plain that the culture is the text and the literary artifacts rising from it are sub-texts. This understanding of tribal values and views, a cultural understanding will enable us to illuminate the texts accurately in the case of Leslie Marmon Silko's and Paula Gunn Allen's Yellow Woman stories from Spider Woman's Granddaughters. Critics must study the aspects of Laguna Pueblo deities Ts'its'naku (Thought Woman, Spider Grandmother) and her twin daughters, Naotsete and Uretsete (sometimes called Its'city), that the works allude to and take their meaning from. Ts'its'naku, or Spider Woman, "...thought the earth, the sky, the galaxy, all that is into being, and, as she thinks, so we are. She sang the Divine Sisters, Nau'its'ity and Ic'sts'ity (or Naotsete and Uretsete, or other various spellings and pronunciation, depending upon the Keres tribal dialect and transcription being used) into being out of her medicine pouch or bundle, and they in turn from their bundles the firmament, the land, the seas, the people, the katsina, the gods, the plants, animals, minerals, language, writing, mathematics, architecture, the Pueblo social system and every other thing you can imagine in this our world." 88 According to the Keres, a gynocratic society whose language and social systems are traditionally were matrilineal, matrifocal and matrilocal, the world was created by the Grandmother Spider whose twin daughters created what remained of the world. Grandmother Spider is a creator deity common in both southeastern and southwestern 88 Franz Boaz, Keresan Texts, pp 35-36 64 cosmology, she who weaves the very fabric and design of the world and all that is within it. In many Pueblo stories collected by the anthropologist Franz Boas in the book Keresan Texts 89 , the Pueblo stories of creation changed over the years, most likely due to the influence of Christianity on the tribes. Uretsete is presently seen as a male deity, the father who created the world, and Naotsete his consort, as the mother: "A long time ago there in the north at the place of emergence below there our mother, corn-mother worked miracles. Everything that has names developed, the sun and the moon, and the stars and rainstorms and spirits and katsina and the shamans and game and the people were completed, then our mother Nau'ts'it'i (sic) and our father I'tc'ts'it'i said 'how is it?' and our mother Nau'ts'it'i, 'is it not yet done? Shall we not put out our children?'" 90 The story on the previous page, as told to Boaz by Ko'tie in 1919, reflects the type of mythical storytelling told two centuries after Catholicism came to the Pueblo. The female supernatural Uretsete was incorporated into Christian mythology as the Father- Creator, and her sister Naotsete became the Mother-Consort whose creative powers were reduced to that of the consort of the male Creator. Whereas in the original stories Uretsete as Mother sang from her bundles the world with her twin, Uretsete as Father was given the duties of creation: "Then our father I'tc'ts'it'i spoke thus, 'No.' said He. 'first I shall divide the water and the land.' Then spoke our Mother Na'ts'it'i, 'Go ahead.' Then our father said "let me try to see.' Then to the 89 American Bureau of Ethnology, 1932 90 ibid, p 39. 65 mountaintop went our father I'tc'ts'it'i. Then there below he looked around. Then he divided the air and land. He shook it. There was shaking. Then he looked at it. Then he said, 'Earth and water have become good.' thus he said. Then he also said, 'only the earth will be ripe,' said I'cs'ts'it'i, our father. Then again the earth he turned inwards (toward himself). When he turned it there was a light breeze. Then next he turned the water and sky both." 91 Evidence given in the version of Emergence, as told by Gi'mi (1919) talks of the distinction between the white father and the Laguna mother, showing that the Pueblo stories were influenced by Catholicism. Uretsete, seen within the passage is still the father, but the storyteller specifically tells a story, distinguishing between the white people's father and the Laguna mother: "There in the north long ago was the place of emergence and there also were our mother and our father. I'tc'ts'it'i, this one was the white people's father. On her part this Nau'ts'it'i was short and this one was the Laguna people's mother." 92 (emphasis added) In her novel The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, Allen, performing Trickster, boldly asserts the archaic meaning behind the stories, that Grandmother Spider created the sacred twins and the twins were female: "Within the pouches, the sacred identical pouches she had placed the seeds that would bear the woman who was her own twin. Uretsete and Naotsete she would name them, double woman she would name them, from whose baskets would come all that lives. In the 91 ibid, p 55. 92 ibid. 66 Northwest she placed one, Placed one she in the northwest...And they said, 'We will name. We will think.' Thus they said. Thus they sang...Shaking, they were singing. Shaping the katsina and the spirits, the game and the mountains. Singing, chanting, shaking, crooning, they named everything. Thus they made everything ready for their children... 93 In the prologue of her novel Gunn Allen performs Spider Woman herself: giving back the power to the people, back through the bloodlines to the gynocratic society from which she was sung, back to the goddess/supernatural Spider Woman, back to Spider Woman's daughters, Naotsete and Uretsete. Here Allen becomes that Divine Linguist that Esu/Trickster at the crossroads, the mediator between gods, giving the people back the power that the deities gave to begin with. She is performing Trickster, performing Laguna, performing clan, performing tribe. This is the role the Trickster plays culturally, and this is the role the native woman, the woman of Laguna, inhabits and portrays to the inner and outer world. These are powerful female supernaturals, these twins Naotsete and Uretsete, who in other aspects and other cultures have different names. To the Pueblo they are Uretsete and Naotsete, to the Dine (Navajo) they are Changing Woman and White Shell Woman; among the Quiche Maya they are Xmucane and Xepycoc, one of whom Xepycoc, undergoes a similar sex transformation after Christianization. Among Erdrich's people, the Chippewa, the sisters Matchickkwewas and Oshkikwe retain their female identities, having Uncle Nanabozho (Nanapush) as the male aspect within the plot. 94 The 93 Gunn Allen, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, p 2-3. 94 Paula Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of The Light. 67 mulitplicitous nature of these deities can be overwhelming. Educated in the western monotheism, the western scholar may be unable (or unwilling) to comprehend the multiplicity of the Pueblo, Dine, Maya, Chippewa, and Cherokee goddesses. For example, in one of her aspects, the great mother Uretsete is also known as Iyetiku, the mother of all Lagunas, the spiritual connection between the mother/creator and the people. Uretsete, as Iyetiku, establishes her connection to her children by giving the Pueblo the gift of corn. Corn is sacred to the Pueblo; in its seed aspect it is representative of the regeneration of the Pueblo people 95 , and when it is eaten reaffirms the connection through physical sustenance of the goddess to the land and to the people who inhabit it. Iyetiku gave the people the Irriaku, the sacred ears of corn, as a gift to cement that connection, to bring it to a physical reality. The Irriaku, or Yellow Women (in one clan at least) are dressed in feathers to honor all things connected with Iyetiku: her creative powers, her gift to the people, the peoples' sacred connection with the landscape. When the people honor the Irriaku, they honor themselves and the goddess that is so the seed of tribal consciousness. The goddess is honored, the people are honored, the land is honored, all given physical manifestation in an ear of yellow corn. 96 To the Pueblo, the gifts of the goddess are seen in those yellow ears of corn, the Irriaku, and the connection between the divine mother/goddess and the children is substantiated. The spirit world becomes a physical reality in daily life through the Irriaku. 95 ibid 28. Personal interview with Paula Gunn Allen, 10/10/91, Seal Beach, CA. Professor Gunn Allen detailed Laguna festival practices in relation to the Irriaku and the similarities between clan practices among the Pueblo tribes. 68 In her essay ―Cuentos de la Tierra Encantado: Magic and Realism in the Southwest Borderlands‖ 97 , Gunn Allen explores the confluence of cultures (American Indian, specifically Navajo, Pueblo, Apache; Hispanic, and Euro-American) and landscape in the American Southwest. ―Besides food, stories provide a deep sense of continuity within a psychospace. A region is bounded and shaped by its climate and geography, but these features take on a human and spiritual dimension when rendered significant in narrative. The smells, sounds, and tactile sensations that go with a locale are as central to its human significance as the sights, and it is within the stories that all the dimensions of human sensation, perception, conception, and experience come together, providing a clear notion f where we are, who we are, and why.‖ 98 This confluence of cultures is what informs the interstices in these multi racial, multilingual spaces, and the study of place and space becomes important in looking at American Indian performance and the American Indian storyteller performing Trickster in story. Womack posits in Red on Red that he disbelieves assimilation is a one-way process, that assimilation creates a culture that influences one another equally. The American Southwestern culture is a prime example of that process. Inclusive of cultures, the American Southwest has within its tenuous borders influences from Euro America, Native America, and Mexico. Two of the southwest‘s most populated cities, Los Angeles and Denver, have the second and third largest populations of urban American Indians in the country. Tribal governments estimate that by the 2000 census, there are more Indians living in cities than there are on reservations or ancestral homelands. Certainly, this 97 Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity, University of Kansas Press, 1997. pp 342-365 98 ibid. 69 confluence of cultures have a great influence upon one another, culturally, linguistically, mythologically, spiritually, even in the foods that are eaten. Stories tend to be told around tables, around food, around fires, around bars, around cultural centers, in theatres, in art. In performing Indian, writers, specifically Gunn Allen, are influenced by tribal center, Laguna culture, as well as the cultures that surround Laguna. And in this confluence, influences perceived and performed as culture bearer, as the Trickster herself. Performing Trickster is to perform culture, tribal culture, intertribal culture, and inform culture all around us. Up until now, I have used examples and discussed tribal narratives that have remained connected to the place in which these narratives spring from: Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico. The Laguna, in general, have remained at Laguna Pueblo for thousands of years in their ancestral homelands. The connection of landscape, gender, narrative and identity has been explored in previous pages with a nod to a culture that has remained in the same place for thousands of years. Can the same connections be argued for cultures that have been dispossessed, not once, but twice, of their ancestral homelands? Does the connection between gender, landscape, narrative, and identity remain constant if the landscape in question is no longer physically connected to the nation? Can the cultural work of nation building (political, spiritual, social) performed by narrative practices in Cherokee and Muskogee Creek communities, still retain a distinct tribal identity when the people, those who constitute the nation, are taken away from its physical boundaries? The dispossession of the Creek and Cherokee Nations from the old nations‘ boundaries in the 1830‘s remains a deep wound to the people that still exists today. The Treaty of New Echota, which certain factions of Cherokee ceded lands in present day Georgia, 70 Tennessee, and Kentucky in exchange for lands in ―Indian Territory‖ would belong to the nations ―as long as the grass shall grow and the rivers shall run.‖ 99 Yet in 1906, Indian Territory became Oklahoma and statehood was awarded in 1907. 100 The overarching question of the project is: how has the concept of ―home‖ in modern Cherokee and Creek narratives (―home‖ meaning a physical geography, a narrative history, and a social identity) been reconceptualized by artists in the face of widespread dispersal? I will investigate in how work by Cherokee and Creek women writers, specifically Joy Harjo, Arigon Starr, and Gayle Ross, have recreated the concept of ―home‖ as a decolonizing project of nation building within the Cherokee and Creek diasporas. I am interested in how these writers utilize indigenous epistemologies and bicultural competence in their work, and how they reinvent, reimagine, and reconceptualize the concepts of ―home‖ apart from the physical landscape but within the body as well. I suggest that these writers—Harjo‘s How We Became Human, Ross‘ How Rabbit Tricked Otter and Other Stories, and Starr‘s The Red Road and Super Indian— write against the romanticized trope of ―American Indian identity‖ and call into question a performance of identity through stories that not only rewrite non-Indian invented 99 See Theda Perdue and Michael Green, (2004). The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents; and Thurman Wilkins (1986). The Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. 100 See Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940; new edition, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984),; and Arrell M. Gibson, "Indian Land Transfers." Handbook of North American Indians: History of Indian-White Relations, Volume 4. Wilcomb E. Washburn & William C. Sturtevant, eds. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1988. Pages 226–29. The examination of Creek and Cherokee narratives is provocative because of early forced migrations of the Creek and Cherokee nations as legislated by the federal government during the early years of the American republic. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, Manifest Destiny, and subsequent federal Indian policy legislated early dispersal of Indian Nations into foreign territory that preceded imperialistic policies that would later characterize America‘s involvement in future global conflicts. Creek and Cherokee dispersal, as well as dispersal of many other southeastern Indian nations, came out of a period in early American colonial history in which the United States was just starting to implement imperialistic policy.etc. 71 histories, but that critique their own longings. How does each writer define herself by her identity categories: woman, native, tribal, Creek, Cherokee, citizen, writer, actor, musician, storyteller? How are these writers writing against stereotypes of American Indians that have been and still are perpetuated by media images of ―the‖ Native American? How are these writers influenced by the American Indian societies in which they live, work, and write? How do these writers reconcile political citizenship and cultural citizenship within their respective nations? How has their writing/performance/cultural critique addressed nation building in crucial periods of American Indian history: during; and in the era of pan-Indian tribalism and the survival of native nations and how these nations reimagine themselves in the 21 st century? And finally, what are the gender issues addressed in each of their work disrupting notions of contemporary and traditional Creek and Cherokee gender identities? In the following chapters, I will address each of these questions in examining the poetry, stories, and plays of Joy Harjo, Gayle Ross, and Arigon Starr. This project requires extensive textual analysis of poetry, plays and fiction by diasporic American Indian writers. Analysis of Joy Harjo‘s poems from How We Became Human, and her play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, Arigon Starr‘s plays The Red Road and Super Indian, and Gayle Ross‘ one woman show Inside the Beaded Beltway and her traditional stories as well as her storytelling performances through the lens of identity categories is important. Comparing the stories of the Oklahoma Indians before their arrival in California with those dated during and after, will support my argument that a diasporic identity, with a nod to the local as well as ancestral knowledge, is constructed as early as the 1860‘s when John Rollin Ridge was writing in California. 72 Joy Harjo, born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, left at an early age and went to school at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico to study painting and found her voice as a poet in the early 1970‘s. She has lived in Los Angeles, Tucson, and currently divides her time between homes in Honolulu, Hawaii and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Gayle Ross lives in Texas, where there is an historical presence of Cherokee descendants. Gayle‘s ties to the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma are cultural, as a Ross descendant and as a storyteller as well. Gayle also understands that the concept of tribal sovereignty is to establish the political authority of the Cherokee Nation over tribal members in Tahlequah and in the diaspora as well. The Cherokee Nation‘s struggle to establish its historical connection to Oklahoma in determining its membership and historical specificity to place is always in the forefront of her mind when determining Cherokee identity. Arigon Starr is a member of the Kickapoo Nation of Oklahoma and is also Creek and Cherokee on her mother‘s side, was raised in a military family and lived most of her life in San Diego, California and makes her home in Los Angeles. To The work of dispersed Creek Indians, specifically Joy Harjo and Arigon Starr, relate to Creek migration stories that allow for analysis to apply to an argument for the Creek diaspora. Harjo‘s early work reveals insight into the pan-Indian movement; Starr‘s play The Red Road is situated in the midst of the red power movement of the 1970‘s that sprung out of the intertribal Indian schools that preceded the federal boarding school system. Yet their work is firmly situated in Oklahoma: Harjo‘s poem ―The Last Song‖ references, through metaphor, her connection to ―home‖: 73 how can you stand it he said the hot Oklahoma summers where you were born this humid thick air is choking me and i want to go back to new mexico it is the only way i know how to breathe an ancient chant that my mother knew came out of a history woven from wet tall grass in her womb and I know no other way than to surround my voice with the summer songs of crickets in this moist south night air oklahoma will be the last song i‘ll ever sing. 101 To read this poem is to understand the metaphor of Oklahoma for a Mvskoke woman. Here Harjo references the state of Oklahoma as place and as home for a community that has a long history of dispossession by the federal government. Forced from ancestral homelands in the east and marched to the present day Creek Nation in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. Harjo herself has said, ―The poet cannot be separated from place. Even placelessness becomes a place. The world of conjecture, scholarship, and philosophical discourse is a place or series of places, based on land and how one lives off that land.‖ 102 As a diapsoric Creek and Cherokee Indian, the place of emergence for 101 ―The Last Song‖ from The Last Song, Puerto del Sol Press, New Mexico, 1975. 102 Introduction, How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975-2001. Norton, 2002. 74 Harjo is not just Tulsa, Oklahoma but parts of Georgia and Alabama, sites of the historic Creek Nation. Relocation and dispersal, voluntary and involuntary, are all these sites, as well as New Mexico and Hawaii, all the places she calls ―home‖. Wherever she is in the world, Oklahoma will always be home, the place to where she emerged and will return. 75 CHAPTER 2. THOSE LONG LONELY NIGHTS AT THE DINER: SPECIFICITY OF PLACE, HOME AND COMMUNITY IN ARIGON STARR’S THE RED ROAD ―Welcome back to the show! All kinds of Indian tribes gather here at Verna‘s All Nations Café. Creek Indians, Choctaw Indians, even a Navajo who‘s all the way from Window Rock, Arizona. He‘s round, brown, and round, just like a good fry cook should be…‖ Country singer Patty Jones, The Red Road Arigon Starr‘s one woman show, The Red Road, premiered at Native Voices at the Autry in March 2006. Directed by Randy Reinholz, the one woman show is the story of the goings-on at the fictional All Nations Cafe in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, in the mid- 1970‘s. Developed and produced by Wacky Productions in conjunction with Native Voices at the Autry 103 , the play tells the story of Verna Yahola, the Creek café owner in the midst of a personal crisis with her finances, her love life, raising a ―tween‖ niece, all the while maintaining a comforting space of home in the midst of a summertime tornado 103 Wacky Productions in Starr‘s production company and managed by Janet Miner; Native Voices at the Autry, housed at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, is one of the premier American Indian theatre companies in the United States. Under the direction of Randy Reinholz (Choctaw) and Jean Bruce Scott, Native Voices at the Autry has been developing and producing native theatre on stages across the country since 1999. 76 and the taping of country singer Patty Jones‘ 10 th Anniversary TV show. In addition to Verna, her niece Loretta and country and western superstar Patty, the audience is introduced to other characters: the Navajo fry cook, Emmit Tsinajinnie and his 13 year old, Beatle-obsessed half-Kiowa son, Desmond; the militant American Indian Liberation (―AIL‖) leader, Richard Doolittle and his sister, Bonnie, AIL‘s ―community relations liaison of the year‖ (both Doolittles are Pawnee); Verna‘s close friend Etta Walters, a Lac de Flambeau Ojibwe now living in Sapulpa; Creek deejay Clyde Chupco, who serves as Patty‘s co-host for the TV show; Verna‘s long haul truck driving brother Merle Yahola, Jr., (―…the tastiest dish at the All Nations Café…‖) 104 , and finally, British punk rocker Danny Dacron, who just wants to ―see America through Indian eyes,‖ 105 . Starr, as playwright, actress and songwriter, embodies each of these folks with her own brand of ―down-home‖ storytelling, serving as a cultural touchstone for many people. 106 All of these characters come together as a deadly tornado bears down upon the All Nations Café, stranding this group, each with his/her own agenda, that comes to a head when these agendas butt up against one another. Not only does this play place the audience squarely in the physical location in the Creek Nation, but it gives glimpses into the collective humor of native peoples in Oklahoma. The importance of humor, and the ability to laugh at oneself as well as others, 104 The Red Road, 11. 105 ibid, 30. 106 Charley Narcomey, a Creek Indian living in Riverside, California, and graduate of Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma, a place featured prominently in The Red Road, wrote of his reaction to seeing play in California, ―The show was wonderful, I have never heard Chilocco mentioned so often outside of Oklahoma. I grew up on a farm outside of the school and my parents both worked, attended as students and retired from Chilocco. It really made me feel good, hearing all the reference to the Creeks and to the towns and real "Indian" things that belong to our peoples and not some other tribe. It really brings back many memories and rekindles the "pride" of the Muskogee Nation.‖ 77 is central to The Red Road and to Starr‘s radio comedy series, Super Indian. Humor in the face of tragedy has been a longstanding native tradition, and Starr, as writer and performer, injects every day jokes into the play that on the outside would seem strangely out of place in the face of impending doom. Facing repossession of her stoves and the closing of the All Nations, which her parents have entrusted to her safekeeping, Verna‘s world is about to come crashing down around her. Her beloved brother is driving his rig out in a twister, her sister has basically dumped Loretta on Verna‘s lap, her parents are off on a whirlwind tour of Europe, the activists from American Indian Liberation are calling her Creek identity into question, and all of this is being broadcasted to an entire nation on Patty‘s television show and to the Creek Nation and all of Oklahoma on Clyde‘s radio program. The personal and professional crisis Verna is faced with now becomes the communal as well, and Verna faces all of it with the grace and humor of a modern Indian woman. The community bands together to help her through the crisis, even recognizing her as ―Creek Citizen of the Year‖. Humor, healing, and home are all concepts central not only to The Red Road, but to Starr‘s work in general. Oklahoma, as a site of not only native resistance but of native dispossession and survivance, is a central theme in Starr‘s work, especially in The Red Road. The performance of Oklahoma as place---as survivance, as continuation, as dispossession, as annihilation, as ―home‖--- is central to this narrative of the All Nations Café. In this essay, I explore the trope of ―home‖ as a conflicted space, full of humor, of healing, of belonging and of dispossession as Starr as playwright and performer acknowledges Oklahoma not as romanticized vision of ―home‖ but of as an all-encompassing connection to her identity as a Creek-Cherokee-Kickapoo-Seneca Indian. 78 The Red Road is a love story to a place, thorns and all, and told from the perspective of an Oklahoma Indian in the diaspora. It is a ceremonial performance, an affirmation of the connection between people, land, and spirits that have endured centuries of genocide and conquest. Survival, through humor, is a touchstone to home that will carry native people along in a world that does not seem to have a place for them. If they have those cultural touchstones, humor rooted in home and family, healing and survival in the diaspora with that connection is home is essential. Arigon Starr is an apt representation of a disaporic Indian. A member of the Kickapoo Nation of Oklahoma, she was born in Pensacola, Florida in 1961 to naval officer Ken Wahpecome and his wife, Ruth, while the family was stationed at the Pensacola Naval base. Ken was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, of Kickapoo and Shawnee descent; Ruth (Cornell) was born in Claremore and is Creek, Seneca, and Cherokee. Ken‘s family, like many Oklahoma Indian families, were born Baptists, belonging to Indian community churches; in Ken‘s case specifically the Bowen Indian Baptist church in Bowen, Oklahoma. Ken‘s great grandfather was a preacher in the church and his grandfather a deacon. The Wahpecome family, including Arigon‘s older sister, Gay, like most military families moved around quite a bit, living in Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Tennessee, and lived for a long time in Subic Bay in the Philippines. Ken was a recruiter and most of the time the family was in the United States, finally settling, by the time Arigon was in 8 th grade, in San Diego, California. As a child, Arigon never spent much time around Indians other than family members until her middle school years 79 in San Diego, when the family became active in the Indian Resource Center in San Diego. 107 Like many Indians of his generation, Ken Wahpecome spent the mandatory time at Chilocco Indian Boarding School in Anadarko, Oklahoma. Years of boarding school mentality and the abuse of Indian children by non-Indians took their toll on Ken. He tended to turn his back on his early life in Oklahoma, saying Indians ―were mean and tease too much.‖ 108 In a way, his joining the Navy, like for so many young Indian men of his generation, was a path out of the poverty and disillusionment that pervaded many Indian communities in Oklahoma. Arigon admits that early in her life, the only Indians the family tended to find themselves amongst were themselves. However, while in San Diego, it was then the family began spending time connecting with other Indian families through pow wows and the San Diego Indian Center. The coming together of Indians from all over the United States into the urban city center of San Diego is reminiscent of cultural exchange between Indians in another darker period of Indian history that is the boarding school period. Starr uses this period as yet another cultural touchstone for her Red Road characters, the coming together, in Oklahoma, of Indians from many different nations. The Red Road is about humor, healing, and survivance, and Starr is unafraid to delve into the issues of survivance, identity, and race all under the guise of a comedy/musical one-woman show. In the Red Road, Starr gives us a roadmap to navigate survivance in the world of Indian America. All roads in this map lead to the All Nations 107 The family became active in the Indian community in San Diego because of the proximity of other natives in the Armed Forces. As a recruiter, Arigon‘s father Ken came into contact with many service people from all branches in the military; the particular Indian armed forces community in San Diego was very active on the native community level at that time. 108 Ibid, Interview with Arigon Starr, March 16 th , 2007. 80 Café. Survivance, identity, and race are all pertinent issues facing Indians today, as they faced Indians in the previous centuries, and in the 1970‘s in which The Red Road takes place. In spite of overwhelming attempts to exterminate indigenous peoples religiously, culturally, politically, and economically, native peoples in the Americas have continued to flourish and survive. Survivance, according to Gerald Vizenor, is the survival not only in the physical sense of surviving genocide and colonization, but the surviving the misrepresentations of Indian peoples that continue to be manifested today by the non- Indian world. 109 Out of these misrepresentations come the postindian warriors who ―arise from the earlier inventions of the tribes only to contravene the absence of the real with theatrical performances; the theater of tribal consciousness is the recreation of the real , not the absence of the real, in the simulations of dominance.‖ 110 Vizenor argues that the term ―indian‖ (little ―i‖) is the encapsulation of the images of native peoples perpetuated against us by non-Indians, that is narratives of disappearance and the end of a race, as suggested by Frederick Jackson Turner‘s ―Frontier Thesis‖ and Helen Hunt Jackson‘s A Century of Dishonor. Postindian warriors, Vizenor asserts, include contemporary and historical native writers who put forth other, more tribally accurate, representations of native life. ―The postindian ousts the invention with humor, new stories, and simulations of survivance.‖ 111 Starr, like many native writers of her generation, address issues of survivance in her work. As an Oklahoma Indian, a Kickapoo-Creek-Seneca-Cherokee Indian, she 109 Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives of Post-Indian Survivance, University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 110 ibid, p 6 111 ibid, p 5. 81 inherits three centuries of displacement and forced migration through all of her native nations. What are the ramifications of forced migrations of a people from their ancestral homeland, a place which is so clearly culturally identified from traditional stories, songs, poems; from within the body and soul of a people that a connection to the land is what has remained in the memory and hearts of a people that were not supposed to survive? How can thousands of native peoples, from over 500 different tribes, nations, and communities come together in a place that itself is full of the storied conquest of native peoples in place names, in film, literature, oral history, and name? When the forced migration occurred from reservations and rural communities starting from Indian Removal and well up into the twentieth century, native people left ancestral and adopted homelands to call urban areas ―home‖. What was the impact of these immigrants 112 upon the many native nations still living in the urban landscapes, facing erasure and extinction in a city that looked nothing like their ancestral villages? It is through ceremonial performativity, that is, the artistic, folkloric, mythological and political relationship native peoples share with the nations of origin that has allowed us to survive together in a place 113 in which we could have been simply erased. 114 We cannot be simply labeled ―urban‖ Indians because we are a diasporic people, displaced and dispersed across the world, far away from home, family, and community. We are nations within a larger, colonizing nation, dispersed through government relocation upon relocation, ending up far way from 112 I purposefully choose the ―immigrant‖ spelling over ―emigrant‖ because as part of the American Indian diaspora we are of sovereign nations who have migrated to foreign shores. 114 Much has been written about the so-called demise of the Gabrieleno, or Tongva Indians, who are the original inhabitants of the Los Angeles basin pre-European contact in California. In popular literature and history, the Tongvas died out. They sure look good for dead people! 82 ancestral space and place. For Oklahoma Indians, we were removed at least three times: the first time through the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to then Indian Territory which is now known as Oklahoma; the second through boarding school systems; the third through relocation programs of the 1950‘s. 115 As Creek poet Joy Harjo notes in her poem ―Anchorage‖, Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it, but also the truth. Because who would believe the fantastic and the terrible story of all our survival those who were never meant to survive?‖ As scholars, we are just beginning to investigate the implications of defining an American Indian diaspora. As Cindi Alvitre and I argued in ―Performing Nation, Performing Identity‖, we are, as native peoples, living through dispersal not only within national boundaries of the United States but within boundaries of other native nations. 116 For those of us living in Los Angeles, we reside within the boundaries of the Tongva Nation, currently federally unrecognized but still surviving. We also live in a colonized space, colonized first by the Spanish and reified daily though place names such as Mission Boulevard, Mission Inn, Imperial Boulevard, etc. Webster‘s defintion of diaspora is as follows: ―noun, Greek, meaning dispersion; from diaspeirien to scatter, from dia + speirein to sow. 2. a: the breaking up and scattering of a people; b: people 115 One could certainly argue that the exodus of Oklahomans in the 1930‘s to urban centers such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York also contributed to this relocation and creation of the Indian diaspora. Many families, including my own, migrated to Chicago then Los Angeles during this period prior to the federal government‘s urban relocation period of the 1950‘s. 116 Dunn & Alvitre, ―Performing Nation, Performing Identity‖ 83 settled far from their ancestral homelands (e.g. the African diaspora); c: the place where these people live.‖ 117 Through the breakup of tribal lands, through separation, adoption, boarding schools, relocation and termination, native peoples in the United States have been separated from ancestral homelands, settled far from those ancestral homelands, and relocated in large populations to urban areas that are far from the nation. Los Angeles then, with the largest urban American Indian population in the nation 118 , is a site of displacement, temporal and spatial, that is an ongoing experiment in cultural survival that continues into the 21 st century. In Janice Norwood and Vera Monk‘s collection of writings on southwestern women‘s art 119 , the landscape‘s influence upon the myth and imagination of its writers and artists inform the region as well as the psyche of the individual and communal artist, specifically female artists. The landscape is a vehicle which artists draw inspiration, express social and personal aesthetic ideals, and form communal connections with society, place, community, spirituality, family, and creativity. Landscape provides necessary connections for life; it informs who we are and how we are in a way that sometimes there is no other expression for other than poetry and art. Native peoples in the southwest, because of our deep ancestral connections to landscape and the mythologies of the living landscape, express connections to the landscape in unique ways. Landscape tells the story of emergence, of history, or religion, and birth that is indigenous of our Native experience. The connections expressed through ritual and ceremony, through art and music and poetry, celebrate that ritual connection in 117 Merriam-Webster, 2005. 118 US Census Report on American Indian Population, February 2002. 119 Norwood & Monk, editors, The Desert Is No Lady. 84 the everyday. Tribal aesthetics 120 are applied to the landscape, and the aesthetic cannot live without the land. The indigenous mythology of the landscape reveals a relationship between people and earth that is revealed in very human ways. Performance of culture, in all its diverse forms, appears in language – myth, prose, ceremony, memory. As David Abrams notes, ―Every poet is aware of this primordial depth in language, whereby particular sensations are invoked by the sounds themselves, and whereby the shape, rhythm, and texture of particular phrases conjure the expressive character of particular phenomenon.‖ 121 The concept of ceremonial performativity becomes important in this discussion of holocaust, diaspora, and survival. J.L. Austin, the linguistic philosopher, described performativity as the following: ―A performative is the semiotic gesture that is being as well as doing. Or, more accurately, it is a doing that constitutes a being; an activity that describes what it creates. 122 Paula Gunn Allen defined ceremony and myth as inter- related: myth being the prose recording of a peoples origins and spirits and ceremony being the reenactment of those stories. 123 As native peoples, the performance of our identity is intimately connected to our stories, songs, and poems; to the landscape in which we inhabit that informs our being as well as our doing. It is through our ceremonies, our songs, our words, that our rituals are reenacted in daily life. We speak of our creation and connection to each other and to the landscape, and our actions, our 120 Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Rediscovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions 121 David Abrams. The Spell of the Sensuous 122 As quoted by Eve Sedgwick and Andrew Parker in Performance and Performativity: A Reader 123 Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop. 85 dances, our artistic expressions, reify the core of who we are as native peoples. Yet how do we continue these traditions in places that are not part of what Chad Allen attributes to N. Scott Momaday‘s ―blood/land/memory complex‖? 124 Allen argues that the connection between blood, land, and memory is basic to the concept of identity in American Indian communities. It is the connection between ancestors and land, tied to a specific place and time. Archival documents are stored in the blood of native peoples that connects them to the land where they came from. Allen quotes Momaday, ―my memory of you connects me to your memory of events, as an unbroken line to the past.‖ 125 As native peoples form new alliances and connections with those native peoples of the local community, they become connected to the memories and landscapes of the local knowledges. Even though we may not ―know‖ our ancestors or those of other native peoples in the local communities, our own memories and blood as diasporic people connect us in a recording of our pasts, presents, and futures with those of a local community. We connect the diasporic dots, if you will, to find new pathways to and of Indian Country. In participating in the ceremonies of our adopted nations, often far from home, we are performing our identities at the ceremonial level, further cementing our connections to one another on another scale. The result of colonization and government policies of termination and relocation have resulted in a substantially large, multi-tribal population of young indigenous peoples existing as second and third generation urban American Indians, some with or without tribal relations ―back home‖ intact. The role of the traditional and modern storyteller is 124 Chadwick Allen, Blood Narrative. 125 ibid, 160. 86 the role that forms the subject ancestrally and represents ―the call‖ from home. The late Lee Francis III wrote about his son, Lee IV‘s experience as an urban Indian in the essay ―We The People: Young American Indians Reclaiming Their Identity‖ 126 : ―My son was born in Fairfax, Virginia. He is an urban. Since infancy, my spouse and I told our son story. We told story about all of creation, seen and unseen. We told him about the People. We told him story about the People of Fairfax, Virginia. He learned about the civil war and the pogroms committed against the People. We told him stories that incorporated that values, attitudes and beliefs of the People. We told stories about hummingbird and coyote and the tree people and the cloud beings… ―It is a sad reality that a majority of urban Native students do not have a clue about the trials, tribulations, joys, and hopes of the People.‖ 127 One can also conclude that Francis was speaking not only for ―young urban Indians‖ but for young urban Indians living in a diaspora. For many young urban American Indians, the concept of the landscape of home is a faraway image told of only in story from those who left it behind. Home is also problematic in the sense that as a result of colonization, it is not always the ―safe place‖ in the traditional sense of ―home‖. It is not ―safe‖ due to cause and effect of colonization, externalized and internalized oppression. 128 Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Guillory Duran‘s theories of intergenerational post traumatic stress disorder, leading to domestic violence, substance abuse, and suicide, are often located in a trajectory that begins with and ends with the sense of home: home encompassing domestic space, land base, tribal center, language, literature, and economic struggles. Home also represents environmental and political struggles: the struggle for an ever 126 From Genocide of The Mind, edited by MariJo Moore. 127 Ibid, p. 80-81. 128 Native American Postcolonial Psychology, p 32-35. 87 decreasing land base which is still ―held in trust‖ by the American government 129 ; land that is used by others for toxic waste disposal on or near reservation water and agricultural systems; the desecration of sacred places such as Puvungna (the Tongva place of emergence in Southern California) and Puthidiim (Ajachumen place of emergence present day San Juan Capistrano Mission. Poet, musician and playwright Joy Harjo would argue that the break from the traditional stories, those that connect us to places of emergence, and forced removal and those histories of a people that are specifically that of the Creek Nation, is what has caused much of the intergenerational trauma, which I will discuss further in later chapters of this project. Many young Indians have some concept of their tribal identity, yet an outside ―other‖ constructs an alternative ―Indian‖ identity for them. How many of us have been told, ―Funny, you don‘t look Indian,‖ or ―how come you don‘t have black hair?‖, or ―Do you have a tipi in your backyard?‖ or ―I knew you were an Indian; you‘re so spiritual!‖ We are constantly barraged by images of the pretend, or the Hollywood Indian. If we don‘t wear beads, feathers, or turquoise, then we‘re not seen as authentically Indian by the non-Indian ―other‖. The return home then becomes an important aspect to a ritual of remembrance for many young urban American Indians. The role of story, as Lee Francis states, is the ceremonial performative of modern tribal and clan identity. This return home informs what has become the Native American or American Indian canon: the writings of many contemporary writers, from Mourning 129 Suzan Shown Harjo, Statement of Suzan Shown Harjo, President, The Morningstar Institute, For the Oversight Hearing On Native American Sacred Places Before the Committee on Indian Affairs, United States Senate, Washington, D.C., June 18, 2003. http://thenativepress.com/sacred_statement.html 88 Dove on through Dawn Karima Pettigrew, 130 reflect this sense of home: a contested space. Story for us then becomes the connection to the landscape, to the nation, to our identity as an American Indian, as a tribal person. It connects us to what Paula Gunn Allen calls ―the universe of medicine‖ 131 . As a diasporic Indian, Arigon Starr is one of those who feels, as what I call, ―at home in the world‖. As a singer/songwriter, she often plays the casino and community center circuit, building a strong fan base in Indian Country. She is a beautiful, strong Indian woman, with a wicked sense of humor and an engaging wit. She has the ability to make anyone feel welcome, which is certainly indicative of her Southern upbringing in a Western world. In addition to her travels in Indian Country, Starr maintains connections to the Indian community in which she lives, Los Angeles, taking place in local community and ceremonial events. In Arigon Starr‘s world, whether the world of the fictional Leaning Oak reservation of Super Indian or the down home feel of the All Nations Café in The Red 132 Road, the specificity of place becomes important in relation to the community that surrounds that place---the sense of being taken care of by the community and preserving that community is a theme central to Starr‘s work. Yet that community is not always a safe place, a place of respite from the outside world. Yet it is how her characters move through that landscape becomes important in the study of her work, and that relationship 130 A mixed blood Muskogee/Cherokee/Seminole/Chickasaw/African and Anglo American, Dawn Karima Pettigrew‘s first novel/memoir/poetry volume, The Way We Make Sense, was one of the first published works in the 21 st century dealing with issues of the contested home space. 131 Grandmothers of the Light, Beacon Press, 1991. 89 between the community and its members is the signifier of ―home‖. Viewing ―home‖ as a site of resistance, a site of humor and of healing is what Starr‘s work is about. Her work is about connections between people and landscape, and social movements that connect community members to those in the diaspora. Cultural events that ties Indians together within the pan-Indian movement becomes an important theme in Starr‘s work. The modern pan-Indian movement is especially evident in the pow wow circuit. Pow wow culture is often where young Indians, especially urban-raised diasporic Indians, experience any semblance of ―traditional‖ Indian culture. The pan-Indian experience is very strong at pow wows, that is the focus on gathering together, singing, dancing, and celebrating the social connections to other Indians is a strong undercurrent across the United States. Pow wows are often where non-Indians first experience ―Indian‖ culture, and the pow wow circuit is a social construction in unto itself. Based upon traditional northern Plains gatherings that predate European contact, these gatherings were public spaces in which ceremonial contact, both social and spiritual, represented in dance and drama, flourished. The modern pow wow, as Indian peoples were moved out of traditional homelands into urban areas in the 1950‘s, became a space where a communal Indian identity flourished. Citing pan-Indian cultural touchstones as pow wows and the Native American Church, the anthropologist James H. Howard noted the development of pan-Indian identity in his article ―Pan Indian Culture of Oklahoma‖. Indians in Oklahoma, Howard noted, were rapidly being assimilated into the dominant white culture. As a result, a super-tribal, or pan-Indian, culture was developing around Indian communities: 90 By pan-Indianism is meant the process by which socio-cultural entities such as the Seneca, Delaware, Creek, Yuchi, Ponca, and Comanche are losing their tribal distinctiveness and in its place are developing a non- tribal ―Indian‖ culture. Some of the elements in this culture are modifications of old tribal customs. Others seem to be innovations peculiar to pan-Indianism. 133 Howard goes on to note that the pan-Indian movement in Oklahoma as by no means a ―simple phenomenon‖ but an attempt by tribal peoples top salvage a sense of Indian identity, not just a ―heritage‖ but identity, in areas where the cultures were rapidly being assimilated into mainstream American culture. The tribes involved in this phenomenon, Howard concluded, numbered nearly thirty tribes. Of these tribes members of the Creek, Cherokee, Seneca, and Kickapoo tribes were noted. 134 The seed on pan- Indianism wasn‘t planted in the pow wows and religious gatherings of native peoples during the Indian relocation programs of the 1950‘s but at least two generations earlier during the boarding school period of federal Indian policy, one of those schools being Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma. The discussion of Chilocco Indian School, its mission, and its student body is an important consideration in discussing Arigon Starr‘s The Red Road. Although the play takes place in the mid 1970‘s, shortly before Chilocco would close its doors in 1980, the intertribal connection between several prominent characters was established long before the action of the play while they were students.. Chilocco Indian Agricultural School was constructed in 1883 on land deeded to the school by the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. Federally funded as part of the government‘s attempt to ―save the man, kill the Indian‖ 133 James Howard, ―Pan-Indian Culture of Oklahoma‖, The Scientific Monthly, November, 1955. 134 ibid, p 216. 91 during the developmental stages of the Indian boarding school program, Chilocco was established to ―house, civilize, Christianize, educate, and transform American Indian youth‖. 135 Boarding schools sought to erase cultural identity in native children, forcing them to abandon their languages, religions, songs, and other cultural practices and indoctrinated them with Euro-American lifeways that included training and education in domestic duties and farming skills. Students were often placed with non-Indian families, in which they ―learned‖ new skills. Chilocco‘s student body came mostly from Oklahoma, specifically the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Wichita, Comanche, and Pawnee tribes. As Oklahoma approached statehood by dismantling tribal governments and treaties, by 1906 most of the student body was comprised of Oklahoma Indians, excluding the so- called Five Civilized Tribes. However, by the early part of the twentieth century, students from the Cherokee Nation comprised the majority of the student body, followed by students from the Choctaw Nation and the Creek Nation. K. Tsianina Lomawaima has noted in her work on Chilocco and for the Oklahoma Historical Society that after World War II more Oklahoma Indians began attending Oklahoma public schools and Chilocco began serving more remote Indian populations from states like Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, home to the Laguna, Ute, and Navajo nations. 136 Attendance at Chilocco and other Indian boarding schools was not by choice: Congress declared in 1891 that boarding school attendance for Indian children was compulsory. It is well documented that methods of coercion were used on Indian families by government agencies to get 135 K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School. University of Nebraska, 1999. 136 K. Tsianina Lomawaima, ―Chilocco Agricultural Indian School‖, Chronicles of Oklahoma‟s Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History, Oklahoma Historical Society, http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/C/CH042.html 92 children into school. By 1900, Congress had created a network of Indian schools that included 147 reservation day schools, 81 on reservation boarding schools, and 25 off- reservation boarding schools. 137 In the world of The Red Road, Emmit Tsinajinnie, the All Nations Café‘s Navajo fry cook, waxes fondly about his days at Chilocco: ―I make biscuits just the way they taught me at Chilocco Indian School in Anadarko. Our teacher used to tell us, ―Feed ‗em – but don‘t fatten ‗em.‖ AAAY!‖ 138 The idea that Emmit, a Navajo, from another matrilineal tribe in the ―west‖, can ―feed but not fatten‖ the other students under his charge is a nod by Starr of the relationships between matrilineal tribes in the Indian boarding school system. In the boarding school system, Indian students were trained in the service professions, as domestic servants or field and industrial workers, so they would have marketable ―skills‖ to find jobs outside of the reservations and in the white world upon graduation. 139 Emmit‘s skills as a cook would serve him well in his later career, as the fry cook at the All Nations Café. The idea that Indian students would not return to the reservations with marketable skills that would only assist them in the non-Indian world was a goal of the boarding school system. However, on Starr‘s Red Road, the community will always prevail: that Emmit serves the community of Sapulpa as a fry cook was a skill he brought 137 Francis Paul Prucha, SJ, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian 1865- 1900. University of Oklahoma, 1976; Frederick L. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians 1880-1920. University of Nebraska, 1984; K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School, University of Oklahoma, 1999. 138 The Red Road, p 8. 139 Lomawaima , p 22. 93 to the pan-Indian tribal world of Oklahoma. Although Emmit is Navajo, his late wife was Kiowa, one of the tribes relocated to Oklahoma, and his son, Desmond, is half-Kiowa. Emmit has found a sense of home in this his own Indian diaspora, yet it is still home for him as it is the home of his son‘s mother. Emmit, like Verna, has survived the Indian boarding school system to keep the home fires burning for the community in Sapulpa. The Creek and Cherokee tribes, historically, are tribes whose kinship structures are lineal and clan descent claimed through the mother‘s line. Cherokee scholars Theda Perdue and Michael Greene, among others, have documented in written histories of the Cherokee people these traditional clan systems: ―Because the Cherokee were matrilineal, that is they traced kinship solely through women, the usual residents of a household were a woman, her husband, her daughters and their husbands, her daughters‘ children, and any unmarried sons (married sons lived in their wives‘ mothers‘ households.)‖ 140 Fields were worked communally by the women of the community; when a field was finished the women would move on to the next one, and the next one, and so on. Villages were permanent in that they did not relocate to follow hunting subsistence patterns, as other Indian nations did, but the property ownership transferred from mother to daughter, therefore land stayed in the hands of women. Early Cherokee narratives speak to shared power between genders as well as the female connection between landscape, creator, and the People. Much early non-Cherokee western scholarship on the Cherokee, specifically James Mooney, argued that the Cherokee since ―before the Revolution had so far lost 140 Theda Perdue and Michael Greene, The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents, 2 nd editions, Bedford/St. Martins, Boston & New York. 2005. 94 their primitive customs from contact with whites that Adair, in 1775, calls them a nest of apostate hornets who for more than thirty years had been fast degenerating.‖ 141 Mooney goes on to further argue that since the Cherokee had lost so many of our customs, including our oral traditions, that stories therefore no longer belonged to the tribal community but to the early storytellers themselves. Even as cultural intrusion was staged in the guise of conversion and baptism, stories were further transferred from the Cherokee communal oral tradition by assigning personal authorship, something which was traditionally unheard of in Cherokee society. Stories of women‘s power sand gender equality were watered down through retelling, through western reshaping, through translation into the foreign English language. Yet the stories survived of Selu, the Corn Mother, and her husband Kanati, the Hunter, and how we are to imitate their gender roles in that women‘s roles surround agriculture and domesticity; men‘s roles surround hunting and provision of food outside of the home. Creek stories and clan kinship systems are similar to the Cherokee, in that these tribes are culturally, though not linguistically, related. Creek oral tradition holds that we emerged from the earth and moved east to the old Creek nation, parts of Alabama and Georgia. Ten linguistically related Muskogean bands and two linguistically unrelated bands (Yuchi and Shawnee) made up the Creek Confederacy, and like the Cherokee, inheritance and kinship were determined in the matrilineal way. Women tended farms and homes, while men hunted and brought food from outside of the domestic sphere. Traditional stories reflected and instilled these traditional family values into Creek 141 Mooney, Sacred Myths and Formulas of the Cherokee, p 229. 95 homes, a practice which still continues, while not on the same level of the historical tribe, in the contemporary Creek Nation in Oklahoma today. 142 Despite the early cultural intrusion of Cherokee and Creek life by European American colonists and the Cherokee and Creek subsequent adoption of Euro American culture and lifeways, many early stories of Cherokee and Creek life document the power of women in both traditional and contemporary society. As I argued in chapter one of this project, many western feminists will have trouble with some of the gender roles women occupy in Indian Country, but to Indian women these roles reify traditional gender roles that are viewed as equal in our societies. Verna Yahola, the owner of the All Nations Café, is in the very sense of the word a traditional Creek woman. Inheriting the café from her parents, Verna is charged with keeping the home fires burning. Feeding and nurturing from a central location is a natural extension of traditional women‘s gender roles in Creek society. As farmers, it was the women‘s duty to provide home and food for their families and clans. Verna is that modern Creek woman whose traditional role is very clear: the nurturer, the caregiver, the heart and soul of this Creek community and yet a beacon on the road for travelers and providing that sense of home on the road. As Patty Jones tells the audience, ―All kinds of Indian tribes gather at Verna‘s All Nations Café. Creek Indians, Choctaw Indians, even a Navajo who‘s here all the way from Window Rock, Arizona.‖ 143 Home, as provided by Verna, is the place that ties in all on the Red Road to the tribal center, the tribal community. It is that sense of home and place that connects the outside world, the 142 see David Lewis, Jr. and Ann T. Jordan, Creek Indian Medicine Ways, and Jean Hill Chaudhuri and Joytopaul Chaudhuri, A Sacred Path: the Way of the Muscogee Creeks, UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2001. 143 The Red Road, p 5. 96 diaspora, to home. And it is the sense that humor and home can begin healing the wounds of relocation and assimilation in The Red Road. Native humor, explains the Ojibwe playwright and humorist Drew Hayden Taylor, is based upon one large inside joke that native people have been privy to for hundreds of years and that non-natives are afraid to laugh at the jokes because it is politically incorrect for non-natives to laugh at natives. ―Political correctness,‖ Taylor laments, tongue firmly implanted in cheek, ―had invaded my career…‖ The audience, Taylor continues, ―…does not expect native people to laugh at themselves.‖ 144 An audience raised on cowboy and Indian westerns expects to see Indian plays dealing with ―tragic portrayals of a culture done wrong.‖ 145 Non-native audiences, or what Taylor refers to as ―pigmentally challenged‖, are afraid to laugh at native humor because of the perceived political incorrectness of doing so. Taylor, and others, including Kenneth Lincoln, have posited that humor in native literature always been present in places most unexpected. How can the audience be expected to be in on the jokes when for the last hundred years in native cinematic images, native peoples have been portrayed as stoic warriors, tragic princesses, and clinging to cultures that were slowly fading into oblivion? Because native cultures have continued to exist outside of mainstream consciousness in rural communities and urban centers, completely ignored by mainstream American culture. To most Americans, native peoples exist only in the cultural imagination of Hollywood film: as dying cultures fading away as Manifest Destiny takes over from the 144 Drew Hayden Taylor, ―Seeing Red: The Stoic Whiteman and Non-Native Humor‖, Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal and their Representations, p 22. 145 ibid. 97 idyllic dream world Adamic past 146 . Or, native peoples invade American cultural imagination when casinos or other gaming issues are brought to the forefront of political arguments between native and non-native political bodies. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that once the Battle of Wounded Knee occurred in 1890, this event signaled the end of the Indian Wars on the ―frontier‖ and therefore Indians ceased to exist. 147 Louis Owens, and later Jacqueline Kilpatrick, argued that images of Indians as the vanishing race or the noble savage have continued to be help up in literature and cinema as a romantic ideal of the ―first Americans.‖ 148 Therefore, the image of an Indian with a great sense of humor disrupts the image that America has of ―its‖ Indians: stoic, noble, aloof. The late Lakota scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., argued in his seminal book ―Custer Died for Your Sins‖ that Indian humor, sly and subversive, plays a central role not only in traditional communities but pan-Indian communities as well: Humor has come to occupy such a prominent place in national Indian affairs that any kind of movement is impossible without it. Tribes are being brought together by sharing the humor of the past. Columbus jokes gain great sympathy among all tribes, yet there are no tribes extant who had anything to do with Columbus. But the fact of white invasion from which all tribes have suffered has created a common bond in relation to Columbus jokes that gives a solid feeling of unity an purpose to the tribes…The more desperate the problem, the more humor is directed to describe it.‖ 149 146 Kenneth Lincoln, Sing With The Heart of a Bear: Visions of Native and American Poetics. UC Press, 147 Cook-Lynn, Why I Can‘t Read Wallace Stegner. 148 Louis Owens, Mixed Blood Messages: Literature, Film, Family and Place; University of Oklahoma, 2 nd ed. 2001; Jacqueline Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film, University of Nebraska, 1999. 149 Vine Deloria Jr., ―Indian Humor‖, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, 2 nd edition, p147. University of Oklahoma, 1988. 98 Deloria wrote this essay during the rise of the American Indian civil rights era, in the late 1960‘s. In a text that is a scathing account of the treatment of ―its Indians‖ by white America, Deloria deconstructs the image of the vanishing Indian and reveals in its place, the modern survivance is rooted in intertribal humor. Starr takes this a step further in both the Red Road and in Super Indian, by poking fun at other tribes in the text and in performance of the pieces. For example, in introducing the Red Road character of Richard Doolittle, ―National Spokesman for a group calling itself American Indian Liberation, or A.I.L.,‖ Creek radio DJ Clyde Chupco tells his audience, The leader of A.I.L., or ―ALE‖ Richard Doolittle, just returned to Oklahoma from Minnesota. [LOON CALL SOUND] Boy, last time I saw Richard was at Chilocco Indian School. He was about five feet tall and five feet wide. Soak-soh…Thocky! (CREEK FOR BIG BUTT) Most folks thought he was a Hopi or Pima. No, he‘s nothing exotic like that. Just plain ol‘ garden-variety Pawnee. [HORSE SOUNDS]…‖ 150 Starr is making light of a certain type of Indian activist from the 1970‘s whose super-serious countenance and general attitude fed right into white America‘s image of the modern noble savage. The Oklahoma Indians at Chilocco thought Richard‘s tribal background was something ―other‖ than the Oklahoma tribes because of his ―other‖ looks – round and dark—that we tend to associate with Indians of the southeast. Starr performs Chupco as a larger than life, loud radio personality whose cultural focus is that of a Creek Indian in the Creek Nation, describing the Pawnee with a horse sound. Other Oklahoma Indians are in on the joke: the Pawnee, a southern Plains tribe relocated to Oklahoma, were culturally unrelated to other relocated Indian Territory tribes. We were agricultural; 150 The Red Road, 13-14. 99 they were nomadic and people who depended on horses and buffalo for sustenance. Starr is signifying, as Gates would argue, on multiple levels: that of the Pawnee‘s insider/outsider status in among the Five Civilized Tribes in Oklahoma, and that of communities‘ resistance to the Hollywood-ready, five second media bites of the typical 1970‘s activist/radical. That Richard Doolittle shows up at the All Nations Café with a wad of money in his pocket and a song and proposal for Verna that is basically blackmail is also a nod to the corruption charges that seemed to follow this type of activist in the 1970‘s and 1980‘s is a comic play on the stereotype: eventually Richard is exposed for the fraud he is by the community as the tornado that finally hits during the climax of the play sucks out his clip-on braids and reveals the ―real‖ Richard. Richard‘s sister, Bonnie Doolittle, is also a play on this stereotype as well. Bonnie, as Clyde Chupco describes her to the audience, is AIL‘s ―community liaison of the year,‖ and also a graduate of Chilocco: ―Bonnie Doolittle just handed me a press release that says – ―Miss Doolittle, a multi-talented Pawnee chanteuse, (HE PRONOUNCES IT CHAN-TOO-ZEE) has a powerful message for all Indian people which she communicates in song.‖ Bonnie then goes on to sing, in true ―Debby Boone/Up With People‖ fashion 151 , a song in which she advocates the torching of white homes and communities: We‘re gonna beat them up ‗Til we hear them scream Whip them to a bloody pulp So they know we‘re mean Put sugar in their gas tanks 151 In the stage directions immediately prior to Bonnie‘s performance of her signature song ―Until Freedom Comes‖, Starr describes the song in this way: BONNIE SINGS ―UNTIL FREEDOM COMES‖ IN THE CHEERY STYLE OF DEBBY BOONE AND 'UP WITH PEOPLE.' (Red Road, p 17-18) 100 Then torch their town Burn, baby, burn to the ground But for now I‘m the crying Indian …Until freedom comes 152 Deloria argues in his ―Indian Humor‖ article that many of the jokes in Indian communities are a response to shared suffering at the hands of European colonization. ―The more desperate the problem,‖ he writes, ―the more humor is directed to describe it. Satirical remarks often circumscribe problems so that possible solutions are drawn from the circumstances that would not make sense if presented in other than a humorous form.‖ 153 Starr turns her gentle teasing humor in on the problems facing Indian communities during that 1970‘s that still pervades today: the fact that like Deloria‘s Columbus and Custer representations, we as Indian people have become our own enemy, seeding discourse and disharmony within our ranks. Bonnie Doolittle questions Verna‘s Indian identity in a very public way on Clyde‘s radio show: Before I begin, here‘s the truth about Verna Yahola. She‘s not a REAL Indian. I found a newspaper article in the Catoosa Chronicle about a white baby that wandered away from a family picnic around the same time the Yaholas added a new daughter to their family. Honestly, does Verna look Indian to you? 154 Bonnie‘s very public ―outing‖ of Verna as a white baby found wandering at a picnic in Claremore is typical of the in-fighting that occurred as a result for the search of authenticity and orality in activist circles, something which still exists today. Starr‘s take on this topic is yet another signifier and comment on these stereotypes. That Verna 152 ibid, 18. 153 Deloria, ―Indian Humor‖, Custer Died for Your Sins, p. 147. 154 The Red Road, p 17. 101 Yahola, member of the Creek Nation, of a prominent family whose life‘s work has revolved around taking care of and being part of a traditional community can be outed as non-Indian by outsiders means no one is safe from this kind if attack. To call into questions one‘s identity, the essence of who one is, is the worst kind of attack within Indian communities, and it is usually acted upon by outsiders to a community. Bonnie also goes on to air, literally, Verna‘s financial woes which Bonnie thinks will rally the troops (pardon the pun) against Verna, but instead backfires as the community rallies around a beloved icon. Bonnie and Richard later receive their comeuppance at community hands as Verna‘s brother Merle Jr. describes: Hey, Dickie! Couple of Apache truckers have been looking for you and the proceeds from that fancy AIL Fundraiser. They pulled in right behind me! So did your Dad. Bye-bye, Dickie! 155 The tribal community will always prevail in Starr‘s world, and those who upset the balance are dealt with in that manner. It is safe to assume that Richard and Bonnie will be more in fear of retribution at the hands of their father, rather than face the Apache truckers on the missing AIL fundraiser money Richard was trying to bribe Verna with. The character of Verna serves as a cultural touchstone not only to audiences but to the other characters in the play as well. The connection between Verna, the All Nations, and Oklahoma is very powerful in the blood/land/memory trope. As a mixed-blood Choctaw, singer Patty Jones relates to Verna on many different levels. Verna‘s letters to Patty become a source of strength to Patty, and Patty has based a few of her hit songs of the friendship of these two Oklahoma Indians: 155 The Red Road, p 34 102 Today, we‘re on location in beautiful Sapulpa, Oklahoma celebrating our tenth anniversary at Verna Yahola‘s All Nations Café and is she an inspiration. Her letters and her life have become some of my biggest hit songs. This one got me inducted into the Grand Ole Opry. SHE SINGS “A TRUCKER‟S BRIDE”- HER FIRST BIG HIT. 156 As a woman who is part Indian and ―out in the world‖ as an entertainer, Patty‘s friendship with Verna is a cultural touchstone for the home trope in Starr‘s work. For Patty, Verna is that connection to a tribal center that is a part of who she, Patty, is. Patty‘s identity as country singer and Patty‘s identity as Choctaw Indian, and the ―lightness of her skin‖, are all questions that have been asked of Patty before. Her kindred relationship with Verna, also a light skinned Oklahoma Indian, is what connects Patty to home. Questions of identity are all a part of Indian Country and the road home. As Patty says in her preface to her song ―The Choctaw Blues‖, Some ignorant folks go by color alone when they decide who‘s Indian and who‘s not. Just because Verna and I don‘t look like an extras in a John Wayne movie does not mean we‘re white-eyes. (SHE PICKS UP GUITAR) You‘d think being able to pass would make life a lot easier, but it does not. Even though home in Starr‘s world is that site of resistance, it is also a site of contested space. But it is the humor in that contested space that keeps the characters grounded in their sense of home, of family, of place. Even as Verna‘s identity is called into questions, it is the tribe, the Creek Nation that confirms her place in the community by giving her an award for all the hard work she has done not only for the café but for the tribe. It is her brother Merle Jr. who gives her the news: 156 Ibid, p 5 103 Verna, the Tribal Council ain‘t giving me the award. It‘s for you. Five thousand dollars. (READING) The Sapulpa Council of Elders bestows this award to Verna Yahola for service to the community. You have been named Creek Citizen of the Year. After the twister comes and takes care of the Doolittles and AIL, after Verna decides she will marry Emmit (―sorry all you other fellers. Sometimes the Navajo gets the girl…‖) and stay on at the All Nations to keep feeding the community: Daddy always says to stay on the Red Road because it‘ll take me exactly where I need to be. He said, ―Verna, darlin‘ the Red Road means you keep the Big Rig of Life truckin‘ down the highway, outta the ditch, you choose and you go. 157 One stays on the red road because that is where they belong. In Verna‘s world, and in Arigon Starr‘s, the return home is the sense that all Indians belong somewhere, and that somewhere is in Indian Country, close to the community – both the local and diasporic. Starr‘s Verna Yahola serves both of those communities….all from a fictional café smack within the boundaries of the Creek Nation. The local – and the national – come together and serve the purpose of bringing people home. 157 The Red Road, p 35. 104 CHAPTER 3. THE RETURN OF REDBIRD: JOY HARJO AND THE NARRATIVE SOVEREIGNTY IN WINGS OF NIGHT SKY, WINGS OF MORNING LIGHT In every word and sound there lives a story. In Wind‘s howl we were forced back to the other side of the Mississippi, slammed like a meteor against a pile of smallbox blankets. Damn that was good. Now, who goes next? 158 Joy Harjo is perhaps one of the most well-known American poets of the late twentieth century. In addition to being a poet, she is a musician, singer and songwriter, playwright, and film maker who performs regularly with her Albuquerque-based band, The Arrow Dynamics Band. A member of the Mvskoke (Creek) Nation and of Creek and Cherokee ancestry, she has won many awards including the Arrell Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award, Oklahoma Book Awards, 2002; The American Indian Festival of Words Author Award from the Tulsa City County Library: the 2000 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award,: 1998 Lila Wallace-Reader‘s Digest Award: the 1997 New Mexico Governor‘s Award for Excellence in the Arts; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas; the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Harjo‘s first music CD, Letter from 158 From the play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, world premiered at Native Voices at the Autry in conjunction with the La Jolla Playhouse, March 2009. 105 the End of the 20th Century was released by Silver Wave Records in 1997, which was honored by the First Americans in the Arts for Outstanding Musical Achievement and called by Pulse Magazine the ‗best dub poetry album recorded in North America‖. Her second CD of original songs, Native Joy for Real crosses over many genres and has been praised for its daring brilliance. Harjo has performed internationally, from the Arctic Circle in Norway at the Riddu Riddu Festival, to Madras, India, to the John Anson Ford Theater in Los Angeles. She has been featured on Bill Moyers: The Power of the Word series, and has appeared on a Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. Harjo also narrated the TNT series The Native Americans and the Emmy award-winning Navajo Codetalkers for National Geographic. Harjo‘s books include She Had Some Horses, What Moon Drove Me to This?, In Mad Love and War, A Map to the Next World, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, and her most recent How We Became Human, New and Selected Poems from W.W. Norton. Her newest cd, Winding Through the Milky Way, includes songs from her one-woman show Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. And, if that wasn‘t enough, Harjo‘s column, ―Comings and Goings‖, details her travels for the Muskogee Nation News. In addition to working on her one woman show, she is writing a memoir with new poems for Norton, forthcoming in 2010. Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1951 to a Creek father and a mixed Cherokee-French mother. Her early life was influenced more by her father‘s Creek traditions, and when her parents split up she remained with her mother and brothers and sisters. Enrolling at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 1968, Harjo migrated to New Mexico as a teenage single mother to a young son to study painting. Influenced by poets Leslie Marmon Silko and Simon Ortiz while at AIAI, Harjo began 106 writing poetry and has said ―it saved my life.‖ 159 She has told me, several times, that she wanted to sing and play saxophone, like her grandmother and aunt, but was unable to do so as she was banned from the musical arts she loved by her stepfather. She made up her mind to learn to play saxophone when she was forty, and did so, playing professionally for the last twelve years. For her second cd, Native Joy For Real, she wanted to try something different and began voice lessons. Now, at 57, she‘s writing a play. Harjo has been called an ecological poet, a feminist poet, and a mythic poet, among the many descriptions of her varied work. Her poetry has been the subject of many essays and scholarly critiques, chapters in groundbreaking works on American Indian literatures, including Craig Womack‘s Red on Red and Paula Gunn Allen‘s Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters. Her work is of great interest to me not only as a poet but as a scholar and musician, and in her work she demonstrates the link between the local and the diasporic communities while maintaining home and tribal connections. Harjo has said, How can you stand it/he said/those hot Oklahoma summers/ where you were born/ this thick humid air/ is choking me and I want to go back/ to New Mexico / it is the only way/ I know how to breathe/ an ancient chant/ that my mother knew/ came out of a history/woven from wet tall grass/ in her womb/ and I know no other way/ than to surround my voice/ with the summer sound of crickets/ in this moist south air/ Oklahoma/ will be the last song/ I sing 160 Even living in New Mexico as a young mother, Harjo‘s mind was always on Oklahoma, missing summers and hot, wet air, reminding herself that wherever she would be in the 159 Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. 160 ―The Last Song‖, reprinted in That‟s What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women, edited by Rayna Green. University of Nebraska Press, 1983. p 136. 107 world, she would always be at home in Oklahoma. For her, the home is something that not only remains in the imagination, but in every landscape she has lived in since. As Craig Womack writes, ―Harjo‘s work demonstrates that connection to one‘s tribal nation vitalizes one‘s writing.‖ 161 Womack argues that although Harjo has spent most of her life outside of Oklahoma and is influenced by other, non-tribal philosophies, her identity as a Creek citizen and her participation in ceremonies at stomp grounds is what grounds her work. It is a decidedly Creek sensibility, or ―Creekness‖, as Womack argues, that pervades her work. One cannot separate the ―Creekness‖ from the place of Oklahoma. One can be a non-native Oklahoman, but a Creek is a native Oklahoman and the place is not separate from the identity as well. The Creek Nation has a history of disinheritance, starting with Removal in the 1830‘s, and leading up to the Dawes Severalty Act, in which the Nation was dismantled as a political entity by the federal government in order to make room for Oklahoma statehood. The connection to landscape was carried in the memories and oral traditions of the Creeks who were removed from the Old Nation to Indian Territory, and remembered in the minds and hearts of the contemporary Creek Nation. The idea of place, and the stories of Removal are told, as well as the stories of allotment are still alive and well in the Creek cultural imagination. This is the ―Creekness‖ that Womack speaks of, and it informs the ―Creekness‖ that forms the basis of Harjo‘s work. The blood connection to the ancestors is physically, spiritually, and morally a connection to the past in an unending line from the old Nation to the modern Nation. 161 Craig Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 108 ―In the Mvskoke world,‖ Harjo says, ―women are accepted as painters, artists. To make art …is to replicate the purpose of original creation.‖ 162 As Paula Gunn Allen has noted, when we refer to our tribal creation myths, we are recording a ceremony, reminding ourselves of who we are and where we come from. 163 The return to the myth- telling, dream-showing, is in itself replicating the creation stories themselves, ensuring the ongoing survival of the community within and outside of the community. Harjo references Momaday‘s genetic memory of the blood/land/memory trope I discussed in the previous chapter, as ―original memory‖: My journey on this earth in this life is marked by a path of red earth that leads from the mounds of Okmulgee in what is now Georgia, to the Battle of Horseshoe Bend site at a curve in the Talapoosa River in now-Alabama, to the Mvksoke Creek Nation in now-Oklahoma, to the grounds of Indian school in now-New Mexico, and since that collection has taken me to the red earth of O‘ahu. 164 Even though Harjo herself has not made that journey of forced removal from the old Creek Nation, she remembers that journey in her own migrations, starting from the place where we emerged in present day Georgia to where she was born in present day Tulsa, in the heart of the modern Creek Nation. Those migrations resurface in her work time and time again, as noted in the poem ―The Flood‖: This story is not an accident, nor the existence of the watersnake in the memory of the peoples as they carried the burden of the myth 162 Joy Harjo, introduction, How We Became Human: Poems 1975-2001, W.W. Norton, 2002. p xvii. 163 Paula Gunn Allen, ―Where I Come From It‘s Like This‖ from The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition, 2 nd edition. Beacon Press, 1992. 164 Harjo, How We Became Human, p xxiii. 109 from Alabama to Oklahoma. Each reluctant step pounded memory into the broken heart and no one will forget it.‖ 165 Harjo refers to the traditional stories of the water snake of the Creeks and other matrilineal tribes of the southeastern U.S., relocated to Indian Territory, or Oklahoma, during the years of Removal. That the ancestors carried the stories which originated from one place to the next is evidence of her ancestral knowledge of these stories; that the stories are told again and again is testament to the orality and strength that is carried within them. The migrations are always in the story of her own personal journey from Oklahoma to further west, whether it is New Mexico, Arizona, California, or Hawai‘i. The poet‘s journey is not only the physical trajectory, but the ancestral as well. ―My own journey on this earth is marked by a path of red earth in the mounds at Ocmulgee in what is now known as Georgia…to the Mvskoke Creek Nation in now Oklahoma,‖ Harjo writes in the introduction of A Map to the Next World. The metaphor is sometimes lost: that the dirt in parts of Oklahoma is actually red, as is the dirt in parts of New Mexico, parts of California, and parts of Hawai‘i. The iron in the volcanic soil in these places is what causes the red earth color, but in Harjo‘s world, and in the larger Creek world that exists within the metaphors within the Creek worldview, the blood/land/memory trope is very strong. Red in Creek cosmology is the color of war, of blood, and of blood spilt upon land. The color red is the color of blood, which is traced in the lines of battle the ancestors walked as they were forced out of the old Creek Nation into now-Oklahoma. The Redstick rebellion, named for the band of armed Creeks that refused to ally themselves with the American government in 1813. The Creek Civil War, as it is known, 165 ―The Flood‖, How We Became Human, p 100. 110 would lead to a deep wound in the Creek Nation that eventually led to Removal in less than fifteen years later. 166 Harjo‘s work then creates a sense of the decolonizing project I discussed earlier in my introduction. The story didn‘t end when the Creeks (and the other Five civilized Tribes) were forced out of modern-day Alabama and Georgia, but it continued in the unbroken line that ―connects me to you.‖ 167 The story connects us to the past in the unbroken line of blood in the red dirt of home: home in the blood that was spilled in the old Nation and the blood that was spilled during the nation‘s removal to Indian territory. In Taiakake Alfred‘s influential work Peace, Power and Righteousness, the Mohawk scholar uses metaphor as a methodology of decolonizing native scholarship. Native communities continue to be in crisis because, Alfred argues, ―…the ongoing crisis of our communities is fuelled by continuing efforts to prevent us from using the power of our traditional teachings.‖ 168 Alfred‘s work is rooted in traditional Rotinohshonni, or Mohawk, teachings on peacemaking and democracy. Alfred uses the metaphor of the great Law of Peace and the ceremonies attached to this Great Law is to decolonize ―hearts and minds‖ as a method of achieving a true native sovereignty. A specific ceremony from the Mohawk, the Condolence ceremony, ―represents a way of bringing people back to the power of reason.‖ 169 This ceremony, paraphrased by Alfred in the 166 The Americanist loyalists were known as the White Sticks, meaning there was desire for a peaceful resolution to the war between the American government and the Creek Nation. 167 See previous chapter in which I discuss Chad Allen‘s work on N. Scott Momaday‘s ―blood/land/memory‖ trope. 168 Taiaiakake Gerald Alfred, Peace Power and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, Oxford University Press, 1999. 169 Ibid, introduction 111 introduction of Peace Power and Righteousness, expresses the need for truth and reconciliation between individuals and community, a recognition of the pain and suffering brought into the community, and the healing of land, memory, people, and nation. The healing of that blood-land-memory complex involves traditions that are steeped in Mohawk blood, memory, and land. It is a ceremony that is unique to those from whose culture it emerges, and it is a way to promote healing and sovereignty of the mind, that is the decolonizing of the contemporary, postcolonial native mind, in order to introduce and replicate harmony back into the life of the community. This metaphor decolonizes the Mohawk mind, centered in western hegemony, because it signals a return to the pre-contact culture of the Mohawk and connects the modern mind to a traditional epistemology that precedes western influence. By referencing this Ceremony, Alfred argues that this should be the methodology that governs the hearts, minds, and political actions of the Mohawk communities. And in this decolonization, this return to native epistemology, lies the essence of a true sovereignty for native peoples. Native sovereignty is a concept that has been taken up by tribes in this modern era of self-determination. The difficulty in achieving sovereignty, Alfred argues, is that as native communities tribes and nations are rooted in not only our traditional teachings, social structures and cultural relations but in the imposed structural elements forced upon us by the state in colonial practices. Sovereignty, as conceived of and practiced by tribes and the federal government, is a concept that will never be fully realized by native nations within U.S. boundaries. The existing frameworks of sovereignty are not traditionally native concepts and there is no way the federal government is ever going to 112 give political control back to the tribes; in that sense native sovereignty is an elusive concept, and oxymoron. Tribal sovereignty is defined, by the American Indian Policy Center, as follows: ―Sovereignty is an internationally recognized concept; American Indian tribal powers originate with the history of tribes managing their own affairs, and case law has established that tribes reserve the rights they had never given away. 170 ‖ Given this definition, it would seem that native nations are guaranteed sovereignty through the U.S. Constitution and through federal case law decided by federal courts. Tribes argue that they are indeed sovereign powers- a case in point is the current state of the Cherokee nation‘s disenrollment of Cherokee Freedmen citizens. 171 Many tribes rely on gaming revenue as a method of economic self-sufficiency, yet gaming is strictly regulated by government compacts that the tribes are forced into negotiating with state governments to allow certain types of gaming on tribal lands. If native nations were truly sovereign, using the federal government‘s definition of sovereignty, then tribes would not be held to negotiate these compacts as mandated by the federal government. Certainly, one could argue that the United States, as evidenced by the Marshall Trilogy as the foundation for Indian law in the United States, never recognized the 170 American Indian Policy Center, St. Paul, Minnesota, 2002. Native nations‘ sovereignty is further developed in federal Indian law through treaties and the ―nation to nation‖ status conferred upon tribes by the federal government. Furthermore, the American Constitution, which many, including Donald Grinde, argue is based upon traditional Mohawk forms of governance in the great Law of Peace, recognizes Indian tribes as distinct governments. It authorizes Congress to regulate commerce with "foreign nations, among the several state, and with the Indian tribes." (U.S. Constitution, Art. 1, sec. 8, clause 3) 171 The Cherokee Nation has argued that, as a sovereign nation, it has the jurisdiction to determine its membership as determined by tribal constitution and treaty status with the federal government. Following this argument, the Cherokee Nation began the process of disenrolling its Freedman Descendants, those of African American and American Indian descent who most often cannot prove lineal descendancy from an enrolled Cherokee on the Dawes Rolls. This of course has caused great controversy among Cherokee citizens and non-citizen Cherokees as well as those, like myself, who are of both American Indian and African American descent. 113 sovereign powers of native nations within its boundaries. Lenape scholar Joanne Barker argues in ―Sovereignty Matters‖ that the federal government did acknowledge the sovereignty of native nations in the formative years of American Indian legal policy through the treaty-making process inherited by the colonizing powers of Europe. ―Yet the fact remains, ― Barker writes, ―that indigenous peoples were recognized by England, France, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States as constituting nations that possessed rights to sovereignty.‖ 172 In the landmark Supreme Court decisions which collectively bear his name, Chief Justice John Marshall argued that native sovereignty does not exist due to the Doctrine of Discovery, and that the tribes are ―domestic, dependant nations‖ of the federal government, with the relationship similar to that of ―a ward of his guardian.‖ 173 Barker historicizes the modern understanding of native sovereignty exists since the end of World War II in which tribes began to articulate the concept through social movement, cultural production, and political change. As tribes moved out of the termination and relocation era of federal Indian policy and into the era of self-determination, many nations argued for sovereignty as a method of gaining self- reliance. As Craig Womack and others have noted, many tribes used cultural production as a method of expressing political sovereignty, engaging in a discussion of the relationship between people and land that predated the Doctrine of Discovery. The traditional right to self-governance is rooted within the oral and written traditions of native peoples, through song, story, ceremony, and ritual; it is in the language, in the metaphor, in the ritual that sovereignty is articulated in an unbroken line from past to 172 Joanne Barker, ―For Whom Sovereignty Matters‖, Sovereignty Matters. 173 The Marshall Trilogy. 114 present. Tribes are actively preserving and pursuing forms of preservation such as language revitalization, ceremonial practice, and other forms of cultural sovereignty that date back to pre-colonial times. Northwestern California tribes such as the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, and Wiyot nations have brought back ceremonies from the brink of extinction as late as the 1990‘s, and are continuing to preserve these traditions which were in danger of being lost. Other nations have addressed cultural preservation as a political and social platform and continue to do so today. One could also argue that the last vestige of true tribal sovereignty would be cultural property and the tribal laws governing such property. Intellectual property rights, theoretically, could be argued as a measure of tribal sovereignty. The oral tradition, where these stories, songs, ceremonies and language remain, connects the tribes and nations to the sovereign past and predate colonialism by foreign powers. The language, stories, songs and ceremonies speak of the relationship between nation and land, between community and traditional clanship systems, and the relationship of the community to the land from which the tribe has emerged for hundreds of years. Yet recent court decisions concerning intellectual property rights and whether or not certain tribal narratives belong to individuals or to a community have further eroded tribal ownership claims when it comes to traditional narratives. One could argue that intellectual property rights and the legislation governing those property rights erode tribal sovereignty, yet these stories exist to do what they were meant to do: teach tribal histories, mythologies, and land rights through the passing on of the narratives. As I have argued elsewhere, native women writers have used these traditional narratives, both ceremonial and performative, to bring these histories back to the tribes and also to others living outside of the tribal national 115 boundaries. 174 Paula Gunn Allen‘s novel The Woman Who Owned The Shadows takes on recorded Keres (Laguna) narratives of a male creator god, based upon published (by Franz Boas) written recordings of tribal oral narratives, and reclaims the tribal feminine as returning these narratives to a female creator, Iyetiku, and Iyetiku‘s sacred twin children. 175 Leslie Marmon Silko, in Storyteller, reclaims tribal Yellow Woman narratives and rewriting those narratives as contemporary stories. 176 In Silko‘s contemporary Yellow Woman stories, all of the traditional elements of the story are there, yet the characters are recast as modern Lagunas and Navajos, living in a very modern world. These narratives are narratives of survivance that connect the tribal reality of now to the tribal reality of the non-imagined past. Modern writers, such as Gunn Allen and Silko are taking traditional narratives and remaking them in a world that speaks to us not only of today but what has gone before us in the tribal past. The sovereignty of the story, the ability to decolonize the tribal heart and mind, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Gerald Taiakake Alfred argue, is present in the work of contemporary writers, and Joy Harjo, as poet, musician, and storyteller, is at the forefront of this decolonizing process in her work. 174 Carolyn Dunn & Carol Zitzer-Comfort, editors, Through the Eye of the Deer, introduction. Aunt Lute Books, 1999; Dunn, ―The Trick Is Going Home‖ from Reading Native Women: Creative and Critical Representations, edited by Ines Hernandez-Avila, 2006. 175 Paula Gunn Allen, The Woman Who Owned The Shadows, Aunt Lute Books, 1992 (2 nd edition). 176 Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller. 116 POETRY OF PLACE Joy Harjo‘s collective body of work in the last thirty or so years has reflected a sense of the political in artistic expression. From her advent to the world of the arts as a young painter with two small children, studying at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the birth of her poetry out of that space, to her musical career, developed through her years in Arizona, and now to her playwrighting career in California and Hawaii, Harjo has followed a unique, yet typical, trajectory. As Creeks, we feel the inexorable pull to migrate westward, to follow the sun, and Harjo continues that narrative and physical trajectory, both in life and in her artistic expressions of that life. Writing as resistance, art as resistance, is frequently a methodology employed by Harjo to convey politics through expressive media. Politics is art, and art is politics, in Harjo‘s world, which is expressed as a connectedness to community, family, clan, and nation. Hers is, as Craig Womack has argued, uniquely Creek in its worldview, and not only does the Creek Nation claim Harjo, but she claims her Creek-ness as well. Harjo‘s play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, premiered at Native Voices at the Autry on March 12, 2009, with a three-week run ending on March 29 th . Directed by Randy Reinholz, starring Joy Harjo and featuring the play‘s musical director Larry Mitchell, Wings was workshopped first at the Public Theater‘s Native American Festival in New York, then with Native Voices at the Autry in the summer and fall of 2008, and enjoyed subsequent readings in Hawaii, California, and New Mexico. Like the play‘s writer, the piece itself followed a western trajectory. It is the story of Redbird Monawhee, a Creek and Cherokee woman who faces death in a car accident and as a result of that accident revisits period of her life assisted by Spirit Helper, a Muskogee 117 spirit. Redbird‘s relationships with her parents, her children, friends and lovers are examined in what the Los Angeles Times called a ―painful journey from a traumatic childhood to serenity and acceptance…‖ and a ―well-charted, an inspirational odyssey that makes ―Wings‖ take flight.‖ 177 Semi-autobiographical, lyrical, and brutally honest in its unflinching portrayal of alcoholic parents, abusive step-parents and lovers, functional-in-its-dysfunctional portrayals of Indian identity, Wings is clearly a step in the evolution of Harjo‘s vast body of work. The play takes the themes of diaspora, longing, sovereignty, and native metaphor and follows in a circular narrative that reflects traditional Creek thinking, seeing, and believing. Creek elder Donald Fixico notes, ―Indian thinking is seeing things from a perspective emphasizing that circles and cycles are central to the world and that all things are related within the universe. For Indian people who are close to their tribal traditions and native values, they think within a native reality consisting of a physical and a metaphysical world.‖ 178 Fixico goes on to argue that native peoples, in general, and Creek Indians, specifically, see the world in terms of all of its manifestations: spiritual, physical, mental, and emotional. The Creeks understand the relationship between the tangible and the non tangible, that is between ―a mountain and a dream‖, but understand that relationship between these two entities is as real as the tangible is indeed real. The intangible, the dream, is a reality that is equally related to the tangible, and vice-versa. Harjo‘s play is indeed a meditation on the worlds: the ―real‖ world of Redbird Monahwee and the traumas she has suffered as a child and as a young woman, and that of Spirit 177 Los Angeles Times review by F. Kathleen Foley, March 16 th , 2009. 178 Donald Fixico, Indian Thinking in a Linear World, p 1 118 Helper, Redbird‘s spiritual ―guardian‖, who assists Redbird in her transitions between life, death, and rebirth- the mysteries and rites of women in native traditions. 179 ―Seeing,‖ Fixico argues, ―or hecvs (in the Muscgoee Creek language), is cultural awareness of all relations to the seer. To see properly, one must be aware of all surrounding things, including those that might not be seen in a physical sense, but choose to exist in the metaphysical sense.‖ 180 This is what I argue is the definition of the bending of time, the understanding that all time exists in a circular faction and that the worlds of the seer are inter-related, drawing back to the concept of ―the universe of medicine‖. The bedning of time is the narrative arc of the play, that is, the method in which Harjo uses to heal her protagonist, Redbird. Redbird must confront the wrongdoings of her past, committed by her and by other family members, in order to set herself on a path to heal the wounds of the past. Harjo bends time in Wings, and this is evident in the introduction to Redbird‘s own time-bending ancestor: My great-great-great-grandfather always had the best horse, says my father. He was a sharp horse trader, and could even talk with horses in their own language. And not only that, old Monahwee knew how to bend time. What do you mean, bend time? I always ask. Time is a being, like you and me. Mostly it just rolls like the Arkansas River. Monawhee is able to bend time- to see through the worlds of the Creek and move forward and backwards in seeing what lessons the world has to offer. Redbird, like her ancestor, is able to bend time with the help of Spirit Helper. Spirit Helper allows Redbird to see into 179 Dunn and Comfort, Through the Eye of the Deer, Introduction. 180 Fixico, p 6 119 her past and present to understand how and why Redbird has arrived at the crossroads of her spiritual and physical death--- at a deadly car crash brought on by too much alcohol and too much grief. The relationship between Redbird and Time as personified in the ―being, like you and me,‖ is what anchors the play in this distinct Creek was of seeing the world. Seeing through the eyes of the Spirits and the ability to bend time is what brings Redbird back to herself, back to wholeness in a journey to reclaim her fragmented spirit. The concept of bending time in not uncommon to other native nations in the United States but in Maori cultures in New Zealand as well. Maori social worker Roseanna Solomona, living in Sydney, Australia and working within a large diasporic Maori community in Sydney, writes of the connections of past, present, and future in Maori contexts: Imagine a circle that has within its sphere our ancestors back to the beginning of man, our global family now and those generations, who are yet to be born into this world. Envisage the interplay at this level. When a Maori kaumatua or elder stands to speak at a formal ceremony within tikanga Maori or tradition he will address the dead, the living, the people attending the gathering and those of future generations. Here is the eternal circle alive today. 181 Here Solomona and Fixico speak to the ability of native peoples to have an understanding of time in the non-linear sense expressed in Western traditions. Harjo plays with this idea of ―bending time‖ in the metaphorical sense throughout Wings. In the spirit world, time is bent and ecompasses the dead, the living, and future generations. At the center of Wings is the kitchen table, which Harjo notes in stage directions, represents 181 Roseanna Henare Solomona, Whakaaro-rua, p 31. 120 THE GUT AROUND WHICH ALL ACTION FLOWS. IT IS A HEART, A BED, A BIER, A CAR, A COUNTER AT THE BAR, AN ALTAR, AND A HIDING PLACE. 182 The kitchen table becomes not only a metaphor for the above objects significant to Redbird‘s life but the actual objects from which she tells the story of her life. The story of her life, as a ceremony, is what we witness in Wings. The ceremony of healing, of returning to wholeness is then connecting Redbird to home, to her community, to her children and the ancestors, both born and yet to be born. Time has been bent so the audience can glimpse into the past, present and future; Like Redbird, like Monawhee, Harjo ―bends time‖ so we can journey in Reedbird‘ ceremony and be a part of her healing as well. The metaphor of the table is presented in actuality as all of the objects it becomes: ―the gut around which all action flows‖. Harjo is presenting the table as the center of ―home‘, home being the actual domestic space as well as the landscape of home, the space of Indian country and the space where one is not always safe. As Redbird moves out into the diaspora, at Indian boarding school, at college, and later with her lover Sonny in his unnamed tribal landscape, she carries with her the wounds and the stories of home, the stories of her ancestors (especially Monahwee, whose name she also carries), and the language of a people in diaspora. Cultural trauma, or ―displaced knowings‖, is what results from the harsh life lessons Redbird learned at the kitchen table that was her home: the turbulent relationship of her parents and her mother‘s subsequent marriage to the abusive ―Keeper‖. The Keeper‘s assault on the things Redbird holds dear: her music, her mother, her siblings, all succeed in pushing her away and out from her family, her home, and her community. The separation from her mother mirrors the 182 Harjo, Wings production script, December, 2008. 121 separation from her father after her parents‘ divorce: the displacement of home, family, community, and culture creates a rupture that can only be healed by the bending of time and a return home to Creek ceremonial life. That first rupture is what sends Redbird on a journey to leave home and family and community and strike out on her own in the disaporic Indian community, far from the Creek Nation. Cindi Alvitre and I have argued in our article ―Performing Nation, Performing Identity‖ that in order to decolonize the space of home in American Indian communities we must address the following issues in recreating the safe space of home in native communities: that a safe space needs to be created in the community that all members feel safe there; that there must be a safe space created not only for native peoples within their home communities but in the diasporic as well; we must acknowledge within these safe spaces the artistic and folkloric relationship to the political; and that we define for native peoples what ―safe‖ is. Alvitre has argued elsewhere that non-natives have been successful in placing natives in ―safe spaces‖ of western culture: e.g, museums, cultural centers, and Hollywood films. In order for these spaces to be safe, Alvitre argues, the threat of the dangerous native must be relegated to the museum to the long ago historical past, and that the native, especially in Los Angeles, must be completely disassociated with the present 183 . Jack Forbes also argues that the erasure of native place names in America has relegated Indian peoples to non-citizen, non-person status in his essay ―The Name is Half the Game‖: 183 Alvitre, Cindy Moar. (2005) ―Moving Into the Mainstream‘: (An Epoch Changing Shift in the Relationship Between Native Americans and Museums Now Promises To Bring Native Ways of Knowing to Mainstream Understanding) in Convergence: Autry National Center Magazine Winter) p 7 122 Part of the process of European invasion was to impose European names and nicknames upon America. Thus the Powhatan-Renape people‘s name for their land, Attan-Akamik (Our Own Land- Place) was replaced by ―Virginia‖, a name that allowed the English to domesticate a bit of American territory, as it were. 184 I cite as an example, in the next chapter of this project, the ways in which native literatures about the landscape in Los Angeles have been completely erased in favor of a ―new‖ Los Angeles; Alvitre argues that in placing natives in museums the threat of danger has been circumvented. This placement of native peoples in museums and in film allows others to become the authority on what exactly native cultures are and when these native cultures ceased to exist. 185 In Wings, Harjo creates the safe space that has been not always safe for the character of Redbird Monahwee. The kitchen table, while onstage it is just that- a kitchen table, it becomes a metaphor for home, the creation of a safe space outside of an unsafe space that allows the audience to explore what needs to occur in order for Redbird – and us as audience- to feel safe again. Redbird, like her grandfather, is able to bend time with the help of the aptly named Spirit Helper, and this creation of the space is what connects Redbird to Paula Gunn Allen‘s ―universe of medicine‖. 186 Redbird‘s agency, that is, the bending of time, allows for the creation of the safe space while reconciling her to her past, her present, and her future. Redbird sings, in the beginning of the play: 184 Jack D. Forbes, ―The Name is Half The Game: The Theft of ‗America‘ and Indigenous Claims of Sovereignty‖, Eating Fire, tasting Blood: An Anthology of the American Indian Holocaust, Thunder‘s Mouth Press, 2006. P 34. 185 Cindi Moar Alvitre, ―Moving Into the Mainstream‘: (An Epoch Changing Shift in the Relationship Between Native Americans and Museums Now Promises To Bring Native Ways of Knowing to Mainstream Understanding) p8. 186 Gunn Allen, Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters. 185. 123 Cehotosakvtes [che‘e ho toe cha za‘a dee] Chenaorakvtes Momis komet [chee na‘a o-o-o thla ka dee mo‘o mais komet] Awatchken ohapeyakares hvlwen [a-watch-ken oh-o pey yak athles hvl wen] Do not get tired. Don‘t be discouraged. Be determined. To all come in. We will go to the highest place. 187 Thus begins the ceremony for Redbird, and for us as the audience. We are invited into her world, her healing journey, into the creation of safe space that is her home, her heart, to the place of este cvti (stijaati), or of the red people, as we Creeks call ourselves. As Redbird takes her place in the ceremony that will include the bending of time, with the assistance of Spirit Helper. Spirit Helper, the Creek elder representing the ancestors who have come before, not only guides Redbird but the audience as well, as the story of Redbird‘s life unfolds. The kitchen table becomes the kitchen table where her mother gave birth to her at home in Oklahoma, the place where in the Choctaw language, ogla houmma, meaning ―they are red‖. With no women to assist her, Redbird‘s mother struggles to give birth: When my spirit crossed worlds to join my father and mother, there was no circle of women to assist the birthing. There was no cedar or tobacco…but—my mother had drugs! My body was a wet, ripe, bloody seed And it was about to be spit onto concrete in Oklahoma. That‘s when I changed my mind. 188 187 Wings production script, December 2008, p 5. 188 Ibid, p 9. 124 The struggle to be born to Redbird‘s mother, a ―beautiful half Cherokee waitress in love with a good looking Creek man (my father)‖ begins Redbird‘s ceremony in the play. Redbird pushes against being born, her mother pushes to get her out and they struggle. Redbird doesn‘t want to be born, she doesn‘t want to be a girl, but Spirit Helper helps her by telling her ―you will forget.‖ The struggle to be born culminates with the forgetting of who and what one is. To be born, in this world, is to relearn everything one has learned as a spirit waiting to enter the world. This is the first place Redbird bends time in the story of her life; that she (and the audience) can witness her birth in the telling of her life story that will heal her from the mess she has made of herself. Immediately after Redbird‘s birth, the kitchen table becomes a kitchen table, the place where Redbird alternately hides to watch the adults dance, laugh and sing; and hides when the singing turns to fierce fighting and bloodletting. Home once again becomes a place of great joy and great tragedy. Redbird‘s father tells her the story of how old Monawhee, his great grandfather, learned how to bend time. The seed of the story is planted in Redbird‘s consciousness by her father; she too will learn how to bend time in order for this ceremony to take place. Shortly after imparting to her the story of Monawhee and his ability to ―bend time‖, the party turns tragic after alcohol and postcolonial trauma mix: I try to pull him off her, and he goes crazy. What happened to the storytelling father? The one who tickles me? The man who makes my mother laugh? He throws me across the room into the wall. He keeps swinging. I get away. I hide under the table. 189 189 Wings production script, December 2008. P 15-16 125 The trauma of witnessing this violence in the home becomes associated with Redbird‘s childhood, accompanying the story of her birth, her childhood, and her parents‘ volatile relationship. Hiding under the table, which represents home and a safe space of home, is where Redbird goes to attempt an escape of the trauma of home life. Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Guillory Duran argue in Native American Postcolonial Psychology that generations upon generations of internalized violence have created a culture of domestic violence that is prevalent in many American Indian homes. Duran and Duran argue that internalized male on female violence occurs when men‘s traditional roles in the traditional tribal economy is erased. Women, the Durans argue, have been the recipients of ―the absorption of the negative cathexis of male repressed rage.‖ 190 That rage then, is displaced upon the women of the family unit, the mothers, daughters, wives and sisters. The men in Wings, Redbird‘s father, her husband, the Navajo drag queens she meets at school, are all victims and victimizers of this aggressive posturing by native men. The Durans further argue: This identification with the aggressor by Native American men is of a quality that has at its core a desire to gain the aggressor‘s power and eventually turn that power on the aggressor. At a deep level in the acquisition of the aggressor‘s power has the ultimate goal of destroying the aggressor and restoring the community to a pre-colonization lifeworld. Because the removal of the colonial forces is not realized, the repressed rage has no place for cathexis except to turn on itself. 191 190 Duran and Duran, ―The Vehicle‖, Native American Postcolonial Psychology, p 38. 191 Ibid, p 36. 126 As a victim of this internalized rage and oppression from what she witnesses as a young child, Redbird begins to take on her father‘s role and the oppression and rage she feels then becomes directed at herself. The vehicle for Redbird‘s outlet of her rage and oppression becomes drugs and alcohol, and an intense self-hatred that begins to show itself when she is sent to boarding school. The internalized rage and oppression becomes part of Redbird‘s historical memory, along with the stories her father told her about her old Monawhee, with that of the rage directed at she and her mother by her father‘s inability to come to terms with his own internalized oppression. The idea of home, then, becomes synonymous with trauma and thus begins the trauma that Redbird tries so desperately to escape, but always is forced to return to. Still, Redbird makes no excuses for her father‘s rages. She tells the audience, In my family‘s blue-sky memory, we loved my father without question. We loved his laugh, his stories, his swinging us through the sky. We struggled with his fight, his jab, his fear. 192 Redbird acknowledges her father‘s grief in the wake of his own mother‘s death at a young age, and his growing up without the benefit of strong parental figures, which he would have had in a traditional Creek family. The story becomes part of the story of colonization: the historical memory is ripped away from the community at a young age, as Redbird says later in the play, ―…the grief had to go somewhere…we had no one left in our family who knew how to bury it…‖ 193 The family is torn apart by her father‘s rage and her mother‘s sacrifice to that rage, and the cycle of violence born in rage and guilt 192 Wings, production script, p 15. 193 Ibid, 16. 127 will continue its ravages on Redbird if she can‘t learn how to bend time and reconnect with the ancestral memory that has been ripped from her by colonization. Out of the absence of her father is born the ―sky blue memory‖, the love they hold for their father out of melancholy, out of trauma, and out of loss. His absence creates such a longing that Redbird will travel the world to find it, to return it to her ceremony. Soon, her mother‘s next marriage to the man Redbird calls only ―The Keeper‖, escalates the abuse and self-hatred Redbird feels as she continues the story, the ceremony, of her life: Then, I have a fever. My mother takes off my shirt. Prepares a pan of alcohol and water. ―I‘ll take over‖, says her keeper. My mother goes to bed. She‘s exhausted from working. She leaves me there. ―Lay down‖, he demands. Every place he touches I turn rotten. When I am back in the room with the children who are still sleeping, I pull out the knife and I begin to cut away the broken. 194 Like so many native children, Redbird has suffered many abuses at the hands of non- Indian tormenters. The fact that this abuse is suffered in her own home further devastates her and causes her to inflict physical, as well as emotional, self-torture. After the abuse by The Keeper, Redbird forgets everything: the ability to bend time, the ability to with the eyes of the ancestors and the children she learned from Spirit Helper as a small baby. As she leaves for boarding school, Redbird‘s mother awakes briefly from her keeping to give Redbird a song and a tobacco pouch: these gifts, traditional gifts, are the start of Redbird‘s journey of healing, even though she doesn‘t know it yet. Her mother wakes 194 Wings, p 18. 128 from her dream, a dream in which she is kept asleep by the Keeper and way from her own children, and gives her the gifts from the traditional way of life, that will keep Redbird anchored to home while out in the diaspora. TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION: THE CEREMONY As I mentioned earlier in this analysis of Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, the subtitle of the play is ―A Ceremony‖. The complexity and layers of ―a ceremony‖ cannot be drawn into simple terms, or what Paula Gunn Allen has called a reclassification of the term. 195 Cindi Alvitre and I call for the creation of safe space in a diasporic world in order for healing to take place. Vine Deloria, Jr., and Louis Owens discuss the invisibility of native peoples, the destruction not only of physical space but of the emotional, spiritual, and mental space as a method of colonization. Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls indigenous researchers to break down the traditional notions of western epistemology by calling upon ancestral ways of knowledge and argues that imperialism frames the indigenous experience as it is part of our story, our version of modernity. Craig Womack, Robert Warrior, and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argue for a return to the traditional community to inform research on the political and artistic work of native artists. Roseanna Henare-Solomona argues for the investigation of a tribal metaphor of weaving strands of knowledge systems in expressing both western and indigenous knowledges. Following these scholars, I argue that the modern performances of ceremonial literatures establish sovereignty, connect the storyteller, the performer, and 195 Paula Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of the Light, introduction. 129 the audience with the universe of medicine, that is the ability to, like Joy Harjo, bend time and establish a roadmap to narrating sovereignty (cultural, linguistic, and political) into the next seven generations to come. The use of western epistemology, the performance of tribal literature is like, following Solomona, weaving the strands of western epistemology, indigenous epistemology in a bicultural play that while favors the indigenous, acknowledges the use of western knowledge systems within indigenous frameworks. In his chapter ―Abalone Woman Attends the Wiyot Reawakening‖ from Abalone Tales, anthropologist Les Field historicizes the traditional Wiyot tale by examining its relevance to the modern tribe. In 2004 the city of Eureka, California, ceded forty acres of land known as Indian Island to the Wiyot tribe, the only government body in the United States who has ever ceded land back to an Indian nation. 196 In 1860, two hundred Wiyot men, women and children were massacred by leading citizens of the city of Eureka. The only survivor of this massacre was an infant who would grow up to become the great- grandfather of Wiyot tribal chair Cheryl Seidner, under whose leadership the Wiyot achieved federal recognition and the establishment of the Table Blue Reservation, just south of Eureka, California, near the town of Loleta. The massacred tribal members were celebrating their world renewal ceremony in the ancient village of Tuluwat, and the village was destroyed in the massacre. 197 196 I interviewed Wiyot tribal chair Cheryl Seidner, one of my oldest and dearest friends, on American Indian Airwaves/Coyote Radio on February 28 th , 2004. In the interview, we acknowledge that Eureka is not the most liberal or Indian-friendly cities in California; so the city council‘s acknowledgement of the terrible tragedy of the Indian Island massacre and its subsequent ceding of the land to the Wiyot tribe signified a huge shift in public policy and truth and reconciliation in not only Humboldt County but the United States. 130 For the last twenty-five years, Seidner and her sisters Leona Wilkinson and Marian Crutchfield, and many others, have organized a candelight vigil on the grounds of the former Tuluwat, which had become an abandoned shipyard by the mid-1980‘s. The candlelight vigil is so that the citizens of the area, Indian and non-Indian, remember what happened that night in 1860. It has been a peaceful and conciliatatory ceremony that seeks to remember what happened on the land, to acknowledge the past and to celebrate a future for the Wiyot and their neighbors. The spirit of this ceremony has been carried across Indian Country beyond international borders by Seidner herself, and by other nations, including the Tongva in Southern California, who use this model as a form of truth and reconciliation to heal the old wounds. Helene Shulman Lorenz and Mary Watkins would consider this Wiyot ceremony ―Silenced Knowings‖. According to Shulman Lorenz and Watkins, ―silenced knowings‖ are the guilt associated with surviving genocide, whether on the receiving end or the practicing end of genocide: Many silenced knowings can exist within apparently ordinary lives and communities, the lives of others and our own lives. By silenced knowings we mean understandings that we each carry that take refuge in silence, as it feels dangerous to speak them to ourselves and to others. The sanctions against them in the family, community or wider culture render them mute and increasingly inaccessible. Once silenced, these knowings are no longer available to inform our lives, to strengthen our moral discernment. Once pushed to the side, these knowings require our energy to sustain their dissociation, and our numbing to evade their pain. 198 197 The number of those , massacred has varied; Hupa scholar Jack Norton (When Our Worlds Cried: Genocide in Northern California, San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1979) has argued that the number was nearly two hundred; Les Field cites an article from the San Francisco Chronicle stating the number to be sixty. Chief Seidner believes the number closer to Professor Norton‘s claims. 198 Shulman Lorenz and Watkins, ―Silenced Knowings‖, paper given at the annual conference of the National Training Laboratory, Bethel, Maine, July 20, 2001 131 The silenced knowings of the Wiyot tribe is the truth of the numbers of the massacre at Indian Island; the silenced knowings are the thoughts and feelings of the Tongva child at public school in Los Angeles when a teacher tells his or her class that the Gabrieleno Indians of Southern California no longer exist. The silenced knowings in Joy Harjo‘s Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light is the internalized oppression that causes Redbird Monahwee to leave home, drink and do drugs and drive drunk, nearly killing herself in the process. The silenced knowings are what come out in the howling contest scene which marks a shift in the play from the story of Redbird‘s birth to her journey to adulthood, where her healing begins from a spiral of self-destruction through the journey of healing in ceremony. Like the story of the Wiyot renewal, like the story of the Tongva child, like the story of Redbird Monawhee, Wings is just that: a story rooted in an indigenous knowledge system that has not been destroyed, neither by ourselves and by the outside colonizers. The howling contest scene of Wings marks a site of great change for its protagonist, Redbird. It is at the 49, the after pow-wow pow-wow, where the howling contest takes place: The first official Howling Contest took place one Saturday night out on the West Mesa after the Powwow Club had closed. That Saturday the bar didn't just close, it gave out from exhaustion. Finally all the suck weight of unanswered prayers, forgotten songs, the struggle to put food on the table and buy shoes for the babies, in a city build over sacred grounds, made an unbearable weight. It all collapsed. 199 At this point in her ceremony, Redbird has graduated from boarding school with her diploma, confronted The Keeper to see her mother, but having been unsuccessful in 199 Wings production script, p 33. 132 freeing her mother from The Keeper‘s lair, she returns to New Mexico, still broken from her past. The table, now serving as the 49 drum, accompanies Redbird‘s song to get the party started. ―I‟m from Oklahoma, got no one to call mine, so I go a looking for you honey. If you‟ll be my baby, I will be your honey all the time.‖ 200 At the 49, which the party after the party, the howling reveals the pain of colonization and the long-silenced knowings that affect each of the characters: Navajo drag queens Manny and Marty, whose howls represent the ―slight fourteen-year-old boy huddled in a circle of uncles who had been dragged away to church school before they were five. These uncles took turns beating their nephew for his girlish ways. In the original teachings, they were to be Manny‘s fathers, so he would have a circle to take care of him.‖ 201 For Wind, Redbird‘s Blackfoot partner in crime, the howling contest represents ―… a shivering newborn is left in a box with the rest of the children while the parents walk through the cold to the bar. They drink to forget blood in the snow, to forget losing buffalo and horses without number.‖ 202 Most of the Indians present at the 49 have in some way lost their traditions and lost their connections to the center, or to home, and for them the howling contest is in itself a ceremonial journey that will free them in ways they haven‘t been for a long time. The scene is the journey to the Diaspora and what results from that journey. For Manny and Marty, their gender socialization has caused them ostracization and disapproval, as well as physical violence, from their home community. Wind‘s loss is affected in the removal of her language and ancestral memory. And finally, for Redbird, who has to be 200 Ibid, p 35. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid, 37-28. 133 coaxed into the howling contest only after a fight breaks out at the 49 and the police arrive to break it up, the howl represents the inability to articulate the struggles she has lived with to this point; and perhaps the struggles she will eventually face. Out of the howling contest comes a relationship with the man who will become her children‘s father, Sonny, a handsome Pueblo storyteller. Sonny would not leave my side after that--nor would I let him. He promised he‘s taking me out of here. Where we‘re going, we don‘t need money for gas, or anything else. ―I‘m taking you home. I‘ll get you the best‖, he said. Sonny, baby, you are the best. There is no sky limit to us. We‘re in it deep; we‘re in it high, and all the rest. 203 To Redbird, Sonny is indeed her ticket to a better life, a chance to not repeat the mistakes made by her mother and father. In the story of Redbird and Sonny, Harjo refers to the old Deer Woman stories prevalent in the southeastern tribes: someone, usually a beloved child of the community, ends up getting spirited away from the dance grounds by a beautiful or handsome outsider, never to be seen again. Paula Gunn Allen tells us that the deer woman spirit is a ―supernatural who appears as a human woman and as a doe by turns. She is said to bewitch men and women and eventually cause their descent into death and prostitution.‖ 204 Julian Rice, in his study of Ella Cara Deloria‘s Deer Woman and Elk Man narratives, collected from the Lakota and Dakota bands of Sioux, notes that the original purpose of the Deer Woman and Elk Man stories were to teach young people marriage and courtship rituals that sought to establish the perpetuity of the tribe. 205 203 Ibid, p 41. 204 Paula Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman‟s Sourcebook. Beacon Press, Boston, 1991. 205 Julian Rice, Deer Women and Elk Man: The Narratives of Ella Cara Deloria, p 161-62. 134 Annette Van Dyke writes of the use of Deer Woman narratives in Susan Power‘s The Grace Dancer and Louise Erdrich‘s The Antelope Wife, that ―weave cautionary tales about the kinds of relationships between men and women which are needed to sustain the community while delineating those which destroy group cohesiveness.‖ 206 Paula Gunn Allen wrote in the introduction to my poetry book, Outfoxing Coyote, that Deer Woman is …a sacred deer, able to appear as a beautiful human woman; even in some accounts able to bear children, who, as it turns out, are also shape shifters, changing from human to deer. The stories about encounters go way back, and there are some modern people who say they saw her, or knew someone who followed her, and was never seen again. 207 Carol Comfort and I, discussing Joy Harjo‘s ―Deer Dancer‖ in our anthology Through the Eye of the Deer, explore Deer Woman‘s presence in Harjo‘s ―Deer Dancer‖: Like [Paula Gunn] Allen, Harjo points to a vital link between past and present in her invocation of Deer Woman, but instead of using a traditional story to frame her modern narrative as [Gunn] Allen does, Harjo creates the connection by depicting the traditional figure as a living presence.‖ 208 As she has done with Spirit Helper, and the time bender Monawhee, Harjo has introduced the audience to the world of spirits in Creek cosmology. Harjo herself invokes Deer Woman as part of Redbird‘s narrative, the Deer Woman story Redbird‘s grandmother 206 Annette Van Dyke, ―Encounters with Deer Woman: Sexual Relations in Susan Power‘s The Grass Dancer and Louise Erdrich‘s The Antelope Wife,‖ Studies in American Indian Literature, Vol 15, Nos 3 & 4. p 168. 207 Paula Gunn Allen, ―Poet As Guidester‖, introduction, Outfoxing Coyote: Poems, Carolyn Dunn. That Painted Horse Press, Los Angeles: 2002. 208 Dunn & Comfort, ―Introduction‖, Through the Eye of the Deer, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1999. p ix. 135 tells her of how, one night at a Stomp Dance, a beautiful daughter of the chief disappears after meeting a handsome young man who was welcomed into the dance grounds by the community. ―We were wary,‖ Redbird‘s grandmother says of the handsome stranger, ―but it is our way to take good care of visitors. Still the people are not fools. We were warned to stay within the circle.‖ 209 Still, the beloved daughter of the chief disappears, wearing only a red dress and loafers, and Redbird‘s grandmother tells her (and us, the audience) a new red star appears in the horizon on the next morning‘s rise. Redbird asks her grandmother if the story is true; Grandmother doesn‘t answer but she and Redbird ―ponder the matter. All of her stories carried deep pockets of mystery.‖ 210 This is a common theme in Harjo‘s work: that the stories indeed carry deep pockets of memory and of mystery; in every story told in the Creek world, there is a message that contained in these traditional worlds that can resonate in the in the modern one. The story serves as the touchstone for Redbird, out in the diaspora, to remind her that even as we Creeks travel, out spirits seem to find us, wherever we are. As Redbird embarks on her future with Sonny, she remembers her grandmother‘s Deer Woman story and wonders if she, Redbird, is involved in a Deer Woman story of her own. Is Sonny the mysterious young man who appeared at the dance grounds to spirit one of the tribe‘s beloved daughters away, or perhaps maybe he is a relative to the spirit man? Whoever Sonny is, Redbird is determined that she will not make the same mistakes her mother and father did, but in her perfect world of ―fresh passion‖, soon Sonny‘s 209 Wings production draft, p 44. 210 Ibid. 136 words become similar to that of The Keeper‘s, and Redbird finds herself in an exact reenactment of her own birth through her son‘s: The birthing was hard. He pushed. My body pulled. We went back and forth between sky and earth. I began dying. I lifted my body and felt free. My grandmother found me in the after-death realm, as I stood at the entrance to my family‘s encampment. ―Go back, Redbird. It‘s not your time. Your babies need you.‖ She pushed and after she pushed, my stolid boy found his way into the world with us. 211 The birth of her son allows Redbird to once again bend time and see her grandmother in the afterworld, and her grandmother sends her back to be her children‘s mother. Inasmuch as Redbird has determined she and Sonny will not make the mistakes of her parents, she finds herself reliving her mother‘s life all over again. Harjo is using a traditional Creek narrative, which anchors Redbird home, as a way to bring Redbird back to the place where she must heal in order to be whole again. Redbird needs to hear the stories again and again, needs to bend time to make sure that the narratives are recorded and retold, like the birth cord that ties her to the red earth of Oklahoma. However, the gift of her mother‘s tobacco pouch and song is what finally enables Redbird to leave what has become a toxic relationship with Sonny over ―his tree‖ 212 . Referring to the Iroquois story of the woman who fell from the sky, Redbird breaks free of Sonny by falling through the sky and landing, through time, when their children are grown. Even though the children 211 Wings, p 47. 212 In our discussions over what the tree actually represented, I suggested that the tree was representational of the shared creativity between Redbird and Sonny, that Sonny, already an established artist within his community, would jealously guard his position and prominence in his community. Joy argued that the tree is a woman, and that the argument was over Sonny‘s carousing with other women, just like Redbird‘s father had done back home in Oklahoma. We liked each other‘s interpretations but stuck with our own. 137 are grown, there still is the threat of the ―silenced knowings‖ which seek to destroy their lives. Spirit Helper tells Redbird that in order for the children to be free of the intergenerational trauma that threatens to engulf them, Redbird must confront her mother and her father in order to break the cycle of violence that lives on through their shared grief. Redbird‘s mother is still in the grip of The Keeper. ―The danger with evil,‖ Spirit Helper tells Redbird, ―is that it becomes habit.‖ Although Redbird‘s mother expresses her love for her daughter, her mother is still unable to come to terms with her own past and leave The Keeper. Redbird‘s mother tells her that she will always hold her in her heart, that they are connected by virtue of matriarchal bloodlines, even though The Keeper succeeds at keeping them physically apart. For now, this will have to suffice for Redbird, the knowledge that her mother keeps her close to her heart and that they will always be connected. The song ―Winding Through the Milky Way‖: signifies another shift in the play, another shift in Redbird‘s fevered grasp towards wholeness: Hyvtke lani Open your being Hyvkte jade In every small thought of what to fix In every immense thought of dancers winding through the Milky Way Hyvkte lvste What obscures, falls away Shining persons arrive here Hyvkte hvtke 138 Harjo is singing a healing song here for Redbird: that Redbird, and the audience, need to look to the traditional stories and songs and prayers for that wholeness we long for, that we have become separated from. As the Ancestors dance along the Milky Way to arrive here on earth, in this ceremony of bended time, Redbird must look to them for her answers, look to the language and song and ceremony that has sustained the Creeks from time immemorial to the very real and modern now. Redbird is too late to save her mother, or to save her father, who lies in state on the kitchen table, now a bier. ―I followed your tracks and I finally found you, Daddy,‖ Redbird says to her father‘s body, ―I see your relatives wrapped your body in your favorite ceremonial blanket.‖ 213 Redbird then remembers a story her father has told her, that of hunting a deer and how they hunter honors the spirit of the deer who has sacrifice herself for the good of the hunter‘s family, the good of the tribe. ―We pray with tobacco to acknowledge the spirit of the deer. We give thanks, mvto‖, Redbird‘s father tells her, in Redbird‘s memory. Redbird wonders then why her father was unable to bend time and save himself. At this point, she feels the stories have failed her, just as her parents have failed her, as Sonny failed her, as she has failed her now-grown children. It is her father‘s death that finally sends Redbird over the edge, and her journey culminates in a terrible car accident in which she lies in a coma, and in the coma her vision of Spirit Helper and her own ceremony toward healing is revealed. The play shifts again and ends with the story that is revealed at the beginning of the play, the Creek creation story in which Rabbit, our trickster, creates human beings and breathes life into us. In true Rabbit fashion, he makes a grievous error, and then is unable to control his 213 Wings, p 53. 139 creation when the aspect of human free will comes into the story. Harjo is telling us once again, through the narration at the end and at the beginning of the play, that the story will give us the answers, as the story has given us answers since time immemorial. As Duran and Duran argue in Native American Postcolonial Psychology, ―The core of Native American awareness was the place where the soul wound occurred. The core essence is the fabric of the soul and it is from this essence that mythology, dreams, and culture emerge.‖ 214 The story, what Harjo has given us in the story of rabbit and the Clay Man, is what Duran and Duran call ―the vehicle‖, the process by which healing occurs at the soul level. The artistic element, Harjo‘s creation of this play as community healing, is both and artistic and political practice in that she is using traditional practice to heal a soul wounded by colonization. RABBIT AND THE CREATION OF THE CLAY MAN As the Cherokee historian and novelist Robert J. Conley notes, ―the tales not only survive, they adapt.‖ 215 As Joy Harjo herself notes, ―there are many versions of the creation story.‖ 216 Indeed, among the southeastern nations, the stories differ, as do the 214 Duran and Duran, p 45. 215 Conley, introduction to Friends of Thunder, by Jack F. and Anna G. Kilpatrick, University of Oklahoma Press, 1995 (reprint edition). 216 Harjo, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, W.W. Norton, 1994. 140 stories between the Creek clans. Harjo chooses to use, in the beginning of Wings and in the end, a story of how Rabbit, our trickster figure, created a clay man who would become the first human being. 217 Rabbit is lonely and breathes life into a clay man he has created. This action of course backfires on Rabbit, and the Clay Man begins to out-trick the trickster: Rabbit‘s trick had backfired. And now his clay man was too consumed to run with him. Rabbit tried to call the clay man back, But when the clay man wouldn‘t listen Rabbit realized he‘d made a clay man with no ears. 218 Through telling this story of Rabbit, Harjo is expressing the reason for the wounding of the soul that is so prevalent in Native America, the same soul wound that Redbird suffers. Because Redbird has forgotten the stories, she needs to find salvation in those same stories, and Spirit Helper is the one to lead her there. It is only through the stories that Redbird can find fix the broken pieces. This is where the ceremony begins, and this is where it ends, with the story of Rabbit, and the story of the table: When we got there we found Rabbit chasing the clay man in the direction of the river, to the healing waters, to the stirred up depths. Clay man jumped in. The water took care of him…. See this table piled with the gifts of the earth? Everything you need is here. You can come to this table to eat, to rest, for friendship and family, and For fresh insight. Healing plants and foods can be found at this table. Stones who carry the oldest knowledge surround and uphold the table. They will always speak the truth. 219 217 See Gayle Ross‘ How Rabbit Tricked Otter and Other Stories; also for Creek Rabbit stories see Ernest Gouge‘s collection Totcv Mvcvse. 218 Wings production script, p 4. 219 Wings, p 56. 141 The audience has been invited into the ceremony with Redbird, and the audience is part of the healing process as well. Redbird goes into the audience, and gives everyone in the audience a gift from the table. This ceremony is variation on traditional Creek ceremony, and other tribes as well, in which everything is shared amongst the community as a form of healing. ―This giveaway is in honor of our ceremony tonight,‖ Redbird tells us, ―in honor of all the gifts of struggle that have been given to each of us: human, creature, plant, element, nation and star. Everyone here is part of the story. Mvto. Mvto.‖ 220 Just as Redbird finds healing in the Creek stories and the stories of her life, she gives healing to the audience as well. ―There is something for everyone,‖ Redbird tells us, and the audience is given something to take home at the end of the play, in thanksgiving for being part of Redbird‘s healing ceremony. The table is for everyone, the sense of home and place is for everyone, and that is where everyone will find healing. The kitchen table that represents home, warts and all, is indeed a birthing table, a place of safety, a place of neglect, and a bier. The space that is the source of hurt now becomes the source of healing, and through the help of the ancient spirits, through the help of the story, colonial wounds can be treated and shattered pieces are made whole again. The stories have been given as a roadmap for all of us, and we must continue to the journey to follow that roadmap home. Redbird has returned to herself through this ceremony, and she has returned home to confront the demons of her past. To make peace with her mother, and with her father‘s spirit, has allowed her to survive her near-death in the car accident, we, 220 Ibid p 58 142 the audience, are able to share that journey with her. The Creek creation story, which has been told time and time again, is once again told so that new generations of Creeks can connect to the home of the ancestors and with Spirit Helper‘s guidance, Redbird‘s return home gives her strength in a lifetime of vulnerable moments. ―This creation story,‖ Harjo writes in The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, ―lives within me and is probably the most dynamic point in the structure of my family‘s DNA.‖ 221 By virtue of being born into the world, Harjo is a reaffirmation of her family‘s identity in the Creek world, and in the outside world as well. The creation story is encoded in the DNA of her family and relatives and is remembered either slowly or at once in the retelling in family gatherings or community social dances. Harjo uses the metaphor of ceremony and continuity of ceremony to tell Redbird‘s story, as Taiakake Alfred uses the metaphor of the Mohawk condolence ceremony for a method of narrating sovereignty. Harjo is doing the same: using the story of Redbird‘s ceremony, and the unique ―Creekness‖ of that ceremony, to tell the audience that this story too. Non-Creek audience members are connected to Gunn Allen‘s ―universe of medicine‖ in that they are taking part of a ceremony, of a giveaway, as Redbird is able to pick up her splintered psyche and create herself anew. As Creeks living outside of the Nation and in the diaspora, Harjo is showing us as well that this creation story is coded in our DNA, and the narrative of sovereignty, the stories of our ancestors, is what will lead us to true self- determination. The metaphor of healing in Redbird Monawhee‘s story is that she has gone back home, back to the source of her grief and learned through the story of her ancestor 221 Harjo, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky, p 4 143 Monawhee‘s bending of time and the Deer Woman narrative that the stories are living, breathing entities that live with each retelling. Language, culture, and ceremony are the hallmarks of sovereignty; that is the political, social, and spiritual practices of a people that show them how to lead and govern themselves. In traditional societies, this is how we learned to self-governance: through the story cycles that were told again and again. Our creative work informs the political work, and Harjo, in Wings, is making the statement that to go home again is how we can all heal the wounds suffered as a cause or beginning at the space of home. The stories are coded with the political as well as the spiritual, and in order to find our way home, we must look to the stories to do so. 144 CHAPTER 4. STORIES CARRIED UPON OUR BACKS LIKE TURTLES: GAYLE ROSS AND THE BUILDING OF NATION And so began one of my favorite journeys as a storyteller – back through story after story. So many stories that, as my Creek friend Joy Harjo says, „we must carry them on our backs like turtles.‟ Back through time to that long ago day when an old man of the Susquehannock stood with a young boy looking out over the rich valley of the Potomac. Spying the surveyors coming, he turned to the boy and said, “Ah grandson, someday none of this will be yours!” From The Beaded Beltway, by Gayle Ross Osiyo. Do hi stu. It is customary among Aniyunwiya, the Real People, to introduce oneself, and in our way. Through the ways of the mothers. I am Dideyosgi Driver, a direct descendant of a Beloved Woman called Nanyehi, and she married White Owl, an Iroquois, those we call Elders. Nanyehi and White Owl had a daughter, Oconoluftee, who married a Muskogee Red Stick man, Este Melletv, or the Pointer; they had three daughters, one called Nancy Wolf, or Waya Unega; she married a Scottish trader, William Morehead; their daughter Elizabeth Morehead married Baptiste Filhiol, he was French, Cherokee, and Choctaw. Their daughter, Elizabeth Wolf Filhiol, married a half Cherokee, Peter Cornstalk MacKinnon; their daughter Elizabeth Oconoluftee married a Creek and Choctaw Freedman known only as the Driver; they had five sons and one daughter, Zilla, called Doc; Doc married a Chickasaw-Quapaw man named Averill Henry; their daughter Lisabet married a Cherokee/Muskogee man Silas Pathkiller, their daughter Laura married a man who was Choctaw from Mississippi and French, Johnny Tubbee. Laura‟s daughter Lisette married Redbird Sixkiller, who was ½ Cherokee and ½ white, their daughter Nannie married a full-blood Keetowah man, Standing Down; their daughter Betsy Down married Thomas Rhyme, who was 1/8 th Cherokee and the rest white; their daughter Lila, married Chris Goins, who was ¼ Cherokee; their daughter Christina was my mother, who married a Cherokee fullblood from Oklahoma named Joe Walker. So when folks ask me how much Cherokee I am, I tell them that story and say, there it is, you figure it out. From the play Yellow Bird, by Carolyn Dunn 145 I open with a quote from the beginning of my play, Yellow Bird, in which the character of Didyegosdi, the Storyteller, introduces herself to the audience. She gives us an example of a lineage marked by the history of the Cherokee Nation, that is the mixing of cultures that occurred when the Cherokee became known as one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes. This story is based upon the story that Cherokee storyteller Gayle Ross opens her performances with in which she expresses who she is and how she came to be as synonymous with Cherokee political and cultural history. ―When people ask me how much Indian I am,‖ Ross asks playfully, ―I tell them you figure it out.‖ Ross has succinctly given us at least one thousand years of Cherokee history in about a two minute monologue, establishing not only the Nation‘s history, but her own personal one as well. Cherokee identity can be fraught with complications. The common joke in Indian Country is how most white Americans will always claim Cherokee heritage back to a ―great-grandfather who married a Cherokee princess…‖ Ross always jokes, in her storytelling performances for Indians, about ―how she got around…‖ These stories are rooted in Cherokee history, as the tribe had mixed with non-Indians very early on during the American colonial era, and that the tribe today recognizes up to 1/164 th Cherokee blood to enroll for citizenship in the tribe. One could argue that many Cherokee citizens are more culturally non-Indian than Indian, although they fit in the legal requirements for citizenship in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. However, the Cherokee Nation‘s argument that each tribe has the sovereign right to establish its citizenship requirements has been supported in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and in legal courts across the United 146 States and in United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. As I have argued in chapter three, each native nation has the sovereign right to determine its citizenship, and these are questions that modern native nations are still wrestling with today. The Cherokee Nation, with its long history of acculturization into and resistance to colonial practices, has a unique relationship with the federal government because of it early emulation of American colonial and political practices. Many Cherokees adapted early to federal pressures to adopt American ways of governance and familial structures, which caused a deep schism in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma that still continues, on many levels, today. In this chapter, I argue that Gayle Ross embodies both the nationalist Cherokee identity in her work, yet she also embodies a very traditional, matriarchal and matrilocal identity which complicates the role of storyteller and cultural historian in the nationalist sense. She tells traditional stories so that culture will continue in the oral and literary traditions, yet resists colonialism and colonizing narrative discourse in the performance of these stories. ―The oldest form of education for we Cherokee,‖ Ross prefaces her performance at the Northeastern Oklahoma State University‘s Founder‘s Day celebration in 2009, ―is traditional stories.‖ She repeats the term ―we Cherokee‖ over and over when in performance. Her repetition of the word connects her to the oral traditions of the ancestors, of the storytellers of old, and reaffirms her identity as both Cherokee nationalist, and, standing on the grounds of the Founder‘s Day celebration and of the old Cherokee Female Seminary, an assimilationist as well. However, I argue that in her use of traditional stories, Ross the nationalist forecloses Ross the assimilationist, and what remains is the function of the story: to educate Cherokees not only in the homeland, but in the vast Cherokee diaspora as well. 147 The history of the Cherokee Nation and its determination to establish tribal sovereignty in the face of American colonialism is well documented in both colonial history of the United States and tribal histories as well. The beginnings of federal Indian law in the United States can be traced to the Marshall Trilogy, cases named after Supreme Court Justice John Marshal. Of the three cases, two cases changed the nature of tribal sovereignty in the United States by ruling that Indian tribes were not foreign nations, but rather were "domestic dependent nations." As such, both cases provided the basis for the federal protection of Indian tribes, or the federal trust relationship or responsibility. The two cases, Cherokee Nation vs. Georgia, and Worcester vs. The State of Georgia, were the advent of the trust relationship between the federal government and Indian Nations. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) . The Cherokee Nation sued the State of Georgia for passing laws and enacting policies that not only limited their sovereignty, but which were forbidden in the Constitution. The Court's decision proclaimed that Indians were neither US citizens, nor independent nations, but rather were "domestic dependent nations" whose relationship to the US "resembles that of a ward to his guardian." In this case, the federal trust responsibility was discussed for the first time. This would be the case that placed the Cherokee nation, and subsequently all Indian nations, under the jurisdiction of the federal government, not beholden to the state governments. In Worcester v. Georgia (1832) a missionary from Vermont who was working on Cherokee territory sued the State of Georgia which had arrested him, claiming that the state had no authority over him within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation. The Supreme Court, which ruled in Worchester's favor, held that state laws did 148 not extend to Indian country. Such a ruling clarified that Indian tribes were under protection of the federal government, as in Cherokee v. Georgia. Chief John Ross, who was 1/8 th Cherokee, was chief of the nation during these tumultuous pre-Removal times, and would remain chief until the Civil War. Ross was the wealthy son of a mixed blood Cherokee and Scottish mother and a full blood Scottish father, born in Alabama in the old nation, and would die in Washington D.C., as the chief in exile of a nation state that had been nearly decimated by Removal, long-standing and extremely bitter factions within the Cherokee Nation, and further loss of land and rights after the Cherokee Nation sided with the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Chief Ross would be elected to the Cherokee Constitutional Convention after Removal (his first wife, Quatie Brown, a fullblood Cherokee, would die on the Trail of Tears), and in his attempt to create a nation-state in the new national boundaries of Indian Territory, would be elected Principal Chief in 1839 by the new Cherokee government. The creation of the modern Cherokee Nation has its roots in the political relationship between the historical Cherokee Nation and the nation state that is represented by the United States of America. Duane Champagne argues in Indigenous Peoples and the Modern State, that contemporary native identities are defined as the relationship between native peoples and the modern state; contemporary native identities are not formed by native peoples and nations themselves. Traditional tribal identities are based upon clan and familial identification; the modern native identity is the only ethnic identity that is federally legislated by the federal government, and the legal definition of Indian becomes something very different than the cultural identification of Indian. While 149 the goal of the nation-state is assimilation, acculturization, and integration into the modern nation state, Champagne argues that indigenous communities have resisted those processes and continue to resist those processes because native peoples‘ rights to land and self-determined governmental structures lie outside of the theory of the formation and growth of nation-states. ―Nation-states, with their strong policies of assimilation, integration, and sometimes incorporative multicultural diversification and inclusion, ‖ Champagne argues, ―have policies and values that run counter to indigenous values and goals. This process is often called nationalism.‖ 222 The idea that native peoples and the right to self-determined rule as independent nations has been argued time and time again, and as I mentioned previously in this project, is always elusive. American Indian nations not only have unique claims to land, culture, and religious freedom that lie outside of the modern nation state parameter of inclusion, assimilation, and aculturization that has so far continued to the slew of health problems facing Indian communities today. Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Guillory Duran argued in Native American Postcolonial Psychology, that many problems facing Indian communities today, ranging from alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, larger community violence and suicide, are direct results of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) that colonizing practices have inflicted upon native peoples. 223 As I argue previously in this project, native identity formation remains outside of the nation state praxis in native communities. Native identities are formed on the basis of 222 Duane Champagne, ―Rethinking Native Relations With Contemporary Nation States‖, Indigenous Peoples and the Modern State, Alta Mira Press, 2005, p 4. 223 Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Guillory Duran, ―The Vehicle‖, Native American Post-Colonial Psychology. New York, CUNY Press, 1995. P 39-42 150 the relationship between native peoples and the ancestral landscapes native peoples have inhabited for over ten thousand years, as opposed to two hundred years of occupancy by the Euro-American political structures. The English, French, Dutch, Spanish, and later American governments practiced policies of assimilation and acculturization that were preceded by years of outright hostility and hatred when confronted by the existence of Native peoples in the United States. When the Constitution was written, it included a provision that implied federal authority over the conduct of Indian relations. Thereafter, the federal government - not state governments - was empowered to deal directly with Indian nations. This chronology is intended to trace at least five types of laws and events that have defined this ongoing relationship between the federal government and Indian nations:  Federal laws and activities intended to clarify the relationship between the US government and the various Indian nations.  US Supreme Court decisions that interpreted the parameters of the relationship between the federal government and Indian nations, especially in regard to tribal sovereignty.  Key treaties signed between delegates of the US government and Indian nations and subsequently ratified by Congress.  Major military battles fought between the US army and Indian nations.  Major Indian responses during the struggles to retain their ancestral land, as well as maintain and regain tribal sovereignty. The periods of American policy between the American government and native nations can be characterized by five periods:  1787 to 1871 - The Formative Years  1871 to 1934 - Allotment and Assimilation  1934 to 1960 - Indian Reorganization and Termination  1960 to 1979 - Indian Self-Determination  1979 to the Present - Self-Governance 151 Before and during the formative years of federal Indian policy, the federal government, through the treaty making process, established a government to government, state to state relationship with the Indian nations. Treaties were agreements between sovereign nations, and by entering into treaties with the native governments, the United States recognized the sovereignty and legitimacy of native governments. However, many of these treaties were violated by the federal government and policies of removal, allotment and assimilation further dispersed native nations from ancestral homelands into unfamiliar territories. The Cherokee Nation, since the time of Chief John Ross‘ leadership in Indian Territory, has been faced with rebuilding the Nation on several occasions in time that are relevant to the Cherokee Nation‘s development as a nation in modern times. The allotment and assimilation era saw the further dissolution of tribal sovereignty in that tribally-held lands were converted to individual ownership and land title that saw further land being taken from Indian nations and being distributed to non-Indians. During this time, Indian boarding schools became a tool of assimilation that forced tribes to turn over children to the government with the goal of further separating Indians from their languages, religions, and cultures, often times by coercion, torture, and abuse. The Indian Reorganization and Termination era of federal Indian policy saw yet another attempt to assimilate Indian peoples into the nation-state. The Meriam Report of 1928 was an attempt to deal with ―The Problem of Indian Administration‖. 224 Congress‘ response to the Report was to pass the Indian reorganization Act of 1934, which sought to place decision making and political power back with Indian nations. However, the 224 Institute for Government Research, The Problem With Indian Administration: Report Made at the Request of the Honorable Hubert Work, Secretary of the Interior, and Submitted to Him, February 21, 1928. John Hopkins University Press, 1928. 152 Secretary of the Interior, and the extension of the office, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, still had final jurisdiction over tribal economic development, governmental restructuring, and other decision making powers. The IRA also lead to the termination and relocation policies of the 1950‘s, in which tribal citizens were relocated to urban areas, specifically Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Denver, and Minneapolis/St. Paul, with promises of jobs and housing. Tribal governments lost their federal recognition during this period and were no longer eligible for federal health services, housing, education, and economic development. In exchange for small financial contributions from the federal government, many impoverished nations took the funds and were no longer recognized by the federal government as a legal American Indian tribe and this act further impoverished communities and decimated human capital needed to rebuild healthy nations. The 1960‘s and 1970‘s were a time of political upheaval for not just Indian tribes but for the entire country as well. The long history of racialization, torture, political disenfranchisement and loss of land, culture, language and religion contributed to the resurgence of tribal activism and assertion of traditional tribal identities over the definition of and ―Indian‖ identity mandated by the nation-state of the federal government. The reestablishment of political rights and the establishment of tribal sovereignty, land rights, treaty rights, and self determination became the goals of Indian activism during this period. The Cherokee Nation‘s development during these times of upheaval is well documented. Albert L. Wahrhaftig and Jane Lukens-Wahrhaftig argue in their article ―New Militants or Resurrected State?: The Five County Northeastern Oklahoma 153 Cherokee Organization‖, that the modern Cherokee Nation was reorganized into a modern nation state by mixed blood Cherokee citizens who were culturally more non- Indian (white) than Indian. 225 The Wahrhaftigs argued that the Cherokee Nation, during the Termination and reorganization Era, that the Cherokee Nation‘s modern government was founded by Cherokee citizens who had no cultural ties to the Cherokee community; that is they had no idea on how to be Cherokee: During the last quarter-century, these allied populations and institutions have created the contemporary Cherokee government. That government, staffed by legally Cherokee, long-assimilated Americans of Cherokee descent has become the center of eastern Oklahoma's power structure. 226 The Cherokee government, according to Wahrhaftig, was a government built upon a government of legal Cherokees, that is those in leadership who were legally recognized by the federal government as a Cherokee, but who were culturally white people who had Cherokee ancestry. ―The programs the Cherokee government administers are directed toward the ultimate assimilation of the culturally Cherokee population into a monoethnic 225 This article came out of Albert Wahrhaftig‘s fieldwork in which he observed and recorded the Five County Northeastern Oklahoma Cherokee Organization, a Cherokee group that came out of the red Power movement during the Civil Rights era in the 1970‘s. This article was published in The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History, edited by Duane H. King Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. 223-246 p. 226 Ibid, p 226. Interestingly enough, John Witthoft argued in ―Observations on social change among the eastern Cherokees‖, also published in King‘s edited volume, that the Eastern Band in North Carolina faced similar issues: ―One persisting threat to the well-being of the Cherokees is the continued existence of a poorly integrated class structure in which the white Cherokees, non-Cherokee businessmen, and culturally white branches of mixed families occupy an upper-class status of economic and social privilege in the total system which is the Qualla society. This class is poorly integrated into the society in the sense that most of its members show little or no commitment to the goals or welfare of Cherokee society and seem opposed to Indian values and language use.‖ 154 society.‖ 227 These Cherokee citizens, according to Wahrhaftig, exist today as a tribe that is recognized legally as an Indian nation, many of whose citizens do not identify as Indians but as white people with Indian ancestry. ―Because of peculiarities in federal legislation for enumerating Cherokees, these persons are legally recognized as Cherokees; they identify themselves as ―having Cherokee ancestry‖ (although never as ―Indians‖)…‖ 228 What then has changed since Wahrhaftig‘s fieldwork in the 1960‘s and 1970‘s? New leadership at the Cherokee Nation, whose ties to traditional communities have been documented, are attempting to rebuild the Nation, utilizing Harvard‘s John F. Kennedy School of Government model. We are now in the modern era of self determination and self-governance, in which tribes and nations are developing not only the language of sovereignty and self-governance, but the practice of it as well. They are looking to support the nations by establishing political and cultural control over land rights, treaty rights, and intellectual property rights, among others. According to the introduction of The State of Native Nations: Conditions Under U.S. Policies of Self-Determination, the Harvard project on American Indian Economic Development asserts that many native nations are actively engaged in four activities which are crucial for of nation building. The activities tribal nations are involved in are: 1) working to strengthen their institutions of governance to more effectively assert their sovereignty, 2) diversifying their economic activities to better improve their citizens‘ well-being; 3) crafting innovative social policies by drawing upon the experience of both the Indian and non-Indian worlds, and 4) 227 Ibid, 229. 228 Ibid, p 226. 155 tapping and developing their cultural resources, both traditional and emergent. 229 How are tribes addressing these four ―broad themes‖? According to the Harvard project, tribes and nations are addressing these four activities by focusing on four areas. These areas are the idea that tribes are individual, sovereign nations whose members are now actively engaged in the citizenship of their nations and strengthening forms of governance through tribal courts, constitutions, and political practices. Tribes and nations are looking to their assets and economy to further develop true self-governance. Economic development can include casinos and other tribal business development, in order to increase the wealth, income, and human capital of the nations. Social development is also a goal of the nations in self-governance, that is the ability to provide for the social welfare of the nation‘s citizens. Health care, social welfare, education, and housing programs are developed with communities‘ specific needs in mind. Finally, culture, arts and media are being looked at as a task to further develop the idea of nation building in American Indian communities: To many outsiders, ―Indian culture‖ means iconic, if not stereotyped, symbols and images: beautiful Acoma Pueblo pottery, grass dancers at Crow Fair, or a dispute over ancient human remains covered in the local newspaper… For each tribe, its specific culture encompasses a group sense of identity, more or less shared outlooks on the world, a degree of shared goals and values, and more or less shared modes of organizing community affairs. 230 While the processes of nation building are outlined in a specific manner, the cultural aspect of the process isn‘t as explicitly defined by the Harvard Project. This is perhaps 229 The State of Native Nations, Oxford University Press, 2008. P 10. 230 Ibid, pp 17-18 156 because the Project seeks to recognize the sovereignty and diversity of American Indian nations and leave the cultural aspect of building of nation to each individual nation. However, I argue that the political movement often forecloses the cultural movement, and tribes and nations must examine cultural resources to influence the political. Our cultural resources inform the political, and as I have argued elsewhere, the political and the cultural I traditional societies were not separated. Craig Womack‘s argument in Red on Red implies that Creek political thought and Creek cultural though were, and are, wholly unique in that they inform one another. The story informs the politics, and he argues that modern Creek and Cherokee writers, specifically Joy Harjo and Alexander Lawrence Posey utilized traditional stories and language to shed light upon the modern issues surrounding sovereignty and self-reliance. ―Politics, land, and story are deeply entwined entities,‖ Womack tells us. He further illustrates that while Posey, at best a complicated, very modern and very traditional Creek Indian, argued for assimilation, he also was a Creek nationalist who used his newspaper to shed light on the corruption and devastation that the Dawes Severalty, or Allotment Act, brought to the Creek Nation and the rest of the Five Civilized Tribes. ―Creek identity has several components,‖ Womack argues, ―but two of the most important ones are language and culture.‖ 231 The most important issues then, in nation building, would seem to support the language and culture initiatives as imperative in rebuilding nations after the cultural devastation of American colonial practices. The current administration of the Cherokee Nation fully supports these initiatives in order to build the Cherokee Nation now and in the future. Principal Chief Chad Smith, 231 Womack, Red on Red, p 59. 157 who has been elected to three consecutive terms of office, has been elected by tribal citizens on a platform of jobs, language, and community. 232 Smith and Deputy Chief Joe Grayson, Jr., have strong ties to the political movements of the 1960‘s and before that time. Smith‘s great grandfather was Redbird Smith, who fought Cherokee allotment at the turn of the twentieth century as Oklahoma pushed for the dissolution of tribal governments. Grayson‘s family is also actively involved with the community on the cultural level, in both the Baptist and Stomp Dance traditions. Both come from families fluent in Cherokee language and cultural practices. Although there is a large and very vocal opposition to the current Cherokee government by Cherokee citizens, specifically regarding the disenrollment of the Freedman descendants and other political hot topics, the party line is that the current administration has achieved its goals in all of its campaign promises. 233 232 Chief Smith‘s personal website states his and Deputy Chief Joe Grayson‘s platform as follows: ―Our Promise: Provide honest leadership that respects the Constitution, the Laws and Administers an Open Government. Understand the needs of our people, encourage participation and engage Cherokee communities in their government. Improve and protect essential services of the Government on behalf of the Cherokee people; Provide job opportunities and expand our economies. Preserve and promote the Culture, Heritage and Traditions.‖ (www.chadsmith.com). 233 See articles in The Cherokee Observer, an independent newspaper which has been very critical of the government of the Cherokee Nation. David Cornsilk‘s article, ―What Is Sovereignty?‖ (OpEdNews, http://www.opednews.com/articles/2/opedne_david_co_080410_what_is_sovereignty_3f.htm) argues that the Cherokee Nation (CNO, or Cherokee Nation Oklahoma) forfeited its sovereignty when it reorganized its current governmental structures under the Indian Reorganization Act and regained federal recognition in 1944. Cornsilk further alleges that Chief Smith‘s argument of tribal sovereignty when referring to the disenrollment of the Cherokee Freedman descendants- in which the CNO removed tribal citizens from its rolls- is invalid because the CNO is no longer a sovereign power. (Cherokee Observer, Blackwell, Oklahoma. www.cherokeeobserver.org, accessed February 23, 2010.) See also Larry EchoHawk‘s letter to the CNO (EchoHawk is the current head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a Pawnee attorney) in which EchoHawk states that the CNO and the United Keetowah Band (UKB), Oklahoma‘s federally recognized Cherokee bands, are not the Cherokee Nation of old but ――successors in interest‖ and said they were descended from the historical Cherokee Nation, but that neither was the original tribe.‖ (Associated Press, Indian Country Today, July 13th, 2009. Article can be accessed at http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/50644002.html) 158 As part of its modern nation building initiative, the Cherokee Nation has developed a history class for its citizens and employees. According to Mimi Jorgensen in her essay ―Getting Things Done for the Nation: The Challenge of Tribal Administration‖, Jorgensen describes the course as follows: Organized chronologically, the course encourages students to develop their own responses to various crises in Cherokee history- preventing European encroachment in 1753, responding the of the Removal Act passed by the US Congress in 1830, rebuilding the Nation in 1846, challenging the U.S. allotment policy in 1885, and coping with the Congressionally determined dissolution of the Nation in 1906--- and then compare their responses to decisions of the Cherokee leaders of the past. These comparisons have generated respect and appreciation for the long history of the Cherokee Nation- building initiatives and wisdom and ingenuity of former Cherokee leaders (155) This class has been praised by Cherokee citizens, leadership, and other tribal leaders outside of the Cherokee Nation because it encourages Cherokee citizens (and non-citizen Cherokees by blood) to have a more comprehensive understanding of the history of the nation during crisis periods. Certainly, these moments in Cherokee national history represent turning point for the nation, its citizens, and its leadership. Is there a moment in the course where the cultural autonomy, as opposed to the political autonomy, is brought into question? Where is the Cherokee worldview, the Cherokee origin myths, the legends and stories that were and are still being used to guide tribal citizens today? Robert J. Conley, a well-known Cherokee writer, historian, and storyteller, published The Cherokee Nation: A History in 2005. This extensive history was written with the endorsement of the Cherokee Nation, and Conley begins at the beginning: with the myths and legends of the Cherokee people. Conley utilizes Cherokee origin stories to refute the Bering Strait theory which has been utilized by academics and others to refute 159 indigenous claims to lands sovereignty by native peoples in the contemporary United States: The earliest immigrants, they say, came down into North America from Asia across a land bridge that formed during the ice age, linking the two continents. These people, they say, were simply wandering, i.e. nomadic, big-game hunters, and they were following game. 234 Conley cites a recorded legend in Carolina, the where many Cherokee resided in ancestral tribal lands prior to Removal, later published in 1717, that could be interpreted as supporting the Bering Strait land theory: We passed on our journey and at last found ourselves so far gone over the mountains till we lost sight of the same and went through darkness for a good space, then (saw) the sun again, and going on again we came to a country that could be inhabited. 235 Conley then goes on to cite several Cherokee legends, the first ―How the World Was Made‖ which he argues refutes the Bering Strait theory. This is what is called an ―earth diver‖ legend, in which the animals, specifically Dayuni si, the Water Beetle, dove to the bottom of the ocean and pulled up earth from underneath the water: At first the earth was flat and very wet. The animals were anxious to get down, and sent out different birds to see if it was yet dry… men came after the animals and plants. At first there was only a brother and sister until he struck her with a fish and told her to multiply… 236 ―This tale,‖ Conley argues, ―would seem to constitute a claim that the Cherokees have always been part of the old Cherokee country in what is now the southeastern part of the 234 Robert J. Conley, The Cherokee Nation: A History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. P. 1 235 Conley, citing Thornton, p 2 236 Conley, ―How The World Was Made‖, ibid, p 2-3 160 United States.‖ 237 Conley goes on to cite scholars Jeffrey Goodman and Vine Deloria, Jr., who both posit that perhaps the Bering Strait served as a bridge that encouraged migration south and north. Deloria calls the Bering Strait theory ―scholarly folklore‖ and Goodman suggests a theory modern man existed in Southern California, and that evidence suggest the migration from north America to Asia. 238 Conley uses the myths as a starting point, a beginning, of how to tell the history of the Cherokee nation. The Cherokee Nation has always lived in the ancestral homeland (before Removal) and the legends support the building of not only nation in the physical building of the landscape, the working of the land, but in the political and cultural landscape as well. Conley uses the myth ―Origin of Disease and Medicine‖, recorded from Cherokee storytellers by James Mooney in the American Bureau of Ethnology reports, to further explore the Cherokee world view 239 . This story expresses the relationship between the Cherokee people and the natural world. The story begins with the explanation that in the world of long ago, animals and humans and plants communicated with one another until the world became overrun with people. Frog tells us, ‗we must do something to check the increase of the race, or people will become so numerous that we shall be crowded from off the earth. ..‖ 240 The rest of the animals come forth to condemn humans and blame humans for the various diseases of the world that come out of the mistreatment of the 237 Ibid, p 3 238 Ibid, p 2 239 Conley, p 9-11. Originally published by the American Bureau of Ethnology Reports in 1900, Mooney would later collect his fieldwork into the classic Cherokee Myths, which is still widely referenced today by Cherokees and others. 240 Conley, p 10 161 natural world around them. Each of the animal councils determined that they would cause harm to humans, yet the plant worlds who, according to the story, were ―:friendly to man‖, agreed amongst themselves to help man and provide healing from the plight of the animal-caused diseases: Each tree, shrub, and herb, down to even grasses and mosses, agreed to furnish a cure for some one of the diseases named, and each one said, ‗I will help man when he calls upon me in need.‘ Thus came medicine, and the plants, every one of which has its use if we only knew it. …Even weeds were made for some good purpose, which we must find out for ourselves. When the doctor does not know what medicine to use for a sick man the spirit of the plant tells him. 241 Cherokee knowledge of the landscape is thus supported in the oral narrative tradition of the nation, that the knowledge of the specific space and place occupied by the People has been handed down through the generations in the form of oral narrative. The oral narrative is what connects the people to place, the nation to the particular landscape from which they are born out of. The knowledge of plants and animals from the beginning of time, from the creation stories, grounds the People in their space and place and speaks of an unbroken line that connects them to the place of which they emerged from. 241 Ibid. 162 THE CULTURE OF STORYTELLING ―One shouldn‘t be talking about the people unless one knows about the origins of the people.‖ Daryl ―Babe‖ Wilson, When the Ancestors Whispered: California Indian Stories Although Mooney recorded early western (Oklahoma) Cherokee narratives, Anna G. Kilpatrick and Jack Kilpatrick, Cherokee ethnographers, would later record stories from both the Eastern Band in North Carolina as well as the Cherokee Nation, or Western Band, in Oklahoma; and of the Kituwah Cherokee, the traditionalists that live in Oklahoma and Arkansas and also have federal recognition as a separate Cherokee band. 242 The Kilpatricks, unlike Mooney, were Cherokee (Jack a mixed-blood and Anna a fullblood and fluent speaker of the language) and according to Robert Conley in his introduction to the University of Oklahoma edition of Friends of Thunder, ―marveled at Cherokee poetics structures and devices, and delighted in Cherokee cultural traditions revealed in the texts they collected, studied, and enjoyed….yet they did not sacrifice or ignore the rules of sound scholarship.‖ 243 The Kilpatricks noted, in their own introduction to Friends of Thunder, that they were moved by the resilience of the Cherokee people--- and their bicultural competence ---to have the ability to walk in two worlds. When discussing previous scholars‘ lamentation of the end of Cherokee traditions early in the twentieth century, the Kilpatricks address one scholar‘s words nearly sixty years later, as they collected stories from a supposed ―dying culture‖: 242 Jack Kilpatrick and Anna Kilpatrick, Friends of Thunder: Folktales of the Oklahoma Cherokee, University of Oklahoma Press, 2 nd edition, 1995; The Night Has a Naked Soul: 243 Ibid, p xii. 163 Dr. ten Kate had not taken into account the amazing ability of the Cherokees to maintain an equilibrium between two opposing worlds thought even today the Cherokee businessman on the way to his country club can be wrapped in deep speculation as to the exact height of the slant eyed giant Tsuhl'gul or the correct dosage of a decoction of dalon'ust' induced for a recalcitrant kidney. Behind the television set in the cabin of his fellow tribesmen lurked the little people and the Bible and Thunder shared Cherokee reverence. 244 The Kilpatricks assure us that the Cherokee citizens interviewed are living in a very modern world, still the traditional stories, along with the Bible, as many of the informants (and many Cherokee citizens as well) are Baptists, the stories are still as real and present in their minds and hearts as they were hundreds of years ago. The stories are recorded exactly as told, and therefore live still in the oral tradition in which they originally resided, and still do today. Although many have connections to the Baptist faith and have been Baptists for many generations, the stories that reside in the oral tradition still speak to the cultural connection to the traditional Cherokee culture and way of life that preceded Christian conversion. One cannot speak of the narratives of indigenous peoples in the United States without speaking of the Oral Tradition. Paula Gunn Allen defined the Oral Tradition in American Indian societies as ―stories, songs, poems, related to native ritual traditions passed from generation to generation through retelling.‖ 245 Gunn Allen also argues in The Sacred Hoop that ritual traditions are ―rituals as sacred acts cementing relationships 244 Ibid, xv. 245 Paula Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of the Light, Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. 164 between all in the Sacred Hoop.‖ 246 The oral narratives of tribes, in general, carefully construct the sense of identity and place within tribal nations. The oral narratives speak of relationship to land, to community, and to social structures that are unique to the tribes and nations that inhabit these worlds. The cultural identifiers of the narratives construct the identity of the individual, to family, to clan, to tribe, and to nation. The relationship of belonging to not only a family but a clan and a larger tribe and a larger landscape argues for the existence of a people to a space and landscape that is solidified in that oral---and familial--- tradition. Gunn Allen‘s arguments in 1986 were against the establishment of the literary canon in American literature that had up until that point, refused to acknowledge American Indian literary traditions as part of American literature. Gunn Allen argued that this omission was racialization in action, the discounting of a peoples‘ cultural production as held up to a standard by which cultures cannot be judged because of differing world views and aesthetic. Not only was the oral tradition discounted by an outside culture that valued the written word over the oral narrative, but devalued in the eyes of the colonizing culture. Gunn Allen later argued that tribal literary traditions must be held to their own aesthetic, and cannot be judged against the aesthetic that is not Native in origin. She argued for a separate native, pan-tribal aesthetic that generalized native world views as opposed to western world views: Native American literature should be important to Americans not as a curio, an artifact of the American past that has little pertinence to an American present or future, but rather as a major tradition 246 Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston, Beacon Press, 1986, 1992. 165 that informs American writers ranging from Cotton Mather and Nathaniel Hawthorne through Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and William Faulkner to Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade Bambara, and Judy Grahn. 247 Like Robert Conley, in his introduction to The Cherokee Nation, Gunn Allen starts her narrative with a traditional story from her Laguna Pueblo mythic tradition, that of Thought Woman who created the world around her: At the center of all is woman and nothing is sacred cooked right as the Keres Indians of Laguna Pueblo say it without her blessing her thinking: In the beginning set to not go thought woman finished everything, thoughts, and the names of all things. She finished also all the languages. And then our mothers your Uretsete and Naotsete said they would make names and they would make thoughts. Thus they said. Thus they did. 248 Gunn Allen later gives an example from the Cherokee pantheon of spirits, citing Selu, the Cherokee Corn Mother. Like the Laguna Pubelo, the Cherokee are/were a matrilineal, matrilocal and, as Gunn Allen argues, a matrifocal people. Like the Laguna Pueblo, the Cherokee were/are an agricultural society whose land base were subsistence based and that subsistence was corn. Marilou Awiatka tells us in Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother‟s Wisdom, that many tribes tell origin of corn stories. ―Although the stories vary in content from tribe to tribe,‖ Awiatka begins, ―they have a spiritual base in common, which began when the People first cultivated maize from a wild grass. They perceived corn as a gift 247 Ibid, p 4. 248 Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop, p 13. 166 from the All-Mystery, the Creator, the Provider.‖ 249 In the beginning, the story goes, Creator made the earth. Then came Selu, the Corn Mother. Like the Keres Irriaku, or Yellow Woman, Selu‘s gift of corn to the People represents the connection between the Cherokee and our ancestral landscape, much like the Keres stories of the Irriaku represent the connection between Iyatiku, the creator goddess, and that of the land. Awiatka expresses Selu in the following poem: Against the downward pull, Against the falter Of your heart and mine, I offer you a gift A seed to greet the sunrise--- Ginitsi Selu, Corn, Mother of Us All, Her story. The creation of the world is Selu‘s gift, as is the sacred yellow corn given to the People that renews itself, like the creation story upon telling after telling, is reborn through each human hand that touches it…each human voice that speaks it. Myth is a very strong word to be throwing around, and a dangerous one at that in this day in age in any scholarly treatise that does not approach the study of folklore. So let me define what I mean when I say myth. Merriam Webster tells us that myth is first and foremost, a 249 Marilou Awiatka, Selu: Seeking the Corn Mother‟s Wisdom, Fulcrum Publishing, Colorado, 2 nd edition. 1994. P 9. 167 Function: noun Etymology: Greek mythos Date: 1830 1 a: a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon b: parable, allegory2 a: a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone; especially : one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society <seduced by the American myth of individualism — Orde Coombs> b: an unfounded or false notion3: a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence: the whole body of myths. 250 Scientific definition, or reasoning, seeks to invalidate myth in western empirical knowledge systems, as Conley argued in the preface of The Cherokee Nation. While Cherokee myths tell us that we have been here and did not cross a land bridge to arrive her, western empirical data tells us that we did indeed do so. Myth, therefore, in usage and in practice, has come to signify, in western traditions, a falsehood. Gunn Allen and I elsewhere have defined myth as the prose recording of a relationship between a people, their land, and the creator. 251 Myth and ritual are intrinsically related and interdependent upon one another because ritual is the reenactment or performance of a particular story that connects a people to their history, culture, language, and identity: Stories traditionally were handed down in Native life to be used as teaching tools among tribal societies. Creation myths and rituals were taught through vast oral traditions that kept culture alive and vibrant, generation to generation.... Applying the Western template to a literature based firmly and non-Western traditions steals the work's meanings, recasts it, and in a word, colonizes it. 252 250 Merriam Webster, 2009. 251 Dunn and Comfort, introduction, Through the Eye of the Deer: Aunt Lute Books, 1999. 168 In the mythos of Thought Woman, from the Keresan people, of Laguna Pueblo, there is a relationship of language to myth. When one speaks, when Thought Woman speaks, things (thoughts) become reality. The Navajo and Lakota tribes, among many others, believe in the power of words, once spoken aloud, take on a shape or life of their own. Language is always moving, taking power and life from the continued experience or breath, taku skan san, that which moves, moves. 253 As a story is told and retold again, each time it takes on new life, taking its communal power from a continued retelling that connects the story back to when it was told many generations before. Healing chants, songs/prayers combat disease is healing ceremonies such as the Beautyway ceremonies (Navajo) and the Brush Dance (Yurok, Karuk, Tolowa, Hupa). The retelling of stories, Gayle Ross tells me, is in the care and feeding of them. The stories, specifically the Cherokee stories which she tells, become a great responsibility to carry forward for the next generations who will come after us. 254 Gunn Allen defines the types of American Indian literature in The Sacred Hoop as 1) ceremonial, and 2) social. 255 Under the ceremonial category, songs and stories of healing, initiation, hunting, blessing of houses, planting, harvesting, and journeying would fall under that type; social dances and songs (Stomp Dance, Snake Dance, many 252 Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of the Light; Carolyn Dunn, ―The Trick Is Going Home: Secular Spiritualism in American Indian Women‘s Literature‖, Reading Native American Women, edited by Inez Hernandez-Avila. 253 Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of the Light. 254 Interview with Gayle Ross, January 8 th , 2010 255 The Sacred Hoop, p29 169 pow wow songs and even 49 songs) fall under the social category. These songs and ceremonies are living stories; they live because they continue to be told in what Gerald Vizenor would argue as literatures of survivance. In many native narratives, power from the spirit world, power in the natural as well as the secular world and the symbol of that power, are elements of the storytelling traditions. Symbols are instruments of power, cementing a connection between the physical world and the spirit world. A symbol is a physical aspect of spirit power. Symbols in American Indian literature represent themselves and nothing else – other than manifesting the spirit powers to the physical world. Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan, in her novel Power, expresses this idea though the voice of her protagonist, Omi: I have a strong wind inside me, is what Grandma said. A wind with eyes. They used to call it the spirit, the breath, the name we have for it is Oni. I feel lives and spirits in the woods, and I see the growing things. 256 Omi is expressing in English, the name for the Maker of Breath, or the spirit who breathed, who created the world. Omi‘s connection to the spirit is what it is---a connection that she has to the world around her, to the landscape, and to the people who she lives with and around. Omi‘s power --- her connection to the living and breathing entities in the world---comes directly from the divine, from the Maker of Breath, and there is no need to explain further where her power comes from, and what her power is a symbol of: it is power, and nothing else. When Omi speaks, when she breathes, she is recreating the creative power and spirit of the Maker of Breath, and that creative power connects her to the ―universe of medicine‖ in her world. 256 Linda Hogan, Power. WW Norton: New York, 1998. P 4 170 Other examples of symbol in native narratives are the Yellow Woman narratives I discussed earlier in this project. In her introduction to the collected Yellow Woman narratives in Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, Paula Gunn Allen discusses the significance of the yellow ears of corn, or Irriaku, and their relationship to the Pueblo people. Referencing anthropologists Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict‘s observations of the Cochiti Pueblo, Gunn Allen ―implies that the sacred and the ordinary are perceived as a seamless whole.‖ The Yellow Woman stories included here are to be read with that point in mind. Far from being arcane (though they may seem puzzling at first) loss, persecution, rescue and the relation of these to the sacred, but because the Yellow Woman stolen are Irriaku--- sacred ears of corn that link persons to our Mother, Iyetiku. The loss of these Yellow Women portends loss of rain, livelihood, and of connection between the people and the sacred place where Iyetiku lives. 257 The Irriaku, the sacred ears of corn, are actually the sacred ears of corn; at the same time, they are the Yellow Women of legend. In a world where the sacred and the secular have no divisions, the symbols are not symbols of something else, but they are what they are. In another example of symbols in American Indian narratives, Chumash poet Georgiana Valoyce Sanchez writes of a symbol of power that has its physical location in an object in ―The Dolphin Walkingstick‖: He says Sure you look for your Spirit Symbol your totem Only it‘s more a waiting Watching For its coming 257 Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, ―Cochiti and Laguna Pueblo Traditional Yellow Woman Stories‖, p 181. 171 You listen You listen for the way it Feels deep inside. 258 The passage of the symbol of her father‘s power is what Sanchez is expressing here through the power and the symbol of the actual walking stick her father carved for himself, with the symbol of the dolphin as its head. For the Chumash people of California, the dolphin, like the Yellow Women for the Pueblo people of New Mexico, and like the Cherokee Selu, Corn Mother, are an expression of the relationship between deity, land, and people. This expression is seen also in the landscape but as in the breath of the people as well. Sanchez later references a creation story of the Chumash in her poem, when Kakunupmawa, the Sun, takes pity on her children who are drowning and turns them into dolphins so that their lives will be spared. The dolphin walking stick then becomes a symbol that expresses that connection between land, people and deity, and, as Sanchez states at the end of the poem, ―They sent the dolphin to me.‖ 259 The physical symbol, the actual dolphin walking stick itself, is like the story above, given to Sanchez by her late father after his passing. The stick and the story become, as Sanchez tells is in When the Ancestors Whisper, ―the map that my father took with him on his journey.‖ Eduardo Duran and Bonnie Guillory Duran argue that women‘s roles as storytellers are unique in traditional American Indian societies. ―Since the female brings into the world the physical life of the people, the expectation has been that she also 258 ―The Dolphin Walkingstick‖, Through the Eye of the Deer: An Anthology of Native American Women Writers, Aunt Lute Books, 1999, p 167. 259 Ibid, p 169. 172 carries the psychological and spiritual well-being of the community.‖ 260 The cycles of women‘s lives, Carol Comfort and I have argued previously, follow the cycle of women‘s stories: birth, life, death, and generation through the carrying of traditions. Gunn Allen argues that women‘s stories are a symbol of women‘s power as regenerative and creative 261 . What was at one time is now oral and it is culture that lives through the written word in cultures that are scattered diasporically. Women‘s roles as storytellers – ritual as an enactment of vision- the two walk hand in hand. Without vision there is no ritual and vice versa. Myth records the vision and the ritual. Myth teaches us the transcendence of every day ordinary things and that the spirit world walks in the ordinary world. These are all inter-related – within what Gunn Allen calls the Sacred Hoop. Oral literature (myths) account for early tribal traditions. These traditions address a tribal aesthetic – a commonly held belief or reality system. As Barbara Duncan tells us, ―The Cherokee believe that stories, along with ceremonies, arts and crafts, and other traditions, help the individual and the culture to ‗stay in balance.‘ The Cherokee attribute their survival as a people, a unique culture, to their closeness to the land and their adherence to Duyukta. Duyukta is a moral code that might be roughly translated as ‗the right way,‘ ‗the right path,‘ or ‗the path of being in balance.‘‖ 262 Ask any storyteller what the most important aspect of a story is, and they will tell you something different. The relationship between the storyteller, the story, and the audience becomes of great importance. As Daryl ―Babe‖ Wilson tells us, ―One shouldn‘t be talking about the people unless one knows about the origins of the people.‖ 260 Duran and Duran, Native American Postcolonial Psychology, p 37-38. 261 Gunn Allen, Spider Woman‟s Granddaughters, introduction. 262 Barbara Duncan, Living Stories of the Cherokee, University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 173 ―As storytellers,‖ Georgiana Sanchez tells us, ―we invite the listener into a space. We transform that space in the stories, which is a whole other reality…the only map my father had [in the world] was the story his father told him years before.‖ 263 The oral stories represent the unbroken line that exists between the people of today and the Ancestors who came before. As Sanchez tells us, ―What Father taught us through his stories was that we have always kept our former way of looking at the world through our stories.‖ 264 Even though the Chumash world has been, like other native nations in the United States, decimated by disease, disenfranchisement and dispersal, the core tribal truth has remained in balance through the telling and retelling of stories, passed from elders to children, with each generation taking on the task of teaching and telling the next one. Gayle Ross is a great-great granddaughter of John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation during and after the infamous ―Trail of Tears,‖ the forced removal of many Southeastern Indians to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in the late 1830s. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1951, she grew up in Lewisville, between Dallas and Denton. Her mother was from Alabama, and her father was the son of Anne Ross, who was the daughter of Robert Bruce Ross, Chief Ross and Quatie Brown Ross‘ grandson. Her grandmother had relocated to Texas after World War II where her sister, Jenny Ross Cobb, opened the first photography studio opened by a native woman in Texas. Anne had divorced her husband, Gayle‘s grandfather and a mixed-blood Cherokee, shortly after 263 When The Ancestors Whispered. 264 ibid 174 World War II. Divorce at that time was barely heard of, especially in the South, and Anne and her son John Ross were Cherokees in the diaspora from then on. Anne Ross Piburn had come from a family of cultural historians and their connection to their famous ancestor and it is from this rich heritage that Gayle‘s storytelling springs. Anne was the first curator of one of the first Cherokee museums in Park Hill, Oklahoma, where she had returned while her son stayed in Texas with his family. Anne would stay with her son‘s family when she visited Lewisville and Gayle grew up listening to her grandmother‘s stories of the Cherokee Nation. ―We come from a long line of Cherokee assimilationists, and Cherokee nationalists,‖ Gayle says. ―My grandmother‘s stories about the Trail of Tears and of the allotment period taught me what it means to be Cherokee, just as her and my grandfather‘s involvement with the Stomp Grounds taught me what it is to be Cherokee. To me, our family histories tell us who they were and what they endured. We learn what this means through the stories.‖ 265 After her grandmother‘s death when Gayle was ten, her connection to the Cherokee community in Park Hill didn‘t end, but became less frequent. Her father, John Ross Piburn, was a commercial pilot, and so the family traveled quite a bit, and stayed in Texas. Gayle grew up in Texas during the Civil Rights movement, which helped form her cultural identity even further. She attended college at the University of Texas, and became active in the Indian student organization at UT in the 1970‘s. Trained as a journalist at UT, she later worked in radio and television, and earned her living as a copy writer for local news station in Dallas/Fort Worth. I asked Gayle how she went from working as a journalist to a storyteller, which if one really thinks about it, is not such as 265 Interview with Gayle Ross, January 8, 2010. 175 stretch, but she laughed and told me, ―in school, on career day, there wasn‘t an option for storyteller on the career education surveys… my mother said I was just born this way.‖ 266 During the past twenty years, she has become one of the most respected storytellers to emerge from the current surge of interest in this timeless art form. The function of the story in a native worldview, Ross has said, is ―stories don‘t just explain the world, they create it, such is their power.‖ 267 At the time Gayle started telling stories in performance, she reconnected with her Cherokee family in the Merle-Park Hill area when she and her husband, Reed, were traveling through and decided to stop at the Merle House Museum--- where her grandmother Anne had been curator and her cousin Bruce Ross had taken over. ―I would walk down the street in Merle,‖ Gayle said, ―and people would say, look, it‘s Anne Ross‘ granddaughter, that‘s Gayle…‖ and the long lost Ross descendant had found her place in the world. ―It was amazing to hear people say that, to belong to something,‖ Gayle said in our January 2010 interview, ―to have that connection to my grandmother was very powerful and connected me back to the Cherokee Nation.‖ 268 Ross says she never apprenticed as a storyteller in the traditional sense. She became disillusioned with the broadcast media industry. ―My family dynamics didn‘t fit the stereotype,‖ she says, referring to the formal storytelling apprenticeship that can occur in storytelling communities. Her grandmother kept the family histories; when someone would start talking about the Trail of Tears or allotment while at family gatherings, if 266 Ibid. 267 Gayle Ross, Inside the Beaded Beltway, p 15. 268 Gayle Ross interview, January 8, 2010. 176 Anne wasn‘t telling traditional stories she was setting the records straight on the family histories. ―Because of my grandmother‘s love of language, and her love of story, and her love of history, I took on her mantle. So I began studying our history, learning our family stories, learning other Cherokee stories, and I began to understand the responsibility of the caring and feeding of these stories.‖ 269 Like many Cherokees out in the diaspora, Gayle relearned about the history and traditions of the Cherokee Nation through the stories her grandmother told at family gatherings, and also through stories recorded by early anthropologists, like James Mooney, and cultural historians, like Anna and Jack Kilpatrick. The stories, for her, like many others, became to the connection to home from out in the world. Ross has appeared at most major storytelling and folk festivals in the United States and Canada, and in concert halls and theaters throughout the US and Europe, often appearing with some of today‘s finest Native American musicians and dancers. She is in demand as a lecturer and visiting artist at college campuses and she continues to mesmerize children at schools and libraries across the country. The National Council for the Traditional Arts has included Gayle in two of their touring shows, ―Master Storytellers‖ and the all-Indian show, ―From the Plains to the Pueblos.‖ She was invited by Vice President Al Gore to perform at a gala at his residence entitled ―A Taste of Tennessee‖ and was the only Native American speaker chosen by the White House to appear in the ―Millennium on the Mall‖ celebration in Washington, DC. Gayle, who has published several of her stories in illustrated books, has spoken at meetings of the 269 Ibid. 177 American Library Association, the International Reading Association, and the International Board of Books for Young People. She was a commentator in the Discovery Channel‘s award-winning documentary, ―How the West Was Lost,‖ and her stories have been featured on the National Public Radio programs ―Living on the Earth‖ and ―Mountain Stage.‖ Her publications include The Girl Who Married the Moon: Tales from Native North America and The Story of the Milky Way: A Cherokee Tale, both co-written with Abenaki storyteller Joseph Bruchac. Ross‘ other stories in print include How Rabbit Tricked Otter and Other Cherokee Trickster Stories, How Turtle's Back Was Cracked: A Traditional Cherokee Tale and Legend of the Windigo: A Tale from Native North America with Grace Lictenstein). ―Once you start telling stories and reconnecting with and moving in [Cherokee] community--- going to hog frys, Stomp Grounds, political meetings, they‘ll tell you what to do. You become beholden to the community. I was twenty-seven when I started down this path and an elder told me, ‗you‘re too young to do this.‘ I answered then as I answer now, twenty something years later, ‗I tell what I know as best I can.‘ 270 Of her role as storyteller and Cherokee ambassador, Ross has said, in true self-deprecating style: It was a hobby that got out of hand. I was telling stories once at the Cherokee Heritage Center and my mother was up with me. My mother came up with me because she was so proud that I had been invited to perform at the Heritage Center. Somebody came up and asked that same question and my mother leaned over, interrupted and said she was always that way. 271 270 Ibid. 271 Interview with Gayle Ross, January 8 th , 2010. 178 The tradition of telling stories is a longstanding family tradition for Ross, and keeps her connected to her family, to her clan, and her community. As a Cherokee in the diaspora, the connection of the stories keeps her close to family in Texas, in California, and back home in Oklahoma. She feels an affinity with her grandmother, Anne Ross Paiburn, who died when she was eight but of whom she has very fond memories as family matriarch and as storyteller. When asked about the ancestral connection of coming from a long line of storytellers and the connections established between generations, Gayle says this: I guess probably it's true. My grandmother told stories. In fact, beginning around 1916 through the early 1920's, she traveled around as a storyteller. At one point she had her own one-woman show off Broadway in New York and she told Cherokee stories, sang in Cherokee. When I came along, she was long past those days but she was the family storyteller and the family historian. I just grew up with a love of stories and a love of language. 272 In addition to being a storyteller, Gayle is a cultural historian. As she herself states, she comes from a long line of Cherokee assimilationists and Cherokee nationalists. These terms go back far in the history of the Cherokee people, in which the argument over assimilation became part of the nation‘s lexicon from the time of the American colonial era to the present. Several factions argue for assimilation of the Cherokee Nation into the western, and later American ways of life; while others argued for the sovereignty and legal right for the Cherokee Nation to exist and an independent nation. By identifying herself as both, by claiming family ties to both sides of the national argument, Ross is asserting her identity as a Cherokee, grounded in the social, historical, and cultural 272 ―About The Artist: Gayle Ross‖. Kennedy Center, Millennium Stage, March, 2003; Tina L. Hanlon, ―Gayle Ross: Cherokee Storyteller‖ Applit Bibliographies, January, 2004. http://www.ferrum.edu/applit/bibs/ross.htm 179 processes that brought the Nation to its place in space and time in the modern world. The signifier of ―assimilationist‖ and ―nationalist‖ is of great cultural importance to a modern Cherokee; it connects that person to the distant and not too distant past of Cherokee politics and cultural renewal. But what does it mean to be a nationalist in the modern world, and to be an assimilationist in the modern world? To look at Ross‘ work in the context of these two varying modes of cultural and political citizenship is to understand how the stories are woven together to form the basis of my argument that cultural citizenship should be just as privileged as political citizenship, and that the two should not be mutually exclusive as they have become in the modern history of the Nation. As Ross herself has said, the telling of stories comes with great responsibility, and that responsibility of telling the stories is to impart cultural knowledge that for whatever reason, be it acculturization or displacement or a combination of both and other varying dispersal factors, the stories and songs and ceremonies must be part of any nation building initiative because of their function as transmission of cultural knowledge. While the Nation prides itself on its nearly 200,000 enrolled citizens 273 , it is committed to providing those citizens who are culturally white a grounding in Cherokee language, culture, and tradition. The tribe has turned to Gayle Ross and her storytelling in performance to advance further its mission of revitalizing culture, language, and community. 273 Coates, None of Us Are Supposed to Be Here, Dissertation, Department of American Studies, University of New Mexico, 2002. 180 RABBIT’S BIG TRICK The body of Ross‘ published work, from her trickster tales and other traditional stories, to her new one woman show she is calling Inside the Beaded Beltway, uses these stories to connect to the ―universe of medicine‖. Although Ross, as what she calls a Cherokee nationalist, has towed the party line when it comes to privileging political citizenship over cultural citizenship, she also argues for the recognition of those with cultural ties to the community who may not be enrolled Cherokees. But it is, as I argue, the story tells us otherwise. In the traditional trickster stories, we see Rabbit pretending to be someone he is not, and in that archetype lies a warning for those who would again pretend to be something they are not. Citizenship, the stories tell us, should be maintained from the connection to the universe of medicine, and in the story lies the answer to how we should be as a people in this modern world. As former Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Wilma P. Mankiller tells us in the introduction to Ross‘ collected tales How Rabbit Tricked Otter and other Cherokee Trickster Stories, When I was a child growing up in the isolated Cherokee community of Mankiller Flats, we had no telephone, television, or other direct link to the outside world except a battery-operated radio. Like generations of Cherokees before us, we relied on storytelling to pass the cultural and historical information from generation to generation. Storytelling was also a great way for adults to entertain others, especially young people, and to teach important value lessons about honesty and personal responsibility, and the importance of sharing with others. 274 The teaching of honesty and personal responsibility is foremost in Ross‘ mind when she is traveling and telling stories. She told me that she had long wanted to collect traditional 274 Wilma P. Mankiller, Foreword, How Rabbit Tricked Otter and Other Cherokee Trickster Tales, told by Gayle Ross, illustrated by Murv Jacob. p. 5. 181 rabbit trickster tales because of her affinity with this character who is always getting himself in and out of trouble. 275 Rabbit has great responsibility to the community of the animal spirits, as the messenger who conveys information to and between the animal world, and he teaches the human world how to act, or how not to act in some cases. 276 Rabbit teaches the human world that pride is not a virtue valued in a society that is mutually dependent upon its membership to act a certain way. Mooney goes to great lengths in Myths of the Cherokee to discern the separateness of the Indian rabbit tales with the African American rabbit trickster tales. Mooney argues that the Cherokee stories, as a whole, are ―too far broken down ever to be woven together again into any long-connected origin legend, such as we find with some tribes,‖ 277 The Kilpatricks would later disagree with Mooney, citing how culture and the transmission of indigenous knowledge in Cherokee communities in both the Eastern band and Oklahoma Nation have survived intact. 278 Both the Kilpatricks and Mooney agree that Rabbit is the prominent trickster spirit in many tribal legends not only among the 275 Interview with Gayle Ross, January 8, 2010. 276 I spend considerable time in previous chapters of this project discussion Trickster characters and their roles in traditional folktales of native peoples, specifically Coyote and his/her role is southwestern American Indian folklore. In this Trickster discussion, I will focus on Rabbit as he is primarily the Trickster figure for southeastern Indian cultures. Rabbit, or Hare, appears as the Trickster figure for many indigenous cultures around the world, including Tibet, Japan, and India. (see Terri Windling‘s article The Symbolism of Rabbits and Hares, Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts, Winter 2005: http://www.endicott- studio.com/rdrm/rrRabbits3.html). Rabbit also makes his appearance in the Yoruba trickster tales in West Africa, and In North American folklore he is most notably present in Algonquin, Muskogean, Iroquoian, and other indigenous American cultures and in African American, Cajun and Creoles of color communities in Louisiana and the Creole diaspora in Texas, California, and Illinois. Interestingly, one could certainly argue that because of their mix of European, Canadian, American, American Indian and African cultures, the Creole tales bring together a unique mixing of cultures that reflect not only the racial mixing but the cultural mixing of these distinct cultures as well. 277 James Mooney, Cherokee Myths, p 232. 278 Jack F. Kilpatrick and Anna G. Kilpatrick, Friends of Thunder. Introduction 182 southeastern tribes but up and down riverways and landscapes north and south. Mooney tells us, From the prominence of the rabbit in the animal stories, as well as in those found among southern negroes, an effort has been made to establish for them a negro origin, regardless of the fact that the rabbit--- the Great White Rabbit--- is the hero-god, the trickster, and wonderworker of all tribes east of the Mississippi from Hudson Bay to the Gulf….The animal itself seems to be regarded by the Indians as the fitting type of defenseless weakness protected and made safe by alert vigilance, and with a disposition, moreover, for turning up at unexpected moments.‖ 279 Mooney goes on to record his informant Suyeta as Suyeta begins his rabbit story, ―Tsi-stu wuliga‘natatun une‘gutsatu gese‘i,‖ translated as ―Rabbit was the leader of all in mischief.‖ 280 The Kilpatricks don‘t devote much time to explaining Rabbit‘s role in Cherokee culture, but they collected many Rabbit trickster stories in Friends of Thunder. Creek and Cherokee poet Joy Harjo mentions Rabbit at the beginning of her play Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone until somebody got out of line. We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the wind. Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play with him; he was lonely in this world. So Rabbit thought to make a person. And when he blew into the mouth of that crude figure to see what would happen, the clay man stood up. Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken. The clay man obeyed. Then Rabbit showed him how to steal corn. The clay man obeyed. 279 Mooney, Cherokee Myths, 232-33. Mooney tells us Suyeta was a Baptist minister preaching to an all Indian congregation, and although he rarely dealt with Indian mythology in his sermons and other clerical duties but had what Mooney called ―a good memory and liking for rabbit stories.‖ (p 237) 280 Ibid, 233. 183 Then he showed him how to steal someone else‘s wife. The clay man obeyed. Rabbit felt important and powerful. 281 Rabbit, through his tricks, sets in motion all of the discord and disharmony that sets Harjo‘s play in motion. Suyeta‘s statement, recorded by Mooney, ―Rabbit was the leader in all mischief,‖ succinctly sums of the role of Rabbit in Cherokee culture, that he is indeed the troublemaker of all troublemakers. Gayle Ross‘ Rabbit is no different. ―How Rabbit Tricked Otter‖, Rabbit‘s pride is put to the test. ―Long ago, the animals did many of the same things people do,‖ Ross tells us. ―They especially loved to dance.‖ 282 This passage references the connection the Cherokee have to social and ceremonial dances, the cultural, clan, and familial connection to the Stomp Dance Grounds where a person comes from and is seen as part of the larger Cherokee community. Dances are an integral function of the traditional Cherokee world view. As Will West Long told anthropologists Frank Speck and Leonard Broom in Cherokee Dance and Drama, the ceremonial and social dances and songs were given to the Cherokee ―as spiritual aids in the struggle for life against an adverse animal kingdom, the agency of disease, and a menacing world of mankind.‖ 283 These dances and songs, as a conceptual unit intertwined with one another for the purpose and function of ceremony, are the community‘s response to the world around them. 281 Joy Harjo, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. Production Script, February 8, 2009. 282 Ross, How Rabbit Tricked Otter, p 13. 283 Speck and Broom, Cherokee Dance and Drama, p 5. 184 In ―How Rabbit Tricked Otter‖, the animals decide to hold a dance to honor the animal who has the most beautiful fur coat. After much deliberation, they decide that the animal to be honored will be Otter, and Rabbit, in his role as messenger to the community, is chosen to go and inform Otter of the dance in his honor. This, of course, causes jealousy, a symptom of Rabbit‘s pride of his own fur coat: ―Rabbit knew that his own fur coat was nothing special, though he was quite proud of the long, curly tail Creator had given him,‖ Ross tells us. ―Nevertheless, it made him very jealous that Otter was going to have an honor dance.‖ 284 So Rabbit, being Rabbit, decides to trick Otter and the other animals by stealing Otter‘s beautiful fur coat: ―There was only one way to do that, and that was to steal Otter‘s fur coat.‖ 285 Rabbit convinces Otter to hang up his fur coat on the journey back to the dance grounds, and Rabbit convinces Otter that fire is falling from the sky and Otter runs off and jumps into the river, leaving his coat behind. Rabbit takes Otter‘s coat, goes back to the dance grounds for the dance, and the animals find ―Otter‘s‖ new dance to be very strange and become suspicious. Bear. Otter‘s good friend, is so incensed that Rabbit would play such a mean trick on Otter that when Rabbit is discovered and runs away from the dance grounds, Bear swipes at Rabbit‘s tail, taking off the beautiful curly tail with his bear claws and leaving Rabbit with a little poof of a tail at his hind end. When the story finishes in this incarnation, we understand why Rabbit‘s tail is a little poof on his rear end, and why Otter lives on both land and river: 284 How Rabbit Tricked Otter, p 13. 285 Ibid. 185 So if you are looking for Otter‘s grandchildren, look into the rivers and lakes and streams. Because all the otters are living there still. And even now, you will see Rabbit‘s grandchildren do not have the beautiful tail that Creator gave them. All that is left is a little white puff of fur. 286 As listeners to this story, we learn that pride and dishonesty are not the attributes that we strive for in a communal world, that for every action there is a reaction, and for a negative action there will be a negative reaction. In Rabbit‘s case, the loss of his tail is in retribution for his dishonesty and jealous actions; Otter‘s love of the water was a new skill he learned and had to adapt to his new environment without his beautiful coat. Stories like these helped the Cherokees of old to learn to adapt to new environments as a tribe when we were relocated in various times of Cherokee history. They also teach us that we must learn to accept who we are as a people and as a community and strive to respect our gifts and the gifts of others. Other animals also benefit from Rabbit‘s actions. In the story ―Why Possum‘s Tail is Bare‖, Rabbit turns the tables on Possum, who also loves his long, silky, furry tail. ―Creator gave Possum a beautiful, bushy, furry tail,‖ Ross tells us: and Possum was vain about this tail. He bragged about it all the time and sang about it at every dance, until Rabbit (who didn‘t have much of a tail left since Bear pulled it off) became jealous and decided to play a trick on Possum. 287 Like Rabbit, Possum suffers from a since of pride that gets him into trouble; Rabbit himself sees that someone else who suffers from pride should be put in his/her place. Rabbit‘s job as messenger comes into play here. Rabbit, in teaching Possum a lesson, 286 How Rabbit Tricked Otter, p 17. 287 Ibid, p 19. 186 sees himself as just the person who should do so. Rabbit convinces the other animals that maybe a dance for Possum, honoring his tail, will keep him quiet in the future about this special tail everyone is tired of hearing about. Rabbit convinces Cricket, (whom Ross tells us the Cherokee name means ―barber‖) to fix Possum‘s tail for the dance. Cricket, upon Rabbit‘s instruction, shaves Possum‘s tail (unbeknownst to Possum) and ties the hair on with a red strong. When the dance convenes in the evening, Possum is singing about his fabulous tail and moves to untie the red string to show off his tail and it falls off, causing great humor to the other animals. Possum sings louder and louder about his great and beautiful tail, causing even more mirth, and when he turns to see what the animals are laughing at, he turns and sees his now ―long, red, skinny, hairless tail.‖ 288 Possum is so shocked and humiliated he falls to the ground, as if dead, which is what, Ross tells us, possums do to this day when they are surprised or frightened. Once again, Rabbit has exposed us to a certain type of justice that will happen if we exhibit too much pride over something of beauty and great value. Traditional Cherokees are taught that everything must be in balance, and that taking too much pride in oneself or one‘s appearance is not socially acceptable. We hear the story Ross tells and understand that if we act foolishly, once again there will be retribution, in order to bring things back into balance and harmony. Rabbit, having gone through the humiliation because of his own pride and jealousy, is eager to teach others the same lesson. In another story in the trickster cycle, Rabbit shows his colors as a would-be ladies‘ man. A young man, who is very handsome, is ashamed of his face and carves a very beautiful mask to wear at dances. The mask garners him quite a bit of attention from 288 Ibid, p 22. 187 seven young women, and Rabbit, who is watching the peoples‘ dance from the woods in order to learn new songs, decides he would like the attention of seven beautiful young ladies and plots to steal the young man‘s mask. He steals the mask and the young women soon find something is amiss with their friend: ―My friend,‖ said one young woman, ―what has happened to your voice? It is so high and squeaky! ―Oh,‖ said Rabbit, thinking quickly, ―I choked on a bone caught in my throat yesterday. Perhaps that is what makes my voice so scratchy.‖ 289 The young women laugh and pinch Rabbit until he ―turns back and blue all over‖ and when his mask slips sideways, they recognize his split nose and chase him away from the dance grounds. Meanwhile, the young man finds his mask where rabbit drops it and the young women treat him indifferently because they have discovered his secret. Once he puts away the mask for good, he finds that people, and his seven young lady friends, like him ―very much, just the way he was.‖ 290 Here, the young man discovers, through the intervention of Rabbit‘s backfired antics, that when he is true to himself, the community accepts him the ways he is, wearing his true face. The above story, ―Rabbit Dances With the People‖, illustrates clearly a lesson from antiquity that modern Cherokees learn from still today. Trickster stories are, according to Ross, crucial in shaping identity. She argues that Rabbit is undone by pretending to be someone he‘s not. By disguising himself as something he isn‘t, he never learns his lesson even when he is punished for his transgression against societally sanctioned norms. ―Every single Cherokee story is about being true to yourself,‖ Ross 289 ―Rabbit Dances With the People‖, How Rabbit Tricked Otter, p 73. 290 Ibid. 188 says, ―if not, you‘re not hearing what the story is saying to you.‖ 291 Like the Western Apache concept of stalking with stories that Keith Basso writes about in Wisdom Sits in Places, the trickster stories and Rabbit‘s follies follow him where he goes until he learns the lesson of the story, which he never seems to be able to do. Ross likens Rabbit‘s antics to modern Cherokee politics in the struggle between the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and other non-federally recognized Cherokee groups across the United States. 292 Ross says, ―We Cherokees are so besieged by folks who don‘t know what it means to be Cherokee- I call them the ‗Fraud Squad‘, those who represent themselves as Cherokee but aren‘t citizens of the Nation. Rabbit is like those who claim to be something that they really aren‘t.‖ Ross‘ nationalist identity, as she calls it, is part of the culture of the Cherokee Nation. ―The difference is, as a tribal citizen, I just don‘t claim to be Cherokee, but the Nation claims me as well.‖ As a nationalist, the stories teach Ross about the Cherokee historical moments of the Trail of Tears and allotment. ―These stories, the Rabbit stories, the stories of allotment and the Trail of Tears, taught me what it means to be Cherokee.‖ 293 The stories then, function the same way the Cherokee Nation‘s history class does: teaching citizens what it means to be Cherokee in the modern world. Stories connect the people back to the world of the traditional Cherokee, and the function of the 291 Interview with Gayle Ross, January 29 th , 2010. 292 It is well documented that there are many groups across the country who claim Cherokee ancestry that are not citizens of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, nor are they citizens of the Eastern Band or the UKB, the three federally recognized Cherokee bands in the United States. The Cherokee Nation agrees that many of these groups have Cherokee ancestry by blood, but asserts that they are not citizens of the Cherokee Nation and in no way speak for the Cherokee Nation. 293 Interview with Gayle Ross, January 29, 2010. 189 story remains to confirm identity in a place where, according to Cherokee anthropologist Julia Coates, ―none of us are supposed to be here.‖ 294 Ross‘ one woman show, Inside the Beaded Beltway starts with what Ross calls a story inside a story, back through story after story. So many stories that, as my Creek friend Joy Harjo says, we must carry them on our backs like turtles. Back through time to that long ago day when an old man of the Susquehannock stood with a young boy looking out over the rich valley of the Potomac. Spying the surveyors coming, he turned to the boy and said, ―Ah grandson, someday none of this will be yours!‖ 295 What is so lovely about this one woman show is that Ross the storyteller seamlessly weaves the strands of Cherokee history with Cherokee myth and legend, as well as a fond look back at the exploits of her ancestor, Chief John Ross, who lived in exile the last five years of his life in Washington D.C. as the Civil War raged on and around the Cherokee Nation in then-Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. Storytellers, those in the professional circuit that Ross travels and tells in, simply stand and tell stories, letting voice and inflection, gestures and eye contact assist in conveying their message. As she stands in front of the audience and tells the story of her ancestor and how she walked the same streets he did in Washington, D.C., one can feel the emotion in her voice when she tells of the paths she followed to be where Chief Ross once walked. The placing of tobacco on Indian graves, which she does on arrival in D.C., is mimed lovingly as she shows us how 294 Dr. Coates developed the curriculum of the Cherokee Nation‘s history class into what it is today, under the direction of Chief Smith. Her dissertation, None of us Were Supposed to Be Here, documents the production of history in the Cherokee and non-Cherokee worlds in regards to the Cherokee Nation. Currently a UC Presidents Fellow at the University of California, Davis, Coates travels the Cherokee Diaspora as a consultant and still teaches the course. 295 Gayle Ross, Inside the Beaded Beltway, p 2 190 and what was done. It is an intimate moment that Ross shares with us as her audience, which places us squarely on the gravesites with her as she honors the fallen dead of the Indian Country‘s great list of national --- and international--- heroes. Ross had been invited to perform at the Kennedy Stage in D.C. and the producer of the show was excited to have her, as, according to Ross, he told her, …‖I really want to find a way to include you in this project, but I can‘t think of any connection between Indians and DC.‖ 296 Historical moments in time and Indians in Washington are brought together on stage by Chief Ross‘ descendant. Gayle tells the story of Indian delegations from other nations coming to please their case for Indian sovereignty and land rights, but to no avail. The southeastern Indians are no exception, although we assimilated much earlier than other tribes did to American culture, thought, and education: The so-called ―Civilized Tribes‖. Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole and Creek. Faced with overwhelming pressure for their lands, these tribes produced educated, sophisticated leaders, often mixed-bloods, who could deal with the feds on an equal footing. One Washington journalist once wrote of a Cherokee delegation led by my ancestor, Chief Ross, ―They know more about American law than the Congress they were addressing‖. And I daresay they had better manners! A southern congressman started a brawl on the House floor while they were speaking because Indian Commissioner Thomas McKenney addressed them aloud as ―Gentlemen‖. 297 As Gayle Ross walks the street of Washington D.C. in the twenty first century, the irony of being a Ross descendant still wandering those streets is not lost on her. She 296 Ibid, p 1 297 Ibid, p 6 191 understands the importance of having walked the places her ancestor walked, representing the Cherokee Nation as he represented the Nation so long ago: But as I prowled the streets, the ghosts of those old time delegates would catch my attention, flitting in and out of the corners of my imagination. I found myself looking for the streets where some of those old hotels once stood, the ones where they stayed. Brown‘s Indian Queen, the Tenison, the Beveridge boarding house. I went to Congressional Cemetery to lay tobacco on the Indian graves. 298 Everything and nothing has changed in these last two hundred or so years, but what does remain is the Cherokee Nation, still resilient after all these year, even as Chief John Ross watched the supposed death knell of the Nation during the Trail of tears, during Removal, and during the Civil War. Meeting Presidents (Clinton and Bush) and other dignitaries, such as Vice President Al Gore (and performing Cherokee stories in the Gores‘ home), and General Colin Powell and his wife, Anna, Ross is moved by the generations upon generations of Indians who have visited Washington, and continue to do so. As the world rolls by and seems unaware of the presence of Indians, contemporary and historical figures, in the capitol of the United States, the Cherokee storyteller remembers all the delegations who have come and gone and remembers to lay tobacco on their graves in Arlington. Representing the nation has always been at the foremost of Ross‘ work as a storyteller. As I mentioned earlier in this project, the function of the story serves many roles, inclusive of ceremonial roles and social roles. The dances also serve these functions as well. Paula Gunn Allen tells us that the story serves as the ―universe of medicine‖, that which connects the people to their past, present, and future, all tied within 298 Ibid, p 11. 192 the landscape and their identity of the nation as intertwined within the landscape. ―There are values we prize as a people,‖ Ross says, ―we are individuals connected to the values of the larger Cherokee people. Stories of today fulfill those same functions- the events that shape who you are as a person.‖ 299 This is how Cherokee citizens should learn about their identity- through the sharing and learning of stories that remain in the oral tradition- connecting them to the ―universe of medicine.‖ ―When you learn stories,‖ Ross says, ―you accept the responsibility of the care and feeding of these stories. They are living beings, teachers. You have to learn from them yourselves.‖ This sentiment is echoed in the legend of the Cherokee rose, a story of the Trail of Tears that Ross has told many times. The story goes that along the Trail of tears, the women began to die because of the separation from their families to the old Cherokee Nation in the east, and from the harsh winter conditions in which they were forced to march to Indian Territory. The elders come together and are talking amongst themselves saying (and I quote Ross here directly in performance, ―The strength our Nation is the Cherokee women. If they do not survive, then we will not survive.‖ Representation of a nation, telling the stories of that nation is survivance in a way that has been replicated generation after generation. Stories survive by being told over and over again, whether recorded in the oral tradition or in the literary tradition. Like Chief Mankiller says in her introduction to Ross‘ collection of trickster tales, generation upon generation have learned about Cherokee history and identity through the care and feeding of stories, and these stories have resonated in an interior landscape of the teller and those listening. The cultural resource and the shaping of stories told time and time again also 299 Gayle Ross interview, January 29, 2010. 193 tells us how to be modern Cherokees in the modern world. The value lessons of the Cherokee Nation are imbedded still in the story cycles and narratives, and important lessons are gained from learning the lessons of ―honesty, personal responsibility, and the importance of sharing with others.‖ The story behind the story of the history of the Cherokee Nation needs to be told, and in order to see the Nation into the next generation, we must return to the beginning- the story of who we are and how we came to be- to guide us into who we are becoming. 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrams, David The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More Than Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Alfred, Taiaiakake G. Peace Power and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto, Oxford University Press, 1999. Allen, Chadwick Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts, Duke University Press, 2002. Allen, Paula Gunn Spider Woman's Granddaughters, Beacon Press: 1990. 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Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. Oxford University Press, New York. 1988. Getches, David and Charles F. Wilkinson, Robert A. Williams Cases and Materials On Federal Indian Law: American Casebook Series. West Publishing, 4 th Edition, 1998. Geiogamah, Hanay ―Ritual and Its Deeper Rhythms in Ceremonial Performance‖, published in American Indian Performing Arts: Critical Directions, Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center/University of California Press, 2009. Hanlon, Tina ―Gayle Ross: Cherokee Storyteller‖ Applit Bibliographies, January, 2004. http://www.ferrum.edu/applit/bibs/ross.htm Harjo, Joy How We Became Human: Poems 1975-2001. Norton, New York: 2002. Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Ceremony. Production Script, February 2009. 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University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Performativity and Performance, Routledge, London: 1995. Perdue, Theda Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Indians of the Southeast Series). Bison Books, 1999. Perdue, Theda and Michael Green, editors The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History With Documents. (2 nd edition). Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2005. Pettigrew, Dawn Karima How We Make Sense. Aunt Lute Books, 2002. Pesantubbee, Michelene E. Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico: 2005. Prucha, Francis Paul American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian 1865-1920. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. Ramsey, Jerrold Reading the Fire. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Rice, Julian Deer Women and Elk Man: The Narratives of Ella Cara Deloria, University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Ross, Gayle Inside the Beaded Beltway: A One Woman Show. Ross Productions, Fredericksburg, Texas. 2009. 202 The Girl Who Married the Moon: Tales from Native North America. Illus. S. S. Burrus [Sam Sam Burrus]. Mahwah, NJ: Troll Medallion, 1994 Dat-so-la-lee, Artisan. Illus. S. S. Burrus. Morristown, NJ: Modern Curriculum Press, 1995.. How Rabbit Tricked Otter and Other Cherokee Trickster Stories. Illus. Murv Jacobs. The Parabola Storytime Series. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. How Turtle's Back Was Cracked: A Traditional Cherokee Tale. Illus. Murv Jacobs. New York: Dial Books for Young Readers, 1995., Live at the National Storytelling Festival. Audiocassette. Fredericksburg, TX: Gayle Ross, 1990s The Witch of Goingsnake and Other Stories (1988). Recorded at Loma Ranch Studio (WorldCat). To this Day: Native American Stories. Audiocassette. Fredericksburg, TX: Gayle Ross, 1986. Recorded at Loma Ranch Studios. Ross, Gayle and Elizabeth Ellis. Twelve Moons. Audiocassette. Dallas: The Twelve Moons Storytellers, 1982. 42 min., Mixed and recorded at Loma Studios (WorldCat). Ross, Gayle and Grace Lichtenstein. Legend of the Windigo: A Tale from Native North America. Illus. Murv Jacob. New York: Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 1996.. 203 "The Skeleton Woman, As Told By Gayle Ross. Graveyard Tales. Audio cassette. Jonesborough, TN: National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling, 1984. Little Rock: August House, 1992. Live From the National Storytelling Festival Rowe, John Carlos New American Studies. (Critical American Studies Series). Duluth: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II. Oxford University Press, 2000. Solomona, Roseanna Hetare Whakaaro – Rua: A Bicompetent Approach to Social Inquiry. Master‘s Thesis, University of Western Sydney, Australia. 2004. Sanchez, Georgiana Valoyce, Daryl ―Babe‖ Wilson and Ernest Siva. When the Ancestors Whispered: California Indian Stories. A Project of the California Indian Storytellers Association. Sanchez, Georgiana Valoyce ―The Dolphin Walkingstick‖, Through the Eye of the Deer: An Anthology of Native American Women Writers, edited by Carolyn Dunn and Carol Zitzer-Comfort. Aunt Lute Books, 1999, p 167 Sandoval, Chela Methodology of the Oppressed, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 2000. Schwaller de Lubicz, R.A. Sacred Science (English translation) Inner Traditions International, Rochester, Vermont. 1982. Shulman-Lorenz, Lorene and Mary T. Watkins ―Silenced Knowings‖, paper given at the annual conference of the National Training Laboratory, Bethel, Maine, July 20, 2001 204 Silko, Leslie Marmon Ceremony. Penguin Books, New York. 1977. Storyteller. Penguin Books, New York 1981. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, 1999. Smith, Patricia Clark with Paula Gunn Allen ―Earthly Relations, Carnal Knowledge‖, printed in The Desert Is No Lady, Vera Norwood and Janice Monk, editors. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. First Edition. Speck, Frank G., Leonard Broom and Will West Long Cherokee Dance and Drama. (Civilizations of the American Indian Series). Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Stewart, R.J. Elements of Creation Myth. Longmead, UK: Element Books. 1989. Sturm, Circe Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. Berkeley: University of California, 2002. Taylor, Drew Hayden Me Funny, Toronto: Douglas and MacIntyre Publishing, 2006. ―Seeing Red: The Stoic Whiteman and Non-Native Humor‖, in Walking A Tightrope: Aboriginals and Their Representations, edited by Ute Lischke and David T. McNab. Waterloo: Ontario, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2005. Turner, Frederick Jackson ―The Significance of the Frontier in the West‖, reprinted in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, edited by John Mack Farragher, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Van Dyke, Annette ―Encounters with Deer Woman: Sexual Relations in Susan Power‘s The Grass Dancer and Louise Erdrich‘s The Antelope Wife”, Studies in American Indian Literature, Vol 15, Nos 3 & 4. p 168. 205 Vizenor, Gerald Manifest Manners: Narratives of Post-Indian Survivance, University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Warharftig, Albert L. and Jane Lukens-Wahrhaftig ―New Militants or Resurrected State?: The Five County Northeastern Oklahoma Cherokee Organization‖, The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History, edited by Duane H. King Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. 223-246 Warrior, Robert L. Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions. Duluth: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Weibel-Orlando, Joan Indian Country: L.A: Maintaining Ethnic Community in Diverse Society. University Of Illinois, 1999. 2 nd edition. Welch, James Winter in the Blood. Harper and Row, New York. 1974. Windling, Terri The Symbolism of Rabbits and Hares, Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts, Winter 2005: http://www.endicott- studio.com/rdrm/rrRabbits3.html Accessed February 12, 2010. Witthoft, John ―Observations On Social Change Among the Eastern Cherokees‖, The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History, edited by Duane H. King Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. Wolfe, Ernest G. Jr. ―Coyote: A Contrary Character‖ (unpublished paper), Department of Anthropology, UCLA. 1990. Womack, Craig Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1999. 206 APPENDIX: INTERVIEWS Interview with Arigon Starr, March 16th, 2007. Torrance, California. Interview with Joy Harjo, conducted by Carolyn Dunn, performer. Dramaturgy on Wings of Morning Light, Wings of Night Sky. Native Voices at the Autry Playwright‘s Retreat, San Diego State University School of Theatre, June 13-15, 2008. Interview with Gayle Ross, conducted by Carolyn Dunn, Fredericksburg, Texas, January 8, 2010. Interview with Paula Apimwan Tripp-Allen, Humboldt State University, Arcata, California, California Indian Conference. October, 2005. Interview with Paula Gunn Allen, conducted by Carolyn Dunn. Seal Beach, California, October 22, 1991. Interview with Gregory O‘Rourke, conducted by Carolyn Dunn, July 3 rd , 1991. Brush Dance Ceremony, Requa Village, Requa, California.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This project addresses the cultural work of nation building (political, spiritual, social) performed by narrative practices in diasporic Cherokee and Muskogee Creek communities. The overarching question of the project is: how has the concept of “home” in American Indian writing (“home” meaning a physical geography, a narrative history, and a social identity) been reconceptualized by artists in the face of widespread diasporization? I am interested in how work by Cherokee and Creek women writers, specifically Joy Harjo, Arigon Starr, and Gayle Ross, has recreated the concept of “home” as a decolonizing project of nation building within the Cherokee and Creek diasporas. The interdisciplinary fields of performance studies, literary history, American Indian Studies, gender studies, and landscape studies guide this project and its examination of poetry, storytelling, fiction, plays, and performance of the writers/artists.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Dunn, Carolyn Marie (author)

Core Title Carrying the fire home: performing nation, identity, indigenous diaspora and home in the poems, songs, and performances of Arigon Starr, Joy Harjo and Gayle Ross

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2010-08

Publication Date 08/13/2010

Defense Date 03/23/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American Indian performing arts,American Indian studies,American Indian women poets,OAI-PMH Harvest,storytelling

Place Name USA (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Handley, William R. (committee member), Lint-Sagarena, Roberto (committee member), Roman, David (committee member)

Creator Email carolynd@usc.edu,nitaishki@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3331

Unique identifier UC1453644

Identifier etd-Dunn-3709 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-379500 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3331 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Dunn-3709.pdf

Dmrecord 379500

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Dunn, Carolyn Marie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu