By E. Dianne Bechtel, University of New Mexico

Abstract

This article is a controversial view of the ethnic political status of Native American Indians in current American literary criticism. It questions popular and politically correct multiculturalism and points to it as a tool in impeding the literary, and by extension, the political self-determination of Native Americans in the academic arena. It argues for essentialism as a tool in establishing a political presence that resists institutional attitudes and proscriptions, which ultimately benefit the status quo. The conference article generated much interest at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association & American Culture Association, February 11, 2006, on Native/Indigenous Studies, panel #430: Native American Lit III: Early American Indian Literature: New Directions and New Insights. The article was taken from a longer paper entitled “Meta-Politics in Native American Literature: The Real and the Imagined Politics of Ramona.”

A question we fear, but should discuss, one that is endemically ignored in the politically correct Untied States, is whether or not the current notion of “race” and its historic oppression and negative construction forces a positive construction of race off the playing field prematurely and unfairly; and more importantly to point out within this context the imperious act of silencing opposition through the reductive label or classification of the self-determining acts of groups as “essentialism.” This stance reinscribes the historical wish of assimilation in which a group’s efforts to articulate their own subjectivity within important discourses are effectively erased. The theoretical claim of race construction as reductive essentialism is itself a form of essentialism that closes off the crucial standpoints for articulating a positive formation of race or ethnic awareness, which is a necessary ingredient in constructing the healthy self-image of both individual and culture. The removal of cultural complexity by negating race reifies nineteenth century rhetorical activism which absorbs resistance. This may nurture the popular multicultural atmosphere, but it robs unique identity with a peculiar double move of trying to preserve it as museum piece.

Most defenders of the Indians’ right to exist in the nineteenth century could imagine no alternative solution to the perceived “Indian Problem” but assimilation. Assimilation, an antiseptic word for cultural extinction, did not recognize the Indian’s right to unique cultural survival or peaceful coexistence. Political writers and social reformers who claimed to speak for the natives during the height of nineteenth-century Indian resistance did so with methods and results that actually revealed the rhetorical supremacy of white speakers. Reformers like Helen Hunt Jackson whose objectives were to advocate for the protection of the Indians in the division of tribal lands, nevertheless asserted a supreme guardianship in which the control of native representation was assumed. With its roots in the greater good, such advocacy multiplied white hegemony and kept political control and self-determination from natives. This may have been the only solution at the time for a conquered populace unaccustomed to white European economic and political ambitions, but it did set a precedent in which White Anglo hegemony could continue to entrench itself in native matters, a precedent in which colonizing hegemony would multiply for all the “right” reasons and thus would not recognize itself as such. The positive model of rhetorical strategy and native representation, as articulated by Whites, did not reveal or represent the Indian so much as it revealed White primacy based on White social, moral, and religious identity.

We find ourselves more than a hundred years later, as we study Native American Literature, repeating the same hegemonic representations, rules of exclusion, the same proscriptions of obliteration, however, with different terminologies, more sincere sympathy, and more rhetorical authority sanctioned by historical racisms. The new academic theories about multiculturalism, amorphous hybridity, i.e., “there are many ways to be Indian,” and the negation of “authenticity” by use of the master’s language, and the pressure against “essentializing,” remove all viable roads to an expressed particular identity and ironically represent that old tragic wish—vanish. But how does the native and native discourse surmount the current and popular theoretical models that negate the essential identity needed for self-actualization, for the assertion of sovereignty, especially for the “brown” Indian, when there is no pan-Indian unity, no stable subject, as they say. Two things need to occur: admission that forced assimilation is still taking place in modern times and recognition of a real and unique native rhetorical voice that is not White-mediated and that does not reflect White hegemony. As simple as it sounds, this is nearly an insurmountable task, but one that must begin with an interrogation of the seemingly common-sense rules that keep a serious Native discourse neutralized.

The force of the “new” assimilation or multiculturalism is itself essentialist and reductive at core, demanding homogeneity, which ignores the complex and troubled issues of brown traditional people dealing with the inroads of white phenotypes and new social constructs. For many of these people, there is a strong need to articulate an essential identity. As many feminist scholars have pointed out, marginalized people must challenge the imposed intellectual definitional sophistries to dismantle the hegemonic advantage. According to Patricia Hill Collins, speaking on the politics of empowerment for black women, hegemonic order seeks the abandonment of group distinction and such imposition of “new and enlightened” understanding proceeds directly from Anglocentric dominance. “The significance of the hegemonic domain of power lies in its ability to shape consciousness via the manipulation of ideas, images, symbols, and ideologies” (285), hence the theoretical language of color-blindness, munificent multiculturalism, and the necessary debarment of essentialism. These strategic definitions inscribe the controlling language of current hegemonic order in racial or ethnic matters in the United States. However, a group’s self-definition, its social and political subjectivity, must rely on the articulation of essence for its resistance and reclamation of power. Declaring such as imaginary is reminiscent of nineteenth-century assimilation policy, in which no alternative stance to White order was permitted. The mostly unquestioned acceptance of dominant ideology in the applications of theory in American Indian ethnic politics and literature, today, very nearly parrot the assimilationist mandate.

According to Robert Allen Warrior, an intellectual sovereignty (as practiced by Native poets, for example) must be developed to achieve an American Indian critical study, i.e., a clearly self-defined category of epistemology and discourse.

As many of the poets find their work continuous with, but not circumscribed by, Native traditions of storytelling or ceremonial chanting, we can find the work of criticism continuous with Native traditions of deliberation and decision making. Holding the various factors sovereignty, tradition, community, process and so on in tension while attempting to understand the role of critics in an American Indian future is of crucial importance. An intellectual and critical praxis in which we focus on such tensions, differences, and processes confronts us with the material reality American Indian people face in the struggle for self-determination. (117-18)

Warrior defines essence as “material reality” even though he refers more particularly to the intellectual realm. This is no accident. There is a long record of “material reality,” of lived and thought self–representation, of “Indian authored” literature based in the cultural and political reality they lived. Natives dictated or wrote letters, appeals and petitions, essays, personal histories, accounts of oral histories and cultural practices. In essence, there is most definitely an Indian intellectual tradition of self-representation, of coming to terms with conquest, and a call for doing what must be done to survive culturally and to assert identity. Thus, Native Americans became racially-aware, accepted or challenged land allotment for better or worse, and aligned with the prevailing Western paradigms to assert position, presence, and a stable subjectivity. While these new constructions of self-awareness and race-awareness changed Native Americans, I argue that they were nevertheless desirous of self-determination based on their ethnicities, unique cultures, and life ways. We call such awareness “racial identity.” Today this kind of categorizing is considered wrong-headed and simplistic essentialism based on imaginary constructs.

So, where do the separate rhetorical goals and ideologies of Whites who represent Indians and Native Americans who represent themselves in literature meet today? I argue that they do not. For to assert a legacy of particular identity, historical presence and cultural survival would not, and in praxis does not, result in the language of the imaginary. Race as an ideological and political construction persistently resists nonexistence, absolute assimilation, or universality and plays out in the tangible world despite indoctrination to the contrary. Racialization as Howard Winant calls it, can serve as a panethnic bloc when it becomes necessary to mobilize socially and politically. Winant observes, “inclusionary and exclusionary politics are involved in panethnicity as racial and ethnic boundaries and definitions are contested…Panethnicity will continue to be an enduring feature of political life as we enter the next century” (61). As each side of the theoretical and political debate about race and essentialism asserts its particular point of view, each strategically includes and excludes the elements of their choosing. It is interesting to note that the dominant culture, with its undisputed control of political and theoretical institutional programming, insists upon universality or pluralism “the many ways of being” to forcefully assert the non-existence of “race,” while the other most often insists upon unique racial identity.

The insistent argument for the abandonment of race awareness (or the positive way of being raced) works to further entrench White Euro-Anglo expansionist thought. In other words, the dominant ideology of universalism, pluralism, or multiculturalism (whatever you want to call it) is rooted in a different goal than the good a raceless society can achieve. The seemingly beneficent theoretical stance against raced awareness subsumes cultures, weakens their claims, and relegates difference to the ethnographer’s study or the museum curator’s display. These are the undeniable signs of continued conquest which invisibly repeat the historical benevolence of the nineteenth-century do-gooders working on behalf of hegemonic order not the interests or needs of the indigenous.

White primacy is the subtle operator in beneficent ideological professing about race—a self-satisfaction, which can only come from the primary position of goodness. Goodness and a correct sounding rhetoric about racism reinforce White superiority. The modern imperative of multiculturalism follows the traces of nineteenth-century political rhetoric in the lives of American Natives, their political status, and their very representations in American culture—from law, to ethnographies, to literature—they are still the wards of Anglocentric control. One need only look at the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the current laws concerning the real status of Indian lands and their Congressional oversight to see the reality of continued covert and negatively-raced treatment of people that is allowed under federal or institutional guidelines when matters require dominion—a true multiculturalism or a non-interested political racelessness is no longer the defining referent. The rule against the essentialism of self-representation is achieving the same political results in the intellectual arena.

White classification in the brown native’s most important battles of land rights and racial identity are constantly replayed in American culture forcing us to unwisely revisit the same arguments and standards that historically defined Indianness for white purposes of classification. We end up including White writers and White thought and White hybridity reducing the unique standpoint of cultural resistance and experience of the brown-identified Indian who cannot rely oh the privileged status of the right skin color. Beneficent multiculturalism seeks to mix and blur these lines. In other words, we repeat the historical acts of dominance and theft of territory with our modern classifications and inclusions of White discourse in Native American literature. Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona, for example, qualifies as Native American literature in many Native American studies because it undertakes to represent Indians. But the strange reality is that it actually represents White hegemony with White maternal prescriptions for Indians. The nineteenth-century judgments, at base, serve American Indian policy and proceed from White Anglo Saxon politics. Ironically, we are forced to invoke the blood quantum to place Helen Hunt Jackson’s work where it belongs, in White American literary discourse just as American Indians were historically forced by white encroachment to accept such a system to protect their remaining land rights. Literature is the new battlefield in the issue of sovereignty.

Well-intenioned as multiculturalism, hybrid unity, and utopian dreams of racial unity may be, such a stance is harmful to American Indian assertion of identity. With its emphasis on homogenous inclusion and its proscriptions for eradication of race issues based on historical racisms, segregations, and documented injustices, our modern day rhetoric does not sound very different from Hunt Jackson’s nineteenth-century appeals to protect “her” beloved Indians and it is just as unrealistic and lacking in depth. Under the sign of unity and the rejection of “race” as an imagined construct, we dilute or deny the distinctiveness of ethnicity and cultural identity, which taken together we call race. Racial identity and its politics must be asserted in order to culturally self-determine the survival of unique peoples and their unimpeded assertion of thoughts and rhetorics. We cannot rely on a theoretical hybrid unity to do this work. It does not. As has been historically demonstrated, cultures and their relics can be appropriated without understanding. Their ideas and icons can be classified and put on display, so the force of self-determination cannot reside in cultural iconic information alone. It is the ethnic or raced essence, the lived experience that gives any culture its gravity.

In presenting the argument of indigenous peoples worldwide, Chadwick Allen discusses the formation of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP) in terms of the need for Native discourses to be separate from the “occupation” and control of white ideas and classifications (15). While Allen rejects a purely racially based cultural self-assertion, and for the very good reasons of linguistic, cultural, and genetic differences, he is right when he says that “Despite the elaborate theorizing of post-colonialists and multiculturalists, the treaty paradigm [at least] requires a level of essentialism, indigenous peoples constitute a clear border between the signers of treaties” (220). Allen argues for the moral rather than taxonomic as the most important and critical thrust of indigenous claims (211), but here is where an exclusively logical and objective construction of cultural differentiation breaks down. Without its taxonomic or racial base the “moral thrust” has no imperative referent—with such a non-threatening stance no redress of ancient wrongs or serious recognition of current political agency becomes necessary. This automatically protects the interests of the status quo, and can lead to a lack of introspection needed for real understanding and acceptance of diversity.

The battle over indigenous identity and cultural space in Native American literature is one of the few places left to assert a particular political identity. However, our theoretical insistence upon the language of erasure, with concepts that privilege multicultural unity and dismiss the standpoint of racial identity as only imaginary threatens to silence the resistance discourses of cultural “others,” and to control or dilute other modes of indigenous expression. Scholars like Chadwick Allen and Patricia Hill Collins recognize the need for essentialist markers to articulate ethno-political standpoints¹. Specific cultural knowledge and historical experience reside in the body politic and as such can be equated with psychic and political territory. Racial warfare and subjugation of the American Indian has continued into the realm of the theoretical and this is precisely where no territory should be ceded. To resist the continued status of wards and objects to be controlled or studied, whose production and artifacts are doubted or put on display for entertainment rather than taken for ethnopolitical assertiveness, the American Indian must claim the subject position in the rhetorical realm, and this struggle to assert agency cannot occur without the group identity, the standpoint of race or essence.

In his essay, “The Politics of Recognition,” Charles Taylor rightly observes that such counter privileging can result in the ironic and illogical pattern of reverse discrimination, thereby perpetuating the very thing the “other” wishes to remedy or escape. What Taylor and most scholars in agreement with multiculturalism fail to consider, quite possibly because they are subconsciously in alignment with the dominant discourse, is that the politics of “others” are not based solely in the emotional need for equal respect and recognition, but possibly in something far more important, the need to politically survive. Thus, recognition of a positively raced assertion of identity requires not simply a shift of position for the traditionally-defined subordinate “other.” Rather it requires a shift of position for the so-called dominant in which the active language and actual maintenance of such positional identity is recognized and given up. No such argument has ever been taken seriously because, politically, White America is not finished with the project of manifest destiny and the never-ending work of maintaining conquest.

Race classification as a useful tool is strategically put into play by the dominant culture for the purposes of social, political, and economic statistical quantification. It is no less a useful frame of reference when others want to use it for the similarly useful purposes of self-definition or ethnoploitics, but here is precisely where it becomes problematic, impolitic, and evidence of simplistic binary construction. To control the gates of intellectual production, to propagate a positive ethnic and political self-representation, to challenge the accepted and respected dominant paradigms, American Indians and all marginalized people must boldly articulate and insist upon “essence.” For the essence of American Indian life is not based in any universal or White mediated experience of reservation life, Indian schooling, or forced assimilation. Positively articulated perspectives of ethnicity and culture are the building blocks of healthy self-image, racial equality, and sovereignty. We cannot skip this step in the healing of relations, in the road to true multicultural tolerance. The self-determination of Native America on its own ethnic/racial and political terms without White interference must be recognized.

Notes

1.Standpoint theory postulates that the marginalized groups or “others” place themselves at the center of analysis to understand and share situated knowledge without relinquishing the uniqueness of their position or essence. According to Collins, Because standpoints are situated in, reflect, and help shape unjust power relations, standpoints are not static. See Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice pp.201-28.