Eric Gary Anderson, On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial </head><body><img src="http://southernspaces.org/images/interior_r1_c1-print.gif" /> <div class="title2"> <div align="center">On Native Ground: Indigenous Presences and Countercolonial Strategies in Southern Narratives of Captivity, Removal, and Repossession</div> </div> <div class="title4"> <div align="center">Eric Gary Anderson, George Mason University </div> </div> <div class="body1" div align="center"> <a href="javascript:MM_openBrWindow('../../../contents/con_cit.htm','citation','scrollbars=yes,width=510,height=350')"> cite this page</a> | <a href="print/1a.htm" target="_blank">printable version</a> </div> <br/><br/> <div class="title3">Abstract:</div> <div class="body10"><em>This essay argues that mainstream, familiar concepts of a bordered South and a recognizable southernness, however permeable and flexible, are mostly dysfunctional when it comes to American Indian literatures. "Native southern ground" can nevertheless be located and described. For example, captivity narratives written before and during Indian removal, though narrated by Europeans or Euro-Americans, reveal non-utopian ways in which "the South" works as Native ground. From a pointedly sovereign Native perspective, contemporary Native texts such as</em> Shell Shaker<em> (2001) by LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) reaffirm what various Indians in early captivity narratives say and "say" and do as they work against the impositions of a proto-regional colonial demarcation. In radically repossessing the very experience and practice of captivity, removing it from its western generic place and casting it as primarily a tribal affair conducted on Native ground, Howe stands with various other contemporary southeastern Native writers in working to repossess homelands that they rearticulate not as "the South" but as Native ground. </em></div> <br/> <div class="title3">Essay Sections:</div> <div class="body5"><a href="1a.htm">Introduction</a> | <a href="1b.htm">Locating Native Ground in Southern Texts</a> | <a href="1c.htm">Conclusion</a> | <a href="1d.htm">Recommended Resources</a> </div> <br/> <div class="title3">Introduction:</div> <div> <div class="body9">I borrow only my title from Alfred Kazin's 1942 study <em>On Native Grounds</em>, an influential reading of modern American prose in which Kazin never, by "Native," means American Indian writing from any region of the Americas. My new book project, <em>On Native Southern Ground</em>, sets out to demonstrate that the South has long been a thriving locus of American Indian thinking and writing. I hope to supplement but also expand the field of Native Studies, which did not exist in 1942 and in which the vast majority of critical work today (including my own first book) resists regionalism but often homes in on Native writers and texts associated with particular regions, whether the American Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, or the plains. It is true that Native southern writers often choose to "talk about the South" tacitly, casting aside notions of a bounded southern region or culture area and embracing a sense of home place that they define in their own terms as Native southern ground. But this point does not adequately explain why Native and Southern Studies are such strangers. <br/> <br/> <table width="92%" border="0"> <tr> <td width="54%" height="24"><div align="left"><a href="1a-001-ss-07-egander.htm" target="_blank"><img src="images/1a-001-ss-07-egander_sm.jpg" width="300" height="186" border="0"></a></div></td> <td width="46%"><div class="body10"> <div align="center"><a href="1a-001-ss-07-egander.htm" target="_blank">Map of Major Indian Tribes <br/>in the "South," circa 1750</a></div> </div></td> </tr> </table> <br/> Neither does my next point, which is that American Indians are in no way relegated to "the South before 'the South.'" Native southern ground is not lost (or preliterate) ground, not simply a mistily nostalgic pre-southern place, situated in some other culture's bracingly chronological order and largely defined against the canonical non-Native South, the post-southern non-Native South, and the most recent manifesto-driven incarnation, the New (but still pretty much non-Native) South. Instead, I argue that the South before the South remains very much a living presence, a transcultural complex that, geographically as well as rhetorically, operates on Native ground. </div><br/> <table width="100%" border="0"> <tr> <td width="51%" rowspan="2"><div class="body9">Why, then, do Indians continue to be mostly absent from the critical and institutional conversations about southern literature? In a <a href="http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=or_jz978AdkC&oi=fnd&pg=PA3&dq=%22Maddox%22%2B%22Removals:%2BNineteenth-century%2BAmerican%2BLiterature%2Band%2Bthe%2B...%22%2B&ots=_Cio95YVPA&sig=kGYUsQQTbusmN8Ah2eGOjlBGMKk#PPA3,M1" target="_blank">1991 study</a> that comments on the relationship between Native Studies and American Studies, Lucy Maddox begins to articulate one of the major reasons why these fields—and, by extension, subfields such as Southern Studies—have not converged as richly and productively as they might: "It is still difficult . . . to find a place for the Indians in the 'civilized' texts we [i.e. non-Natives who do American Studies] produce as critics; and the alternative to finding a place there is still, it seems, removal" (178). But there are other alternatives; for one, American Indians are perfectly capable of finding places for themselves—and for non-Indians—both within and beyond the confines of academic structures. <br/> </div></td> <td width="49%"><div align="center"><a href="http://www.guilfordnative.org/images/uncpseicapr202106750.gif" target="_blank"><img src="images/1a-003-ss-07-egander_sm.jpg" width="200" height="272" border="0"></a></div></td> </tr> <tr> <td><div class="body10"> <div align="center">Conferences such as the one featured above investigate the relatively unexplored relationship between Native Studies and the American South. </div> </div></td> </tr> </table> <br/> <div class="body9">But as Maddox's observation perhaps inadvertently points up, these places are not necessarily accessible to non-Natives. For example, American Indian literature and criticism that has to do with the South often does without "the South" as an explanatory category, focusing instead on particular southeastern tribal nations or on intellectual paradigms—such as Native American literary separatism—that, for obvious reasons, do not rely on non-Native notions of regionalism. Maddox is right, in other words, to see removal as a crucial, vexing part of the institutional and intellectual problem she discusses; but more attention needs to be given to the diverse, creative, at times subversive ways in which American Indian literatures and cultures of the South devise countercolonial strategies that help them find places for themselves in relation to the South. <br/> <br/> As it turns out, American Indians have not only been made separable from the South, very much including its literature; American Indian literature of the South also makes itself both separable and inseparable from southern literature and "the South." Native theories and practices of intellectual sovereignty, self-determination, and literary separatism emphasize Native cultural identities, looking to <a href="http://www.muscogeenation-nsn.gov/" target="_blank">Muskogee Creek</a>, <a href="http://www.cherokee.org/" target="_blank">Cherokee</a>, <a href="http://www.osagetribe.com/" target="_blank">Osage</a>, and other tribal-national southern homelands and, in the process, operating as a form of strategic counter-removal. In these and other ways, this body of indigenous literary work continues to speak indigenous truth to colonial power, giving the lie to any suspicions that anti-Indian colonialism, persistent as it is, has succeeded in silencing, assimilating, speaking for, and otherwise colonizing Indians out of existence in the South, however broadly defined and whomever does the defining.</div> <br/> <div class="title3">Essay Sections:</div> <div class="body5"><a href="1a.htm">Introduction</a> | <a href="1b.htm">Locating Native Ground in Southern Texts</a> | <a href="1c.htm">Conclusion</a> | <a href="1d.htm">Recommended Resources</a> </div> <br> <div class="body6"> Published: 9 August 2007<br/> <br/> © 2007 Eric Gary Anderson and <em><a href="../../../abo_cop_sta.html">Southern Spaces</a></em> </div> <br/> </div></td> <td><img src="../../../images/spacer.gif" width="1" height="114" border="0" alt=""></td> </tr> </table> </body></html>