Conclusion:
Let me turn, finally and briefly, to a contemporary
Choctaw novel, Shell
Shaker (2001) by LeAnne
Howe. From a pointedly sovereign Native perspective, Howe both
returns to and reaffirms what various Indians in early captivity narratives
seem
to say and do as they, in effect, work against the impositions of a proto-regional
colonial demarcation. On the one hand, Howe works to decenter Indian
removal—without
repressing its lasting trauma—by thinking about it in the contexts
of indigenous historical and political engagement in multiple "Souths."
(What removal sets out to remove, among many other things, is precisely
this historical and political presence.) On the other hand, as Howe
sets
in motion a nationalist Choctaw resistance that begins in the sixteenth
century and reunifies Mississippi
Choctaws
and Oklahoma
Choctaws in the
twentieth, she recaptures the very experience and practice of captivity,
removing it from its western generic place and casting it as primarily
a tribal
affair, a concerted effort to repossess homelands that they rearticulate
not as "The South" but instead as Native ground.
What is one to make, for example, of the captivity and removal of a Durant, Oklahoma, landmark and source of civic pride: the Big Peanut? Howe details the mysterious theft of "the sacred nut," a "gray, four-foot-long heavy cast-aluminum statue" presented to the city by "a businessman who'd wanted there to be a downtown attraction that honored local peanut growers" (52). The iconic goober's origins are well known and clearly explained, and its removal is not taken lightly by local law enforcement officials, one of whom ominously intones to Isaac Billy, the brother of one of the novel's most important female characters and the editor-in-chief of a Choctaw newspaper, "Remember this: whoever steals art generally turns killer" (53).
Comic as this incident is, it functions as one relatively small plot point nestled within a larger, intricately tangled narrative that moves back and forth across centuries and connects twentieth-century Oklahoma Choctaws most explicitly with their sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Mississippi relatives and avatars. The Big Peanut turns up in the house of an elderly, Hamlet-quoting Choctaw woman who goes by various names, including Divine Sarah and Sarah Bernhardt, and acts in the movie Last Tango in Paris, but who is also the animal spirit Big Mother Porcupine. She has been alive for centuries, as she points out, and is therefore well able to connect present-day red-on-red and white-on-red Choctaw problems with analogous eighteenth-century red-on-red and white-on-red conflicts. Placed in these contexts, the miniature narrative of the Peanut's removal and captivity is an indigenous narrative; just as the stolen Peanut is housed in a Native space, so too the larger narratives that Big Mother Porcupine and LeAnne Howe tell are situated on Native textual ground that includes, contains, frames, and otherwise houses various non-Native characters (including an IRA money runner who goes by the alias James Joyce), institutions (such as the Oklahoma Historical Society), and other entities (the Mafia).
Further, as Big Mother Porcupine and LeAnne Howe's stories leapfrog back and forth between 1991 Oklahoma and 1738 Eastern District of the Choctaws (in present-day Mississippi), they leapfrog over the catastrophic traumas of the nineteenth century. Not until page 137 of this 222-page novel does the narrative directly confront and address Indian removal. The speaker is Shakbatina, a Choctaw Shell Shaker.
What is one to make, for example, of the captivity and removal of a Durant, Oklahoma, landmark and source of civic pride: the Big Peanut? Howe details the mysterious theft of "the sacred nut," a "gray, four-foot-long heavy cast-aluminum statue" presented to the city by "a businessman who'd wanted there to be a downtown attraction that honored local peanut growers" (52). The iconic goober's origins are well known and clearly explained, and its removal is not taken lightly by local law enforcement officials, one of whom ominously intones to Isaac Billy, the brother of one of the novel's most important female characters and the editor-in-chief of a Choctaw newspaper, "Remember this: whoever steals art generally turns killer" (53).
Comic as this incident is, it functions as one relatively small plot point nestled within a larger, intricately tangled narrative that moves back and forth across centuries and connects twentieth-century Oklahoma Choctaws most explicitly with their sixteenth- and eighteenth-century Mississippi relatives and avatars. The Big Peanut turns up in the house of an elderly, Hamlet-quoting Choctaw woman who goes by various names, including Divine Sarah and Sarah Bernhardt, and acts in the movie Last Tango in Paris, but who is also the animal spirit Big Mother Porcupine. She has been alive for centuries, as she points out, and is therefore well able to connect present-day red-on-red and white-on-red Choctaw problems with analogous eighteenth-century red-on-red and white-on-red conflicts. Placed in these contexts, the miniature narrative of the Peanut's removal and captivity is an indigenous narrative; just as the stolen Peanut is housed in a Native space, so too the larger narratives that Big Mother Porcupine and LeAnne Howe tell are situated on Native textual ground that includes, contains, frames, and otherwise houses various non-Native characters (including an IRA money runner who goes by the alias James Joyce), institutions (such as the Oklahoma Historical Society), and other entities (the Mafia).
Further, as Big Mother Porcupine and LeAnne Howe's stories leapfrog back and forth between 1991 Oklahoma and 1738 Eastern District of the Choctaws (in present-day Mississippi), they leapfrog over the catastrophic traumas of the nineteenth century. Not until page 137 of this 222-page novel does the narrative directly confront and address Indian removal. The speaker is Shakbatina, a Choctaw Shell Shaker.
In 1831, throngs of ragged children, my descendants' children, were forced out of Mississippi. Walking west with their stomachs in their hands, they were compelled to beg for food and water. I endured the songs they sang for the dead. There was no one left who could tell them the stories of how their grandmothers had once turned themselves into beautiful birds in order to fly to safety. There was no one who could conduct a proper funeral. No one to pick their bones, afterward. Imagine my agony.
But their sweet remains, their flesh and blood, seared stories into the land that kept account of such things. Mother Earth would exact a price. Twenty-nine years later, the white people who pushed my children out of their homelands were driven insane. Witness the destruction of their Civil War and the decades of waste and ruin that ensued. Plantation children were turned into homeless beggars who would one day birth the Ku Klux Klan. Today, their descendants drive by the Nanih Waiya, our beloved Mother Mound, with their car windows rolled up for asylum trying to drown out the ghostly screams of Choctaw children who were walked to death on the road to the new promised land. But they cannot. Now they have seen what happens when Earth and spirit and story are reunited, and we pull stars down from the sky and cause a fifty-mile prairie fire. (137-138)
Perhaps this catastrophic wound is still too fresh for words. But Shakbatina indicates, near the close of this passage, that the effort to silence and remove Choctaw children fails: Choctaws cannot be removed, let alone extinguished. Rather, as Howe's switch from first-person singular to a first-person plural pronoun signifies, she joins with Shakbatina to proclaim that Choctaws are still here "and we pull stars down from the sky and cause a fifty-mile prairie fire." This passage, situated very near the center of Shell Shaker,
leads to important questions and realizations for characters and readers of
the novel. How can American Indians, very much including American Indian writers
and the enterprises of American Indian literature and criticism, repossess
dispossessed southeastern homelands and retell the stories of and from these
home places? In what ways do indigenous people and stories take control of
their own comings and goings? Perhaps one strategy is to insist that the Trail
of Tears is one devastating and unforgettable part of a much larger story that
comes both before and after removal and affirms lasting and complicated connections
among Choctaws. Another is to undertake the cultural work of reunifying Oklahoma
and Missisippi Choctaws in Mississippi, at Nanih
Waiya, which Shell Shaker
does, in ways that powerfully underscore the presence of Native ground, in
both physical and textual manifestations.
All in all, "the Native American South" is ironically being radically repossessed as well as redefined by Indian writers such as Howe, in ways that pressure and even expunge the received term "southern" as well as the interestingly loaded "before" and "after" formulations applied to historical concepts of the "South." Native southern ground can be as elusive as a captivity narrative without a captivity—or without a self-determined Native narrative perspective or any sort of unmediated or even less mediated Native textual ground. And when Native stories about Native southern places are mostly absent, or at least inaccessible to me, is there any way that I can "claim" Native southern ground without taking it away again, in another act of colonialism? I am not temperamentally inclined to be that pessimistic, and Joy Harjo, in her poem "New Orleans," does stay with the present tense when she says that "There are voices buried in the Mississippi/mud. There are ancestors and future children/buried beneath the currents stirred up by/pleasure boats going up and down./There are stories here made of memory" (43). But Native southern ground is also these buried voices, wreckage, ruins, trace memories, maybe the "Indian" name of a city or a river or maybe not even that. For these and other reasons I also want to be mindful of Robert Warrior's cautions against optimistic notions and practices of "inclusion" and his call for a Native American studies that has "a provocative presence in American studies, challenging old and new orthodoxies and demanding attention to the still-present realities of the foundational history of this continent" (686). I agree, and would only add that I would like American and Southern Studies to reimagine their own provocative presences and absences within Native Studies, to rethink—really rethink—the tenets and governing assumptions of these disciplinary "regions," and to be mindful of their own non-Nativeness, the ways in which they remain settlers, assuming a southern sense of home but at the same time remaining, even today, far from home on living Native ground.
All in all, "the Native American South" is ironically being radically repossessed as well as redefined by Indian writers such as Howe, in ways that pressure and even expunge the received term "southern" as well as the interestingly loaded "before" and "after" formulations applied to historical concepts of the "South." Native southern ground can be as elusive as a captivity narrative without a captivity—or without a self-determined Native narrative perspective or any sort of unmediated or even less mediated Native textual ground. And when Native stories about Native southern places are mostly absent, or at least inaccessible to me, is there any way that I can "claim" Native southern ground without taking it away again, in another act of colonialism? I am not temperamentally inclined to be that pessimistic, and Joy Harjo, in her poem "New Orleans," does stay with the present tense when she says that "There are voices buried in the Mississippi/mud. There are ancestors and future children/buried beneath the currents stirred up by/pleasure boats going up and down./There are stories here made of memory" (43). But Native southern ground is also these buried voices, wreckage, ruins, trace memories, maybe the "Indian" name of a city or a river or maybe not even that. For these and other reasons I also want to be mindful of Robert Warrior's cautions against optimistic notions and practices of "inclusion" and his call for a Native American studies that has "a provocative presence in American studies, challenging old and new orthodoxies and demanding attention to the still-present realities of the foundational history of this continent" (686). I agree, and would only add that I would like American and Southern Studies to reimagine their own provocative presences and absences within Native Studies, to rethink—really rethink—the tenets and governing assumptions of these disciplinary "regions," and to be mindful of their own non-Nativeness, the ways in which they remain settlers, assuming a southern sense of home but at the same time remaining, even today, far from home on living Native ground.
 |
 |
 |
Contemporary Native authors, including LeAnne Howe,
Joy Harjo, and Stephen Graham Jones, craft new visions of Native
ground
by rethinking the traditional histories and geographies of the American
South.
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About the Author:
Eric Gary Anderson is associate professor of English
at George Mason University, where he teaches American Indian, southern,
and multiethnic American literatures.
He is the author of American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts
and Dispositions (University of Texas Press, 1999) as well as of numerous
essays in books such as Faulkner and the Ecology of the South (University
Press of Mississippi, 2005), Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary
American Indian Poetry
(University of Arizona Press, 2003), and South to a New Place: Region,
Literature, Culture
(Louisiana State University Press, 2002). His recent and forthcoming work
includes an article on narratives of the Atlanta child murders (in PMLA),
a piece on Black Hawk (in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance),
essays on the intersections of Native and Southern Studies (in Mississippi
Quarterly
and American Literature), and a book tentatively entitled On
Native Southern Ground.
Essay Sections:
