The Ancient Way of the Feminist

While trying to read Twilight of the Elites is no fun, I'm enjoying Scott Richard Lyons's X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (University of Minnesota Press, 2010).  Lyons, who is Ojebwe/Dakota, is assistant professor of English at Syracuse University.  Though his thinking is informed by postmodernism among other approaches, he writes accessibly, and he actually uses postmodernism.  Ever since I began reading such writers -- including some prominent ones -- in the eighties, I've noticed that many of them announce their postmodern deconstructive allegiances in their theoretical introductions, but when they get down to business they fall right back into older, simpler modes. Lyons actually works on the assumption that identities are unstable, for example, and that concepts like sovereignty "have to be claimed in order to contest or revise them (136).  People who are afraid that rejecting foundations or absolutes means you can't contest or revise standards might want to read Lyons and see how it's done.

But even better, I enjoy Lyons because he generally agrees with me.  This is a pleasure I first encountered when I was researching the New Testament and early Christianity thirty years ago: after wading through hundreds of pages by scholars whose conclusions (as far as I could tell) didn't follow from their evidence or arguments, I'd come upon a scholar who criticized those conclusions for the same faults I saw, and who at least gestured toward possibilities I'd seen, but which were ruled invalid out of hand by most scholars.  Of course this didn't necessarily mean that I, or they, were right.  What it meant was that a person could be a trained professional and reach the same conclusions I did.  It could even indicate that some of the standard conclusions, which most scholars seemed to consider certain, were at least debatable.  The reason they weren't debated had more to do with the faith commitments of the scholars involved -- until recently most professional Bible scholars were believers, and often clergy -- than with the strengths or weaknesses of the arguments.  I'm willing to be the only person who holds a certain position if necessary, but I'm enough of a social animal to take comfort from knowing that there are other people who hold it too.

Analogously, then, I take heart from Lyons's differences with some of his fellow Indians, including academics.  He disagrees with Craig Womack, for example, in much the same terms I do, though I don't assume that Lyons would agree with all of my criticisms.  So my disagreements with Womack can't be explained away as the result of my not being Indian, since Lyons, who is Indian, has similar disagreements.  Again: I might still be wrong; so might Lyons.  But we can't be dismissed with ad hominems; our arguments must be dealt with on their merits.

Lyons also has some useful anecdotes:

I am reminded now of several arguments I had as an instructor at Leech Lake Tribal College with culture cops who wanted to shut down our science programs because they taught evolution. "Nothing in our oral traditions says that we came down from trees." Science was considered suspect because its origins lay outside an Ojibwe epistemology; because the latter was deemed suspect and pure, it had to be protected from contamination. My side eventually won the day, though not (as one might expect) through our claim that we needed to teach science to produce more local doctors and nurses. It was only after we successfully argued that our clan origin story could be read as a kind of proto-evolutionary theory that the culture cops backed off [96].

I'd been wondering what Indian traditionalists (or Indian Christians, for that matter) think about Darwin. "Culture cops" are cultural purists: "enthusiastic reclaimers of culture, often young, male, and educated, frequently with urban roots, who straddle a fine line between support and condemnation in the name of cultural revival" (76).  Note "educated": as Lyons says later, they "try to resist Western modernity and the 'white world' by employing discourses that are themselves rather Western, modern, and 'white' in character' (96).

Lyons distinguishes between culture cops and elders, who he says tend to be much less rigid.  He also compares culture cops to "fundamentalists," which is ironic because what is fundamentalist in this story is reinterpreting the clan origin story to reconcile it with evolutionary theory. Fundamentalists don't take sacred texts literally, as is often said: they consider them inerrant, free from error. To keep error out, you need a lot of very non-literal interpretation.

In a discussion of Native American nationalism, Lyons discusses the First Nations Canadian scholar Taiaiake Alfred, whose three books on reviving Native culture have been very influential.  Here's part of what Lyons (who largely approves of Alfred's work) has to say. 

First those negative legacies [of colonialism] must be transcended: "People must be made whole and strong and real again before they can embark on a larger struggle" ... This is not really an individual pursuit so much as a community project of "warriors" empowering each other.  Alfred wants to witness "one-to-one mentoring, face-to-face interaction, and small-group dialogue to effect the regeneration of our minds, bodies, and spirits.  This is the ancient way of the warrior" ... Of course, this was also the ancient way of second-wave feminists, who called it "consciousness raising," but there are traditional Indian equivalents to what he describes: talking circles, sweat lodges, vision quests, and other such occasions for dialogue and introspection ... [137]

"Warriors."  Sigh.  Warriors aren't an ideal for any culture: they're parasites who run a protection racket.  Pay me, give me your daughters and the best food, and I'll protect you from the guys like me in the next town. (Just between you and me, I feel much more kinship with them than I do with you civilians.)  I wonder what place Alfred has in his regenerated Native societies, not just for women, but for non-warrior men.  No, we can't all be warriors, any more than we can all be Superbowl champs: the guy at the top of the pyramid is held up by everybody under him. Will women be allowed into the talking circles, the sweat lodges, the vision quests, or will they be expected to chew the hides, cook the meals, and nurse the wounded?  I don't think many of today's Native women will go along with that, any more than their distant foremothers would have.

Lyons also points out the "chicken-or-egg dilemma" in Alfred's prescription: "we could just as well argue that strong sovereign nations would produce cultural revitalization" 138), an argument with which I'm in sympathy.  So, as you can see, I'm enjoying myself greatly as I read X-Marks.  But it's not just an echo chamber in which I get my own pet ideas bouncing back endowed with academic authority: Lyons also traces out difficulties in political concepts like "culture," "nation," and "race," among others, going places I haven't gone.  I'm learning as well as having my prejudices stroked.  If I weren't, I wouldn't enjoy the book as much.

Re-invented Traditions: Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing

Before I criticize Drew Hayden Taylor's anthology Me Sexy any more, I want to praise the best piece in it, the final one, "First Wives' Club: Salish Style" by Lee Maracle.  For one thing, the writing feels embodied.  Despite all the prattle by the other writers about how First Nations don't apply a body/spirit divide to sex, most of them write about sex like white people.  (Not that I'm in any position to point fingers there: I am a white person.)  In a way, that's only to be expected.  Against all the queer-theory academics who say they're gonna write about queer embodiment (following Foucault's exhortation to think and write about bodies and pleasures -- which, weirdly, he seemed to think were somehow pre-theoretical -- writing doesn't produce a body; at best it's a projection of a body.  Writing isn't pleasure (though the act of writing, like reading, can be pleasurable): it's a shadow or at best an evocation of pleasure.  I think that instead of trying to make writing less intangible, we should recognize it for what it is and rejoice that we have such a useful tool.  No matter what theoretical tools you apply, though, writing about bodies and pleasures produces only more texts.  The best cookbook, with the most delicious-looking full-color photographic illustrations, still won't nourish you.  In the end you have to set aside representations and cook and eat, or make love.

Still, some writers give me the impression of not trying to pretend they don't have bodies, and their writing evokes bodies and pleasures in such a way that it seems fair to call it embodied.  Most of the writers who bring this off are female; I'm thinking of Joan Nestle, for one.  Lee Maracle is another, maybe because (like Nestle and the other writers I'm thinking of) she's older, apparently about my age.  Her sense of humor, which also stands out in the collection, helps too.  Try this anecdote from her contribution to Me Sexy:

As a young person my chiefs asked me to organize the youth and encourage them to attend the first all chiefs’ conference in Kamloops, B.C. So I called a youth gathering to be held at the local Indian Friendship Centre in Vancouver, notified all the young people I knew and made a presentation on behalf of the not-quite-fully-formed Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs. It was 1968, the year the skimpy, sexy T-shirt came on the scene for young women. I was wearing one. Along with my skimpy T-shirt I had on a pretty snug pair of jeans and no bra (it was the sixties). An elder from Saskatchewan named Ernest Tatoosis came up after my talk and complimented my speech. After a pregnant pause he added, staring at my cleavage (small though it was), “But maybe you should dress more traditional,” and he pointed at my shirt. I knew what he meant. He was well known for scolding women for wearing sexy clothing. “Real Indian women wore dresses, long dresses, covering their legs and buttoned to the neck.” I suddenly remembered a picture of a group of First Nations men dressed in Western pants, shirts, and sporting little mini-skirts and holding old rifles. Should I tell him that I will wear a long dress buttoned to the neck if he wears that mini-skirt? He probably wouldn’t get it. “You’re right,” I answered instead, and I removed my shirt.

Cree women apparently wore long dresses (deerskin) before Europeans arrived and traditionally covered their bodies pretty much head to toe. What Tatoosis did not know was that, prior to the arrival of the good Oblates, Salish women did not wear shirts during the summer or at a good old bone game.

In this era of Aboriginal Studies, there is a tendency to red-wash or clean up our past before passing on our traditions, and sometimes it gets cleaned up in accordance with someone else’s current morality. I am not advocating a return to the old lahal games practices, in which women sang and danced half-naked, enthusiastically cupping and bouncing their beautiful breasts in an attempt to distract the other team, but we should know a little about who we are before we become someone else’s idea of who we should be [172-3].

In Craig Womack's Red on Red (Minnesota, 1999), he complains, "It is way too premature for Native scholars to deconstruct history when we haven't yet constructed it" (3).  As I wrote before about his complaint, deconstruction really isn't the issue.  I've heard similar complaints from African-Americans and some of my Homo-American brethren as well when they are confronted with anti-essentialist arguments.  It doesn't really matter what you replace it with: the standard -- traditional? -- academic approach to history is seriously flawed, not just in content and European bias but in method.

I wonder what Womack would make of Lee Maracle's story.  When Native peoples are under attack, when (as an elder Womack quotes put it) "We may look like Indians, we have the color of an Indian, but what are we thinking? What are we doing to our own children who are losing their language, their own ways?" (55), shouldn't Maracle have held her tongue and covered up, instead of insulting an elder to his face in public?  Shouldn't she have reined in her rebellion until the First Nations were safe and secure again?  Shouldn't Native women be supporting their men instead of tearing them down?

Of course not.  The hard part about living in the world is that you have to do everything at once -- recover the past, invent the future, and balance the present -- and this task is all the harder for oppressed groups struggling for survival.  Being embattled is no excuse for falsifying the past, though, or imposing irrelevant restrictions on your fellows in the present.  I don't know whether Ernest Tatoosis got his prudery from Christian missionaries or the parallel mindset in Cree culture, though what an amazing coincidence that his ideal woman's outfit sounds so suspiciously Victorian.  But it doesn't matter: why should Maracle have dressed "more traditional"?  How would it have helped her as an (evidently very effective) organizer?  His phrase "real Indian women" gave the game away: as though Maracle wasn't a real Indian woman.  Every divisive stumbling block ever thrown into the path of an organization has been justified by someone as being necessary, and for the group's own good, when it's more likely they sprang from someone's neurotic compulsions: notice again Tatoosis staring at Maracle's cleavage.  There's no principle for deciding the question in advance, but I do think people need to be more skeptical of such moves.  I think Maracle made the right response in that moment, though I'd love to hear more about Tatoosis' reaction, and I wish more of the writers in Me Sexy had her attitude.