PART II

4.
Figures and the Law:
Rhetorical Readings of Congressional and Cherokee Texts

At this time 1890 we are too near the removal of the Cherokees for our young people to fully understand the enormity of the crime that was committed against a helpless race, truth is the facts are being concealed from the young people of today. School children of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man's greed for gold.
—U.S. ARMY PRIVATE JOHN G. BURNETT

This threat of being deprived of a great part of her domain by an alien and semi-barbarous people appeared intolerable and unthinkable to Georgia . . . [who] forbade the Indians to play with their make-believe government. . . . With the Indians out of the way, Georgia was for the first time in her existence master of her own territorial destiny.
—E. MERTON COULTER

In the second chapter of this book, I offered a rhetorical reading of one of anthropology's classic works, Franz Boas's Race, Language, and Culture . The intention was to examine the textual grounds for a number of contradictory general-

izations about Boasian "science," and the various "convergences," as I have called them, of ethnography and literature in the contexts of modernism and postmodernism. Boas's writing bears a signature, to take a term from Derrida; it is author- and style-specific, in Clifford Geertz's sense;^[1] thus my rhetorical critique of Race, Language, and Culture sought to give voice to what the text itself could not speak, what the individual author could not or would not say.

When one turns to the rhetorical analysis of those nearly anonymous texts called laws, however, the project of critical rhetorics—I mean by this term to offer a parallel to the recently developed field of critical legal studies^[2] —in its attempt to speak what the text cannot or will not say becomes a critique of ideology. For laws, of course, are not merely public texts but publicly sanctioned texts. That is to say, their language does not merely express or represent but effectually permits, prohibits, or requires particular acts. Laws, then, are the specific outcome of successful rhetoric, public speaking oriented toward persuasion. Once that outcome has been written into law, however, these texts are no longer persuasive but coercive, and may be enforced with the full power of the state. Laws are fixed in letters; but the letter of the law remains open to acts of interpretation. These have traditionally been engaged in not by literary critics but by lawyers—although it is the case, of late, that the interests and concerns of some lawyers and some literary people have also converged to a quite striking degree. If ethnography and literature are most readily seen to con-

[1] See, for example, Derrida's "Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name," and Geertz's "Being There: Anthropology and the Scene of Writing," in Works and Lives .

[2] For a recent overview, see Victoria Kahn, "Rhetoric and the Law."

verge in relation to postmodernism , law and literature, I believe, most readily converge in relation to rhetoric .

I will not attempt to give now (as I did not earlier) even a sketch of the historical development of rhetoric in the West from Plato to Aristotle; from the Romans to the Renaissance; thence until our own time. My particular concerns here, I believe, require only that I note my sense that rhetoric, in the Classical period where it began as a formal subject of detailed inquiry (and where, as Eric Cheyfitz has shown, it served as a pretechnological technology of control), concerned itself with analyzing the particular figures of speech appropriate to specific public occasions of speech, whether these were "deliberative" or "juridical" (Kahn 21). All the rare birds of rhetorical terminology—metalepsis and catalepsis, catachresis, oxymoron, antiphrasis, and so on—are subdivisions of the four "master tropes," metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and all are names for linguistic constructions, each one of which might be more or less effective in persuading an audience to a particular position, at a particular moment—whether justice (both legally and philosophically) or property were involved.

Rhetorical figures or tropes, then, provide charged images of their objects of concern; but these images, presented in any extended discourse, cannot help but imply a narrative, or, simply, tell a story. This is the case for contracts, laws, Supreme Court decisions, or formal histories quite as well as for the texts we conventionally refer to as "stories." As I have noted regularly throughout this book, in the West, these stories are intelligible as exemplars, variants, or combinations of the four plot structures—I am again following Northrop Frye and Hayden White—called romance, tragedy, comedy, or irony (satire, for White)—plot structures which may be discerned, as White has abun-

dantly shown, in texts where the narrative is indeed implied rather than stated, and where the story told offers itself as "truth" rather than as "fiction," e.g., in history and historiography, and also, as I shall try to show, in law where it seeks to make history by imposing a story. My text is the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

1

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 presents a series of images rhetorically figured, and a story about the Indian, a particular narrative construction of Indian-white relations—both of which work together to make certain kinds of sense of the material they organize: the tropes in which images are presented, and the stories that presentation narrates, having, in a phrase of Hayden White's, explanatory force. Or, as Edward Said even more tellingly puts it, not merely explanatory force. In a brilliant discussion of what he calls "images of centrality," Said speaks of the power of these images to give "rise to semi-official narratives with the capacity to authorize and embody certain sequences of cause and effect, while at the same time preventing the emergence of counter-narratives" (1988 58). Finally, Said writes, "centrality is identity," determining "what is powerful, important and ours" (1988 57), and so, too, what, defined as "theirs," is precisely not important, is powerless. Said's "images of centrality" are, of course, cultural productions, of the "superstructure," as an older Marxism would say, and thus they can only be "semi-official" in their capacity to authorize. But the law of the land is most certainly official; and the "sequences of cause and effect" it authorizes, and the identities it recognizes as "powerful, important and ours," through the images it provides and the stories it tells,

have predictive efficacity, for the law permits the state to compel compliance by means of force.

As is well known, the idea of "trans-lating" the eastern Indians westward so that an expanding Euramerican population might "improve" and more productively use Indian lands had already been considered by Jefferson and Monroe as a sort of permanent solution to America's Indian problem. This solution seems to have become an urgent national priority at the time of Jackson's presidency not only because (I am largely persuaded by Michael Rogin's arguments)^[3] Jackson was obsessed with Indians; not only because it took until the latter 1820s for the white population's need or, as seems more substantially the case, greed for land to grow sufficiently to exert acute pressure upon Indian holdings; not only because gold was discovered in 1829 in Georgia at Dahlonega on the western boundary of the Cherokee nation; not only because even some clergy and laypersons sympathetic to the Indians became convinced they would do best beyond the corrupting influences of frontier whites. Important as all these factors were, there is also a narrative dimension to the history we are considering.

This is to say that Indian removal could finally be written into law and enforced in the 1830s because by that time, a certain story about America and about "civilization" had become sufficiently acceptable that it could be used as ideological justification for "certain sequences of causes and effects," for the policy of—to cite Berkhofer again—"expansion with honor" (145ff). This story, as numerous

[3] See Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian.

commentators have remarked—and it is a story that has been reinvoked from the invasion of Massachusetts to the invasion of Panama and the recent war in the Gulf—organized images of the white man and the Indian in such a way as to satisfy Americans that they might not only have their way, but have it—in Alexis de Tocqueville's phrase, which I shall cite more fully below—in complete conformity and with "respect to the laws of humanity" (339), naked self-interest clothed with justice and sanctity.

The particular story to which I am referring has been told many times, by no one better than by Roy Harvey Pearce, who, more than thirty-five years ago, in Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind , described the way in which "the history of American civilization would . . . be conceived of as three-dimensional, progressing from past to present, from east to west, from lower to higher" (49), with the acutely developing problem, therefore, as Pearce stated it, "of understanding the Indian, not as one to be civilized and to be lived with, but rather as one whose nature and whose way of life was an obstacle to civilized progress westward" (41). To achieve this "understanding" required, in Pearce's careful distinctions, a very particular "Idea, [a] Symbol, and [an] Image" (vi–vii). The idea was that of the savage and his savagism; the symbol was the Indian, as represented in a series of images whose functional purpose would be, on the level of culture, to reconcile our national interests with our national ideals. These images , I suggest, in order that they might represent the Indian symbolically in a manner consistent with the idea of his savagery, must be figured ironically , from a tropological perspective, and, from the perspective of narrative, must be emplotted, structured as a story tragically .

The story of Indian savagery must be structured as a trag-

edy because the story of Euramerican civilization—the Euramerican narrative of identity, in James Clifford's phrase—was structured as a comedy. Comedy is the name the West gives to stories that organize images in terms of a progress toward reconciliation and integration; in the Classical period, or in Shakespeare, for example, comic plots end with a dance, or a dinner, or both of these at a wedding. In general, the tale America seems to have told of itself, the story that gave the Euramerican self-images and an identity in the nineteenth century, was a narrative of the inexorable advance of civilization toward the fulfilment of its manifest destiny, the extension of the frontier ever westward, ever forward, to establish a continental arch from sea to shining sea.

The "civilized" protagonists of the American comedy, as in any comic story, encountered opposition and resistance, in this instance on the part of those they called Indian "savages." It is in the nature of comic plots that any regressive "blocking characters," in Northrop Frye's phrase (167), those who would stand as "an obstacle to civilized progress westward," in Pearce's phrase (1989 41), must be overcome—but the comic mood is such that no pain, no pity, or terror, is to be felt at their defeat. What I want to show is that the Indian Removal Act inscribes the narrative of the Indian as a tragedy, and that the tragedy of the Indian stands in relation to the comedy of the Euramerican as figures of the savage stand to figures of the civilized man.

If comedy is an integrative structure which cheerfully reconciles and unites its characters, tragedy is a dispersive structure which fearfully casts out and severs its characters from the places and persons they would be near. Terrible as such exile is, still, it is tragedy's insistence, it is just; the climactic moment of tragedy comes in the recognition of

the wisdom of resignation to the existing order of things—an order that is presented as necessary and unalterable. To tell a particular kind of story, comic or tragic, as White has shown—as also to refuse to tell any one kind of story, as I have tried to show—is always to offer a particular kind of explanation of the world as experienced, or, to refer again to Said, to authorize a particular sequence of historical causes and effects (1988 7).

As it is on the macro-level of narrative structure or plot—tragedy, comedy, and so on—so, too, is it at the micro-level of sentence structure, or style. I return here to the subject of the figures of language, which themselves present some human beings as "in" and "us," other human beings as "out" and "them." Ironic tropes such as antiphrasis or negation, catachresis or misuse, oxymoron or paradox, and aporia or doubt, all work at the level of style to deny and to disperse. And these are the tropes, I suggest, which govern the representation of the Indian savage in the Indian Removal Act as in much discourse of the period. (Such representations, it should be noted, have particular effectivity in determining the kind of tragic emplotment in which they appear.)

2

The Removal Act is titled an "ACT TO PROVIDE FOR AN EXCHANGE OF LANDS WITH THE INDIANS RESIDING IN ANY OF THE STATES OR TERRITORIES, AND FOR THEIR REMOVAL WEST OF THE RIVER MISSISSIPPI ."^[4] Its first section asserts "that it

[4] Because I quote extensively from the Act, and, because it is readily available (e.g., in Washburn), I have not thought it necessary to reproduce it in its entirety. As the reader will see, I have thought it necessary to reproduce the Cherokee documents I discuss below because they are not readily available. Washburn, for example, gives the text of the "Indian Removal Act," as he also gives the text of the Supreme Court decision in Worcester v. Georgia of 1832. But he does not cite the text of a single one of the "Cherokee Memorials to Congress," nor does he

cite the text of the Cherokee petition to the Court that initiated Worcester v. Georgia. Peters's standard lawyers' edition of Cases Argued and Decided in the Supreme Court of the United States . (Book 8) summarizes this latter Cherokee document and quotes selectively from it, but no standard reference that I have been able to find offers a complete text.

shall and may be lawful for the President of the United States" to set aside specifically described and designated lands west of the Mississippi "for the reception of such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside, and remove there." As an act to provide for the exchange and removal of those Indians "as may choose " to exchange and remove, this legislation reproduces, in its very language, a number of paradoxes particular to the period, but, as well, paradoxes inherited from the broader context of Christian patriarchal culture.

Etymologically, that is, to provide is simply to see ahead, from Latin, pro-videre . The verb form makes its nominal appearance in the word providence , generally indicative of God's foreknowledge of events, with a strong implication of predestination. But this foreknowledge, in Christian doctrine, is also taken as compatible with free will, the human creature's ability to choose . As a pertinent literary example, consider John Milton's description of Adam and Eve, in Paradise Lost , as sufficient to stand yet free to fall. This is altogether paradoxical, in my view (although it may be a paradox that Milton exploits for antimonarchical effect). God knew, of course, that they would fall, but nonetheless—somehow—they were still sufficient to stand. Section I of the Removal Act both provides for an exchange, while it insists upon the free agency of the Indians. This paradoxical situation reproduces the paradox also central to pre-Christian classical tragedy where the protagonist cannot escape his fate yet nonetheless affirms his status as tragic

(rather than, say, merely pathetic) by taking responsibility for his fate: it is as if he chose it. The Indian, to the framers of this bill, must not be mere victims of civilization's providence but free agents who can voluntarily "choose" to exchange and remove—for all that, in point of actual fact, as we shall see, there was not very much of a choice at all.

More particularly, these paradoxes reflect such things as the determination of Jefferson and Monroe that Indians must not be allowed to act against the best interest of the United States (although Monroe, who had to face the issue more acutely than Jefferson, was against the use of force), as this confronts the determination of another former president, John Quincy Adams, that the government keep its original promises to the Indians, regardless of American self-interest. Historically central to these paradoxes is what Brian Dippie has called the "embarrassment of 1802 when the federal government, in exchange for Georgia's western lands, bound itself by compact to extinguish existing Indian title in the state, despite the 'solemn guarantees' previously made to the indigenous tribes" (56–7). The problem facing the framers of the Removal Act was, in Robert Berkhofer's phrase, how to reconcile national interest with national honor.

In his First Message to Congress, President Jackson explicitly denied the right of independent governments or states (like that of the Cherokee) to exist within the United States (in particular, Georgia; cf. Guttmann and Halsey 37–8), and clearly affirmed his commitment to Cherokee removal. Yet even Jackson could not avoid the "providential" Christian paradox, as he asserted that Cherokee "emigration should be voluntary , for it would be as cruel and as unjust to compel the aborigines to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land" (in Gutt-

mann and Halsey 39, my emphasis). Jackson's inflexible determination that the Indians choose to remove encountered the Cherokees' inflexible determination not to choose to remove, and the impasse was resolved by the use of, first, subterfuge and intrigue, and, finally, state violence, which sent the Cherokee westward on the "Trail of Tears" in 1838.

Section II of the Removal Act states

That it shall and may be lawful for the President to exchange any or all of such districts [newly created, in the west] . . . with any tribe or nation of Indians now residing within the limits of any of the states or territories, and with which the United States have existing treaties, for the whole or any part or portion of the territory claimed and occupied by such tribe or nation, within the bounds of any one or more of the states or territories, where the land claimed and occupied by the Indians, is owned by the United States, or the United States are bound to the state within which it lies to extinguish the Indian claim thereto. (My emphasis)

The language here, I believe, reflects Jackson's strong sense of the government's historical error in treating the Indians as sovereign nations in the past, offering, it appears (I am neither a lawyer nor a legal scholar), an interpretation of international and national law that would seek to remove the "embarrassment" of Article I, Section 4, of the Georgia Cession of April 24, 1802 (Guttmann and Halsey 10) simply by deciding the matter in Georgia's favor (e.g., "or ," above). This section of the Act, that is, seems to assert that all land "claimed and occupied by the Indians" is in fact if not in deed "owned by the United States" and thus, that Indian occupancy is simply at the sufferance of the United States in the person of the President. This, to be sure, is the inter-

pretation put forth by then Representative and, later, Governor of Georgia, Wilson Lumpkin in the House debate upon the subject, and it is consistent with the declaration of the Georgia Senate in 1827 "that the state might properly take possession of the Cherokee country by force, and that it was owing to her moderation and forebearance that she did not thus take possession " (1095 my emphasis). Here, the legal force of the federal government's past treaties with the tribes is simply abrogated in favor of the right of the states to regulate their internal affairs as they see fit, with Indians presenting no exception—something to which Chief Justice John Marshall would take exception in Worcester v. Georgia in 1832. Lumpkin's sense of the matter is that whatever Federal/Indian relations may be, Georgia/Indian relations are another matter altogether—with the effect, of course, that Indians be damned.

Although the Act has six more sections, we have already, by Section II, reached the climactic moment of our story, the tragic epiphany of the law which reveals a president in the position of god or fate, possessor in the name of the United States of all lands far and wide, who can remove or allow to be removed any Indians, as he sees fit, with the providence of this act—and this independent of those Indians' desire, for all the fact that they must be presumed to have a choice in the matter. What follows is largely denouement, the president and the United States offering financial payment or otherwise unspecified "aid and protection" to the forced exiles, as if to say, as typically with tragedy, that all is, if not well, at least as it should be: that the world represented here, however painful, is, nonetheless, just.

Thus Section III of the Act makes it "lawful for the President solemnly to assure" the Indians that "the United States will forever secure and guaranty to them, and their

heirs or successors" the new lands to which they have removed, a very curious assurance, even in regard to a commander-in-chief with powers over the territories, inasmuch as the preceding section of the bill has just reneged on all previous such assurances as guaranteed by treaty "forever." The Cherokee in their "Memorial" to Congress of July, 1830 (I look at this again just below), were quite clear that were they to remove and "make themselves comfortable in their new residence, they [would] have nothing to expect hereafter but to be the victims of a future legalized robbery!"^[5] (Guttmann and Halsey 59)

Section IV announces "That if, upon any of the lands now occupied by the Indians, and to be exchanged for, there should be such improvements as add value to the land," the president is to determine the value of these improvements and pay for them—once more, an ironic provision in light of the fact that capacity to improve the land had always been a touchstone of civilization, the Indians now to be removed for their inability to be civilized, yet paid for any improvements. One wonders at the spectacle of President Jackson, who had said of Cherokee lands in his First Message to Congress that these were "tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements " (in Guttmann and Halsey 39, my emphasis), charging the Treasury for just these nonexistent improvements.

Section V specifically offers "the emigrants" such "aid and assistance as may be necessary for their support and subsis-

[5] A point made by de Tocqueville as well, e.g., the Indians readily perceive all that is provisional about the settlement proposed for them. Who can guarantee that they will be able to remain in peace in their new asylum? The United States pledges itself to maintain them there, but the territory they now occupy was formerly secured to them by the most solemn oaths. . . . No doubt within a few years that same white population which is now pressing around them will again be on their tracks. (336)

tence for the first year after their removal." Section VI promises the exiles protection "at their new residence, against all interruption or disturbance from any other tribe or nation of Indians," and as well "from any other person or persons whatever." However sincere the government may have been in wishing to protect the removed Cherokee from further white encroachment and in preventing intertribal warfare (as, for example, with the Osage), its record in regard to the former was consistently abysmal, and its capacity in regard to the latter—considering that the Cherokee were being relocated to areas where there were already Chickasaw, Creek, Choctaw, and Osage—was modest at best. Thus I find a certain irony in this provision as well; and the Cherokee "Memorial" cited above once again may be consulted for the Indians' own understanding of the meaning of federal protection.

Section VII seems to me oddly placed and difficult to understand from the text alone; it would seem to respond, again, to the government's concern to prevent the setting up of sovereign states in the new territories to which Indians were removed, and, again, to prevent intertribal warfare. But the language is curious. Section VII states

That it shall and may be lawful for the President to have the same superintendence and care over any tribe or nation in the country to which they may remove, . . . that he is now authorized to have over them at their present places of residence: Provided , that nothing in this act contained shall be construed as authorizing or directing the violation of any existing treaty between the United States and any of the Indian tribes.

Two matters especially strike me here. First, for all the blandly paternalistic benevolence of the phrasing, granting

to the president the "same superintendence and care over"—the preposition seems telling (i.e., idiomatic usage would seem to permit "care for " as well as "care over ")—the Indians he has had heretofore, there is something ominous in the assertion that there is no "world elsewhere," not "another country" in which the Indians, should they so choose, might escape presidential "superintendence and care." To read this phrase as ominous, let me say, is not a matter of a presentist perspective only; for many in the age of Jackson understood perfectly well the kind of "care" he would have "over" the Indians, the Indians included.

Second, since everything in this act is based upon a view that "existing treaties between the United States and . . . the tribes" misconstrued the claims of Indian title, the United States purchasing what might simply have been claimed by right of conquest, by eminent domain, or by the doctrine of domicilium vacuum , thereby rejecting the basis for all existing treaties between the United States and the tribes, it seems appropriate to read these words as offering an ironic sense of history—or else a deep hypocrisy.

Section VIII is the conventional appropriations section, concluding the matter by appropriating "the sum of five hundred thousand dollars" for "the purpose of giving effect to the provisions of this act." Thus, ironically or not, money has the last word.

The Removal Act was passed in the Senate by a vote of 28 to 20, and then, in the House, by a vote of 103 to 97. For want of four votes, in the words of Henry Storrs, Whig of New York, we might now "break up [the Indians'] society, dissolve their institutions, and drive them into the wilderness" (in Washburn 1057). Jackson signed the bill into law immediately, on May 28, 1830. As Alexis de Tocqueville summed up the matter:

The Spaniards by unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, did not succeed in exterminating the Indian race and could not even prevent them from sharing their rights; the United States Americans have attained both these results with wonderful ease, quietly, legally, and philanthropically, without spilling blood and without violating a single one of the great principles of morality in the eyes of the world. It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity. (339)

The "primary premise" of the imagery in which the Indian is depicted in the Removal Act, in Robert Berkhofer's phrase, "is the deficiency of the Indian as compared to the white" (113). As the published debate over the Removal Act makes clear, the bill denies to the Indian sovereignty over land and person; as "noble savage" the Indian is oxymoronically depicted; as "murderous savage," "embarrassment" (e.g., in the remarks of Wilson Lumpkin, Democrat of Georgia), encumbrance or nuisance, he is figured by catachresis (misuse, absurdity, anachronism, etc.) or antiphrasis, as negation of the civilized person, its antithesis or zero degree. Ultimately, inasmuch as it remains unclear at this time whether the Indian would indeed "civilize" himself or "vanish," no statement about him can quite have determinate meaning: the figure for such indeterminacy is the figure of aporia or doubt. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 set the terms of discussion for the "Indian Question" for more than half a century.

3

The full effects of the Removal Act were not felt by the Cherokee until 1838. First, in 1835, fewer "than one hundred Cherokees," of more than fifteen thousand eastern

Cherokee, in "alliance . . . with the Jackson-Georgia Removal Party" (Woodward 174–5) signed the Treaty of New Echota, agreeing to the cession of all the Cherokee's eastern lands to the federal government for a sum of five million dollars (less the cost for removing the Cherokee to the west, a cost which came to over one and a quarter million dollars). Then, in 1838, some twelve thousand remaining Cherokee were forced by federal troops under the command of General Winfield Scott to head westward on the infamous Trail of Tears. The kind protection of the government notwithstanding, fully one third, four thousand people, died en route.

But the Removal Act was only the first of several "documents of barbarism," in the recent phrase of one Native American legal scholar.^[6] In the century and a half since its passage, a great many other Indian bills have been proposed and enacted to attempt to deal with America's ongoing "Indian problem." I will make reference only to those that seek to make general policy. First is the General Allotment or Dawes Act of 1887. The intention of Dawes was presumably to give the Indians a last chance at "civilization" by bringing them to a proper appreciation of the virtues of private property; the Act provided for the allotment in severalty of lands formerly tribally—communally, indeed "communistically"—held. Like the Removal Act, Dawes was supported both by those who genuinely wished to do what they thought best for Native people as well as by those who simply wanted another means of obtaining what land was left to the Indians. In 1934, under the Wheeler-Howard, or

[6] See Robert A. Williams, Jr., "Documents of Barbarism: The Contemporary Legacy of European Racism and Colonialism in the Narrative Traditions of Federal Indian Law." I am grateful to Donald Bahr for bringing Williams's detailed essay to my attention.

Indian Reorganization Act, Indians were to be "reorganized," allowed, that is, to retain what remained of older, more traditional lifeways if they wished—their wishes, unfortunately, to be made known to the government by strictly parliamentary means that were unfamiliar at best, and, at worst, repugnant to many members of the tribes. In 1953, Indians were to be "terminated": according to the provisions of House Concurrent Resolution 108, the government announced its intention to terminate or sever its longstanding special relationship with the tribes. Only the Menominee and the Klamath, among the larger tribes, were actually "terminated" by the government (with predictably disastrous results) before this policy was amended and then abandoned. Nineteen sixty-eight brought the Indian Civil Rights Act, and 1975 the Indian Self-Determination Act, both of which, for all the positivity of their titles, brought very mixed blessings to Native peoples.^[7]

The American "image" of the Indian, as presented seminally in Pearce's work and elaborated in the important studies of such scholars as Robert Berkhofer, Brian Dippie, Richard Drinnon, and Michael Rogin, appears "officially" as Indian "policy" in the "narratives" we call laws—where they have the most important material consequences. And it is, of course, possible to offer a narrative and figurative analysis of each of these major acts.

For example, the Dawes Act appears to be predicated on ironic images of an oxymoronic, or paradoxical, type that can be emplotted comically as a tale of acceptable citizenly integration into a turn-of-the-century society facing un-

[7] For an overview see Michael Dorris's "The Grass Still Grows, the Rivers Still Flow: Contemporary Native Americans," and Williams, cited above. Excellent bibliographies of recent work can be found in W. R. Swagerty's Scholars and the Indian Experience: Critical Reviews of Recent Writing in the Social Sciences .

precedented immigration. The classic literary illustration here comes from Henry James's 1904 visit to Ellis Island (described in The American Scene of 1907), in which James recognizes the unanticipated necessity "to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien" (1968 85). In an age in which the "inconceivable alien" must some-how be conceived of as also an American, the Indian can become just another hyphenated citizen, no longer the American Indian but, oxymoronically, the Indian-American—an American who, like all his brother and sister hyphenate Americans, is to be melted in the great melting pot into a Christian capitalist.

This melting pot notion of monocultural purism or nativism was, apparently, particularly strong from 1915 or so to 1922 (cf. Matthews), for all that it was strongly opposed by movements for both cultural pluralism and liberal cosmopolitanism (cf. Hollinger). After the Great Depression, in the era of Franklin Roosevelt, cultural pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and, generally, a somewhat greater—if grudging—willingness on the part of the dominant culture to accept at least some degrees of difference as potentially "American" are more marked. In these years, to grant the fact that newly arrived Americans might choose to retain and display degrees of Italianness, or Jewishness (etc., etc.), no longer appears, at least to some, as quite such a profanation of the "sanctity of [the] American consciousness," nor a violation of "the intimacy of . . . American patriotism" as it did to James. In this context, the original inhabitants of this continent might also be permitted to retain traditional cultural forms, without—the irony here is all too apparent—seeming "un-American." The figure by which this view of the ethnic American is represented is

metaphor, the figure based upon analogous substitutability; e.g., by analogy, Chinese -American or Mexican -American or Native American may be substituted for American . Non-WASP lifeways, in this view, need not be melted out or away, but, instead, they may become distinctive threads in the uniquely American coat of many colors. This alternative image of America has its counterpart today in the image—call it residual or emerging—of American society as a rainbow or mosaic. In any case, the Wheeler-Howard or Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 would seem to image the Indian metaphorically while (still) emplotting his story comically.

The "termination" policy, according to which the federal government announced its intention to sever special relationships with (and responsibilities to) the tribes, images the Indian in more or less ironic tropes of a catachrestic type, and projects, for the story of the "terminated" Native, radically ironic emplotments. Indians are once again figured as anomalous and antithetical persons, and so they may be cast adrift to manage as they can. Stories about these drifters and outsiders will be cast in the ironically absurd narrative mode known in the West from Kafka, on to—I here name artists whose influence is roughly contemporaneous with the institution of the termination policy—Beckett, Ionesco, Antonioni, and Edward Albee. Finally, it may be said that the Indian Civil Rights Act and the Self-Determination Act, heir to the reformational and reintegrative hopes of the sixties, recapitulates Wheeler-Howard's imagery and structure: metaphor, figuratively; comedy, narratively. Once again Indians are to be allowed to manage their own affairs—so long as they do so, as John Collier himself wrote, "with the aid of modern organization methods" (in Dorris 52).

These remarks take their subject matter at what is ob-

viously a very high level of generalization. But, as I hope I have shown in my analysis of the Indian Removal Act, particularization of a rhetorical, narratological, and historical nature would certainly be possible. Rather than attempt this, however, I want to turn to the sort of analysis urged most strongly by my ethnocritical perspective, and examine an "official" Cherokee response to the threat of removal. Thus, to take a phrase from Roy Harvey Pearce, I want to try "to do for the Red side of the story what [I] did for the White" (1973 90).

But there are a great many problems in the way of any attempt "to do for the Red side of the story" what is fairly easily done "for the White."

4

The most "advanced" of the "five civilized tribes," the Cherokee were able, by 1830, to write their own language in the syllabary devised by the mixedblood Sequoyah (George Guess) in 1821. In the estimate of one of their number, John Ridge, by 1826 approximately a third of the eastern Cherokee were competent in the writing of English.^[8] As early as 1808, the Cherokee had adopted their earliest known written law, and in 1827, amid much fanfare,

[8] See Ridge's "Essay on Cherokee Civilization," in which he writes, "I suppose that there are one third of our people who are able to read & write in the English Language. In the Cherokee Language, there is a large majority who read and write in George Guess' syllabic character" (736). But in the "Resolution and Statement of the Missionaries" resident in the Cherokee Nation at the end of 1830, the missionaries note that they "have before [them] the names of 200 Cherokee men and youths who are believed to have obtained an English education sufficient for the transaction of ordinary business" (Guttmann and Halsey 68), obviously a far, far smaller figure than Ridge's earlier estimate. The missionaries would seem to agree, however, that "a majority [of the Cherokee] . . . can read with greater or lesser facility" in "their own language in Guess's [Sequoyah's] alphabet" (69).

they had drafted and adopted a constitution modeled closely upon that of the United States—both of these documents written in English. Thus the Cherokee were well positioned, when the pressures upon them of Georgia and of Jackson to remove intensified, to fight for their rights by a variety of textual means, among them letters, petitions, and "Memorials"^[9] to the courts, the Congress, and the various officers of the federal government, and also by means of articles and editorials in The Cherokee Phoenix , a newspaper founded in 1828 by Elias Boudinot and edited by him until 1832 (it ceased publication in 1834). "The Cherokee Phoenix ," according to Rennard Strikland, "contains the most articulate presentation of the Cherokee position" (67n) on removal. Speaking for what seems to have been an overwhelming Cherokee consensus in opposition to removal, the Phoenix was apparently "sent to the four corners of the United States," inspiring "white newspaper editors in New Orleans, New York, Washington City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore to recopy its editorials citing Jackson's and Georgia's oppression" (Woodward 168). These editorials (in English and in the Sequoyah syllabary) no doubt provide "semi-official" narrative responses to the removal threat—for all that much of what appeared in the Phoenix was often supposed to be the work of—or, at the least, carefully over-seen by—the Rev. Samuel Worcester, longtime Congregational Minister to the Cherokee.^[10]

[9] So far as I have been able to determine, a "Memorial," in the nineteenth century, seems to be what we might call a memorandum. The Cherokee Memorials could thus be described as memos petitioning to Congress; they are not—I can say this much with relative certainty—memorializing texts, i.e., they do not exclusively (although they sometimes do in part) seek to recall the memory of persons or times gone by.

[10] But see the volume compiled by J. F. and A. G. Kilpatrick, called New Echota Letters: Contributions of Samuel A. Worcester to the Cherokee "Phoenix," for Elias Boudinot's confirmation of Worcester's rejection of that charge, pp. 93ff.

But what of an "official" document, one to parallel the Indian Removal Act? I believe that there can be no such Cherokee text, strictly speaking, because the Cherokee in 1830 could only produce laws—not merely persuasive but coercive texts—to regulate their internal affairs. They had not the power—nor, I believe, the tradition or inclination—to "provide" for the behavior of others outside the Cherokee Nation. While Georgia and the United States could and did pass legislation determining what the Cherokee might and might not do, the Cherokee could not and did not pass legislation to determine what Georgia and the United States might and might not do. Instead, as I have said, they wrote and distributed editorials in the private sector of their own Nation and in the United States generally, and sent petitions and "Memorials" dated, passed, and signed by members of the General Council of the Cherokee Nation (Principal Chief, Assistant Principal Chief, Executive Counsellors, etc.) to the federal government. It is to these latter documents, I believe, that one must look for a text at all approximating to the discursive order of the Indian Removal Act.

Correctly anticipating that President Jackson's First Annual Message to Congress (I have referred to it above) would strongly support their removal from the east, the General Council of the Cherokee Nation met in November of 1829 to draft a "Memorial" to both Houses of Congress petitioning for their right to remain. This Memorial is the nearest thing I know to a Cherokee parallel to the Indian Removal Act.^[11]

Bills for the removal of the Cherokee having been introduced into both Houses early in 1830, and debate on the

[11] Closest in time , as well as closest in discursive order to the Removal Act. There are, to be sure, "Cherokee Memorials to the Congress" Of an earlier date, as there are also memorials that follow the passage of the Removal Act.

Removal Act having begun in the House on February 24, this "official" document of the Cherokee Council, along with twelve other memorials "from the native citizens of the nation themselves, and adopted throughout the country, and to which are appended upwards of three thousand names" (H. R. 311 1), was "Committed to the Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union to which is committed the bill No. 287, to provide for the removal of the Indian tribes in any of the States and Territories West of the river Mississippi, and for their permanent location" (1). It was "Presented, and laid on the table, March 15, 1830."

I will offer some analysis of this "official" Cherokee Memorial shortly, supplementing my account (in the notes, for the most part) with reference to the first of the individual petitions from the "native citizens of the nation." This latter text has been widely known to the world, let me note, as a consequence of its inclusion, in condensed paraphrase , in the tenth and last section of Volume I of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America .^[12] But before proceeding, it seems necessary to ask what sort of analysis would be appropriate to a document like this.

[12] I reproduce it in full in Appendix B to this chapter. It should be noted that de Tocqueville's citation of this Memorial, although it is given inside quotation marks, is not , as his most recent editor, J. P. Mayer, states, a "slightly summarize[d]" version (cf. 338) of the full text. Prior to the 1880s or thereabouts, the conventions of citation were very different from what we take them presently to be. Thus, in spite of the quotation marks, what de Tocqueville offers is an abbreviated paraphrase. Inasmuch as he quotes only four of a full seven paragraphs of the Cherokee text, his account, I think, is hardly "slightly summarize[d]." I won't take the space here to compare de Tocqueville's version with the original—for all that that might be a fruitful exercise—but will only remark that de Tocqueville's version represents, to my view, a text midway between the highly formal Euramerican manner of the "Memorial of the Cherokee Council" and the somewhat more traditional manner of the "Memorial from the Citizens of the Cherokee Nation."

This is to say that inasmuch as we have before us texts in English—and texts, it appears, originally composed in English rather than, as so much so-called "Indian oratory,"^[13] translated from Indian to English—which are specifically addressed to a Euramerican audience, it might seem proper to perform upon them just the sort of rhetorical analysis one might perform upon any text in English. And yet, surely it is also worthwhile at least to raise the question (for all that, as I note just below, I can't very well answer it) whether such texts might not owe something to traditional Cherokee oratorical practices, so that the imposition upon them of a purely Western analytic grid would badly distort them. As the first Memorial from the individual Cherokee citizens puts it, "we address you according to usage adopted by our forefathers, and the great and good men who have successfully directed the Councils of the nation you represent" (7 my emphases). This, it seems to me, means according to the "usage[s]" of Western rhetorical practice, and also to those of traditional Cherokee oratorical practices.

But traditional Cherokee oratorical practices, like those of most of the indigenous people of the Americas, are very little known.^[14] Most of what there is to work from in textual form are, to reorient a phrase from Donald Bahr, "foreign policy" speeches in English translation of (one may reason-

[13] See, for example, the collections by Armstrong, Nabokov, Sanders and Peek, and Vanderwerth.

[14] Studies of traditional oratorical practice are currently having something of a renascence among anthropologists, historians, and linguists. Among the studies of which I am aware, see those by Donald Bahr, Nora and Richard Dauenhauer, and Michael Foster, among others. In regard to Cherokee documents of the Removal experience, as Raymond Fogelson has pointed out, very few exist. I am grateful to Professor Fogelson for suggesting a number of sources that have aided my understanding of these matters.

ably assume) varying accuracy—although there do not exist transcriptions of Native language originals against which to compare them. In this regard, the oratorical speeches translated into English by Euramericans obviously differ from the Cherokee documents composed in English by Cherokee. And yet the translated speeches and the Cherokee Memorials alike result from what are artificial, or, at the least, nontraditional occasions. For the speeches, the occasion for rhetorical performance is an encounter between delegations of whites and Indians for the purpose, in the vast majority of cases, of negotiating Indian land cessions. On these occasions, it should be noted, neither party could proceed in a manner entirely familiar to their culture, although this similarity does not suggest an equality: however necessary innovations of eloquence were to both Native and non-Native peoples, the latter always held the balance of power.

This is to say that Euramericans, on these imperial occasions, had to engage in a measure of formal improvisation, while the Native Americans, as colonial subjects, had to improvise in regard to content, a much more radical step. The whites, whose power depended upon such things as fixing boundaries and property lines, making deeds, arranging payments for land, and so on, speak of these matters to the Natives in a kinship language they had not for centuries used among themselves or with any other Western nation, a language—to take a term from Michael Paul Rogin—of "fathers and children": e.g., The Great White Father in Washington reminds his Red Children, etc. Meanwhile, the Indians seem to have spoken in much the same language they had always used among themselves and with other Indians (e.g., often beginning with formulas that had cosmological reference, indicating the distinctiveness

and long duration of their own culture or "way," etc.) but found themselves in the position of trying to make this traditional formulaic language speak of things it never had spoken of (permanent boundaries, deeds, payments for land, annuities, etc.), in Eric Wolf's terms, to make a kin-ordered language convey capitalist concerns. To press the matter no further, I will only say that while I am far from prepared to attempt, here, any reconstruction of the principles of traditional Cherokee oratory, it yet seems reasonable to assume that traditional Cherokee public speech would inevitably have been based upon the cultural "postulates," in Rennard Strickland's phrase, "commonly accepted by the traditional Cherokee" (21), and that they would reflect the epistemological, ethical, and psychological views of Cherokee people.

5

And yet, having said this much (or little), I must nonetheless confess that in the "official" Memorial of the General Council of the Cherokee Nation to Congress, I don't find anything of substance that I might refer to traditional Cherokee oratorical practices. The majority—twenty-two of the thirty-seven signatories—of the "Memorial" affix an "x mark" rather than a "proper" signature in alphabetic script or in the Sequoyah syllabary to this document, and thus announce themselves as people who do not write. But the "President of Committee," Lewis Ross, the "Clerk of Council," John Ridge, the Principal Chief, Assistant Principal Chief, and two of the three "Executive Counsellors" signing approval of the document do affix their names in script. And these are very likely the men responsible for composing the actual text—one which, as I have said, seems to be in close conformity to American (Western, textual, legal) practice.

To repeat, I find little or nothing in it that would seem to be dependent upon traditional (oral, unlettered) Cherokee practice,^[15] but it has not been readily available for study, and I have reproduced it in its entirety in an appendix to this chapter so that any sharper eye or ear than mine may discover what I may have missed. Let me add here that the distance of the Cherokee Memorial from traditional Cherokee oratory, as it seems to me, has—as Eric Cheyfitz has shown in discussions of "Frederick Douglass" in his narrative, and of Caliban in The Tempest —both alienating and liberating potentialities. On the one hand, to accede to the "master's" language, in the Cherokee case, to adopt the prevailing legalistic mode, is to abandon one's own language; on the other hand, to take possession of the master's "books" is to obtain some important part of the master's power—which then, to be sure, may be turned to one's own purposes.

The Memorial of the Cherokee Council opens with what I take to be deliberate although unstated reference to the Declaration of Independence. Jackson had cited the Declaration, in an opinion presented to the Cherokee by the Secretary of War in 1829, as impugning Cherokee rights to their aboriginal homelands, and the Memorial does indeed offer a counterargument to Jackson's on this point later on

[15] This is not the case with the first Memorial from the native citizens of the Nation which employs kinship language—initially that of children speaking to their elders and father(s), then, speaking to "Brothers" (7). There is also in the narrative structure of this document a (mythic?) sense of cycles, it seems to me: of a movement from a height to a low point with the distinctive possibility, phoenix-like, of a rise-again, as the Cherokee memorialists describe their former loftiness in regard to the whites, their subsequent and present lowliness, and their hopes to follow the whites—and here, I would say, the structuring principle shifts—in a progress to civilization and salvation, a progress that would not be likely cyclically to reverse itself.

in the text. But by opening with language that parallels the Declaration's own well-known language, the Cherokee, I believe, seek to substitute metaphorical figures for the ironic, antiphrastic figures (e.g., as noted above, the Indian as opposite and negative of the white man, etc.) regularly employed for the representation of Native people by Jackson, Georgia, and the proponents of removal. The opening words of the Cherokee Memorial, I mean to say, by echoing the language of the Declaration of Independence assert the legitimacy, at least, of political equivalences between the Cherokee and the American colonists. As two peoples who each had, formerly and in the present, to fight for their right to independence, Cherokee and Euramerican may be metaphorically compared rather than antiphrastically contrasted , analogical comparability being the essence of metaphorical figurations.^[16]

Addressed, as I have said, "To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled" (2), the Cherokee Memorial of 1830 begins:

We, the representatives of the people of the Cherokee nation, in general council convened, compelled by a sense of duty which we owe to ourselves and nation, and confiding in the justice of your honorable bodies, address and make known to you the grievances which disturb the quiet repose and

[16] Both the "Memorial of the Cherokee Council" and that of the native citizens insist upon a history of political equivalence. Both reject the notion that the Cherokee were ever mere tenants at will on their ancestral lands, citing the indisputable fact that both Great Britain and the American government regularly made treaties with them as one sovereign nation with another. The "Memorial of the Cherokee Citizens" also asserts the metaphorical comparability of Cherokee and Euramericans in its notation of the fact that both peoples have known the conditions of largeness and smallness, power and powerlessness.

harmony of our citizens, and the dangers by which we are surrounded. (2)

The Declaration of Independence does not begin this way, of course, for it initially narrates the wrongs done to the colonists by King George. But it then moves to the following words:

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions . . .

Where the Declaration first establishes the "long train of abuses and usurpations" for which the British King George III is responsible, the Cherokee Memorial only later establishes some of the abuses not of George but of his namesake state, Georgia. Where the colonists were no longer petitioning George, their principal oppressor, but presenting a "Declaration" to all the world to judge the justice of their case, the Cherokee are decidedly petitioning—not Georgia, their principal oppressor, nor the president, Georgia's staunch supporter, but, rather, petitioning the Congress of the United States, just that body that had adopted the Declaration. (Cf. Thomas Jefferson, "Congress proceeded the same day to consider the Declaration of Independence, which had been reported and lain on the table the Friday preceding, and on Monday referred to a Committee of the whole" [639]—exactly the referee of the Cherokee Memorial.)

Yet in spite of the similarity I have remarked, there is a crucial difference to note as well. For unlike the American colonists who found themselves compelled "in the course

of human events" to declare their independence, the Cherokee find themselves compelled, rather, to affirm theirs. And the Cherokee, I believe, are aware of and mean strategically to exploit the irony that the central, virtually sacred document that had proclaimed the sovereignty of the United States Americans should now be instantiated as the document—so Jackson had claimed—serving to undermine the sovereignty of the indigenous Americans. For "It remains to be proved," the Cherokee Council asserts with a turn to the specifically logical rather than the rhetorical dimension of the issue, "how our right to self-government was affected and destroyed by the Declaration of Independence, which never noticed the subject of Cherokee sovereignty" (3).

Whatever the metaphorical equivalence of Cherokee Indians and American colonists, there is, again, a difference. For, as the Cherokee memorialists write, "It is a subject of vast importance to know whether the power of self-government abided in the Cherokee nation at the discovery of America. . . and whether it was in any manner affected or destroyed by the charters of European potentates" (2–3). And the bulk of the Cherokee Memorial rehearses a history in which both the British colonialists and the American colonists become sovereign (and so free to be imperialists in their turn), consistently treated with those in original possession of the land as independent and (themselves) sovereign nations. That is to say, from the "discovery" of America until the present moment, the representatives of European powers and of the United States treated with the Cherokee metaphorically from a legal and political perspective.

Thus the Cherokee anticipate Jackson's charge in his First Message to Congress that it is intolerable and unconstitu-

tional for any state to allow an Indian tribe "to erect an independent government" (Guttmann and Halsey 38 my emphasis) within its borders. It is the insistence of the Cherokee, supported with a very great deal of (to my mind persuasive) evidence, that they have always been, and have been treated as, an "independent government," a nation sovereign on its own territory. Here again the Cherokee seem fully aware of the irony inherent in the fact that, having recently taken for themselves the specific forms of the American government—having, as they put it, exercised their "right to improve our Government" (4 my emphasis)—they should find that government perceived as an invention, newly erected, rather than as merely a version of what has always been.

In addition to these local, or thematic, ironies, I would suggest that the "official" Cherokee Memorial, from the point of view of emplotment, attempts to replace America's "official" tragic narrative of Indian decline with either an ironic or a comic counternarrative.^[17] In figurative terms, to repeat, the Cherokee seek to undo an ironic tropology and to put in its place a metaphorical one; in narrative terms, however, the Cherokee offer to the Congress not the tragic tale it is used to, but instead, a tale that in the light of past

[17] The "Memorial of the Native Citizens" accepts that their story thus far seems to have taken the outline of a Christian tragedy, i.e., that "By the will of our Father in Heaven, the Governor of the whole world, the red man in America has become small, and the white man great and renowned" (7). But they make it quite clear, in the same way as the "Memorial from the Cherokee Council" does, that if they, "who are remnants"—the language, is, as frequently throughout the text, reminiscent of the Old Testament—are to "share the same fate" (7) as the many tribes "now nearly extinct" (7), their story will be marked by injustice and unrighteousness, a cruelly ironic tale. The native citizens, like the Council, conclude with fervent hopes that this will not be their story, although they do not develop the comic prospects in the detail that the Council does, as I note below.

history and present circumstances can only be emplotted ironically or comically.

For the Cherokee Memorial insists that if, indeed, the Cherokee people must remove, they will do so entirely against their will, not voluntarily or by free choice, for "our attachment to the soil of our ancestors is too strong to be shaken" (H. R. 311 5). Thus the Cherokee refuse to accede to the central condition of tragedy, as it is understood by Sophocles or, indeed, by Jackson in his First Message to Congress, refusing a voluntary resignation to their fate. "The power of a State," the Cherokee fully recognize, "may put our national existence under its feet, and coerce us into her jurisdiction; but it would be contrary to legal right, and the plighted faith of the United States' Government" (4). Cherokee removal, as emplotted by the Cherokee , is not the tragic story the whites would tell of the sad-but-just punishment meted out by God, fate, or even the progress of history; instead, the Cherokee insist, the story of their expulsion can be nothing but the story of ironic victimization; should they be removed from their homeland, theirs would be no tragic tale, but rather, the merely pathetic story of people in the wrong place at the wrong time who, despite all their efforts to save themselves, were nonetheless crushed not by right but by might alone. The Cherokee memorialists will not allow their dispossession to be seen, as savagist ideology would have it, as inevitable or necessary, neither God's will, nor Nature's law. Rather, should they be "translated" west of the Mississippi, such an outcome would be the result of no more than the force of American imperial power.

But, of course, the purpose of the Cherokee Memorial in substituting such a bitterly ironic story for the comfortable tragedy familiar to American savagist thought is pre-

cisely to enlist the aid of Congress in preventing that story from taking place. Having announced their firm adherence "to what is right and agreeable to [themselves]," and their strong attachment "to the soil of [their] ancestors" (5), the Cherokee shift to a sketch of a happier outcome than that of removal. Noting that they have "been invited to a retrospective view of the past history of Indians who have melted away before the light of civilization, and the mountains of difficulties that have opposed [their] race in their advancement in civilized life," they yet "rejoice that [their] nation stands and grows a lasting monument of God's mercy, and a durable contradiction to the misconceived opinion that the aborigines are incapable of civilization" (5). As the preceding quotation may already indicate, the Cherokee, as they move toward the conclusion of their Memorial, offer a narrative of identity in which they describe themselves not only as politically analogous to Americans in regard to independence and sovereignty, but as like them in sharing a morally, religiously, and socially progressive future.

The Cherokee delegation writes,

The opposing mountains that cast fearful shadows in the road of Cherokee improvement, have dispersed into vernal clouds; and our people stand adorned with the flowers of achievement flourishing around them, and are encouraged to secure the attainment of all that is useful in science and Christian knowledge. (5)

The florid imagery continues as the Cherokee look to a continuance of "the fostering care of the United States" under which they have "prospered" (5); the latter phrase is repeated as they appeal, in conclusion, "for justice and humanity to the United States, under whose kind and foster-

ing care [they] have been led to the present degree of civilization, and the enjoyment of its consequent blessings" (6). With "patience" the Cherokee await the "final issue of [Congress's] wise deliberations" (6), and, rhetorically at least, propose a comic future in common with the dominant Euramerican society, as each progresses, at its own pace, toward the heights of Christian civilization.

The Cherokee Memorial, as I hope the reader will agree, is a very powerfully persuasive document. Nonetheless, it did not sufficiently persuade the Congress, where, finally, in the House, for want of four votes, as I have already noted, the Indian Removal Act was passed, and the Cherokee committed by law to the ironic destruction they had clearly foreseen and fought to avoid. Subsequent Memorials to Congress did not prevent the extension of Georgia law over the Cherokee in June of 1830, nor their forced removal westward in 1838.

5.
Literary "Criticism" / Native American "Literature"

I embrace the world. I am the world. The white man has never understood this magic substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. . . . He enslaves it. An acquisitive relation is established between the world and him. But there exist other values that fit only my forms.
—FRANTZ FANON

The nearer a study comes to live performances (the orator's breath, the speed at which he talks, where he raises his voice), the finer becomes the distinction between being a student and becoming an orator. In studying a religious art, where breath has overtones of "strength" and "spirit," this ground must be traversed cautiously.
—DONALD BAHR

In order for criticism to be responsible, it must always be addressed to someone who can contest it.
—TALAL ASAD

The criticism of Western literatures, as is well known, is more than two milennia old, extending at least from Plato to the present. Criticism of Native American literatures,

however, is at best little more than two centuries old. This is to say that although as early as 1612 William Strachey produced a rough transcription and a paraphrase of what he called a "kind of angry song against us" (78–9) by the Powhatans, it was not until the European "Romantic" period (1760s or so) that the conditions of possibility existed for the recognition that Native American people did in fact produce and circulate something like what Westerners call literature, something that might be worthy of critical attention.

Having discussed this matter on a number of occasions,^[1] I will only briefly recall to the reader, here, that the indigenous people of the present-day United States, inasmuch as they did not rely upon alphabetic writing as a means of information storage and transmission, initially seemed, in the eyes of the European invaders, barred from possessing a littera-ture , defined as the culture of letters (littera , letter). But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the meaning of literature shifted away from an emphasis on the form of presentation (writing) toward an emphasis on the content of the presentation (imaginative and affective material). By the time, for example, Bishop Percy's collection of Scottish ballads appeared (1765) to impress such as William Wordsworth with the expressive powers of illiterate, rustic men who, as Wordsworth put it in the preface to Lyrical Ballads , "convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborate expressions" (446), it increasingly became possible to speak of an "oral literature" as something other than a contradiction in terms.

Although as late as 1823, according to Victor Barnouw,

[1] E.g., chapter 1, above; and for a fuller discussion, see "Native American Literature and the Canon," in The Voice in the Margin , pp. 96–131.

Lewis Cass, Governor of the Michigan Territory, "sent a questionnaire about Indian customs to traders, military men and Indian agents under his jurisdiction," which included the question, "Do [the Indians] relate stories, or indulge in any work of the imagination?" (Barnouw in Norman in press), his curiosity in this particular area seems to have been somewhat retrograde. For by the time Cass sent out his questionnaire, it had not only been noted that the Indians did, indeed, produce literature , but it was as well the case that this indigenous literature was increasingly becoming available for criticism . By 1823, that is to say, there were already some few texts of Native stories, songs, or other "work[s] of the imagination," translations into English of one sort or another.

What I am trying to say is simply that the first condition of possibility for a Western literary criticism of Native American literatures is the recognition that Native Americans do, indeed, produce discourse that might be called literature; and that the second condition of possibility for a Western literary criticism of Native American literature is the availability of texts of that literature. The relation between a criticism that is absolutely and unequivocally textual in orientation, and a literature that is oral (and so entirely independent of, indifferent to, and both historically and in the present frequently resistant to all forms of textualization) is, of course, highly problematic—to the degree that any possible "relation" between Western criticism, even ethnocriticism, and Native American literatures may be wishful and naive. I will return to this complex and difficult matter. For the moment I will only repeat that Western literary criticism has been and—so long as it remains Western literary criticism—will continue to be text-based

(regardless of the existence of audio and videotapes, etc.), while reminding the reader that Native literatures are and continue to be oral and performative.

To produce the texts of an Indian literature requires the work of transcribers (because Indian literary performances are oral performances) and of translators (because it has always been, and, unfortunately, remains the case—with, to be sure, significant exceptions—that a majority of the literary critics of Indian literatures, myself included, have little or no competence in Indian languages). The first full textualization and translation of a Native American performance I know in the present-day United States is that of Lt. Henry Timberlake in the eighteenth century. Here are a few lines of Timberlake's "Translation of the WAR-SONG , Caw waw noo dee, &c ":

Where'er the earth's enlightened by the sun,
Moon shines by night, grass grows, or waters run,
Be't known that we are going, like men, afar,
In hostile fields to wage destructive war;
Like men we go, to meet our country's foes,
Who, women-like, shall fly our dreaded blows. (81)

Timberlake's verse translation—a typical instance of a new matter ("primitive" war songs) initially appearing in an older manner (heroic couplets)—are bound to strike the contemporary reader as inevitably very distant from what any eighteenth-century Cherokee warriors might actually have sung.

Nor is it at all clear how much of the Cherokee language Lt. Henry Timberlake knew. His Memoirs (1767), in which this "translation" appears, suggest that he had spent enough time among the Cherokee to achieve some linguistic com-

petence in their language. Still, it is altogether likely that Timberlake, working from the Cherokee (and working, probably, with an Indian who knew some English; working, as well, either from memory or from whatever rough notation of the original he or another had made), had not the linguistic "control" of the original language, in Dell Hymes's term,^[2] that we assume, say, a Pope or a Johnson, translating in roughly that same period from the Greek or Latin, would have had of those tongues. And Timberlake did not have (he could not have had, as I have noted) a fixed or authoritative text of the original upon which to base his translation.

Thus, in retrospect, at least, we may see Timberlake as presenting a founding instance of what would become the paradigmatic situation for subsequent translators of Native American literatures, a situation that finds them somewhere between the typical position of translators from Indo-European languages able to work from a given/fixed/authoritative text, and that of anthropological translator-investigators who encounter, as Talal Asad puts it, not society/culture as texts but, rather, "people who speak" (155)—which "speaking," of course, is eventually textualized in ethnographic discourse.

Although Native languages were already being studied in the seventeenth century (so that the Bible might be translated into Indian), and no less than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson collected Indian wordlists for learned societies in the eighteenth century, detailed comprehension of Native languages seems to have reached a first plateau of relative sophistication only after the middle of the nine-

[2] For this see Hymes's "Some North Pacific Coast Poems: A Problem in Anthropological Philology," first published in 1965, in In Vain I Tried to Tell You (1981).

teenth century. Samuel Worcester's earlier labors among the Cherokee, to be sure, included work on the Cherokee language, and later clerics like Bishop Riggs in the Dakotas, and H. R. Voth among the Hopi, or ethnographic workers like Washington Matthews and Frank Hamilton Cushing in the southwest, and Horatio Hale in the northeast, among others, provided a base—syllabaries, dictionaries, grammars, and the like—which was built upon "scientifically" in the twentieth century by the academic, anthropological linguistics largely founded by Franz Boas. Systematic study of the indigenous languages of the Americas continues to develop today, and there remains a very good deal of work to be done (as well as a good deal of work that can never be done, because there are no more speakers of a number of Indian languages). Thus, if texts are needed for the Western criticism of Native American literatures, and if most of those who have written criticism of Native American literatures have needed texts in English, then the trustworthiness of the available translations is, as Dell Hymes has pointed out in detail, a matter of considerable importance. I agree with Hymes and others that the accuracy of translations is a matter of major concern, although I would suggest that it may be possible to judge at least some few English texts of Native American literatures "bad" translations while yet judging them to be at least potentially "good" criticism. This distinction first requires one to take a position as to what "good" translation is (I have been throughout trying to take a position as to what "good" criticism is), and I will reserve this matter, too, for further discussion.

For a Western criticism of Native American literatures to develop, I have said, there must first be the recognition that there is such a thing as indigenous literature, and, second, there must be a minimal control of the languages in which

these literatures are expressed for their textualization in various forms of translation. Yet one more condition for criticism must be met, and that is a knowledge of the cultures whose concerns Native American literatures—like any literatures the world over—address and express. This may perhaps most easily be illustrated by citing an anecdote presented by the anthropologist Laura Bohannon in an essay called "Shakespeare in the Bush." In it, Bohannon recounts her attempt to offer a plot summary of Hamlet to the Tiv people of West Africa when, Bohannon having often asked them to tell their stories, they asked her to tell them one of hers. At every point in Bohannon's summary, the Tiv interrupted to assure her that she must be getting the story wrong—for no son would act as Hamlet did toward his mother, no young person speak as Hamlet did to an elder, no spirit behave as she said Hamlet's father's ghost did, and so on. However "timeless" and "universal" we might think Shakespeare to be, Hamlet as he wrote it made little sense to the Tiv.

In just the same way, we may well recognize that Native American stories that include instances of mother-in-law avoidance may make the wrong kind of sense to Westerners, as mother-in-law jokes may confuse or disturb many Indian audiences: all narratives that involve kinship relations are sure to be somewhat baffling if one does not know how a given culture expects kin to behave toward one another (and most Native narratives deal substantially with kinship relations). Frequent patternings of fours and fives in Plains and Northwest Coast stories will seem odd to people whose own pattern numbers are three or seven. Those used to looking others in the eye, vigorously shaking their hand, and inquiring casually of their health will not readily understand why such behavior causes laughter or consternation among

the Hopi and other Indian people. To develop any critical approach whatever to Native American literatures that deal with such matters—and all songs and stories, all literatures everywhere, deal with such matters—one needs an understanding of that people's cultural assumptions.

While no one disputes this in an absolute way, nonetheless, a certain rejection of the need for detailed, culture-specific information has arisen recently from two different versions of a perspective I will call "esthetic universalism." Both versions, in their strong forms, are obstacles in the way of any approximation to an ethnocriticism.

The first type of esthetic universalism holds that for all the differences in cultural custom all over the world, art is, nonetheless, essentially the same everywhere. Thus Karl Kroeber writes that

even an inexperienced reader can rewardingly apply to traditional Indian narratives the kind of critical attitude he brings to other literatures. When one does this, the primary discovery one makes is that diversity of interpretation is possible because the narrative truly is a work of art. (1981 8)

"A majority of Indian stories," Kroeber continues,

appeal to enough common features in human nature to allow us at least entrance to their pleasures—if only we can relax sufficiently to enjoy them. (1981 9)

Kroeber here replicates the worst aspects of Lévi-Straussian idealism as in such comments as the following:

The mythical value of the myth is preserved through the worst translation. Whatever our ignorance of the language and cul-

ture [!] of the people where it originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in the world. (Lévi-Strauss in Berman Ms. 1)

As Judith Berman has shown in a careful reading of one of Boas's translations from the Kwakiutl, even Boas, who most certainly was not ignorant "of [Kwakiutl] language and culture," could produce a text that leaves us "wondering how much of the 'mythical value' of a myth really does emerge in a bad translation" (ms. 1).

In the same idealistic vein as Lévi-Strauss and Kroeber, we have Jarold Ramsey's citation of the Nez Percé translator, Archie Phinney, to the effect that

Any substantial appreciation of these [Nez Perce] tales must come . . . from vivid feelings within oneself, feeling as a moving current [of?] all the figures and the relationships that belong to the whole myth-body. (Ramsey 1983 xxi)

Ramsey rhetorically asks, "Doesn't Phinney's formula ring true for us, too, literature being what it is, and our imaginations of life being what they are?" (xxi). The difficulty, of course, is that just what literature "is," as I have noted, not to say what "our imaginations of life" in different languages and modes of presentation "are," may not be so clear or universal as Ramsey assumes. As a participant in Nez Percé culture, a speaker of the language, and a fully prepared auditor of mythic stories, Phinney may well judge the effectiveness of any given telling as it does or does not produce "vivid feelings" in him. For Ramsey to appropriate Phinney's criteria as so easily available to the Western reader is naive at best, and even then a naivete perpetuating the worst imperial arrogance.

Even Kroeber's ideally "relaxed" reader, for all that she may spot "common features in human nature" in Indian literatures and permit herself the very greatest "diversity of interpretation," may find her readings either banal or simply mistaken. A reading of Indian literature that discovers in it, for example, the observations that people age and die, or that spring brings renewal to nature, would produce the identity of Indian literature to all other literatures by ignoring the particular, different, and other manner—the culturally-specific modes and codes—by and in which such observations are presented. And such a reading may simply be misinterpreting particular cultural details, taking them in ways that would be quite appropriate to Western literary art but which are not at all appropriate to Native American literary art. "Diversity" of interpretation is certainly possible for any rich literature, but it is not the case that anything goes; egregiously mistaken interpretations are the most usual consequence of an "inexperienced" reader applying "the kind of critical attitude he brings to other literatures" to the literatures of a very different culture. This is one more instance of—to take a well-known phrase from William Bevis—assuming "we" will get Indian literature as cheaply as we got Manhattan.^[3]

The second type of objection to an insistence on the importance of ethnographic information in the understanding of Native American literatures is more recent, and more complex in its implications. This objection derives its force from the context of postmodernism. Gerald Vizenor, the Anishinabe (Chippewa) poet, novelist, and critic is the foremost proponent of an anti-social-scientific, postmodernist approach to Native American literatures. Vizenor's sense,

[3] See Bevis, "American Indian Verse Translations."

more or less similar to that of postmodernist anthropologists like Stephen Tyler, as I have noted above, is that social-scientific "knowledge" is predominantly knowledge of its own rules, codes, and concepts for making sense of culture, not of culture itself. Human linguistic behavior—"literature"—like human behavior generally, for Vizenor is best exemplified by the figure of the trickster, whose shape-changing, limit-transgressing antics provide the best guide—it is inherent in the nature of the trickster not to provide a model —to who and what we are, and, as well, to how we ought to read.

Although there are a good number of Native American narrative types that neither deal with tricksters nor court their style and mode, for Vizenor the trickster is everywhere: "The trickster is a communal sign in a comic narrative: the comic holotrope (the whole figuration) is a consonance in tribal discourse" (1989a 9). Whatever is "evoked" (I make reference again to Tyler, whom Vizenor approvingly quotes) by the sentence above, there is also the following to consider: "The instrumental language of the social sciences," Vizenor writes, "are [sic] tragic or hypotragic modes that withhold communal discourse" (1989a 9). A couple of pages later in the same essay, however, Vizenor remarks that

social science studies reproduced new theories and contributed not so much to the doom of tragedies, but to a new insolence in tribal literature, an outbreak of hypotragedies . (1989a 11)

Grammatically, the "new insolence in tribal literatures" would seem to stand in apposition to—to be virtually synonymous with—"an outbreak of hypotragedies ." If that is the case, then it becomes difficult to understand how "hy-

potragedies," typical of the social sciences, are actually inimical to that "communal discourse," which surely marks "tribal literatures." It may be that Vizenor means "hypotragedies " to be in apposition to "new theories" in "social science studies." In any case, the passage quoted above continues, "The trickster, a semiotic sign in a third-person narrative, is never tragic or hypotragic, never the whole truth or even part truth" (1989a 11). The terms hypotragic and hypotragedy come up again and again, not only in Vizenor's preface and introduction to Narrative Chance , and in his "Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes," the essay which concludes the book, but as well in his later "Trickster Discourse," in which the hypotragic is tied to monologue, the unpardonable sin of the social sciences. Most recently, tricksters are explicitly tied to the postmodern: "Crossbloods hear the bears that roam in trickster stories, and the cranes that trim the seasons close to the ear. Crossbloods are a postmodern bloodline" (1990 vii), Vizenor writes. What is valorized here is the "comic and communal, rather than [the] tragic and sacrificial; [for] comedies and trickster signatures are liberations" (1990 viii).

Vizenor's sense of postmodern/trickster/comic "liberations," if I have at all gotten the point, insists upon the absolute difference of all linguistic acts and all texts one from another, a form of radical epistemological relativism that, in its own way, can lead to another type of esthetic universalism, in this case, one that would emphasize the absolute irreducible distinctiveness of all phenomena, one from another, rather than their ultimate sameness—an esthetics, as I think, in the ironic mode. Like Stephen Tyler's postmodern ethnography, which "describes no knowledge and produces no action," transcending both "by evoking what cannot be known discursively or performed perfectly,"

something "beyond truth and immune to the judgment of performance" (123), Vizenor's critical remarks resist semantic clarity in the interest not of logical but, rather, of rhetorical and evocative force, his prose offering itself as the concrete embodiment and illustration of any doctrine it would at once uphold and subvert. What I believe it cannot claim is to offer a superior, a "better" account (according to any criteria whatsoever) of Indian literatures ("tribal narratives," trickster narratives, "communal discourses," and so forth) than social-scientific accounts. Nonetheless, as I have already suggested in chapter 3—and this is a matter to which I shall return soon—I believe Vizenor's critical writing may well be adapted for the development of an ethnocriticism of Native American literatures.

Western criticism, I have said, must constitute itself by work on texts rather than on actual performances and this, as I have also said, is a problem of major proportions for someone like myself who is interested not only in Western critical approaches to Indian literatures but in the development of an ethnocritical approach. Ethnocriticism, as I have been trying to define it and, in whatever degree, to practice it, cannot strictly be just a further development of Western critical practice. Rather, it must be a practice which seeks, to cite Jana Sequoya's formulation, a "convergence—which does not, however, comprise an identity—of indigenous and Western epistemes" (3); in Talal Asad's sense, it must be no less than an attempt, in language, at "learning to live another form of life" (149).

The problem is how to achieve this "convergence" or "learning" when the ethnocritical encounter is one between "competing ways of having stories," ways in which capitalist/individualist "ways" confront Indian sacred or "communitarian ways" (Sequoya 14), or, to refer again to Asad, of

"different uses (practices), as opposed merely to different writings and readings" (160) of the work in question.

To take these matters into account is to question not only the possibility of a criticism of Native American literatures, but as well of an ethnocriticism, inasmuch as—in Sequoya's development of her argument, one to which Asad's commentary has particular relevance—indigenous literatures in the postcontact period must actively seek to distance themselves from Western (textual) critical practice in order to maintain their value and integrity. For all that ethnocriticism wishes to engage on an equal footing with Native literary practice, it cannot help but do so in a context of vastly unequal power relations. Thus, for all that the ethnocritic may decently and sincerely attempt to inquire into and learn from the Otherness of ongoing Indian literary performances, the sociopolitical context being what it is, she or he cannot help but threaten to swallow, submerge, or obliterate these performances. This is not to say that nothing can be done; but good-will or even great talent alone cannot undo the current differential power relations between dominant and subaltern cultural production.

Sequoya's comments come in a penetrating critique of Leslie Marmon Silko's highly acclaimed novel, Ceremony . And, indeed, it is likely that what most readers will know of Indian literary production today is the poetry and fiction of what may justifiably be called—the phrase is Kenneth Lincoln's—the recent "Native American Renaissance." This is work written in English for publication, and even though a very good deal of it appears under the imprint of small presses with limited means for advertisement and distribution, it nonetheless has a circulation far greater than the performances of contemporary-traditional (this adjectival phrase must not be taken as oxymoronic) Native singers and

storytellers. These latter, as is inevitably the case for oral literature, even in an "age of mechanical reproduction" far more complicated than any Walter Benjamin imagined, do not circulate very far beyond the community of their intended (and culturally prepared) auditors. I do not know whether the singing and storytelling in which a fair number of Native people are, today, actively engaged is sufficiently abundant to justify speaking, in this regard, too, of some sort of "Renaissance." (But there is the whole question of the very specific Western implications of that term, in any case, implications which, obviously enough, imply analogies to the rediscovery of "lost" "classical" traditions which tend to distort the history of Native literary production. Lincoln, it seems to me, intends the term in a vaguely honorific sense, and it is in that sense, and that sense only, that I have invoked and found it acceptable.) I think I do know that any indigenous criticism of this work will mostly appear in this work, so that it, too, will not circulate much beyond the storytelling communities.

I mean to say that contemporary singing and storytelling goes on in communities that use those performances as means of affirming and validating their identities as communities—communities, which, insofar as they are traditionally oriented, do not separate those stories from their performers, audiences, and occasions, and so have no reason to develop any distinctive category of "criticism" about them. This is not in the least to say that Indian people have no ideas or thoughts about the "literature" they perform or participate in; it is to say that they have no need to produce a body of knowledge about it that is separate and apart from it. As a point of fact and an illustration of that point, let me note that my pronominal uses of "it" in regard to Native peoples' understanding of their literature is a Western con-

vention that probably accords very badly with what I understand to be the actual ways Indians think about these things: for there is no abstract category like "literature" or "knowledge" that might be the antecedent of such an "it." (This is not , I should say, an instance of Spivak's catachrestical criticism: rather it is a fairly common problem of cross-cultural criticism).

In the West, there is a more or less (the issue is currently much contested) distinctive category of discourse that can be referred to as "literature," and its knowledge, indeed, knowledge it self, exists as a reified object, a commodity, an "it." The Western literary critic tries to know literature and to obtain knowledge about it , which he or she then has—in the best of cases, to teach it , and share it , and pass it democratically on to others. But in any event, a virtual thing is involved, one that is alienated from its lived experience precisely to become alienable, i.e., transferrable or translatable (and, again, for ostensibly "good," disinterested, even transcendentally Kantian purposes, as well as for "bad," and economically interested ones). This is, to repeat, not the case for traditional Indian people both today and in the past.

It may be helpful here to mention, by way of illustration, the work of Harry Robinson, a contemporary Okanagan storyteller.^[4] Because so few in the Similkameen Valley in Southern British Columbia where he lives speak Okanagan any more, Robinson, who learned his stories in his native language, nonetheless tells them today in English. Wendy Wickwire, who has published some of Robinson's stories, notes that

[4] I am grateful to Professor Anthony Mattina for bringing Robinson's work to my attention.

in speaking English Harry uses pronouns indiscriminately. "He," "she," "it," and "they" are interchangeable, no matter what the antecedent. In most cases, Harry uses the plural neuter "they," rather than the singular "he," "she," or "it." (Wickwire 15)

Wickwire adds, "This is common in the speech of native elders" (15), and this may or may not be related to the few remarks I have offered about Indian ways of "having" stories. (I would not want to engage the problematics of any Whorfian linguistic determinism; but, again, see Asad's discussion of uses/practices.)

Wickwire sums up a good deal of what I have been trying to say when she writes of her decision not to edit out of Harry Robinson's "traditional" stories some "'modern contaminants.'" I will quote her at some length:

The purist might edit some or all of the "modern contaminants" out of Harry's stor[ies], believing these to be tarnished post-contact influences on an otherwise traditional body of knowledge. This is typical of the scientific tendency to crystallize living, evolving oral culture—to transform myth into a static artifact, an "urtext" which contains the purest essence of what, to the Western mind, a native North American culture is (was). To do so is to miss the point entirely. In an oral tradition such as Harry's, where nothing is fundamentally new, and where creation is not some moment in the past, but remains present as the wellspring of every act and every experience in the world, the body of what is known is an integral part of creation. (23)

Thus "to crystallize Harry's stories, either on tape or in book form," as Wickwire is fully aware, is to "fix . . . these living

stories in time. They will now no longer evolve as they have for hundreds of generations," and so her "book might be criticized for Homerizing Harry." By "criticized," of course, Wickwire means blamed, disapproved of. But it is only by "Homerizing Harry" that her book—and, most particularly, his stories—may indeed be criticized: by which I mean that his stories may be turned into subject/objects of a Western criticism of Native American literature. So far as Harry Robinson's stories do live and evolve, their evolution would contain within them any "criticism" of them, revisions, and variously selected "contaminants" serving as implicit commentary, and serving as an integral part of—to return to Sequoya's discussion—the "particular relationships with the conditions which produce them and specifically position the audience with respect to those [conditions]" (Sequoya). It would seem, then, that what is necessary for Native American oral literatures to become subject/objects of criticism is, to put the matter baldly, that they die.

To the extent that this is, however, unfortunately, true, it bears upon the prospects for a properly ethnocritical account of Native American oral literatures, calling into question, as I have fully tried to acknowledge, the practice of the project I have been defining in theory. For it may well be the case that the Western view of history, for example, as compared or contrasted with the historical view of High Plains (and, I suspect, other Indian) people (see p. 16), like the Western view of literature and of criticism as compared or contrasted with the view of traditional people, cannot "converge" or satisfactorily be mediated—or, as I shall take the matter up, "translated." It may be that unless one is quite willing "to murder to dissect," the differences are irreconcilable. Short of reaching such a conclusion—but also, I admit, quite short of the specific outline of a practice—I

can only offer the following speculations. And, in Eric Cheyfitz's phrase, "Only the other has the right to decide if these figures touch his or her facts" (xix).

Although I have been critical of Gerald Vizenor's trickster criticism just above, a criticism located explicitly by Vizenor within the Western postmodern episteme (postmodern, over the past several years has, indeed, become one of Vizenor's favorite words), there may—again, as I have noted above and in chapter 3—be ways in which Vizenor's "loosening the bounds" of Western discursive categories could be reoriented for ethnocritical purposes. I would once more cite the extremely fascinating conjunction of Vizenor's commitment to postmodern "trickster" fluidities with their ostensibly comic, infinite openness, and his commitment to what I have called premodern tribal identities, with their strong sense of natural rights and responsibilities—and as well to a view of the natural world utterly and entirely different from the postmodern alienation of late capitalism. Vizenor, at any rate, is at the height of his powers, and his very special work is clearly worth watching in its ongoing development.

It also seems to me—I admit to tentativeness and unsureness here—that there may be possibilities for the development of a nonviolent, anti-imperial ethnocritical practice for Native American song and story, not directly but indirectly—I will discuss another indirect route in detail just below—through the study of Native American oratory. Oratorical performances, like narrative or lyric performances, are always ritualistic, in varying degrees sacred—if, as I think, one can indeed speak of degrees of the sacred—and, like the songs and stories, committed to defining, affirming, and sustaining the communal life. But oratorical performances are those developed for specifically

public occasions, and some of these, in post-contact times, increasingly have had to be adapted, far more than the songs and stories, to the pressures of nontraditional—which is, of course, to say Western, pressures. The Cherokee Memorials responding to the Indian Removal Bill, which I have attempted to analyze as rhetorical writing , had, as they continue to have, oral analogues. In the present, Native oratory ranges from the ritual oratory of the Pima and Papago (Tohon O'odham) analyzed by Donald Bahr, to that of the Iroquois longhouse ceremonies analyzed by Michael Foster, to oratory for the dedication of fish hatcheries analyzed by Anthony Mattina and his student, Donovan Lytle, to the Tlingit speech acts studied by Richard and Nora Dauenhauer.^[5] I am admittedly offering no more than general intuitions here, but it seems to me that in the current revival of interest in Native American oratory there are possibilities for the development of an ethnocritical practice that may in time be adjusted to produce, as well, an ethnocriticism of Native American song and story.

Bahr's broadly suggestive (and rather overlooked) study of 1975 (one of the epigraphs to this chapter comes from this text) may offer some important possibilities in these regards, contending, as it does, "that the original collections of ritual oratory should be returned to the Pimans in written form and in a manner that will facilitate their use" (1975 3); that the "methodological eminence [Bahr] assigned to the written Piman version is a lonely eminence . . . because no reader of the next pages will be able to relate to it in a familiar manner" (28); and, thus, that his "written text is a

[5] I have already cited Bahr's study of Pima and Papago ritual oratory. See Works Cited for the unpublished manuscripts by Mattina and Lytle. I also there give references for the important recent studies of oratory by Nora and Richard Dauenhauer, Miguel León-Portilla, and Joel Sherzer.

product without a public at the present time, pure scholarship" (28). Moreover, Bahr writes that its methodological base or "theory was 'made up' by [him] and is not the product of any orator" (30). "No Piman orator," Bahr affirms, "is presently known to be interested in the problem of writing and very little is known about how orators think or theorize about their oral art" (30). But perhaps out of these awarenesses something further can come—especially if it should turn out, as Bahr tentatively dares hope, that Pimans might, indeed, become interested in the "returns" he and others have made. Nonetheless, as Sequoya has once again pointed out (personal communication), any specifically ethnocritical approach to Native American oral literary practice, even to oratory, will have to take into account the enormously different visibilities and powers of the dominant culture and the Native American minority, Asad's specification of what he calls "unequal languages" (156).

To the extent that any sort of critical practice consistent with ethnocritical aims already has some actual if incipient existence, I would suggest it may be found not in the formal discourses of Western criticism, but, rather, as one might perhaps guess from the discussion thus far, in the practice of translation from Native American literatures into English. It should be clear that I am not thinking, here, of Henry Timberlake's procedures or of their later analogues. Instead, I am thinking of those moments in the history of translation when the intentions of poet-translators from the dominant culture more nearly seemed to approach the intentions of Indian performers than anything Timberlake could have imagined. I think these might be examined for another indirect route toward an ethnocriticism of Native American literatures.

By way of illustration, let me only mention the translation

versions of Indian songs done by Mary Austin in the twenties and thirties of this century, before turning to the translation versions of Jerome Rothenberg from the sixties to the present. It has been said by some that so far as these two consider themselves actually to be doing translation, they do "bad" translation, and I believe there may be a measure of justice in that judgment.^[6] I would like to argue, however, that "bad" as these texts may be as translations, they nonetheless may be quite "good"—at least useful—as criticism. (In this I differ from Talal Asad insofar as he differentiates clearly between translation and criticism .) Further, the fact that translation-as-criticism to some extent mirrors the Native American way of doing "criticism"—critical practice, that is, only as internal to an evolving literary practice—it may do somewhat less violence to the literatures it "criticizes."

Before going on to develop this point, I suppose I must say something about how I understand the distinction between "good" and "bad" translation—and I continue to print these two words within quotation marks for obvious reasons—although even to approximate an adequate account of this matter would take us far out of our way. Because my critical orientation is more nearly cultural-materialist than idealist, I am largely in agreement with Bahr's view (although I don't mean at all to suggest that he shares my critical orientation) of "good" translation. I agree, that is, with his "simple but somewhat extreme position that English translations of non-English poetries ought to reflect the style of the original even at the expense of looking or

[6] Bevis, in the essay cited in note 3, early made a case against Rothenberg's translations (and Austin's as well), and more recently, William Clements has published a useful if, in my view, somewhat extreme critique in "Faking the Pumpkin: On Jerome Rothenberg's Literary Offenses."

sounding odd in English" (1975 2). Consistent with this is Robert Brightman's recent observation that "By common consensus," there are "two necessary requirements" for translators. First is "some control of the original language from which the English translation is rendered," and second is the "explicit specification of the syntactic, semantic, lexical, prosodic, or other parallelisms that are used to delimit the text into lines and/or more inclusive units of poetic measure" (179). This sort of view would exclude Mary Austin entirely and Jerome Rothenberg at least partly as potentially "good" translators , as it also seems to exclude Howard Norman, a study of whose The Wishing Bone Cycle provides the occasion for Brightman's remarks.

Of course, there have been radically different views of "good" translation, ones that privilege the translator's ability to rise above fidelity to the letter of the original's style in the interest of capturing its "essence" or "spirit." Somewhat less usual are the views of Rudolf Pannwitz, Walter Benjamin, and Maurice Blanchot (I shall turn to them soon), attempting, in Benjamin's words, to make "both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel" (78). The standards according to which one may judge the degree to which any given translation may or may not have fulfilled this task remain mysterious to me, although Asad's instantiation of Benjamin's commitment to the "intentio " of the original demystifies the matter to a great extent.

One of the reasons Jerome Rothenberg's work is so interesting is that—and the reader has already many times encountered my attraction to this sort of endeavor—he importantly mediates idealist and materialist concerns, paying at least some measure of attention to "syntactic, semantic, lexical, prosodic" (Brightman 179) elements of the original,

while feeling quite unconstrained to cut loose from those elements in search of the essentially (perhaps he would say "universally") "poetic" dimension of the original (Asad's/Benjamin's "intentio" ). In a recent essay, called "'We Explain Nothing, We Believe Nothing': American Indian Poetry & the Problematics of Translation" (1991), Rothenberg not only defends his translation practices (in a tone and manner that are not at all defensive), but demonstrates his awareness of the ways in which translation is inevitably criticism. The particular kind of criticism Rothenberg's "ethnopoetic" translations perform is about the nearest approximation to anything I know of an ethnocritical practice for Native American literature already in place.

Rothenberg begins with an epigraph from an essay of Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot writes:

Likeness, as [Walter] Benjamin rightly says, is not at issue here: if one requires that the translated work resemble the work to be translated, no translation is possible. What is involved, rather, is an identity that takes off from an alterity: the same work in two languages foreign to each other, and this mutual foreignness thus making visible the movement by which this work always becomes other , the very motion from which must be drawn the light which will transparently illuminate the translation. (84)

Without endorsing Blanchot's commentary as a whole (I balk, for example, at the notion of any form of transparent illumination, as well as, in the context of imperialism—which does not seem to concern Blanchot—the notion of "mutual foreignness"), still there is much that is useful here. Blanchot has in mind a famous passage in Benjamin's essay, "The Task of the Translator," in which Benjamin cites ("as

the best comment on the theory of translation that has been published in Germany" [Benjamin 80]) some remarks of Rudolf Pannwitz. Pannwitz is quoted as follows:

Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English . Our translators have far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works. . . . The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. (In Benjamin 80–1, my emphasis)^[7]

Now Benjamin, like Blanchot, isn't in the least interested in the imperial relations between European metropolitan powers and others; his project, the mystico-theological side of Benjamin which some (not I) admire, is a kind of impossible imagining of a totalized and unitary language, what must have been before the Tower of Babel; what God would speak or think. Eric Cheyfitz, in his study of the relations between translation and imperialism, also cites Pannwitz/Benjamin, and does so for purposes much closer to my own, as, with significant differences, does Talal Asad. (See also David Murray.)

[7] Inasmuch as it is translation I am talking about, it should be noted that the translation of Pannwitz's German into English is that of Harry Zohn. Blanchot's citation of Pannwitz is probably—I haven't been able, I regretfully admit, to check this—from the French translation of Pannwitz-in-Benjamin. This appears in the English translation of Blanchot by Richard Sieburth rather differently than in Zohn, as follows:

Our translations even the finest ones proceed from a false premise they want to germanize sanskrit greek english instead of sanskritizing hellenizing anglicizing german . . . etc. (Blanchot 85)

This is very effective—but I suspect quite "free" in its translation of Pannwitz!

This is to say that so far as translation may be imagined as a critical practice that seeks to undo its largely imperial history—its claim to speak for those who have no eloquent language of their own, its domination of the foreign figure of speech (Aristotle's definition of metaphor) by domesticating it, siting-by-citing it within one's own discourse, and so on—Pannwitz's is an exemplary conceptualization. According to Cheyfitz, Montaigne, in his essay on the cannibals, attempts "to displace the univocal opposition between the proper and the figurative with an equivocal, or kinbased relationship, where mastery [based in such an opposition] is impossible" (Cheyfitz 155). In much the same way, Rothenberg affirms the view that

translation . . . involves . . . a discourse on its own problematics. . . . [I]t functions as a commentary on the other and itself and on the differences between them. It is much more a kind of question than a summing up. (1991 2)

Inasmuch as translation from Native American literatures raises questions "that center on orality, . . . on the sacred, and . . . on the question of imperial displacement" (1991 3), Rothenberg claims "that translation as a process is a principal means by which [these questions] can be explored" (3).

As Montaigne, in Cheyfitz's analysis, "uncannily imagines the language of the cannibals so he can alienate his own language in it" (Cheyfitz 163), as Asad insists that translation must be "learning to live another form of life" (149), so, too, does Rothenberg cite the Brechtian term "Verfremdung " to speak of his "own urge" in what he has called "'total translation"' (14), "as much to cultivate the mystery [of otherness, difference, alterity] as to dispel it" (14), or to take that

"mystery" into his own language. If, to return once more to Cheyfitz's discussion of Montaigne, the project of anti-imperial translation—this might, indeed, better be called sublation —is "to blur the frontier between the proper ['literal'] and figurative meanings of essential ethnological vocabulary" (Cheyfitz 155), this project, in Rothenberg's practice, seeks inevitably to challenge "the dominant assumptions" in the West "about the form and function of the poetic act" (11), in Asad's account, to cause the translator critically to examine "the normal state of his or her own language" (157). Thus translation can become "a calling into question of dominant attitudes in the colonizing culture" (31), and perhaps "help foster [in the dominant culture] the conditions for a new, even a newly sacred sense of poetry and of life" (31)—a sense that might, in fact, learn a good deal from traditional Indian peoples.

Of great importance to Rothenberg's view of translation is his determination, as he has said again and again, to get as far away as he can from writing (1968; 1991). Just as his former colleague and fellow translator Dennis Tedlock has committed his translation procedures to the production of what Tedlock calls a "performable translation" (13), so, too, does Rothenberg also—often at least, if not always—produce performable translations, translations, indeed, which he has on many occasions performed. (And, I might note, my own response to his performances, a response that seems to be consistent with what I have heard from others who have heard him, finds them to have great power.) This is not to say, unfortunately, that I believe the translations from Native American literatures Rothenberg has done fully achieve the goals he has stated. On the page, for example, Rothenberg privileges the visual in ways that do not, in my opinion, provide parallels for the aural. There is also a thor-

oughly Western subjectivistic individualism—e.g., as he admits, he does things frequently as they feel right to him —to his work that is probably all but inescapable but which nonetheless obtrudes upon any close approach to the cultural bases of tribal performances. And, as Sequoya has pointed out in a comment on Rothenberg's essay (personal communication), there remains in the forefront of his project the desire for self-transformation which (without denying the integrity of Rothenberg's commitment to social transformation as well) is quite alien to traditional performers. All of this notwithstanding, I would still say (or perhaps merely repeat) that Rothenberg's translations may nonetheless have possibilities, tentative though they may be, for the material practice of an ethnocriticism—so far as this may be possible for Native American literatures.

6.
Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self

Although studies of Native American autobiography have become more numerous of late, no one of these has yet taken as its central focus the matter that has perhaps more than anything else occupied students of Western autobiography, that is, the nature of the "self" presented in these texts. This is not to indicate an error or omission; to the contrary, inasmuch as the centrality of the self to Western autobiography has no close parallel in Native American autobiography, any immediate orientation toward the self would inevitably have seemed ethnocentric, at the least premature. But to say that the Western understanding of the self, in its various historical representations, is neither prioritized nor valorized in Native American autobiography is not at all to say that subjectivity is, therefore, absent or unimportant in these texts. Whether or not Paul Heelas is correct in his generalization (and I think he probably is not) that "the autonomous self is universal" (48), it is very likely the case that some sense of self—perhaps Amélie Rorty's "reflective, conscious subject of experience, a subject that is not identical with any set of its experiences, memories or traits, but is that which has all of them" (11)—is indeed to

be found universally, and so, to be sure, among Native American people.

The problem is that every term in Rorty's (or in any other) description is culture-specific, inflected in its meaning by the particular cultural codes according to which we differentially "have," as historically and geographically situated men and women, our similar "experiences" as human beings.^[1] What, after all, does it mean for the Hopi to be "reflective," for the Yaqui to be "conscious," for the Chippewa to be a "subject," for the Ojibwa to "have" experiences? Humans are or do all of these things, and we are or do them in the same ways—differently. Considerations of this sort have animated work in the ethnography of the self, from its rudimentary and initially "anti-psychological"^[2] be-

[1] If not another "problem," another consideration is that while some sense of self may be universal, it is not the case that that sense of self, whatever it may be, receives cultural validation. As we shall see, not selfhood, hallmark of "individualist" society so much as personhood, hallmark of the "holist" society (Dumont passim) is what is found among most of the world's people.

[2] Clyde Kluckhohn, quoted by A. I. Hallowell (387n). I would not be quite so certain as Marsella, DeVos, and Hsu, writing at the meridian of Reaganism, that "The Self has returned!" nor so unequivocally cheered if that were indeed the case. Nevertheless, it does seem to be true that psychological anthropology, for better or worse, is currently on an upswing and that its focus of study is whatever name we choose to give to the unitary male's or female's own sense of himself or herself as a unit entity. Almost by definition, a strictly conceived psychological anthropology tends to privilege the individual perception of self, projecting a Western bourgeois bias. For a tough, ideologically inflected account of the early culture and personality movement, see Harris 1968. Although culture-and-personality studies may be dated from as early as 1910, their influence, through Benedict, Mead, Sapir, and others (cf. n. 7, below), is more nearly a matter of the thirties. Hsu is particularly hostile to "personality" as the reference term for this type of study, which may account for the title of his co-edited text, Culture and Self . Thomas Williams lists over a hundred and twenty references that permit the interested reader to trace the historical trajectory from culture and personality to psychological anthropology in his "The Development of Psychological Anthro-

pology," the introduction to a collection of essays on the subject. For the "continuities" between the two orientations, see also the study by Philip K. Bock. Victor Barnouw's textbook, in its fourth edition as of 1985, still adheres to the older nomenclature for its title. The introduction by John Kirkpatrick and Geoffrey M. White to their Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies offers a particularly sophisticated and thoughtful account of these matters. The journal, Ethos , published by the American Society for Psychological Anthropology was founded in 1973.

ginnings in the form of "culture and personality" studies from about 1910 on, to its current existence in the form of a decidedly "psychological anthropology." Yet for all of this work, we are still far from any conceptual and terminological consensus about how to speak of the self, the individual, or the ego, the "I," or "me," the "modal personality," the "model of identity"—or, indeed, the "subject," where each of these terms signals not only a personal preference, a research interest or emphasis, but as well, as Paul Smith has recently shown, a disciplinary affiliation (subjects coming more or less from philosophy, individuals and selves from the humanities, egos and modal personalities from the social sciences, etc.).^[3] Even to the extent we do know how these terms apply to the West, we know less well how they apply (or don't apply) to the rest, whose thought on such matters is reduced (or elevated) to the level of "indigenous psychologies."^[4]

To be sure, these studies are barely a century old, so that it would be premature to abandon, as a certain postmodernist strain of thought would urge, further efforts in the direction of some greater accuracy of description and explanation. Yet it is necessary to acknowledge, here, a practical rather than a theoretical problem certain to beset ad-

[3] See Discerning the Subject .

[4] See, for example, Paul Heelas and Andrew Lock, eds., Indigenous Psychologies: The Anthropology of the Self .

vances along these lines, one akin to that Freud posited for the general prospects of psychoanalysis.^[5] I refer to the fact that while it is a fairly simple matter to convince people that their eating or greeting habits are cultural rather than natural, it is considerably more difficult to convince them that the ways in which they think and deeply feel about themselves are also more nearly culturally than biologically determined. And modern Western concepts of the self are so thoroughly committed to notions of interiority and individualism that even anthropologically sophisticated Westerners have a tendency to construct their accounts of the varieties of selfhood as an evolutionary narrative, telling a story of a progression from the social and public orientation of ancient or "primitive" self-conception (the self as social "person") to the modern, Western, "civilized," egocentric/individualist sense of self.^[6]

This tendency may be responsible for what I take as the essentially comic plot of Marcel Mauss's 1938 essay, most recently translated as "A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self." Mauss's seminal study tells a story which has as its happy ending the emergence of the "moi ," the Western post-romantic self as veritably "sacred," a construction that surpasses what Mauss calls the personnage models of the Native Americans, Mauss's chief illustrative example, and the personnalité models of ancient and/or non-Western peoples generally. For Mauss, Native American self-consciousness was minimal, or, better, de-

[5] Sigmund Freud, "One of the Difficulties of Psychoanalysis."

[6] Paul Heelas, who develops practical applications of Andrew Lock's distinction between concepts of the self as "in control" or "under control," according to what he calls "idealist" or "passiones " models (39ff), quotes Edward Tylor, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and C. Hallpike in ways that would seem to indicate their attachment to a Western view for all their (rudimentary, in Tylor's case) commitment to versions of cultural relativism.

fined by the etymology of the word person (personne, personnage ), from Latin persona, per sonare , as this referred to the mask through which the actor spoke his role in public. Not an individual with rights and responsibilities before the law (this must await the Roman addition of the right to a personal praenomen or "forename," and the Christian invention of "the moral person"), the Indian was rather the representative of his ancestor or his clan, an actor who merely performed his appointed character. As Mauss would have it, the Indian knew little or nothing of that consciousness which is properly and proudly a self -consciousness, "an act of the 'self,"' and which, from Fichte on, saw "the revolution in mentalities . . . accomplished" (22). Mauss drew some of these conclusions from the investigations of Boasian anthropologists, and he offers particular data from the Hopi. In this regard, as Peter Whiteley has recently shown, Mauss either ignored or was quite simply wrong in his understanding of the complexities of Hopi naming practices (Whiteley 1988). For all that Hopis do, indeed, identify with clan and sodality roles, Whiteley's carefully gathered data show that Hopis also take great pleasure in the distinctive, "poetic," and, indeed, quite individualistic qualities of some of the names they formerly and continuously bestow and appreciate (Whiteley 1991). These comments are intended to suggest a complexity to the "red side" of the story greater than most commentators have thus far allowed; this is not to say that Native American and Eurmerican conceptions of the self are , after all, more nearly alike than Mauss claimed.

For, there is little or nothing in the indigenous cultures of the Americas to parallel what I will offer here as an illustration of the apogee of the "modern" Western moi , what we find in a text like Gerard Manley Hopkins's "As kingfish-

ers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame," in which the inward self appears both as actor in "God's eye," and sublimely unique romantic consciousness.

For Hopkins,

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came . (53)

But this lovely indoor self, in Mauss's tale, unfortunately was never present to the poor outdoor Indian.

In his ultimate celebration of the inward self, Mauss, as a number of commentators have noted, seems to renege on his initial promise to "leave aside everything which relates to the 'self' (moi ), the conscious personality as such," and to focus instead on the "social history" (3) of the person, the category of prime concern to Mauss's uncle and maître , Emile Durkheim, as it was to that major but—at least in literary circles—currently somewhat obscure figure, George Herbert Mead. Mead's "social theory of the self," as Stephen Lukes has remarked, sought "to explain how it can be, in all societies and cultures, that" in Mead's words,

all selves are constituted by or in terms of the social process, and are individual reflections of it [yet] every individual self has its own peculiar individuality, its own unique pattern. (Lukes 287)

In this regard, any attempt to privilege the sacred inviolability of the self by setting it in opposition to society or culture, standard Western bourgeois practice at least

since Fichte, involves, to return to Lukes, "a significant loss of understanding" of everything beyond the local/Western. To avoid such a loss, we get in the forties and fifties a redescription of the Native American sense of self by such writers as Dorothy Lee and George Devereux, among others, in ways that relativize the matter in the interest, to invoke again the phrase of Fischer and Marcus, of anthropology as cultural critique. Whatever Indian sense of self—and this is no more monolithic than any "Western" sense of self—one may describe now seems less "primitive" and retrograde than, indeed, more "advanced," wiser than what prevails in the West in its superior comprehension of the dynamic interaction, not the opposition, between any self and any society. Oddly, or not so oddly, we have, in this period, a comic narrative of identity once more—only the protagonist is different!^[7]

[7] But there is a complicated history here, which, although it is beyond the scope of this chapter, is very well worth detailing. The background involves Ruth Benedict's prescriptive "descriptions" of Native American personality clusters (1934); Margaret Mead's Pacific excursus (1928); and Erik Erikson's intervention culminating in detailed accounts of correlations (Erikson being quite careful to deny any claim to statements of a directly causal nature) between Yurok and Sioux childrearing practices and adult character structures. The work of Anthony Wallace with the Tuscarora and A. I. Hallowell with the Ojibwa also deserves mention, as does that of George Spindler and the "Rorschachists." George Devereux's important invention, as it were, of ethnopsychoanalysis commences with the practical demonstration of his Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian , and achieves full theoretical statement in From Anxiety to Method . Current work along a variety of these lines, as I have noted above, is abundant. Still, the conclusion of Richard Shweder's recent three-part essay, "Rethinking Culture and Personality Theory," is that "Most of the postulates of the culture and personality school . . . worked out in the 1940s and 1950s . . . do not weather well under empirical and conceptual scrutiny" (I 255–6). Shweder's own positions are "worked out" in his "Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally?" (co-authored with Edmund J. Bourne).

Before developing this point just a bit further, it seems to me useful to speak of the point Carter Revard has so shrewdly raised in regard to any narratives of Indian identity. Revard, I mean to say, has raised the important issue of demographic or topic-al influences on generic geneses. For one thing, as he writes,

I wonder how much mere demographics has to do with the differences between Native American and Western literature. I take a major fact to be that in a small, relatively classless society where everyone knows everyone else, it is redundant for anyone to offer an autobiography. I take as another major fact that cities are meant to hide lives, to make sure nobody knows what one has been doing, to try and prevent circumstances of family and parentage from constraining a person's claims on society or claims for herself. I take it that in a society where there are many people and most of them have never met or meet only for brief moments, where "privacy" means one can hide everything in the past from anyone else, THERE it is possible to offer autobiography. (Personal communication)

Any Indian sense of self we may derive from Native American autobiography must, I believe, take these considerations into account. And these considerations, as I shall have occasion to note shortly, bear on the matter of voice and text in Native American self-presentation.

To return to the particular history of the thirties and forties, however, it was Devereux's opinion that for Native Americans "maximum individuation and maximum socialization go hand in hand" (291), while Lee concluded that Lakota cultures demonstrate "autonomy and community in transaction" (1986 41). Of the Wintu self, Lee noted (her generalizations supported by impressionistically selective

"ethnoscientific" citations from Wintu grammar and diction), that it is

not clearly opposed to the other, neither is it clearly identical with or incorporated in the other. On most occasions it participates to some extent in the other, and is of equal status to the other. (1959 137)

Wintu know "society" more readily than the "self," the reverse of our Western knowledge; but most of all, Wintu seem to have found a way to reconcile what often appears to Euramericans as an opposition between self and society.^[8]

In any event, insofar as we would attempt to generalize about the Native American self from the available studies, that self would seem to be less attracted to introspection, expansion, or fulfillment than the Western self appears to be. It would seem relatively uninterested in such things as the "I-am-me" experience,^[9] and a sense of uniqueness or individuality. More positively, one might perhaps instantiate an "I-am-we" experience as descriptive of the Native

[8] To the extent this is true, it might then be said that some Native American cultures seem to have reconciled the apparently antithetical implications of the English words subject and individual , for all that these are often used as synonyms. As Raymond Williams has usefully pointed out, the etymology of the first, from the Latin sub- and jactum (p.p.), to be thrown under or beneath, persists in the senses of being subject to, the subject of, subjected, and so forth (e.g., Lock's self "under control"). The etymology of individual, however, continues to carry with it the original sense of indivisible, as if one were fully present to oneself and uniquely empowered as causal agent (e.g., Lock's self "in control"). This sense of the individual, espoused historically by a certain vulgar humanism in the fifties, called forth an equivalently vulgar anti-humanism in the sixties and after (as, e.g., in much of Foucault), with no place whatsoever for the active force of human agency. For a fine account of these matters see Kate Soper's Humanism and Anti-Humanism .

[9] For the "I-am-me" experience, see Herbert Spiegelberg's discussion in Eakin, pp. 217–9.

sense of self, where such a phrase indicates that I understand myself as a self only in relation to the coherent and bounded whole of which I am a part (e.g., the quotation from Lee above). Here, Jane Fajans's distinction between the "person as a bounded entity invested with specific patterns of social behavior, normative powers, and restraints, and the individual as an entity with interiorized conscience, feelings, goals, motivations, and aspirations" (370 my emphasis) is useful. Native Americans (along with most of the world's people, it would seem) tend to construct themselves not as individuals but as persons. As Carter Revard had shown over ten years ago, in his comments on the autobiographies of Geronimo and others, and as David Brumble, from a somewhat different perspective has convincingly affirmed (1981, 1989), for Native American persons, "the notions of cosmos, country, self, and home are inseparable" (Revard 1980 86).

At this point it would be possible to proceed with readings of several Native American autobiographies in order to determine whether their authors do or do not seem to conceive themselves in the ways suggested by the available anthropological and psychological literature. The danger here is that such readings tend not to be actual "readings" at all, but, instead, tautological exercises in the "discovery" of literary "evidence" for psychological or anthropological "truths" already established elsewhere, as if autobiography were no more than a museum for the self where one could peer through language as through the transparent glass of a case.

Concerned to avoid such vulgar reductionism, it is tempting to adopt the militantly formalist position of a Paul de Man, which insists that autobiography is no more than a figure of reading, an effect of language, and thus can pro-

vide no reliable information about selves—or about anything else outside the orders of language.^[10] This position denies that we can ever know another self in autobiography—affirming (what for the deconstructionist is apparently abundant recompense) that what we can know is simply the infinite play of linguistic signification.

How, then, to navigate between the Scylla of a purely realistic/referential reading and the Charybdis of a purely linguistic/figural reading? How to satisfy a thoroughly reputable interest in the subject of autobiography as biographical existent, and as cultural and historical agent, while centering one's commentary on what autobiographical texts present linguistically, the actual words from which any sense of self must be inferred? For, to speak, now, only of Native American autobiographies, one finds little or no explicit mention of who-I-am, little or no mention at all of the self as the object of conscious and developed concern.

Let me propose as one avenue of approach—and so an attempt at mediating the two positions—that we appropriate terms for the figures of language as applicable to some facts of life. With all due apologies to the reader for elaborating what may well be obvious, I want to state as clearly as I can here the potential contribution the discussion to follow hopes to make; this is also, I am well aware, to specify the grounds for that discussion's limitations and weaknesses. I mean to suggest that the West's traditional fourfold rhetorical division of elocutio and poeisis into metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, a division invented to name linguistic relations, may be taken (metaphorically) as naming relations of an actual/"realistic" type between the per-

[10] See "Autobiography as De-Facement." The figure specified by de Man is prosopopeia. For an excellent brief discussion see Eakin, pp. 184–91, whose own view is rather different. Paul Smith comments on de Man's essay as well, pp. 105ff.

son/individual and others (or society) and so may provide terms for a theory of self-conception and self-situation as these appear in the texts we call autobiographies .

If it is indeed the case, for example, that there are peoples who actually do conceive of themselves as in some very real sense interchangeable with their ancestors and their posterity (the Balinese, in Clifford Geertz's account, perhaps?^[11] ), then we might expect any stories they tell about themselves to show a metaphorical conception of the self, one that constructs identity paradigmatically, along the vertical axis of analogical selection. Metonymy and synecdoche I take as terms that name relations of a part-to-part and a part-to-whole type. Thus, where personal accounts are strongly marked by the individual's sense of herself predominantly as different and separate from other distinct individuals, one might speak of a metonymic sense of self. Where any narration of personal history is more nearly marked by the individual's sense of himself in relation to collective social units or groupings, one might speak of a synecdochic sense of self, both metonymy and synecdoche constructing identity syntagmatically, along the horizontal axis of contiguity and combination.

While I am ignorant of specific instances of an ironic sense of self elsewhere in the world, I would suggest that some of what might be called "modernist" senses of self in the West may be usefully categorized as ironic. The exemplary texts here (I cite novelistic examples for the purer types fiction can construct; autobiographical near-equivalents may readily enough be found) are, at the earliest, Melville's uncanny imagination of the "confidence

[11] For a sketch of the Balinese "self" as well as some others, see Geertz's "'From the Native's Point of View': On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding."

man," and Dostoyevsky's story of the "underground man," these followed by a whole library, as it were, of ironic modern "characters": T. S. Eliot's fragmented voices out of "the waste land," Robert Musil's "man without qualities," Kafka's "arrested" and metamorphosed men, Virginia Woolf's disembodied monologists in The Waves , right on to Samuel Beckett's portrayals of the self as contingent to the point of virtual dissolution. In these texts there is neither the metaphorical sense of the cosmic interchangeability of persons; nor the metonymic sense of the specific uniqueness of otherwise comparable individuals; nor the synecdochic sense of personal representation of a collective entity. Rather, there is only the sense of self-identity as fact-with-no-meaning: I-am-I, but so what. Or, in the specifically antiphrastic form, I am not like him, not like her, certainly not like them, that's not me, nor that, nor am I much like anything at all.^[12]

From the perspective of a rhetorical hardliner like de Man, the procedure I have outlined represents no more than a categorical error: one cannot cross the line from language to life inasmuch as it is the very essence of figures to signify only linguistically and not realistically. That is to say, if one takes the standard illustration of synecdoche, "fifty sail" for "fifty ships," it is obvious that the figure makes no sense realistically:^[13] although one can , of course, visualize fifty sails coming across the water, the image itself is un-

[12] The typical affective response to such a sense of self in modernist literature is the feeling of alienation and anxiety. The postmodern self, it should be said, is also constructed ironically and rhetorically presented by the figure of catachresis , "abusive" or absurd usage. Its affective response I see as what Fredric Jameson has referred to as schizophrenic "euphoria." See Jameson's "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." For catachresis , see chapter 2.

[13] Granted, it makes surrealistic sense, but surrealistic sense I take as a textual effect. Surrealistic speech by definition could not have ordinary or normative force.

likely to refer to anything one might actually see. Literally, it makes no sense. The same is true for "he is all heart," e.g., visualizing "him" as an assemblage of arteries, auricles, ventricles, etc. Nonetheless, I am making the assumption that the part-to-whole relation named by the term synecdoche and the part-to-part relation named by the term metonymy, along with the relations termed metaphoric and ironic as these are posited in language, can usefully be applied to relations we experience in life, particularly, here, the relation of the individual self, or subject to other individuals selves, or subjects, and to collectively constituted groups.

I am assuming, to put it in the phrase of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, that there are, indeed, "metaphors we live by" (q.v.); and that, as M. Brewster Smith has written, "the metaphorical texture of our views of self is part and parcel of our metaphorical construction of the world" (74). I tend to believe that there is not a radical epistemological break between the use of metaphor in life, as in Lakoff and Johnson's sense that metaphor quite unself-consciously and unambiguously involves "understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (5 my emphasis), and the use of metaphor in texts, as in Gerard Genette's sense of the figure precisely as "a sense of figure, . . . [whose] existence depends completely on the awareness that the reader has, or does not have of the ambiguity of the discourse that is being offered him" (54). For all that the former emphasizes the sense-constructing possibilities of figures, while the latter asserts the sense-deconstructing possibilities of figures, I take the difference as a matter of emphasis rather than one of opposition.^[14] Thus I will suggest that the

[14] Lakoff and Johnson rather casually take the figure of metaphor as a master trope (all other figures are taken as kinds of metaphors) and assume that what is understood and experienced in the natural-language and ordinary-usage examples

on which they exclusively base their argument (they are totally unconcerned with metaphors in writing) is always clear and unambiguous. There is a kind of extraordinary complacence in asserting categorically, as they do, for example, that "UNKNOWN IS UP," and "KNOWN IS DOWN" (137), without (say) taking into account the "metaphor" of "consciousness raising." To have one's consciousness raised, whatever this may indicate in terms of "understanding and experiencing," would seem to move up toward knowing. But even if I am wrong, if, that is, a "better" interpretation of the "metaphor" bears out the unknown/up, known/down interpretation, clearly there is at least the possibility of a certain ambiguity. In the same way, for all that a Genette, a de Man, or a Derrida can always show the persistence in any apparently plain statement of some further possibility of signification and so the possibility of some further ambiguation, that does not prevent us from "understanding and experiencing" some relatively clear meaning. I offer these remarks in support of my contention that the textual and ordinary uses of metaphor are different versions of the same.

theory of tropes has value for a theory of self-conception, and that its usefulness resides most particularly in its giving us a way of speaking of the self as it is actually presented textually, in autobiography. I shall further suggest that cultural techniques of information transmission—oral as differentiated from written techniques—also correlate with particular figural preferences and particular conceptions of self.

In a provocative article, Stephen Tyler has attempted to place the "Standard Average European"^[15] preference for seeing as a way of knowing and for writing as a way of conveying what is known against the backdrop of an ignored or undervalued non-Western preference for doing and speaking. Evading the formalist-structuralist distinction between metaphor and metonymy that, at least since Roman Jakobson's famous essay on "Linguistics and Poetics," has become a virtual staple of poetics—"the irreplaceable bookends of our own modern rhetoric," in Gerard Genette's phrase (107)—Tyler focuses on a distinction between metonymy and synecdoche, not so much as parallel terms concerned

[15] "Standard Average European" is a category Tyler takes from Benjamin Whorf, whose work he specifically praises in some polemical notes.

with relations of contiguity, contact, or correspondence (syntagmatic relations as opposed to the paradigmatic relations of substitution definitive of metaphor, or the antiphrastic relations of negation definitive of irony), but as terms differentiable by the kinds of relation with which they are concerned. For Tyler—and I have already accepted his account of these matters in my remarks above—metonymy is concerned with part-part relations while synecdoche is concerned with part-whole relations. Here I want to propose that while modern Western autobiography has been essentially metonymic in orientation, Native American autobiography has been and continues to be persistently synecdochic, and that the preference for synecdochic models of the self has relations to the oral techniques of information transmission typical of Native American cultures. Let us (briefly) take this second matter first.

Traditionally, the autobiographical forms (such as they were) that existed among Native American peoples—the coup story on the Plains foremost; accounts of dreams or mystic experiences^[16] —were communicated orally, Indians of the present-day United States not having developed alphabetic writing, and (therefore) publicly as well. One did not tell of one's war honors in private, to one's wives or best friends, but to assembled members of the tribe, an audience that included eyewitnesses to the events narrated who were dutybound to object to or deny any false claims. In the same way, we know that the most powerful visions (e.g., the celebrated visions of Black Elk at ages five and nine)^[17] were often enacted tribally, dramatically performed in public so that their full effect, which is to say their collective

[16] See, for example, the study of Lynne Woods O'Brien.

[17] See Black Elk Speaks .

effect, might be experienced ("done," as Tyler might say). I win honors, then, not only for me (most assuredly for me, however, particularly on the Plains, but elsewhere as well) but for us, the tribe; I am granted a vision, but the vision is not just for me, nor is any of it usable or functional until it is spoken, even performed publicly. This sense of personal eventfulness and this manner of communicating the personal orally, dramatically, performatively, in public, to the extent that they inform any written text of an Indian is very clearly more likely to privilege the synecdochic relation of part-to-whole than the metonymic relation of part-to-part. Speech always assumes a present listener as opposed to writing, where the audience is absent to the author, the author absent to the audience.^[18]

It is the part-to-part relation, however, that seems to mark Western autobiography—itself marked by writing.

As evidential shorthand, consider that locus classicus of modern autobiography, Rousseau's Confessions . "I understand my own heart," Rousseau writes, "and understand my fellow man. But I am made like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different" (17). The units compared are precisely that: units, one-to-one, man-

[18] The link between metonymic self-conception and the primacy of textual communication is affirmed by Rousseau when he writes,

I know nothing of myself til I was five or six. I do not know how I learnt to read. I only remember my first books and their effect upon me; it is from my earliest reading that I date the unbroken consciousness of my own existence. (19, my emphasis)

Scenes of reading and/or writing, as I have noted elsewhere (1981), are central to the eastern American tradition of autobiography and even before Thoreau. It remains to add what recent feminist criticism has solidly established, that orality—speech, the voice, and the mother tongue—and textuality—writing and the father's pen(is)—are, indeed, perceived as gender-related in the West, where men tend toward metonymic presentations of self, and women—in this like Indians and tribal peoples generally—tend toward synecdochic presentations of self.

to-man, part-to-part. Rousseau does not see himself as an aberration, one who cannot accurately be classed among the genus, Man; rather, he is specifically different from other individual men, from each and every one of them, one-by-one. For all that any full understanding of Rousseau must take into account his deeply social and "communitarian" commitment—it may, indeed, reasonably be claimed that any autobiography, however "individualistic," also implies a theory of society—still, the figures of his self-representation in the Confessions tend toward the metonymic.

If we turn to Thoreau, writing half a century after Rousseau, we find much the same sort of thing. Addressing his "neighbors," in the headnote to Walden ,^[19] Thoreau promises (or threatens) to "wake" them up; addressing his "readers" in the book's second paragraph, he promises to answer their questions "concerning [his] mode of life." In every case, "the I or first person . . . will be retained" in his book, for it is "always the first person that is speaking" in writing. What Thoreau would provide is what he himself

require[s] of every writer . . . a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. (1)

"Perhaps," Thoreau continues,

these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as

[19] That Walden is an autobiography is assuredly open to question. Given the current sense of the broadness of the autobiographical genre, I will simply take it as such without further comment.

apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits. (1–2)

It seems reasonable to read these remarks metonymically: Thoreau's model of proper speech-in-writing images the individual man addressing other individual men (there remains the problem of what women were to do with these constructions), who, while they certainly make up the generalized categories of "neighbors," or "readers," or "writers," or "students," must finally read as he writes, in the "first person," each individually "putting on the coat" to assess its fit. This metonymic construal of the individual autobiographer asserting his or her individuality against or with the individuality of others persists into the twentieth century—when, as I have noted, it begins to dissolve. "I am I because my little dog knows me" (64), Gertrude Stein wrote—but in a book she ironically called Everybody's Autobiography .

When we turn to Native American autobiography the situation is rather different. Native American autobiography, a post-contact phenomenon in its written forms, exists in two types which I have elsewhere called the Indian autobiography and the autobiography by an Indian.^[20] The first of these is constituted as a genre of writing by its original, bicultural, composite composition, the product of a collaboration between the Native American subject of the autobiography who provides its "content" and its Euramerican editor who ultimately provides its "form" by fixing the text in writing. Autobiographies by Indians, however, are indeed self-written lives; there is no compositeness to their

[20] See my For Those Who Come After .

composition, although inasmuch as their subject, in order to write a life, must have become "civilized" (in many cases Christianized as well), there remains the element of biculturalism. In both sorts of texts, let me claim, we find a privileging of the synecdochic relation of part-to-whole over the metonymic relation of part-to-part.

At this point, the reader may well expect some illustrative demonstration of a synecdochic nature to make its entrance, a detailed reading of a single text being offered as representative of a larger body of autobiographical work. I will not fail to conform to such expectation. I have chosen to consider an autobiography by an Indian rather than an Indian autobiography for two reasons. First, it is the case that every aspect of the Indian autobiography, including the particular sense of self conveyed, is at least theoretically ascribable to its non-Native editor as much as to its Native subject. This fact raises questions it would be too cumbersome to deal with just here. More importantly, to work with the autobiographies of traditional, tribal persons—and Indian autobiographies are almost exclusively focused on this sort of person—and then to show that they are indeed traditionally tribal, relationally synecdochic, courts even a greater circularity than what is inevitable to such exercises. As noted above, Indians who write their own life stories must first have learned to write and at least to that extent been influenced by the dominant Euramerican culture. To see whether their autobiographical presentations of self therefore have also been influenced by the dominant culture—whether they have, in my terms, tended to move from synecdochic to metonymic senses of the self—seems the more interesting tack to take. I proceed now to consider the autobiographical work of the Reverend William Apes (1798–1837?).

One of the very first autobiographies by an Indian is A Son of the Forest (1829) by the mixedblood Pequot and Methodist preacher, the Reverend William Apes.^[21] This text was followed in 1833 by Apes's The Experiences of Five Christian Indians , the first chapter of which, the "Experience of the Missionary," offers a second brief autobiography by Apes ("the Missionary"). This makes no reference to A Son of the Forest but instead promises a further autobiographical volume, "a book of 300 pages, 18mo. in size; and there, the reader will find particulars respecting my life" (4). Apes was never to write such a book, although his further publications—Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, Relative to the Marshpee Tribe . . . (1835), in part an account of political work on behalf of the Mashpees, which landed him in prison, and Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon in Federal Street, Boston . . . (1836), a fierce attack on the Puritan origins of American racism—are both intensely personal. All of his writing, I would suggest, may fruitfully be read as pieces of an extended autobiography.

By 1798, the year of William Apes's birth, Pequot cultural integrity was at a low point. This is to say that aboriginal lands had been usurped or heavily encroached upon by

[21] Apes was preceded as an autobiographer by the Reverend Samson Occom, a Mohegan, who wrote a brief account of his life in 1762, and by Hendrick Aupaumut, generally referred to as a Mahican, who produced a text in 1792 that at least contained a good deal of autobiographical material. The Memoir of Catherine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation as edited by the missionary Rufus Anderson appeared in 1824. The very brief life history of Paul Cuffe, like Apes, a Pequot, appeared in 1839. By that time the first Indian autobiography, J. B. Patterson's Life of Black Hawk (1833), had been published. For further references, see the indispensable annotated bibliography by David Brumble (1981) and its "Supplement" (1982), as well as Brumble's recent full-length study, American Indian Autobiography (1988). My own book (1985), as well as the introduction to Swann and Krupat (1987a), may also prove helpful.

whites so that traditional ecological economies and cultural practices were severely disrupted where they were not entirely destroyed. Disease, alcoholism, and Christianity served as further agents undermining tribal coherence and cultural competence, with predictable effects on Native self-conception—although Apes came to view Christianity as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. Apes did not live long with his parents who tended to move about considerably. Placed with his grandparents, Apes was so cruelly treated—at the age of four, his arm was broken in three places (ASOF 12) as the result of a drunken beating administered by his grandmother—that he eventually was sent to live "among good Christian people" (13). Their goodness did not prevent them from "selling" (31) him to a judge who worked him and "sold" (35) him to someone else. I will not detail Apes's life-adventures further;^[22] suffice it to say that he eventually became a convert to evangelical Methodism, attaining to the position of licensed Methodist "exhorter" (111), although the license to preach, which he desired, was still, at the conclusion of A Son of the Forest , withheld from him.

At this point in his life, Apes seems to see himself as something like Mauss's Christian "'moral person'," virtually "a metaphysical entity" (19). Although Mauss reads the Christian stage of Western self-conception as a step on the

[22] A further account of Apes's life and work, most particularly in relation to the Bakhtinian concern with the plural elements of "individual" speech appears in my "Monologue and Dialogue in Native American Autobiography." Barry O'Connell's forthcoming edition of Apes's complete works offers, in its introduction, the best and most complete account to date. O'Connell also makes a case for spelling (and pronouncing) this writer's name as Apess. For all that I am now fairly well persuaded that Apes is better spelled and pronounced Apess, I retain the earlier form for this chapter which was completed long before I had the benefit of O'Connell's very fine work. See also David Murray on Apes.

way toward (these are, of course, my terms, not those of Mauss) metonymic construals of self, it needs to be said that this is by no means the only reading possible. Christian tradition gives us abundant instances of solitary individuals seeking relation foremost with God (e.g., the early desert fathers, medieval mystics, Louis Dumont's "outworldly" Christian individuals), but it also gives us abundant images of individuals defined foremost by a sense of commonality and community (Dumont's post-Calvinist "inworldly" Christians). For every "I" focussed exclusively on "Thou," for everyone trying to love her particularized neighbor, there are also those who are committed to doing unto all others as they would have done unto themselves; those committed to what William Bradford called "the church or commonwealth" (39), made up of persons who believe that—I return to Dumont—"we should embody that other world in our determined action upon this one" (116).

It is this latter sense of Christian self-definition that is important to Apes, who does not fail to grasp its political implications. Toward the close of A Son of the Forest , Apes writes:

I feel a great deal happier in the new [Methodist Society] than I did in the old [Methodist Episcopal] church—the government of the first is founded on republican , while that of the latter is founded on monarchial principles. (115)

And Apes "rejoice[s] sincerely in the spread of the principles of civil and religious liberty—may they ever be found 'hand in hand'" (115). He believes that

If these blessed principles prevail . . . the image of God in his members will be a sufficient passport to all Christian priv-

ileges; and all the followers of the most high will unite together in singing the song of praise, Glory to God in the highest, &c. (115)

In this way Apes seeks to replace the lost paradise of the Pequots—what he called in the first paragraph of his autobiography "the goodly heritage occupied by this once peaceable and happy tribe" (7)—with the paradise regained in Christ. The tribe to which he would now belong, defining himself by his membership, is that of "the followers of the most high." Obviously enough, "all the followers of the most high" (my emphasis) must include Indians—at least those Native "members" of the saved in whom "the image of God" is to "be a sufficient passport to all Christian privileges." "Look brethren," Apes exhorts in his penultimate paragraph,

at the natives of the forest—they come, notwithstanding you call them "savage ," from the "east and from the west, the north and the south," and will occupy [because the last shall be first?] seats in the kingdom of heaven before you. (116)

Yet for all that Christian Indians will share equally with Christian whites a heavenly heritage in the future, those same Indians, now, in the present, are abused and discriminated against by whites. Nor is it Indians only, as Apes came increasingly to understand, but blacks and all people of color^[23] who suffer from American race prejudice. Here, the incompatibility of Christianity and racism emerges as a major theme of William Apes's subsequent writing (as it would, of course, become a theme of Frederick Douglass

[23] This includes the Jews, who, as Apes writes in The Indian's Looking Glass , "are a colored people, especially those living in the East, where Christ was born" (60)!

and the abolitionists). I shall try to say in a moment how this bears on the question of his synecdochic self-definition.

Consider, in these regards, Apes's second brief autobiography, "The Experience of the Missionary." Addressed to the "youth," "those poor children of the forest, who have had taken from them their once delightful plains, and homes of their peaceable habitations" (3), Apes's account of his life here places a particular emphasis on those aspects of his suffering that occurred because of race prejudice. In a text of only seventeen pages, Apes's increased awareness of the problem of color in America is indicated by such phrases and sentences as "Had my skin been white" (8), "Now, if my face had been white" (9), "I would ask the white man, if he thinks that he can be justified in making just such a being as I am . . . unhappy . . . because God has made us thus" (17), "I was already a hissing-stock, and a byword in the world, merely because I was a child of the forest" (19), and so on.

In these regards, consider also that the cover of the first edition of The Experience . . . gives its full title as The Experiences of Five Christian Indians: Or the Indian's Looking Glass for the White Man . But The Indian's Looking Glass . . . is not merely an alternate title for the collection of autobiographies, but the title of a pamphlet or sermon that appears after the fifth "Experience," at the end of the book. This is a brilliant and violent attack on racism. I will quote its first two sentences; they indicate, I believe, a new strength and stylistic assurance.^[24] Apes begins:

[24] The grammar, to be sure, is questionable, the two sentences properly constituting but a single sentence. But it should be remembered that Apes's written style is very much the transcription of an oral manner. Whatever he may or may not have known and remembered of aboriginal orality, his commitment to a Christian tradition of "exhorting" and "preaching" provides a continuity with Native modes of communication. It is fitting, therefore, that his final work is "only" the text of what was orally "pronounced at the Odeon."

Having a desire to place a few things before my fellow creatures who are travelling with me to the grave, and to that God who is the maker and preserver both of the white man and the Indian, whose abilities are the same, and who are to be judged by one God, who will show no favor to outward appearances, but will judge righteousness. Now I ask if degradation has not been heaped long enough upon the Indians? (53)

If this book of "Experiences" is to be taken—as the "or" rather than "and" on the cover would seem to urge—as providing a "looking glass" for the white man, then what that looking glass reflects above all are the "national crimes" (56) of white Americans. Here is the extraordinary passage in which this phrase occurs; I believe it is worth quoting at length:

Assemble all nations together in your imagination, and then let the whites be seated amongst them, and then let us look for the whites, and I doubt not it would be hard finding them; for to the rest of the nations, they are still but a handful. Now suppose these skins were put together, and each skin had its national crimes written upon it^[25] —which skin do you think would have the greatest? I will ask one question more. Can you charge the Indians with robbing a nation almost of their whole Continent, and murdering their women and children, and then depriving the remainder of their lawful rights, that nature and God require them to have? And to cap the climax, rob another nation to till their grounds, and welter out their days under the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of a burning sun? I should look at all the skins, and I know that when I

[25] I find it difficult not to think of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" just here. Apes's image of corporeal criminal inscription resonates with a good deal of contemporary theoretical work.

cast my eye upon that white skin, and if I saw those crimes written upon it, I should enter my protest against it immediately, and cleave to that which is more honorable. And I can tell you that I am satisfied with the manner of my creation, fully—whether others are or not. (56)

Apes's next work (the Indian Nullification . . .) continues to be concerned with racism, announcing it explicitly as central to his life. Writing in the third person, Apes states in his introduction that the author "wishes to say in the first place"

that the causes of the prevalent prejudice against his race have been his study from his childhood upwards. That their colour should be a reason to treat one portion of the human race with insult and abuse has always seemed to him strange; believing that God has given to all men an equal right to possess and occupy the earth, and to enjoy the fruits thereof, without any such distinction. (10)

Apes now sees himself quite self-consciously as the prophet of colorblind Christianity, and this bears upon the question of self-definition inasmuch as it would seem he can be fully himself only as an Indian member of the tribe of the nonracist saved. It is the part-to-whole relation in which the self as such is validated only in its social-collective (Christian) personhood that is important to Apes. But let us come finally to William Apes's last known text, the Eulogy on King Philip .

Apes's turn to King Philip is rather a return, for the initial sentence of his first work, A Son of the Forest , had described its author as "a native of the American soil, and a descendant of one of the principal chiefs of the Pequot

tribe, so well known in that part of American history called King Philip's Wars" (ASOF 7). It was Philip's defeat in war which initiated the Pequots' loss "of the[ir] goodly heritage," and so it may come as no surprise to discover that a vindication of Philip, the narrative reconstitution of his "defeat" as a victory, now becomes for Apes the necessary condition for any recuperation of that "goodly heritage." The Eulogy proclaims Philip "the greatest man that was ever in America" (EKP 55–6), providing a revisionist history of the Pilgrim invasion: "the seed of iniquity and prejudice was sown in that day" (21), when the Pilgrims invaded these shores, Apes writes. Speaking to the descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans in Boston, Apes would yet say:

Let the children of the pilgrims blush, while the son of the forest drops a tear, and groans over the fate of his murdered and departed fathers. He would say to the sons of the pilgrims, (as Job said about his birth day,) let the day be dark, the 22d of December, 1622; let it be forgotten in your celebration, in your speeches, and by the burying of the Rock that your fathers first put their foot upon. For be it remembered, although the gospel is said to be glad tidings to all people, yet we poor Indians never have found those who brought it as messengers of mercy, but contrawise. We say therefore, let every man of color wrap himself in mourning, for the 22d of December and the 4th of July are days of mourning and not of joy. (20)

And so, Apes continues, "while you ask yourselves, what do they, the Indians, want? you have only to look at the unjust laws made for them, and say they want what I want," which is that "all men must operate under one general law" (59). That law is to be, as Apes had earlier written, both "civil and religious" (ASOF 115), for it is the worldly implication

of Christianity as Apes understands it that the "image of God in his members" be the "sufficient passport to all Christian privileges" (ASOF 115), not only in heaven but here on earth as well—and, as he says, "first, in New England" (EKP 59).

Curiously—amazingly?—Apes's Eulogy was sufficiently popular to warrant a second edition in 1837, after which year, as I have noted, no more is known of the Reverened William Apes. So far as his writings may be taken as formally and informally autobiographical, it seems reasonable to suggest that they show him engaged in a very particular form of synecdochic self-definition. Recalling from the first a lost tribal identity and a "goodly heritage" in which all share together, he attempts with increasing self-consciousness to reconstitute and redefine his "tribe" and its "heritage" in Christian terms as a means of constituting and defining himself—this latter process, in typical Native American fashion, hardly self-conscious at all. The tribe to which Apes will ultimately belong must finally be made up not so much of Pequots or Puritans, not even only of Christians, "but [of] men" (EKP 59). In the end, as I have said, Apes is simply an Indian member of the colorblind saved, one of those nonracist Christians who, like most Indians traditionally, are usually more interested in their integration within a principled community rather than in their unique or "sacred" individuality.

Apes's synecdochic presentation of self finds parallels in a great many autobiographies by Indians. I would instance first, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins's Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), whose very title proclaims her individual life as comprehensible foremost in relation to the collective experience of her tribe. Then there is

Charles Alexander Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civilization: Chapters in the Autobiography of an Indian (1916) with its conclusion, "I am an Indian. . . . I am an American" (195). Approaching the present, there is Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller (1981) which, as I have described it elsewhere,^[26] conceives of individual identity only in functional relation to the tribe. Silko, as a contemporary Laguna "storyteller," takes her place in a line of "storytellers as far back as memory goes" (Dedication); she is what she does to sustain her community. Finally, we may look to the ongoing autobiographical projects of the Minnesota Chippewa novelist and critic, Gerald Vizenor, who, in a number of recent autobiographical texts, as I have earlier noted, invokes the "mixedblood," or "crossblood," the trickster, and the author as categories in relation to which he may define himself. Inasmuch as, in Vizenor's view, "mixedbloods loosen the seams in the shrouds of identity" (1987 101), they have a ready relation to tricksters—those jokers, shape-changers, and limit-challengers—and to writers of fiction, poetry, or criticism who are all, if true to their vocation, focused on the powers of the imagination. And Vizenor defines himself in relation to these "tribal heirs to a wild baronage" (to take the subtitle of his The Trickster of Liberty ); for all that these each take self-definition as a loose and impermanent thing, yet they have a certain collective sense of responsibility as identity.

For all of this, I would not want to be understood as claiming that all autobiographies by Indians must necessarily be unimpressed by varieties of individualism, nor that all autobiographies by Native people must take synecdoche as their defining figure. The autobiographies by the much-

[26] See "Monologue and Dialogue. . . ."

acclaimed N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa, seem to me as metonymic in their orientation as Rousseau's, for example.^[27] In the same way, Western autobiography is hardly constrained to metonymic strategies. A good deal of autobiographical writing by Western women, it seems, and certain forms of Christian autobiography, as I have noted, are quite likely to adopt synecdochic types of self-identification, as are the autobiographies of writers whose deep commitment to political egalitarianism works to structure their self-conception in a part-to-whole manner: I think here, for example, of Prince Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and, more recently, Assata Shakur.^[28] So far as one may generalize, however, it does seem to be the case that Native American autobiography is marked by the figure of synecdoche in its presentation of the self.

[27] See The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Names, and my discussion in the study cited above.

[28] See Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Living My Life , and Assata . Shakur's use of lower case "i" within sentences (she capitalizes "I" at the beginning of sentences, where all letters equivalently get to appear in upper case) seems a gesture in the interest of bringing the individual ego back to proper scale as simply an existent among others.