7

The lines that one speaks of as marking frontiers, borders, boundaries, fields, and disciplines are very often considered to be real and tangible in their existence, not merely figures of speech. As a figure, however, the line and, in particular, its adjectival form, linear, have been used to provide generalized images for what are said to be typically Western

ways of constructing reality. Western lines and linearity have then been set against the circles and circularity that are, figuratively, supposedly descriptive of the Native American worldview. Having argued the case against the logic of opposition as useful for cultural analysis, I want now to argue against what I will call the metaphorics of opposition. My aim is further to undo manichean types of cultural representation, here, in their specifically figural form.

There is an abundant available history of metaphorical representation of the Western logos as linear, most particularly as this linearity is imaged as a chain or a ladder. Arthur O. Lovejoy's 1936 book The Great Chain of Being is perhaps still the best study of and along these lines. Generalizations about the Native American metaphysic or mapping of reality, in contrast, propose an apparently pan-Indian epistemology, which, so far as it may be represented, appears in no linear image, but, rather, as one or another type of the circle or circularity. So far as there is an "Indian" worldview, tribal diversities notwithstanding, it would then most appropriately be figured as a wheel (most typically a medicine wheel) or hoop (usually a sacred hoop). Sacred hoops and medicine wheels, in their seamless curvature, represent the cyclical, no-beginning, no-end, turn-and-turn-again, "mythic" view of reality of Native American peoples, one that can metaphorically be set against the ladderlike view of arché and telos , hierarchy and progression, of the Western "historical" view.

Thus, as Paula Gunn Allen has written, in an essay revised and reprinted several times, the Native American

circular concept requires that all "points" which make up the sphere of being be significant in their identity and function, while the linear model assumes that some "points" are more

significant than others. In the one, significance is significant, and is a necessary factor of being in itself, while in the other, significance is a function of placement on an absolute scale which is fixed in time and space. (In Chapman 116)

She continues:

In the Native American system, there is no idea that nature is somewhere over there while man is over here, nor that there is a great hierarchical ladder of being on which ground and trees occupy a very low rung, animals a slightly higher one, and man a very high one indeed—especially "civilized" man. (116)

A variant of such a view also appeared in the seventies in the autobiography of the Lakota traditionalist, Lame Deer, in a chapter called—whether by Lame Deer himself or by his editor, Richard Erdoes—"The Circle and the Square." In the late eighties, the Lumbee professor of law, Robert A. Williams, Jr., began a lengthy article "on the cycles of confrontation between white society and American Indian tribalism," in particular "the structural similarities . . . between the early nineteenth-century Removal era and the modern West today" (237), with these sentences:

As an eastern Indian moved West, I have become more appreciative of the importance of a central theme of all American Indian thought and discourse, the circle. (237)

It is "the importance of the circle in American Indian thought and discourse," Williams continues, which "particularly alerts [him] to many alarming similarities" (238) between the Removal period and the present. Finally, let me mention a recent essay by the German scholar Hartmut

Lutz, called "The Circle as Philosophical and Structural Concept in Native American Fiction Today." What to make of this curious agreement on the part of Western and Native scholars alike concerning the metaphorical disagreement of their respective cultures?

I should first say that from Lovejoy to Allen and after, these figural accounts of—in a phrase from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson to which I will return in chapter 6—the metaphors Europeans and Indians "live by" seem to me generally accurate—at least insofar as the Native American's worldview is determined by its material base in the seasonal/cyclical rhythms of the agriculturalist's and the hunter's perspective, and the Western Euramerican's worldview is determined by the arbitrary, strictly conventional rhythms of first an industrial and, now, a postindustrial society of consumption, information, and representational exchange. For the Native American situation, Carter Revard's astute comment that "We might well be cautious about generalizing too far, but we should not shiver inside unnecessarily narrow limits either" (92) seems to me very much to the point. And yet, for all its importance to current Indian critics and scholars, the metaphorical allegory of opposition, like its logical counterpart, seems to me devoid of any but the most general explanatory usefulness.

Just as Sam Gill's recent Mother Earth: An American Story has shown that only at an extremely high level of generalization can it be said that Native American people traditionally viewed the earth as their "mother"—something that is also taken, by now, as a virtual truism among Indians and non-Indians—so, too, only at an extremely high level of generalization might it be said that circles are, in Robert Williams's formulation, "a central theme of all

American Indian thought and discourse" (237). It is my suspicion that just as Native people and whites equally came to accept as useful to their mutual and antagonistic purposes what Tecumseh (in Sam Gill's analysis) and, later, Seathl (in Rudolf Kaiser's analysis)^[25] may not ever have said, in the same way, both Native and non-Native scholars have been avid to generalize the Plains camp circle, tipi shape, and medicine wheel as providing a master trope governing the thought of all Indian peoples.

As Allen, whose background is Laguna, must certainly know, Pueblo people do not live in round houses—although, to be sure, the shape of the kiva is round (but, then, Hopis dance in lines as well as circles). Robert Williams currently works in Pima and Papago (Tohono o'odham) country and these tribal peoples' dwellings were not and are not circular. (Although as an eastern Indian, and so—I merely guess here—one closer to economies that are currently somewhat further away from hunting and agriculture, he may well have been impressed by Hopi and Papago economic rhythms.) Neither are Navajo blankets and rugs round; the most prized of these—highly valued, I mean to say, by the weavers themselves as well as by their Indian and non-Indian owners—have linear designs worked into them. And what of the Iroquois, people of the Longhouse? Their wampum belts and strings, it should be noted, are not worn in a circle around the waist or neck, but may depend vertically or extend horizontally. And so on. One might also go on to point out that if Euramericans square dance they also circle round their partners, and ring-

[25] See Kaiser's "Chief Seattle's Speech(es): American Origins and European Reception."

around-a-rosy, and so on and on. (And, historically, European agricultural economies, at least, were undoubtedly quite "cyclical" in orientation.)

But let me repeat: none of this is to deny that if one had to choose a single image to figure the reality-construction of Westerners and Native people, lines for the former and circles for the latter would , indeed, be the best choice. (And, once again, partly because even in today's world most Indian communities are a good deal closer to seasonal cycles than most Euramerican communities.) The point is that one does not have to choose. Just as reliance upon the manichean logic of civilized/savage, lettered/unlettered, or its victimist revision as biological/anthropological, primary/secondary, etc., imposes a hierarchy that both hurts people and constrains understanding, so, too, does reliance on manichean metaphorics. Further, by imposing totalized stereotypes that insist not merely upon the difference but the opposition of the images invoked, such a reliance threatens to doom Native Americans and Euramericans to repeat the past. If lines and circles can meet only tangentially , a figural or geometric imperative acting, as it were, in the place of fate, then frontier encounters between the peoples submitted to that fate must continue to be marked by misunderstanding and conflict.

Yet, as I have said, both Indians and non-Indians who participate in American, academic, critical culture seem to have a deep-seated attachment to metaphors of this kind, and so for all my sense that explanations in terms of hoops and lines, and the like, are both potentially dangerous and, as well, essentially helpless before the complex facts of Native American and Western cultural diversity, I will nonetheless take the time to suggest ways in which these figures might be construed so that they would be capable of rela-

tions to one another that are not merely oppositional or tangential. Consider what follows as an ethnocritical exercise in subjunctivity.

If it were the case that these figures could effectively be deployed for explanatory purposes, then it might be noted that inasmuch as a line is a potentially infinite series of points, it could not strictly be said that lines have beginnings and endings, but only that segments of lines do. Nor are lines always straight; one definition of the line is "a continuous extent of length, straight or curved " (Random House Dictionary, my emphasis). Lines, thus, need not be seen as necessarily the opposites of circles, but, rather, they may be seen as parts of circles, the line as arc ("any unbroken part of the circumference of a circle or other curved line " [R. H. Dictionary, my emphasis])—or like a chain arranged in a loop . I will not pursue this line of reasoning, which courts a certain circular logic, any further just here. In the realm of metaphor, as in the realm of speech and culture, differential interaction may be proposed both as more "realistic" and as politically more egalitarian than oppositional conflict.