{i}

The Fusion of Identity, Literatures, and Pedagogy: Teaching American Indian Literatures
        Julie LaMay Abner           .                 .                  .                  1

New Stories and Broken Necks: Incorporating Native American Texts in the American Literature Survey
        Chris LaLonde                 .                  .                  .                  7

Corners, Walls, and Doors: The Methodology of Exams in a Course on American Indian Literatures
        Sandra L. Sprayberry       .                  .                  .                  21

Not for Publication, or: On Not [Yet, Anyway] Producing Bicultural Lumbee Auto-Ethnography
        Susan Gardner                 .                  .                  .                  29

When Critical Approaches Converge: Team-Teaching Welch's Winter in the Blood
        Jim Charles and Richard Predmore     .                  .                  47

Silko's Originality in "Yellow Woman"
         Ed. Peter Beidler            .                 .                  .                  61
        1: The Woman as Willing Victim
              Heather Holland         .                 .                  .                  60
         2: Silva as Brutal Rapist
              Ann Cavanaugh Sipos                  .                  .                  63
         3: Old Spider Woman Eliminated
              Jian Shi    .                 .                  .                  .                  65
        4: The White Rancher Added
              Nora El-Aasser          .                 .                  .                  67
        5: Hunting, Cooking, and Gender Roles
             Melissa Fiesta Blossom                .                  .                  69
        6: Boundaries Crossed
              Carolyn Leslie Grossman             .                 .                  71
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        7: The Power of Water
              Jennifer A. Thornton                    .                 .                  73
        8: Looking and Seeing
              Vanessa Holford Diana                .                  .                  75

FORUM
Calls for Submissions             .                 .                  .                  85

REVIEWS
Ke-ma-ha: The Omaha Stories of Francis La Flesche. Eds. James W. Parins and Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr.
        Michael Elliott                 .                  .                  .                  89

Life and Death in Mohawk Country. Bruce E. Johansen
        Michael Elliott                 .                  .                  .                  93

The Feathered Heart. Mark Turcotte
        Ruth Rosenberg               .                  .                  .                  96

Eagle Drum: On the Powwow Trail with a Young Grass Dancer. Robert Crum
        Ruth Rosenberg               .                  .                  .                  98

Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization. Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo
        Larry Ellis                         .                  .                  .                  100

CONTRIBUTORS                   .                  .                  .                  104

The Fusion of Identity, Literatures, and Pedagogy: Teaching American Indian Literatures

Julie LaMay Abner         

        Many circles are around us.
        Many circles rule this land.
        Many circles cannot be broken.
        This I understand.

        The Buffalo grass grows in the spring,
        To feed the elk and deer,
        Who are prey to the timber wolf,
        And the lion and the bear.

        The purple sage grows in the spring,
        To attract the butterfly.
        The yellow spider builds a web.
        There the butterfly will die.

        The blue jays hatch in the spring,
        In a nest way up high.
        A raccoon eats all but one,
        One that's strong enough to fly.

        Life means death, and death means life,
        To every living thing;
        And winter comes to prepare the land
        For the coming spring.

        Many circles are around us.
        Many circles rule this land.
        Many circles must not be broken,
        This we all must understand.

Larry Sunderland              

                                         
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        Today, in the post-Dances With Wolves era, to be an Indian is not only to be socially acceptable, but also politically correct; obviously, this has not always been the case. When pondering how to approach the teaching of a course on American Indian literatures, the first important question that must be considered is what is an Indian? Identity for Native Americans is a complex and highly controversial issue and was recently thrust into the academic forefront when novelist David Seals, while reviewing The Indian Lawyer, stated that James Welch and Louise Erdrich are not "Indian" enough because they both depict the atrocities that contemporary Native Americans must face but do not demonstrate the strength of cultural values and traditions that have allowed Indians to survive the Columbian trauma and subsequent centuries of xenophobia (648-50).
        Is Indian authenticity determined by blood quantum, the ability to speak a Native language, being born on a reservation, or being listed on a tribal roll? Sadly, Native Americans are the only group of people who must prove their heritage and cultural identity by carrying a tribal ID or a Bureau of Indian Affairs blood quantum card. The safest and best definition of Indianness still appears to be N. Scott Momaday's, "An Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself" (162), even though Arnold Krupat calls it hopelessly vague and sexist (186-87).
        Another important question that must be addressed is what are American Indian literatures? Is any document that an "Indian" writes considered American Indian literature, or is a text that a "non-Indian" writes using Indian themes and following certain accepted techniques (like polyvocalism, circularity, active audience participation, mystery, and reverence for nature) an Indian text? Are Tony Hillerman's books Indian books, and who is the author (or who are the authors) of Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk or Neihardt? Michael Dorris once stated that "there is no such thing as `Native American literature,' though it may yet, someday, come into being" (147-62).
        Not until Momaday's publishing of his Pulitzer Prize-winning text, House Made of Dawn (1968), in which he consciously and purposely takes Native oral tradition and successfully segues it with Euroamerican written form, was a new Native American genre created in form and effect. Kenneth Lincoln, who coined the term "Native American Renaissance," calls Momaday the greatest Native American writer of all time, and credits him with creating and defining this new genre-- Native American literatures.
        Fortunately, a decade later, even Dorris, who chaired the Native American Studies Program at Dartmouth, agrees that such a designation (Native American literatures) does indeed exist. Many authors, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Paula Gunn Allen, and Louis Owens, are also known for {3} transforming essential elements of Native American oral traditions into EuroAmerican printed form. These authors share the cloak of creation with Momaday.
        Another element that must be considered when teaching Native American literatures is cultural context. Indian texts are not written in the same way or from the same mindset that EuroAmerican texts are. Paula Gunn Allen has asserted:

Traditional American Indian literature is not similar to western literature because the basic assumptions about the universe and, therefore, the basic reality experienced by tribal peoples and by Western peoples are not the same, even at the level of folklore. This difference has confused non-Indian students for centuries. (58)

        Although I strongly agree that the cultural context is crucial in both understanding and teaching American Indian literatures, the ultimate goal is for such marginalized works to be mainstreamed into a traditional American survey course, which will eliminate the need for culturally specific ones.
        Texts should, of course, be taught based on their individual merits. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding the literary canon rages on, but most academics seem to favor at least a rethinking of the canon, if not exploding this longstanding "idea" that eliminates women and people of color.
        This issue spans many approaches and views regarding American Indian Literatures and pedagogy and is infused with the art and poetry of the well-known Mescalaro Apache artist, poet, and writer Lorenzo.
        Chris LaLonde ("New Stories and Broken Necks: Incorporating Native American Texts in the American Literature Survey") discusses a general approach to mainstreaming Native American works into an American Literature survey course without just adding one or two "Indian" texts. He asks the profound question, "How do we situate Native American texts within a disciplinary narrative from which they have been so long excluded without either relegating them to marginal and marginalized status or diminishing their intrinsic aesthetic merit?" He proceeds to demonstrate his method of effectively attaining that goal while using The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
        Sandra L. Sprayberry ("Corners, Walls, and Doors: The Methodology of Exams in a Course on American Indian Literatures") discusses how she altered her approach to teaching American Indian Literatures by replacing her two required written exams with oral exams/conferences. She asserts that the exams "clashed pedagogically with the literatures and cultures we were studying." She successfully demonstrates what she feels to be a more experiential, holistic, and global {4} approach to assessment and explains that the new process will be similar to the Lakota vision quest, and she goes on to explain her three-part plan.
        Susan Gardner ("Not for Publication, or: On Not [Yet, Anyway] Producing Bicultural Lumbee Auto-Ethnography") writes about a very controversial group of people who were declined federal recognition in 1989; according to anthropologist Larry Sunderland, the Lumbee are thought to be possible descendants of the Raleigh "lost" colony and possibly not of original Indian ancestry at all. Gardner takes a group of graduate students to do primary research by interviewing the Lumbee. She discusses the ethical questions of authorship and ownership of stories and the enormous responsibility involved in academic research. As a matter of fact, she respects the individual's stories enough that she does not quote them in her article because she feels that "our research is but a tributary flowing into the river of heritage, and that heritage is the Lumbee people's, not ours." The stories stay with the Lumbee--where she feels they rightly belong.
        Jim Charles and Richard Predmore ("When Critical Approaches Converge: Team Teaching Welch's Winter in the Blood") discuss the hows and whys involved in team-teaching Welch's text. They begin their discourse by quoting a thought-provoking statement by Larry Abbott: "Along with the obvious revolution in thinking about what constitutes the canon in American literature, there has been a parallel, if quieter, revolution in pedagogy, about how we teach what we teach and why we teach what we teach." They begin to outline an effective "approach that relies upon the integration of diverse literary critical theories" and demonstrate to their students what Kenneth Roemer calls the "significant ways that Indian and non-Indian texts speak to each other."
        This special issue ends with Peter Beidler and his graduate students Melissa Fiesta Blossom, Vanessa Holford Diana, Nora El-Aasser, Carolyn Leslie Grossman, Heather Holland, Jian Shi, Anna Cavanaugh Sipos, and Jennifer A. Thornton ("Silko's Originality in `Yellow Woman'"), comparing Leslie Marmon Silko's story with one of the traditional Keresan versions of "Evil Kachina Steals Yellow Woman." Beidler then asks his students to write a paper in which they argue what they feel is most original in Silko's version of the story. Beidler's eight students proceed effectively to lend their voices to the story.

{5}

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon, 1986.

---. "Yellow Woman." Spider Woman's Granddaughters. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989. 211-15.

Baym, Nina et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature 2. Fourth Ed. New York: Norton, 1994.

Dorris, Michael. "Native American Literature in an Ethnohistorical Context." College English 41.2 (1979): 147-62.

Evers, Larry. "Native American Oral Literatures in the College English Classroom: An Omaha Example." College English 36 (1976): 649-62.

Krupat, Arnold. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.

Momaday, N. Scott. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper Collins, 1968.

---. "The Man Made of Words." The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature. Ed. Geary Hobson. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1979. 162-73.

Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1932.

Roemer, Kenneth M. "The Heuristic Powers of Indian Literatures: What Native Authorship Does to Mainstream Texts." Studies in American Indian Literatures 3:2 (Summer 1991): 8-21.

Seals, David. "Blackfeet Barrister." The Nation 26 November 1990: 648-50.

Sunderland, Larry. "Native American Database." Unpublished manuscript.

----. Personal Interview. 18 February 1996.

Welch, James. Winter in the Blood. New York: Penguin, 1974.

New Stories and Broken Necks: Incorporating Native American Texts in the American Literature Survey

Chris LaLonde         

        These are wonderful times for teachers of American Indian literatures. There are numerous recent and new anthologies of Native American poetry, prose, and autobiography from which to choose, an ever-increasing number of readily available texts by Native American writers, a heightened awareness on the part of colleagues concerning the quality and value of those texts, and a concomitant acceptance by administrators of the need to study and teach those texts. Even so, Native American literatures are neither the primary area of expertise nor the sole teaching responsibility for many in the profession. As Americanists, Native American literature specialists and non-specialists are in all likelihood called on to teach period courses, genre courses, and survey courses. At the same time, the successful efforts to open up the canon of American literatures creates a fundamental pedagogical problem: how do we situate Native American texts within a disciplinary narrative from which they have been so long excluded without either relegating them to marginal and marginalized status or diminishing their intrinsic aesthetic merit?
        The American literature survey course is the place where this problem is most vexing. We do not have the luxury, to quote Marjorie Pryse, of "giving students more exposure to fewer writers in the hope that they will discover a love for reading" (23) if our goal in a survey course is to engage the blossoming canon and give our students a sense of the multiplicity, and the richness in multiplicity, of American literature. Yet, as Carolyn Porter has pointed out, "you cannot simply accept multiculturalism (grudgingly or enthusiastically), adding a few representative texts to your survey course and proceeding as before with the old stories about the Puritans, the romance, the frontier, or what have you" (469). We need new stories for the new stories, for {8} Native American texts which arc, in the case of the Anishinaabe (to cite just one example), from when turtle presented his back to Grandmother Nokomis so that the island home could be formed for both the Anishinaabeg and the other-than-human land-dwelling people to the contemporary time and place of, for instance, Kimberly Blaeser's "Where I Was That Day." Selections from The Education of Henry Adams in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, volume two, are critical to the new story I attempt to articulate in my American literature survey course: that story stresses the necessity of context(s) if we are to begin to understand and appreciate Native American texts, and that story also invokes the tendency to marginalize those texts within American literary history in order to unmask and depotentiate it.
        First, however, some information about the institution and the course for the sake of context. North Carolina Wesleyan College is a young, small, church-related (but not Christian) institution that purports to have the liberal arts as its foundation. The vast majority of the students major in either business, computer information systems, or justice studies--that is, by and large, how to be an officer of the law. There are few English majors. All students are required to take one literature course from among a group designated by the College as satisfying a graduation requirement in the Humanities. English 204, Survey of the Literature of the United States, 1865 to the present, is one of those courses. Consequently, I can begin the course in any given semester certain that nearly all the students will be in the class because they are required to take a literature course and this will be the only literature course many of them ever take, that most of them will be in this particular course because it fits their schedule and not because of an interest in American literature or American literary history, and that in all likelihood none of them will have taken the first half of the two-course American literature survey sequence.
        I, on the other hand, enter the course determined to help the students become better readers, writers, and thinkers; to give them some of the fundamental tools of literary analysis and have them use those tools on a wide range of texts; to expose them to the trajectory of American literary history and the various terms we use to structure and make sense of it; and to compel them to interrogate literature and why and how, if at all, it might be meaningful in their lives.
        In the increasingly crowded field of literature anthologies, the Norton Anthology of American Literature remains the popular choice for American literature surveys. The recently published fourth edition is noteworthy for its inclusion of a wider range of selections by Native American writers and from traditional Native American texts. For instance, in the opening section of the second volume, "American Literature 1865-1914," the editors have added, in order, a section on {9} Native American oratory, an excerpt from Charles Alexander Eastman's From the Deep Woods to Civilization, John Oskison's short story "The Problem of Old Harjo," and a section of Native American chants and songs. In order to introduce these texts as literature and as part of the expanded canon of American literature I propose that we follow the tacit lead of the editors of the Norton Anthology and read up to and then against the final selection in the opening section: "The Dynamo and the Virgin" chapter from Henry Adams' The Education of Henry Adams.
        We begin by reading and discussing works by Clemens, Howells, and James. We then move on to the other, "minor" realists, the local colorists, and the naturalists. That is, we are for the most part faithful to the order offered by the "Table of Contents": any infidelity consists of skipping the Native American Oratory section rather than turning to it before we discuss James, after we talk about Crane's work to conclude our look at the realists and regionalists, or during our discussion of both texts in the African-American oral tradition and by African Americans. However, the syllabus makes clear that we will read and discuss the Native oratory selections and the songs and chants at the same time later in the semester.
        My rationale is simple: I want to expose the students to the authors and works that compose the traditional canon of American literature during the realist and naturalist periods. It is, after all, a survey course. In addition, most of the students have not read most of the authors or the particular works. What is more, we cannot open up the canon until we have defined it, and--taken in conjunction with the section essays, headnotes, and biographical information--the selections we read and discuss give us that definition. From the beginning we read closely, discuss the various dimensions of the texts before us, interrogate their connections to late nineteenth-century America, and familiarize ourselves with the standard literary terms. Nothing new so far. Still, all this is done to prepare the students for the excerpts from The Education of Henry Adams and, then, the Native American texts.
        Adams' text may seem an odd place to turn in our quest for new stories, but it is a fruitful way to introduce Native American texts in a literature survey course. After all, as the editors of the Norton Anthology point out, The Education of Henry Adams "is now considered by many critics to be the one indispensable text for students seeking to understand the period between the Civil War and World War I" (906). More to the point, although Adams' first significant publication focused on John Smith's various representations of Pocahontas and their relationship, Native Americans are scarcely present in The Education; furthermore, Adams elides twenty years of his education, 1871 to 1892, that, as we know, saw the United States Government and the United {10} States citizenry wage a war against the first peoples of this continent, which ended with their defeat, removal, and confinement on reservations. Surely that period held extraordinary opportunity for education, but Adams offers nary a word.
        I do not wish to take Henry Adams to task in my new story, however, so much as I want my students to come to grips with and internalize the scene in "The Dynamo and the Virgin" chapter of The Education in which Adams' narrator describes Adams "after ten years pursuit . . . lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new" (933). On the one hand, this scene and the chapter as a whole are vital to an understanding of America and western civilization at the opening of the Twentieth Century, for, as Adams writes, in the seven years prior to 1900 "man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old" (933). It is critically important that our students understand this "translation" if they are to grasp modernism in particular and twentieth-century American literature and culture in general. That is, the students must understand the context in and from which Adams writes. Ideally, our previous discussions of various texts, terms, and the times have helped to establish what Adams', and America's, neck was like before it was broken. On the other hand, the scene of Adams with his broken neck and the rest of the chapter are vital to my new story.
        We turn from Adams not to the modernists, who dominate the next section of the Anthology, or to Black Elk Speaks, portions of which constitute the next selection in the text, but to the selections of Native American oratory, chants, and songs. The obvious alternative, and a perfectly legitimate one, is to turn to selections from Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's Impressions of an Indian Childhood and a juxtaposition of her education with Adams', followed by the selections from Black Elk Speaks in light of both educations. The editors make this progression all the more attractive by placing the texts in consecutive order. I prefer a more radical juxtaposition, toward the ends already mentioned. I ask the students to make sense of the oratory, chants, and songs and to articulate any connections they see between those texts and "The Dynamo and the Virgin." They come prepared to talk about how the "Indians were forced off their lands." They are ready to cite passages from the oratory of Cochise and Charlot to show how the whites misled and mistreated the Natives. They are less ready and eager to discuss either the excerpts from the Navajo Night Chant or the Chippewa songs. I suspect this is so because those texts are like nothing they have read to date for the course. Nevertheless, I argue that we need to turn first to those texts in order to begin to have some sense of some of the worldviews of Native peoples before their necks were broken.
{11}
        That is, we need to situate the texts in their contexts. Native and non-Native scholars stress the necessity of context if we are to understand and appreciate particular texts. Joseph Bruchac writes, "The Native American view of life as reflected in literature (whether in English or originally in an earlier Native language) is holistic. Remember that, if you are teaching Native American literature well you are not just teaching literature, you are teaching culture. To understand the work--or to begin to understand it--it must be seen as it was used" ("Four Directions" 6). Moreover, as Kenneth Roemer makes clear, "Teachers and scholars who ignore the cultural, historical, aesthetic, linguistic, and, in the case of oral literatures, the performance contexts of Native texts risk making ludicrous and even sacrilegious mistakes" ("Heuristic" 8).
        Let us take the Chippewa songs in the Norton Anthology as a case in point. Situating the songs in their cultural context means beginning by articulating the centrality of song and music to the Chippewa, or more properly the Anishinaabe.¹ Anglo scholars like Frances Densmore (who collected and translated the songs that appear in the Norton Anthology), Thomas Vennum, Jr., and Edmund Danziger, Jr. stress the integral connection between song and music and traditional daily life: there were sacred songs, dream songs, love songs, war songs, story songs, songs to accompany various activities. These songs, in the words of Ojibway ethnologist and writer Basil Johnston,

were utterances of the soul. As such, they evoked every theme that moved men's hearts and souls. Songs were poems chanted; they could be praises sung, they could be prayers uplifted to the spirit. Most were of a personal nature composed by an individual on the occasion of a dream, a moving event, a powerful feeling. (Ojibway Heritage 148)

Crossblood Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor makes clear that the dream songs were, indeed, "the signatures of personal and communal woodland identities" (Summer 3).

Those signatures were and are meant to be heard, often with accompaniment. Thus, our attention to context necessitates that we hear the songs. I have found that playing selections from Ojibway Music From Minnesota: A Century of Song for Voice and Drum helps to lift the word off the page and into aurality and orality for students. Once there, it becomes easier for the students not to visualize but to understand that the Anishinaabe impulse to transform life into song and song into life is born of a sense of rhythm's evocative power. Again, Vizenor is instructive: "the poetic images were held, for some tribal families, in song pictures and in the rhythms of visions and dreams in {12} music: timeless and natural patterns of seeing and knowing the energies of the earth" (Chippewa 24-26).
        The articulation of those timeless and natural patterns is both their voicing and a jointing together of singer and the natural world, singer and the audience, and audience and the natural world. The song-poems, initially so off-putting to the students because of their minimalism and indeterminacy, need to be understood as powerfully evocative and essentially generative. The connection Vizenor sees between the tribal songs and haiku for instance, referred to but unelaborated by the editors of the Norton Anthology, stems from an awareness of the tendency of each to evoke--the freedom both confer--and the role of the audience given that freedom. In the Introduction to his 1984 collection of haiku, Vizenor writes that "In haiku, as a form of meditation, there is a pleasant separation from grammatical philosophies and the implied presence of the author, rather than a separation from the earth" (Matsushima 5). This pleasant separation necessitates that the haiku, to quote Donald Keene, "`must be completed by the reader'" (qtd. in Matsushima 3). The same is true of the Anishinaabe songs. Kimberly Blaeser says that "The songs presuppose certain tribal knowledge and seek not to retell, but to allow the listener access to the experiential reality of the song's subject" (190). Later she adds, "The goal is not to understand the author, to `get' the author's meaning, but to move beyond the words on the page and experience natural, underlying harmonies that are part of our primal memory--to create life from static words" (197). Thus, we spend time discussing how the life articulated by the anthologized songs and the audience is intimately connected to the seasonal rhythms of the natural world and the traditional Anishinaabe lifeways.²
        The seasonal rhythm and Anishinaabe worldview are evoked by the first song anthologized in the Norton, "Song of the Crows":

        Be'bani'gani'
        Nin'digog'
        Binesiwug'
        Nin'wendjigi'miwun'
        Andeg'nindigo'

          &n bsp;  Translation
        The first to come
        I am called
        Among the birds
        I bring the rain
        Crow is my name (869)

The editor's footnote tells us that Frances Densmore pointed out "that crows are said to have given this song to a young man who was fasting. The crows then became his manido, or spirit power" (869). {13} The note adds that the crows "are thought to bring the welcome spring rain." The song, then, is an example of the stories told by the natural world that are given to the Anishinaabeg to articulate the fundamental realities of life. Traditionally, the Anishinaabeg would know and appreciate the relationship between the song of the other-than-human crow and one's relationship to the world and its people. The song given by the crow, in this case during a vision quest, voices both the peopled cosmos of the Anishinaabe and the interconnections that kept, and keep, that cosmos delicately balanced. The song-poem evokes spring's arrival, without directly indicating it, and thus articulates seasonal promise, renewal, and the end of the trying and difficult northwoods winter for the Anishinaabe. Moreover, because the song is evocative, it articulates the necessary connection between singer and audience and highlights the necessity of experience and engagement to an understanding of both the song and life connected with the natural world, its rhythms, and its peopled cosmos.
        It was and is a difficult life, rich with uncertainty and sudden, often unexpected change.³ Blaeser and others remark that the uncertainty and change are articulated in traditional and contemporary Anishinaabe literature by a characteristic indeterminacy. Such is the case with "Song of the Crows." Is Crow called "the first to come," or is Crow called to be the first to come? Gerald Vizenor's interpretation of the second song in the Norton Anthology accentuates indeterminacy, and I like to have students hear that text as well as Densmore's translation of the song in order to highlight the indeterminacy in the former and facilitate discussion about what the articulation of indeterminacy, on the one hand, and the suppression of indeterminacy, on the other, can tell us about both the Anishinaabe worldview and the Euroamerican view of an albeit sympathetic Frances Densmore. Densmore's translation of the song includes the indefinite pronoun, only to double it and use a conjunction to definitively fix the sound the singer had heard:

        A loon
        I thought it was
        But it was
        My love's splashing oar (870)

Vizenor's interpretation, however, refuses to supplement indeterminacy with determinacy, and is therefore more in keeping with the Anishinaabe worldview and aesthetics:

        the sound of a loon
        i thought
        it was my lover
        paddling (Summer 54)

{14} Did the singer hear the sound of a loon that he/she initially thought was the sound of his/her lover paddling? Or did the singer hear the sound of his/her lover paddling and initially mistake it for the sound of a loon? The song refuses to say conclusively one way or the other; hence, it compels the audience to acknowledge the indeterminacy that is a part of the Anishinaabe life-world and "complete" the song for him/herself by appealing to personal experience.
        The new story that emerges as a consequence of situating, in this instance, the Anishinaabe songs in their cultural context insures that the students develop more than simply a general, pan-Indian reading of the Native American texts. It also compels them to relinquish stereotypes about the Indian as stoic, unemotional, inarticulate, and unartistic. Therefore, situating the songs in their context produces a scene roughly analogous to that offered by Adams in "The Dynamo and the Virgin": our students' literary and cultural necks are "broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new" (933).
        Furthermore, Kenneth Roemer has indicated how teaching the Navajo Night Chant, portions of which are also included in the Norton Anthology, raises fundamental questions of periodization, authorship, and authority which, to continue my conceit, can effectively break a student's historical, and literary historical, neck as well. The same is true with the Anishinaabe songs included in the Norton Anthology. Although the songs are chronologically situated by the editors according to the date of their collection and publication in the first decade of the Twentieth Century, a not illegitimate decision, the songs themselves could be situated much earlier than that. For instance, the songs whose subject is warfare with the Siouan people could be dated any time between the late Seventeenth Century, when conflict first arose between the woodland Sioux and the westering Anishinaabe, and the mid-Nineteenth Century, when bands of both peoples fought in the parkland belt of Minnesota. Other songs could be dated even earlier. Questions about the authority and authenticity of the translations can also be raised, and, as I have suggested, Vizenor's interpretations of several of the songs in the Anthology are useful vehicles for exploring these issues. They also help us to think about authorship of the songs in particular and the concept of the author in general.
        As was the case for Henry Adams in fin de siècle America and Europe, the students in the survey are "translated . . . into a new universe" (933) by the contexts we have established and the questions about authorship, authority, and the identity of the literary text that we have raised. Our interrogations serve to break the students' necks: how they might have viewed literature and literary studies. Consequently, instead of being either incidental or marginalized elements in the survey syllabus and the canon, the Native American texts in the opening {15} section of the Anthology's second volume assume the most vital role a text can perform: to compel the reader to confront the literary and cultural elements of the work and the constructs that are literature and American literary history.
        It is now that the broken necks they have suffered can lead to paralysis, or even death. For instance, more than once have students uttered statements like, "Well, then, if we don't know whether we can trust the translations and if this stuff could have been sung before 1865, and it wasn't even written down, then why are we studying it in this course?" or "If it is so difficult to find out what is Literature [with, I take it, a capital L], then why study it at all?" One way to answer these questions and initiate the process of healing, while at the same time keeping the Native American texts in their newly-won position at the center of our discussion and stressing what keeps contemporary Native Americans from succumbing to paralysis, is to have the students recall "The Dynamo and the Virgin."
        Adams sees both the dynamo and the Virgin symbolically. The latter is a symbol of a "spiritually unifying force" (906) that had shaped humankind and has been supplanted by the dynamo. Her force was a product of the "reproduction" she symbolized (934), but, according to Adams, by the beginning of the Twentieth Century the idea of the Virgin and her symbolic force "survived only as art" (935). Therefore, Adams turns to art in his search for answers and healing.
        Time and again, Native American traditions tell us, the first people turned and turn to ceremony and artistic utterance for celebration and healing. Both are intimately connected to place and are transformative. Kenneth Lincoln writes that for Native Americans "Words carry their essential meanings" and songpoems "sing the origins of people, creatures, things, in local revelations, exactly where they exist. The people hear and glimpse truths unexpectedly, out of the corner of the eye, as nature compresses and surprises with rich mystery. All things are alive, suggestive, sacred, and in common" (46). The act of articulation, then, of giving breath to and jointing together, is revelatory, celebratory, and transformative.
        Let me return to Anishinaabe songs and thought to make this point clear. The dream songs articulate identity. They insure connection with place and others: "the meditation would never lead to the common fears of separation, manifest manners, and the loneliness of civilization" (Summer 12); rather, the visions that articulate and were articulated "were spiritual transmigrations that inspired the lost and lonesome souls of the woodland to be healed" (Summer 9). From the perspective of a literary anthropology, artistic utterance and creation are fundamental human endeavors because they can transform and heal. We turn to art, that is, in order to articulate and make sense of the {16} world and ourselves. We study literature, or at least we try to in my courses, in a fashion that transforms the classroom into a liminal space, marked by indeterminacy, where we explore together issues of the identity of particular literary texts, the contexts from which they spring, and what those texts tell us about humankind.
        The Native American texts, which the students now understand necessitate engagement and are transformative, remain before us for the rest of the course as a point of departure and reference as we engage and discuss particular texts with, I hope, a newfound awareness of their transformative powers, and as we discuss modernism, postmodernism, American society and cultures, and American literary history.⁴ The strategy for helping engage Native, and non-Native, texts is, finally, valuable for all Americanists teaching American literature surveys, particularly if they are using the Norton Anthology of American Literature. It gives those without training in reading and teaching Native American texts much to help appease any anxiety they have concerning their ability to teach those texts; it gives all of us a way to tell a new story. Introducing the Native American texts following a discussion of Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin" helps professor and students thoughtfully situate Native American texts within the canon, accentuate and interrogate the aesthetic qualities of those texts and the fundamental questions they raise about literature and American literary history, and helps to articulate the nature of the literature survey classroom. Thus, students come to realize that what has been broken is not so much their necks as the casts around them that had kept them from turning their heads, expanding their horizons, seeing well, and hearing well.

        ¹Vizenor notes "The Anishinaabe were nominated the Ojibway, the Ojibwe, the Chippewa, Chippeway, and other names in written translations and historical documents" (Summer 20). Their "legal" identity in the eyes of the United States Government is the Chippewa. I adopt Vizenor's spelling of "Anishinaabe" rather than the editor's "Anishinabe."

        ²On the traditional lifeways see, for instance, Ignatia Broker's Night Flying Woman, Edmund Danziger's The Chippewas of Lake Superior, Frances Densmore's Chippewa Customs and Chippewa Music, John A. Grim's The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians, A. Irving Hallowell's "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View," Basil Johnston's Ojibway Ceremonies and Ojibway Heritage, Theresa S. Smith's The Island of the Anishnaabeg, and Gerald Vizenor's Summer in the Spring and The People Named the Chippewa.

{17}
        ³Let me offer two examples from personal experience. I led a class on an extended wilderness canoe and camping trip through Quetico Provincial Park as part of a course on Anishinaabe literature and culture. While canoeing across Sarah Lake in the early afternoon, we were caught by a wind that suddenly came up in front of an advancing thunderstorm. We abandoned our plan to make a particular campsite on the far side of the lake, had all we could do to make it to an island campsite, and quickly set up tents. The wind was fairly raging by the time we were finished--but the rains never came, and twenty minutes later the sun was out, the wind was gone, and the lake was calm. The ice also comes quickly to northern Minnesota lakes, and I have taken a boat across an open channel one early November morning and walked back across ice too thick to break with the boat the next day.

        ⁴That is, in addition to coming into play when we discuss the other works by Native writers in the Norton Anthology, they are integral to our discussions of the modernist attempt to revitalize culture through art, of the imagist movement, of the postmodern turn to indeterminacy, of the importance of place in the work of such contemporary poets as Lorine Niedecker, Richard Hugo, A. R. Ammons, and James Wright, and so forth.

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

Baym, Nina et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of American Literature 2. Fourth ed. New York: Norton, 1994.

Blaeser, Kimberly. "Gerald Vizenor: Writing--in the Oral Tradition." Diss. U of Notre Dame, 1990.

---. Trailing You. Greenfield Center NY: Greenfield Review, 1994.

Broker, Ignatia. Night Flying Woman. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1983.

Bruchac, Joseph. "Four Directions: Some Thoughts on Teaching Native American Literature." Studies in American Indian Literatures 3.2 (Summer 1991): 2-7.

Danziger, Edmund. The Chippewas of Lake Superior. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1979.

Densmore, Frances. Chippewa Customs. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1979.

---. Chippewa Music. Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 45. Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1910.

Grim, John A. The Shaman: Patterns of Religious Healing Among the Ojibway Indians. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1983.

Hallowell, A. Irving. "Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and World View." Teachings from the American Earth: Indian Religion and Philosophy. Ed. Dennis and Barbara Tedlock. New York: Liveright, 1975. 141-78.

{18}
Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Ceremonies. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.

---. Ojibway Heritage. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.

Lincoln, Kenneth. Native American Renaissance. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.

Ojibway Music From Minnesota. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, n.d.

Porter, Carolyn. "What We Know That We Don't Know: Remapping American Literary Studies." American Literary History 6.3 (Fall 1994): 467-526.

Pryse, Marjorie. Teaching With the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fourth Edition. New York: Norton, 1994.

Roemer, Kenneth. "The Heuristic Powers of Indian Literatures: What Native Authorship Does to Mainstream Texts." Studies in American Indian Literatures 3.2 (Summer 1991): 8-21.

---. "The Nightway Questions American Literature." American Literature 66.4 (December 1994): 817-29.

Smith, Theresa. The Island of the Anishnaabeg. Moscow: U of Idaho P, 1995.

Vizenor, Gerald. Matsushima. Minneapolis: Nodin, 1984.

---. Summer in the Spring. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1993.

---. The People Named the Chippewa. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Corners, Walls, and Doors: The Methodology of Exams in a Course on American Indian Literatures

Sandra L. Sprayberry         

        It is not my purpose in this essay to detail the many destructive horrors of Indian boarding school education,¹ but it was in reading and teaching such firsthand accounts as those of Lame Deer and Mary Crow Dog that I began to question my own pedagogy in a course titled Literatures of the American Indian:

In those days the Indian schools were like jails and run along military lines, with roll calls four times a day . . . We were forbidden to talk our language or to sing our songs. If we disobeyed we had to stand in the corner or flat against the wall, our noses and knees touching the plaster. (Lame Deer 23)

I will hasten to add that my students are, in fact, predominantly White and that my own teaching style is far from militaristic. But in teaching American Indian literatures, I had concluded that traditional academic methods of evaluation--particularly written exams--can create corners and walls of punishment.
        Having taught for quite some time in a discussion-centered classroom, where my students were encouraged to voice their thoughts, I had already positioned my pedagogy far from the teacher-centered one that Lame Deer and his generation experienced. However, in teaching this literature for several years, I had become increasingly disturbed by the means by which I evaluated my students' progress in the class. Though I had always assigned projects that required oral presentations and collaborative work, and though I had expected class participation, evidenced by verbal and non-verbal engagement in the class, I still required two written exams. Though my broad and open-ended essay questions created a relatively flexible structure that allowed, I thought, {22} room for my students to take the exam in their own directions, I still felt that the exam situation itself--in which students respond in writing to my questions and submit their answers to me for my evaluation in writing--clashed pedagogically with the literatures and cultures we were studying.
        Borrowing from research on American Indian teaching and learning styles, I decided that, even though few in our class had Native American blood, in this course we could learn to develop Native American ways of knowing² and that, in the process, the exams should be more reflective of the literatures and cultures that we were studying. For these reasons, I constructed oral exams/conferences to replace the written exams I had previously administered.
        Predictably, most studies of American Indian teaching and learning styles acknowledge the oral tradition and experiential learning as important components of the process. For that reason, I began from the premise that an oral examination would reflect course content more accurately and would also create a more dynamic process. As I explained to the class, the process would be akin to the Lakota vision quest, in which the quester secludes him/herself to seek a vision (exam preparation), presents the vision to a tribal elder for discussion, interpretation, and clarification (the exam/conference held with me), and then returns to the tribe to perform or otherwise share the vision (class discussion after the exams).
        My broader goal in revising my exam format was to design an exam that would create a holistic learning experience, particularly since educational research indicates that Native American students are more adept at "global" or "simultaneous processing," a "synthesis of separate elements into a group, or perceiving as a whole--similar to aspects of many traditional and modern Indian cultures" (More 19). Therefore, I designed questions that were even more global than the previous essay questions I had formulated for written exams.
        To illustrate my points, I include the midterm exam questions I designed for my most recent class. We had just concluded our study of Lakota culture and of the genre of autobiography and had read three texts: Black Elk Speaks; Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions; and Lakota Woman. I gave the questions to the class in advance of our conferences so that they could think about their responses in advance. They were also allowed to bring their books and one page of written notes with them to the conferences. The questions were as follows:

1.  Discuss Native American autobiography. What was the nature of the collaboration between White writer and Native American storyteller? How and why were these stories told and preserved in textual form?
2.  Explain Black Elk's, Lame Deer's, and Mary Crow Dog's {23} concepts of the sacred hoop in its literal and symbolic forms. How/was the sacred hoop broken? How/is it mending?
3.  Topic of your choice: Choose any issue you wish to discuss, and discuss it in the context of all three books.

        Perhaps I am idealistic about the scope of learning that can occur during such an exam, but in constructing these questions, I attempted to create a process conducive to holistic learning. As educator Paul Marashio asserts:

Presently, most Euro-American education experiences are segmented into a utilitarian educational experience because Euro-Americans place greater emphasis on those skills valuable to the work-a-day world. . . . Euro-American society approaches life from a one-dimensional view; materialistic gain. Unfortunately, humanities are shunted. Contrarily, the Native American implements a full-dimensional educational experience with the learner submerged daily into learning through an inter-disciplinary approach about life, art, music, ethics, laws, hunting, culture, farming and self. From these combined educational experiences, the Native People learn about their interrelationship with the universe, consequently, understanding their role in the universal scheme. (9)

To learn about interrelationships with the universe and our roles in the universal scheme may seem overly ambitious, unrealistic, and impossible objectives for any college course, but the sorts of huge questions that one seeks answers to in a vision quest do not necessarily belong outside the scope of the classroom.
        Much of the literature that we read in this course raises just these sorts of cosmic questions, and as Paul Marashio explains, such questions should serve as a "learning model" (8). Marashio goes on to illustrate this life-quest-as-learning-model with the words of Alfonso Ortiz:

"I have attempted to determine, then, how reasonably . . . every man [and woman] would answer for [themselves] questions such as the following: Who am I? Where did I come from? How did I get here? With whom do I move through life? What are the boundaries of the world within which I move? What kind of order exists within it? How did suffering, evil and death come to be in this world? What is likely to happen to me when I die?" (qtd. in Marashio 8)

Particularly in our discussions of the sacred hoop, my students and I have begun to broach such large questions, as we grapple with the {24} issues of discovery (in its literal and figurative connotations), conquest, assimilation, annihilation, and global healing. Very often our discussion of the sacred hoop concludes with them asking themselves the question, "What can we do to heal the sacred hoop?"
        As these questions and the oral format of the exam indicate, the structure of the exam is conversational, dialogic, fluid, dynamic. In essence, I am able to individualize and personalize each student's exam experience according to their particular needs and desires. This aspect of Native American pedagogy--the offering of praise when earned and the offering of further instructional attention when needed--is possible when instructor and student are face-to-face in a conference setting. Such pedagogy is possible, especially when I carefully prepare my students for the process, explain to them that these are evaluative conferences, and read to them this description from Plenty Coup:

"Our teachers . . . were grandfathers, fathers, or uncles. All were quick to praise excellence without speaking a word that might break the spirit of a boy who might be less capable than others. The boy who failed at any lesson got only more lessons, more care, until he was as far as he could go." (qtd. in Marashio 6-7)

        As student comments on my course evaluations indicate, the exam is a positive learning process for most students. Most students have indicated that with oral, dialogic exams, they are given the opportunity to clarify and expand their answers in ways that they cannot in a written format. Most students have also indicated that with my guidance, they have learned more in the process of taking the exam than they have in written examination situations. I do indeed view my role in the process as their guide, their elder.
        Of course, for some students, the exam is a painful process. For those students who have adequately prepared but are uncomfortable verbalizing their thoughts, the situation may create discomfort, but I remind them that silence is communication in American Indian cultures, not the uncomfortable pause of ignorance it is in mainstream American culture. As two educators who had worked with Native American students learned,

In the dominant culture, silence tends to make people "nervous." If a pause is perceived as being too lengthy, someone will say something--anything--in an effort to break the silence. In contrast, silence among Native Americans communicates "oneness." (Boseker and Gordon 23)

Because studies indicate that mainstream American pedagogy emphasizes "impulsive" and "trial-and-error learning," quick responses that are {25} tested out in the classroom (More 20-21), I have found that my students feel ignorant if they do not respond immediately. Prior to the exam, I remind them that in Native cultures, learning styles are "reflective" (More 20) and "listen-then-do (e.g., learning values through legends taught by an elder) or think-then-do (e.g., thinking through a response carefully and thoroughly before speaking)" (More 21). I also explain that "wait-time," which Boseker and Gordon define as "the length of time a teacher pauses after asking a question and also after a student's response" (23), is to allow time for careful reflection and speculation. These explanations seem to put the less verbally articulate but prepared students at some ease.
        For those students who have not adequately prepared for daily classes and for the conference, this exam situation is probably the most painful. Those few students are forced to acknowledge their failure of responsibility in their own and in the classroom community's learning processes, for I have seen vividly illustrated in their facial expressions just how impossible it is for them to pretend to have read the material and to pretend to have prepared answers to the questions when they are facing me. To pretend that such responsibility lies with anyone outside themselves is impossible at this point. To begin to acknowledge their responsibility to the classroom discussion community is, however, possible.
        Paradoxically, though this exam format may allow for more individual accountability and growth than the traditional written exam format, I have found that it seems to foster cooperation rather than competition. Because I teach students who are, on the whole, academically superior and goal-driven, I have found that the traditional exam format encourages grade competition in ways that the oral format does not. As research in cooperative learning indicates, both Native and non-Native students may become discouraged during competitive situations (Boseker and Gordon 20). The evaluative conferences, however, encourage cooperation, both between my students and me and also among my students.
        Because I intentionally call the process an evaluative conference, I discuss these evaluative and grading issues directly with each student. Pointing out that the class policy statement lists particular expectations for each student--reading all of the material by due dates, class attendance, engagement both verbally and non-verbally with the material in class discussion, substantial contributions to the classroom learning community, preparation for the conference, demonstration of substantial learning during the conference--I then ask the students, at the conclusion of our conference, what grade they would give themselves. I have found that most students' assessments of their progress concur with my own evaluation, but in those cases where we do not {26} concur, we are able to discuss further the issues involved.
        Most students tell me at the conclusion of the process that they had "dreaded" the exam, but after having experienced it they prefer it to the written examination format. In class discussion after the conferences, they share with each other what they have learned. Because I have guided our conferences to assure that everyone has achieved a basic level of understanding of the material we have covered, we can proceed together. But because each exam/conference is also tailored to each individual student, they can also begin to pursue their individual quests in further understanding this material. I like to think that rather than backed up in a corner of the classroom, flat against the wall, they are opening a door.

        ¹For a thorough historical overview of American Indian education, see Teaching American Indian Students, edited by Jon Reyhner, and particularly chapter three, "A History of Indian Education," written by Reyhner and Jeanne Eder.

        ²I borrow this term from the book Women's Ways of Knowing, which asserts that women and men have markedly different learning styles. Educational research indicates that Indian and non-Indian students also have markedly different learning styles, but such data has primarily affected current trends in teaching Native Americans. Here I advocate that Native teaching and learning styles would also benefit non-Native teachers and learners.

Belenky, Mary Field, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule. Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

Boseker, Barbara J., and Sandra L. Gordon. "What Native Americans Have Taught Us As Teacher Educators." Journal of American Indian Education 22.3 (May 1983): 20-24.

Crow Dog, Mary, with Richard Erdoes. Lakota Woman. 1990. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Lame Deer, John, and Richard Erdoes. Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. 1972. New York: WSP-Simon & Schuster, 1976.

Marashio, Paul. "'Enlighten my mind . . . . .': Examining the Learning Process Through Native Americans' Ways." Journal of American Indian Education 21.2 (February 1982): 2-10.

{27}
More, Arthur J. "Native Indian Learning Styles: A Review for Researchers and Teachers." Journal of American Indian Education 27.1 (October 1987): 17-29.

Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. 1932. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.

Reyhner, Jon, and Jeanne Eder. "A History of Indian Education." Teaching American Indian Students. Ed. Jon Reyhner. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992. 33-58.

Not for Publication, or: On Not (Yet, Anyway) Producing Bicultural Lumbee Auto-Ethnography

Susan Gardner         

The investigator is always a person of writing, belonging (whatever his political opinions might be) to the ruling classes and linked to an institution (publishing, newspaper, university, museum); he investigates on behalf of the general reading public or the "scientific community." . . . Every experience is thus collected in an ethnological perspective and is constituted as an object in the gaze, the listening or discourse of a subject who assumes responsibility for it according to his own identity, his own interest. . . . At the same time that it is a form of rescue or help, intervention is an act of violation or voyeurism, a form of abuse of power. (Lejeune 209-210)

[T]estimonio is not a form of liberal guilt. It suggests as an appropriate ethical and political response more the possibility of solidarity than of charity. . . . The narrator in testimonio is a real person who continues living and acting in a real social history that also continues. . . . [T]estimonio appears therefore as an extraliterary or even antiliterary form of discourse. (Beverley 98-99, 104)

        Lumbee Indians, and, by implication, other Federally-unrecognized Native groups in the Southeast (in North Carolina, Coharie, Haliwa-Saponi, Meherrin, Waccamaw-Siouan), are becoming fashionable: in certain "safe" contexts, anyway. In 1994, for example, there was an exhibit entitled "Pathmakers: North Carolina Indian Women of Distinction." In 1995, in conjunction with the traveling national exhibit, "Partial Recall" (curated by Lucy Lippard), the Mint Museum {30} of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina sponsored "Recollections: Lumbee Heritage," an exhibit of historic photographs, 1875-1945, from the largest group of Indian people (approximately 40,000) east of the Mississippi.¹
        These exhibits stand in vivid contrast to what anthropological and literary colleagues had advised before I moved to North Carolina: "No one knows what to do about the Lumbees; no one knows how to classify them"; "I'm always looking in dictionaries of American Indian tribes for the Lumbees, but none ever mentions them." Living here, I've learned that Euramericans especially may have trouble categorizing them, but to Lumbees this is not their problem. Owing their historical survival to cultural adaptation, they insist upon defining their future identity as they see fit.²
        In anything I teach--whether sections of composition for Engineering majors, with an international content; a survey of European, West African, and Native American epics; "postcolonial" women writers of the English-speaking Caribbean and southern Africa--I find myself saying to students, "The world is our `text.' This classroom is the least of it, a launching pad only." Since 1991, when I introduced a junior-level 15-week undergraduate survey of Native North American Indian literatures, a Native Carolinian focus with service work for the local or statewide Indian communities has been integral (albeit tokenistic), a commitment I discuss in "`And Here I am, Telling in Winnebago How I Lived My Life': Teaching Mountain Wolf Woman."³
        In 1994, as the English Department began reconfiguring both its undergraduate and graduate (MA-level) curricula, I seized the opportunity to introduce a theory-intensive course, Native North American Indian Autobiography, for graduate students. It was the emphasis on theory, rather than the content alone, which legitimated it to the then Coordinator for Graduate Studies. Desiring to continue a "service" dimension in this new offering, after consulting with some Lumbee tribally-enrolled colleagues outside the university, I produced the following syllabus, though vividly aware that syllabi, like curricula vitae, can be among the greatest fictions one produces. What I didn't realize then was that I was proposing a task for students which, if not impossible, might be questionable.

        Traditionally in Western autobiographies ("self-life-writing"), the individual is depicted over/against society, realizing her or his unique destiny. Thus, we expect an autobiography to be "confessional in form, exploring the inner labyrinth of the psyche, recording the emotional vibrations of the writer as well as the cultural milieu, documenting historic events and the autobiographer's relationships with {31} members of society, encompassing both the inner and public lives of the subject over a lengthy period of time" (Bataille and Sands 4).
        But "writing" (or telling) "the self" is not a traditional indigenous American narrative genre, and the notion of a Native American individual standing out from society would be almost incomprehensible, that person seen as pathologically disordered. Instead, Hertha Dawn Wong suggests terms such as "communo-bio-oratory" ("community-life-speaking" to allow for group identity and oral narrative, since the self-narrated life "told to the page" is a fairly recent development), or "auto-ethnography," "self-culture-writing," to emphasize a sense of self determined by a culture's, rather than an individual's, discourse (6).
        This course will examine "pre-literate" traditional life-telling; the case of Black Elk Speaks (one of history's more ironic titles), via The Sixth Grandfather; bicultural collaborative autobiographies (Native speaker or writer and interpreter, Anglo editor) as exemplified by "Crashing Thunder" and his sister, Mountain Wolf Woman; and two contemporary, self-written narratives, N. Scott Momaday's The Names and Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller. We'll also look at briefer narratives of varying sorts in Arnold Krupat's Native American Autobiography. Additionally, we will benefit from a tour of the Mint Museum's "Partial Recall" exhibition, which combines biography-through-image (photography) and autobiographical essays by Native people, and an accompanying exhibition from North Carolina's Lumbee tribe.
        In addition to meeting the theory-intensive requirement for the master's degree in English, this course involves a fieldwork component as a service to the North Carolina Indian community. You will interview an elderly Indian person and devise your own form to render both your role and the Indian's voice in the narrative you will produce: how will you transform oral recollection to written (and, possibly, video-recorded and -edited) narrative? This project, initiated by the non-profit American Indian Heritage Council of Charlotte, is imperative, due not only to the age of the participants (over 80), but because interviews already collected relate knowledge concerning traditions, oral history, material culture, and environment which is almost wholly unknown to younger generations. With the participants' consent, interview materials will be donated to the Heritage Council and the North Carolina Indian Cultural Center in Pembroke.

        Instead of a research paper, then, students would undertake information retrieval for an archival project, joining an endeavor initiated decades previously by the late John L. Carter, Registrar of what is now Pembroke State University (North Carolina's Indian-founded tertiary education institution, serving a people neither "white" {32} nor "black," as the state defined such falsely homogeneous "categories"). From 1835, when the North Carolina Constitution stripped what are now the Lumbee of their identity as "free persons of color," until 1887 when the General Assembly provided for--but did not fund until later, and then, minimally--separate schools for these Indian people and their descendants, no formal instruction was available for them at all.⁴ Carter's son, T. Vail Carter, founder of the Heritage Council, has continued the project using more technical sophistication (video-recording for eventual storage on laser disc), but working very much on his own so-called "free" time.
        Having now taught the course twice--and looking as though I shall continue it as long as the elders, my students, and I are available--this retrospect is an opportunity to take stock of what I thought might happen and what actually has. From the standpoint of theory, I felt on deceptively safe ground, since I had participated in Kathryn Shanley's National Endowment for the Humanities/Newberry Library D'Arcy McNickle Center documentary workshop on Native autobiography in 1992. But a lot has appeared since then, and as the project has evolved, my concept of Euramerican collaboration has altered enormously.
        Methodologically, moreover, it would have been difficult to be less prepared. The only "expertise" the students and I brought to bear was conventional literary criticism (and, in my case, a thorough grounding in feminist and postcolonial theories resulting from prolonged work in "Third World" universities). Indeed, we rather prided ourselves on not being professional snoops and voyeurs into other cultures. But this comfortable conscience ignored the hegemony literary critics assume as a matter of course: text-bound, we were confident in our ability and, indeed, authority, to interpret, decipher and redefine, as if texts (let alone their creators) had no rights of their own. What, then, of "texts" solicited by us, orally transmitted but that we then transcribed? "Reduced to writing?" How amenable are they--or, rather, should they even be--to the graduate apprenticeship of what a colleague once called (in unwittingly comic typographical error but profound truth) "post-criticisms?"
        As the project developed, I became better read in life histories collected by ethnographers, sociologists, linguists, and gerontologists, very few of whom would have endorsed our good-hearted, inexperienced, unsophisticated, and invariably "biased" research (for my students and I never assumed Lumbee people to be anything but Indians). Had we heeded the admonitions and caveats from these disciplines, we would probably never have had the nerve to speak with anyone. For instance, Charles L. Briggs' Learning How to Ask: a Sociolinguistic Appraisal of the Role of the Interview in Social Science {33} Research was a lively, terrifying introduction to communication blunders generally, let alone cross-culturally.⁵ Nor did we wish to further the scholarly intrusions condemned by Linda Hogan in "Workday:"

              I go to the university
              and out for lunch
             and listen to the higher ups
              tell me all they have read
              about Indians
              and how to analyze this poem.
              They know us
              better than we know ourselves. (qtd. in Coltelli 85)

        My students hardly welcomed the project which, never having interviewed an elder myself, I assured them would be far more challenging and intriguing than the customary library-regurgitated research paper. The two males in the 1995 class, both Euramerican poets, resisted from the outset. Bob informed me that he was interested in neither autobiography nor theory, just in Indians. In any event, he regarded graduate education as an exercise in grovelling. (Ultimately, he was the first to complete his interview--with a traditional healer--and produced a provocative narrative about the interaction to accompany his transcript. Rather reminiscent of two of his favorite writers, Jim Harrison and Adrian C. Louis, it's nonetheless very much his own.) Jeff took me aside to demur that he was a reclusive writer far too shy to interview anyone, let alone an Indian, and veered towards dropping the course. Only at midterm, when I suggested that, in addition to his transcript, he produce free verse from it as a thank-you to his interviewee, was he wholeheartedly converted. Deborah, meantime, preferred to work with children.⁶ No one felt comfortable with theory, especially the two post-bacs routed into the course because no other was open. Yet their sympathies were engaged from the start, since one was a first generation Italian-American and the other, who identified as African-American, was also related to the Saponi people through her mother. Both were acutely, if differently, familiar with bicultural strain and strength. But fearing the seminar would be cancelled if I lost any of the seven students, I cravenly offered the possibility--if they would just hang on for awhile--of a research paper instead of the interview. The research papers were never written.
        Initially, we had no predetermined agenda other than an archival one, and this continues to predominate. Models to follow were few. Most of what we had read in the way of bicultural autobiographies came from the Nineteenth Century or ethnically more homogeneous {34} groups from other areas of the country. We were familiar with injunctions and admonitions such as those voiced by Murray L. Wax, "The Ethics of Research in American Indian Communities" and Vine Deloria, Jr., "Research, Redskins, and Reality" (431-68). In class "we" (who included two African-American women) watched the PBS documentary "Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance," by the National Film Board of Canada and aired by PBS for Black History Month in 1991: the only biography of a Native Carolinian to reach a mass audience that I know of. This served largely as an example of what not to do: the re-presentation of Sylvester Long's lifelong, ultimately self-destructive attempt to "play Indian" (Cherokee, then Blackfeet, although he seems to have been a Lumbee African American) portrays Black life in Winston-Salem earlier in the century as fatalistic, pious, resigned, and defeatist. Its overall effect combines condescension with faulting the victim, as if "Long Lance" had any freedom to be himself in Jim Crow society. His is an exemplary, tragic case of what Jack Forbes calls "the manipulation of race, caste, and identity" ("Manipulation" 1) in the classification of red-black peoples.
        Otherwise, excepting a few cameo appearances in North Carolina school history texts (e.g., the obligatory chapter about Indians before the Lost Colony, guerrilla leader Henry Berry Lowrie), no extensive biographical research about North Carolina Indians has gained a significant academic or popular audience. Both Karen I. Blu's The Lumbee Problem: the Making of an American Indian People (1980) and Gerald M. Sider's Lumbee Indian Histories: Race, Ethnicity, and Indian Identity in the Southern United States (1993) date from research conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s; although certainly based to an extent on interviews, they are theoretical projects. Adolph L. Dial (Lumbee) and David K. Eliades' The Only Land I Know: a History of the Lumbee Indians (1975) does not contain oral autobiographies per se, although there is a suggestive chapter concerning folk beliefs. Interviews with a few Eastern Cherokee elders appear in Laurence French and Jim Hornbuckle, eds., The Cherokee Perspective: Written by Eastern Cherokees (1981), but these concern a federally recognized group, and no methodology is discussed. Out of all the Foxfire interviews, only one is with an Indian (Catawba potter Nola Campbell in Foxfire 9).⁷
        By 1995, beyond the archival aspect, my pedagogical concerns included a mix of ethical and aesthetic considerations, as the syllabus indicates. None of us wanted to be collaborators in the Eurocentric tradition of the original bicultural composite autobiography delineated and critiqued by Krupat. Instead of suppressing their roles and institutional positions, I wanted the students to confront and voice these.⁸ We set out not wishing to "prove" anything, but we did want {35} to render whatever we "found" in an appealing manner. That was the problem.
        I am thankful that our co-workers are Lumbees, a very acculturated people since at least the early Seventeenth Century. No translators or interpreters were needed, for example: indeed, the people who became the Lumbees spoke English before the later Scots arrivals in the region did. Before many of our own ancestors did. What some might see as a hindrance--every Lumbee "speaks English, is Christian, works at similar occupations [to Euramericans], and lives in a house that resembles those inhabited by others. Lumbees have no `exotic' rituals, dances, songs, or crafts, nor do they dress distinctively" (Blu 134)--was our gateway into a complex, contradictory world where ethnicity is both given and contested.⁹
        Twentieth-century Robeson County little resembles the liminal terrain of mysterious (to Euramericans) waterways, channels, and "islands" providing refuge to the notorious Indian outlaw--now a reclaimed Lumbee hero, subject of an outdoor drama, "Strike at the Wind!"--Henry Berry Lowrie. Appropriately enough for a folk hero, he disappeared (in the early 1870s) but never demonstrably died; the state of North Carolina still has a price on his head. For Lumbee acculturation has never been the whole story: the people's history is also occasionally characterized by defensive violence, including notably, in the late 1950s, the only successful routing of a Ku Klux Klan rally anywhere.
        Which is a rather lengthy way of saying that we went where our interviewees were, whether people who had relocated to Charlotte and Greensboro (as agribusiness seized their lands, leaving them with no outlet for their traditional farming skills) or those who could survive at "home." Our lack of funding proved to be a blessing: the university administration only grants $100 towards a graduate student's travel, and the interviews, not constituting a conference, didn't qualify. But ten dollars will buy gas to Pembroke and back, and we were free of any funding agency's stipulations. No Federal strictures bound us, no BIA agencies existed to oversee us, no tribal council needed to approve of us,¹⁰ and the university by and large ignored us (except for insurance purposes). Indeed, before the project developed into curriculum development and research grants for 1995 and 1996, no formal ethics regarding "human subjects" guided us, either. We adapted permission forms adhering to the university's rules (boiling down to confidentiality and anonymity, with the interviewees' right to edit), and guidelines from the Heritage Council. But, as I discuss below, the more we learned from the people we interviewed, the less entitled we felt to disseminate it.¹¹
        So we had no externally-sanctioned "authority" (nor did we aspire {36} to). Our credibility was conferred by Vail and by the coordinator of the Indian Education Program at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools, Rosa Winfree, who had helped design the undergraduate course. Rosa's encouragement and endorsement have sustained me for nearly six years. Named Indian Educator of the Year in 1989 by the United Tribes of North Carolina, and a 1992 delegate to the White House Conference on Indian Education, she has served on the board of the National Indian Education Association, as a trustee of Pembroke State University, and is presently chair of the board of the Native American Scholarship Fund. Vail provided the Heritage Council interview schedule,¹² matched the students with elders, advised us how to behave (informally, respectfully, patiently), and acted as videographer. In effect, we were working through webs of kinship. (I realized I was catching on when I could identify, without prompting, one person's "grandaddy" as someone else's "grandmother's brother.") We also worked through John Carter's status in the Indian community, which Vail has inherited and continued. No one would refuse Vail; the community remembers his "daddy" as "smart."
        Only later did I realize that such endorsement kept both the students and myself from scrutinizing our agendas (our academic mission seemed so "obvious," so transparent); we took our narrators' cooperation for granted. What, if anything, did they want from us? How did they "edit" what they told us?¹³ And although we followed Vail's format, to what degree did our additional questions reflect fantasies and projections? I believe it is fair to say that some of us, myself included (although I would have denied it), were occasionally motivated by an unrealistic hankering after purity or essences, or an imperialist nostalgia. For example, we wished that someone, if only old enough, would remember an even older relative having spoken an American Indian language.
        In a way, then, we were reflecting the history of Lumbee relations with Euramerican society and its institutions: they weren't the ones instigating or desiring contact, we were. In noting our initiative (rather: our feeling we had the "right" to take it), I don't intend to imply that our narrators were victims, with little choice but to "sing": their people have a long history of dealing with intruders. Rather, I need to note our lack of more critical self-reflection about what we were doing, as if our interviews took place apart from history or politics.
        As the project developed, we found--no doubt because of the Lumbee passion for education--that our association with the university could be an asset. We neither denied nor emphasized it. As the project expanded (through word-of-mouth as much as anything) we found ourselves working with Indian (and, often, very Southern) {37} institutions, such as regional church conferences or home church gatherings. (I had never envisaged driving over 100 miles to attend a church breakfast at 7:30 in the morning. Nor did we anticipate that meeting at people's convenience might entail beginning at 11:30 p.m.) Many interviews involved travel to events where elders congregate: seasonal festivals, seniors' meetings at urban Indian centers, 90th birthday celebrations, annual homecomings (the town of Pembroke or churches), honor dances for veterans, giveaways and pow-wows; some have taken place at their homes. Vail has rambled on foot throughout the county with an elderly man who pointed out concealed graves from a nineteenth-century smallpox epidemic. We often visit pow-wows and celebrations with no intention of interviewing, only introducing the project and making contacts. Some interviews generate formal follow-up, others burgeoning friendship. The 200-mile round-trip journey, for me, has become nearly as routine as the 20-minute commute to the university.¹⁴ Most valuable has been Vail's contextualization: his information and guidance as we drive to interviews, our processing what was said on the way home, my sometimes bewildered questions, our further discussions once the interviews are transcribed.
        At this time, my students and I have collected 20 interviews (some of which do not conform to the original age minimum, but all of which are with people regarded as elders by their communities). The oldest is 90. John and Vail Carter have collected more, pre-dating and going well beyond our contributions.
        The question of "suitable" "finished" narrative no longer eludes us so much as it has become beside the point. All the students wrote forewords (usually about their anxieties and expectations) and afterwords (usually correlating the interview information with historical or political data) to their transcripts. A number of factors influenced me to renounce the quest for form, as well as quoting any of the interviews here or, for some time, anywhere else. But it was hard. I was coming to identify with Virginia Woolf's emotions about (self-written or publically spoken) British working women's lives, and longed to share accent, idiom, rhythm with other audiences:

How many words must lurk in these . . . vocabularies that have faded from ours! How many scenes must lie dormant in their eye which are unseen by ours! What images and saws and proverbial sayings must still be current with them that have never reached the surface of print, and very likely they still keep the power which we have lost of making new ones. (xxvii-xxviii)¹⁵

        But what the project boils down to is that people give information to us which they expect to be returned, and returned unsullied. {38} Although the students detested Philippe Lejeune's On Autobiography, with its confusing Gallicisms and references to works they had never heard of, Chapter Nine, "The Autobiography of Those Who Do Not Write" was, for me, a crise de conscience.
        Lejeune's elegant, elaborate, detailed exposition of peasant and working class "autobiographies" in France demonstrates the impossibility of such endeavors: "Collaboration blurs in a disturbing way the question of responsibility, and even damages the notion of identity" (192); "[B]ehind these problems of identity are hidden problems of power relations . . . and constraints that come from rules characteristic of different circuits of communication" (192); "In writing, as elsewhere, `authority' is always on the side of the one who has the power" (197); "If we use the speech of the model, it is less to give it to him than to take it from him" [emphasis his] (209); and so on and on.¹⁶ But Lejeune does hold out a tentative hope: "The essential choice [is] to abandon writing [i.e., publication; emphasis his] and to produce audiovisual life stories, by turning to . . . video techniques," using the product in situ for community discussion.

The apparatus that has been set up should not be looked upon as an alibi . . . to assuage [collectors'] guilty conscience, but rather as the search for a compromise, for a lesser evil. . . . Time will tell whether this work of emancipation and distanciation will have contributed to changing the game of social relationships, of which the work itself is the product. (215)

        So perhaps, in future, the interviews may play their part in other projects. From the start of our working together, Vail and I have toyed with the idea of producing an educational program for UNC TV, and I envisage cooperation in future with initiatives such as the Native American Church History project,¹⁷ with institutions such as the Department of Indian Studies at Pembroke State, as well as the university archives, or with individuals such as Barbara Braveboy-Locklear collecting oral histories on their own. The project may not remain solely oral: a wealth of documentation awaits us, such as with the Lumbee-Cheraw tribe and the Lumbee Regional Development Association. If forced to define it academically, officially, I'd say our research is evolving into a study of the personal experiences of Carolina Indians as affected by Federal and state policies of termination, exclusion, urban relocation, and "Indian [BIA-mediated] self-determination." It may spearhead an investigation of remembered and reconstructed ethnicity: a study of the narrative discourse constructing tribal (or other group) identity in a worst-case scenario of almost total acculturation and annihilation. It definitely will not become another {39} coffee table book of elders' wisdom. But it may indeed become Southeastern North American Indian testimonio, in which "individual stories . . . can be read collectively as one story refracted through multiple lives" (Davies 4). But, as Sistren learned in collecting and compiling life stories of Jamaican women:

Soon it was clear that the testimonies would not fit neatly into an introductory section. They refused to become supporting evidence of predetermined factors. They threatened to take over the entire project and they would not behave. . . . So, in the end, we . . . decided to change the nature of the entire project. (qtd. in Davies 3)¹⁸

        So I don't believe either my students or I will write this grand testimonial narrative. We can only facilitate and contribute, leaving the editing and publication to those who, initially, helped us: the roles are now reversed, the biculturally-produced "autobiography" turned inside out. It has come not to matter that we have permission to quote the elders, that they have "released" us to do so. I can't "do it": allow myself a voice-over, become the controller, possessor or interpreter. Our research is but a tributary flowing into the river of heritage, and that heritage is the Lumbee people's, not ours.
        As I was completing this interim report after innumerable false starts and discouraging drafts, Vail and I took time out from what wound up being hours of an Indian Education public hearing (at a church, needless to say). Typically, I had a legal pageful of information I needed him to verify, interpretations for him to review, and quotations for him to assent to before sending the manuscript off. (At most, I thought he might delete a quotation or two, or suggest others.) Typically, apart from vetting matters of fact, he offered no advice. Typically, what I envisioned as a formality lasting perhaps a half hour before the hearing developed into a lengthy conversation having little to do, at first glance, with the matters at issue for me. We returned to the hearing, took part in group work and the concluding blessing, folded chairs and prepared to go home. "I don't think I addressed most of your questions," he said in parting. "You addressed the most basic of all," I replied, feeling very much lighter, freer, unburdened, my aching jaw (the infallible marker that something is "wrong," my universe out of balance) unclenching. For the first time that evening, I felt I could breathe. "I've made up my mind. I'm not quoting anybody."
        And so I haven't. Not in this context; not for now; not for publication.

{40}

        ¹The curator for both is Lumbee oral historian and storyteller Barbara Braveboy-Locklear. "Pathmakers" opened at the Native American Art Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina. At the Mint Museum, Mark Leach, curator of twentieh-century American art, guided my graduate students through "Partial Recall"/"Lumbee Recollections" and impressed us with his candid, politically-informed, sensitive discussion about "exhibiting a culture." The giant NationsBank is now pitching in: publicity about its April 1996 exhibition of Catawba pottery ensured that the 1995 Catawba annual after-Thanksgiving festival, on their reservation across the border in South Carolina, swarmed with collectors scampering after appreciable investments. Their pottery, says their tribal historian, until recently very nearly a "dying art," is "putting them on the map," however ironically.

        ²See Dana Milbank's Wall Street Journal front-page article, "What's in a Name? For the Lumbee, Pride and Money" and the retorts by (Lumbee) David E. Wilkins, "Wall Street Journal Reporter Was in Error on Lumbee," and Stanley Knick reprinted in Indian Country Today. Milbank provides a 1995 example of the dominant culture's continuing refusal to allow Lumbees the basic right of self-identification.

        ³The article discusses in more depth how teaching Native North American Indian literatures obliges me to redefine the promotion/tenure criteria (especially "service"), and the inappropriateness of academically-defined "objectivity" when a dominating culture "studies" those it has extinguished, "enveloped" (Jack Forbes' term), ignored, or marginalized.

        ⁴Founded in 1887 as the Croatan Normal School, the university became part of the 16-campus state of North Carolina system in 1972. In truth, our project's origins describe an infinite regress. John L. Carter was an extraordinary man, a polymath. Church historian of the Burnt Swamp Baptist Association for 42 years, as director of special projects at Pembroke State University he became concerned with a "missing link" in Lumbee community history, the generation of c. 1900-1930. (Before and after--although by no means complete or even composed primarily by Indian people--documents in Washington DC and Raleigh delineate the historical portrait and process somewhat.) With students at the university, he compiled an audio-taped interview collection which, some 12 years after his death, his son Vail started listening to. This, then, could be described as the project's genesis, but it probably dates back to Vail's great-great-great- grandfather Cary Wilkins, Esq., owner of a 1700-acre farm and founder of the Burnt Swamp Baptist Association: minister and justice of the peace, his own written documentation dates from 1851, when very few Indian people in southeastern North Carolina had any opportunity to become literate. Unlike many other Indians, these neglected people were not hostile to a cruelly-enforced literacy; disenfranchised, they embraced it.

        ⁵However , our colleague Boyd Davis' "When Students Collect Data: Ethics,