This semester I’m teaching a course called “Native Modernisms.” The goal is to reconsider how we talk about modernism in literary studies by centering literature written by Native American authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (instead of reading Pound, Eliot, Stein, etc.).
There is a whole hornets’ nest of problems to be rattled here. I am not Native; there are no Native students in the class. I come to the study of Native American literature through the study of white supremacy—specifically, through the study of how departments of English remain indebted to their white supremacist origins. This is not a framework that necessarily takes Native knowledges as a starting point (though sometimes it does).
It’s standard for professors of literature to design courses based on their research. I have tried to teach the racist source materials I work with and publish on, and I don’t think it works. It feels irresponsible and frankly just gross to me to spend a semester devoted to the writings of white supremacists and people who upheld white supremacist ideologies and institutions, even if this is knowledge I think students should have. It seems more important that students encounter directly the writings of artists who worked against white supremacy in all of its insidious and obvious forms. So instead of teaching Mary Austin or Alice Corbin Henderson or Louis Untermeyer, I’m teaching Molly Spotted Elk and Too-qua-stee and Lynn Riggs.
I have taught classes focused on Native poets before, and have tried a variety of ways to get students thinking about my identity (why is a non-Native woman teaching them this stuff? have they had a Native professor before? do they know any Native people at this school?) and their own identities as a necessary precursor to any ethical engagement with Native literatures and cultures. (There is of course a huge body of literature on the ethics of teaching Native American lit as a non-Native that I’m indebted to.) This semester I decided to start with a conversation about what we already think we know about Native American literatures, cultures, and histories, and to move into a conversation about territorial acknowledgments centered on pieces by Chelsea Vowel (Métis) (“Beyond Territorial Acknowledgments”) and Debbie Reese (of Nambé Pueblo) (“Are You Planning to Do a Land Acknowledgment?“).
This was such a useful activity for a group of non-Native students. It became clear in our initial discussion just how much everyone’s childhood was saturated with harmful caricatures of Indigenous peoples and how this early exposure does lasting damage (see Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian). Students reported knowing that the vanishing Native narrative isn’t quite right, but also thinking that Native American cultures have functionally been destroyed. Here’s my transcript of these students’ free associations with the term “Native American”:
Zitkala-Sa
Sherman Alexie
Howard Zinn
Book of Native American folk tales??? Can’t remember the author or if they were real
PNW Indigenous cultures
Histories of Native women advocating for themselves (Cherokee)
Pocahontas as children’s story/casually racist cartoons
Connection of Native American culture with nature/land
Museums/collections of artifacts
Jackson/Trail of Tears
Women’s Rights Movement and Indigenous Rights Movements
Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea
Thanksgiving/Columbus Day celebration
Geronimo, Falling Rock—ghost stories/scary stories/demonizing and mystifying Native American cultures
Spirit animals, headdresses, totems (appropriation)
Stereotypes of drunkenness, gambling
Peter Pan
Sleepaway camps with “Indian” activities/names
Racist mascots
Mardi Gras Indians
Samuel Zimmerman – land clearance in Latin America to benefit Tulane (linked oppressions across national boundaries)
We then turned to the Vowel and Reese articles to answer the questions: do we want to try to write a land acknowledgment as students studying at Tulane? Who would such a project benefit? What are the advantages and disadvantages to the increasing ubiquity of land acknowledgments?
Here is my transcript of that conversation:
What is a territorial acknowledgment?
Public, open acknowledgment that this land doesn’t belong to settlers but settlers are here
Crafted in consultation with local groups and through research
Purpose? Who do they benefit?
Work on inclusion of Indigenous peoples into a hegemonic system (do we want this??? do Indigenous peoples want this???)
Problems?
Already a settler-colonial framework of land ownership
Repetition dilutes the power
Words without consequences/veneer/symbolic gesture
Absence of them in rural spaces
Can become more about settler feelings than the good of Indigenous communities
Erases violence of conquest?
Can be tokenizing/ticks off the “diversity box” without changing society
Benefits?
A starting off point to acknowledge history, discomfort and disrupt
Could spark people to action
Questions raised?
What does a self-declaration of allyship do for Indigenous people/communities?
Problem of audience—how are listeners receiving LA? What comes after the acknowledgment?
Would mass scale land acknowledgments in the U.S make a difference?
Competing systems of governance
Best practices if we did decide to write a land acknowledgment
Not quick—take time
Work with indigenous people to write the acknowledgment
We want to be better “guests”—how do we do that according to your laws, and what are your laws?
Opening up ongoing lines of communication
Focusing on contemporary issues—epidemic of missing/murdered Indigenous women—not just “they were here and now we’re here too”
Need to add listening, being specific—the beginning of a relationship/conversation, not an end
Accompanied with concrete actions
Add resources, places to donate $, time, etc.
In the end, we decided that it would take at least a semester’s worth of work to write a useful land acknowledgment, and that land acknowledgments might work best as an educational exercise for settlers and non-Natives rather than as an attempt at “reconciliation” or recognition. Students also very smartly noted that we could probably get our institution to provide money for such an activity, since it would be great PR for said institution. (They are a really sharp group.)
I left class incredibly excited by these students’ willingness to interrogate their own positionality and by their desire to learn as much as they can this semester about Native American literatures. It also solidified my unease with my position as a non-Native scholar teaching this topic at a private university built on a former plantation. I am never not thinking about what good my teaching does or what it means to actually be a politically committed professor. At my best, I think I’m really good at getting students to think about their responsibilities to communities they are not part of and may not know much about. At my worst, I contribute to the functioning of institutions that continue to uphold violent forms of inequality. These things of course happen simultaneously.
For now, I’m trying to model for my students what it means to continually self-interrogate and to lay bare my own inadequacies. I try to make sure they’re aware of approaches we could be taking that we’re not (for instance, this is a broad course emphasizing generic diversity—it could be a course focused on tribally specific literary traditions). In assignments and in our course bibliography, I’m highlighting for them the vast bodies of scholarship by Indigenous intellectuals and knowledge keepers. It is, I hope, like a land acknowledgment, the beginning of a conversation and not any kind of end.