Malea Powell describes “survivance” as
the process by which Native Americans wield a uniquely effective rhetoric that
conveys the ideas of survival and resistance. Powell uses Charles Alexander
Eastman’s autobiography From the Deep
Woods to Civilization in one of her examples. She claims that by “using
dominant discourse, Eastman marks himself as a subject within it, not just as a
victim subject to it. In doing so I hear him imagine a new Indian-ness, one
that is not a ‘fictional copy of the past’…,but an Indian-ness in which he
encounters his enemies ‘with the same courage in literature’ as his ancestors
‘once evinced on horses’” (“Rhetorics”425). In this way, the Indian might come
to represent himself or herself as a survivor of the attempt at complete
assimilation, while at the same time using English, the language of the
colonizers, to maintain a position of power and resistance through rhetorical
sovereignty.
Referring to historical Natives who
became adept practitioners of rhetorics of survivance, in “Listening to
Ghosts,” Powell decribes those people as “those who encountered Euroamerican
culture, learned the language of the colonizers, and negotiated the demands of
‘civilized’ life as they critiqued, resisted, and survived its impositions”
(14). Rhetorics of survivance.
If language is the means through
which we articulate our thoughts, beliefs, and stories, is there something of
Native culture, including thoughts, beliefs, and stories that we are unable to
communicate if we no longer speak our Native languages? In this way, I wonder
if there is a divide between the culture of our ancestors and our own due to
some lost meaning that never made its way into our understanding. Is there a
profound difference between our idea of Native culture and our ancestors’ idea
of Native culture due to the invisible wall of language? Personally, I can’t
say that I feel that a part of my
identity is missing in the absence of any knowledge of Potawatomi language.
English is the language I know, and it’s the language that feels like it most
belongs to me. If I were trying to communicate my thoughts to you right now in
Potawatomi, you wouldn’t be reading this—because I wouldn’t be able to say the
way I understand it in my English-language mode of thinking. When I do try and
learn and speak Potawatomi, the words taste unfamiliar and I hesitate in their
utterance. So I take comfort in the words of Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird in
Powell’s “Listening to Ghosts.”
We are coming out of one or two
centuries of war, a war that hasn’t ended. Many of us at the end of the century
are using the “enemy language” with which to tell our truths, to sing, to remember
ourselves during these troubled times…But to speak, at whatever the cost, is to
become empowered rather than victimized by destruction…These colonizers’
languages, which often usurped our own tribal languages or diminished them, now
hand back emblems of our cultures, our own designs: beadwork, quills if you
will. We’ve transformed these enemy languages. (20)
So at the same time I wonder if
something is lost in the reverse transfer of language. I’ll look at my own
tribe for an example. For the majority of us who don’t know Potawatomi
language, but have an understanding of our tribal culture and stories in
English, do we lose something of our understanding of the culture we’ve always
known through our use of Potawatomi language? Not to say that learning
Potawatomi is a bad thing—no language should be forced out of existence. But at
the point we are now, a generation that has been Potawatomi in the language of
English, are we somehow claiming that there is something about the language
that will make us more Potawatomi
than we already are? What does that even mean? How can we be more of ourselves
than what we are? I think the only possible answer to any of these questions is
that we can only go about “reinventing ourselves again, in the indigenous
languages that named this continent” (“Listening” 20). After all, it’s not
beyond the scope of the Indian’s ability to reconfigure her identity in the
face of circumstantial changes.
There’s no doubt that Indians’
acquisition of English has empowered our rhetoric. Powell points out that
through the federal government’s attempt to assimilate Natives into
Euroamerican modes of thought and language,
Eventually they created Indian doctors
and lawyers, activists and politicians, scholars and teachers. Instead of being
at the mercy of white translators, Indian lawyers understand the intricacies of
the legal ties that bind us and are invested by the system of Euroamerican
justice with the authority to do something about it. (“Rhetorics” 427)
By using this new rhetorical sovereignty we
can renegotiate Indian policy and retell a national history that includes Native
Americans in pivotal roles.
But in looking at Powell’s explanation
of Winnemucca’s ideas of Indian reform, specifically her insistence that Indians
should have individual control over tribal land, I wonder if Winnemucca acted
against the interests of Indian tribes. She claims that her tribe, the Paiutes,
"can enjoy lands in severalty without losing their tribal relations, so
essential to their happiness and good character, and... citizenship, implied in
this distribution of land, will defend them from the encroachments of the white
settlers, so detrimental to their interests and their virtues" (qtd. in “Rhetorics”
407). I understand the idea that owning land as individuals will keep others
from taking over tribal land, but the overall implications of such reform do
not represent the best interest of all
tribes. Perhaps I’m passing judgment on her because of my knowledge of what
happens as a result of that reform, and maybe that’s not fair. The Citizen
Potawatomi, too, desired the individual allocation of tribal lands, but in the
end many of them ended up losing their land and their money. So I guess my
overall question is: how did Natives wind up believing that individual land
allotments were a good thing? Was their nineteenth-century rhetoric a little too much like that of the Euroamericans?
No comments:
Post a Comment