Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans

Joëlle Rostkowski

Description

In these lively and informative interviews, noted ethnohistorian and international consultant Joëlle Rostkowski brings to light major developments in the Native American experience over the last thirty years. Overcoming hardships they have experienced as the "forgotten" minority, often torn between two cultures, these prominent native writers, artists, journalists, activists, lawyers, and museum administrators each have made remarkable contributions towards the transformation of old stereotypes, the fight against discrimination, and the sharing of their heritage with mainstream society.

Theirs is a story not so much of success but of resilience, of survivance, with each interview subject having marked their time and eventually becoming the change they wanted in the world. The conversations in this volume reveal that the assertion of ethnic identity does not lead to bitterness and isolation, but rather an enthusiasm and drive toward greater visibility and recognition that at the same time aims at a greater understanding between different cultures. Conversations with Remarkable Native Americans rewards the reader with a deeper understanding of the Native American Renaissance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE. Tragic wisdom and survivance
DEBORAH L. MADSEN

INTRODUCTION. From forgotten Americans to Indigenous rights
JOËLLE ROSTKOWSKI

PROLOGUE. Conversation with Gerald Vizenor, series editor, poet, novelist, and art critic

1. N. Scott Momaday, poet, novelist, painter, and UNESCO Artist for Peace

2. Suzan Harjo, policy advocate, journalist, essayist, and poet

3. Richard West, lawyer and founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian

4. Emil Her Many Horses, curator, National Museum of the American Indian

5. Sven Haakanson, director of the Alutiiq Museum, Kodiak, Alaska

6. Veronica Tiller, historian, consultant, and writer

7. Erma Vizenor, tribal chair, White Earth Reservation, Minnesota

8. Louisita Warren, elder of Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico

9. Tony Abeyta, painter and sculptor

10. David Bradley, painter and sculptor

11. Darren Vigil Gray, painter and musician

12. E. Jill Momaday, actress, model, and former chief of protocol, state of New Mexico

13. Rulan Tangen, dancer and choreographer

14. Robert Tim Coulter, lawyer, founder, and director of the Indian Law Resource Center

15. Kenneth Deer, journalist, educator, and UN Indigenous representative

16. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

EPILOGUE. In memory of Deskaheh

NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX OF PEOPLE
GENERAL INDEX

Sujets

• Indigenous peoples
• History of the Americas

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 14 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438441764
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNY series, Native Traces

Gerald Vizenor and Deborah L. Madsen, editors

conversations with remarkable Native Americans

Joëlle Rostkowski
state university of new york press

Book cover: Tony Abeyta, Totem , collage, 2009.
Page iii: Tony Abeyta, Tin Tintabulation , Triptych (oil), 1997.
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS Albany, New York
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production and book design, Laurie Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conversations with remarkable Native Americans / by Joëlle Rostkowski.
p. cm. — (Native traces)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4175-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America—Biography. 2. Indians of North America—Civil rights. 3. Indians of North America—Government relations. 4. Indians of North America—Ethnic identity. 5. Indians of North America—Intellectual life. I. Rostkowski, Joëlle.
E89.C66 2012
323.1197'073—dc23                                                                                                                    2011019510
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Levi General, Deskaheh (Haudenosaunee), who came to Geneva in 1923 to present his R EDMAN'S A PPEAL FOR J USTICE to the League of Nations.
Acknowledgments

For my mother, Lucienne Ribert, who gave me my roots and my wings, and showed me the beauty of the world.
For my husband and traveling companion, Nicolas Rostkowski, managing partner of the Orenda Gallery, where Native artists are welcome.
For Edilou, student of art and budding artist, our daughter.
I am grateful to Gerald Vizenor and Deborah Madsen for their insights, encouragement and their interest in international research.
Special thanks to James Peltz and Laurie Searl for their faith in this book and to the SUNY production team for their friendliness and efficiency.
Thank you to the Remarkable Native Americans, whose voices are heard in this book, for their courage, creativity, and humor and for sharing with me some of their dreams.
In memory of my father, André Ribert,
None of our dreaming was in vain.
Jane Mendelsohn
PREFACE
Tragic wisdom and survivance

D EBORAH L. M ADSEN
The guiding principle of the Native Traces book series is the concept of survivance , developed by Gerald Vizenor and exemplified by Joëlle Rostkowski's conversations with a series of extraordinary Native Americans. Survivance is not a static object or method but a dynamic condition of historical and cultural survival and also of political resistance: an epistemology, an ontology, and an axiology. Survivance is the continual assertion of nonterritorial Native sovereignty, which the interviewees in this book describe as the condition of their lives as artists, writers, journalists, lawyers, and activists.
Survivance, as a structuring epistemological principle, is political, cultural, and aesthetic, a resistance and counterinterpretation that constantly seeks to expose the workings of dominant colonialist ideologies in the production of everyday meanings. Survivance refuses the easy acceptance of the “commonsense” interpretation of the world that supports what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls the “possessive logic” of nation-state sovereignty. 1 Vizenor describes this interpretative resistance as the “unsaying” of the world and the corresponding effort to speak it “otherwise” in Native terms. 2 In this way, survivance counters the epistemology of disavowal that characterizes settler relations with Native peoples. Freud's concept of disavowal names a psychological process of simultaneous acknowledgment and denial, characterized by knowing what is actually the case but behaving as if it were otherwise. Disavowal is a defensive function that allows the rejection of some perception of reality because, if accepted as real, that perception would threaten the integrity of an existing worldview. In the context of U.S. settler colonialism, the history of Native dispossession is both acknowledged and denied, for example, in the official legal doctrines of “discovery” and “conquest” that regulate relations between the federal and tribal governments. Survivance rejects the historical and cultural narratives that deny a Native sense of presence, a presence that preceded and endures despite colonial settlement. These narratives write Native communities into a condition of absence—a disavowed presence—and as perpetual victims lacking individual and communal agency. However, as Gerald Vizenor tells Joëlle Rostkowski in the interview published here, “The character of survivance creates a sense of native presence, a critical, active presence and resistance, over absence, historical and cultural absence, nihility and victimry.”
Suzan Harjo expresses a common experience among the interviewees here when she tells how this character of survivance was articulated to her in her childhood by family and teachers who “told me that white people would try to break my spirit, just as they had twisted history…. I was always prepared for outsiders to try to make me and our Native peoples into lesser beings, and to resist them and to prevail.”
The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) is an institution inspired by the sentiment of survivance. Indeed, the permanent exhibits are structured around the central assertion of ongoing Native presence and one of the installations, included in the permanent exhibit Our Lives , prominently displays Vizenor's definition of survivance. The NMAI presents visitors with a succession of survivance narratives that, like the stories told in the conversations presented here, testify to the falsity of dominant narratives that emphasize Native victimry and absence. As Richard West, the founding director of the NMAI, remarks in his interview, “We conceived a museum that was to become not only a cultural space but also a community center. To the consternation of some people it has asserted its difference, its specificity as a civic space where one is confronted not only with native objects but also with the native experience.” This Native experience—this Native epistemology or world-view—is inseparable from the objects that constitute the museum's collection. West explains that “Objects tell a story. They have a language. To interpret the objects, you need to know the history of the communities and the meaning of the ceremonies. They sometimes have a spiritual dimension that exceeds their aesthetic value.” This recognition of the epistemological power of survivance, enacted in the mission and structure of the NMAI, makes of the museum what West calls “a safe place for unsafe ideas”: a place where “Native peoples can interpret their cultural inheritance and contemporary lives.”
The bringing of a living Native cultural inheritance into the contemporary moment is a key survivance move. Emil Her Many Horses describes, from his perspective as a permanent curator at the NMAI, the practical challenges and efforts to develop the inaugural exhibitions, singling out “the section Our Universes , [where] we stressed native philosophies, Indigenous cosmologies, traditional ways of explaining the creation and order of the universe.” This emphasis on Native epistemology and worldview is described also by Sven Haakanson, director of the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska, who explains, “I know how important it is to make things, to transmit knowledge through the actual objects, through gestures, through active participation, through the sharing of knowledge by getting each person to create a piece. This experience links them to our history in ways only creating can—one on one and hands on.”
For Richard West, this survivance hermeneutic works through the objects of the NMAI collection; elsewhere, Gerald Vizenor describes this same epistemology operating through a lexicon of “shadow words” that elude and exceed the conceptual reach of European discourses. This vocabulary of survivance endures as the “tragic wisdom” that the tribes have achieved through the difficult history of European contact, one of the many traces of tribal presence that Vizenor describes as “the remanence of intransitive shadows.” 3 An intransitive verb has no object; an intransitive shadow has no object but is only itself. Literally, “remanence” signifies the magnetic force that remains within an object once the external magnetizing field has been removed. This is a powerful metaphor for an understanding of Native identity that is not a shadow of something fro