Dismantling Appropriation and Reaching a Space of Cultural Enunciation: “You Dishonor Me”

In my last post I gave a thorough analysis of cultural appropriation and how it is a rhetoric of colonial control.  I ended my post by posing a final question that all post-Indian warriors of survivance must answer.  To re-appropriate or not, or do severe all contact.  I hastily made the decision that it would be better if we stop trying to appropriate the needs of Natives, and that we should leave them be.  They need not re-appropriate if they can live without the myths and images they are plagued with by modern American society. 

 But I am wrong in assuming that the past can be undone and Native Indigenous people and Americans can live happily ever after…… Damn romantic gestures of human grandiosity!  There is no way we can live separately as much as we try to create and instill division.  Whether it is through destruction or control, there is no use in ignoring the voice of either side.  Each has a voice within the binary of communication, but in the case of Native/Non-Native the Natives voice is always within the channels of the Non-Native.  Most of the time, the voice is marginalized and ignored all together.

With that said, Post-Indians have a duty to reclaim their voice and make it their own.  The Native voice is synonymous with their culture.  With the appropriation of their voice, their culture was appropriated as well. 

Post-Indians, in order to be warriors and survivors, must use re-appropriation as their rhetoric of decolonization to reclaim a voice that has been taken.  IT is the only way they can break the myths surrounding their beautiful civilized culture, and break free of the paracolonial space they inhabit.   There is no way of going back to a state of pre-colonial time.   Once two cultures have come in contact, they are FOREVER changed—spiritually and physically.   If it is one thing I have learned so far as a post-colonial theorist, it is that no society can ever go back to pre-colonial times.  There is, however, a caveat.

A colonized society must use the past to understand how they can survive in the present and beyond. Historicize!

As I was watching the Symposium, I noticed a theme that constantly entered the conversation between all five scholars—acknowledgment and recognition.  I think King and Jackson both gave the best explications of how acknowledgment and recognition are the first steps to re-appropriating and understanding how to survive in the present.     (Reminder: Post-Indian warriors must understand the present to fight for a futre!)

Dr. Jackson says that the dominant group must be in support if any change is to take place—a mutual recognition.   In order for this to happen Jackson states that Natives must acknowledge the dishonor done to them directly to the dominant group.   Jackson also points out that images are text (which in other terms means Images are rhetoric!) and as such they function as a visual and written text. I agree with this type of thought and scholarship.  Images are forms of textual power, and function as rhetoric! Love it.

Yet, the reason this has not happened—recognition and acknowledgment—is because there is miscommunication on both ends.  The Non-natives think they are honoring Natives. All speakers agree that Natives have been just as guilty as perpetrating the myths that are “honoring” them.  The only reason the system works is because of an imbalance which I keep referring to.   The dominant always enfold the sub-dominant group. 

I like what Dr. Jackson proposes, but he doesn’t provide a direct answer—except to say we must come to the space in which communication takes place.  Instead Dr. King provides the answer of how re-appropriation takes place through recognition and acknowledgment and how to arrive at the space of communication. 

***This space is none other than the cultural space of enunciation.  It’s the space in which both cultures are in constant dialogue***

Dr. King says that Origin stories are important.  Yet it is not the beginning where the focus should be placed.  He thinks people get too caught up with why the story started in the first place.  I think he’s referring to why these cultural appropriations took place in the first place.  Instead he thinks it is important to focus on the evolution of appropriation and how it has become an institution of thought.   Instead of focusing solely on the why, it is important to examine the historical process of HOW the appropriation is able to survive, and how it survives in the present.

I agree with Dr. King and Dr. Jackson.  WE must reach a place of cultural enunciation, where each culture can speak for itself.  ONLY then, we will begin to understand, as a nation of humans, the racism, hate, and cultural superiority that is a product of cultural appropriation.

If we never reach this space of dialogue, I think both cultures will die.  Native and non-Natives must learn the dialogue of survivance together.

Decolonize, survive.

Homosexuality: Two Spirits

As a post-colonial scholar, and a gay man, I am most interested in the intersections of Queer theory and Post-colonial theory.   Many argue that the two cannot be combined.  Personally I think it is wrong to be so close minded.  When it comes to sexuality, colonization twists and distorts it. Homi K. Bhabha even thinks that the “Other” binary is based on a sexual relationship between the two (For further reading on this Check out Bhabha’s Location of Culture). Therefore, I think it extremely necessary to study the formation of sexuality within the colonial context.  I know my thesis is going to be aimed at answering the question of whether or not homosexuality exists within the pre-colonial world, or whether it is a product of European colonization.  

Therefore the issue I’d like to deal with this week is homosexuality pre-Colonial Native tribes.

When I first formulated the hypothesis above, I was deeply invested in the concept that homosexuality did exist on its own within the pre-Colonial world.  Yet, after having read this article by Walter L. Williams—Author of Spirit and the Flesh—I have begun to think differently.  The article can be found here http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/oct/11/two-spirit-people-north-america .  Williams talks about the concept of “two-spirit people” which I have never heard of before, although it reminds me of Aristotle’s own analysis of gender and sexuality.  Before Europeans showed up, Williams says that “Native Americans have often held intersex, androgynous people, feminine males and masculine females in high respect…Rather than emphasizing the homosexuality of these persons, however, many Native Americans focused on their spiritual gifts.” It would seem that homosexuality wasn’t applied to a person, it existed with not connotations.  Williams goes on to say that people that fit the mold of performing two gender roles were the most useful to tribal life, they could do everything that both males and females did (¶ 6).  Homosexuality didn’t exist as a taboo, it was natural.  Same sex relationships weren’t seen as people possessing certain sexuality.  They just were.  Williams then states that it wasn’t until “the 20th-century, [that] homophobic European Christian influences increased among many Native Americans, [and] respect for same-sex love and for androgynous persons greatly declined” (¶ 7).   The physical act, and the physical characterization of feminine males and masculine females, was given a name and associated with an attitude of disgust and sin.  The act of same-sex within the Native world was normal without the influence of colonization, but when Europeans gave it a name and a meaning—homosexuality—the understanding and respect of it changed.  Apparently after, these two spirit people were expelled from their tribes and faced a variety of setbacks including suicide and death (Williams ¶ 7).

Quite frankly this whole thing pisses me off!  Why does religion and colonization destroy everything that is initially considered sacred? Language and words create trouble and define the way we see our lives.  There was no such concept of homosexuality.  Not all is lost, because apparently there has been a recent movement to regain respect for these individuals that have been destroyed by colonial mentality. 

It looks like I might have to reconfigure my thesis because it is much more complicated than any simple understanding of sexuality.

I’m going to end this post with a little documentary that talks about the word “Bedarche” and how it came to define two-spirit people as homosexuals.  

 

A Predicament of Appropriation: An Indian in a Box and the Rhetoric of Re-Appropriation

After having read Powell's explication of Vizneor's work, and then reading Vizneor directly, I keep contemplating the concept of a "paracolonial" native.  I keep questioning whether or not agree with what Vizneor has to say, and I’m finding faults within Powell’s own explication of Vizneor’s concepts.  However, this week I’d like to try to understand the term “paracolonial” by understanding it through the colonial phenomena of cultural appropriation.

Cultural appropriation is a rhetorical/political tool of colonization.  Yet communication is somewhat skewed because cultural appropriation is a form of dominance that caters to the hegemonic force in control. I say it is rhetorical because although it may not be a direct written or spoken speech, there is always a certain audience in mind, and there is always someone promoting a certain colonial agenda.

***

Before I get deeper into this post, I want to quickly provide a working definition—of the word cultural appropriation—that will serve as the basis for my analysis of the assigned readings.  Oxford Ref. Online defines cultural appropriation as “a term [that is] used to describe the taking over of creative or artistic forms, themes, or practices by one cultural group from another. It is in general used to describe Western appropriations of non‐Western or non‐white forms, and carries connotations of exploitation and dominance” (The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature 3ed).  Because Indian stories were traditionally oral, as we have learned through some of the narratives we have read so far, I am mostly interested in the appropriation of the native voice.  Voice is important to any culture, and sometimes it is vital to examine how the voice of a culture is appropriated by another.

***

Vizneor, in the “Introduction” to Manifest Manners: Narratives of PostIndian Survivance, defines how the colonial phenomena of Manifest Destiny became act of dominance and appropriation instilled through social/political/artistic discourses. This form of appropriation is what Vizneor calls “manifest manners.”  I want to examine this passage. Vizneor says that:

Manifest Destiny would cause the death of millions of tribal people from massacres, diseases, and the loneliness of reservations.  Entire cultures have been terminated in the course of nationalism.  These histories are now simulations of dominance, and the causes of the conditions that have become manifest manners in literature.  The postindian simulations are the core of survivance, the new stories of tribal courage. The simulations of manifest manners are the continuance of the surveillance and domination of the tribes in literature. Simulations are the absence of the tribal real; the postindian conversions are the new stories of survivance over dominance. The natural reason of the tribes anteceded by thousands of generations the invention of the Indian.  The postindian ousts the inventions with humor, news stories, and simulations of survivance. (4-5)

This passage is full of the words simulations, dominance, the invention of the Indian, and finally the postIndian. But what does Vizneor mean by all of this terminology, and how does it have to do with the appropriation of the Native voice?  This passage represents three rhetorical strategies specific to colonization and its two aspects—one is specific to the Colonizer, and the other specific to the Colonized (Colonizer=Europeans, Colonized=Natives).  First, the concept of manifest destiny didn’t just appropriate Native culture it destroyed it.  Yet, as long as culture is able to be voiced—in this case Vizneor is most concerned with the colonized who do this and calls them postIndian warriors—than it can survive.  The second concept stems from the fact that the Indian was a European invention, and as such it was a simulation of control.  Not only was native culture appropriated it was reinvented and forced on Indians through manifest manners. Finally, this passage suggests a re-appropriation.  Re-appropriation is specific to the colonized because it works at reclaiming what was taken in the first place.   Thus, Vizneor works at analyzing the narrative appropriation of the simulations that have worked to keep the Indian invisible, yet substantially real.  

I’d like to explicate the authenticity of Indians because I think it makes it easier to understand appropriation, and the process of re-appropriation by the postIndian.  

Pre-Colonial Native—Authentic Indigenous culture before European colonization

Simulated Indian—European Invention, Inauthentic, an appropriation through manifest manners

PostIndian—Invisible, considered inauthentic with a desire for authenticity, re-appropriation is the means by which postIndians are able to survive.

As you can see, there are 3 stages of appropriation, with the postIndian representing the concept of re-appropriation. If appropriation is the process by which a dominant controls another culture, then re-appropriation is the counter of the controlled culture.  The culture be suppressed takes back their own culture, yet they are forced in a space of inauthenticity, not of their own making.


Is it right to explicate the Native experience, am I guilty of appropropiation just through my analysis?  The answer would be NO, because in order for re-appropriation to take place one has to understand the rhetoric and experience of appropriation in the first place.  However, I am guilty of boxing the Indian into certain categories, but I do so for the purpose of understanding the discourses that defined the Indian experience in hopes that I can foster re-appropriation.  

In the “Preface” of Vine Deloria, Jr’s Custer Died for Your Sin, Deloria talks about the appropriation of Indian culture and history in the exact same way as Vizneor. By doing so he calls for Indians to re-appropriate what has been taken in the first place.  Deloria states that “the legend of the Indian was embellished or tarnished according to the need of the intermediates to gain leverage in their struggle to solve problems that never existed outside of their own minds…White society concentrated on the individual Indian to the exclusion of his group forgetting that any society is merely a composite of Individuals” (10).  Deloria is referring to the simulated Indian that Vizneor theoretically outlines.  In doing so Deloria also outlines the appropriation of Indian society through the “individual” image of the Indian.   Once gain this is the rhetoric of cultural appropriation. Assumptions become truth, and many by into the inauthenticity of such assumptions.


So what is the way towards a post-colonial freedom for Natives?  Vizneor calls on re-appropriation by taking the written narrative and imbuing it with the oral traditions of Natives, hybridity seems to be the goal.  Deloria however wants to set aside all aspects of rhetorical appropriation—appropriation has caused nothing but misunderstanding and trouble.  Instead she argues that what Natives need is not to be placed in a box and pitied, nor do they need to reclaim a certain image.  Instead she says “What we need is a cultural leave-us-alone agreement, in spirit and in fact” (21).


Personally I agree with Deloria even though I find power in re-appropriation. Maybe it’s time we stop trying to understand, and just listen in “spirit and in fact.”  Why can’t we stop determining what Indians need, and just let them be.  Re-appropriation of voice would be awesome, but that only creates more problems.  I think Indians should be able to determine their own needs without any interference of other cultures.

To re-appropriate or not, that is the question that must be answered by postIndian survivors.

Nature Fights Back

When I look back on last summer and hurricane season I wonder why it is that we keep experiencing natural disasters that have been unlike any that have come before.   However, it’s not just my own thoughts that got me thinking about the most recent devastation of the land and the current people that inhabit it.  One thing I am certain of is that industrialization is the reason why the Earth has begun to fight back.  We American’s are wasteful and overly greedy.  We always take, take, take and never give back.  Our technology gets better and better, but at what cost? We pay the price with damages to the Earth and soon these damages will not go unchecked. 

There have been recent green movements, but are they enough to rectify the damages that have been done?  How will we cope when there is nothing left? I shudder to think about the repercussions.

Some might argue that we are coming up on End Times and are being punished for our sins. This belief is right in one concept and one concept only.

 We are being punished for our sins. We are being punished for the sinful rape of mother Earth.
These are thoughts that have come to occupy my mind lately, and the more I see natural disasters the more I wonder how they could have been prevented. Yes I know there are factors beyond our control, but I like to think of life as the pebble effect.  You throw the pebble in the pond it creates a ripple that creates another ripple, until it gets so big it reaches the edge of the pond with nowhere to go. Sometimes it overspills the edges. 

Life is like that, and how we treat nature is the same way. These thoughts are not of my own making, and they have been influenced by a Native Response.  I came across a blog entry from a blog I have been following called Unsettling America—I found the blog when doing research for my Post-Colonial Theory class.  If you are interested in the act of decolonization—whether it be a person’s mind or a person’s environment—it’s a great place to start.

The essay that got me thinking about this issue of Nature fighting back is called “In the Eye of Issac” (Link to esssay) by T. MayT. Mayheart Dardar.  Dardar is a Houma Native from the Area of Louisiana. ( Let me remind you first that last summer we dealt with two major Hurricanes unlike any we have seen in the past decade—Sandy and Issac.)  His essay was a response to the latter hurricane Issac, Sandy had not yet hit us with her unnatural rage.  Dardar recounts as a young boy how his father taught him the lessons he needed to help sustain himself from the land—never taking more than was necessary (Dardar ¶2).   Dardar says that “All this [his father’s lessons] served to make real to me the basis of the Houma’s relationship to land and water, the very basis of my identity as Houma. It is the connection we have as a people to one another and to this homeland that feds us, cares for us, and has given birth to us that make us the people we are”( ¶3).   Through this passage one can infer that the Houma’s conveyed certain rhetoric when it came to understanding and living in harmony with the land.  The body was intricately linked to land, and then water, and community was established through these relations.  It didn’t matter what Houma tribe one belonged to, you were human and connected simply through your relationship with the Earth.  Your humanness was determined by nature.  Rhetorics of living in harmony with the Earth!

Read the Essay I think what Dardar has to say is beautiful, and he speaks eloquently on the rhetorics of decolonization and the Earth.

I want to leave you with a little documentary about the Houmas and who they are and the issues they deal with when sustaining their own culture.  But what I want to do most is make you revaluate your own position in terms of the Earth that sustains you.  Will you let capitalistic practices ruin the only thing that gives you life?

 

 

Decolonize your mind, Decolonize the environment, Decolonize Nature.

Rhetorics of Survival: The Power of Mimicry and Re-imagining the Power of Alterity

As I sit here and contemplate this week’s readings, while formulating what it is I want to say, I find myself wondering how many of us put on a show in our daily lives. Better yet, I sit here and wonder how many people put on clothes and associate certain feelings or emotions with them.

This baseball hat makes me look like a dude. Now where’s my protein shake?

           

This blazer means business. I’m an independent woman out to change the world. I won’t take any shit!

These glasses show how intellectually stimulating I can be, I’m a student.  In language there are only differences.

                       

I’m guilty of promoting certain stereotypes but there is some truth to the stereotypes that define us!

How often do you pretend to be something other than you are not, and when you do so do you do so under the pretense of wielding a certain power? Is it for the purpose of subversion or avoiding subversion? Why do we pretend to be something other? What do we gain by doing so? Why must we constantly re-imagine our own lives at the expense of our own identities?

Is this an innate mechanism of survival that we all must live with or is it a product of cultural phenomena?

I have a story, which I’d like to tell again, if it’s one thing I learned so far stories are what we are!  I often find myself reverting to it when I am reading about the cultural discourses that define my course of study—specifically the ideology that surrounds cultural mimicry and alterity. High school was a difficult time for me.  Yeah, cliché I know, but it was.  My experience was unique but I’m sure it’s one I can share with others who lived a closeted life.  Long story short, in high school I realized I was gay; it was a terrifying realization for someone who only knew homosexuality as taboo and disgusting.  As such, I treated my own sexuality this way.  I loathed this part of me and avoided it. I couldn’t avoid because as a young male my hormones were all over the place.  I longed for some sort of physical contact that assured me that what I felt wasn’t wrong, but a natural part of life.  I’d secretly fantasize about male sexual relations, yet I’d tuck these fantasies away in some dark corner and “pretend” to be straight.  My best friend was gay—truth be told I had the biggest crush on him—and I treated him horribly.  I’d tell him to stop being such a faggot and I made fun of him to avoid the stares that threatened to expose who I really was—A certified, Class A, flaming homosexual.  I cringe now at the way I had treated my best friend. I had power, but at what expense? Simple, I lived a life that was not my own.  I pretended to be something other than who I really was.  AND I found myself constantly reimagining my own life, wanting to be something more than the weakness that was “supposedly” my own sexual identity.   I was a ghost, physical on the outside and intangible on the inside.

Needless to say, I got pass this stage of my own sexual identity, thankfully my best friend Nathan forgave me as well, but I learned something in the process. 

There is great power in alterity and mimicry.  What I was doing was an act of sexual mimicry—pretending to be straight when I was not.  However, I’d like to point out one concept.  The problem wasn’t my sexuality.  IT was the way society, as well as myself, perceived my homosexuality.  Therefore, I learned that the only way to survive was to work the system in hopes that one day I could freely express who I was.  I saw mimicry as a rhetorical form of survivance—thus I think it’s important to first examine Powell’s essay.

 I must humble myself before I do so, because a whole culture didn’t rely on whether or not I was comfortable to express my own sexual identity

 But the premise of my story is the premise of what Powell calls Rhetorical Survivance which is a key theoretical concept to this week’s readings.

Malea Powell’s essay “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing” was perhaps my favorite article, mainly because it helped me understand my own story better in terms of understanding mimicry and alterity.  I’d like to examine briefly a concept that was rather new to me and made me question the term post-colonial.  It also made me think again about mimicry and alterity and their places within poco theory.   Powell brings up the question of whether or not Native Americans are “post-colonial” or “neocolonial” peoples (399).  She makes the argument that they are not post or neo colonial peoples.  Instead, she uses a term coined by Vizneor, and calls them “paracolonial” which means “a colonialism beyond colonialism, multiple, contradictory, and with all the attendant complications of internal, neo-, and post-colonialism” (Vizneor qtd in Powell 399).  This is perhaps the most awesome, and terrifying, term I have ever faced when it comes to post-colonial theory.   Is it safe to say that what both Vizneor and Powell both theorize is that Native Americans are stuck in a permanent stasis of alterity? Are they are bound by pre and post-colonial phenomena? Are they forced into a space of colonial/cultural hybridity?

***

Sorry for the little interlude, but I feel as if I should clarify what alterity means before I go further with my explication of the theory and text: Alterity is a system of colonial power that is similar to a binary/dichotomy, in which a person’s subject position is constantly defined by that which is different or other than one’s self. We are talking about the anthropological discourse of the “Other.”

***

I love what Powell has to say, because she not only calls for Native’s to re-imagine their own identities but to use the “simulation of dominance” as a form of “liberation” (401).  In essence she says that the way Native American’s use writing as a form of rhetorical survivance is through embracing what she calls “acculturation.”  I wonder why she doesn’t just use the term mimicry because that is basically what she describes when it comes to the writing of both Eastman and Winnemucca—Native writers who have deconstructed the other binary and in doing so understood the power, or duality, of cultural mimicry.  Perhaps she avoids using the term mimicry because it is understood as a concept of post-colonial theory, and she made it quite clear that when it comes to Natives they must be understood as paracolonial.  Yet I think the term mimicry is extremely applicable to what Powell has to say.  Through her analysis of Eastman and Winnemucca Powell explains that both Native writers used writing to destroy the power that colonial discourses as a form of objectification of their own lives.  They become subjects instead of objects—and they do so by subverting the system that works so hard to destroy them.    

This concept of re-imagining one’s self and cultural mimicry/hybridity is also prevalent in Powel’s other essay “Listening to ghosts: an alternative (non)argument.”  Powell discusses her own cultural hybridity and the fact that she is bound by the empirical discourses of the academy ( 13).  This is more of a call to action, for those Native Americans in the academy to rethink and seek “alternative” discourses when it comes to studying and promoting the rhetoric of indigenous people (12).   This alternative discourse that Powell seeks starts with what she says is “writ[ing] [her]self and [her] body into comprehensible space” (12).  I think what she is trying to clarify is the fact that in order to promote indigenous rhetoric, one must first start by opening a physical space for Natives to begin the discussion, to tell their stories. To use writing as a way to reclaim what was lost.

I want to end this post with a challenge by King, which comes from the chapter titled Afterwords: Private Stories.  King writes that:

I know it’s an easy job to be critical, easy enough to look around the world, easy enough to find      bad behaviors everywhere, easy to say that the proof of what we truly believe lies in what we do    and not in what we say. So I’ll say it. Perhaps we shouldn’t be displeased with the “environmental ethics” we have or the “business ethics” or the “political ethics” or any of the myriad of other codes of conduct suggested by our actions. After all, we’ve created them. We’ve created the stories that allow them to exist and flourish. They didn’t come out of nowhere. They didn’t arrive from another planet.

Want a different ethic? Tell a different story.(164 ITAL added)

King calls for us to rethink the way we define ourselves, after all according to King stories define our very existence.  But the difference is in the way we retell the story.  When it comes to rhetorical survivance Natives must re-imagine their own existence, to face the system of alterity that exists, and embrace it.  That is where power comes from, realizing that there is power in being different—whoever controls that difference makes the rules.

There’s power in turning colonization on its head.

Decolonize your mind, decolonize the world.

A Sovereign Voice and the Power of Stories

As I was reading through both Scott Richard Lyon’s article and Thomas King’s narrative I couldn’t help but remembering a concept we went over in my Post-colonial theory online class with Dr. Clemens.  For the first week Dr. Clemen’s had us listen to a TED talk from African author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie if you have the time I suggest watching it because it is applicable to the readings which we have done this week. Here’s a link to the her speech on the single story.

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html
 

(If you have the time I suggest you watch it. Better yet just watch it. She’s a great speaker and an even wonderful writer.)

The premise of Adichie’s TED talk was the danger of telling a single story. Even though her speech focused on the way African’s are understood in terms of colonialism I think the premise holds true for the way Native American’s are viewed through colonial lenses. As I stated in my first post, symbols are a source of power, and can be used to control.   Stories work exactly the same way because they can function through the use of symbols and symoblic messages.   But what’s most interesting about stories is that whoever tells a story has the power to change lives, destroy lives, create lives, tell lies, and tell truth….and so on.  Thomas King even states this by saying “I tell stories not to play on your sympathies but to suggest how stories can control our lives, for there is a part of me that has never been able to move past these stories, a part of me that will be chained to these stories as long as I live. Stories are wondrous things. And they are Dangerous” (9).  The danger of stories is that they can become myth that functions as truth.   This is where it is most important to understand the danger of the single story.  When the same story is told over and over again, it eventually is accepted as truth.  

 

The story of Colonization goes like this:

Europeans were the most civilized group of people that lived on the face of the Earth. Eventually they needed to populate the world with their divinity and supremacy.  Soon they reached forth and discovered new lands with people that were less fortunate than they.  They weren’t European so they weren’t civilized.  They were savage, barbaric, demonic, and needed to be brought into the light.

 

This is just one side of colonization but one story that is told over and over again.  I must admit by telling it I fall into the trap of telling a single story. NOT all Europeans were like that, just as I am sure there were some indigenous people that seemed terrifying to the Europeans at first.  But when we only look and see single aspects of certain things, or in this case tell single stories, we risk not seeing the full picture.  

Thomas King in his narrative The Truth About Stories starts each section with a story.  It’s the same story everytime, with the same premise, however each time the person telling the story changes, and the person listening to the story changes as well.  I love the way King uses this story as a message because it functions as a symbol, and it distorts the way we normally tell stories—always the same way, always the same people, and always the same plot. However, King demonstrates that it is easy to manipulate the way we tell stories—once again this is where the danger of telling stories, they can easily be influenced and changed.

It is through the single story that the image of the Romantic/literary Indian was created, and King goes to great length to stress this concept.  King explains this through detailing how Edward Sheriff Curtis took it upon himself to photograph the dying Indian—along the way Curtis took wigs, costumes, and stuff associated with Indian’s as props for his pictures (King 35-37).  King says that the reason for this is because Curtis was trying to recreate the image of the Native American that was already engrained in American society and the public mind.  It wasn’t hard for Curtis to recreate and revive the single image of the noble Romantic Indian because “Native culture, as with any culture, is a vibrant, changing thing, and when Curtis happened upon it, it was changing from what it had beent o what it would become next. But the idea of “the Indian” was already fixed in time and space” (37).  Once again the Romantic Indian cuts it really close to being a single story, an image that represents power and control—created through the use of stories, language, and racial discourses.  People see what they want to see when we are told things are a certain way and must never change. 

 

Although I mentioned the dangers of the single story, there is a positive side to telling stories.   King within his narrative interweaves multiple stories to create one story of oppression and misunderstanding.  But through interweaving these stories King is doing something much more important than telling stories.  In one part of Chapter 2 King mentions that Will Rodgers, an iconic Native American, was “what Antonio Gramsci called an “organic” intellectual, and individual who articulate the understanding of a community or a nation” (41).   Through his many and interweaving narratives King becomes an organic intellectual himself.  How ironic is it that King points out somebody else as organic intellectual! As an organic intellectual, King is able to make a political and cultural statement.  His stories are his own, but they are his to share—to his people both Native Americans and Americans because he is a cultural hybrid himself.   Yet through creating a single story King is able to locate his own voice of sovereignty unconstrained by history and images of the native.  His single story becomes a mass encapsulating story, a call to action.  

I mentioned the concept of a sovereign voice and I’d like to explicate the meaning of that statement but first it’s important to examine a section of Lyon’s essay.  Richard Lyon’s in his essay “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What do American Indians Want from Writing?”  states that “sovereignty, as I generally use and understand the term, denotes the right of a people to conduct its own affairs, in its own place, in its own way” (450).  However he takes the concept of sovereignty a step further by saying that even though “the meanings of sovereignty have shifted and continue to shift over time,  the concept has nonetheless carried with it a sense of locatable and recognizable power” (450).   Through this statement it is clear that sovereignty’s power lies within the simple act of recognition.   

King redefines sovereignty within the telling of stories.  Stories=Power/Power=Sovereignty.  His voice and the voices he gives the people within his stories function as an act of re-appropriation.   By reclaiming his own heritage and culture, King demonstrates that the single story can be dangerous, but it can also be used to reaffirm freedom and culture. 

 

I’d like to leave you with a song that I heard while listening to NativeRadio.  It ties so perfectly to Lyon’s article on Rhetorical Sovereignty and the first few Chapters within King’s narrative.  It provides a warning, and it provides a call to action. 

Enjoy, and decolonize your mind.  

Power is one voice, one cry, and one sovereign story.