Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Indigenous Studies

Native North America in (Trans)Motion

Birgit Däwes, Karsten Fitz, Sabine N. Meyer, Birgit Däwes, Karsten Fitz, Sabine N. Meyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317507338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Studien der amerikanischen Ureinwohner

In recent years, the interdisciplinary fields of Native North American and Indigenous Studies have reflected, at times even foreshadowed and initiated, many of the influential theoretical discussions in the humanities after the "transnational turn." Global trends of identity politics, performativity, cultural performance and ethics, comparative and revisionist historiography, ecological responsibility and education, as well as issues of social justice have shaped and been shaped by discussions in Native American and Indigenous Studies. This volume brings together distinguished perspectives on these topics by the Native scholars and writers Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), and Tomson Highway (Cree), as well as non-Native authorities, such as Chadwick Allen, Hartmut Lutz, and Helmbrecht Breinig. Contributions look at various moments in the cultural history of Native North America—from earthmounds via the Catholic appropriation of a Mohawk saint to the debates about Makah whaling rights—as well as at a diverse spectrum of literary, performative, and visual works of art by John Ross, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, Emily Pauline Johnson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Emma Lee Warrior, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Stephen Graham Jones, and Gerald Vizenor, among others. In doing so, the selected contributions identify new and recurrent methodological challenges, outline future paths for scholarly inquiry, and explore the intersections between Indigenous Studies and contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies at large.

Part I
Native Studies for the Twenty-First Century

Theoretical Trajectories and Critical Approaches

1 Literary Transmotion

Survivance and Totemic Motion in Native American Indian Art and Literature

Gerald Vizenor

The concept of transmotion, a spirited and visionary sense of natural motion and presence, has evolved into an aesthetic theory to interpret the modes, distinctions, and traces of sacred objects, stories, art, and literature (cf. Vizenor, Fugitive Poses 15). Native American literary transmotion is related to ordinary practices of survivance, a philosophical conviction that is derived from the critical examination of sacred objects in museums and relative observations of motion and totemic associations in art, literature, and languages.

Cultural survivance is an apparent resistance to the crafty ideologies of nationalism, the cultural simulations of ethnographic models, and the pushy liens of gossip theory. The visionary and totemic stories of creation are instances of literary transmotion, and the continuous variations of origin stories create a discrete sense of presence and survivance.

My literary mediations and theories on transmotion and survivance arise from studies of the concocted provenance of sacred objects, actual totemic visions and associations, the actual experiences of totemic visions, stories of the fur trade, situational narratives, literature, and from perceptions and descriptions of cosmototemic art, or the worldly significance of transmotion in totemic images and portrayals of cultural survivance (cf. Vizenor, “Native Cosmototemic Art” 42).

Native American creation stories, totemic visions, sacred objects, dreams, and nicknames are heard daily and forever remembered as transcendent traces of cultural survivance and continental liberty. Native survivance must be elusive by definition, a necessary condition of the cultural theories of resistance and the natural motion of seasons and stories. The actual practices of survivance create a vital and astute sense of presence over absence in stories, art, and literature. “The nature of survivance creates a sense of narrative resistance to absence, literary tragedy, nihility, and victimry. Native survivance is an active sense of presence over historical absence” and the manifest manners of monotheism and cultural dominance. “Native survivance is a continuance of stories” (Vizenor, Native Liberty 1).

The traces of totemic or visionary transmotion are clearly observable in indigenous cavern art, on ancient stone, and in the contemporary portrayals by Native American painters. The painterly features of transmotion, however, are original and rather elusive. Yet the traces of totemic transmotion are easily perceived in the imagination, interpretation, and translations of songs, stories, and literary art.

The Anishinaabe word manidooke means in translation “to have a spiritual power” and “to conduct a ceremony.” The word is an “animate intransitive verb” and describes a visionary sense of motion and presence (Nichols and Nyholm 77). The wider sense of the word is construed as spiritual and visionary motion, or transmotion and survivance. The natural motion is not constrained or determined by a direct syntactical object.

“The sky loves to hear me sing,” is a vital revelation of natural motion in the translation of an Anishinaabe dream song (Densmore vol.1: 204). The Native singer listens to the turnout of the seasons, and then directs the words of his song to the natural motion of the wind and sky. The gesture is ironic, of course, a gratifying tease of nature, and a creative totemic sense of presence.

“With a large bird above me, I am walking in the sky,” and, “I feel the summer in the spring,” are translations of two more visionary songs that were heard more than a century ago among the Anishinaabe in northern Minnesota (Densmore vol.2: 254). Frances Densmore, the honorable recorder of Native songs and ceremonies, translated these dream songs in Chippewa Music at the turn of the twentieth century. She recorded hundreds of Native singers on phonographic cylinders, the most advanced recording technology at the time, and provided stories and images of the songs, translations by the singers, and ethnographic notes. Densmore, for instance, recorded “Song of the Crows” by Henry Selkirk. He explained that the song was a gift. Clearly the singer assumes the voice and visionary transmotion of the crow and arrives with the natural turn of the seasons.

The first to come

I am called

Among the birds

I bring the rain

Crow is my name.

(Densmore vol.1: 134)

Native survivance is natural motion, and the sentiment is contrary to dominance, that continuous murmur of state surveillance and the ethnographic containment and closure of cultures in federal archives. Survivance creates a sense of presence, and a singular resistance to manifest manners, the commercial modalities of monotheism and tragedy, and the cruel legacy of victimry (cf. Vizenor, Manifest Manners vii–viii, 4–5).

Toni Jensen, for instance, writes with a sense of literary transmotion and Native survivance in “At the Powwow Hotel,” a short story published in From the Hill.

When the cornfield arrived, I was standing in our hotel’s kitchen, starting Lester’s birthday cake. It was raining outside, foggy too, for the sixth day in a row, and there was flour all over my blue jeans. I was trying to figure out what the book meant by sift. Lester had been outside by the canyon all morning, inspecting bugs or digging holes or looking into the sky. […] We live in West Texas on a three-hundred-acre cotton farm at the edge of Blanco Canyon. We own the Blanco Canyon Hotel, all twelve rooms, though everybody in town calls it the Powwow Hotel on account of Lester and me being Indian.

(Jensen 55–57)

Natives arrive at the hotel that day and the conversations continue with gestures to the miraculous arrival of corn, a field of corn. The Navajos “talked about why the corn had skipped them, had set its course east of their tribes.”

“But tonight,” the narrator declares, “there was the sound of feet, moving counterclockwise, the smell of coffee and bread and the raw greenness of the field. And tonight, there were my legs, still at first, but surprising me by doing anything at all, and then there I was, part of it, moving” (67). Jensen creates a marvelous sense of natural motion and cultural survivance. The arrival of the corn is a crucial and memorable scene of totemic and visionary transmotion at the Powwow Hotel.

Leslie Silko, in her novel Ceremony, encircles the reader with mythic witches, ironic creation stories, and a sense of natural motion. “That is the trickery of the witchcraft,” said the old man.

They want us to believe all evil resides with white people. They will look no further to see what is really happening. They want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction. But white people are only tools that the witchery manipulates; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs. We can because we invented white people; it was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place.

(Silko 132–33)

The witches contrived a customary binary structure of race, a mythic colorant of cultural separation. The literary witchery is clearly ironic, a trace of transmotion in a contemporary creation story.

“I have no state but my visionary portrayals in art, no Native nation but a sensual, totemic landscape of memories, and the unreserved resistance to dominance and nostalgia,” declares Dogroy Beaulieu, the Anishinaabe artist and narrator of the novel Shrouds of White Earth (3).

Does anyone ever experience a native state, a secure place of stories, solace, and sentiments that never torment the heart and memories? Yes, of course, my friend, you create marvelous literary scenes and stories of the reservation, and yet your characters are always in flight from the mundane notions of reality. You write stories not to escape, but to evade the tiresome politics of native victimry. I create traces of totemic creatures, paint visionary characters in magical flight, native scenes in the bright colors of survivance, and you create the same scenes by the tease of words and irony. We both have a place in the sun by art and literature, and a place name, but our situations, as artists of irony, are always uncertain with the tradition fascists of the White Earth Nation. I create green shamans and creatures in flight, a totemic tease and trace of my own want and crucial dread of absence. (5)

Dogroy accounts for his surname as a place, an actual township on the reservation. “Beaulieu is the place of the visual stories of my art, the shrouds of animals, birds, and visionary figures. Marc Chagall creates visionary scenes over his hometown, Vitebsk, in Russia, on the Pale of Settlement. Beaulieu is my Vitebsk, a settlement on the Pale of the White Earth Nation” (6). The modern constitutions of democratic governance are abstract and purposive documents, and with no obvious single author. The parchment rights and commitments are proclaimed for individuals and citizenry, and yet the crucial sentiments of natural motion and the covenants of liberty ratified in egalitarian constitutions are scarcely considered as visionary narratives. The Constitution of the White Earth Nation, however, provides that the “freedom of thought and conscience, academic, artistic irony, and literary expression, shall not be denied, violated or controverted by the government.” Probably no other constitution in the world has specifically protected the individual rights of artistic practices, an ironic literary manner, natural motion, and cultural sovereignty (cf. Vizenor and Doerfler 63–79).

The traces and ethos of these crucial constitutional sentiments of survivance and continental liberty are revealed in ancient cave art, in the natural motion of animals, and in the obvious creative resistance of contemporary Native American painters and literary artists to dominance, cultural separation, and curatorial exclusion of abstract and innovative arts. Native transmotion and the essential scenes of survivance are visionary, and the images inspired by these sentiments are embodied in ancient caves, on stone, hide, birch bark, paper, and on wood and canvas.

Native and indigenous cosmototemic artists created the first memorable scenes of presence, natural motion, and survivance on the slant of stone, and in the great shadows of monumental caves more than thirty thousand years ago on every continent. The spirited shadows of cave bears, lions, horses, and elusive shamans dance forever on the contours of the ancient stone.

Shadows are a natural presence in stories and artistic scenes. Shadows reveal a vital motion, visionary and animate, and create a sense of presence. The Anishinaabe word agawaatese, for example, is translated as a shadow of flight, a totemic image of presence, not the mere absence of light, or a passive cast of the source. The traces of shadows are a presence in stories and art.

The Chauvet Cave on the Ardèche River in France is one of the most recent discoveries of ancient art. The stately scenes of cave bears, lions, and horses are spectacular, and the shadows and natural motion of the totemic animals are evocative after some thirty thousand years. The singular portrayal of a row of cave horses is similar to the visionary horses painted on hide, paper, and canvas by Native American cosmototemic artists. The row of marvelous horses in the Chauvet Cave anticipates the perspective and natural motion of many original red, green, and blue horses painted in the late nineteenth century by the untutored ledger artists who were detained as political prisoners by the United States Army at Fort Marion, Florida.¹

The Chauvet Cave and Lascaux Cave in France, and the Cave of Altamira in Spain, are the most prominent sites of cosmototemic art in Europe. The ancient rock art sites in Arizona, California, Texas, Minnesota, and Ontario, Canada, are the most famous in North America. There are many other prominent rock art sites in the world. The Cave of Swimmers, for instance, a site of exotic rock art figures in marvelous natural motion, buoyant on the sandstone, was secured and documented in the mountains of southwest Egypt.

Selwyn Dewdney and Kenneth Kidd studied the ancient rock paintings of shamans, totemic animals in natural motion, cranes, winged figures, serpents, miniature creatures, and handprints near Lake Superior, Lake of the Woods, and in the Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada.

These great granite galleries of rock art are cosmototemic and similar to the actual images scored on traditional birch bark scrolls of the Anishinaabe. The rock images were mostly red ocher and painted with a cedar brush or fingers. Dewdney pointed out that the “aboriginal artist was groping toward the expression of the magical aspect of his life, rather than taking pleasure in the world of form around him. Essentially, however, the origin and purpose of these deceptively simple paintings remain a mystery” (20). These ancient rock art scenes of natural motion are indeed mysteries. The images are portrayals of transmotion, visionary, and not cast in some ritual secrecy. The descriptive interpretation of “groping toward the expression” diminishes the visionary sense of cosmototemic natural motion.

The elements of form, perspectives of natural motion, and visionary dimensions in ancient Native American art anticipated the movements of impressionism, cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. “Form, in the narrow sense, is nothing but the separating line between surfaces of color,” declared Wassily Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art. “This is its outer meaning. But it has also an inner meaning, or varying intensity, and, properly speaking, form is the outward expression of this inner meaning” (29). Cosmototemic portrayals of animals, birds, and shamanic figures in natural motion were enhanced by contours, and by the buoyant colors favored by culture and memory.

The Salon masters of art traditions and practices, once dominated by aristocratic patronage, were directly connected only to the painterly elements of portraiture and secure dimensions of cultural representations. The masters either slighted or spurned the untutored and visionary natural motion of cosmototemic art.

Likewise, the abstract portrayals of Oscar Howe, George Morrison, and many other Native American artists were once excluded from exhibitions by romantic and restrictive curatorial doctrines that determined the nature of the form and subject of indigenous artistic practices and expressions in painting.

David Penney pointed out in “The Poetics of Museum Representation: Tropes of Recent American Indian Art Exhibitions,” that baskets, pottery, jewelry, beadwork, and other cultural and artistic practices became commodities to traders, tourists, and galleries. “When ethnographic allegory merged the notions of artifact and art, however, dealers, consumers, and museums began to evaluate these commodities not only in terms of their artistry but also in terms of their ‘authenticity’ as ‘artifacts’ unmediated by the outside world.” Traders and others stressed “exotic, tribal, and even ‘primitive’ qualities” (Penney 50).

Oscar Howe was born almost a century ago on the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota. He graduated from the Pierre Indian School during the Great Depression, and continued his studies at the Studio School, Santa Fe Indian School, with the distinguished art teacher Dorothy Dunn.

Howe was an innovative painter, inspired by familiar cultural designs and at the same time by abstract figurations and cubism. In 1958 Howe entered the Annual Painting Competition at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His abstract entry was rejected because it was considered not to be “traditional” art by an “Indian.”

Pablo Picasso, George Braque, Fernand Léger, and other distinctive cubist painters were both censured and celebrated for their bold avant-garde art and transformations of cultural and figural representations. The original images by Native American abstract artists, however, were once rebuffed in the name and favor of simulated images of cultural traditions. Native American arts became unique commodities, and the secured value was redoubled by the ethnographic and curatorial provenance of tradition and authenticity.

“Whoever said that my paintings are not in the traditional Indian style has poor knowledge of Indian art indeed,” Howe wrote to the curator of the Philbrook Museum. “There is much more to Indian art than pretty, stylized pictures. There was also power and strength and individualism. […] Indian art can compete with any Art in the world, but not as a suppressed Art” (qtd. in Code, cf. also Berlo and Phillips 221). The museum curator had rejected an original and abstract painting that was clearly inspired by traditional cultural designs, and by a curious continuation of natural motion and other traces of transmotion common in cosmototemic art.

George Morrison was born on the Grand Portage Reservation in Minnesota. He studied fine art at the Minneapolis School of Art, and the Art Student League in New York City. He was inspired by the art movements of the time, expressionism, cubism, and surrealism, and was associated with Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning.

Morrison was a brilliant expressionist artist, and his paintings were exhibited with the most distinguished abstract artists in New York City and Europe, but regional museum and exhibition curators would not accept his bold abstract paintings in “Indian” exhibitions for many years because the artistic form and elements of his style were not considered to be “traditional.” The notions of cultural traditions declared by museum curators at the time were primarily derived from ethnographic studies, and not from original artists. T...