Speaking for the People

Native Writing and the Question of Political Form

Mark Rifkin

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781478014331, 9781478013419
• eBook ISBN: 9781478021636
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

In Speaking for the People Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings to reframe contemporary debates around Indigenous recognition, refusal, and resurgence. Rifkin shows how works by Native authors (William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Ša) illustrate the intellectual labor involved in representing modes of Indigenous political identity and placemaking. These writers highlight the complex processes involved in negotiating the character, contours, and scope of Indigenous sovereignties under ongoing colonial occupation. Rifkin argues that attending to these writers' engagements with non-native publics helps provide further analytical tools for addressing the complexities of Indigenous governance on the ground—both then and now. Thinking about Native peoplehood and politics as a matter of form opens possibilities for addressing the difficult work involved in navigating among varied possibilities for conceptualizing and enacting peoplehood in the context of continuing settler intervention. As Rifkin demonstrates, attending to writings by these Indigenous intellectuals provides ways of understanding Native governance as a matter of deliberation, discussion, and debate, emphasizing the open-ended unfinishedness of self-determination.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. What’s In a Nation? Cherokee Vanguardism in Elias Boudinot’s Letters
• 2. Experiments in Signifying Sovereignty: Exemplarity and the Politics of Southern New England in William Apess
• 3. Among Ghost Dances: Sarah Winnemucca and the Production of Paiute Identity
• 4. The Native Informant Speaks: The Politics of Ethnographic Subjectivity in Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Stories
• Coda. On Refusing the Ethnographic Imaginary, Or Reading for The Politics of Peoplehood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index