Carolyn Dunn's News and Views

Saturday, June 20, 1:00 p.m., Mandell Weiss Forum Studio, La Jolla Playhouse
Saturday, June 27, 1:00 p.m., Wells Fargo Theater, Autry National Center

The Frybread Queen by Carolyn Dunn (Muskogee Creek, Seminole, Cherokee)
Directed by Scott Horstein
Dramaturgy by Robert Caisley

Three generations of Indian women come together for the funeral of a beloved son. The collision
of personalities forces them to confront long-simmering tensions that threaten to tear them apart.

This quietly poetic drama has all the haunting qualities of a tragicomedy—Navajo
style! A reception follows the reading and discussion.

frybread queen

(between 3-4pm, join us for a reception featuring authentic frybread)

_____

see Native Voices at the Autry's site:
http://www.autrynationalcenter.org/nativevoices/nv_events.php

Twilight
The sun falls behind
The succulence of cloud.
Our coming, our leaving
Another day, another night.

Water sprays
From the crest
Of a fluorite wave.
The head tips slightly
Forward,
Leading the torrent
Of motion
One after the other,
Capping to the shore.
Breaking, as grief
Pushes on ahead.

The last light
Shallows in her absence.
Turning, twisting,
Now just an imprint
Where my feet touched earth.
Trading breath,
Leaves flutter
In the waning day,
Seared by the rising
Breath of heaven.

Like so many before,
So many after,
Who will be here
To sing
When I
Am gone?

© 2009 Carolyn Dunn

...from Children's Literature magazine.

Eighteen years ago, when my non-Indian brother-in-law remarried, he told me that the wedding would be in Sedona, Arizona. “We have a native medicine man performing the ceremony- I’m looking forward to you meeting him,” he told me. “You should get along very well.” I assumed that this “getting along very well” would be because we were both native peoples. When we met, the first thing the “medicine man” said to me was “Where did you get that curly hair?” to which I replied, “the same place you got that Spanish last name.”

We have been completely acculturized in this country to think we understand than Native peoples have a certain phenomelogical look, and if we don’t fit under that rubric, then the questions begin. The federal government and other non-Indian entities have been very good at creating division within our communities and we have allowed them to tell us what is Indian and what is not. We have allowed them to tell us what our identity is, and who we are. They have taken our stories, many times, and made them their own. Some have gotten very good at hiding their nativist agenda- their ability to speak for native peoples while asserting their own nativism in this country. It is a dangerous precedence if we are to allow non-natives to tell us what stories belong to whom, and that we, as native people, who are doing the work of reclaiming our songs, our stories, and our languages.

The eighteen year old adventure of my brother-in-law’s wedding in Sedona would continue well past the ceremony itself. As part of a guided tour of Sedona that the “medicine man” made his living giving to non-natives, he began telling stories of place names in the area. I was accompanied on this tour by my dear friend, a Laguna scholar and critic who questioned the authenticity of the place names the self professed “medicine man” was spouting. “Who gave these places these names?” she asked him, to which he replied smugly, “I did.”


The cultural work of repatriation works in many ways. In my own work, I have examined how stories recorded by early anthropologists were written and recorded to reflect the cultural biases of the recorder. (see my article in Ines Hernandez-Avila’s Reading Native American Women: Critical and Creative Representations; see also my introduction to Through the Eye of the Deer, co-written and edited with Carol Comfort). To place an aforementioned oral narrative back into the tribal repertoire is in itself an act of reclaiming that story for that tribe. To place these stories back into the tribal archive and acknowledge the tribe to whom it belongs is to re-gather the story that has been spoken and give credit where credit is due. Is that an exploitation of a culture? If that is so, then one must accuse other native peoples whose work in cultural reclaimation have included Alfonso Ortiz, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan, among many, many other native writers. Are storytellers such as Gayle Ross, Dovie Thomasen, and Tim Tingle, who have told other peoples’ stories (with utmost care and credit to the original storyteller and the tribe) in performance and in print, exploiting the storytellers and the tribes to whom these stories originate? The danger of taking stories that belong to others, reclassifying them as your own and lending a certain cultural authenticity to these stories is indeed exploiting native peoples and others who come to these stories thinking they will be learning about native peoples. Beverly Slapin’s review of Coyote Speaks does everything she accuses the authors (Ari Berk and myself) of doing: she attempts to synthesize the book and takes short phrases from the book out of context to further her own nativist agenda. She avoids mentioning the book's authors' extensive cultural and scholarly expertise in both the field of American Indian literary studies and in native communities in Indian Country. She further accuses us of making vast generalizations when it comes to native peoples, where we very clearly state in the book, “It is important to remember that there are more than five hundred distinct Native American tribes, with as many languages and cultures.” (p 17). We are careful also to follow the lead of the late scholar and activist Vine Deloria in that any stories still in the oral tradition still reside there. Do we criticize Anna and Jack Kilpatrick for recording traditional Cherokee stories and placing them in a written archive? Do we criticize Alfonso Ortiz for co-authoring a book with Richard Erdoes on native mythology that takes an oral archive and placing in a written one? Do we criticize Rigoberta Menchu for taking the oral narratives she learned as a child and placing it in a children’s book? No, because these texts are preserving an archive that was in danger of being lost at one time. Do we take their written records of these narratives completely out of context to support a so-called “nativist” agenda? The Kilpatricks attempted to record traditional Cherokee narratives exactly the way the original storytellers performed them, to preserve the sense of the oral archive. Does that mean the written version of the story takes away a story’s orality? Does it take away a story’s authenticity because it is now part of a written record for not only the nation from whom it derives but non-natives as well? If we are to follow the logic of Slapin’s argument, then the retelling of any native story infringes upon the rights of native peoples and exploits native peoples in the retelling.

The cultural work of storytelling is to reify a peoples’ history, language, cosmology, in a sense, it is a retelling of that peoples’ origin narratives. To retell these narratives that classifies them as quaint old folktales and genericizes them as simply “a Native American tale” colonizes these tales and becomes a danger to the outside world who doesn’t share the cultural world view of the tribe to whom these tales belong. That is exploiting a people and their stories.

I Met an old Woman

I met an old woman

who looked beyond

the years of living,

scattered among stones,

grain,

and living between

ashes, reeds,

forgotten things.

She took my hand

in hers.

bebe, bebe,

she whispered, then I

was standing under

a splash of stars

spreading from a center

of the womb

of hidden and swollen

satrs.

In her touch,

she displaced

memory rooted

and routed along

a trail of tears,

from which

spring roses

born of thorns

and deep red bloom.

Survival is this,

she said,

biology speaking a language

unspoken by stars

whose light

has long gone

back to the exploding

dome of the sky.

Entrails

of light, each

seeping into

new and wet

beings and blessing.

We can trace the trajectory

of a spark, of birth

of life, of death.

Here it ends

when it begins.

Bebe, she smiles,

you look so like my own.

A motherless child

sees oceans of stars

in her eyes,

laced within

the shining sorrow

of a long foreshadowed

unfolding prayer.

Albuquerque

10-16-08

Memorial Tribute to Paula Gunn Allen

Saturday, Oct 25, 2008

5 - 9 PM

City College of San Francisco
50 Phelan Avenue, San Francisco
Diego Rivera Theater

Please join us. Program details forthcoming.

The blog always suffers when it's back to school time. So we've been in for a month and I'm now just updating. Trying to get everything done---get back into the working mom mode, finishing dissertations, articles, short stories, getting review copies out, fly fishing (or in our case raiding Kernville for anything 50's pink) with my Sisters, has kept me busy. But I am up to my ears in ideas and complaints as well as rants. Once again, the only people paying attention to Indians arew Indians, what else is new. Palin's record on Alaska native rights? Atrocious! Of course one does not find that little tidbit in the mainstream media but only amongst Native America. And once again, I am still not surprised. It's ok to complain about Indians if you live near a casino and traffic pisses you off, or to complain about how Indians rip off the state of California, as our governor so eloquently stated when he was about to oust the previous governor. In 1992 I visited the Shakopee casino in Minnesota where I overheard a little elderly blue haired lady complain about how much the Shakopee community was making money hand over fist as she plied her quarters into the slot machine. (she really did have blue hair). So all of this gets me thinking about the theory section of my current project and the colonization of America. I should say the continuing colonization of America....


Theories of nation building and narrative, decolonization, and what Linda Tuhiwai Smith calls “the decolonizing moment” can shed light onto the particular situation of the American Indian diaspora. Research on indigenous peoples, according to Smith, has been cloaked in the language of colonization; from “discovery” to “claiming” and “naming”. Utilizing indigenous epistemology from her Maori culture as well as Michel Foucault’s theories on power and Jacques Derrida’s theories on language, Smith examines the intersections of western imperialism, knowledge, and research, and how indigenous researchers must access and utilize indigenous epistemologies in researching and writing. Smith also argues that western (European-American) research on indigenous peoples forecloses on indigenous representation and identity, that the language of colonization remains intact within academic, historical, and critical studies on indigenous nations by researchers outside of these indigenous communities. The narrative of research conducted in native communities has furthered the colonial and imperialistic narrative of western hegemony, and in order for decolonization to take place and for new narratives to emerge, researchers – native and non-native- must address the language of colonization within these narratives and examine their own complicity within constructing colonial narratives. Smith insists that indigenous researchers must not only use indigenous narratives as a mode of resistance but as a way to rebuild integrity of native communities utilizing native epistemologies. Indigenous scholars are educated in western epistemology as well as in the narrative of their communities and therefore are bicultural, as both Smith and Roseanna Henare-Salomona argue. The language of colonization is reiterated, rearticulated in western trained indigenous researchers’ narratives; we must acknowledge colonial research systems and implemement indigenous research systems and ways of knowledge into our own methodology. Henare-Salomona, a Maori clinical social worker living and working amongst the Dharru aboriginal nation in western Australia, argues that indigenous peoples must be bicultural and bicompetent in order to survive ongoing colonization. Indigenous people are not only competent in their own cultures, but as a diasporic people must be competent in the epistemology of the west as well as that of our adopted indigenous homelands. Henare-Salomona’s work as a diasporic indigenous Maori woman living amongst a different indigenous community than her own is an example of multiple indigenous epistemologies that can be applied to American Indians living far from nation and home, multiplicitous in their ways of knowing. Henare-Salomona’s work in the application of Maori metaphor to research in Maori communities living abroad is groundbreaking in the sense that she argues for community metaphor as a research method for Maori communities. Henare-Salomona developes multiple approaches to her investigate of Maori identity; like American Indians, Maoris in Aeoteoroa and abroad acknowledge their tribal identities and then their national indigenous designation (Maori). Henare Salomona’s work seeks to “highlight the possibilities for the emergence of a new way of being, one that is more suited to the next generation and their anticipated experiences in this land. The narrative will then be analysed and examined for what toanga or gifts of knowledge may then be offered for future Maori living here in Australia. At the same time, this thesis is an introduction to Maori culture in the hope to give readers a better understanding of Maori people and the cultural protocols and concepts that guide the way in which they live and exist in the world. It also reveals the way they feel about their sense of place in this new land and the connection they still have with Aotearoa.” Chadwick Allen’s Blood Narrative, an exploration of indigenous identity in contemporary American Indian and Maori writing, is a text of great impact upon my project as well. Allen investigates “the construction of indigeneity within the context of a deep and enduring settler colonization…writers and activists who self-identify as American Indian or New Zealand Maori to mark their identities as persistently distinctive from those of dominant European–descended settlers and as irrevocably rooted in the particular lands these writers, activists, and community leaders call home.”What makes indigenous cultures distinctive? How has the demarcation of identity categories been addressed by indigenous peoples as colonized by European powers? Allen argues, N. Scott Momaday’s “genetic memory” trope, that blood/land/memory is "a complex of interrelated tropes and emblematic figures that were developed by American Indian and New Zealand Maori writers and activists to counter and, potentially to subvert . . . dominating discourses" (220) of First World nations. "Blood" represents "an enduring indigenous identity" (220); and "Memory," "a specific indigenous history" (218) or "narratives of connection to specific lands" (220). The blood/land/memory complex trope of native writers becomes even more provocative in an American Indian setting of dispersal in Indian lands of other nations.

So when I say Rick Nelson was right, I'm thinking of his song Garden Party: "...you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself..." We just got a review of Coyote Speaks from the School Library Journal, which can be a blessing or curse in the publishing world in which we operate. Apparently, to some reviewers (and hiring committees) one cannot be an academic and a poet, nor can one be a Native American and a scholar at the same time. My co-author (and evil twin brother) is referred to as "academic" and "scholar" and "Professor Berk" while I am "Native American poet", "tribal member", and "Ms. Dunn". And all I do is think about blood-land-memory complex and survivance and decolonizing frameworks all day. Ari, however, says that sometimes being an "academic" and a "scholar" isn't always the best classification to be assigned. Just like Henry Kissinger is "Dr. Kissinger" and Jean Kirkpatrick isn't "Dr. Kirkpatrick". There is still a class ceiling in this world and it's still smeared by the blood of my ancestors.

It has been a wonderful summer. I spent a week with the Creek Divas at this year's playwrights' retreat with Native Voices at the Autry. It was my third retreat, first as an actor, since I was workshopping two of my plays in the previous retreats. I had the honor of working with my friend Joy Harjo on her new one-woman show Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light as well as on Creek playwright Julie Pearson-Little Thunder's The Girl Who Was Captured By Ghosts. I'm also really excited to announce that my play The Frybread Queen will be presented as a staged reading at the Wells Fargo Theatre at the Autry National Center in Griffith Park on November 3rd.

My new poetry book, Echo Location, will be published by the end of the year and we are in editing stages. Griselda Suarez is editing and some of you may know her work from Through the Eye of the Deer. Griselda is on faculty in Chicano-Latino Studies at Cal State Long Beach and is working on several of her own manuscripts, including the excellent The Mysteries of the Maginficent Rosario Santos. Gris and I have known each other since working together at Upward Bound at Cal Ploy Pomona where she was a lead tutor and resident advisor for summer programs. She later went on to become the assistant director for Educational Talent Search for AASE in San Francisco where she earned her MFA in creative writing and returned to Southern California to teach at Idylwild Summer Arts and CSULB. We both have had similar career tracks, being academics as well as dedicated to educational opportunity and TRIO programs.

We will also be developing the literary journal Angelena in the coming year, both online and in print. Angelena is a journal devoted to creative and critical works by women writers of color in Los Angeles, "from the freeway to the river." Our inaugural edition will feature Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, the Chumash/Tohono O'odham poet; African-American playwright Calysta Watson; Tongva scholar and artist Cindi Alvitre, the Kickapoo-Creek diva herself, Arigon Starr (who many people don't know is an incredible artists as well as musican/ playwright/ singer/songwriter, etc. etc...) among other L.A. based poets. The sense of a poetry community in Los Angeles is very limited and Gris and I are working toward filling the void and using the journal as a way to build community and use art as activism here in this city. We are looking forward to getting Angelena out by Spring 2009, so look for coming updates on this issue. Paula Gunn Allen had agreed to write the editorial for the inaugural issue but due to her illness was unable to do so. We honor her memory by continuing with the first issue.

Sadly, the final edition of the Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts will be forthcoming in the fall. Terri Windling and Midori Snyder have worked so hard over the years to keep this online journal up and running and will close the journal in order to concentrate on their own work but will keep the mythic arts alive in other venues. I will have a new piece in the final journal, "Spider Woman". Terri and Midori published several of my Deer Woman articles and most of my poetry published in the last few years has been through Endicott.

And, in closing, I am very pleased to announce that my first children's book, coauthored with my evil twin brother Dr. Ari Berk, will be published at the end of the month by Abrams. Coyote Speaks contains original poetry and stories by me as well as re-tellings of traditional stories by both of us from across Indian Country. Some of Ari's wonderful artwork is in the book as well as his dedication to preserving storytelling traditions of Native America. Also included is a final chapter on storytelling in Los Angeles, since both Ari and I are from this city alot of people love to hate. Ari also has some exciting projects forthcoming and I hope to be able to announce them soon (hint, hint).

I'm also pleased to announce that we are working on a new website for both myself and Mother Bear Media. Karen Strom, who has by sheer determination and will brought so many native writers to the web, has been my webmistress for the past eight years and I thank her so much for her patience with me and my lack of mad computer skills to get my site up. Robert Silent Thunder will take over from her and will struggle to comprehend the madness as we work on getting new sites developed and published this fall.

More sooner than later, hopefully!

Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts final issue now online:
http://www.endicott-studio.com/jMA08Farewell/index.html

Coyote Speaks is now available through the usual suspects...published August 20th.

Labels: Coyote Speaks, literature, poetry