Carolyn Dunn's News and Views

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.