Attewell, Nadine

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UCLAAmerican Indian Culture and Research Journal TitleTrans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. By Chadwick Allen.Permalinkhttps://escholarship.org/uc/item/6xz1733gJournalAmerican Indian Culture and Research Journal , 38(1)ISSN0161-6463AuthorAttewell, NadinePublication Date2014DOI10.17953Copyright InformationThis work is made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, availalbe at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital LibraryUniversity of CaliforniaREVIEWS 247In sum, as this book makes us rethink the familiar it also moves scholarship about the Creek War and the War of 1812 beyond Tohopeka and on to other sites and stories—around the bend, as it were. Karim M. TiroXavier UniversityTrans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. By Chadwick Allen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 336 pages. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.Over the past two decades, indigenous literary studies has been transformed by the call to develop interpretive methodologies that can illuminate tribal or national literatures in their aesthetic, epistemological, cultural, historical, and political specificity. Insofar as Chadwick Allen’s second book champions a comparative approach to indigenous literary studies, one that the author terms “trans-Indigenous literary studies” (xvii), Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies thus constitutes a major intervention in the field even as it attends to the distinctive character of particular communities, tradi-tions, and texts. Because Allen elaborates his methodological vision through assembling careful, multi-layered, and often revelatory readings of texts by American Indian, Kanaka Maoli, M!ori, and Aboriginal writers, the book’s contri-butions—and pleasures—are many. As in his first book, Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (2002), Allen’s commitment to reading cross-contextually eschews the homogenizing gaze of earlier “pan-Indianisms” as well as those reductive anti-essentialisms that seek to delegitimate the project of intellectual sovereignty by denying that anything like a distinctively Creek or Kanaka Maoli perspec-tive exists at all. Rather, Allen locates his method within an intellectual tradition that includes Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies (1999) and Craig Womack’s Red on Red (1999), two monographs that, as he describes them, center “Indigenous concerns and perspectives within academic research paradigms and focaliz[e] Indigenous theories and analytic perspec-tives” (xx). Insisting that a trans-indigenous literary criticism is compatible with and indeed requires such a foregrounding of indigenous epistemological frameworks and points of view, Allen draws attention to the ways in which his own personal and genealogical connections, formal training, and professional experience have informed the particular juxtapositions pursued in Trans-Indigenous as he shows what vital critical insights may emerge from reading AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL 38:1 (2014) 248 à à àcross-culturally (xviii–xix). "e goal throughout is “to develop a version of Indigenous literary studies that locates itself firmly in the specificity of the Indigenous local while remaining always cognizant of the complexity of the relevant Indigenous global” (xix). Indeed, Trans-Indigenous makes a compelling case for the significance of the particular, illuminating textual details by way of a reading methodology attuned to the workings of indigenous lifeways, languages, epistemologies, and aesthetic systems. Building on existing indigenous arts scholarship that engages “distinct and specific Indigenous aesthetic systems in the appreciation and interpretation of diverse works of Indigenous art” (106), chapter 3 performs three complementary readings of Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday’s 1992 poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” each informed by a di#erent indigenous worldview and aesthetic system (as derived from Plains Indian pictographs, Navajo weaving, and M!ori customary art respectively). In chapter 4, mean-while, Allen suggests that the wonderful Rowley Habib poem “When I of Fish Eat” organizes space in such a way that the plate from which the speaker is preparing to consume fish becomes legible as a marae atea (the space in which hosts and visitors encounter one another during M!ori ceremonies), a P!keh! (non-M!ori) form “reconfigured as the site of a distinctly M!ori practice” (174). "rough attending to the ways in which “trans-customary” works like “When I of Fish Eat” establish what the M!ori art scholar Robert Jahnke describes as “empathy with customary practice” through the use of “pattern, form, medium, and technique” (qtd. in Allen 153), Allen models a formalist reading practice that emphasizes the “culturally-coded aesthetic pleasure” and intellectual, cultural, or political meaning indigenous audiences obtain from such artifacts as baskets—or poems (104). Readers will find many of the book’s methodological provocations compel-ling (not to mention the insights they a#ord), whether or not they are persuaded by Allen’s proposal for a trans-indigenous literary criticism. It is important, however, that scholars of indigenous cultural production grapple with the possibilities as well as the risks of the situated cross-cultural reading praxis Allen advocates in Trans-Indigenous. In order to show how rich are the interpretations that can “result from juxtaposing . . . linguistically, structurally, and thematically dense works” originating in di#erent geopolitical contexts “in multiple critical and generative conversations” (145), in chapter 4 Allen revisits “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” this time reading Momaday’s poem alongside works by Kanaka Maoli and M!ori artists like Naomi Losch, Rowley Habib, and the hip-hop group Upper Hut Posse; chapter 5 is devoted to two long poetic sequences focused on indigenous technologies of place-making by the Cherokee/Huron/Creek writer Allison Adele Hedge Coke and M!ori poet Robert Sullivan. REVIEWS 249"e juxtapositions that organize chapter 1 are, perhaps, less successful. Here Allen recovers a transnational archive of 1960s-era American, Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand “overview texts” that purport to assess “the contem-porary status and aspirations of Indigenous people” (6). If Allen’s comparative approach does make clear the extent to which such documents index settler colonial (rather than uniquely American or Australian) projects of rule and self-legitimation, it is less obvious what their di#erences reveal, beyond fuel-ling the kinds of insidious comparisons that, as Allen rightly cautions, “serve only the interests of the settler, his culture, his power, his nation-state” (xiv). In contrast, in chapter 2 Allen’s trans-indigenous frame initially leads him to identify the absence of “highly visible” American Indian responses to the 1976 American bicentenary as a lack (55), but he is then inspired to reflect not only on those responses that do exist (including the alternative history novels Indians’ Summer and The Indians Won), but also on the reasons why they may not have sought or achieved the visibility of Aboriginal responses to the 1988 Australian bicentenary, for example. Perhaps more important than the felicity of particular juxtapositions is the question of what underpins such juxtapositions or makes them possible. While I appreciate Allen’s commitment to doing and not just describing trans-indigenous literary studies, on this point at least I would have liked a more elaborated theoretical discussion. In part, I think, Allen’s claim is that indigenous people already think and operate trans-indigenously. Instances of embodied encounters between indigenous people that Trans-Indigenous references include the exchanges between Northwest Coast and M!ori artists that inspired Fred Graham (M!ori) to produce the multimedia piece Whakamutunga (Metamorphosis) reproduced on the book’s cover; meetings between indigenous scholars, artists, and activists at international events hosted by organizations such as the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association or HIV/AIDS advocacy groups; N. Scott Momaday’s lifelong interest in Navajo culture sparked during a childhood spent in or near Navajo country; and the author’s own travels to Aotearoa, New Zealand. It may be objected that such indigenous-to-indigenous encounters, unfolding on a global scale, are too much artifacts of privilege to be genuinely produc-tive. At the same time, although it is important that the encounters Allen charts are contemporary rather than historical, without genealogical warrant, it is worth remembering that indigenous people were moving around and meeting one another long before the Fulbright program (say) made it easier for indigenous scholars to do so. We also might reflect on the value of indig-enous-to-indigenous encounters that take place in, amongst, or with texts: if writing and reading are not without costs, buying a plane ticket from Toronto to Auckland is likely even less supportable.AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURE AND RESEARCH JOURNAL 38:1 (2014) 250 à à àIt is true that our encounters with texts are not embodied in the same way as Fred Graham’s encounter with George and Joe David, or the indigenous-to-indigenous encounters M!ori literary scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville investigates in her recent book Once Were Pacific: M!ori Connections to Oceania (2012). "e Euro-American presumption that writing is defined by the capacity to break free from the contexts of its production can make it seem as if textualism interferes with the project of centering “Indigenous concerns and perspectives within academic research paradigms” (xx). However, in detailing how he came to encounter particular texts—coming across Apirana Taylor’s “Sad Joke on a Marae” while struggling to account for the force of “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919,” or searching out American Indian responses to the 1976 American bicentenary after witnessing the Aboriginal protests of 1988, Allen himself draws attention to the contingency and hence the embod-iedness of intellectual work. What I read often a#ects me physically. We might think, as well, about the writing scholars do as genealogical in its way, with citations, footnotes, and acknowledgments as forms of kinship work and community building. In this respect, Trans-Indigenous may be aligned with other recent work in indigenous literary studies that draws attention to the chronological depth and generic breadth of indigenous writing traditions, providing us with a still more-nuanced sense of the genealogies on which indigenous writers draw in the present. "e trans-indigenous literary studies for which Allen makes such a forceful case in Trans-Indigenous demands a great deal of its practitioners. Given the consequent necessity to think about “how to train ourselves—and how to train the generation behind us—for the Indigenous scholarship of the future” (xxxiii), the group of scholars with whom I first read Trans-Indigenous expressed the wish that Allen had more often written about the embodied dimensions of the labor—the conversa-tions and relationships—that helped shape the juxtapositions structuring the book. I think this is a fair critique. For the most part, his footnotes direct us towards other textual sources. But perhaps work like Allen’s also invites us to reconsider what writing and reading involve and make possible, neither insisting that reading and writing inevitably elaborate kinship or community, nor assuming that they do not. Certainly, Trans-Indigenous has a$rmed in me a tremendous appreciation for the extraordinary things people do with words.Nadine AttewellMcMaster University

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