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17 results

  • Chapter 12 - Native Reconfigurations

  • from Part IV - Reconfigurations
  • Edited by John Ernest, University of Delaware
  • Book:
    Race in American Literature and Culture
    Published online:
    26 May 2022
    Print publication:
    16 June 2022, pp 195-209

  • Summary

    In the United States, ways of thinking about race have their roots in both the institution of slavery and settler-colonial policies. For Native and Black peoples, the logic of blood quantum and the “one-drop” rule have worked in tandem as foundations for maintaining white supremacy and a settler logic to eliminate the Native and undermine Black participation in the nation. Many Native intellectuals, from the turn of the twentieth century, created personal narratives to position themselves as speakers on behalf of a wider Native public, to represent Indian Country almost as a distinct nationality, in the hopes of unsettling dominant discourses concerning fitness for citizenship within the United States that were intimately tied to these notions of race. They eagerly participated in American culture to reshape national narratives that had disavowed the roles Native people ought to play within the United States. This chapter highlights how Native-authored texts responded to assimilation projects developed out of boarding schools, allotment, and the promise of American citizenship, and which furthered the logic of elimination. Including this Indian-based dialogue as a core facet of American literary history pushes at the boundaries of the field and its underlying assumptions concerning race, literature, and America.

Indigenous Intellectuals
  • Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930
  • Kiara M. Vigil
  • Published online:
    05 August 2015
    Print publication:
    15 July 2015
  • In the United States of America today, debates among, between, and within Indian nations continue to focus on how to determine and define the boundaries of Indian ethnic identity and tribal citizenship. From the 1880s and into the 1930s, many Native people participated in similar debates as they confronted white cultural expectations regarding what it meant to be an Indian in modern American society. Using close readings of texts, images, and public performances, this book examines the literary output of four influential American Indian intellectuals who challenged long-held conceptions of Indian identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Kiara M. Vigil traces how the narrative discourses created by these figures spurred wider discussions about citizenship, race, and modernity in the United States. Vigil demonstrates how these figures deployed aspects of Native American cultural practice to authenticate their status both as indigenous peoples and as citizens of the United States.