[August 1st
marks the 150th anniversary of Cherokee
Chief John Ross’s death. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Ross and other
native leaders, leading up to a weekend Guest Post from one of our most talented
and significant Native Studies scholars.]
On “authentic” voices and the late 19th
century book and leader that embody the concept.
William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) is
probably one of the most controversial, and definitely in many quarters one of
the most reviled, novels of the last fifty years. The most obvious and
certainly one of the most central reasons for the
attacks which the book has received from African American writers and
historians and scholars (among other critics) is that Styron focuses the
psychology and passion of his fictionalized Nat Turner on a teenage white girl,
ignoring potential (if ambiguous and uncertain) evidence
for a slave wife of Turner’s and greatly extrapolating this relationship
with the white girl from a few minor pieces of evidence in the historical
record. Yet having read at length the critiques on Styron, including those
captured in a book entitled Ten Black Writers Respond, I have to
say that an equally central underlying reason for the impassioned attacks on
the book is the simple fact that Styron, a white novelist (and a Southerner to
boot), had written a novel in the first-person narrative voice of this complex
and prominent African American historical figure.
The issue there is partly one of authenticity,
of who does and does not have the ability to speak for a particular community
and culture. Yet while there may well be specific reasons to critique Styron’s
choices and efforts in this novel, on that broader issue I believe that one of
the central goals of all fiction should be to help readers connect to and
engage with identities and experiences and communities and worlds outside of
their own; seen in that light, Styron’s novel is, at least in its goals, hugely
ambitious and impressive. But it pales (no pun intended) in comparison with a
similar, entirely forgotten novel from nearly a century prior: William Justin
Harsha’s Ploughed Under: The Story of an Indian
Chief, Told by Himself (1881). Harsha, the son of a prominent preacher
and pro-Indian activist and himself an impassioned advocate of Native American
rights, published this novel anonymously, and since it is narrated (as the subtitle
suggests) in the first-person voice of a Native American chief, his project
represents an even more striking attempt to speak from and for an identity and
culture distinct from the author’s own. The novel is long and far from a masterpiece—it
features in a prominent role one of the least compelling love triangles I’ve
ever encountered—but in this most foundational stylistic and formal (and
thematic and political) choice of Harsha’s, it is to my mind one of American
literature’s most unique and amazing efforts.
And yet was it necessary? Just a
few years later, Paiute chief and leader Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins would publish
her Life Among The Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims
(1886), a work of autoethnography and history and political polemic that, like
all of Winnemucca’s life and work, makes clear just how fully Native American
authors and activists and leaders could and did speak for themselves in this
period (as they had for centuries, but with far greater opportunities to
publish and disseminate broadly those voices than at any earlier point).
Winnemucca, like the
Ponca chief Standing Bear whose lecture tour inspired Helen
Hunt Jackson’s conversion to activism and like numerous other Native
American leaders (including Inshta
Theamba, also known as “Bright Eyes,” who wrote the introduction to
Harsha’s novel), spoke and worked tirelessly for her tribe and for Native
American rights more generally, and her book illustrates just how eloquent and
impressive her voice was in service of those causes. Although her individual and
cultural identities became, in both her life and the text, quite complicated as
a result of her experiences as a translator and mediator between her tribe and
the US army and government—complexities that are the focus of the Winnemucca
chapter in my
second book—such complications are, if anything, a further argument for the
value of hearing and reading her own voice, rather than trying to access it
through intermediaries or fictional representations.
Everyone should,
indeed, read Winnemucca’s book, and if we had to choose one Native
American-focused text from the decade to cement in our national narratives, I’d
go with hers without hesitation. But we don’t, and we don’t even necessarily have
to decide whether her voice is more authentic than Harsha’s narrator’s, or Jackson’s Ramona’s
and Alessandro’s, or Theamba’s. There may be some value in that question,
but to me the far greater value is in reading and hearing as many voices as we
can, from this period and on these issues and in every other period and frame,
to give us the most authentic understanding of both Native American experiences
and the whole complex mosaic of American identity. Next leader tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Native American leaders or figures you’d highlight?
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