Self-Determined Stories: The Indigenous Reinvention of Young Adult LiteratureA New Continent of Liberty: Eunomia in Native American Literature from Occom to Erdrich

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Twenty years after the publication of Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (1999), in which Craig S. Womack maintains that European American and Native American literature have “two separate canons” (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 7), Suhr-Sytsma’s and Hamilton’s books demonstrate this assertion’s powerful and enduring influence in Native American literary studies. Suhr-Sytsma contrasts mainstream, non-Native young adult fiction with Indigenous YA, which “significantly revises the conventions” of the former (xvii), and Hamilton illuminates divergent European American and Native American literary histories from Thomas Jefferson to Don DeLillo and Samson Occom to Gerald Vizenor, respectively. Both authors utilize a similar set of verbs to carry the weight of their arguments about these separate canons. In Self-Determined Stories, Indigenous YA diverges from, challenges, troubles, and resists conventional YA literature and some of the critical ideas dominating the scholarship on YA fiction. Hamilton also draws significant distinctions between Indigenous and European American writing in A New Continent of Liberty, with these contrasts emerging as more explicit over time until, for example, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin’s (Zitkala-Ša’s) depiction of Indigenous selfhood represents “a stark departure from the atomistic assumptions of Hemingway’s Nick” (103). In the same vein, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) contains “a dramatic contrast to Heller’s pessimistic vision” (122), and Vizenor’s Chair of Tears (2012) offers “striking and profound divergences” from Ralph Waldo Emerson (167).Womack’s influence also shapes the political investments of both books. He argues in Red on Red that “autonomy, self-determination, and sovereignty serve as useful literary concepts” (11). Both authors draw on these terms to convey the stakes of their arguments. Suhr-Sytsma adheres to the general conception of sovereignty propounded by American Indian literary nationalists, Womack included, as the right for Indigenous peoples to make their own decisions in all areas of human endeavor (thus the familiar terms cultural, intellectual, and rhetorical sovereignty in Native literary studies). Jeannette Armstrong’s novel Slash (1985), for example, offers a “unique portrayal of Indigenous sovereignty,” and the main character “casts sovereignty as a process of empowerment and renewal, not just an end” (21; italics in original). The process of self-determination appears more implicitly in the chapters following Suhr-Sytsma’s discussion of Slash. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) and Joseph Bruchac’s The Heart of a Chief (1998) express self-determination in their “strong, multifaceted critiques of multiculturalist ideology” (30). Similarly, the initially passive protagonist of Cynthia Leitich Smith’s novel Rain is Not My Indian Name (2001) develops her own practice of self-determination, until she finally “assumes agency over her own self-representation” (99). In her short story “Reunion” (2002), Susan Power also emphasizes “the representational power of Indigenous girls and women” (99). This story, Suhr-Sytsma argues, “enacts rhetorical sovereignty through its self-reflexive crafting of a Native female voice” that subverts conventional narratives of romance between Native women and white men (102). Suhr-Sytsma also regularly pauses to comment on the vexed politics of representation in the Native fiction under her consideration, with Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel and Drew Hayden Taylor, to take a representative example, “occasionally falling prey to romanticization themselves” (109). In Self-Determined Stories, Native literature is not predictable, either formally or politically.Hamilton enters the same conversation but conveys his interest in autonomy (individual “self-rule”) rather than sovereignty (communal self-government) within a critical framework established on the Greek concepts of eunomia, “the ideal fusion of the human and the natural” (2); themis, “divine law” (4); and nomos, “social law/rule/order” (4). By tracing “the essentially chiastic trajectories of autonomy in two literary traditions, one suggesting morbid decline through an overdevelopment of the self’s solitary rule, the other a gradual, hard-won ascendance rooted in traditional communalism,” Hamilton reveals “the dramatic reclamation in the Native American imaginary of what its Euro-American counterpart progressively lost: a version of eunomia, the vital blending of human and natural orders” (145). As Hamilton acknowledges, using ancient Greek cultural concepts to build an argument about Native literature runs counter to efforts by scholars post-Womack to draw on Indigenous cultures and histories in the development of critical approaches. He insists, however, on this method’s revelatory promise. As he proceeds through pairs of non-Native and Native writers—Jefferson and Occom, Emerson and William Apess, Mark Twain and Sarah Winnemucca, Ernest Hemingway and Bonnin, Joseph Heller and Momaday—Hamilton outlines a non-Native literary history with an increasingly more isolating, pessimistic, and even pathological view of autonomy and a Native literary history in “ascent” toward a more optimistic, nourishing, and politically potent conception of autonomy.Hamilton’s persuasive and carefully managed argument has a satisfying trajectory, at least for many Native American literary studies scholars, but he tasks a small handful of authors and texts with representing two vast literary traditions. The dual focus across more than two centuries of writing also leaves Hamilton to “sketch,” as he says himself throughout the study, the various components of his argument. Some readers will long for much more substantial historical, cultural, and political contexts. The narrow range of texts under consideration raises concerns, too, about the potential for Hamilton’s work to have a broad impact either on American or Native American literary studies. Hamilton considers, for example, only three Nick Adams stories from one Hemingway collection, In Our Time (1925), and in the final chapter only a single Louise Erdrich and single Vizenor novel. Could Hamilton sustain the coherence of the argument if he expanded it to include important contexts and any of the other thirteen Nick Adams stories published during Hemingway’s lifetime? Could he make the same precise, narrow claim about American Indian literary history if he expanded the discussion to include any one or more of the many other novels by Vizenor and Erdrich or any of the numerous and politically diverse novels by other Native authors both pre- and post-Momaday? How might a close reading of a single novel by a non-Native woman writer, perhaps one that builds on the passing references to Susan Fenimore Cooper and Barbara Kingsolver in the penultimate paragraph in the epilogue, put pressure on the claim about representations of autonomy in American literature?Self-Determined Stories has a broader, sturdier critical foundation. Suhr-Sytsma positions her study within specific literary and political contexts and uncovers the rich details and nuanced representations of self-determination and sovereignty, activism, multiculturalism, hybridity, and interracial romance in Indigenous YA fiction. The chapters on Armstrong and on Alexie and Bruchac contain more compelling arguments than the next two chapters on Smith and Power and, finally, Zobel and Taylor. In the last chapter, Suhr-Sytsma attempts to rehabilitate hybridity as a productive critical term in her discussion of Indigenous speculative fiction, but Zobel’s and Taylor’s “alternative Indigenous hybridities” appear just as plausibly as a range of Indigenous identities (111). After all, as Suhr-Sytsma observes, Taylor says that he “indigenizes,” rather than “hybridizes,” the vampire (147). The YA component of the analysis fades into the background in this final chapter, too. Yet Suhr-Sytsma fully succeeds in establishing the importance of young Indigenous adults and YA fiction in Native American literary studies.