5922 N. Vista Valverde
Tucson, Arizona 85718
(520) 577-3910
Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies
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University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
(520) 621-2244
Opening Plenary Paper
ANNETTE KOLODNY
At least for my own work, I concur with Patricia Seed’s assumption that “the demand by proponents of [the study of] colonial discourse to allow the natives to speak in their own voices has resonated with” – I would even say resulted from – “feminist demands to allow women their own voices.” Certainly, for me, the requirement that my frontier and early Americanist scholarship seek out as many voices as I can discover emanates from the same ethical motivation as my feminist work; indeed, I’ve never really seen the two as separate. I also agree with Seed’s observations about the necessarily inter- and cross-disciplinary nature of the study of both colonial and postcolonial discourses. That said, to her list of disciplines involved in these analyses – history, anthropology, literary criticism, economics, political science – I have found it also necessary in my work to learn something about the history and practice of North American archeology, historical climatology, and even some space science. (If you will ask me questions about any of these, I’ll be happy to elaborate.) But for now, I want to mention the crucial area that Seed omits – and which this summit so happily addresses – and that is the need for training in multiple languages and even some work in comparative linguistics. And, just as important, Seed omits the crucial necessity of developing institutional structures that not only allow for the kinds of cross-disciplinary collaborations required for this work but, as well, institutional structures that encourage and reward such work and the multi-faceted scholarly and disciplinary collaborations it entails.
For those of you who have not had a chance to download and assimilate all the readings recommended for this session, let me read historian Patricia Seed’s description of her current project:
In my own current work, I have been engaged in writing a comparative history of early colonialism in the Americas – French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, and English. Hispanic colonialism indeed exhibits distinctive features, but so do Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedish, and English forms of colonialism. All of them have created through different languages and varying discursive practices the object of empire. All define and rule the conquered territories and peoples variously. But differences among European forms of colonialism – the problematization of the identity “European” – does not dislodge the fundamental insight that all of these actions reduced or eliminated the political, religious, and economic freedoms of indigenous people and often exterminated them in the name of advancing a form of “civilization.” I have found in the critical provocations of colonial and postcolonial discourse a useful way of critiquing the inevitable efforts at national self-congratulation with which every European power seems to have rationalized its particular variant of colonialism as superior to those of its competitors. To perceive in such selfflattery the agenda of an inter-European competition for moral ascendance as well as political power is, I think, to develop a powerful critique of all forms of exceptionalism.
As I’m sure everyone here will agree, this is precisely the kind of comparative work that needs to be done. But, as essentially text-based literary scholars, I think we also need to ask about Seed’s facility in the languages of the documents she intends to compare; and ask, further, if she – or some collaborating scholars – do not possess that language facility, whether she might not too easily flatten all instances of European colonial discourse into an undifferentiated narrative of what she calls “national self-congratulation” or “self-flattery.” Equally important, if she does not also have at least some rudimentary knowledge of the languages and cultures of the colonized indigenous peoples, might she not miss expressions of resistance that may, even if unwittingly, be inscribed in these documents?
EXAMPLE: When the Puritan divine, John Cotton, Jr., was found to have been carrying on an adulterous affair with a colonial woman, his atonement (and, presumably, his punishment, as well) was a ministry to the Indians on Martha’s Vineyard. During his years there, Cotton recorded 470 questions that the Indians put to him regarding Christian theology and beliefs. These included the rather pointed query “whether any man that hath committed Adultery may go to heaven?” As historian Alan Taylor wryly comments, “Cotton did not record his answer” (199).
In Maine in the 1660s, three Indians surprised their English neighbors by “running into our house crying out they should all dye.” The cause, said the Indians, was the appearance of “Cheepie . . . gone over the field gliding in the Air with a long rope hanging from one of his legs.” To John Josselyn, the credulous colonist who recorded the incident, this was simply additional evidence of the Indians’ misguided worship and dangerous religious beliefs. “Cheepie,” he explained, “many times smites them with incurable Diseases, scares them with his Apparitions and panick Terrours, by reason whereof they live in a wretched consternation worshipping the Devil for fear.” But when “we askt them what he was like,” continued Josselyn, “they said all wone Englishman, clothed with hat and coat, shooes and stockins, &c” (Josselyn 95). In short, the Indians had conjured up a supernatural bogey-man that reflected back the Englishman’s own image, writ large. Clearly, however, Josselyn missed the joke – just as he and Cotton and so many other European colonists missed the various, often witty, expressions of Native resistance to the colonizers’ insistent proselytizing and civilizing. To the Indians, it was all still Wabanakik, the Dawnland, even if to Josselyn it was now New England. As far as Josselyn was concerned, “they worship the Devil,” “their Theologie is not much,” and the sooner converted to Christianity and to European ways the better (Josselyn 96).
Acknowledging his debt to the prior work of Edmundo O’Gorman, Walter Mignolo proposes to go beyond O’Gorman’s crucial question – “When and how did America emerge in the historical consciousness of the west?” – by elaborating, as a field of study, what Mignolo calls “colonial semiosis.” That term, he explains, “refers to a conflictive domain of semiotic interactions among members of radically different cultures engaged in a struggle of imposition and appropriation, on the one hand, and of resistance, opposition and adaptation on the other.” Mignolo’s particular interest is in mapmaking and geographical representations. As Mignolo argues (in the paper that I’m certain many of you have already downloaded and read) is “that map-making and geographical verbal descriptions (from the point of view of the colonizing cultures) rested on a conception of truth that identified the map with the territory while hiding, by the same token, the conflicting coexistence of parallel territorial representations (from the point of view of the colonized cultures). In his view, then, “Western map-making became the paradigmatic model of the true representation of the earth, while Native territorial representations were either destroyed” or not taken seriously. His approach to this study is philological and comparative. And he takes his readers into a fascinating philological and etymological study of the English and Nuahatl “culture-relative names for graphic objects in which territoriality is represented.” His approach is, I think, both fascinating and basically correct. But when he concludes that “European geographical discourse during the expansion of the Spanish empire obliterated Amerindian territorial representations,” I have to pause.
My own research tells a slightly different story. While the medieval Norse were not map-makers, the Eskimos they encountered on Greenland and in their explorations of the Arctic certainly were. Ancient Eskimo depictions of North American coastlines are still considered amazingly accurate even by modern cartographers. And the most recent studies of historical cartography provide persuasive evidence that the cartographic information that the Norse brought back to Norway from the Eskimo made its way into southern Europe and was incorporated – however incorrectly – into European maps of the world. In other words, we now have evidence that Greenland, Labrador, Baffin Bay, and segments of the North American coast were already appearing on European maps well before Columbus – just not in the right place. (Again, I’ll be happy to elaborate, if anyone is interested, during discussion). For now, however, I want to add that the Algonquian-speaking peoples of Maine and the Canadian maritimes were also adept map-makers.
Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century explorers of these regions all comment on the accuracy (and alacrity) with which the Indians would draw a coastline or indicate the location of streams and rivers. Explorers’ narratives variously describe Native Peoples drawing a diagram in the sand with a stick, drawing on the ground with charcoal, or – in the case of the Micmac – drawing maps on birch-bark scrolls with charcoal and even annotating these maps with a pictographic writing system. This evidence strongly suggests that, during the early exploration and colonial period, Native knowledge of their terrain had to have been incorporated into European understandings of eastern Canada and what later became the northeastern United States. (For the record, I should also add that with the seventeenth century, according to English narratives, most Algonquian-speaking tribes became increasingly reluctant to share their knowledge of the terrain – in part to preserve the tribe’s exclusive share of the fur trade and in part because the tribes now clearly understood that the English had permanent designs on traditional tribal territories.) Surely, these facts must qualify Walter Mignolo’s assertion that European cartographic understandings owed no debt to Native “territorial representations.”
Most crucially, however, my research suggests that Mignolo’s comparative philological approach to these matters, for all its illuminating insights, must be done in tandem with a study of historical cartography. And his blanket assertion that Amerindian territorial representations were “obliterated” simply MUST be tempered by an acknowledgement that many indigenous peoples retain clear knowledge and culturally appropriate mappings of their original homelands and territories – and that these often serve as crucial evidence in land-claims litigation. As scholars, we have an ethical obligation NOT to make sweeping generalizations that could result in undermining the legitimate aspirations of the people and colleagues we study and study with.
Which is an odd segue into my own present project, because I was on the Passamaquoddy reservation in Maine, doing research in the summer of 2000, just as one of their tribal land-claims suits was being settled.
Let me begin by briefly explaining how I got from the 2 articles recommended for this session’s reading to the current project.
In 1985, in “The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States,” I recommended a course of what I called there “heroic rereading” in unfamiliar and non-canonical texts in order to break the stranglehold of an established canon in English and its accompanying strait jacket of formal and aesthetic criteria. Then, in 1992, in “Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions: Notes Toward a New Literary History of the American Frontiers,” I tried to open up and redefine our entire concept of a “frontier”; and I argued that one of the elements that made my new paradigm appealing (at least to me) was “that English texts, by themselves, could never constitute a sufficient history.” My purposes were to “decenter what was previously a narrowly Eurocentric design” in frontier studies; to introduce a radically interdisciplinary scope to these studies; to make them multi-voiced and multi-lingual, comparativist, and to open up in innovative ways the whole question of literariness. Because both essays are available to you online, I won’t repeat their arguments here – suffice to say that I still agree with and stand by every word of them.
In “Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions,” I catalogued a number of exemplary projects that might be undertaken within my expanded definition of frontier and frontier texts. One of these was to reread the two Norse sagas about the Vineland explorations as “American” frontier literature. And so, in 1993, I introduced both sagas, in English translations, into my year-long Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies graduate seminar on the theory and literature of the American frontiers. I wish I had time to describe the students’ responses in the same compelling detail that Rolena Adorno describes her experience of teaching Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized (a text I also regularly assign in the frontier seminar). Suffice it to say that, for the students and for myself, the two sagas proved provocative but fundamentally unsatisfying because we did want to know “what really happened” in Vineland, wherever it was, and because we wanted the other missing voice – the voice of those the Norse called “skraellings,” meaning wretches, or people who screech, or those of little stature.
So, in 1994, calling up everything I had learned about sagas at the University of Oslo in Norway, brushing up on my Old Norse grammar, and immersing myself in anthropological and archeological studies to the point I thought I could at least hesitantly identify the particular Native groups with whom the Norse might have come in contact, I began a project that I am tentatively titling In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vineland and the People of the Dawnland. My aim is to offer a comparativist reading of Wabanaki Confederacy tribal texts and Norse texts about the contact; to reconstruct at least some of the historical elements of that contact; and then to examine why the fact of that contact – which began about the year 1000 – has continued to have such a strong hold on the imaginations and self-identities of the Wabanaki (especially the Micmac), the Icelanders, the Norwegians, and Anglo-Americans.
Micmac mothers and grandmothers on the Miramachi in Canada still routinely tell their children that they have blue eyes and light brown hair because they are the descendents of the Vikings. Joseph Bruchac, of Micmac descent, is still collecting and publishing stories about blond-haired strangers with names like Leif and Erik who came among The People in ancient times. Halldor Kiljan Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel-prize winning novelist, published a trilogy of historical novels from 1943-46, called Iceland’s Bell. Set in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the trilogy nonetheless looks into earlier times and includes some powerful portraits of several of those Icelanders who tried to colonize Vineland. Similarly, modern Norwegian literature abounds with references to the Vineland colony. And I am going to have to devote an entire chapter to what I’m calling “America’s Viking Heritage” – fraudulent and self-serving though most of that so-called “heritage” really is.
As a way of opening up discussion about the Ibero/Anglo Early Americanist comparatist and collaborative project that is the occasion for this summit, let me briefly list a few of the problems with which I am grappling in my project; I think there may be some crossovers.
To begin with, I tell people I am studying “contact” texts – because I find that the most descriptive and honest term. I do not claim to be analyzing colonial or postcolonial discourses because the vocabulary and methodologies of those approaches are only partially useful to me. Still, I emphasize that I do make use of them. They are particularly helpful in that, like so many of these studies, my work too will radically reposition national and nationalistic narratives about Columbus. And they give me the courage at least to try to represent historically distant cultural Others, Norse and Native Peoples alike.
But analyses of colonial and postcolonial discourses do not solve all my theoretical and methodological problems. So, in no particular order, here is a brief sampling of the challenges I face each night as I go to my typewriter:
1. In order for my readers to understand both sides of this complicated first contact, I find I am having to compose a rather comprehensive history and ethnography of the various tribal groups that make up the Algonquian-speaking Wabanaki Confederacy. But then what do I do when the rules of Wabanaki narrative bear no resemblance to narrative, in all its variety, as understood in the EuroAmerican context? How do I learn – and then transmit to my reader – the grammar of an ancient pictoglyphic writing system that Europeans and EuroAmericans don’t even acknowledge as writing? A script which had to be accommodated to the different physical demands of being inscribed on rock OR on birch-bark with charcoal?
2. With regard to the material transmitted through oral dissemination, how do I deal with narrative conventions in which what EuroAmericans distinguish as EITHER historical OR symbolic OR dialogic OR aesthetic OR didactic, etc., etc. are categories that simply don’t apply; or are categories that can’t be separated out? How do I make the non-Native reader comfortable with my interpretation of oral narrative conventions – as in the Norse stories that preceded the written sagas, or Micmac and Penobscot story cycles – that are intentionally and characteristically unstable? That is, they are meant to change over time.
3. That which analyses of postcolonial discourses regularly recognize as the ambiguous multi-voiced situation of the colonized writer is further complicated in my study by the fact that some of the 19th-century texts in English by Native American writers are re-recording and narrativizing a precursor contact with Europe in which their people prevailed. But they are composing that account after a subsequent conquest and devastation by another group of Europeans and within the now-colonized borders of what had once been their traditional homelands. For whom are the stories now being told – for the following generations of Indians, as the writers claim, OR for a non-Indian Anglo audience? And who are the stories really about, the Vikings or the current colonizer? (As you will see when I finally finish the book, I think my answer to these questions will be “all of the above.”)
I could go on and on – but I think that’s a sufficient sampling to scare any sane person away from taking on a project of this scope.
As may not have been entirely clear from the foregoing, in order to pursue this project, I have travelled widely in Scandinavia; worked with anthropologists and archeologists; talked with saga scholars; spent an entire afternoon in his home outside of Oslo, interviewing Helge Ingstad, the man who discovered and first excavated the only authenticated Viking site in North America at Lans Aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland; spent extensive time talking with Native women and men both in the Canadian maritimes and in Maine; and given myself over to tutelage from a number of Native speakers and medicine – or spiritual – men; and, in the summer of 2000, I lived for a time near the Passamaquoddy reservation in Maine. I will be happy to talk about any and all of this research – and its implications – during discussion. But it’s another topic entirely.
For now, I want to end by raising a question suggested by both the Bolton and O’Gorman papers, a question that became palpably real to me when I researched in Canada and Maine, and a question that I hope will reappear in many contexts over the next three days.
What are the ethical implications and political consequences of doing this kind of Ibero/Anglo colonial comparativist scholarship in the age of globalization and under the shadow of NAFTA?
Thank you.