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Native American Literature, 901 AD? A New Reading of the Battiste Good Wintercount

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2022

Birgit Brander Rasmussen
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Abstract

This essay reads the 1880 Battiste Good Wintercount as a textual conflict zone that brings Indigenous oral and pictographic literatures into dialogue with settler-colonial forms like alphabetic script and books to imagine Native futures after militant resistance. With a timeline that goes back to 901 AD, Good issues a dramatic challenge to Western scholarship on the book, writing, and literary history. He rejects requests for simulations of what Gerald Vizenor calls “tragic victimry” with literary innovation and a narrative vision of survivance. Foregrounding the authority of women, Good invokes new and ancient treaties to insist on Indigenous sovereignty. The essay explores how the literary history of Indigenous pictography informs contemporary Native writers, like N. Scott Momaday, and decolonizing struggles like those identified with the hashtags #NoDAPL and #landback. It concludes with a call to interrogate deep structures of coloniality that organize literary studies through ethnocentric conceptions of literacy, genre, period, and time.

Type
Essays
Information
PMLA , Volume 137 , Issue 2 , March 2022 , pp. 279 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

For my father, Knud Erik Brander Rasmussen, 1941–2022.

References

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