Kristen Brown
University of South Carolina
Kristen is a doctoral candidate (ABD) at the University of South Carolina, where her primary field of study is late nineteenth century American Literature, especially American Indian texts. She has taught English courses at both the secondary and post-secondary level since 2001. Her recent experience teaching for and living in the Navajo Nation has further inspired her passion for environmental issues, particularly water management. Her dissertation is tentatively titled “A Return to Turtle Island: Ecocosmopolitics in Amerindian Literature, 1880-1930.”
Kristen Wright
University of South Carolina
“’We were close students of nature’: Land as Pedagogy in Charles Eastman’s Indian Boyhood”
In her call for “rebellious transformation,” Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson asserts the role of stories and story-telling in recalibrating settler-colonial approaches to education. In order to achieve this epistemological shift, she argues, one must “understand the importance of observation and learning from our animal teachers.” Accordingly, this presentation examines Charles Eastman’s first published work, Indian Boyhood (1902), which presents his memories of coming of age among the nomadic Santee Sioux in the late nineteenth century. While many scholars consider the text’s discursive relationship with allotment policies and assimilation, I explore how Eastman’s self-narrative subtly celebrates the collective “Indian” way of life as one that nourished knowledge of ecosystems and encouraged modification of consumption. Carefully avoiding any essentialist conclusions, Eastman subverts the anthropocentric constructs of capitalism while positing the benefits of incorporating a more-than-human, story-driven ontology.
Primarily through the figures of his uncle and grandmother, Eastman earns what I call a trans-generational “literacy of landscape” which requires he heighten his powers of listening and observation as he learns the forest and, by extension, himself. This presentation focuses on stories in which Eastman recalls learning the language of birds, fish, and trees as part of his “systematic education,” a series of lessons that encourage a more inclusive, eco-cosmopolitical vision. Beyond the pedagogical mode of the nineteenth century “boy book,” Indian Boyhood might inform our own sense of ecological responsibility in the twenty-first century.
