Julianne Newmark
University of New Mexico
Julianne Newmark, Ph.D.Principal LecturerAssistant Director of Core Writing and Coordinator of Technical WritingAuthor: The Pluralist Imagination from East to West in American Literature (Nebraska UP, 2015)Editor: www.xchanges.org•••The University of New MexicoDepartment of English Language and LiteratureAlbuquerque, NM
Beginning with a cohort of turn-of-the-century Native activist writers, many ofwhom would later be initial members of the Society of American Indians at itsfounding in 1911, this project offers an intersectional methodology... [ view full abstract ]
Beginning with a cohort of turn-of-the-century Native activist writers, many of
whom would later be initial members of the Society of American Indians at its
founding in 1911, this project offers an intersectional methodology for deepening
our understanding of the authorial role of foundational indigenous writers like
Charles Eastman, Gertrude Bonnin, Raymond Bonnin, and Carlos Montezuma.
These leaders—as a small sample representing a larger community—were all at
one time employed in the Indian Service, in various capacities. Scholars have
studied the output of these emerging activists at the close of the long 19th
century, as they operated in agentic fashion across media, using Congressional
testimony (the Bonnins), autobiography as published serially in periodicals or in
monograph series (Gertrude Bonnin and Charles Eastman), in self-published
newsletters (Carlos Montezuma), in epistolary modes (all), and in legal briefs
(Raymond Bonnin). Because our understanding of these writers’ tactical
rhetorical savvy is established, I argue that we need to add further nuance to our
knowledge of this cohort by locating instances of bureaucratic compositional
agency within the documents that bear the title “Record Group 75” (the BIA
papers) in the National Archives.
By using a few examples of cases in which an author’s outside-of-BIA and insideBIA textual contributions inflect each other in meaningful ways, this short seminar paper will help us to engage with questions important to cross-disciplinary
scholars: 1) Does the involvement of a Native contributor have a demonstrable
impact on official Indian Bureau documents? and 2) did (and how did) Native
Bureau employees themselves resist colonial organizational structures, even as
evidenced in, for example, an “annual narrative and statistical report,” content all
of these writers would have helped to compile? An understanding of activist
bureaucratic writing can help scholars in literary studies, in particular, deepen
their knowledge of focal authors’ writing as it concerned their “professional”
identity, an identity these writers consistently channeled towards advocacy and
accrual of right for Native people across tribes.
This project involves scholarship from historians, rhetoricians, and literary critics
(including Hoxie, Powell, Vizenor, Warrior, and Lyons) as well as from scholars of
cross-cultural imprints in bureaucratic texts, from the field of professional writing
(such as Williams and Longo).
Indigenous Textualities: Native Americans, Writing, and Representation
