Sarah Robbins
Texas Christian University
Sarah Ruffing Robbins teaches American Literature at TCU. Her 8 academic books address topics ranging from gendered authorship to race relations, literacy practices to public pedagogy. Sarah has (co)directed numerous humanities projects, including Domesticating the Canon, Making American Literatures and Keeping and Creating American Communities. Her recent Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-Cultural Teaching promotes cultural stewardship grounded in historical study as a path to community-building. Several previous publications (e.g., Writing America, Writing Our Communities) reported on programs for educators. Winner of a Governor’s Humanities Award, she focuses much of her work on preparing students for humanities-informed activism.
Native Writers Performing Homeplace Recovery:
Countering the Violence of Historical Erasure and Asserting Civic Rights
Twenty-first century Native American writers frequently revisit nineteenth-century patterns of violence that white institutional power exercised over indigenous peoples—particularly through coercive strategies purportedly exercised to “civilize” Indians. These narrative interventions contribute to a shared cultural enterprise of reasserting Native citizenship and homeplace rights in the face of violent history too often suppressed in white-written accounts of the American past. While multiple strands of story-telling performance have addressed this goal of communal recovery, two recurring plotlines have capitalized on intersectionality in characterization and plot, locating an insistent indigenous sovereignty at a nexus of race, gender, class, and place.
One of these strands—exemplified by Louise Erdrich’s The Roundhouse and Marcie R. Rendon’s Murder on the Red River—seeks a recovery of cultural sovereignty over Native homeplace and associated citizenship rights by linking whites’ continued violence against Native women today to a legacy of lost place-based governance and familial rights. To counter this still-ongoing violence, youthful detective protagonists in these two novels perform counter-narrative investigations that surface links between current trauma and nineteenth-century abusive histories too long suppressed from the official record of “American” civic life. Confronting these histories—though painful—leads to possible pathways of enhanced (if still limited) civic power.
A second narrative strategy—illustrated by Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian and N. Scott Momaday’s The Indolent Boys–involves reclaiming the power of story-telling itself. Both these texts, one a YA novel and the other a play, assert indigenous re-configurations of the assimilationist education enterprise to reclaim Native people’s rights to knowledge-making, and knowledge-keeping, and intergenerational learning. Appropriating highly traditional literary forms (the coming-of-age story and the historical drama) through assertions of Native voice, these counter-narratives join the works by Erdrich and Rendon in reclaiming Native homeplaces by asserting the right to perform alternative histories.
My five-page starter draft for a journal-length essay will benefit, I’m confident, from discussion in this seminar’s context.
