From Misrepresentation to Misapprehension: Discursive Resistance and the Politics of Displacement in Native America

Open Access
- Author:
- Youngberg, Quentin Edward
- Graduate Program:
- Comparative Literature
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- March 30, 2006
- Committee Members:
- Djelal Kadir, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Sophia A Mcclennen, Committee Member
Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Committee Member
Matthew Bennett Restall, Committee Member - Keywords:
- White Indians
Native film
Indian
Indigenous
Native American
misrepresentation
stereotypes
Native politics
Gerald Vizenor
vanishing Indian
Indians and nature - Abstract:
- The very real social and political problems on reservations (like poverty, alcoholism, and suicide) will never be solved so long as these issues are elided by essentialist discussions of culture. Romanticized conceptions of Native cultures elide the facts of racism, bureaucratic inefficiency, and purposefully systematized erosions of Native sovereignty. In the process of these elisions, blame for social problems is laid on the culturally “atavistic” and “inept” (savage) victims for problems that stem, in reality, from an ongoing colonial relationship. By taking on various popular myths about Native cultures (the myth of the Vanishing Indian, the idea of the Nature-Indian, or the myth of the White-Indian), and by setting Native voices in opposition to those myths, this dissertation attempts to de-mystify the politics that lie behind public discourses on and by Native peoples. Moreover, it seeks a better understanding of the ways Natives are denied political agency through public discourses that attempt to represent indians in romanticized, overtly cultural, and ultimately apolitical terms. This is not a project of “understanding” Native cultures; rather, it is a project of understanding how Native cultures are constituted, and why they are constituted as such, in the mythological discourses of a national public. Furthermore, it serves to recognize how those same cultures are reconstituted through the critical responses of Native voices to those national mythologies. Here, I begin to unravel the relationship between culture and politics and, more importantly, to uncover some of the more popular cultural assumptions still working today to displace Natives themselves and to undermine Native politics. My point is that cultural essentialisms come to stand in for political realities; and it is imperative that we come to understand the political basis of Native misrepresentations and misapprehensions. It is also imperative that we give due attention to those Native literatures that insinuate themselves into the contest of representational politics that inform public policies.