What is exciting about this year's critical publications about Native American literature and performance is the way in which they articulate broad visions commanding the general fields of American studies, literature, and theatre to take notice of how Native creations have shaped, and continue to shape, foundational aspects of these interrelated disciplines. Two publications, S. E. Wilmer's anthology, Native American Performance and Representation, and Shari Huhndorf's monograph, Mapping the Americas, use a wide lens to present the extensive histories and ongoing presence of Native peoples in North America, a perspective that dwarfs mainstream notions of American history. Though the books engage in a revisionist process, their subjects are aesthetic: both consider literary and visual creations by Native artists. The expressions examined present differences that range across Native American nations and interconnected worldviews that hold Native peoples together.
Wilmer's anthology presents fourteen articles by both Native and non-Native scholars and Native American performers. Wilmer divides these works into four sections: “Reframing Dance, Performance, and Traditional Stories for a Postmodern Era,” “The Native Body in Performance,” “Native Representation in Drama,” and “Challenging Stereotypes through Film.” The collection comes from the 2002 American Indian Workshop that Wilmer hosted at the University of Dublin. Annually, the European conference presents Native American scholarship predominantly from Europeans; thus, to broaden and perhaps update the book's scope, Wilmer includes additional commissioned works and a reprint of Monique Mojica's “Stories from the Body.” The result is a book with an expansive scope, as Wilmer's introduction explains: “The most that one can hope to accomplish in this book is to introduce the variety and complexity of Indigenous performance traditions and current practices, and to analyze some of the relative controversies and contradictions that have occurred” (5).
The scope works, as performers, such as Daystar/Rosalie Jones and Mojica, provide critical histories of “Inventing Native Modern Dance” and of the continuing legacy of Native American performers respectively. Scholars add their voices to these critical views of Native performance history as Maria Lyytinen traces the evolution of Indian princesses to contemporary deconstructions of princess stereotypes by feminist Native theatre artists; Julie Pearson-Little Thunder recounts histories of Native theatre companies to investigate how they transferred Native values, communal ties, and memories; Jaye Darby applies Jace Weaver's theory of “communitism” to Native dramaturgy, affirming Native American communal values in opposition to the individualism and materialism marking the American mythos; and Kristin Dowell uses “visual sovereignty” to trace how Native American filmmakers combat the erasure of Native American presence in cinema. Critics also explore how Native performance confronts shared issues across Native America: Ric Knowles considers the healing that comes from Native American plays that expose the sexual and physical abuse of Native children in residential schools; while Jorge Huerta considers Native American philosophies within works of Chicano/a playwrights.
Despite this strong scope, the varying critical perspectives used by authors undermine the book's value; consequently, several articles feel out of place. Sarah Bryant-Bertail's study of Pacific Northwest Coast masks and dance and Anne-Christine Hornborg's study of Mi'kmaq narratives obscure Native presence and autonomy with research that uncomfortably relies almost exclusively upon the voices of non-Native, anthropological “experts,” while Native critical voices are relegated to a paragraph or so. While it is interesting that David Krasner can apply the German style of Bildungsroman to a William S. Yellow Robe Jr. play, the critical approach overlooks cultural aspects of Yellow Robe's dramaturgy and never questions how Native American works might extend an understanding of Bildungsroman. Similarly, Bruce McConachie's “Metamora's Revenge” asserts that one must understand John Augustus Stone's Metamora in order to investigate “the stage Indian”; however, he focusses on how Edwin Forrest played Metamora without interrogating how, as Phillip Deloria's Playing Indian suggests, white embodiment of “Indian” personas helped establish early notions of American identity as other than British.
It would have been helpful to craft the anthology's introduction to vigorously address the varied approaches to Native American performance, or to include “discussions” within each section that allowed authors an opportunity to address one another. Without such framing, beginning researchers of Native American performance might misunderstand how critical differences relate to both subject matter and intended audience.
What the anthology lacks in terms of theoretical coherence, Huhndorf's Mapping the Americas makes up with driving prose and focus. The author uses transnationalism to investigate the intersections of American postcolonial studies and Native studies in order to challenge American origin myths, including the perception of Native American absence. As part of this investigation, Huhndorf utilizes Native literary and visual productions as examples of how Native artists challenge the historic and ongoing actions of colonization across North America. Chapter 1 traces the process of America's colonizing Alaska, beginning with the 1867 purchase of territory and extending through expeditions; land and human exploitation; world's fair exhibitions; and the use of maps, photographs, and travel narratives that rendered the harsh terrain familiar and the indigenous inhabitants invisible. Huhndorf's second chapter investigates how Igloolik Isuma Productions uses film – especially the form of the ethnographic documentary – to subvert Native stereotypes of absence through works that teach and record Inuit beliefs, language, and lifeways for Inuit audiences; Isuma also globally distributes feature films based on Inuit mythology and history. Chapter 3 focusses on indigenous feminism, offering insightful analyses of how plays by Mojica, Marie Clements, and Spiderwoman Theater challenge Native and non-Native patriarchal views that relegate Native women into sexualized, subservient, and silent stereotypes. The last chapter, “Picture Revolution,” presents another astute examination of an artistic work, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, through which Huhndorf unifies her book's thematic issues by examining Silko's creation of maps, photographs, and national narrative – tools used for the colonization of the Americas – in order to construct an intertribal world where indigenous inhabitants revolt and reclaim North America.
Although Huhndorf's insistence upon tight definitions of Native nationalism and transnationalism begins to feel strained and tedious, the questions her work poses are extremely relevant. What would happen if Native transnationalism were placed in the center of American studies? As we witness Sarah Palin build her political persona through embodying nineteenth-century Alaskan colonization myths or the attempts of the governor of Arizona to reinforce an imagined line cutting through the Yaqui Nation and Indian country, such narratives of Native Americans' ancient and continuous presence jar notions of nation, borders, histories, representation, and identity. Significantly, both books insist upon this broader vision.
