READ! X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent

So far, my resolve to make one post a week is not going well. I’ve been reading a lot of amazing things and producing writing for classes, but man is grad school (or maybe it’s a life thing) tiring!

I read Scott Lyons’ X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent a few weeks ago, and I was just so astonished by his elegant reflections on citizenship that resounded with me beyond its Native American context. This was the first time I really engaged with Native American scholarship (aside from reading some poetry in my undergrad classes), and it helped me understand the predicament of the Native American people that I only knew vaguely about being largely in the dark about American history.

One of the ideas that I had to grapple with while reading this book is that Native Americans aren’t just other ethnic minorities in the U.S. They deserve more attention and agency, because they are in fact divided into separate nations, and trying to exercise their nationhood in an environment where their lands, culture, and political agency are constantly threatened. They haven’t immigrated to this country—the lands are their ancestral homes that they’ve fought to maintain ties to. I think this is a fact that most people often forget, and that as oppressed nations they are more than marginalized groups within the U.S.—they are  nations that are still colonized, a term we think of as something from the past. For why Native American scholars resist terms/fields like “postcolonialism” or “transnationalism,” Robert Warrior’s “Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn” does an excellent job of explaining how these groups are not “post” colonialism at all, and cannot move forward to consider themselves as a transnational collective when they haven’t even been able to recognize their own nationhood that is able to form interweaving relationships with other nations.

Part of Lyons’ book is thinking about how Native American people can thrive within modernity, resisting mainstream narratives that often depict Native Americans as historical figures in traditional dress, or reduce them to images and slogans on butter, sports teams, and cartoons. He claims that he is a nationalist, not in the negative sense we might associate with aggressive policies, racism, or blind patriotism, but in seeing the need for the robust formation of a nation for the Native American people that can prioritize their interests and prosperity. He argues that to create the kind of nation we want (and this is tricky because to claim to be Native American might depend on residence on reservations, speaking the right language, phenotype, or blood lineage), we must actively demand the things we want to see from its citizens. This means that if the people want to keep their particular language alive, they have to actively speak it and demand others to speak it too. Whatever the nation is imagined to be, the citizens must actively uphold this vision for it to come true. The nation-building comes from practice, not just theorization (this means if you complain about how your leader sucks, or how they’re racist, sexist etc. and don’t want this to be the reputation of your country, do more than complain and act out the kind of nationhood/citizenry you want to see).

Growing up in New Zealand which also has an indigenous people called the Maori, I thought it an interesting contrast to see the ways in which the Native Americans seem so much more invisible in American culture than the Maori are in New Zealand. The Maori make up a larger percentage of the population in New Zealand, for sure, but there seems to be a better integration of Maori culture and I’ve often felt proud about this fact. In elementary school, we were all taught basic Maori words and songs, and even practiced traditional weaving and art. The national anthem is sung in Maori first, and even in my high school we were divided into houses (much like in Hogwarts) that we referred to as whanau, meaning house in Maori. At the same time, after reading Lyons’ book I begin to wonder if New Zealand is really the model for respecting indigenous people as I originally thought it to be. Yes, the country utilizes the language and culture to make it seem like they are respectful of the people the land was forcibly taken away from, but does this really benefit the Maori people themselves? Aren’t the Maori people still stereotyped as poor, unlearned, and victims of other forms of systematic oppression? When I learned Maori culture in school, didn’t only white teachers teach us the language and arts without teaching us the historical context of why we must respect the Maori culture? Whether in New Zealand, America, or elsewhere, we still have a long way to go to make things right for indigenous people.

Pushing me to think of the world around me in new ways, Lyons also introduced me to the idea of rhetorical sovereignty. This means that a people should have the sovereignty to depict themselves how they want to be seen, whether that be in the media or everyday life. I think this concept is incredibly important in our current time, where people fight for representation in media and demand for more diverse narratives to be heard (this means that having a token ethnic character in anything written by a white storyteller is no longer enough—minorities and different groups should be able to tell their stories and represent themselves how they want to be seen). And true to this, I don’t want to summarize Lyons’ work more than I have done now (or am I just lazy? Let’s keep that a secret and allow me to act all educated and politically correct). Instead, I encourage anyone reading this to read his book themselves, and allow him the rhetorical sovereignty to speak in his own words.

I feel like I’ve written this post as a rambling stream-of-consciousness, but this is just how my thought process has been throughout my time at graduate school as I frantically try and piece together things I’ve learned in different classes to make sense of it all.  A lot of my personal research interests are leaning towards nationhood and citizenship (the woman’s role in the image of the successful immigrant as anchors to a sense of nationhood, the Yellow Peril, how freak shows contributed to the construction of a national American identity, the infantilized citizen… the list goes on). As someone who has almost always lived outside the country of my own citizenship (I’m legally a Korean citizen who spent most of her life in New Zealand, now in America) this is a topic that intrigues me to no end. Recently, I read in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the U.S.-Mexican Border (another great book!!) that citizenship could be divided into three zones: the political (right to vote, legal standing), the economic (right to work and prosper in that country), and the cultural. I technically participate in the economic zone  (I get paid as a grad student/employee of the university, and I pay taxes), and I think I’m sufficiently well-versed in American culture (I get enough pop culture references to pass as American in conversation, if I had an American accent). Am I almost American? (No, I wish. Although why do I want to be? That’s another matter). Where are my allegiances? Anyway, I think it’s worthwhile for anyone of any field to reflect on their position in the world, and how we can be active citizens in whatever zone or nation to make our communities a better place.