I should probably preface this week's contribution with a small disclaimer: I don't always connect every single thing on earth to American Indians or AI literature. That said, I know I do it fairly continually these days. The reason for this is that I'm currently putting the final touches on my doctoral exams reading lists and working on several papers specific to my field, so my semester is pretty much 24/7 American Indian lit. So please bear with me as I once again tie the class readings to my own work, as it's proving very helpful to me!
Now then, let's move on to de Certeau. One of the most compelling parts of this book appears in the general introduction to the text. The author states on page xiii:
For instance, the ambiguity that subverted from within the Spanish colonizers' "success" in imposing their own culture on the indigenous Indians is well known. Submissive, and even consenting to their subjection, the Indians nevertheless often made of the rituals, representations, and laws imposed on them something quite different from what their conquerors had in mind; they subverted them not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept. They were other within the very colonization that outwardly assimilated them; their use of the dominant social order deflected its power, which they lacked the means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it.
This passage took me back six years ago or so, to a memorable two weeks that I spent traveling the Southwest crammed into a fifteen passenger van with thirteen other college students and all our belongings. Our trip was a slow meander through many amazing Native American sites in Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico, and nowhere was as memorable as Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico (see images below). As a Native person myself, these opportunities to meet hundreds of Indian people and see their various histories played out in the locales in the Southwest was unparalleled, and Acoma was the pinnacle of my experience. Our guide through the Acoma Pueblo--the oldest continually inhabited community in North America, since 1150 A.D.--was one of the community elders entrusted with the sacred duty of maintaining tribal habitation in this mostly deserted pueblo. He had much to share with us, all of it interesting. However, the one topic that I found most memorable was the context that Jimmy, our guide, placed upon the seeming passive conversion of Acoma Indians to Catholicism and the threading of Catholic and other Western practices of everyday living into the fabric of Pueblo life. He pointed out the covert geographic significance of the location of the Catholic church in the pueblo. The entire building surrounded the former site of the main pueblo kiva, where most of the tribe's spiritual and other ceremonial practices took place. However, this covering of the kiva site was indeed exactly that--a covering, rather than a removal. The kiva itself was simply covered over with the church altar, thereby conflating Acoma spiritual practices with the form and function of the Catholicism that was now reflected by the Acoma Indians as the formal community religious practice due to intense pressures by the colonizing Spanish. In Jimmy's words, this meant that, although the Acoma Indians had sincerely embraced and accepted much of the framework of Catholicism, this was done squarely on their own terms, under the radar. In this sense, they both accepted and reflected Catholicism, while simultaneously and largely invisibly invoking the power of the kiva and Acoma spiritual traditions. Or, to steal de Certeau's terminology, the Acoma Indians' "use of the dominant social order deflected it's power, which they lacked the means to challenge; they escaped it without leaving it" (xiii). I would add to this my own assertion that "escape" can be taken to mean more than a mere slipping of physical bonds; rather, in this sense escape can further be understood as a loosening and manipulation of ideological, cultural, or spiritual bonds as well.
This can be seen in many pieces of American Indian-authored literature. One text that comes immediately to mind is D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded. In this story, the mother of the protagonist, Catharine Leon, spends the better part of a lifetime displaying a seeming full conversion to Catholicism; however, hiding underneath the surface is a continuing connection to and respect for the spiritual and cultural traditions of her Salish Indian people, a subversive side of Catharine that will eventually compel her to denounce her Christianity in order to die on Native terms and in the embrace of the beliefs of her Salish people.
On the same page of de Certeau's work as mentioned above, he states that, "The presence and circulation of a representation (taught by preachers, educators, and popularizers as the key to socioeconomic advancement) tells us nothing about what it is for its users" (xiii). This assertion is abundantly illustrated in the character of Catharine Leon. Although she has become a sort of poster child for Catholic conversion and is held up to other Indians of her community as a shining example of what it can mean to be Indian yet converted to the "truth," her experience is deeper and more conflicted than can be understood by simply analyzing her conversion as a thing of fact (Is she now Catholic? Yes? Then it's a thing that is done, finished!) Her mere presence and movement as a Catholic convert never removes the now-hidden layer of her Indianness, her "other"-ness. Rather, it's simply a form of being that she has, at least for certain moments, placed around herself like a set of white man's clothes. She reflects, but only to a certain depth. Beyond that depth, she remains herself, and so nothing is lost even in the process of "gaining" Catholicism. To cop another de Certeau phrase, Catharine exhibits the "procedure[ . . . ] of 'consumption'" (xiii), not the fact of having been fully consumed. In the same sense, "the other," whether that other be American Indian or otherwise, is extremely difficult to pin down to categories of "everyday," as that everyday ordinariness often conceals a lower layer of meaning that will not necessarily be visible to casual (or even intent!) observation. This is part of the reason that some readers find texts such as Sherman Alexie's or Leslie Marmon Silko's difficult to follow or understand, as many Native writers play with these competing layers of the ordinary within their stories and poems. Or, to connect this idea back to what de Certeau notes, they are enacting a deliberate process whereby they "make [through the use of language and "speaking," albeit through a written text] innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests and their own rules" (xiv).
Connie
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