Review: Native American Representations

Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations #

By Gretchen M. Bataille, ed.

University of Nebraska Press, 2001

Bataille, Gretchen M., ed. Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. ISBN 9781496245298.

In 1994 a company of European and North American scholars gathered at the Chateau de la Bretesche in Brittany (a French chateau, an ocean away from the communities under discussion) to theorize representation in American Indian literatures. The setting is almost too perfect an emblem, and the guest list is the point. Gretchen Bataille, who has spent a career anatomizing the machinery of Native misrepresentation (first in The Pretend Indians with Charles Silet, then in the life-writing scholarship she produced with Kathleen Mullen Sands), collects those symposium papers here, and the transatlantic roster makes this a book about how images of Native peoples travel rather than how they function at home. In this review, I will argue that the volume's lasting value is comparative and archival, namely its record of an early attempt to think Indigenous representation transnationally; I will also argue that its ceiling is structural, since a collection built to indict colonial silencing reproduces, in its own table of contents, the very imbalance it has the vocabulary to name.

Distortion and appropriation, flip sides of the same coin #

Bataille's introduction supplies the through-line. She begins with the Norse encounter and the word "Skraeling," moves to Columbus appraising the people he met as material for extraction, and follows the same operation forward through captivity narratives, dime novels, Wild West shows, and the German and Japanese hobbyist tourism that lets enthusiasts rent an "Indian" identity for a weekend. In my estimation her claim runs as follows: misrepresentation has not evolved so much as changed costume. What begins as a colonial technique for justifying seizure becomes, five centuries later, a commodity form; distortion and appropriation are flip sides of the same coin, one operation running at different speeds.

The essays test this thesis from several angles. David Murray works the question of cultural property (what does appropriation actually take?). Louis Owens appears both as subject and as contributor; his essay on The Sharpest Sight closes the loop between Native authorship and the reception machinery the volume anatomizes. Kathleen Sands takes up collaborative personal narratives, where the ethics of representation grow complicated (two authors, one voice). Other contributors turn to the Federal Writers' Project state guides, an underused archive of official "Americana" in which Native people appear as scenery. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff closes the substantive essays by reversing the telescope, reading early Native depictions of Europeans; Kathryn Shanley supplies a theoretical afterword.

Ruoff's reversal is the volume's best structural decision. After two hundred pages of watching Europeans invent "Indians," the reader watches Native writers describe Europeans, and the asymmetry of the archive becomes visible rather than merely asserted.

Method, and what the method costs #

The contributors work almost entirely with texts (literary works, journals, guidebooks, ethnographic and popular writing), read through postcolonial theory and theories of appropriation. In 1994 this approach was genuinely early. Scholars had scarcely brought postcolonial frameworks to Native American material, and the question of whether they fit at all, given that settler colonialism does not end in decolonization, sits unresolved but usefully open across several chapters.

The costs come with the format. Symposium volumes cohere as conversations and fragment as books, and this one does both. The essays share a preoccupation rather than an argument, so the reader supplies more connective work than the introduction does; the seven-year gap between gathering and publication left some pieces trailing the theoretical conversation they entered. The title promises "distorted images," yet the analysis stays close to print, with film, photography, and material culture largely offstage. Likewise, "representation" is a rubric elastic enough to hold nearly anything, which is why the volume feels capacious in some chapters and diffuse across the whole.

The most serious objection is one Shari Huhndorf raises in Great Plains Quarterly, and I find it hard to answer. A collection built to indict colonial silencing includes strikingly few Native scholars, and Native women's voices are thinner still; Shanley and Ruoff carry a great deal of weight for a book with this many contributors. This irony is structural, not incidental. The volume theorizes who gets to speak while reproducing, in its own contents, an imbalance it can name but does not remedy.

Verdict #

In short, the book is useful and its ceiling is clear. Its lasting value is comparative and archival: it documents an early moment when European and North American scholars tried to think together about Indigenous representation, and it put transnational appropriation (especially the European hobbyist scene) on the scholarly agenda before that became a recognized subfield. Read alongside Philip Deloria's Playing Indian and Huhndorf's own Going Native, both of which arrive within a few years, it looks less like a breakthrough than a well-timed staging area.

I recommend it for graduate students in Native American literary studies who want to see how postcolonial theory first entered the field, and for scholars of transatlantic reception and hobbyism who need the early citations. Readers looking for a current account of Indigenous self-representation should start elsewhere and return to this volume for its history. Owens's death in 2002 gives his contribution a weight the editors could not have anticipated; it reminds us how much of this volume's intellectual energy came from a generation of critics whose work the field is still catching up to.