Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1997
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3/4, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 251-59.
Abstract
In the final essay of his most recent book, The Turn to the Native: Studies in Criticism and Culture, self-styled "ethnocritic" Arnold Krupat wonders aloud whether, through his interpretive activities, he hasn't become a "leftist colonizer" of the very sort critiqued so scathingly by Tunisian revolutionary theorist Albert Memmi more than three decades ago (p. 126). This worthy query, seemingly posed mainly as a rhetorical device allowing its author to absolve himself of the charge-he shortly concludes that simply by being "someone who reads and writes about Native American literature" he has made himself "useful without vanity" and is therefore merely "a nice Jewish boy among the Indians" (p. 130)-is plainly deserving of a deeper, less self-interested interrogation.
Leaving aside the conundrum of personal vanity imbedded in the decision by any writer to publish an autobiographical piece, and the thoroughly begged question of the perspective from which Krupat's work might be judged useful (on the book's dust jacket, its publisher announces that The Turn to the Native has been "long-awaited," but neglects to mention by whom or why), this thin volume contains no shortage of material upon which to base a more detached and scrupulous sort of analysis. A close reading of the overall text leads unerringly to an understanding of the author's sentiments radically at odds with the carefully- contrived air of innocence and good intentions he adopts toward its end.
One need venture no further than the opening pages of the first essay, "Criticism and Native American Literature," to appreciate both the magnitude of Krupat's anti-Indian bias and the lengths to which he is prepared to go in alternately defending and denying it. In this single twenty-nine page endeavor, he manages not only to "debunk" virtually every indigenous author who has lately contributed significantly to the field of literary/ cultural criticism-a roster extending alphabetically from Sherman Alexie to Robert Allen Warrior-but to align himself openly with positions assumed by many of the dominant society's worst appropriationists: Michael Castro, Sam Gill, Jerry Mander, and Werner Sollors, to name a few.2 Along the way, he offers a tacit endorsement of such unabashedly Indian-hating diatribes as those compiled by James Clifton as The Invented Indian (p. 11), a collection with which he seems unfamiliar since he not only fails to cite it directly but seriously misstates the thrust of its major argument.3
Ultimately, one is left with the distinct impression that there is hardly a white "interpreter" of Native America Krupat is not prepared to support in one way or several, scarcely an indigenous writer he is not prepared to manipulate, misrepresent, or degrade. Take, for example, his casual dismissal of several detailed native critiques of the material put forth by "James Clifton, Werner Sollors, and Sam Gill, among others" as "ad hominem attacks." This cavalier and misleading depiction is offered on the very page where he opines, after barely a sentence of analysis and no quotations, that remarks critical of a "prominent non-Native scholar" made in 1992 by Lakota poet/essayist Elizabeth Cook-Lynn were "racist" (p. 11 ).4 The Turn to the Native is littered from start to finish with similar polemical distortions.
Comments
Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln