Review of Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel by Sean Kicummah Teuton

Authors

Penelope Kelsey, University of Colorado

Date of this Version

Summer 2011

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly 31:3 (Summer 2011).

Comments

Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

Abstract

In Red Land, Red Power, Cherokee scholar Sean Kicummah Teuton considers three Red Power novels by N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Leslie Marmon Silko with a methodology he terms tribal realism. Teuton defines tribal realism as a "'postpositivist realist' view, which allows for genuine debate and exchange across cultures, while still respecting how social location may grant special access to knowledge." Teuton finds the novels of the Red Power era especially significant for investigation in his forging of tribal realism because of "a new intellectual rigor that ... characterize[d] the Red Power movement," citing the proclamation by Indians of All Tribes from occupied Alcatraz Island as a signal example of this shift. Moreover, Teuton argues that the Red Power novel enacts an "empirical process of decolonization" which is linked to identity and experience, thus illustrating its engagement of a postpositivist realist episteme and "an alternative, historically grounded theory."