HUM 221: Dispossession, Sherman Alexie and defining 'what an Indian can be'

Instead of reading Sherman Alexie right away, even though I assigned "Unauthorized Biography of Myself" for today, I want us to do little groundwork first. Alexie is angry. He has a right to be, of course. But he doesn't let his anger define him. We read an article about him last month on the BookPage website, in which he said:

I love museums, but for me the greatest part of all this is I'm a completely active member of the culture. Forgive the immodesty, but I think it's much more important for an Indian like me to be in The New Yorker magazine than it is for me or an Indian to be in a museum [so that] we join the culture rather than become a separate part of it. It's great to talk about traditions and to see them represented and to get a sense of history, but I think it's more important to change the possibilities of what an Indian is and can be right now.

Now there's a new article out in Sadie, a new magazine of the arts headquartered in Brooklyn. It's titled "The Absolutely True Interview with Sherman Alexie, an Amazing Part-Time Indian" (a play on a recent title of his). Money quote (one of several):

... I think the United States forgets it colonized the Native Americans, and, you know, I should say, by and large, it's white liberals that forget that. I think white conservatives are happy they colonized Native Americans, but white liberals forget that and don't think of themselves as being colonial.

Question: What does Alexie mean by "colonial?" What do I mean by "dictionary?" Serious answer: One of the key concepts we're going to use in HUM 221 is called "post-colonialism." It is defined on an Emory University website on postcololialist studies as the "study of the interactions between European nations and the societies they colonized in the modern period," especially in the former British and French empires in Africa and Asia. Deepika Bahri, author of the Emory website, argued, "the United States might also be described as a postcolonial country, but it is not perceived as such because of its position of power in world politics in the present, its displacement of native American populations, and its annexation of other parts of the world in what may be seen as a form of colonization." I would argue the displacement of Native American populations, and cultures, makes their literature and art, in important ways, post-colonial.

A second money quote from Alexie's interview in Sadie magazine, and one that has to deal with the aftermath of colonialism. Magazine editor Jesse Sposato asked Alexie if he celebrates Thanksgiving. His answer:

Yes! ... You know, white folks brought me Custer, but white folks also brought me Bruce Springsteen, so I'll be giving thanks for Bruce Springsteen.

For more on the displacement of American Indian populations, the Global Policy Forum has a brief survey of displacement titled "Making of The United States: Westward Expansion 1783 to 1890" by Geoffrey Barraclough, professor of modern history at the University of Oxford. We'll look at the map in class; a lot of the time maps are pretty dull, but this one isn't. It shows the historical background of dispossession and colonization that writers like Sherman Alexie work out their vision of what an American Indian can be in contemporary society.