Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form by Mark Rifkin (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form by Mark Rifkin Sarah Klotz Mark Rifkin. Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 311 pp. Paperback, $27.95. Speaking for the People follows in a long line of Mark Rifkin’s monographs that put nineteenth-century Native American texts in conversation with political, cultural, and queer and feminist theories. The book looks at four central Native intellectuals—Elias Boudinot, William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Ša—and deftly reads their work as manifesting notions of peoplehood for their respective communities. The book is impressive in its interdisciplinary approach and temporal scope. Rifkin draws together postcolonial theory, Native American and Indigenous studies, and close reading methods for the project of understanding sovereignty and recognition in a century of unique challenges to Native peoplehood and land claims across North America. Rifkin’s central argument is that the texts of these four Native intellectuals reveal how conceptions of Native collectivity emerge through open-ended and ongoing processes. When these writers seek to represent a people, they construct forms of peoplehood that are neither static nor uncontested. Rifkin shows the intellectual labor of conceptualizing and narrativizing Native peoplehood in ways that settler readers will understand, while he simultaneously brings forward the Indigenous political forms that are effaced by this necessary engagement with colonial interlocutors. A crucial organizing principle of the book is Gayatri Spivak’s dual sense of the term “representation,” which will be helpful for scholars thinking through the relationship between literary form, political economy, and coloniality. For Spivak, representation connotes both “proxy” and “portrait” and Rifkin draws heavily on this duality in his reading of how Boudinot, Apess, Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Ša write about their relations with native collectives (14). In short, when they seek to represent their people in written texts, they must also engage with the ways in [End Page 181] which they come to stand in for their people in negotiations with settler readers and the US government. Each chapter takes on a different strategy and a different Native group to explain this process of representation as both proxy and portrait of a people. First, Rifkin tackles the most troubling case study for his claim, Elias Boudinot. Boudinot was the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix and also a member of the party that developed the infamous Treaty of New Echota, which led to the displacement of the Cherokee to Indian Territory. Boudinot’s work to represent the Cherokee nation was so unsuccessful that he was executed for treason in 1839; this strikes me as an ethically fraught way to begin the book. Rifkin performs an illuminating reading of Boudinot’s Letter and Other Papers Relating to Cherokee Affairs (1837), a book-length defense of his decision to sign the treaty. But Rifkin’s argument regarding Boudinot’s claim to representivity solely on the basis of his elite status falls short in addressing how Boudinot’s proximity to settler society—from his education at the Foreign Mission School in Connecticut to his fundraising and publishing work—may also play into his determination that the Cherokee could sever the ties between their nationhood and their land base. The following chapters show more nuanced examples of each writer’s representational project. Chapter 2 reads William Apess’s A Son of the Forest, Eulogy on King Philip, and Indian Nullification to demonstrate how each work engages a process of metonymic substitution in which a central character or event comes to “embody and textually materialize what is legally absent—the existence, scope, and normative force of Indigenous people’s self-determination” (78). Rifkin suggests that, in the absence of a treaty relationship between the US government and New England Natives, Apess brings the historic and ongoing presence of Native peoples in the region to the fore of his texts. The most clear and compelling of Rifkin’s arguments appears in chapter 3, which focuses on Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s depiction of the Paiute people as a clearly delineated tribe with a discretely demarcated land base in her 1883 text Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (Forgotten Books...