Like "Reeds through the Ribs of a Basket": Native Women Weaving Stories

Over morning coffee in a Michigan bookstore, we are talking about Native literature: reading it, teaching it, theorizing it, living it. We are searching for interpretive ground, a critical center. It doesn't take long to realize that the center inhabits shifting ground, borderland in motion. Mixed blood, margins, cross blood, mixed culture, frontier space.... We are pretty serious about the discussion, as serious as you can get about trickster territory, especially before noon. Then Patrick LeBeau talks about that old photo he saw. Indian students from Pratt's infamous Carlisle boarding school marching in a bigparade at the 1893 World's Fair and Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. They all carry an instrument or emblem of the trade they have been taught. Tools of the farmer, tailor, carpenter. Carrying hammers and hoes, they are Indians marching into the new era. And here we are, we laugh. A bunch of Indians in an academic parade, marching along with our Ph.D.s, degrees held like banners of our own indoctrination. Do we carry the tools of literary studies that way? Do we naively wave theory like a frat emblem? Are the current theories destructive to the essence of Native Literature as were many boarding school teachings to a Native lifestyle? At least we must admit that at certain times and in important ways they are inhospitable. A full understanding of Native literary traditions cannot flourish when the interpretive theories, the tools of literary analysis, all stem from another/ an other cultural and literary aesthetic. When reading any literature we translate the textual symbols. We reanimate them to give them meaning. But is it possible to translate the hieroglyphs of a Native American system with the interpretive tools of an American or Continental literary or scholastic tradition? For example, the hierograms of Indian expression, the sacred symbols, stem from a particular world view that attributes to words and sounds a spiritual element. Can we "read" these symbols correctly