Homelands: Politics, identity, and place in the American Indian novel

In Homelands, I explain the theoretical implications of the process of decolonization by exploring the ways cultural recovery and political awakening are closely intertwined. In American Indian history, these two concepts are inextricably linked, because U.S. colonialism oppresses Native peoples both with political subjugation and with cultural deprivation. Drawing on a body of theory which has been emerging in recent years, an interdisciplinary "realist" approach to identity and culture, I offer an alternative to the sharp essentialism-postmodernism opposition that, I argue, will not allow us to understand the nature of indigenous struggles. This work is thus concerned fundamentally with the question of how we can develop a theory of identity which explains not only the Native novel, but also the everyday lives and hopeful futures of those to whom it refers.;Native scholars use postmodernist theory to explain the American Indian colonial condition, and have successfully challenged the dominant society's essentialist demand that Native culture be "authentic" by deconstructing the often detrimental racial category of "Indian." But in subverting the very notion of racial and cultural difference, postmodernist theorists are also unable to confront why the world might actually be different for colonized Native peoples, who daily experience real racial and national oppression, than it is for majority peoples.;The realist theoretical tradition reconceives (American Indian) cultural identity not as foundational or authentic but as relational; realists argue that what is called "identity" has a cognitive (as opposed to a purely affective or emotional) basis, and is capable of referring accurately to social facts that constitute American Indian lives. Thus theorized, the process of cultural recovery is not a search for ahistorical essences, but is instead understood as an ongoing dialectic of inquiry through identity and experience. Historically situating the Native novel in the Red Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, a moment of radical political empowerment and cultural recovery for American Indians, I show how three novels responding to the events of this era, N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, James Welch's Winter in the Blood, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, represent a realist process in which political awakening and cultural recovery go hand in hand. In my readings of these novels, I develop a non-essentialist conception of Native cultural identity by charting the recovery of the relationship to the land, and the values this process generates.;My dissertation concludes by extending this exploration of political and cultural growth from the Native novel into daily life, in a study of the incarceration of American Indians in the U.S. prison system today. I show how my understanding of Native experience and identity better supports our political interventions, and explain the need for praxis in American Indian Studies to root Native lives in the real world.