| "Tricksters at Large" is an interdisciplinary study of American literature that explores Native American responses to the imposition of European languages, cultural practices and technologies. Employing Gerald Vizenor's theories of trickster discourse and crossblood culture, it focuses on the history of the Pequot Indians, the development of the American Indian gambling industry and the gambling motif in the contemporary Native American Indian novel. These disparate subjects are examined in context of the ongoing Mashantucket Pequot renaissance and the Akwesasne gambling war. By examining these contemporary phenomena, "Tricksters at Large" establishes a framework to read several texts from the colonial, antebellum and contemporary periods. These include the Pequot War narratives of John Underhill, John Mason and Lion Gardener, Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, James E. Seaver's Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, the collected writings of William Apess, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the Iroquois Code of Handsome Lake and contemporary works of fiction by Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich and Vizenor.;Employing the history of the Pequot Indians as an extended case study of the effects of colonialism on an indigenous North American community, my analysis examines how non-Indian writers have constructed Pequot history and proliferated the myth of Pequot extinction while Pequot writers and speakers have advanced a counter-narrative of Pequot survival, resistance and reassertion. This line of inquiry includes an examination of the ways in which the contemporary Mashantucket Pequot Indians have defined their own "Indianness," advanced the counter-narrative of Pequot survival, and employed federal Indian policy to their own advantage.;This study of Pequot success is counterbalanced with a study of the Akwesasne gambling war. My analysis of this conflict examines current debates concerning the nature and use of tribal sovereignty, the role of tradition in a post-invasion, consumer-oriented economy, and the ways in which Indianness has been contested within the Native American community itself. Finally, these issues are examined through readings of three contemporary Native American novels (Silko's Ceremony, Vizenor's Bearheart and Erdrich's Love Medicine) that employ traditional indigenous gambling stories to examine fundamental questions of difference. |
