Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English
Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English
Review
Reviewed by:

Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture

Shari M. Huhndorf. Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2009. vii + 202 pp. US $39.95.

Shari M. Huhndorf’s new monograph, provocatively titled Mapping the Americas, offers a much needed alternative to the recent dominance of nationalist criticism in Native American studies, a focus which has resulted in the “underrepresentation of women writers” (4). While Huhndorf’s book can be read as working to address this inequity, she also questions the relative absence of Native studies within the emerging field of postnationalist or transnationalist American studies, which may acknowledge the long history of American exceptionalism but avoids delving into the stark reality of American imperialism both domestically and internationally. And Native Americans, of course, most vividly represent that disturbing legacy and its contemporary manifestations, as disputes over land claims, access to and control over natural resources, and cultural, political, linguistic, and economic sovereignty continue to be fought throughout the Americas. As Huhndorf explains in her introduction, she uses a two-pronged focus in order to create a sustained dialogue between Native American and American studies, where such conversations might otherwise have been [End Page 205] seen as incommensurable, because to place Native American studies under the umbrella of American studies would be perceived as an imperializing move. To do so, Huhndorf turns to various sites of cultural struggle and resistance, as manifested in Native-authored literature and visual arts produced by and about Native Americans, including museum exhibition documents, picture postcards, sculpture, and film.

Not surprisingly, Huhndorf begins her study with an examination of how the Indigenous populations of Alaska were colonized as part of America’s efforts at imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her first book, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Cornell up, 2001), devotes considerable space to exploring how Americans have historically reclaimed Native Americans “as part of their own past” (15), particularly through displays at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 and the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Likewise, in Mapping the Americas, Huhndorf draws on a wide array of documents, including drawings done by Yup’ik and Inupiaq students (to promote government efforts to assimilate the Eskimo population) and pavilions designed to showcase colonized cultures at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, held in Seattle in 1909, to understand how the Eskimos were visually infantilized and literally dispossessed by the process of colonization. Her readings of two postcards from the 1909 exposition, one portraying two Eskimo women in Western bourgeois apparel titled “Educated Eskimos” and the other, an image of two toddlers—one in a loin cloth and the other in a long fur coat—called “Igorotte Baby from the Phillipines [sic] and Eskimo Baby from Alaska,” are the most fascinating of the chapter and make a convincing case for the perversity of American exceptionalism within an explicitly transnational framework by attending to multiple sites of American imperialism through a single image. But Huhndorf goes a step further by looking at gendered figurations of these colonized others, namely the Igorotte boy and Eskimo girl, noting that the latter is presented as “more racially advanced and altogether unthreatening” (61), which makes her potentially easier to assimilate.

While this attentiveness to gender is most welcome, the chapters that follow are more uneven in their efforts to pursue what is a complex coupling of often competing agendas. Huhndorf’s second chapter (on Igloolik Isuma Productions) posits an interesting explanation for why Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) has garnered international praise and box-office profits while Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk’s second film, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, has not had similar commercial success; she suggests that the more explicitly anti-colonial message of the second film has made [End Page 206] it less appealing to non-Inuit audiences. Having taught Atanarjuat, the chapter reinforced my own frustrations with non-Native student reactions to the film, and specifically their tendency to treat it as an ethnographic exercise, as well as their discomfort with the film’s concluding moments which self-reflexively take on the film’s ostensibly timeless qualities by showing outtakes of the cast and crew in contemporary clothing, adeptly handling the high-tech equipment used to make the movie. What gets lost in her analysis is gender, except in the concluding paragraphs of the chapter, where Huhndorf notes the need to think about the social disruption caused by violence against women rather than actually discussing it in detail. Chapters 3 and 4 shift to more explicit explorations of gender by examining the work of several contemporary Indigenous female playwrights and Leslie Marmon Silko’s magnificent novel, Almanac of the Dead, which literally deconstructs the cartographic arrogance of American imperialism and thus can be read as probing the limitations of postnational American studies from a Native woman’s perspective. These two chapters demonstrate Huhndorf’s skill at addressing a multitude of issues in an accessible yet sophisticated manner; here, the book is a real pleasure to read. And while the relative dearth of work done on Indigenous women’s theatre in North America makes the fact that Huhndorf devotes only a single chapter to this subject slightly frustrating, she has written a superb entry on “American Indian Drama and the Politics of Performance” in The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States Since 1945 (2006), which has already begun to redress this critical neglect. However, the coda which concludes Mapping the Americas is tantalizing but ultimately disappointing. Huhndorf examines Shelley Niro’s 1997 installation, “The Border,” a work that she rightly claims “alludes to the suppressed gendered violence of conquest” and the primacy of the nation-state by refusing to replicate traditional national borders (173). Niro, as a Mohawk woman, has much at stake in this installation precisely because the Mohawk nation, as Huhndorf notes, has been severed by the forty-ninth parallel. Niro was born in Niagara Falls, New York, but now resides in Brantford, Ontario, near the Six Nations Reserve, and has created an impressive body of work about the transnational negotiations that she and her family (particularly her sisters) face as Mohawk women who literally live on the border.

What is absent from the all too brief coda and Huhndorf’s work generally is an overt acknowledgement of how the specifics of that biographical context intersect with and are integral to discussions of Native studies north of the forty-ninth parallel. While Huhndorf does reference selected [End Page 207] critical works by Native writers and scholars who live and work in Canada, including Emma LaRocque, Cheryl Suzack, Daniel Heath Justice, and Simon Ortiz, I was surprised that she is not more familiar with a number of recent texts by Natives and non-Natives that speak quite directly to Huhndorf’s key concerns. Most obvious among these is Julia Emberley’s Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal (2007), which employs similar reading strategies and tools to explore how models of the bourgeois family were imposed upon Native peoples within Canada and beyond with highly destructive consequences. Emberley employs Royal Canadian Mounted Police Archives, digital archives of photographs from the Royal Museum of British Columbia depicting Native families, and a recent television movie about residential schooling in Canada, alongside fiction and art installations, to explore how the relationship between the white, Western, heterosexual family and the state has flourished and desperately needs to be deconstructed in order for other Native-centred models of identity and praxis to emerge. Emberley also refers to Shelley Niro in the concluding pages of her study, turning to Niro’s film Honey Moccasin, to rethink desire and undermine dominant “romantic myths of aboriginality” in a playfully subversive manner that refuses merely to embrace modernization but rather calls for strategic decolonization of “the multiple forms of colonial violence and brutality” (256).

Indeed, recent books and articles by Native scholars, writers, and activists such as Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, Kristina Fagan, Jeannette Armstrong, Kim Anderson, and Jo-Ann Episkenew, to name a few, that probe Indigenous identities often with a sustained focus on women could be employed by Huhndorf to create a more compelling transnational framework of conversation. It may seem all too easy to criticize these gaps in Huhndorf’s work from the other side of the border—partly because Canada’s own ambivalences about its oft-debated postcolonial status have much more overtly forced writers and scholars north of the forty-ninth parallel to engage with the nation’s history of colonialism, especially with respect to Aboriginal peoples. American exceptionalism is a powerful and sustained narrative that requires enormous energy to be dismantled, and Huhndorf has done a terrific job in taking that on in her new book. However, Huhndorf is too smart to be let off the hook, and I’d love to see her present a truly trans-American critical perspective in her writing. Nonetheless, Mapping the Americas is an important book, one that deserves our attention for deftly coupling Native studies and American studies while remaining focused on Indigenous women’s issues. [End Page 208]

Jennifer Andrews
University of New Brunswick

Works Cited

Emberley, Julia V. Defamiliarizing the Aboriginal: Cultural Practices and Decolonization in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
Huhndorf, Shari M. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell up, 2001.
———. Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture. Ithaca: Cornell up, 2009.

Share