This Document Is a Ph.D. Thesis Written for the Department of Anthropology at the University

Clara NiiSka

P.O. Box 484

Bemidji, MN 56619

and

P.O. Box 7633

Minneapolis, MN 55407

(612) 331-3145 [voice mail]

(612) 339-8317 [office]

September 30, 1998

Preface

This document is a Ph.D. thesis written for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, and advised by anthropologists and linguists. It is situated, at times dialectically, within the academic traditions and discursive constraints of the formal discipline of anthropology. There are sections in this thesis in which the lens of anthropology is reversed, including some of the discomfiting questions asked by indigenous people of anthropologists.

This document is a presentation and exegesis of Wub-e-ke-niew’s theories of language and communication, drawing extensively on Wub-e-ke-niew’s writings “about” language, and on papers and letters jointly written by Wub-e-ke-niew and myself. In the context of anthropology theses, it rests awkwardly between conventional disciplinary categories. Wub-e-ke-niew should, legitimately, be credited as a posthumous co-author rather than as an “informant,” in a work which is both more and less than a “key informant” ethnography of epistemology, an indigenous man’s critical theory of Euroamerican language, and a collaborative work toward bridging the profound differences between indigenous and Euroamerican perspectives.

The content of this thesis is--as is all writing--strongly influenced by the contexts in which the work underlying it was done. Wub-e-ke-niew was Ahnishinahbæótjibway of the Bear Dodem, a brilliant man who stood at the threshold of his people’s extinction and wrote both that, “We must all find a way to work harmoniously together, to create a balanced world for the generations yet to come,” (1995: ), and, “I am among the very last of my people, and I will not vanish in silence--you will not get away with your ‘perfect crime’ of stealing this content” (1997: ).

Wub-e-ke-niew was also my husband. He was a man who casually expected more strength than I knew I had, lifting deer and extricating pickup trucks mired to the axles in mud, but who started and warmed up my car for me in the winter because he knew--despite my protests--that my southern California childhood makes my appreciation of subzero weather a matter of determined effort. The content of this thesis grew from fourteen years of conversation and sometimes intense discussion between my husband and myself. Some of it was as gifts to a beloved, longer-lasting than long-stemmed roses, but most was generated during years of collaborative work and mutual discovery.

Wub-e-ke-niew was very aware of what he described as “pugilistic” tactics of writing, and his published work reflects his intent to, as he put it, “debunk” Western epistemological hegemony. When I returned to graduate school in 1996 after a hiatus of twenty years, it was with Wub-e-ke-niew’s encouragement and support. Although he respectfully declined to express a preference before I charted the direction of my graduate work, once the decision was made, he enthusiastically embraced a project we had begun years previously. During the last year of his life, Wub-e-ke-niew realized that he did not have long to live, and the formal interviews recorded during the summer of 1997 reflect his carefully strategized response to the possibility of his Ahnishinahbæótjibway voice being heard, and perhaps amplified by the authority of academia.

The context of this work is deeply personal, as well as deliberately political within highly contested milieux. But then, one could argue (as I shall) that all academic writing has political aspects.

This thesis is situated amid a number of theoretical and ethical issues currently being debated in anthropology:

The role of indigenous anthropologists, and collateral questions about uncredentialled indigenous people’s often-uncomfortable scrutiny of Euroamerican and other Western societies. Closely connected to these are difficult issues of “voice,” authenticity, and the relative power and privilege associated with academia.

The roots of anthropology, and the discipline’s historical ties to the colonial enterprise.

Long-debated questions of linguistic relativity, and the interrelationships between language and culture; also the question of precisely what constitutes “language.”

Anthropology as an academic discipline and as a “social science,” and the parameters of “valid” data and “acceptable” analyses and explanations.

Ethical problems arising from working within a context of disparate privilege, strongly contested factional divisions, and hotly disputed issues of identity and “authenticity.”

The problems of “objectivity” in light of my deep personal ties to the community within which my subject matter arises.

I shall address this issues within the context of current anthropological debates, as well as by soliciting review and commentary from people of the indigenous community.

Clara NiiSka-etc.

P.O. Box 484

Bemidji, MN 56619

and

401 S.E. 8th Street, #11

Minneapolis, MN 55414

(612) 331-3145

May 3, 1998

Revised, Expanded and Annotated: May 16, 1998

Very Tentative Thesis Outline

Wub-e-ke-niew said, “The English language is hierarchical, linear, abstract, violent--and is a ‘male’ language which excludes female understandings.” He believed that “language creates the world,” and, when pressed for an example of what he meant, said, “All you have to do is look at the forest: the way the Ahnishinahbæótjibway kept it, and the way the White man has destroyed it.”

What did Wub-e-ke-niew mean?

[advisor’s suggestion: what is written, where it is]

Introduction

I am writing for more than one audience, and from more than one point of view. My integrity and commitments are rooted in the Ahnishinahbæótjibway Dodems, although my honesty and honor as a scholar are also in the academic community--and, as Dennison wrote, there is a nearly impenetrable “glass wall” between them ( :). Drafts of this work (are being) circulated among my several audiences, in academia as well as to Ahnishinahbæótjibway. The crux of my thesis is the disparity between these.

[advisor’s comment: make ordering of chapters explicit

introduce ... take apart in straightforward to the more complex, provide a map

make the questions meaningful]

Linearity and hierarchical organization are two of Wub-e-ke-niew’s sharpest critiques of “the English language” and “Western Civilization.” The organization of this thesis is a tentative bridge between two discourses: the “straight forward” structure of academic writing and the multi-layered interactive discourse of the Ahnishinahbæótjibway. In doing this, disparities arise from the very beginning: the convention of Western European academic writing is to explicitly detail the process in advance, during, and afterwards. The academic boilerplate, exposited in innumerable how-to books for undergraduates, is: “This is what I’m going to say ... this is what I’m saying (a, b, c, c1, c2, c3, d) ... this is what I’ve said.” In terms of Ahnishinahbæótjibway values, this could easily be considered an arrogant imposition of one’s own interpretation, as well as an insult to the reader’s intelligence. Perhaps the quasi-acceptable compromise is a hint: not too subtle for the average academic reader, and a bit too, “hey, look at me, I’ll tell you what I’m doing as though you’re not smart enough to figure it out for yourself” for indigenous readers.

This thesis is an exegesis, directly and ordinally derived from my topic statement:

What did Wub-e-ke-niew mean?

The table of contents is an outline, in Western academic terms, of the skeleton of the thesis. In some dimensions, my writing derives from the hierarchical paradigm indicated by the table of contents, and in some, from a recursive, dialogical and interwoven structure. My intent is to translate Wub-e-ke-niew’s statements about language into an anthropological framework, including a detailed analysis of some aspects of his meaning and the contexts within which he framed them, and then to explore some of the implications of his statements as applied to that framework.

How he saw the American English language from the position of being dominated

The “sidebar” formatting device of Euroamerican popular periodical literature, has been liberally used as a means of providing a parallel, more respectful in Ahnishinahbæótjibway terms, discourse. In these sidebars, I shall quote at some length from Wub-e-ke-niew and other indigenous speakers and writers, as well as reproducing some significant portions of relevant primary documents. In Euroamerican academic writing, one interprets with authority; in indigenous terms, one offers evidence so that the reader can come to her or his own understanding.

Part of my purpose in this thesis is to explore the to-Western-eyes nearly invisible interstices between indigenous understanding and what Wub-e-ke-niew called the “regimented thinking of Western Civilization.” In other words, I intend to write about what, according to Wub-e-ke-niew, cannot be said in the English language. This is not a straightforward project, as will be made more apparent throughout the body of this work. From an Ahnishinahbæótjibway perspective, the English language is filled with lacunae, defended voids and realms of the “unspeakable” and unacknowledged. I shall dance with the ghosts upon whose bones academic tradition rests, and, in so doing, shall attempt to draw the non-indigenous reader into at least glimpsing beyond what, in an indigenous analysis of their perceived reality, is an illusory but opaque glass wall.

This thesis is not a politically neutral undertaking, although, ultimately, nothing is ever completely disentangled from politics in the West. The politics of works which in their time were presented as being purely academic, including perhaps many of the anthropological classics, may have been invisible to most readers because the political orientation of the scholars was nearly indistinguishable from the overarching agendas of the societies in which these writers were embedded and to which their work was oriented--”pure objectivity” has historically been, in and of itself, a political stance from within a well-established power structure. Although I am deeply committed to honesty, and am ethically compelled to write with as much fairness and balance as is humanly possible, I expect that my political orientation will be, at times, starkly visible to the average Western reader. The foundation of my writing is within an Ahnishinahbæótjibway context, and the contrast will highlight what may remain unnoticeable when the focus and field are of the same culture. Some of these politics--and the disquiet which my addressing them may raise in some Euroamerican readers--are in fact part of the foundation of my thesis. Epistemology is rooted in more than the mind, and emotions and other “irrational” aspects of communication are integral to the recursive interrelationships between language, culture, and the environment.

Language as an aspect of the individual versus language as a part of society

Why language/thinking ... Descartes, Plato, are there other people? How do we know beyond the here and now, infinity, imagination?

One of the conventions of anthropological writing is to describe, often in considerable detail, the personal interrelationships which the writer has with those whose often-abstracted lives are the focus of the text, and an “arrival trope” is usually an integral aspect of the introduction to an ethnography. This, too, is problematic. As Wub-e-ke-niew wrote in We Have The Right To Exist,

The inclusion of autobiographical material in this book was not my idea. ... Focussing attention on one’s self is something which is not done in Ahnishinahbæótjibway culture. Bragging and boasting are not a part of Aboriginal Indigenous values. (1995:xxix)

On the other side of the argument, as Hollis Melton, publisher at Black Thistle Press, successfully argued to Wub-e-ke-niew, the positionality of the writer is at least as important as the position taken by that writer, the source of the words as meaningful as the words. “They need to know who you are,” she said, “in order to understand what you are writing.”

After We Have The Right To Exist was published, the commentary from the Ahnishinahbæótjibway--and to some degree the reservation Indians--included chiding Wub-e-ke-niew about the chapter of autobiographical material, despite his disclaimer. On the other hand, many Euroamerican readers said that for them, the autobiographical chapter was the most meaningful of the entire book.

Some members of my academic committee have similarly endeavored to persuade me that the inclusion of fairly lengthy autobiographical material is not only relevant, but important in establishing my positionality in a scholarly sense. There is not an easy rhetorical compromise in a situation where the socially acceptable stance among one group of readers, the Ahnishinahbæótjibway, has almost no overlap with the disciplinary requisites of another group of readers, Euroamerican academics. Furthermore, the possible answers to the question, “who are you,” however, are never straightforward in the English language. They depend on the positionality, language and culture of the asker as well as that of the one being asked, on multifaceted aspects of the interrelationship between the asker and the asked, on the social context--and on the complex interplay of volatile identity politics in this turn of the millennium. The personal material relevant to Euroamerican readers of this thesis doubtless depends on the reader, and could vary from an extended autobiography, to a single (to use the up-and-coming word favored by cutting-edge anthropologists of the last decade) trenchant term: “halfie.”

I’ll be brief: I am of the interfaces of a racially-polarized Euroamerican society, and there is no pat and easy answer to who I am, except that I’m fairly shy, and it takes awhile to get to know who I am as a human being. To the Euroamerican readers, in a context where language is often analyzed as being dissociated from the body but where social constructs of physical aspects of one’s body can be almost insurmountable barriers of hierarchically ordered social class, it’s probably pertinent that I’m female, short in stature among Minnesotans and outstandingly tall in Nepal. I’ve spent almost a half-century in my starting-to-wrinkle skin, which is seen by some as too brown to be “white” and by others as too light to be unimpeachably brown. I was born in the mountains of northern California, spent eight years of my late childhood in the aspiring middle-class White-Filipino-Hispanic suburbs of San Diego, graduated from high school in Oregon, and returned to the general geographical area of some of my family’s roots as a scholarship student to an elite liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota.

I was a child in Nixon’s California, and in the fourth grade was “tracked” into an intensive Cold War program intended to hot-house the development of nuclear physicists and other Hard Scientists. I am intimately familiar with the anatomy of atoms as they were understood in 1960, but had difficulty imagining myself wanting to win a Nobel prize for inventing bigger and better ways to blow up “enemies”--my mother was an ordained Southern Baptist minister whose role models were Jesus, Ghandi and Albert Schweitzer. If Mao’s revolution had not succeeded, she doubtless would have gone to China as a missionary, and her oldest daughter would have probably been a different shade of brown. I was an adolescent during the era of Flower Children, Vietnam, radical dreams to make the world a better place, and ordinary people living ordinary lives just past the apex of the American Dream. The Grand Tour of my college cohort was hitch-hiking around Europe, or bicycling cross-country in the U.S., and I did both. I’m about ten pounds over “ideal,” my nose is visibly broken, and I smoke too many cigarettes and frequently misplace my reading glasses.