Tribalography and the Native "South(s)"

Abstract

In “Tribalography in Motion: LeAnne Howe,” Kenneth Roemer and Kirstin Squint noted how the Choctaw Nation citizen is “among the few Native novelists and poets who have written influential theoretical manifestos” (69). LeAnne Howe’s theory of tribalography has been adopted as a critical methodology in the field of Indigenous literary criticism over the last two decades, with an entire 2014 issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures devoted to its exploration. In Squint’s book, LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature, she described Howe as an exemplar of “Native South” authorship, an area of study that has also grown in the last two decades as scholars of U.S. Southern literature have begun teaching and researching work by Indigenous Southeastern writers. Yet, the “intersections of Southern and Native American literature” are still contested spaces, reflecting the long history of European and U.S. settler colonialism in the region. In this article, Squint reads the region and its literature through Howe’s lens of tribalography, considering its “past, present, and future milieus” alongside issues that connect tribal nations such as wars with settlers and impacts of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. These traumas and dislocations are depicted in works by contemporary Native authors who write back to Removal and those who explore themes of marginalization and alienation within a region that has most often been defined through a black-white binary. Squint demonstrates how Howe’s theory can pull these disparate strands together, giving scholars a way to read literature that helps us “reckon” with Removal (as called for by historian Claudio Saunt) and other legacies of colonialism in the region.