The Buckskin

The backdrop against which beadwork is often seen is central in helping to create definition of form and content. Against buckskin, the texture, color and arrangement of beads are made manifest through a connection to and difference from. A disjunctive alliance forms between beadwork and buckskin that is not possible if the beadwork were to remain on the loom without a place. When beadwork is sewn to buckskin, boundaries become clear, even as these media are allied – together their collaborative juxtaposition creates a fragile permanency of representation. The abstract textuality of beadwork becomes contextualized with the buckskin – the design of beadwork materializes with buckskin, and both work to create placement in time and space. For many natives and other marginalized groups, multimedia, textuality, such as beadwork, is at least equally important to, if not more important than, the kind of texutality available with print and writing.

While writing and print have allowed for self representation, writing and text in English are almost always circumscribed by the Whiteman’s sense of order, ownership, authority, and conventions. As sign technologies, writing and print order thought linearly, across the page, top to bottom, letter-by-letter, sentence-by-sentence. Anne Wysocki chronicles how the mind is ordered by the page in her essay “Monitoring Order.” Writing and text limit Native self representations by abstracting word from context of utterance, divorcing symbol from that which it represents. Here’s Craig Howe, an Oglala Sioux who created a hypermedia from the tribal history, describing how multimedia and the process of creating with it might more closely enact traditional practices of meaning making.

Tribalism thus includes spatial, social, spiritual, and experiential dimensions that must be incorporated into those event-centered histories that aspire to achieve an indigenous tribal perspective. Can written histories fulfill this requirement? No. History from an indigenous tribal perspective can not be presented solely through the written word…Histories from an indigenous tribal perspective must be presented in a format that can accommodate multimedia data and structure it in a nonsequential order. P. 167

New media, as tools for meaning making, might allow for a creation of self representations that honor as they remediate (Bolter and Gruisin 2001) traditional forms of multimedia composing. The way that writing, as a tool, works is part of the problem. As we codify, letter-by-letter, word-by-word, we make neat and orderly in ways that inscribe ourselves. The tool itself necessitates linear order in a way that abstracts symbol from place and social event of use. Native communities can re-place themselves with new media because it can include image, sound, touch, and word together at once, across time and place. Thus, when self-representing with new media, scholars can resist the abstraction, reduction, simplification, and orderliness of text.

Added to the problem with how writing as instrument works, writing as a culturally valued and valuable social practice has been a problem. The long-standing mistrust of writing – the Whiteman’s representational system – can be seen in the satirical way that writing was described by some as “talking leaves,” words that dried up and blew away when those words no longer suited Whites. Or writing was viewed with awe, something needing to be controlled and wielded to gain power as Powell describes in her essay “Rhetorics of Survivance: How American Indians Use Writing.” Writing in the genres of treaties, allotment rolls, blood quantum and census lists has been no servant to the Indian. “The white world of abstract symbols became a nightmare for Indian people,” Deloria finds (9). It’s been used as a tool to abstract Native peoples from their contexts, to reduce them to manageable numbers, to re-draw and inscribe their lands, to remove and control them on reservations.

While writing has this sinister history attached to its use, it also has been a tool used to enact agency in the face of this oppression, thinking here of Sequoyah’s creation of the Cherokee syllabari in 1821 and subsequent creations of writing tools for tribal language preservation and daily use. Despite these efforts to master literacy as means of representation, relations to writing and text are still largely defined in the terms of the Whiteman’s institutions. Womack’s Red on Red points to many tensions in relation to modern representations of Native Americans and their cultures in literary works. For instance, “In contemporary literary criticism, it is still a struggle simply to legitimate Native approaches to Native texts, to say that it is OK for Indians to do it their own way…how do Indians view Indians? Literature departments have done little to answer this question: (13). Native writers can create culture through fiction and poetry, but the meta-knowledge of and discourse published about that creation still belongs to (mostly White) literary critics, historians, and anthropologists.

In the early 1800’s Sequoyah worked to demystify and gain control over writing. In 1828 the friend of a friend of Sequoyah (aka Mr. Guess) wrote this letter to the Cherokee Phoenix.

Some young men were making remarks on the superior talents of the white people. One said, that white men could put a talk on paper, and send it to any distance, and it would be understood by those who received it. They all agreed that this was very strange, and they could not see how it could be done. Mr. Guess, after silently listening to their conversation for a while, raised himself, and putting on an air of importance, said, ‘you are all fools; why the thing is very easy; I can do it myself:’ and, picking up a flat stone, he commenced scratching on it with a pin; and after a few minutes read to them a sentence, which he had written by making a mark for each word. This produced a laugh and the conversation on that subject ended. But the inventive powers of Guess’s mind were now roused to action and nothing short of being able to write the Cherokee language, would satisfy him. So Sequoyah went home and after a time went on to create the Cherokee syllabary.

Clearly, Native peoples have had an uneasy relation with writing, though we’ve mastered it, have USED it to bend public opinion and gain resources (Powell 2002, Lyons 2000), and have created our own written symbolic systems to enact and further our language and cultures. Writing as a tool for abstraction (both logical and geo-political), is the buckskin against which new (me)dia representations find definition.

Buckskin