On Starn

Both Clifford and Starn agree on one thing: that there’s no nostalgic return back to a pre-contact way-of-Native-life.    Indeed, Starn’s realism was frankly asserted as thus:  

We live in an age where more than two-thirds of Native Americans now live in cities, and native people are less likely to be harpooning salmon or gathering acorns for [a] living than cashiering at Walmart

or working as lawyers, doctors, or schoolteachers. (196)

   Whereas Clifford interprets the novel, The Word for World Is Forest, through a Taoist lens that presupposes Nature and equilibrium as dynamic– perpetually in flux – making the linear concept of nostalgia, i.e., “returning back to the good ol (pre-contact) days,” unattainable.  Sure, perhaps Starn’s observation is accurately objective.  But just because a Native American lives in a city; doesn’t mean she/he can’t fish for a living.  Moreover, Starn is contrasting one socio/political/economic extreme with another, viz., a traditional Native-way-of-life with Walmart and occupational professions.  Why can’t Native Americans, instead of “harpooning salmon,” work as ecologists, or within other sustainable-minded fields that are in line with traditional Native American values?  Lastly, Starn’s statement acknowledges nothing of the fact that traditional practices, although “outdated,” “inefficient,” and “incompatible with progress,” carry deep, profound, and significant meaning when it comes to Native culture, belonging, and even identity.  I see Starn’s statement as problematic.  But I’d like to hear what you guys think.  Should Indigeneity be severed from nostalgia?  With no sense of a “pre-contact” value system; with no sense of difference; what exactly, then, is Indigenous?   

Here are a few quotes that I found interesting and perhaps debatable:

“The truth is that indigeneity, precisely because it has no fixed or necessary

meaning or destination, comes with no guarantees” (191).

“Indigeneity is a matter of becoming, not a fixed state of being, a historically contingent and sometimes very powerful form of cultural identification and political organizing” (192).

“The very borderline between Indian and non-Indian is unstable and permeable no matter how clear and even biologically determined it may appear in lived experience” (186).

“It takes the settler to make the native, after all, and it can and has been argued that indigeneity is a twin traveler with capitalism and the ideas of civilization and the West, their necessary Derridean supplement…” (186)

Aaron C.