Abstract
Atangle of unexamined cultural assumptions about nature and indigenous people underlies much of the discourse of early, and even present-day America. The semiotic equation of “wild” American Indians with a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts” persists well into the nineteenth century2 The Eurocentric story of “progress” underlying the doctrine of Manifest Destiny was constructed around biblically and philosophically grounded differences between nature—phenomena to be exploited and subdued—and humanity—the superior, rational beings chosen by God to preside over the rest of creation. In the western grand design, nonhuman animals and the land fell unam- biguously to the inferior, “nature” side of the equation, but often and paradoxically, so did some human beings, including Indians.
We are limited not by an aware ignorance, but by our “knowledge” that the world is as we think it “must” be.1
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Notes
Alan Drengson, “Shifting Paradigms: From Technocrat to Planetary Person,” in Alan Drengson and Yuichi Inoue, eds., The Deep Ecology Movement: An Introductory Anthology (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 1995), 85.
William Bradford, in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647 (New York: Modern Library, 1952), 62.
Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New York: Schocken, 1980,1990), 69.
Klaus Lubbers, Bom for the Shade: Stereotypes ofthe Native American in United States Literature and the Visual Arts, 1776–1894 (Rodopi: Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1994), 229.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 133.
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976,1989), xi–xii.
Linda Hogan, Power (New York: Norton, 1998), 17.
Howard L. Harrod, The Animals Came Dancing Native American Sacred Ecology and Animal Kinship (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2000).
Alan Bleakley, The Animalizing Imagination: Totemism, Textuality, and Ecocriticism (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), xiv.
Catherine Rainwater, Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), especially chapter 3.
Mary Midgley, Animals and Why They Matter (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 58.
Washington Matthews (1902), The Night Chant, A Navajo Ceremonial (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1995).
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin, 1977).
Joseph Rael, House of Shattering Light: Life as an American Indian Mystic (Tulsa: Council Oak Books, 2003).
A. A. Carr, Eye Killers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 221.
Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 38–39.
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© 2005 Mary S. Pollock and Catherine Rainwater
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Rainwater, C. (2005). Who May Speak for the Animals? Deep Ecology in Linda Hogan’s Power and A. A. Carr’s Eye Killers . In: Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09411-7_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09411-7_16
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