X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, Scott Lyons

Just got off the phone with my Ojib boyfriend Neek [real name: Tyonek Ogemageshig, you can’t get much more Ojibwe than that as my friend Veronica (also Ojib) tells me]. I was complaining about the book I just finished. “It’s by one of your people,” I said, accusingly.

Neek just laughed, as he always does when I am being a prickly Mandan-Hidatsa nationalist. It is one of his gifts, to be able to love people and deflate their self-righteousness and general grumpiness. He said, “What Ojibwe’s gotten under your skin this time? You just have a thin skin.” WhatEVER! I replied. He said, “You just can’t deal with Ojibwes’ power and strength.” I started laughing. Too ridiculous. He said, “You get distraught, overwrought, and I can tell it just stresses you out: the power of Ojibwes.”

Anyways.

The book I was talking about was X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, by Scott Lyons. Lyons will be at UMich starting this year, I guess coming from Syracuse, so I was curious about his book and decided to read it as I packed and moved in preparation to my new job. His book is divided into four parts after the introduction: Identity Crisis, Culture and Its Cops, Nations and Nationalism since 1492, Resignations. The back of the book reads, “Lyons explores the complexity of contemporary Indian identity and current debates among Indians about traditionalism, nationalism, and tribalism. … Employing the x-mark as a metaphor for what he calls the ‘Indian assent to the new,’ … Lyons contends that Indians should be able to choose nontraditional ways of living, thinking, and being without fear of condemnation as inauthentic.”

In his Introduction, after telling us that he used to think that Spock and other actors of the late ‘60s were Native, Lyons writes, “I use x-mark to symbolize Native assent to the new, and to call into question old ideas of ‘assimilation’ and ‘acculturation.’ … I wrote this book because I was increasingly dissatisfied with the ways in which terms like identity, culture, and nation are used, which is to say, ‘naturally,’ ahistorically, and with a large measure of essentialism” (33).

Lyons’ tone is charming and self-deprecating, and his writing is accessible (although after seven years of grad school who knows how good I am at assessing that any more). He always reaches for the more complicated answer, and leads us there, through his thinking. In that way he reminds me of my former advisor, Phil Deloria, who is also skilled at leading you through multiple possible complicated and deeply engaged interpretations before coming down, always, somewhere in the middle. Which is right, but can be unsatisfying depending on the subject. Like say if you were asking what classes you should take next quarter. Lyons is deeply rooted in the literatures of Ojibwe writers, and in those doing lit crit stuff in Native American Studies; he knows his onions.

I liked the book, but it also annoyed me. Much like my relationships with my Ojibwe friends and boyfriend. [that was a joke] My issues started with the limitation Lyons placed on what the x-mark could mean – on treaties it may mean assent as in Lyons’ metaphor, but on a petition protesting cultural repression, it could mean something much closer to resistance. I also got annoyed because, like all lit crit people I guess, Lyons has defined a rather narrow range regarding from whom we draw our intellectual traditions [it’s mostly the Indians who wrote in English, largely to white people]. Being in the archive for every research project I’ve done has taught me that some documents, like treaty negotiations, petitions, or letters, illuminate a powerful and incisive Indian intelligentsia operating in every Native community. They may not have been writing essays that appeared in Harper’s, but they were crafting, initiating, and realizing a powerful intellectual tradition within Indian communities. This leads to my third issue, which is the level of historical understanding of some of his major examples, such as Red Power, or tribal constitutions and citizenship codes. But on to the chapter summary, with some of my “issues” embedded within.

Chapter One, “Identity”: Lyons does some theoretical work re: what constitutes identity/how is it formed, then historicizes the development of Indian identity in the U.S. (in broad strokes) – including differences in the way Native vs. non-Native communities practiced identity. He mobilizes theory proposed by Manuel Castells that describes three different modes by which identities are produced (legitimizing identity, resistance identity, project identity). After talking about legitimizing identity and resistance identity – the former produced in tandem with the dominant political system, the latter produced in opposition to it – he digs in to explore the potential of the “project identity,” which is formed around a common cause.

He identifies Indigenism as a ‘project identity’ – one focused on “promoting indigenous culture in opposition to neoliberalism and settler culture, [it] seeks a life where power is decentralized and people live in harmony with the natural world and each other. It focuses on ecological sustainability, collective rights, the primacy of Native ways of knowing and indigenous values, and the political virtues of ‘respectful coexistance.” I think the summary is true enough, but tends to elide the very dirty (as in literally, soil-based) struggles that lead to indigenist projects. His summary sounds so neat and clean and calm and peaceful, but across the globe communities are investing in the rhetorics of indigenism because they are being killed directly or via environmental genocide. It’s messy and dirty and heartbreaking, and their use of indigenous identity grows from that soil. But this is a small thing. Overall I agree with his overarching analysis that “Indian” as identity was “never a stable signifier and Indians played a role in its making,” (69) and it stands as one of his “x-marks.” His conclusion to the chapter calls upon all Natives to make their “x-mark” in defining Indian identity/indigenous identity.

Chapter Two: “Culture and Its Cops”: The meat of his chapter I agree with – especially in his layered reading of different moments when Native identity has been policed. He comes out at a place in which he says he doesn’t necessarily like “culture cops” – those who rigidly interpret cherry-picked tradition for political, social, cultural power. But then again, he says, he doesn’t necessarily dislike them either, especially when they are policing on behalf of nationalist projects. Le sigh.

But at those dissonant moments in which it is clear that his engagement with actual history as opposed to a genericized history wanes, I bristle. Those moments impact his claims, for his claims are built upon them. And it bugs me that he’ll engage more deeply with Gerald Vizenor’s “post-Indian gobbledygook” (in the quoted words of Craig Womack), than with the boring, mundane, meat of how Indian communities survived the Reservation and Termination Eras. [I think this is where I depart from American Studies and Native American Studies: I actually think historical detail – deep, contextualized, and meaty detail – matters]

For example, Lyons dates U.S. Native “cultural revival” to the 1960s, post-American Indian Chicago Conference, and bookends his chapter with the AICC Declaration of Indian Purpose. This, however, begs the question, how did those people who attended AICC magically emerge with the Declaration of Indian Purpose … was it perhaps because they had all been continually reviving their indigenous cultures since the beginning of the reservation era? Because that’s what I’ve seen in the archival records at places like Standing Rock, Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Fort Berthold, and Crow – and what I am willing to bet exists in most archival records and community practices in every Indian community across the country, especially if you add data from works like Christian McMillan’s Making Indian Law, John Troutman’s Indian Blues, any of Clyde Ellis’ works, Paul Rosier’s Serving Their Country, Phil Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places, any of Fred Hoxie’s works, or Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert’s article “Hopi Footraces and American Marathons.” Some people were shamed and abused into forgetting or abandoning indigenous cultural practices during the Reservation Era, despite the Indian Reorganization Act, and through the Termination Era. Others were not. The AICC, Red Power movements, and cultural revitalization are only “revitalizations” if you do not engage with the longue durée of Native resistance and commitment to community cultural practices.

Chapter Three, “Nations and Nationalism since 1492”: All about the nation and how nationalism is practiced. I think this is his strongest chapter. He puts contemporary ‘Native intellectuals’ into conversation, along with developments in global indigenous consciousness. His end point is that nations and nationalisms are still concepts being deployed, and that globalization hasn’t made the nation-state defunct, yet. He says that both “nation” as a concept and nationalism as a practice can be dangerous. But they can also be good. Depending on how they are used. Yes, yes, very true. His analysis and what he brings together into his conversation are much more interesting and useful than his summary, obviously.

Chapter Four, “Resignations”: His final chapter is about legal belonging in Indian communities – citizenship and enrollment. He advocates that Native communities move towards a citizenship status rather than enrollment, as enrollment denotes something less than nationhood/the exertion of tribal sovereignty. Native citizenship, he suggests, should be taken seriously and crafted by Native communities so as to encourage the end result they wish to produce for their nation – and citizenship can serve as one of the “x-marks” through which Native communities subvert a disempowering present in order to build toward a realistic and more empowered future.

Anyways, it’s a strong, thought-provoking book. He’s smart. Worth reading, especially because he deploys and puts many different thinkers, writers, and events into conversation with each other. Glad I read it.