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Collaborative Indigenous Aesthetics
N. Scott Momaday's The Way to Rainy Mountain. Leslie Silko's Storyteller. Nora Naranjo-Morse's Mud Woman: Poems from the Clay. Eric Gansworth's A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function. Deborah Miranda's Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir. The collaborative interplay of literary and visual genres enacted by these diverse works posits that relationships are at the heart of Native aesthetics. These relationships extend from the mixed-genre form so common in contemporary Native literature to the dexterity of many Native artists who move among multiple creative forms: writing, painting, photography, performance and film work. Yet, this constitutive facet of contemporary Native literary arts remains undernoted. The most consistent scholar to do so, Chadwick Allen, has repeatedly called for a more capacious framework for Native literary studies that proceeds from the recognition that many Native artists work in "multiple media, and . . . often juxtapose genres and forms" (xxii). From Blood Narrative to Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies, Allen has made the case that "when we conceive written literatures within a more expansive, inclusive context of Indigenous arts, the alphabetic text becomes simply one option within a larger field of self-representation. Literary scholars, I argue, ought to join writers, artists, and arts scholars to engage in Indigenous-centered conversations across the boundaries of traditional disciplines" (xxii-xxiii). Similarly, in Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the nmai, Dean Rader places "Native art, literature, and film in context and in conversation with one another to create a cross-genre discourse of resistance" that models what he aptly terms "indigenous interdisciplinarity" (1-2). While it should surprise no one in the field that Native writers are also visual artists or saxophone players or that Native poets also create poem-films, how do we continue to translate that multiplicity into our interpretive practices?1 To use Allen's and Rader's terms, how do we extend the "conversation" these works compel, both internally, with the new forms forged from the interplay of genres, and externally, with affiliated Indigenous arts practices?
At the same time, how do we pay closer attention to the multiple "lives" of Native literary and visual arts as they are produced and experienced at various sites for diverse audiences? As we know, location-where a work is presented, published,...