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Penelope Myrtle Kelsey. Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8032-2771-2. 175 pp.
In the last few years, some important but difficult challenges have been issued to readers and critics of American Indian literature, most notably by Robert Allen Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack. Warrior has written of the need for critics to recognize and honor autonomous Native intellectual traditions; Weaver has called for a criticism that finds its basis and its objectives in the needs of Native communities; and Womack has argued for an Indigenous criticism that brings tribal ways of knowing to the reading of texts by Native authors. All of their work has attracted serious attention, but it has taken a while - understandably, given that the challenges are difficult - for critics to begin to produce book-length studies that respond to these calls by grounding their analyses in the kinds of theoretical, historical, and social knowledge that Warrior, Weaver, and Womack find essential to a responsible Native criticism and thus to the securing of Native intellectual sovereignty.
Penelope Myrtle Kelsey's Tribal Theory in Native American Literature takes up the challenges proffered by these critics directly, arguing for a reading of Native texts that begins by recognizing their specific tribal referents, traditions, and methodologies. While unquestionably able to stand on its own intellectual merits, Kelsey's study owes a strong debt to the earlier scholarship and its articulation of the need for, and the shape of, an Indigenous criticism. Kelsey defines her purposes in this book as demonstrating how "Native American epistemologies and worldviews" (8) constitute a legitimate...