Dylan Carpenter Native American Lit Essay #1

Unitary Notions of Literacy and Cheyenne Ledger Books

Perhaps it might seem a little banal at this point to mention that when wielding or defining a term as loaded as literacy one must warily exercise some degree of caution; this caution derives most directly from historical, socio-political motivations for one thing manufacturing fundamental divisions between groups that guided (and continue to guide) understandings and conceptualizations of literacy. Collins, in fact, elaborates on this trend, pointing out that the distinction between full/unitary and restrictive literacy was supposed to capture a difference between the unfettered literacy of the modern West and the socially constrained scriptal traditions of much of the traditional (i.e. non-Western) world (Collins 79). Pithily put: invoking literacy means, to a certain extent, invoking subjectivies and identities and the more pernicious invocations tend be deployed to constrain and call to order subjectivies rubbed raw by economic and political harshness (Collins 83). And so, the stakes are rather high, a point that the genealogy of notions of literacy mordantly supports. Too, Collins traces the arc of this very genealogy, one rooted in and tangled by certain structural power relations: race, class, ethnicity, &c. Lets temporarily return to a distinction made above, the notion of full or unitary v. restricted literacy. The former, which Collins crusades against, posits a progressive conception of literacy, and a Western-centric one too boot. Literacy becomes pitted against orality, implies an endpoint, something reached following the movement from oral/spoken traditions to the written word to the electronic age. Implicit in this is

a sort of primitive/advanced Western/non-Western binary that when thrown under pressure seemingly withers away. Naturally, unitary literacy excludes non-typographical texts, and a bevy of disparate modes of literacy. One persuasive counter example, one that seems to support Collins critical theory of historical unitary universal notions of literacy, is the Cheyenne Dog Soldier ledger books. Excluding non-typographical texts like it on the premise of outdated theories of unitary literacy means invoking problematic divisions between groups, divisions that fail to account for literacys multiplicity, fluid modes of relating to the world. When viewing the ledger books, or attempting to fill in the spaces so-to-speak, one naturally runs in to a few roadblocks. For one thing, the images may not resonate, or the meaning may be lost by dint of vast and totally disparate experiences, with which any reader trying to parse meaning brings to the table. Congenital or conscious biases, even more educated, intellectual people who consider themselves liberal, and mindful of difference are prone to misuse anthropology and employ texts as a mouthpiece to vocalize prevailing and otherizing mis-perceptions. Here are several examples. According to the Colorado Historical Society, in plate seventeen, which features a two whites, one retreating, and the other at the mercy of Big Crows thin weapon, that weapon is called a quirt. And to pick a more meaningful example, one with critical weight, look no further to many of the plates feature shields. Now, running with some standard Western formalistic matrices, one might quickly and logically begin to read the shield as some kind of motif. This is a kind of literacy. The issue becomes, of course, decocting just what exactly that motif means. Discovering that the shield denotes sacredness also effects the way readers interpret the ledger books. The notion that Cheyenne myth yokes images of battle and war with images of salvation says something about that culture or group.

Here is where unitary literacy runs in to a bit of trouble. If we assume or posit literacy as hierarchical, as the unitary literacy disciples do indeed do, then ethnocentric eyes filter these images through their pre-set beliefs or representational ideologies about Native Americans. One could say these shields allude to the primitive technologies at the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers disposal, or that the shields illustrate the traditional warrior-mentality of the tribe. All of these assumptive causal moves are not grounded in anything, and illustrate the deficits of unitary literacy. One strategy to guard against this kind of easy-to-fall-in-to otherizing might be the African literature theorist Marican Towas notion of literary anthropology: how to render disparate cultures/groups texts studiable and readable without ridding them of their subjectivies and sending them through Western filters. She argues that Western readers are in a different position, laboring under ethical imperative to be attentive to difference, and that anthropological (along with political and historical) awareness is a necessary precaution to be taken against blindly appropriative reading (Miller 31). The developed distinction between orality and literacy further magnifies this very issue. If we as the authors Collins polemicizes carve out distinctions between these modes of literacy, and order them hierarchically, categorize and document them into oppositional categories, we risk rendering certain ontologies as other. Look no further than the columns these authors develop. In the oral one go characteristics such as memory-based, empathetic and participatory, situational, and aggregative, and in the literate column go the counterparts, such as record-based, objectively distanced, abstract and analytic. The most blaring quality these columns promulgate is a kind of conspicuous Western/nonWestern binaries, these terms eerily mirroring terms Said uses to categorizes the way dominant cultural forces shape notions of otherness. The rigid scientific objectivity present in notions of objectivity, empiricism, and analysis stand opposed to subjective words like empathy and

participation. Excluding these non-typographical modes of literacy means excluding participatory and unique ways of understanding and relating to the world in meaningful, enriching artistic ways. The important of retaining various modes of literacy represents an important theme for Silko, as well. Perhaps the enduring lesson established in Ceremony relates to the important of stories as a mode of healing. They are, as Silko puts it, not simply entertainment. Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there was a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions (Silko 17). This returns to the high-stakes nature of notions of literacy. To limn out distinctions between orality and literacy means losing a great deal of the group-specific healing powers they carry with them.
Miller, Christopher L. Theories of Africans. London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Google Books. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. - - -. Theories of Africans: The Question of Literary Anthropology. Critical Inquiry 13.1 (1986): n. pag. JSTOR. Web. 29 Sept. 2010. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343558>.