Against commodification: Zuni culture in Clarence Major's Native American texts - Clarence Major Issue

African American Review, Spring, 1994 by Steve Hayward

Not too far gone are the days when any county museum served the naively colonial role of representing Native American cultures to all who ventured in. The centerpieces of such exhibits were the dioramas, all of which, no matter the tribe (if, indeed, any gestures toward tribal variation were made), seemed to ensure that every scout troop and picnicking family passing by would leave with a few central notions of what Native American life meant.

The characteristics of the diorama are telling in regard to the dialectics of representation and colonization facilitated by commodification. The diorama is dependent upon freezing time and neutralizing distinctions in space, the "Indians" always resemble no one but other diorama Indians and diorama cave-people. While freezing the latter in a specific time is viable due to the extinction of those ancient cultures, casting the former in similar pre-technological settings suggests a similar extinction or, at best (for the viewer), a delightfully nostalgic primitiveness. At the same time, temporal freezing isolates the figures in the diorama into single, typically stereotyped, actions, thereby containing and enabling viewers to generalize the whole of Indian life. The diorama, like so many "Western" films, levels the specificity of tribal location and, thus, of tribal identity and culture. For both, an exigence exists for establishing the stock-ness of the Indian. Motives for this leveling likely stem from a need to depersonalize the humanity of the Indian, though museums could be driven by such added material factors as a lack of artifacts or the inability to identify one culture from another.

The diorama elicits the charm of an artifact masquerading as something built by invisible, supremely objective, quasi-divine hands. It suggests an unmediated and pristine correspondence between its subjects and what, within the terms of the epistemology operant in the production of the diorama, objectively exists in a real, outside world. Who but a god is capable of building life, let alone a whole village? The lack of any obvious nod to the subjectivity and interestedness of the maker is indeed suspicious. Its final quality, the erasure of any indications of construction and the illusion of objectivity implicit in such an erasure, makes the diorama a serviceable paradigm of the type of representation to which Clarence Major's two volumes built around the Zuni culture sit in opposition.

In contrast to the dioramic paradigm, Clarence Major's Some Ob- servations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century and Painted Turtle.- Woman with Guitar resist commodification and what I would like to call dioramafication. In my examination of Major's Zuni texts, I will pay particular attention to the thematized subjectivities of the two texts, and the similarities of these two aspects to those that Walter Benjamin found in Brechtian theater. In so doing, I hope to describe Major's postmodern response to the artist's representational paradox: How is it possible to follow the will-to-represent, without falling into a colonial will-to-dominate?

One way of approaching this reading is by looking at Major's work in light of the notion of authority. We can accept, at least in part on etymological grounds, the comingling of authorship with authority.(1) And certainly this sense of authority inherent in authorship is facilitated by the guises of objectivity created in so many texts. Major resists this connection in two ways: by insistently foregrounding the fundamental subjectivity of both his characters and himself in a way which suggests a certain hierarchical set of qualifications which condition the accuracy and value of a given character's, speaker's, or author's speech/writing; and by thematizing the obfuscation which occurs when those who aren't qualified to speak do so.

To a large extent, both Some Observations and Painted Turtle engage a form of the question of subalternity. Who has the authority to speak about and create representations of marginalized cultures? In Some Observations, Major provides an elaborate discussion of this question in the form of a poem titled "In Hollywood with the Zuni God of War." The title allude an incontrovertible example of the ways in which, in this case at the bands of the Hollywood film industry, once vital cultural information is so readily ground up and represented as kitsch. First to go in this hegemonic cultural reinvention are distinctions among various tribal identities and narratives. When one of the Zuni actors points out his Zuni-ness, presumably to suggest ant something is gravely wrong with a Zuni playing in a film about Cochise and other Apaches, Major's director replies, "Do you wanna wok or not?" (17). This mocking interrogative response in the vernacular clearly exemplifies the dilemma faced by native workers in an economy of cultural commodification. The Zuni actors must either be the desired stereotypic Indians or be unemployed.

For "Zugowa," the key figure in the poem, who may well be the personification of the God of War, as well as for the nameless speaker and all the other Native Americans employed by the film industry, the pain at this erasure of tribal identity and culture is mediated, if not anesthetized, by the need for income. As Zugowa states: