Introduction

"It Is What Keeps Us Sisters"1:

Indigenous Women and the Power of Story

IN THE MIDST OF WAR, WE BEAR WITNESS, WE CREATE

This special issue on indigenous women is framed for us, as coeditors, by the sad, outrageous, horrifying facts of September 11, 2001, and all that has come in the aftermath. It would be hard to speak of the work of the women included here without so much as a mention of the times in which we live. This collection of Native women's writing and art marks the new century and the moment of its birthing is a time of grievous upheaval for humanity and for the planet. This volume must be seen as an articulation and rendering of our voices in the face of the current war. Yet, it is important to note that for us as indigenous women, the war is not so new. It is, in fact, all too familiar and intimate to us. We have only to look at some of the earlier collections of indigenous women's writing to bring this point home strongly. In Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women Paula Gunn Allen writes,

War stories seem to me to capture all the traditional themes of Indian women's narratives: the themes of love and separation, loss, and most of all, of continuance. Certainly war has been the major motif of Indian life over the past five centuries, so it is perfectly fitting that we write out of our experience as women at war, women who endure during wartime, women who spend each day aware that we live in a war zone.2

This volume reflects these same themes in 2002. We live in the war zone; "how well have we 'survived the onslaught of destruction[?]'" This is a question posed by Joy Harjo in the introduction to Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America, as she notes, "We are coming out of . . . a war that hasn't ended."3

How do indigenous women writers and artists manifest, critically and creatively, their awareness of this unending war? How do they acknowledge and pay tribute to their own and others' expressions of indigenous ways of knowing, including principles of humanity and relationship to all that lives? One crucial way is through bearing witness and giving testimony; most importantly, they "tell story." Conscious of the power of language(s)-spoken, visual, silent, sensual, defiant, courageous, laughterful, the languages of song, of the body, the heart, the spirit, the earth, and yes, the mind-they/we tell story. Conscious of the way language(s) mediate, conscious of how narratives are created, how and where and why they emerge, whose interests are served, which stories become official (for some), which ones are ignored (by some), which ones could help humanity and the relations of the earth, they/we tell story. And as Gloria Bird says about Reinventing the Enemy's Language, "Each piece [in that collection] has gone into the creation of a narrative that is part of an even larger narrative."4

We join this Frontiers special issue on indigenous women to that larger narrative; it is our contribution to the story. Leslie Silko, in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today writes, "This perspective on narrative-of story within story, the idea that one story is only the beginning of many stories and the sense that stories never truly end-represents an important contribution of Native American cultures to the English language."5 The stories help us all (not only Native peoples) to know who we are in relation to all that is. And as Rayna Green writes in the introduction to That's What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women, "Whether it comes directly from the storyteller's mouth and she writes it down or someone writes it for her, the story has to be told."6

How do we know this? Gunn Allen, in Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting, Border-Crossing Loose Canons, says, "The old ones' recognition of the intrinsic identity of text and human consciousness informs the structures of the whole of the oral tradition, and critical theory in Indian Country consists of the often subtle junctures of story cycles."7 Gunn Allen also notes that essays (and by extension, this special issue on indigenous women) are also stories, with plots and characters. Silko says "language is story."8 Through these stories, the past and the future come together in the present in conscious situationality/relationality. Thus, as Silko says, the "stories are, in a sense, maps."9 Maps to deep truth(s), maps that help us to know the lay of the land of our bodies, of our points of origin/emergence, of our hearts and spirits, of the universe, of our minds, of the planet we call home, we call Earth. These story maps allow us movement between the past and the future: looking back, we look forward, looking forward, we look back, always conscious of how the present moment at once holds both past and future.

The women represented in this volume give us maps, give us stories, give us indigenous women's perspectives and ways to make sense for ourselves of the crazy sicknesses, the raw ruthlessness, and at the same time, the amazing gracefulness of the world in which we live. In academia, some of us speak of "theory in the flesh" to contest what is regarded as disembodied theory (theory to which no body is attached, much less a heart or spirit). It is time to extend the idea of "theory in the flesh" to a theory in the flesh and in the spirit rooted in the earth. This is what indigenous women have to offer, even when they are urban Indians, living away from their homelands. They/we have something, call it memory, the root of the truth, that calls into our deepest reaches powerfully. Witness the work of Lillian Pitt, her pieces Flow Between Mind and Earth and Gathering Energy from the Milky Way, that reflects this call.