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Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions

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Robert Warrior's Tribal Secrets was an innovative beginning for carving out a hitherto unrecognized space of Native scholarship: "American Indian intellectual traditions". Since I first read much of this text in draft form and then after its publication, I have found it impossible to get through a course in American Indian history without referencing this text. Whether noting his three generations of American Indian Intellectuals--the Society of American Indians founders, the founders of the National Congress of American Indians, and the founders of such groups as the National Indian Youth Council and the Native American Rights Fund--or by referencing his insightful commentary concerning the writings of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, John Joseph Mathews, Vine Deloria, Jr., and others, I return to this book again and again. This book successfully walks the line between pan-tribal Indianism and local grounding in tribal sovereignty in ways that paved the way for further innovative critical work by American Indian academics doing American Indian studies. My only qualms about this book and the work that is has stimulated concerns how it has made the life of an Anglo-American academic doing Indian studies more difficult: that's not necessarily a bad thing.

In this book, Robert Warrior examines American Indian intellectual traditions through the lenses of two authors: Vine Deloria Jr (Standing Rock Sioux) and John Joseph Mathews (Osage). It's an odd pairing in some ways, beginning with the fact that Mathews wrote fiction while Deloria wrote academic and popular non-fiction across a wide range of topics. In addition, Deloria and Mathews came from different Native communities. Though Warrior is very much concerned about the communities to which Native Americans must retain their ties, he somehow does not ask whether we can speak meaningfully of "American Indian" intellectual traditions--if each Native intellectual must remain grounded in her own community, to what extent can she learn from other Native communities?

Though this book grew out of a dissertation in a field of critical studies sometimes noted for its incomprehensibility, Deloria has written a readable and accessible book. It's very short (126 pages of text on small pages), and I found myself wishing it were longer. I suspect that its brevity reflects a career decision to get the dissertation out before moving to the next project, but that decision left this book feeling incomplete.

Chapter 1 was the most useful part of the book to me. It seeks to place Deloria and Mathews in the wider currents of American Indian intellectual traditions, and so obviously it first has to describe those traditions. Warrior does this very well - - so well, in fact, that I had to wonder why he didn't just conceive his project in terms of telling the fully story of these traditions instead of focusing on just two authors. If, after all, his goal is to recover intellectual traditions it would be best to try to encompass as much of these traditions as one reasonably might. Warrior's focus on Deloria and Mathews, important as they are individually, would tend to diminish the traditions of which they are a part.

The second chapter looks more closely at these authors' texts. The discussion of Mathews' fiction was accessible to someone like me who has not read him, and served as a good invitation to go back and read Mathews. Warrior's discussion of Deloria was, perhaps not surprisingly, less exhaustive given the size of Deloria's corpus. Warrior chooses to emphasize _God is Red_ among Deloria's writings, in part because of its mixed reputation among critics. It would have been interesting to consider more explicitly some of Deloria's legal writings instead - but, despite an expressed interest in including all intellectual traditions, Warrior also explicitly excludes social-scientific and legal traditions for reasons that were unclear to me.

The third chapter, the conclusion, discusses many issues but the most important of them is the role of the intellectual in Native communities today. Warrior is understandably concerned about how someone like him, working in a university apart from his own community, can play a meaningful role despite (or because of) this distance. The general points here seemed well-taken but the chapter was short on specifics. Examples of how American Indian intellectuals make specific contributions to their communities would have made concrete the general issues here.

Overall, this book does an admirable job escaping the jargon of literary criticism while remaining theoretically informed. Even so, evidence of this intellectual heritage persists. Throughout the book, Warrior seems to be imprisoned by the literary and European humanistic traditions in which he chooses to operate. Within this tradition, Warrior cannot tell us directly what he thinks. Instead, he must have Deloria and Mathews tell us about Warrior, by finding Warrior within those writers and their traditions. Even Warrior's insights and critique of each author is presented less as Warrior, and more as "Deloria helps us read Mathews," and vice versa.

I find this approach frustrating as a reader, and I suspect that it is emasculating to the writer. I would rather hear Warrior's own voice, grounded in his own community and its concerns, come through more loudly. As mentioned above, I would also have liked to see a fuller discussion of Deloria and the addition of more authors to Warrior's discussion. But these points are perhaps the best endorsement of the book: Warrior's analysis in this short book was interesting enough that I wish he had done more.