FIRST BEINGS: RELATIONSHIPS WITH NONHUMAN ANIMALS IN NATIVE AMERICAN LITERATURES

Abstract

My dissertation formulates a theory of first beings, or a way to more aptly understand human relationships with animals in Native American Literatures. It starts with a brief, selected history of the scholarship on animal studies. Animal studies, defined succinctly, is the study of our relationships with nonhuman animals. I situate Linda Hogan’s “First People” and John Mohawk’s “Animal Nations and their Right to Survive” as two exemplary texts which contribute to the field of animal studies by examining Native American oral traditions. I analyze two novels—Brothers Three and The Surrounded—using the theoretical lens of first beings. In doing so, I argue these two Native novels from the 1930s show how the process of colonization in North America affected relationships between Indigenous human and nonhuman animals. It did so by promoting increasingly confined methods of domestication over hunting and free-range practices. Noteworthy passages in each novel depict protagonists who question the degree of human difference from nonhuman animals and suggest similarities based on a shared capacity for suffering, specifically suffering caused by this growing degree of confinement. Domestication as such is figuratively meaningful, as these novels suggest, in representing Native peoples' relationships with dominant cultures—the colonizer domesticating the colonized. I then move on to theorize how we can recognize first beings possessing sovereignty, or political agency. I examine the way other animals are included and excluded in the philosophies of two current Native political theorists: Taiaiake Alfred and Dale Turner. I then use John Mohawk’s “Animal Nations and their Right to Survive” as part of a framework to analyze how the traditional Cherokee story "Origin of Disease and Medicine" can be read as recognizing the political agency of nonhuman animals. I follow by examining how a recent political document of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma continues to recognize nonhuman sovereignty. Finally, I conclude that we should be aware of how other animals possess sovereignty by means of our recognition of their suffering, specifically the agency within political discourses to avoid that suffering.