“The Recovery of the People Is Tied to the Recovery of Food”: Food Sovereignty and Winona LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman

This essay turns to LaDuke’s literature and activism to explore ways in which contemporary Native American writers center their work around issues of food sovereignty, environmental protection, and economic self-determination as essential platforms for community regeneration, renewal, and survival. I argue that Last Standing Woman (1997), Anishinaabe writer Winona LaDuke’s first novel, dramatizes many of these concerns at the heart of her activist and political work. Central to the novel Last Standing Woman is the significance of wild rice for the White Earth Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) people of Minnesota. In Last Standing Woman, wild rice is not only a traditional and sustainable crop but also one that can ensure the livelihood of the community. At the heart of a feminist and activist novel like Last Standing Woman – as well as Winona LaDuke’s activist work, more broadly – is a twofold challenge, which resonates across much Native American writing: on the one hand, the challenge to preserve (existing resources, cultural practices, etc.); on the other, to recover the losses Native communities have suffered historically through colonization and its many consequences, such as the enormous loss of land suffered by the White Earth community. The turn to literature provides Winona LaDuke with a powerful site of political engagement, where she foregrounds issues of gender, tribal politics, and the environment at the same time as she tells a powerful story about Anishinaabe continued resilience.

2. Oral literatures

Native Americans carefully trained their memories to record and transmit vast bodies of knowledge verbatim because, in an oral society, the known universe always stood only one generation from loss. ‘Oral literatures’ explains that indigenous tales instruct in ethics, ecology, religion, or governance, and record ancient migrations, catastrophes, battles, and heroism. Oral literatures grow from differing landscapes and forms of life, and still form the basis of modern Native American writing. Despite their differences, oral literatures usually communicate a wish to live intimately with a unique ancestral land and its creatures, a commitment to a proper relationship with that land and its broad community, and a belief in the power of story to achieve this accordance.

Skrevet på papir og skind. Mesoamerikanske manuskripter fra præcolumbiansk tid til kolonitiden

Jesper Nielsen, Christophe Helmke & Maja Balle: Written on Paper and Hides: Mesoamerican Manuscripts from Pre-Columbian to Colonial Times A series of important Pre-Columbian civilizations thrived in the culture area known as Mesoamerica. Among these were the Olmec, Maya, Mixtec and Aztec, literate cultures of different language families. Mesoamerica is one of the very few hearths of literacy in the ancient world, since it is here that writing was invented in the New World, independently of the development of writing in the Old World, as seen in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and China. Whereas the earliest ancestral writing system of Mesoamerica remains elusive it eventually gave rise to as many as ten different writing systems, of which only that of the Maya and the Aztec have succumbed to phonetic decipherment. This contribution provides a thorough overview of Meso­american literature, as represented in the manuscripts that subsist to the present day. As such we do not review the written records inscribed on stone monuments or portable objects and items of regalia, nor the texts painted on murals. Instead, focus is placed on the manuscripts that represent Pre-Columbian literary traditions, both in terms of format, as well as the coupling of images and texts, written in one or another Native American writing system. All of these manuscripts were produced by Native American scribes in the decades preceding and following the Spanish Conquest, although some manuscripts exhibit some degree of European influence and the beginnings of a hybrid Indo-Christian style. We present a background on books and scribes, as well as Mesoamerican writing systems as these are understood today. From there we review the three salient areas of manuscript production in Mesoamerica, namely, the Aztec tradition of central Mexico, the intervening tradition spanning from Puebla to Oaxaca, describing in detail the Mixtec mapa from the town of Xochitepec which is part of the Danish National Museum’s collection, and finally, the Maya tradition in the east. To close we take a look at the continued production and utilisation of Mesoamerican manuscripts, not only for the illicit art market, but also among traditional communities, where manuscripts are still integrated into ritual life and where traces of the Pre-Columbian scribal arts subsist to this day.