Wunnegin Hermeneutic: Reading the Early Modernist Native American Novel 1891–1934 as Observational Awareness of the Other

Abstract

The Native American novel has been a subject of cultural identity debate since the 1980s between American Indian Literary Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism. While both sides claim to have a reasonable definition and purpose of Native American literature, they tend to be narrowly focused deriving definitions of Native American identity that fail to consider Native American philosophical approaches that predate the foundations of the debate. This dissertation and the corresponding research aim to shed light on the Native American novel as a ceremonial extension of older Native American worldviews designed to observe, educate, and reveal the intentions of patriarchal American imperialism. The concept under consideration for such revelations stems from Scott Pratt's consideration of the Narragansett word, wunnegin, and how the term becomes the foundation for a hermeneutic that forms the heart of the Native American novel.

Wunnegin hermeneutics form a distinctively Native American literary/cultural theory that opposes patriarchal and essentialist notions of Native American identity employed by American Indian Literary Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism. An observational and educational reflection on Native American novels written before the critical debate between American Indian Literary nationalism and Cosmopolitans illustrates that there is a history and heritage of wunnegin that not only existed before the discussion but also formed the root of a distinctively Native American interpretation of the novel as a means of teaching mainstream Americans how to be more balanced with the world rather than dictating categorical identities on the world.

These early manifestations of the Native American novel provide a template for mainstream readers of what it means to become more observational toward the unknown, precisely the Native American worldview. Examining Alice Callahan’s 1891 Wynema: A Child of the Forest, Simon Pokagon’s 1899 Queen of the Woods, Mourning Dove’s 1927 Cogewea The Half-Blood, and John Oskisons 1934 novel Brothers Three presents and observes the characteristics of a wunnegin hermeneutic beginning with a language of gestures and invitation.

Secondly, each novel demonstrates through narrative devices popular in mainstream literary culture the shortcomings of mainstream language that limit the identity of Native Americans through the lens of the reader's privileged status within the American patriarchy. Finally, each novel culminates with words that lead to definite action intended to merge mainstream Americans into a new world of plurality where patriarchy no longer has the privilege of place. Each novel seeks to educate readers, teaching them to observe rather than define, think rather than be told, and live rather than die in ideological slavery.

These analyses of early Native American novels establish the root of an academic foundation that becomes an extension of the wunnegin ideal during first contact with Europeans designed to form a peaceful community interaction. Overall, the wunnegin hermeneutic presents a practical Native American philosophy for engaging the continued persistence of the patriarchy to form a critical consideration designed around patience and education that has always been a part of Native American cultures and attributes that are not beyond the reach of patriarchally conditioned Americans designed to lead all Americans into a balanced and pluralistic existence.