Friday, December 4, 2009
Can We get a Nut Cracker for this Nuttiness?
Okay, so this post I'm writing about how nutty the section Requiem For A Leg was. It was absolutely ridiculous. These people are in court over a leg! I seriously had to check a few times to actually make sure I was reading the right thing and that it was for real. Some of the questions that were asked were crazy like, "Do you think you could identify your father's leg if the moccasin and legging on the leg as you now see it were not there?" Seriously? It's a leg! Also, not only are they fighting over a Native American leg, one of the lawyers is a Native American who is missing an arm! Now that's just overkill. The only explanation I could think of for this craziness was written on the back of the book: "Native people will love The Light People, partly for its own sake, partly because it will drive Eurocentric scholars crazy trying to figure out what it is." Perhaps that's what's happening here, I'm a eurocentric and I'm going insane trying to make sense of it.
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It's nuttier than squirrel poo, but I found the section to be pretty interesting because of the implications that Nugush makes at the end. Ok I just checked and it's actually part of "The Anthro's Tale" but it's still part of that main story. Basically he argues that even if the leg was once attached to Moses Four Bears, what really defines ownership? The family by default? Or the museum for all the work they put into obtaining it? In a way, it almost parallels the struggle Native Americans went through for their lands, except in reverse. Basically I thought it raised an interesting philosophical question.
ReplyDeleteI agree about the idea of eurocentric reading, and I wonder if Henry puts us as the audience in the position of the same anthropologists where if we come to the text with our preconceived readings, then we will inevitably get it terribly wrong.
ReplyDeleteI think manticore's point about ownership is also interesting. Definitions are not static, and they can be manipulated for certain ends, which in some ways does parallel issues of land ownership.