Choctaw Tales: An Interview with LeAnne Howe

Abstract

LeAnne Howe, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia, writes poetry, fiction, screenplays, plays, creative non-fiction and critical essays. Her work is primarily concerned with the experiences and the perspectives of American Indian people and communities. Howe’s latest book, Choctalking on Other Realities (2013), which she describes as ‘three parts memoir, one part tragedy, one part absurdist fiction, and one part “marvellous realism”’, received the inaugural Modern Language Association Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures and Languages in 2014. Along with being the recipient of a United States Artists Ford Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, Howe also received the 2015 Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award. Howe’s writing could easily be described as enlivening, eclectic and often hectic, and, more often than not, she brings together a plethora of stories concerning the historical and contemporary experiences of the Choctaw Nation. Various geographical, spiritual, familial and narratological spaces are revealed or plotted during the course of Howe’s narratives, and, as a consequence, images that relate to the act of mapping, the basis of storytelling, and the subject of community and place become recurring motifs throughout her writing. Concerned with the ways in which Choctaw lifeways have been mapped out across time, Howe appears to be especially interested in the representation of travel, exchange, contact and consumption not only in the pre-contact and post-contact United States, but also within the global village.

Keywords:

• American
• American Indian people and communities
• Choctaw literature
• indigenous epistemologies
• Native American literary studies
• tribalography

Notes

¹Those of us who work in the field of Native American studies and scholars who are Native American/American Indian often move freely between those two terms; this is in recognition of the fact that the terms are widely used in Indian Country by tribal communities. There has been a particular revival of the use of ‘American Indian’ on the grounds that this is the term used in the treaties.

²Howe’s Choctaw ancestors were mound-builders, and her people are noted as being numbered amongst the ancient mound civilizations that once inhabited south-eastern North America. The mounds built by the ancestors continue to be revered sites, and Nanih Waiya, which is located in Mississippi, is the mound that the Choctaw hold most sacred.

³Although she is primarily seen as preening, self-regarding and overly exacting—with very good reason—Mary Todd Lincoln is seen by some as a woman who suffered from disabling poor health, mental infirmity and the rigors of a bitterly hard life (she lost three sons to early deaths amongst other tribulations). For instance, around the time of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum’s special exhibit, ‘Mary Todd Lincoln: First Lady of Controversy’, Newsweek ran an article that included a quotation from Jason Emerson, author of The Madness of Mary Lincoln (2007), in which he said that Abraham Lincoln’s wife ‘suffered from bipolar disorder throughout her life’. The article also pointed out that several ‘prominent historians disagree’ with Emerson’s opinion. One of them, Jean Baker, author of Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (2008), told Newsweek that Mary Todd was ‘neurotic and narcissistic’, and that she would not quite ‘go with this insanity bit’ (Springen 2007). Troublingly, Mary Todd Lincoln put many of her pains down to the workings of a malevolent American Indian spirit, which she claimed was attacking her.