Edward Dorn’s Idea of the Native American and His “Curious Paleface” Consciousness in The Shoshoneans
Abstract
In the field of Native American Studies, the politics of representation and research was recognized as late as the 1970s, as a result of
the countercultural challenge of the 1960s. Belonging to that moment
of challenge and change, Edward Dorn’s photo-essay or documentary
prose The Shoshoneans: The People of the Basin Plateau (1966) is an
early example for critical understandings of race, culture and subjectivity from a geo-historical perspective. The text also testifies to the
poet’s quest for cultural origins and claimed ancestors, defining himself as “a curious paleface.” Its dialogic structure allows a space for
the African American photographer Leroy Lucas’ visual language and
Native American activist Clyde Warrior’s civic demands. Observing
the Western American geography as a colonized space, a “No Where,”
and its inhabitants reduced to day-to-day existence, evading the police,
Dorn contemplates his relation to his government, to the Shoshone and
registers his otherness. A forgotten text, until the publication of its expanded edition in 2013, Dorn’s Shoshoneans remains a geo-historical
examination of subjectivity and otherness, presenting a dialogic understanding of the idea of the Native American.
Keywords
References
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