Edward Dorn’s Idea of the Native American and His “Curious Paleface” Consciousness in The Shoshoneans

Year 2020, Issue: 54, 59 - 78, 01.11.2020

Özge Özbek Akıman

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

Edward Dorn, The Shohoneans, otherness, subjectivity

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