Rez Theory: Aesthetics of the Everyday in Native American Literature and Television

Abstract

This dissertation proposes rez theory, a model for the study of everyday aspects of life on the rez in Native American and Indigenous literature and cultural production. I argue that three thematics form rez theory—language, politics and humor—and that consideration of these areas in critical analysis of cultural productions by Native people and about the rez reveals how rez folks use tactics, aesthetics and sensibilities to intervene in structures of power. What I study in this dissertation is not the reservation or reserve—that is, the history of the physically bounded places demarcated by settler colonial governments—but the rez as it is imagined, depicted and represented in text by the people who call the place home and bring it to life. This project examines and applies rez theory to Native American and Indigenous fiction, memoir and television. Beginning with the Native American Renaissance, I argue that Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine uses an array of mundane objects and characters’ attitudes to illustrate her rez aesthetic. I show how Terese Marie Mailhot redeems markers of Indian-ness typically deemed unsavory in the memoir, Heart Berries, by revealing their ambiguity and complicating fixed definitions of rez life. I propose related concepts within the wider framework of rez theory, such as rez vernacular and rez gothic, and illustrate their usage on two Canadian television series, Mohawk Girls and Trickster. The conclusion issues an invitation to rez theory and points to contemporary Native American and Indigenous cultural productions worthy of consideration.

This project intervenes in narratives that position the reservation as a place defined by poverty, tragedy and socioeconomic difficulties by providing a model that promotes Native agency and self-determination. The radical intervention of rez theory is to suggest that such a thing exists at all; that it is possible to understand rez life as critical, tactical and theoretically significant. As a “theory from below,” it looks to everyday Native language, politics and humor to inform understandings of how everyday rez people intervene in strategic processes that seek to determine Native life. Cultural theories, such as Michel de Certeau’s practice of everyday life and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ bricolage, elucidate rez theory. De Certeau’s theories about users versus producers and tactics versus strategies offer a framework for interpreting how rez people operate within systems imposed upon them using tactical interventions. Lévi-Strauss’ bricolage explains how an assembly of objects and attitudes form a rez aesthetic and identifies everyday Native people as the architects of it. Rez theory foregrounds overlooked pieces of ephemera and off-the-cuff attitudes as the material that forms a rez aesthetic. It asks critics to turn their lenses toward the rez as an important site of meaning-making in studies of Native American and Indigenous literature and cultural production.