(Post) Colonial Plainsongs: Toward Native Literary Worldings

In this chapter, Jodi Byrd extends the discussion of hegemonic literature like Little House on the Prairie, explaining the importance of "reworlding" literary assumptions and defi nitions so that they can fi nally speak to the true histories of Indigenous peoples. She tells us that this "worlding of a world" is the work of the settler whose "discursive colonization naturalizes the European order as dominant in the land by imaginatively transforming the Native Other into an empty referent." She reminds us that the problem with hegemony is that "one never does have to think about it, and all too often, Native scholars and authors are left with the task of confronting the unthinking hegemonies" that continue to shape academic knowledge about Indigenous People in ways that support their own dominant desires and assumptions.