Life and Land (In Words and Pictures)

Dividing the land for farms meant draining it, and draining the wetlands required so much capital that speculators were from the beginning the strange bedfellows of the farmers and ranchers. 92 In his discovery of Iowa's capitalist landscape, Sayre cannot help but admire the entrepreneurs, for they “were the flywheels and governors of the great steam engine of American society that was transforming the landscape” (21). The final essay in this gathering, Hertha Dawn Sweet Wong's, “Native American Visual Autobiography: Figuring Place, Subjectivity, and History,” asks perhaps the ultimate question about life, land, and history in America: “Who is at home in what is now the United States?” Examining the works of Native artists and writers ranging from Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds to N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Silko, Wong finds that the answer to this question is complicated, demanding that we “re-envision what we thought we knew” about landscape, history, and autobiography. With the genocidal fury of the Anglo-American conquest, these performances of what Wong calls auto-geography (“acts of personal and cultural geography that construct ‘a place seen from within’”) were put under intense pressure—the Plains ledger books were soon painted or drawn with commercial paints and pencils on commercial ledger paper for white readers—and it has become the goal of “contemporary Native American writers and artists … to articulate their distinctive, contemporary, transcultural subjectivities.” Placing oneself in the landscape—pacing a sandy path in the Kentish Downs, thinking of tennis courts on an Iowa prairie, snapping pictures of American grasslands from the air, planting signposts along a busy New York throughway—these disparate activities, the subjects of the following essays, all reflect in one way or another, the writing, inscribing, and representing that is the complex and contradictory work we humans do in order to make this world our own.