“‘Bringing Things Together’: Tribalography, Lakota Language, and Communal Healing in Frances Washburn’s Elsie’s Business and The Sacred White Turkey

In this article I analyze two novels by Frances Washburn (Lakota/Anishinabe), Elsie’s Business (2006) and The Sacred White Turkey (2010), through the prism of LeAnne Howe’s concept of tribalography. A critical approach that has been gaining influence in Native American Studies, tribalography emphasizes how Native epistemologies pinpoint various interrelations between Native and non-Native communities, histories, geographical places, and temporal dimensions and calls for multidisciplinary perspectives in reading Native American cultural productions. Applying tribalography in the reading of Washburn’s fiction illuminates how indigenous communities in her texts engage in cultural practices such as storytelling, speaking Lakota language, and observing Lakota ceremonies and thus revitalize their culture in the colonial context. Preserving indigenous culture is seen as an act with wider implications than solely strategic resistance: it is also an act of healing and restoring harmony in often troubled communities.