The Native American Scholar: Toward a New Intellectual Agenda

erhaps because of a fear that what would result would too much resemble an episode of cloying nostalgia, I avoided at first including any of the many stories of my time in graduate school in New Haven that came to mind as I considered the venue for and the topic of this paper. Two authors, though, convinced me that a bit of reflection on how a writer or a critic gets from point to another can be enlightening. In The World, the Text, and the Critic, Edward Said argues that one of the unfortunate losses in contemporary critical discourse is that sense critics once had of their work as an intellectual adventure. An earlier tradition, which lasted until the middle of the eighteenth century, was for scholars or critics to consider their life as having exemplary value; scholarly biography was a recognized genre. In both instances what critics did, how they went from work to work, how they formulated their projects were treated as meaningful parts of the methodological experience, not simply as anecdotal tidbits (153).1 Such work, according to Said, would make it possible to understand once and for all that 46 : criticism creates its subject matter-there are no problems simply lying about waiting to be dealt with-but also young critics would understand criticism to be an activity whose main purposes are the enablement of learning and the multiplication of critical discourse, from restriction to comparative freedom (153-54). More than just in criticism, the Spokane poet and critic Gloria Bird has suggested that writers writing about their lives can be liberative.