Sabine Meyer (Osnabrück/Bonn): Indigenous Literature Meets Human Rights: Indigenous Rights Discourse and the Native American Historical Novel

Abstract

My contrapuntal readings of the indigenous rights debates that took place in the United Nations in the 1990s and two Native American historical novels published in the United States around the same time reveal that Native American literary production has been deeply inflected by the law. Robert Conley's Mountain Windsong: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1992), I argue, needs to be read as a critique of the idea that Native American rights can be secured from within the United States' legal order. Through the aesthetic jarring of historical legal documents against a romantic plot, the novel deconstructs the idea of domestic law as an agent of change and introduces the language of human rights as an alternative framework of Native resistance. Diane Glancy's Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears (1996) engages with the then so prominent question of how indigenous rights as group rights can be embedded in a human rights regime that puts the individual center stage. I will argue that the novel seeks to close the theoretical gap between individual and group rights, which stymied indigenous rights debates considerably.

Dr. Sabine N. Meyer
Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Osnabrück
Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”

Curriculum vitae

Sabine N. Meyer is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Osnabrück and the Coordinator of the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law. She is currently a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” at Bonn, where she is working on her second book titled “Visions of Peoplehood and Indigenous Futurity in Native American Removal Literature” (working title).

Sabine N. Meyer studied at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA, and at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, where she obtained her first state examination in English and History as well as a M.A. degree in American Studies and History in 2005. In 2010, she completed her PhD with a thesis entitled “Hopping on or off the Water Wagon? The Temperance Movement in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1848-1919.” Before heading to Osnabrück in 2011, she taught American Studies and Literary and Cultural Didactics at Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster.

Her research focuses on social movements, migration and identity in United States history, representations of Native Americans in American popular culture, as well as the intersections of law and Native American literature. Her publications include articles on the teaching of U.S. history in German universities (Journal of American History (2010)), on Native American literature and the transnational turn (Transnational American Studies, ed. Udo Hebel (Winter, 2012)), on representations of Native Americans in television and film (e.g., Ethnoscripts, zkmb (2013), Provincializing the United States, eds. Ursula Lehmkuhl et al. (Winter, 2014)), and on Native American literature and the law (Routledge Companion to Native American Literature, ed. Deborah L. Madsen (Routledge, 2015), Twenty-First Century Perspectives on Indigenous Studies: Native North America in (Trans)Motion, ed. Sabine N. Meyer et al. (Routledge, 2015)). Her book, We Are What We Drink: The Temperance Battle in Minnesota was published by the University of Illinois Press in the summer of 2015. Meyer is also co-editor of the monograph series Routledge Research in Transnational Indigenous Perspectives.

Sabine N. Meyer received numerous research grants, awards, and scholarships. She was a participant of "Erstklassig!" – a program geared toward promoting outstanding young scholars – at the Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster. Moreover, she received the award for the best dissertation in the field of Historical Cultural Studies 2009/10 at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, and was nominated for the Hans Mühlenhoff teaching award at the University of Osnabrück in 2014. Her research has been funded by the Cusanuswerk and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Beginning in April 2016, she will pursue her own research project "From Removal to Indigenism: Property Discourses in Native American Removal Literature" funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG