Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women's Autobiography 0826359167, 9780826359162

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Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories

Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories

Native American Women’s Autobiography

ANNETTE ANGELA PORTILLO

University of New Mexico Press • Albuquerque

© 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 22 21 20 19 18 17 ISBN 978-0-8263-5915-5 (printed case) ISBN 978-0-8263-5916-2 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the Library of Congress. Cover illustration: LisaNa Macias Red Bear, Healer
Designed by Felicia Cedillos

For Mark and Yemaya

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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CHAPTER 1

Indigenous Epistemologies Decolonizing Native American Women’s Sovereign Stories and the Embodiment of Shared Knowledges 1 CHAPTER 2

Delfina Cuero and Anticolonial Native American Historiography Remapping Kumeyaay Presence through Storytelling and Place Naming 21 CHAPTER 3

“The Land and the People Are Inseparable” Writing the Oral and Visual in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Memoirs Sacred Water and Turquoise Ledge 53 CHAPTER 4

The Power of Story and Resistance Pretty-Shield, Zitkala-Sa, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s As-Told-To and Self-Written Autobiographies 91 CHAPTER 5

Indigenizing the Internet through Cyberactivism, Social Media, and Communo-Blographies The Zapatistas, Idle No More, and Activist-Bloggers 121

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER 6

Not for Innocent Ears Decolonial Pedagogies and Indigenous-Centered Storytelling Practices in the Classroom 137 NOTES

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Index

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank my Indigenous/Mexican/Xicana ancestors for providing me with the strength and perseverance to write about these narratives of truth and survivance. This book honors the voices of indigenous women, knowledge keepers, whose sovereign life stories and blood memories should never be forgotten. I am also thankful to those people in my academic and personal life that have contributed in multiple ways to this book. Since my first years as an undergraduate student at San Diego State University and the University of California, San Diego, I have been fortunate to have many inspiring mentors. I express thanks to Quincy Troupe, who allowed me to imagine that a first-generation working-class woman of color from an inner-city, “Skyline– Paradise Hills” in southeast San Diego, could succeed in college and even pursue a PhD. His amazing spoken-word poetry and especially his classes in African American literature inspired my own projects on the oral tradition. I thank Rosaura Sánchez for introducing me to the genre of testimonio, which has undoubtedly shaped my thinking about life stories by Chicanas and indigenous women. Thanks to Frances Smith Foster, whose classes on African American women’s life stories provided the foundation for my future studies on autobiographical discourses by women of color. And to my graduate mentors at Cornell University, I am grateful for their support as I struggled to overcome my “imposter syndrome” at this institution. I will forever be thankful to my mentor Mary Pat Brady for her intellectual guidance, critical conversations, and valuable advice. And thank you to Helena María

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Viramontes, whose passion for social justice is beyond inspiring. She provided a model of what it means to be a true activist-teacher-scholar, lessons I now pass on to my students. I am also grateful to Kate Shanley, whose expertise and critical insight on Native American literature and autobiography studies have inspired my own work. I thank all my colleagues past and present who provided guidance and mentorship on navigating the often daunting and intimidating environment of academia: Norma Cantú, Jackie Goldsby, Kate McCullough, Deborah Miranda, Marie “Keta” Miranda, Joycelyn Moody, Josie Méndez-Negrete, Eloy Rodriguez, Marta Sánchez, Shelley Streeby, and Sunn Shelley Wong. I am especially grateful to Sonia Saldívar-Hull and Ben Olguín for their advice, mentorship, support, and unwavering belief in me and my academic projects—even during difficult times. Also, thank you to my undergraduate and graduate students over the past twenty years who have awakened my passion for teaching in the most profound ways. They all give me hope that what I teach and write about is inspiring, empowering, and even life changing. I thank my graduate research assistants at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Elizabeth Cali, Lisa Trevino, Brenda Rodriguez, and Megan Nieto. And my colleague and dear friend Margo Tamez, who has provided much needed personal and emotional support, especially as I was finishing my book project. I am grateful to have you in my life. To Rose Rodriguez-Rabin, I am thankful for your friendship. You have provided much needed supportive conversations and insight during my time at UTSA. I thank LisaNa Macias Red Bear for allowing me to use her artwork, Healer, as the cover image. Her indigenous-centered visual language is as significant as the oral and written voices discussed in Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories. I thank one anonymous reviewer and Inés Talamantez, who provided critical feedback and suggestions for my manuscript during the review process, and copyeditor Sandra Spicher. Thank you to Bill Arnold for his invaluable conversations about life, art, and family. I am grateful for his insightful words and photographs that always inspire. And I am especially proud that I persisted with researching and writing this book for over twenty years without any sabbaticals and without sacrificing my rigorous teaching and service commitments at multiple colleges and universities. I thank the University of Nebraska Press for permission to reproduce in part my article “Performing a Strategic Transborder Citizenship: Delfina Cuero Remaps Kumeyaay Presence Through Storytelling and Place

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Naming,” which appeared in Western American Literature 50:3 (Fall 2015): 187–207. And thank you to the College English Association for permission to reproduce in part my article “Indigenous-Centered Pedagogies: Strategies for Teaching Native American Literature and Culture,” which appeared in College English Association Forum 42.1 (Winter/Spring 2013): 155–78. My deepest gratitude is for my life partner Mark Ober, who has provided unwavering encouragement and unconditional love. I thank him for always supporting my choice to remain in academia and pursue my lifelong goals and aspirations. My work on Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories coincided with the birth of our daughter, Yemaya Anne, who has served as further inspiration to continue my activism and work that matters for future generations. She is my heart and has brought to us a life now filled with indescribable feelings of love and happiness. And to our cats Angelita, Alaska, Meister, and Ming, who have provided timeless calmness, love, and support.

CHAPTER 1

Indigenous Epistemologies Decolonizing Native American Women’s Sovereign Stories and the Embodiment of Shared Knowledges

In “How Scholarship Defames the Native Voice . . . and Why,” Elizabeth Cook-Lynn states, The struggle of the colonized indigenous peoples of the continent to tell their own stories . . . through politics or literature or revolutionary movements has been the struggle to reveal to the public the hope for a new and remodeled world. The denial of the basic human right, through the development of nationalistic, legal, social, and intellectual systems that make it impossible for a domestic people, or a domestic nation of Indians to express itself collectively and historically in terms of continued selfdetermination, is a kind of genocide that is perhaps even more immoral than the physical genocide of war and torture. [italics in original] (86) Cook-Lynn’s critique is in reference to the controversy about Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio and the numerous debates regarding its truthfulness.1 Her essay critiques anthropologists who have yet to cast off the “colonialist model” that silences indigenous voices by their attempts to hyperauthenticate sources through a discipline that is “always the handmaiden to colonialism while promoting a certain kind of advocacy to indigenous ‘informants’ ” (86, 81–82). I begin with the Menchú “controversy,” because I argue that this discussion is still relevant in the twenty-first century as I reexamine

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“canonical” Native American women’s nineteenth-century autobiographies and as-told-to works alongside under-examined contemporary life stories, memoirs, new social media, and activist-blogs.2 In Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories, I examine Native American women’s autobiographical discourses and propose that these multiple-voiced life stories resist generic conventional classifications that offer critical paradigms for rereading and unmapping indigenous multilayered histories and identities. These works intersect on numerous levels as they resist hegemonic historiographies, conventional concepts of first-person narrative, and statesanctioned definitions of citizenship. That is, the legacies of colonization, displacement, and traumatic memories of genocide are inscribed on the bodies of women whose memoirs, life stories, oral histories, blogs, social media sites, and experimental multigenre narratives become acts of survival that not only resist silence but also recuperate indigenous-centered epistemologies. Through the process of communal storytelling these cultural productions, grounded in lived experiences, provide spaces where writers and activist-scholars reclaim their subjectivities across cultural, national, and digital boundaries. There are numerous books and essays published about Native American autobiography, including those by well-known theorists such as Arnold Krupat, Hertha Dawn Wong, Gretchen Bataille, Kathleen Mullen Sands, Greg Sarris, and Susan Brill de Ramírez. My book is in dialogue with these theorists and expands on their significant contributions to the field by employing the concept of blood memory and arguing that these women’s life stories are intricately tied to land and bodies where communal histories are excavated from intersecting colonial spaces and narratives. I argue that life stories by Native American women cannot be confined by generic definitions of autobiography that are grounded in an individual privileged subjectivity. I use the concept of blood memory as a way to reimagine Native American identity based on ancestral memory rather than the colonial assumption of a purity of blood and lineage. In other words, blood memories are tied to the body and provide indigenous-centered ways of experiencing one’s history. In her essay “Blood Memory and the Arts,” Nancy Marie Mithlo states that “the concept of blood memory is ageless,” and “blood relationships reference not only the common understanding of what is considered biological heritage or race but also, in an expanded sense, the internalized memories of communal

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history, knowledge, and wisdom.”3 In his comprehensive article “Blood (and) Memory,” Chadwick Allen argues that N. Scott Momaday’s “signature trope of memory in the blood or blood memory,” which was first developed in his novel House Made of Dawn (1968), allows for a more complex reading of the concept as a way to “redefine[s] American Indian authenticity in terms of imaginative re-collecting and re-membering.”4 Allen’s insightful overview of Momaday’s work in relationship to his use of the blood memory trope and the subsequent controversy surrounding the debate of truth and authenticity for indigenous peoples’ identity and life stories is imperative for better understanding how the concept can be used as a tool for decolonization, resistance, and survivance.5 When using the terms decolonization and resistance, I agree with Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who argues that indigenous peoples across the world have other stories to tell which not only question the assumed nature of those ideals and the practices that they generate, but also serve to tell an alternative story: the history of Western research through the eyes of the colonized. These counterstories are powerful forms of resistance which are repeated and shared across diverse indigenous communities.6 She emphasizes how critical it is to tell “our stories from the past” and reclaim them—that is, give testimony to the injustices perpetrated against indigenous peoples as a part of the decolonization process.7 The very act of telling one’s story becomes an act of power and ultimately survivance. Further, Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories argues that the storytelling practices that emerge in these written and oral works articulate an unmapping of the complexities of regulatory definitions of citizenship that have historically colonized and continue to colonize indigenous identities. This interdisciplinary study juxtaposes close readings of texts from wellknown writers with under-examined Native American scholars, writers, activists, and bloggers. In addition, this project extends the work on Native American perspectives on environmental justice by arguing for place-based and land-based readings that center indigenous women’s voices and bodies at the forefront of decolonial struggles for self-determination and sovereignty. I use works by Leslie Silko and Linda Hogan as points of departure to underscore the relationship of indigenous people to their homelands and

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interdependence with all living beings. The memories they recuperate in their memoirs about ancestral identity are rooted within the landscape and geographies of the body as a place and space that is distinct from national topographical maps. As Linda Hogan asserts in her memoir The Woman Who Watches Over the World, “Terror, even now . . . is remembered inside us, history present in our cells that came from our ancestor’s cells, from bodies hated, removed, starved, and killed.” 8 I argue that these women’s stories of forced removal, trauma, and genocide articulate indigenous ecologies and indigenous-centered histories that are shaped by place, land, and collective blood memories. In an effort to resist invisibility, these communal narratives serve as oppositional mappings of Western-centered cartographies, thus providing a rerighting and rewriting of sovereign stories. The Problem of Genre: Native American Autobiography

In contrast to autobiographies written within the Euro-American tradition, autobiographies written by Native Americans do not conform to this dominant form, which is typically characterized as egocentric and individual. For example, in For Those Who Come After Arnold Krupat suggests that the European invention of autobiography, a self-written life, “marked by egocentric individualism, historicism and writing,” does not characterize Native American culture.9 And in Sending My Heart Back Across the Years, Hertha Dawn Wong argues further that precontact Native American pictographs and oral narrations predate our formalized and legitimized definitions of autobiography (5). Although Wong is specifically describing precontact narratives (e.g. pictographs), I argue that her definitions are also appropriate for analyzing as-told-to and self-written stories by Native American women writers. Wong seeks to “expand the Eurocentric definitions of autobiography to include nonwritten forms of personal narrative and non-Western concepts of self and to highlight the interaction of traditional tribal modes of selfnarration with Western forms of autobiography” (5). Similar to Krupat, Wong problematizes the definition of autobiography that is characterized by a Western idea of self. The individual self that is foregrounded in such narratives is based largely on an ideology that assumes a self-conscious and selfevident subject who then uses the written text to express that self. This emphasis on an isolated subject transforming or coming of age counters the

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Native American notion of interdependence that locates identity within the family, clan, and tribal affiliation (14). Wong breaks the term autobiography into three different roots—that is, self-life-writing—and argues that it should be replaced by communo-bio-oratory or community-life-speaking, which would allow for a communal identity and orality. Wong argues that Native American tribes or nations are primarily concerned with the group rather than the individual and that although individual identity is recognized and honored, it is ultimately subordinate to tribal identity and subsumed in a sense of cosmic interconnection (14). In reference to a specific tribe, the Navajo, Wong emphasizes that some Native Americans’ concepts of self include “motion” or “a self that is continually shifting, changing, going” as seen through maturation and change in names, which reflect important accomplishments and changing identities (16). And she reminds her readers that such generalizations can sometimes be suspect, since the notions of “authenticity” and “genuineness” are problematic. In her analysis of the second root of autobiography, life, Wong says, “the autobiographical expressions of precontact Native Americans tend to be event oriented” and therefore can appear to be fragmented through a Western perspective (18). In addition, the narrative is usually an intracultural collaboration, as the community also contributes to the “personal narrative” by actively participating in the storytelling, singing, and dancing. Although Wong is referencing precontact narratives, I argue that her use of the root “life” serves to expand close readings of both as-told-to and self-written stories by Native American women. More importantly, it is important to recognize the “intracultural collaboration,” and contributions of the community, “which are the primary source of identity for the individual” (18). These communal contributions can take the form of storytelling, dancing, and singing and, in a written text, can be identified through the author’s use of dialogue with other tribal members and detailed descriptions of ceremonies and events. Thus, the “life” story of the community is related in addition to the life story of the individual. And the experiences of the narrator are intertwined with the experiences of others and her cultural environment. Not only is an isolated story of one’s experience related, a “life history” is told and documented as written text.10 It is the third root, “writing,” that is perhaps the most complex when examining Native American “autobiographies.” For precontact narratives,

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Wong suggests that it be replaced with “oratory” or language. This would allow for the inclusion of chants, songs, stories, and pictographs. Wong’s argument for redefining the terms associated with self-life-writing and emphasizing the oral aspects of storytelling practices parallels my argument about collaborative or as-told-to works that are ultimately written by ethnographers, anthropologists, and editors. And Wong’s emphasis on reexamining such categories to describe these narratives is useful, since the construction of stories and self within these “texts” are products of oral stories that have been recorded, transcribed, and translated into written texts. Similarly, Krupat states that “collaborative” narratives that were produced with the assistance of editors, translators, and ethnographers are marked by the principle of “original bicultural composite composition.”11 He states, These texts are the end-products of a rather complex process involving a three-part collaboration between a white editor-amanuensis who edits, polishes, revises, or otherwise fixes the “form” of the text in writing, a Native “subject” whose orally presented life story serves as the “content” of the autobiographical narrative, and in almost all cases, a mixed-blood interpreter/translator whose exact contribution to the autobiographical project remains one of the least understood aspects of Indian autobiography.12 This definition is further developed when Krupat likens the “Indian autobiography” to the frontier as it embodies the relationship between two cultures in contact with each other.13 That is, from the perspective of the whites, this “relationship” on the frontier meant their domination against American Indians, as their move westward was characterized by violence that included the written text. But Krupat recognizes that although this relationship was based on unequal power relations, there still existed the potential for resistance within these narratives. “And it is in its presentation of an Indian voice not as vanished and silent, but as still living and able to be heard that the oppositional potential of Indian autobiography resides.”14 In addition, one cannot examine Native American autobiography, and especially as-told-to works, without addressing the oft-cited question of authenticity that typically develops when discussing works produced collaboratively and may include, for example, an editor, translator, and informant.

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Wong counters these critical Western assumptions about authenticity that negate the possibility for existence of “tribal traditions of personal narrative” by tracing the changes in Native American autobiography. At the same time, her argument perhaps inadvertently underscores hyperauthenticating the “tradition” of precontact narratives, which then implies that later collaborative efforts are somehow inauthentic and therefore do not reflect agency. She further discusses those autobiographies solicited in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Euro-American ethnologists, historians, and anthropologists. Wong states that these narratives were not only concerned with the communal self and cohesive tribal identity, as seen in precontact narratives, but they were also concerned with the identity that is in conflict with Euro-American culture (89). Wong modifies Krupat’s definition of a composite autobiography as the “textual equivalent of the frontier” by “shifting the emphasis from Euro-American domination of Native American voices to Native American resistance and creativity in the face of oppression” (89). Wong appropriately titles this chapter, “Literary Boundary Cultures,” modeling her analysis on the notion of heteroglossia, where a single voice reflects the community.15 I argue that this definition echoes the characteristics of a testimonio, whose narrators speak for a community rather than an individual “I,” and therefore contributes to an indigenous-centered decolonial methodology that can be used to reexamine Native American women’s autobiographies, both collaborative and self-written. In “The Margin at the Center on Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative),” John Beverley defines testimonio as “a novel or novella-length narrative in book or pamphlet (that is, printed as opposed to acoustic) form, told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts, and whose unit of narration is usually a ‘life’ or a significant life experience.”16 For the purposes of Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories, I argue that the genre of testimonio and its primary characterization that affirms the narrator as a witness of specific events is applicable to my adapting the concept of “blood memories” that argues Native American women’s embodied life stories or shared knowledges resist, persist, and serve as a form of survivance for their communities. These forms of writing that relate a life story function to construct or revise history and identity formations. As Beverley notes, “Testimonio represents an affirmation of the individual subject, even of individual growth and transformation, but in

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connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression, and struggle” (103). Thus, the question should not be, for example, “How can these mediated autobiographies and testimonios represent the narrator and life history,” but rather, through closer examination, “How do these works, through their witness ‘testimony,’ in fact represent and give a voice to the subaltern?” The element of testimonio that parallels most with Native American women’s autobiographies is the notion of a collective rather than individual narrator. For example, Beverley states, “testimonio is concerned not so much with the life of a ‘problematic hero’ . . . as with the problematic collective social situation in which the narrator lives. The situation of the narrator . . . is one that must be representative of a social class or group. The narrator . . . speaks for, or in the name of, a community or group” (95). Beverley uses the introduction of I, Rigoberta Menchú to underscore his argument: My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I’m 23 years old. This is my testimony. I didn’t learn it from a book and I didn’t learn it alone. I’d like to stress that it’s not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people. It’s hard for me to remember everything that’s happened to me in my life since there have been many bad times but, yes, moments of joy as well. The important thing is that what has happened to me has happened to many other people also: My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people. (1) In their book American Indian Women Telling Their Lives, Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands characterize these types of collaborative narratives as more concerned with “private and intimate aspects of their lives and cultures and with the partnership women share in the structuring and preserving of traditions within their societies.” 17 They also distinguish between the categories of ethnographic and as-told-to autobiographies. They argue that the ethnographic form is not necessarily a literary work but rather one where an anthropologist collects information on the customs, practices, and ceremonies of specific tribes. Although these works are primarily for scientific purposes, Bataille and Sands suggest that they have the potential to be considered “genuine autobiographies” (11).18 Another category similar to the ethnographic form is the as-told-to autobiography, which is usually

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longer and more comprehensive. It includes dialogue (e.g. informal conversation between the narrator and recorder-editor), exploration of inner emotions, responses to events, and an awareness of audience. The editor in the as-told-to form does not simply collect and record but instead collaborates with the narrator to write an autobiography of a woman who “may be representative of the roles of women in her society” as well as a “highly individual and a competent storyteller” (11).19 The last type of autobiography they define is the written narrative, which is either written by an Indian and edited by a non-Indian for publication or is self-generated with little or no editing involved by anyone besides the author (13).20 In dialogue with these theorists, Susan Brill de Ramírez argues for a “conversively informed listening-reading process” when reading these collaborative works, which requires the reader to understand the relationship inherent in storytelling.21 Although her argument echoes those made by others—that is, a call to better understand the storyteller and pay careful attention to the relationship between ethnographer and informant—she further demands that readers become more attentive “listeners” as they practice “conversive relationality” (22). More importantly, one must understand that oral stories, once textualized, cannot simply be reduced to readings that only take into consideration narrative data and historical information. If readers merely consume these works for information, they will most certainly overlook the symbolism of the stories. Thus, in order to avoid misrepresentations and misinterpretations, Brill de Ramírez’s conversive method calls for readers, and even those currently engaged in collaborative ethnographies, to “delv[e] deeply into the story-worlds below” (31). She argues that this method necessitates that the reader-scholar take on a “co-creative role” that allows them to come “into relationship with the storyteller and story-characters and actually becom[e] part of the story” (13). This requires the listener-reader to gain a better understanding of the storyteller’s context; for example, her “historical, biographical, mythical, cultural, tribal, familial, and personal knowledge” in order to better “hear” the larger stories that have been textualized. She argues that this process of “reading-hearing” maintains the centrality of the indigenously originated and informed story (13–14). Similar to Brill de Ramírez, Greg Sarris argues that we must consider the cultural and historical background of both the narrator and the editor in collaborative works. In his reflection on the Autobiographies of Three Pomo

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Women, edited by Elizabeth Colson (1956), Sarris not only emphasizes the need to more fully understand the relationship between the narrator and editor but also to take into consideration how we as readers are informing the text that informs us.22 In other words, readers cannot assume “knowledge and power” or “to know and represent others and their relationships” (428). He argues, our “encounter with the text [i]s an instance of cultural contact,” because we (readers) are not fully “aware of all the cultural and personal influences that determine how we read” (428–29). In addition, Sarris notes that these textualized narrated lives cannot be read as “virtually pure presentations, or representations of those presentations, unaffected by . . . editing” by both the storyteller and the nonindigenous editor (435). For example, in his own interactions with Pomo informants he has witnessed them “make an art of editing what they tell ‘them scientists’” (439). One Pomo woman calls it the “giving-them-a-piece work.” She says, “I give them pieces of this and that. I tell them a few things. Even things we shouldn’t talk about [to non-Indians]. They never get the whole picture, not with just pieces of this and that. Besides, they make up what they want anyway. They tell their own stories about whatever I tell them” (439). According to Sarris, this does not suggest that these Pomo “informants”—the name given to them by anthropologists—were lying; rather, they were and are performing an act of survivance. Decolonial Methodologies: Privileging the Oral Tradition and Storytelling

In dialogue with these and other theorists of Native American autobiography, Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories argues for even more decolonial methodologies that privilege storytelling and oral histories as a way in which to recuperate, reclaim, and remap indigenous-centered epistemologies as the central prism for rearticulating Native American women’s life stories. I argue that autobiographical discourses by Native American women call for decolonial readings that do not insist on a linear structure but acknowledge how the subject’s multiple positionalities inform her writing, speaking, and blood memories, where land-based languages are unearthed. In Decolonizing Methodologies, Smith argues that contested histories are not unfamiliar to indigenous peoples. Rather, these oral traditions have always been “stored within genealogies, within the landscape, within weavings and

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carvings, even within the personal names that many people carried” (33). More significantly, she states that in order to “reright” and “rewrite” indigenous history, one must give testimony in order to “restore a spirit, to bring back into existence a world fragmented and dying” (28). She argues further “our survival as peoples has come from our knowledge of our contexts, our environment, not from some active beneficence of our Earth Mother” (12– 13). It is this argument about knowledge and survival that is perhaps most relevant for my argument about land-based languages and the use of oral stories and autobiographical discourses to approach a better understanding about how one’s very existence and ancestral ties embody sovereignty through blood memories. Although Smith is skeptical of a “misty-eyed discourse that is sometimes employed by Indigenous people to describe our relationships with the land and the universe” she is nonetheless aware that tribal ties and genealogical experiences through her grandmother are what gave her a firmly grounded sense of place (12). Thus, I extend and adapt this claim to include an argument that the oral stories and shared knowledge of indigenous peoples are forms of sovereignty that can be tied to place. My book proposes that Native American women writers across sovereign geographies and overlapping histories of colonialism use metaphorical maps as tropes for remembering and reclaiming one’s territory and subjectivity as they rewrite and tell their stories that are grounded in lived experiences, the landscape, and blood memories. I agree with Smith partly—that is, arguments about Native Americans’ connection to land should not take the form of romanticization via New Ageism that in many ways recolonizes indigenous epistemologies—but I also argue that ancestral memories and especially oral traditions are extremely relevant to claiming sovereignty over one’s history and shared knowledges.23 As a way to further consider the concept of blood memories, I examine Silko and her discussion of storytelling as it relates to the Laguna Pueblo. In her essay collection Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, she states, “The stories are always bringing us together, keeping this whole together, keeping this family together, keeping this clan together.”24 She notes that it is nonsensical to think of these stories as being fixed in time, because they are constant and it is an ongoing process (52–53). She recalls the “old people” saying, “If you can remember the stories, you will be all right. Just remember the stories” (58). And more importantly, “Our stories cannot be separated from their

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geographical locations, from actual physical place on the land” (58). She notes that even today the “original journey from the Emergence Place” for the Pueblo from “Paguate to Laguna down the long decline of Paguate Hill” still “resonates the spiritual, or mythic, dimension of the Pueblo world” (36). In her written works, interviews, and talks Silko reiterates these notions of storytelling and their importance to the Pueblo as well as other indigenous people. But what is perhaps most significant is how she discusses time and place together as intersecting and multilayered. In an interview about the process of writing novels, Silko defines time through the metaphor of an ocean: History was not distant but all around. And so that sense of time that I learned from those old folks and the way they moved was time as an ocean. It’s not something that happened five hundred years ago isn’t way off over there. Time is an ocean, so that sometimes, the fact we are all sitting here now is very dependent on what happened five hundred years ago. And that you can’t just say five hundred years ago, that’s way far in the past. No, that linearity, that emphasis of making time all strung out like a string, that’s political, that’s what colonialists do so that the colonized people. The colonialist always says, “That was so long ago; we really can’t address the things that have happened a long time ago.” But people who have experienced time as an ocean, you know what happened five hundred years ago is right here—just as much as what happened five minutes ago is right here. How can you say that five minutes ago is more important than five hundred years ago? I still have that sense of how it feels. (Interview, 2005) I argue that Silko’s defining notions of time and nonlinearity are intricately tied to her concept of storytelling as a “journey” that is “boundless” and has the ability “despite great distances between cultures” to “bring us together” (Yellow Woman 59). Silko’s thoughts are not unlike Smith’s, whose project is to write and talk back in order to recover indigenous selves from settler-colonialist narratives and positions herself as an indigenous woman who claims a “genealogical, cultural, and political set of experiences” that allow her to do so (Decolonizing Methodologies 12). Since both of Smith’s parents worked away from their tribal territories, she became “firmly grounded” in her “sense of place” when she regularly visited her maternal

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grandmother (12). And it was these visits where she says her grandmother “developed in me the spiritual relationships to the land, to our tribal mountain and river” (12). Similarly, in her memoir, Hogan makes connections between home, land, memories, time, and ancestral identity as someone who never grew up on her “homelands” but only later returned as an adult. She states, “One year my father and I went back to our homeland in Oklahoma. We were together in search of our world, our histories. We wanted to visit with some of the Chickasaw elders. As individuals, and as tribal people, my father and I were searching for ourselves” (Woman Who Watches 115). Hogan recounts the Trail of Tears and forced relocation of her people and lucidly argues that her ancestral ties are what have caused the intergenerational trauma she and her adopted Lakota daughters now suffer.25 In fact, even as an award-winning, internationally recognized writer she acknowledges there is no language and no way of communicating the brokenness, the fragmentation, and the near disappearance of her people (54). She herself escaped the pain of “American history,” that is, the absence of indigenous people, through alcoholism and attempted suicide in what she calls the “lost years” (53). “We Indian people . . . had not been meant to survive and yet we did, some of us, carrying the souls of our ancestors, and now they speak through us” (49). I argue that Hogan’s memoir and the unearthing of her memories of history and place are fundamental to understanding that blood memories are inextricably linked to storytelling and the oral tradition. This echoes the arguments made by Smith in her discussion of contested histories and the absolute need to continue “telling our stories from the past, reclaiming the past, giving testimony to the injustices of the past . . . all strategies which are commonly employed by indigenous people struggling for justice” (Decolonizing Methodologies 34–35). And even though these testimonies are rarely accepted as truth or valid narratives of history, “the need to tell our stories remains the powerful imperative of a powerful form of resistance” (35).26 For all these writers and theorists I argue that the concept of “blood memory” should not be seen as the genocidal language used to define and exterminate indigenous people through the use of government-imposed definitions of blood quantum, but rather an identity based on ancestral memories and stories.27 In other words, blood memories embody historical trauma and the legacies of violence and genocide that have been inscribed on generations of people who collectively embrace shared knowledges as way of healing and

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survivance. Hogan writes, “History is our illness. It is recorded there, laid down along the tracks and pathways and synapses. I was only one of the fallen in a lineage of fallen worlds and people” (59). Thus, for all the women writers-scholars-activists-bloggers examined in this book, I argue that their stories told about this intergenerational trauma are inherently sovereign. There is no question as to the validity of someone genetically inheriting certain types of cancer or illnesses; therefore, intergenerational trauma or epigenetics is no different.28 Why Sovereignty Matters When Reading Indigenous Women’s Stories

My use of the term sovereign to describe these women’s life stories is intentional even though the definition is at times problematic given the complexities of its defining characteristics.29 I argue that the very act of writing, giving testimony, witnessing, and retelling history through the oral tradition embodies the full extent of what it means to enact sovereignty through story. According to Joanne Barker in “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” colonists and the US government manipulated the concept of sovereignty in order to deny indigenous peoples the right to govern themselves and to negate their “territorial rights and humanity.”30 She argues that although “England, France, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States negotiated, signed, and ratified treaties with indigenous peoples,” they negated and manipulate these legal documents for their own colonizing purposes. For example, they deemed indigenous people as users of the land who simply wandered over it for shelter and food. Thus, they were not considered “full sovereigns of the land” based on international law (7). This essentially removed Indian tribes from their foreign status and broke any “implied link between treaties, nationhood, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and jurisdiction that the United States would be obligated to recognize in Indians” (11). Therefore, when Native Americans became seen as wards of the US government, this made it possible to ethnicize indigenous peoples as a “political strategy of the nation-state to erase the sovereign from the indigenous” (16). Nevertheless, Barker argues this definition of sovereignty in relationship to indigenous people became rearticulated after World War II in an effort to resist the dominant and oppressive forces. That is, it began to function as a means of representing “a staunch political-juridical identity refuting the

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dominant notion that indigenous peoples were merely one among many ‘minority groups’ under the administration of state social service and welfare programs” (18). The term sovereignty was adopted and widely used to refer to American Indians’ “rights to self-government, territorial integrity, and cultural autonomy”—all of which the state denied them in negating treaties (18). Thus, Barker argues that the term itself is not easily defined in its relationship to indigenous peoples as a result of these multiple historical shifts in meaning. Although some critics argue the concept cannot be reconciled because it is steeped in Eurocentric epistemologies, others assert that there is a need for an “intellectual sovereignty” that will revitalize and legitimize indigenous epistemologies as valid bodies of knowledge (25). I expand this idea in Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories and argue that narratives by and about indigenous women are legitimate sites of shared knowledge where one’s memories, the oral tradition, and—more importantly—sense of belonging to specific places (i.e. homelands) is a collective act of resistance and self-determination. Kathryn Shanley states the following in “Born from the Need to Say”: Nothing defines indigenous peoples more than belonging to a place, a homeland. No single political issue has been more important to indigenous peoples than the effort to retain land bases, recover lost territories, and hang on to hunting, water, mineral, and other rights associated with living in a particular place. Yet “home” also functions metaphorically to refer to a future place of self-esteem (on the individual level), and self-governance, cultural maintenance, revitalization, and sovereignty (on the collective level). “Home” may not be a “place” indigenous people have ever been before—the global economic structure requires new forms of culture and governance. The drive to go “there” nevertheless urgently continues.31 Thus, as Silko underscores in her essays and creative works, it is place or the connection to one’s homeland, whether literally or metaphorically, that is of utmost significance for indigenous people—in their past, present, and future to maintain a collective sovereignty. As stated earlier, I see this connection to place intricately tied to blood memories—to the stories told and retold that assert a collective consciousness of ancestral identities and survivance. This sentiment is echoed by Cook-Lynn:

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The struggle of the colonized indigenous people of the continent to tell their own stories. . . . The denial of this basic human right, through the development of nationalistic, legal, social, and intellectual systems that make it impossible for a domestic people, or a domestic nation of Indians, to express itself collectively and historically in terms of continued self-determination, is a kind of genocide that is perhaps even more immoral than the physical genocide of war and torture. (86) The argument that cultural genocide (e.g. destruction of language, storytelling practices, etc.) is akin to physical genocide is a claim that is well known and agreed upon among indigenous communities. I agree with CookLynn and see her statement as one that unapologetically defines indigenous stories as sovereign and necessary to maintain indigenous peoples’ autonomy in resistance to any entities that seek to silence or delegitimize these voices.32 In Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, which raises critical questions in the field of American Indian studies, Cook-Lynn examines a writer’s relationship to the past and cites the example of the Sioux uprising of 1862, after which thirty-eight Dakota Sioux men were hanged in a public execution. She strategically calls the executed men “patriots” and forces the readers to rethink the often-cited heroic figure Abraham Lincoln, who was culpable in this act since he administered executive order for these hangings: The event is notable, in a nativist’s view, not because it is the largest mass execution in the history of America, but because the Dakotah grandmothers and those who were to become grandmothers witnessed it. It was forever etched in their minds and it became one of the private horrors of colonialism. (63) As noted by numerous Native American writers-scholars-activists, the notion of time—that is, events occurring or having been recorded in the past—is contrary to the indigenous concept of cyclicality, the belief that what happened one hundred or even five hundred years ago is connected to contemporary issues facing Native American communities. This history and the legacies of destruction, deterritorialization, colonization, and mass genocide against indigenous peoples has not ended, nor should it be thought of as only existing in the past. Cook-Lynn recalls that her own grandmother Eliza Grey

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Cloud Renville (1857–1947) spoke about the mass hanging in her childhood tribal language and called it a “crime against humanity” (63). There are certainly many more massacres that could be cited—the Wounded Knee Massacre (December 29, 1890) and the Sand Creek Massacre (November 29, 1864), among others—but the truth remains that it is the retelling of these events that underscores the significance of the oral tradition and shared knowledge or blood memories in order to maintain one’s ancestral identity through sovereign stories. Thus, Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories is a close reading of several indigenous women’s autobiographical discourses who are from different regions and time periods but whose voices are inextricably linked not only by the urgency to tell their own story but also, as Smith reminds us, to rewrite and reright historical narratives. In the chapters that follow I extend and adapt the work of Native American autobiography theorists and argue that the memories of these women who tell and write their stories of survivance are articulating a place-based and land-based language. And their autobiographical discourses express communal storytelling practices that embody ancestral identities across multiple regions, times, and spaces. Chapter 2 examines the as-told-to work Delfina Cuero’s Autobiography (1968), edited by Florence Connolly Shipek. I argue that Cuero disrupts the erasure and silence of the Kumeyaay by remapping her people’s presence through storytelling and place naming. Cuero’s is not solely an “ethnographic informant,” but rather an agent of history who strategically subverts the autobiographical form as she negotiates her positionality between two nation-states. Cuero is a knowledge keeper and a tradition bearer whose Kumeyaay-centered epistemology calls for a new model of citizenship and reclaims territorial sovereignty for indigenous peoples who have been bifurcated by the US-Mexico border. Cuero affirms an indigenous identity that is tied to ancestral homelands, landscapes, sacred sites, migratory routes, and most importantly intimately tied to her oral stories and blood memories. This chapter contributes to and complicates theories of Native American autobiography and sovereignty by arguing that Cuero’s narrative affirms cultural and traditional practices as she unmaps colonialist notions of belonging and identity by rerighting Kumeyaay histories. Cuero’s knowledge of geographical spaces, and her blood memories of tribal removal and genocide, are indigenous-centered epistemologies that are intricately tied to landbased languages.

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Chapter 3 examines Leslie Silko’s memoir Turquoise Ledge (2010) and her under-examined self-published experimental multigenre life story Sacred Water (1993). Both works assert an indigenous-centered critique of land desecration, exploitation, and genocide through their collective memories of extended family. Her narratives cannot simply be described as nature writing or ecocriticism; rather, they are stories of indigenous resistance, survival, and healing. Sacred Water reconceptualizes the notion of autobiography and is characterized by communal storytelling that is intricately connected to animals, landscapes, and her environment. I argue that she utilizes a Native feminist spatial practice by including images, what I call photomemories, that act as witnesses to a much larger oral history. She strategically integrates photographs as a literary device that counters Western-centered historiography, landscape photography, and pictorialism. Most importantly, her photographs counter images that have historically shaped dominant notions of Native American identity. Turquoise Ledge further explores similar themes and stories about land and place. Similar to Cuero’s experience, Silko’s frequent walks on trails through southern Arizona near her home articulate a land-based language that unearths memories of indigenous spaces. Her memoir recounts her relationships with animals such as rattlesnakes, spiders, macaws, mastiffs, parrots, and hummingbirds. And her stories about the Star Beings, rocks, clouds, petroglyphs, and ancient ones embody an indigenous-centered way of knowing that resists settler-colonial mappings and narratives. She engages in decolonizing methodologies to unearth histories forgotten and then remembered through place naming and storytelling. I argue that she articulates an indigenous ecology where the violent dispossession of lands and memories of genocide are rooted within the landscape and geographies of the body. Her works are not simply about conservation-oriented environmentalism; rather, they serve as unmappings of colonial discourses that underscore indigenous presence in the land and the stories. Chapter 4 examines one nineteenth-century life story by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (the first known Native woman autobiographer), one twentieth-century autobiography by Zitkala-Sa, and Pretty-Shield’s as-told-to life story edited by Frank B. Linderman. In addition, I review several ethnographic autobiographies recorded by Truman Michelson, because it is important to reexamine these early under-researched recordings or ethnographies

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that not only misappropriate the narrative voice but also illustrate how a conversive relational reading can underscore the agency of these women’s stories. For example, I argue that Pretty-Shield was not a passive informant for ethnographer Frank B. Linderman but rather that she strategically incorporates her agency through subversive collaboration and silences. In addition, Zitkala-Sa and Winnemucca Hopkins are perhaps two of the most anthologized early Native American women writers. For this reason, I include a review of their works that emphasizes the need to read these self-written life stories through their specific sociohistorical context. For example, Zitkala-Sa’s narrative should not be disconnected from the boarding school era, when five consecutive generations of children were forcibly removed from their homes, taken to prisons, and tortured with the goal of “Killing the Indian and Saving the Man.” The sovereign stories these women provide are significant to better understanding early Native American women’s life stories and contextualizing the legacies of violence that are still affecting indigenous communities today. Chapter 6 argues for an engaged pedagogy within the context of Native American studies. My arguments and reflections on teaching are informed in part by Devon Mihesuah, who calls for “indigenizing the academy” by challenging the status quo and debating the controversial issues that adversely affect the lives and representations of Native Americans.33 I argue for an interdisciplinary approach to teaching Native American studies and, more specifically, women’s life stories by providing multiple pedagogical models for educators who are considering Native American studies as part of their curriculum. An indigenous-centered model calls for students to examine critically those instances of cultural tourism and popular media stereotypes that continue to perpetuate gross misconceptions about Native American identity. It is especially important that students not romanticize Indianness as they become more consciously aware of their own sociopolitical position in relation to the creative writers, scholars, and activists with whose work they are engaging. Thus, this chapter also provides readers with ways in which to integrate indigenous-centered models into their classrooms and close readings of works for all levels. For example, I argue that identitybased multigenre anthologies, such as Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, edited by Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, provide students not only with a collection of Native American women’s creative writing, but also a significant

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introduction to tribally specific narratives that broaden students’ understanding of the history of colonialism, genocide, and patriarchy in the United States. As a teacher-scholar who is immersed in academia and dedicated to building bridges with multiple indigenous communities off campus, I argue that the theories, readings, and teachings we provide students cannot be disengaged from tribal communities and must provide students the space to also participate in service learning and creative projects as well as activism. It would be a disservice to students if these works were taught in isolation from their sociohistorical contexts and disconnected from the pressing issues facing indigenous peoples today. Chapter 5 expands the notion of sovereign stories by examining the new ways in which indigenous peoples have utilized the Internet as a tool for decolonization. New media has become such a huge part of our everyday lives, and in many cases blogs, digital newspapers, and social media have rapidly become the only ways in which many acquire information about emerging or ongoing social justice movements associated with communities of color. Thus, I end my book by providing a brief overview of new media and review how the Internet is becoming indigenized through blogs, social media, and websites dedicated to indigenous organizations and indigenous social movements. I argue that new social media and individual activistblogger sites have provided opportunities for internationalizing indigenous rights, activism, and movements. Thus, through the use of new technologies there is a move to “indigenize the Internet” whereby some individuals and groups collectively participate in what I call communo-blographies, virtual sites where testimonios and truthtelling about indigenous communities is rapidly disseminated and, therefore, has the potential to create even larger movements of solidarity for social justice.

CHAPTER 2

Delfina Cuero and Anticolonial Native American Historiography Remapping Kumeyaay Presence through Storytelling and Place Naming

The indigenous groups from what is now called San Diego, California, have always known that they emerged from this place and are the original inhabitants of an expansive space that is now bifurcated by a border between Mexico and the United States. As a result of Spanish and American colonialism and missionization, the place names given to Kumeyaay ancestral lands sought to erase and make invisible a people who have traversed this space from time immemorial. Some place names in the region were Hispanicized; others were renamed. In her life story, published and edited by Florence Connolly Shipek, Delfina Cuero disrupts this erasure and silence by remapping Kumeyaay presence through storytelling and locating her subjectivity within the interstices of the borderlands. Cuero’s cultural authority serves as a strategic method to reclaim territorial sovereignty, simultaneously subverting the restrictive definitions of citizenship as defined by two nation-states. Cuero is a knowledge keeper and tradition bearer whose Kumeyaay-centered epistemology negotiates a new model of citizenship that transcends physical and temporal borders. In this chapter, I argue that through an anticolonial indigenous historiography, Cuero strategically subverts the ethnographic as-told-to text as a way to affirm her hyperlocalized, supraterritorial citizenship that is tied to ancestral homelands, landscapes, sacred sites, and the cosmos.

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Kumeyaay Creation Story

In her narrative, Cuero affirms Kumeyaay presence and a communal sense of belonging by referencing the creation story.1 According to the Kumeyaay, when the earth was all covered with water there were two brothers, the Creator Brothers, who lived under the water and wondered what was above them. They emerged from below and came through the water by climbing a high mountain that extended above. The younger brother was blinded because he opened his eyes when passing through the salt water. He returned below, and his stumbling about is what caused the rumblings and shakings under the earth. The elder brother witnessed the land being built by insects, red ants (miskiluwi or ciracir) who filled up the water up with their bodies, which became the land. The land grew from the work of these ants, and many other forms of life began to multiply. From red, yellow, and black clay the brother created the sun, moon, and people. According to the Kumeyaay, the creator not only created the world and humans but also sacred sites, such as mountains and places where one would acquire power for good, healing, and peace. In her autobiography, Cuero briefly refers to one mountain, cu•ma•, that was only used by dreamers (51).2 The creator named this mountain after the spirit Kuuchamaa, who came to be a man according to the creation story. As a human, he was a shaman or kuseyaay, who would call all other kuseyaays from different tribes, including Luiseño, Juaneño, Cahuilla, Cupeño, Quechan, Cocopa, Paipai, and Kiliwa, and teach them about peace, cooperation, and collaboration. According to Cuero, the dreamers had special powers to heal and acquired knowledge about spiritual songs, ceremonies, dances, and healing herbs. Cuero states, Some witch doctors were more powerful than others.3 They got their power from their dreams. . . . They would try to use their power on each other to see who was the strongest. They would not let ordinary people come near them to watch. The last xu.luy [witch doctor dance and contest] was held near Campo about twenty-five or thirty years ago. It was on cu•ma• (Tecate Mountain), a special place used only by witch doctors, high on the mountain. There was another mountain far north in the Cahuilla territory that the doctors went to sometimes. An old relative told me that the doctors were so powerful in the old days

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that they split the mountain down one side and white sand comes down that side now. (50) Cuero’s reference to these healers and shamans are similar to other oral stories told by nearby tribes about the region, including the creation story, which explains why the different tribes now live in different places. Cuero also warns, as do other cultural authorities, that it is forbidden for anyone other than those who have dreamed this power to use these sacred sites.4 And those who come to these places for selfish, evil purposes and anything other than good will become ill and possibly die.5 Delfina Cuero’s stories and those of other Kumeyaay are grounded in the oral tradition—the teachings that have been passed down from one generation to the next. The stories about her relationship to the land are echoed by a collective memory that spans generations and even nearby tribes who continue to preserve their tribal knowledge through storytelling, place naming, and land-based languages. The sacred site that Cuero remembers continues to be revered by the Kumeyaay, and her storytelling practices are part of a Kumeyaay-centered understanding of Creation and one’s interdependent relationship with all living beings and places. For example, she remembers when she was a young child that she asked one of her “old relatives” how he became a healer. He told her the story of how he was chosen to go inside Signal Mountain near the Colorado River, where he was asked about wanting material possessions such as piles of gold. When he said no, he would rather heal the sick woman with sores, the others told him to return and start healing people. And that he would never get anything for this healing. “After he had his dream he told me that he had to go onto a special mountain [Mt. Tecate] for five days. His healing songs came to him during that time” (52). Those who seek to erase indigenous presence cannot deny the living spirits, petroglyphs, artifacts, oral stories, and sacred sites, the indigenous epistemologies that transcend physical, spatial, and temporal boundaries. The Kumeyaay active presence in the lands and space of Southern California from time immemorial is undeniable and supersedes Western-centered notions of origins or doctrines of discovery. Cuero underscores this presence as she retells stories told to her by elders and family members who continue to challenge narratives of settler colonialism. More significantly, tribal survivance is present

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in the landscape and places where the Kumeyaay exist as a people. For example, Cuero also recalls that the “Indians had names for every little spot” (50). And as she “roamed the mountains looking for food” she saw “lots of grinding holes in the rocks everywhere,” so “there must have always been Indians all over the country” (58). Cuero knows that Indians “have always been,” and her stories are part of a collective tribal memory spanning across time and place. Her sense of belonging to a people and existing within the landscape, not outside of it, is also echoed by elders from the nearby Cahuilla: Katherine Aubel: The land’s the most important thing. If you don’t have land, you have nothing. . . . This is a sacred area. This was given to us by our creator, to take care of it, to live here in harmony with it.6 JoMay Modesto: The land was important. Mainly because it gave everything you needed to live on. Well, we came from the land, from the earth itself. And it was created especially for you and so you had a place within that, and you were going to go back to it. . . . The land will change, but it will always remain, it will always be there. . . . I can sit on a rock and think how many generations, how many hundreds of generations of Cahuillas have sat on that rock and thought, “This is mine, this is where I come from.” Not “mine” in the sense of possessing it, but “mine” in that I am a part of it, my world. (Dozier, 58–60)7 Similar to Cuero these women elders also participate in knowledge keeping, and their memories of place and relationship to land articulate epistemologies used to explain the collective experiences of indigenous people in Southern California. Therefore, the multilayered stories that emerge from Cuero’s autobiography, “as told to” Shipek, cannot be defined by confining notions of autobiography, because her oral stories are also the stories of her people and even nearby tribes. And Cuero’s communal oral storytelling elucidates her agency through a Kumeyaay-centered lens. Cuero’s stories not only assert the ongoing presence and challenges brought to her people; her narrative and blood memories serve as witnesses to new forms of genocide, resistance, and healing.

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The Power of Naming: Strategies for Indigenous Survivance (Kumeyaay/Diegueño/Mission Indians)

In Kumeyaay: A History Textbook, Michael Connolly Miskwish notes that the Kumeyaay of Southern and Baja California are composed of multiple clans and linked to other Indian nations as shown through similarities in language (16). They are a part of the Yuman language group, which comprises the following languages: Kumeyaay, Paipai, Kiliwa, Cocopah, Mohave, Maricopa, Quechan, Yavapai, Havasupai, and Hualapai (15). The Kumeyaay are also known as Ipai and Tipai, and their ancestral lands stretch from coastal San Diego County south of the San Luis Rey River, east to the Salton Sea, and approximately fifty miles south of what is now the US-Mexico border to the mission at Santo Tomás in Baja California (16). Miskwish notes that the complexity associated with “naming” is a result of missionization in California. And the terms that have been used to designate this tribe— Mission Indians and Diegueño—are “remnants of colonial classification that designated Native people around the San Diego mission, attaching to them the quality of belonging to the mission site more as property than as citizens” (17). Thus, when reservations were created in the late nineteenth century for “Mission Indians,” some members chose to maintain the name Diegueño for political reasons, that is, in order to distinguish themselves from the Kumeyaay in Mexico and maintain the minimal land rights that were given to them at this time.8 As a result of this long and complicated history there is no one distinct and agreed-upon name that identifies indigenous peoples of San Diego County. In fact, as outlined by Miskwish, the earliest recordings of persons indicating their name chose not to adhere to any “subservient societal structures higher than their Sh’mulq [clan],” and therefore we now have various recordings/spellings of Kumeyaay such as Quemaya and Quamaya (Miskwish, 18). For example, when early Spanish explorers asked persons about their national identity, Miskwish notes that some Sh’mulqs responded with their word for “people”: Ipai, Tipaay, Awikipai, and Kawakipai (Miskwish, 18). The actual naming of Kumeyaay peoples by outsiders and self-naming is significant as it illustrates cross-cultural contact narratives, which must be read through multilayered lenses.

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In many ways Cuero’s narrative continues this tradition of resistance not only to naming but missionization, conversion to Catholicism, and acculturation. Missionization was nothing less than an act of genocide committed against indigenous peoples. Through oral stories, blood memories, and primary sources we have testimony of the cruelties committed, such as severe whippings, rape, starvation, and slave labor.9 According to Joel Hyer, those who fled were hunted down, and soldiers who searched for “runaways” would coerce parents to divulge their whereabouts by threatening to throw their babies into nearby cactus fields (29). Descendants of those who lived at the missions and survived describe them as “concentration camps” where corporal punishment was the norm. In her tribal memoir, Bad Indians, Deborah Miranda rewrites the romanticized version of Mission Indian history and affirms that “the padres believed in firm discipline and consequences; usually this meant flogging (another word for ‘whipping’), but sometimes other kinds of corporal punishment were used as needed” (11). She states that “records from the padres’ diaries and other records indicate that some Indians received as many as 125 blows at one time” (13). And she underscores that “it is a common falsehood that any Indian was ever beaten to death by a padre” (13). Rosalie Robertson (Kumeyaay), who translated Cuero’s narrative, stated “when her people disobeyed the friars, soldiers threw native children off a nearby cliff” (Hyer, 28). Hence, this particular place has been named the Crying Rock by the Kumeyaay (Hyer, 200n41). Robertson also asserts that her people did not understand baptism or why the priests were dumping water on them (Hyer, 28). Thus, the baptismal records should not be utilized as an indicator of indigenous peoples willingly accepting conversion. Through a conversive relational reading of these oral stories it is clear that the historical narrative of conversion through baptism without resistance is false. According to Tony Pinto (Kumeyaay), “coercion could not create converted Indians” (Hyer, 29). He asserts that his people still practiced Kumeyaay spirituality even though many were Catholic. Thus, the complexity of resistance in the face of missionization must be fully excavated to better understand how Cuero’s sovereign life story and her blood memories contribute to a collective testimonio that counters simplistic definitions of California Indians. Another form of resistance by California Indians occurred during the Mexican period (1821–1848) and secularization, when indigenous peoples

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strategically rejected the lands offered to them near the missions. Although the Secularization Act of 1833 was meant to divide and assign lands and livestock from mission holdings to Kumeyaay, the Mexican government instead created ranchos for the governor and his friends. Some Kumeyaay became the laborers on the ranchos while others fled to the coastal areas and mountains (Miskwish, 64–65). Many made the decision to resist and reject the oppressive institutions that sought to erase their presence as indigenous peoples on their own homelands. In her life story Cuero recalls how her grandparents also resisted: My grandmother told me she was under the priests at the mission for a little while when she was young. . . . The Indians did not like them because they had to work too hard for the priests. The women had to make a lot of things. . . . The Indians either learned and did it or they were punished. The Indians left whenever they could. They said the priests were all bad because they made the Indians work hard. (53) Perhaps replying to Shipek’s inquiry about the missions, Cuero’s voice reveals that she believed in a Creator whom she thanked for things like plants and the well-being of her family, but this Creator had absolutely nothing to do with priests, missions, or church. She states that she only heard about priests but never saw one and that she was never told anything about “God” (53). In this section of the narrative, I argue that Shipek chose the word “God” as a translation for Cuero’s concept of Creator. Later in the narrative Cuero’s stories of resistance to Catholic conversion are illustrated further as she recalls traditional coming-of-age ceremonies that were performed by her relatives. Her grandmother said they dug a hole for the girl and filled it with warm sand. They then tattooed her mouth and chin and sang around the hole (39). They continued to perform these ceremonies away from the missions. She says the reason for tattooing or nose piercing was that it helped “you go on the straight road” once you die (40). She recalls that her grandfather “had a hole through his nose” and “he was never taught at the Mission, even though he had always lived in the valley until he was old” (40). These stories are clear indications that Cuero’s relatives, especially her grandparents, were participating in subversive acts of survival that she continues in her own narratives of survivance. Similar to the ways in

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which Southern California indigenous peoples strategically chose their names for political reasons, many also chose to resist missionization and continue their cultural traditions and ceremonies, even if it resulted in punishment or death. Beyond Genre: Native American Women’s Life Stories

Although Cuero’s life story was published during the Native American Renaissance, the lack of scholarly articles or attention given to it outside of brief references in anthropological studies is likely a result of its publication by a small regional press and the fact that it has been categorized as an ethnographic, as-told-to work.10 This text was originally published in 1968 by Dawson’s Book Shop as part of the Baja California Travel Series and titled The Autobiography of Delfina Cuero: A Diegueño Indian, as told to Florence C. Shipek, interpreter Rosalie Pinto Robertson. There were only six hundred copies printed, and the book went out of print shortly thereafter. It was reissued in 1970 by Malki Press with the same title. After going out of print for a second time in 1989, it was republished by Ballena Press in 1991 with a new title: Delfina Cuero: Her Autobiography, an Account of Her Last Years, and Her Ethnobotanic Contributions by Florence Connolly Shipek. Given the colonialist legacies of renaming indigenous peoples and the resulting cultural genocide, the use of the term Diegueño in the first edition and its omission in the latest edition is significant. Similar to the ways that the Kumeyaay chose to name themselves as an act of survival, Cuero also strategically subverts the ethnographic as-told-to form in order to claim agency and cultural authority as she asserts a shifting transborder citizenship that encompasses multiple histories and stories of survivance. One cannot deny the complexities involved with categorizing Cuero’s story within a fixed genre such as autobiography. Therefore, while reading her story, one must take into consideration the context and circumstances under which this life story was ultimately published. For example, the power relations between informant and ethnographer; Cuero’s motivation or sense of urgency, which resulted in revealing secret tribal stories and naming deceased relatives (i.e. going against Kumeyaay custom); the use of a translator; and Cuero’s claim to a strategic subjectivity through subversive discourse. Given the constraints that definitions of autobiography produce, I

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find it more useful to read Cuero’s work through the lens of testimonio, where the narrator participates in an act of survivance or communal witnessing.11 Kumeyaay Testimonio: Unearthing Local Indigenous Knowledges

Cuero’s original motivation for allowing Shipek to record her life story was that she hoped this written narrative would serve to prove her birthplace as San Diego County, thus allowing her to legally cross the border from Baja California, Mexico, to San Diego, California. The urgency of Cuero’s story, her life history and that of her community, is significant as the final published narrative resonates with layering discourses where a subaltern woman negotiates and appropriates the genre of autobiography and more specifically the as-told-to form. For example, Cuero does not disclose all secrets or stories about her community, thus strategically subverting Western- centered discourses. Instead, she tells Shipek that she cannot remember everything, and that certain ceremonies or foodways are no longer practiced in her community. Thus, these silences are subversive acts, because she is conscious of multiple audiences who will read and utilize her stories for different purposes. Cuero’s life story is complicated further because it was never meant to be published and consists of interviews and reports that Shipek constructs into narrative form for a mainstream audience. Thus, Cuero’s “as-told-to” story must be read on differing narrative planes where the written word is not privileged over the oral and the speaking subaltern subject does not need to be validated by the nonindigenous anthropologist. Similar to Latin American women’s testimonios, Cuero strategically uses the “I,” or first-person narrative, to tell a collective “we” story, thereby subverting the process of writing. Thus, the experiences of the narrator are intertwined with the experiences of her community and her cultural environment. According to Anthony Pico, former chairman of the Viejas tribe, the Kumeyaay lived life through songs. They danced and sang to celebrate, mourn and teach. Culture, traditions, history and social values were transmitted through songs. Songs taught everything the people needed to know to survive. There were songs about the environment

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such as salt, wildcats and plants. There was no written language. Songs contained the collective wisdom and memories of the Kumeyaay people. Individuals and clans had songs. Spiritual and creation songs and dances, such as the Bird Song and Eagle Dance, taught moral lessons and connected people with the ancestors and the meaning of life and death. (kumeyaay.com) Cuero also recalls these traditional practices in her life story as she remembers her grandfather telling her about the “big dances,” the keruks and the fiestas. This sense of self as more communal than individual can also be seen through the Kumeyaay belief in dreams where persons would acquire powers in order to help others. Cuero refers to these persons in her life story as witch doctors who would gain knowledge from an altered state of dreaming and learn how they could heal those in need, as previously discussed. Cuero states, “Some witch doctors were more powerful than others. They got their power from their dreams. After a young man had his first dream and received his power, he would work with an older man for a while. There would be special witch doctor ceremonies and dances” (50). Cuero briefly notes that these people, including “herb women,” were selfless (51). They “never thought of themselves any more, only of the people who needed help” (51). These stories underscore the significance of the Kumeyaay as a communal society where there existed a strong connection to the community and not the individual. Cuero’s communal oral storytelling renders her authoritative agency through a Kumeyaay-centered lens, and it is therefore more appropriate to read her narrative through a critical “listening-reading” technique. Cuero is certainly conscious of Shipek as an anthropologist as well as the multiple audiences who will be reading and interpreting her stories. Although there is a sense of urgency from Cuero, who wants to prove her origins, she is aware that by providing only parts of her story and stating she has forgotten many of the “old ways,” she strategically subverts the dominant ethnographically constructed text. The very act of indigenous-centered and land-based language or speech acts becomes a form of empowerment and a way in which to subvert colonial discourses. And Cuero’s testimonio is complicated further by multiple relocations, displacements, and outright genocide as she not

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only reclaims her ancestral homelands but a strategic supranational or transborder citizenship. “There was more to it but I am not a storyteller and that is all I can remember”: Rereading Shipek’s Ethnographically Constructed Text

Following the call for a conversive relationality, I argue that we need to approach close readings of Cuero’s story by reconsidering Shipek’s background as an ethnographer whose relationship with the Kumeyaay complicates our understanding of the cross-cultural contact and power relations between these women. Clearly, Shipek constructed this narrative from multiple interviews conversations that she had with Cuero and other members of the community. In addition, Shipek’s scholarly articles about the Kumeyaay are numerous and cover several of the following topics: sociopolitical structure, adaptation to drought, reactions to the Franciscans, ethnobotanical and land use, and food sources.12 But if we examine Cuero’s story, as Brill de Ramírez suggests, by unraveling the multiple layers of collaboration, then we must also take into consideration Shipek’s relationship or “friendship” with many members of Southern California indigenous groups. She was not only an anthropological observer but also a confidant who served as an advocate as well as an activist in her pursuit of legal rights for Kumeyaay peoples.13 In an obituary written for Shipek, Chet Barfield notes that she was a “trusted friend” of the Kumeyaay. And although she was a “researcher,” Shipek also assisted many members as they navigated government bureaucracies. She also served as “an expert witness in court cases on Indian land and water rights.” He quotes the Viejas tribal chairman at the time, Anthony Pico, who states “She had two passions: One was justice for the Kumeyaay people, and the other was the history of the Kumeyaay people.”14 As a result of her involvement with the San Pasqual band, Shipek was asked to work on the Mission Indian Claims Case Docket 80, a “claim against the government for dereliction in its trusteeship duty to protect the water rights belonging to Indian reservation lands.”15 For this case she was asked to research the “identity problem” of the “Kamia” and their relationship to the “Diegueño” as well as conduct a complete land-use study for the Kumeyaay. During this time Shipek found informants for her research in Baja California, where many Kumeyaay Indians migrated and became unwilling

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refugees in order to live freely in undisputed territory. Shipek asked them questions that related to their everyday living habits, such as what plants were gathered and where, what fish and shellfish were used, and what social and religious activity occurred.16 Shipek then took the informants across the border of San Diego and Baja California, Mexico where she, “constantly tested and cross-checked them for accuracy and reliability.”17 From the late 1950s to the late 1970s she recorded hundreds of interviews of elders who were eighty years and older and gained the respect of community members. In response to an article by Alice Kehoe on the “ideological biases” inherent in the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology, Shipek states that she has been a “revisionist anthropologist for some time,” and this is a direct result of her “long term applied research undertaken for Indian groups” (Shipek’s emphasis).18 Nevertheless, I am not suggesting that Shipek’s self-proclaimed role as a “revisionist anthropologist” means that readers should ignore her primary role as a researcher-scholar or the unequal power relations that existed with her “informants.” Although Cuero, a “trusted” friend of Shipek, allowed her story to be published, the intended audience, at least for Shipek, was nonNative. This is made clear by both the introduction written by Shipek and the preface, written by Lowell John Bean, who is also an anthropologist and author of several works on California Indians:19 But scholars concerned with California’s social history and those engaged in ethnography and the reconstruction of aboriginal life . . . will find fresh and valuable data for continuing investigation and research. . . . For the ethnographer, the information on food collecting, hunting and fishing along the coastal regions of California, will prove invaluable, being specific in terms of what and how, who and when.” (2–3) Bean’s preface is intentionally written within an ethnographic framework, where Kumeyaay peoples are described as objects of study. It is written for “students of ethnography” who are interested in acquiring more information on Southern California Indians. Thus, both Bean and Shipek construct Cuero as a passive informant and not as an agent of history, a storyteller, or even a cocreator in this collaborative project. The preface reduces Cuero’s narrative to data about “the poor and culturally distressed strata of a

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conquered people” (3). And in the first edition (1968), Shipek follows a classic ethnographic framing of the narrative by including a signed photograph of Cuero on the cover. Underneath the photo is written her mark and a symbol in the shape of a t.20 On one level this mark serves to give credibility to the narrative and the ethnographic information. It allows the editors to publish the words of their informant as an authentic voice of the subject, minimizing any skepticism about the validity of its content. Thus, the complexity of mediation where the editors have to employ translators in order to understand their informant’s stories is avoided with this mark signifying credibility. The t also constructs Cuero as the primitive, nonspeaking, nonliterate Indian who must rely on the “civilized” white anthropologist to speak for her.21 Therefore, Cuero, is displaced in the past as the racial other, unable to claim her space in modern culture. It is interesting that, as discussed earlier, the title of the 1991 edition omits the name “Diegueño” and the phrase “as told to.” Shipek became a self-identified “revisionist anthropologist” in the twenty years between the book’s first edition and its latest, after Cuero’s death, yet the narrative, introduction, and preface remain the same. Even though both Shipek and Bean negate Cuero’s subjectivity, perhaps unintentionally, this type of silencing compels us to complicate simplistic readings and employ what Brill de Ramírez calls a conversely informed listening-reading process, where intersubjective relations play a significant role in better understanding the multiple story-worlds that may exist in ethnographically constructed life-history narratives (7). Sarris argues further that when reading mediated works, the narrator should not be reduced to readings that construct the Indian as nonliterate, unacculturated or ahistorical (426). I argue that readers should also take into consideration Cuero’s transformation of the autobiography as she strategically incorporates multiple voices in order to preserve her people’s sovereign stories even as Shipek and this ethnographically framed narrative seek to shape her voice. One example of Cuero’s subversive testimonial practice can be seen in the introduction where Shipek’s reading of Cuero’s laughter is both patronizing and dismissive of the ongoing presence of internal colonialism. Shipek states, Delfina is one of the strongest persons whom this writer has had occasion to interview and to know. She is always laughing, joking, cheerful, and seeing the humorous side of life. Yes, she has had a hard time, been poor and

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hungry many times, but life is still basically good. She laughed many times as she recalled her childhood and she smiled about the pleasant parts. Living with hunger had not diminished her enjoyment of her childhood, her family life, and her playmates. . . . The worst is now past; she and her children have survived. (my emphasis, 17) Shipek’s misreading of indigenous storytelling practices, and her misinterpretation of Cuero’s gestures and laughter, demonstrate not only a major cross-cultural disconnect but also the power relations that existed between them. This passage egregiously erases the real material histories of Kumeyaay and ignores Cuero’s urgent need to tell her story in order to provide evidence of her birthplace. Although she was immersed in the culture for some time, Shipek can never completely identify with the few stories she has been told and records. In fact, as Sarris reminds us, there is a long tradition of silences as practiced by Native “informants” who are conscious of their positions and, instead of revealing all their stories, only give anthropologists “pieces of this and that” (439). Shipek meets the expectations of her audience by constructing Cuero as the passive Indian informant without serious consideration for Cuero’s agency. Thus, Shipek’s introduction participates in an erasure of the material realities that prohibit her “informant” from legally crossing the border and returning home. Instead, Shipek chooses to focus on Cuero’s story as it relates to an imagined life that is free from such complexities. Shipek’s social location as a privileged white ethnographer does not allow her to see that perhaps “the worst” has not yet passed. Conversely, if we unpack the layers of editorial control, this quoted passage can also serve to underscore Cuero as an authoritative speaking subject. Cuero is cognizant of her audience and subverts the textualized narrative voice. Thus, Cuero’s humor and seemingly cheerful demeanor can be interpreted as survivance where her performance as a so-called informant masks the true historical intentions and motivations for telling these stories. Drawing from Vizenor, who argues that Native American writers perform tribal presence as a strategy for survivance, Philip Round argues that Cuero’s narrative is a “persistent history” that is complicated by “crosscultural performance,” a result of “transcribed American Indian autobiography.”22 In other words, the silences and gaps actually “give us a glimpse into the intersubjective, discursive conditions of the production” of Cuero’s

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story as a literary text.23 For example, Cuero retells a story of Coyote, or “bad man,” who would try to deceive people. She notes that “in the beginning of time lots of wild animals were like people and could talk” (41). She states: “This story explains how we have to watch men—there are some good and some bad men. We knew that these stories were told to teach us how to behave and what to expect. The old people did not have to tell us what the story explained at the end of the story, but I am saying what it meant to us” (42). It is significant that the elders did not have to explain what the story meant. In fact, her explanation could be one of many interpretations that may differ depending on the tribe and readers will not understand, nor are they meant to, the full meaning of Cuero’s stories. She ultimately controls the narrative voice, because she chooses which stories to tell Shipek and, more importantly, which ones to explain. Round argues, When Delfina Cuero signals her slight impatience with having to explain the tale of the coyote and the young girls, she steps outside of the closed circle of both the potentially “tragic” reading of ethnographic reportage and the “comic” interpretation of literary autobiography to signal her awareness of the transposition of cultural values in which she has engaged by consenting to being interviewed, and by telling traditional stories in the context of her own unique life experiences. At this moment, Delfina Cuero most reveals her presence as an active agent in the discursive exchange, the decisive historical subtext of which is reflected in the multiplicity of audiences she addresses in such intersubjective moments.24 At one point in the narrative, Cuero states that she does not consider herself a storyteller, repeating several times that she does not remember everything about specific ceremonies or her life history. But it is precisely these pauses and her “not remembering” that mark Cuero’s agency as a knowledge keeper or cultural authority who is conscious of her multiple audiences and therefore does not reveal all her memories. Stephanie Fitzgerald argues that these “silences” or “ruptures” in the narrative not only embody Cuero’s ambivalence about the project but also allow her to resist Shipek’s “attempts to mold her into a role other than what is rightfully hers” (116). Cuero’s sovereign oral stories (e.g. historical, mythical, personal, communal) are interweaved

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throughout this life story and are not meant to represent pure, authentic histories of the Kumeyaay, as defined by Eurocentric reading practices; rather, her stories reveal what Round describes as a “discursive space of the borderlands,” where she simultaneously struggles to “engage her ancestors in a dialogue” while “recognizing the pragmatic value of her narrative” for an imagined audience.25 Although Cuero urgently wants to prove her origins, she is also aware that by providing only “pieces” of her story and stating that she is not a storyteller or that she has forgotten many of the “old ways,” she strategically subverts the dominant ethnographically constructed text. The very act of Kumeyaay-centered storytelling becomes a form of empowerment and a way in which to subvert colonial discourses. As noted earlier, Shipek’s constructed written narrative about Cuero are taken from multiple interviews she conducted over several years and therefore, the stories that do emerge in the final publication primarily disclose the ways in which Cuero and her family would collect food, hunt, fish, and perform particular ceremonies. Thus, I argue that the emphasis on these subjects is clearly a result of Shipek’s ethnographic intentions and research interests. Nevertheless, through a conversive relational reading Cuero’s stories and blood memories also recall that when she was a young girl many of the ceremonies her people performed stopped taking place, resulting in cultural genocide. According to Shipek many of the women, including Cuero, did not participate in the girls’ initiation ceremony and lost their first child. Cuero was one of these women who lost her first child at the age of thirteen. She recalls, they had already stopped having the ceremonies before I became a woman, so I didn’t know these things [food and herbs] until later. . . . I knew something was wrong with me but I didn’t know what. . . . Food was becoming hard to find then and we had to go a long way to find enough greens. . . . My grandmother had not realized my time was so close or she would not have me go [gathering greens] so far alone. They carried me back but I lost the baby. (43) It is only after she loses her child that Cuero’s grandmother then teaches her about the care of babies. And Cuero relates how from this point forward she used such herbs as “xa?a•nayul [Trichostema parishii Vasey, mint family]” or

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“kwa•s [Rhus laurina Nutt., sumac] to bathe” (44). She also learned to keep her baby warm with hot ashes that were covered in bark or cloth, and “to keep the navel from getting infected, I burned cow hide, or any kind of skin, till crisp, then ground it. I put this powder on the navel. I did this and no infection started in my babies” (44). She continued to pass on her knowledge to other women as she helped them bathe their babies in elderberry blossom or willow bark tea. She states, “When my children were older, if they got sick, I used herbs. That is all I used and my children got well again. There are herbs for stomach pains, colds, tooth aches, and everything that Indians knew. There is a real good one to stop bleeding right away from a bad cut. There is another good one for bad burns and to stop infection” (45). These recollections by Cuero can be read through several narrative planes and have multiple interpretations. We can infer that she is answering the ethnobotanist Shipek’s inquiries about certain native plants and herbs that were used for traditional healing and medicinal purposes, but she is also telling stories of survivance. She is simultaneously describing the loss of cultural and traditional practices and affirming that in the face of genocide and mass disruption of everyday life, these traditions and use of indigenous healing practices have not been completely eradicated. In fact, she repeats several times that she continues to practice the lessons she has learned from her grandmother and other relatives: “I still live by the old rules and I’ve never been sick” (42). She also tells the story of her uncle, who told her how he became a healer. He was aware that he would die for having told, but since “he knew he would die soon anyhow,” he tells Cuero. Thus, in many ways Cuero’s testimonio is a collective story about the urgency of preserving and passing on cultural knowledge. This preservation should not be mistaken for nostalgia. Rather, as Simon Ortiz states, “You are remembering for a purpose, you are not just remembering for the sake of having something like nostalgia, but rather to keep a responsibility intact and active.”26 Cuero’s Life Story: Performing a Strategic Transborder Citizenship through Stories of Survivance and Place Naming

Ironically, Cuero’s life story was a result of Shipek’s ethnographic research for the Mission Indians claim case, which led her to “document” and “authenticate” Indian life in the San Diego coastal section by asking her

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informants to identify specific land markers and settings.27 Shipek asked community members questions that related to their everyday living habits, such as what plants were gathered and where, what fish and shellfish were used, and what social and religious activity occurred. Shipek also asked individuals to identify specific markers in the landscape, their places of birth, and former dwelling locations. She would then cross-check this data with other informants to verify their authenticity. I argue that these types of conventional anthropological methodologies to hyperauthenticate Kumeyaay oral stories are fundamentally problematic and steeped in a history of Western colonialist paradigms that are in opposition to indigenous epistemologies. Nevertheless, as is the case with any as-told-to autobiography, Cuero’s voice is not completely silenced. Cuero was aware of Shipek’s previous research and agreed to participate as a way to assert her subjectivity, her identity, and her inherent sovereign right to claim this territory as her homeland. Thus, Cuero’s stories of survival must be read within this context—that is, as a story that centers the cultural authority of Kumeyaay where place naming and storytelling articulate a collective sense of identity. In the end, Cuero hoped that this written narrative would authenticate her birthplace and serve as an official document that would allow her to cross the border legally. Therefore, Shipek attempts to write a linear autobiographical narrative that begins with Cuero’s testimony of her birthplace: My name is Delfina Cuero. I was born in xamca. (Jamacha) about sixtyfive years ago [about 1900]. My father’s name was Vincente Cuero, it means Charlie. My mother’s name was Cidilda Quaha. They were Kum ya.y Indians. My father and mother came from mat kutap (Mission Valley in San Diego). Now they are dead and buried in xamu.l (Jamul) Indian Cemetery, both of them. My father’s mother was Martina Kunyi.ly (Quinnich). His father was kari.ti. kwal (Karretay Cuero). My mother’s father was xamlu.1 kwaxa. (Kamlul Quaha) and her mother was x su.s miskwi.s (Jesus Miskwish). They were all born in Mission Valley. (23)28 For Cuero naming becomes a powerful tool of resistance. By naming her parents and grandparents Cuero affirms her collective sense of belonging and subverts the colonialist paradigms of mapmaking that sought to erase Kumeyaay presence. She strategically traces her lineage back to her

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homeland. And it is this naming and reclaiming of her people’s territory that she believes will provide evidence of her citizenship and right to come home. These stories, these places, and these voices transgress space and time as they speak across historical moments of colonization, missionization, and even the militarization of the US-Mexican border. Cuero’s testimonio is shaped by the voices of her ancestors. Her blood memories and the sovereign stories she retells subversively articulate a transborder citizenship not defined by any nation-state. Her claim to ancestral homelands is not akin to any ownership of place but rather a reclaiming that utilizes “inherent tribal sovereignty,” sovereignty that is original and natural as opposed to legal sovereignty that is tied to the institutions and agents of government.29 In her effort to underscore her sense of belonging she recalls the migration of her relatives who were forced to relocate as a result of encroaching settlers and missionaries. Through the oral tradition she describes how there used to exist Kumeyaay villages throughout the canyon and in the Lakeside and El Cajon Valleys. And how there was a large “xa.tu.piţ [Padre Dam, built by the Mission Fathers]” (24). Since her parents and other Kumeyaay did not “own” any of the land they inhabited, they had to move from village to village, leaving “their own place,” and instead live in places where they could find work or wild food (24). Cuero’s later descriptions of place and land express how settler colonialism by the Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo Americans forcibly removed her people from their homelands. Her sovereign stories embody a history of survival, and her blood memories reflect Kumeyaay-centered knowledge and lifeways. Cuero’s multilayered testimonio unearths the truth about the Kumeyaay’s resistance to Spanish missions and the Spanish land-tenure systems,30 assimilation and resistance to Mexican secularization and the rancho system,31 the end of the Mexican-American War,32 the reservation system,33 and genocide.34 These histories are remembered and passed down to Cuero from her parents and grandparents; they are lived experiences that cross physical, spatial, and temporal boundaries. The mass genocide and historical facts that can be derived from Cuero’s narrative are extremely important, but I have intentionally relegated to the notes a large portion of Southern California history in this chapter as related by ethnographers, sociologists, and historians, as a response to Brill de Ramírez’s call that we should not simply

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reduce our readings of these collaborative works by only taking into consideration the data and historical facts. Thus, my reading of Cuero’s narrative considers her place naming as an alternative history telling or blood memories that are intricately tied to her people and homeland. Her storytelling remaps overlapping and multiple genres, identities, spaces, and time periods, thus affirming a Kumeyaaycentered knowledge that subverts the genre of autobiography and as-told-to form. Cuero’s place naming forces readers to delve into her story-worlds and the meaning of things, both animate and inanimate. She recalls, The Indians had names for every little spot. Many names I have forgotten, but each meant something about that place. ?u.tay (Otay) means a kind of weed that grows there, that is, a lot of that weed grows in that place. xamca. (Jamacha) is the name of a wild gourd and a lot of them grow in that place. xamu.1 (Jamul) was named for a kind of weed that grows where there is lots of water. Point Loma was called mat kunyily (black earth) because that is how it looks from the distance. (24) Cuero unearths histories from places that can never be forgotten and disrupts our readings and notions of land ownership and rights. Her narrative does more than simply prove or claim citizenship, it reminds listener-readers that we inhabit lands that continue to live through names, spirits, and our very presence as a people who now occupy this territory. She ruptures epistemologies that privilege linear, chronological ways of knowing and remaps her life story through her relationship to place. Cuero’s knowledge of geographical spaces, as she remembers, becomes a form of literacy, a means to explain historical and personal experience. In the case of Kumeyaay elders, place naming becomes even more complex as several of Shipek’s informants or “unwilling refugees” from San Diego County discuss how the landscape has changed over the years and even how the Campo Santo cemetery in Old Town was much smaller. The change these informants observe is significant because it illustrates the transformation of place and homelands that is a direct result of encroachment and forced removal. Ironically, it is the destruction of the landscape that contributes to the difficulty of identifying one’s homeland or, in Cuero’s case, proving her citizenship. In the introduction Shipek notes,

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Delfina has been an excellent informant with a remarkable memory of places, plants, and activities. The only areas in which she had any difficulty locating herself were those sections which had been cut, filled, and covered with buildings, or were otherwise altered from the original natural contours of the land. (16) Yet, regardless of mass development, Cuero still remembers and locates herself within the landscape, providing evidence that she belongs to this place, this space, and what she claims are the ancestral homelands of the Kumeyaay. In his discussion on place, Keith Basso argues that “place-making is a way of constructing history itself, of inventing it; of fashioning novel versions of ‘what happened here.’”35 He notes that anyone can be a place-maker—that is, any person who is inclined to ask “what happened here? who was involved? what was it like? why should it matter?” (5). As Shipek asks these types of questions, Cuero and other cultural authorities respond with their blood memories about particular places, including Cuero’s birthplace. Shipek writes, I asked a very old woman who had always lived in the Jamul-BarrettDulzura area if she knew Delfina Cuero, the subject of this autobiography. This woman replied that she had been about ten years old when Delfina was born and that her mother had been a part of the same group as Delfina’s parents. When I asked where Delfina was born, instead of telling me, she had me drive to Jamacha, where she pointed to an old grove of trees and said, “In a little Indian house under those old trees.” (8–9) This exchange between Shipek and another member of the Kumeyaay illustrates the oral tradition as a way to recuperate one’s memories and unearth stories that are intricately tied to place. According to Keith Basso, “whenever the members of a community speak about their landscape—whenever they name it, or classify it, or tell stories about it—they unthinkingly represent it in ways that are compatible with shared understandings of how . . . they know themselves to occupy it” (74). For example, Cuero recalls, “I remember we walked a long way to get ? snya•w (acorns). I know we went into the mountains. . . . We used to gather pine nuts right near the ocean near San Diego beyond mat kula•xu•y (La Jolla or ‘land of holes’)” (27). She recalls walking

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from the mountains to the ocean and back again, the very spaces that have since been desecrated and (re)occupied by mass development. She says, “if there weren’t so many houses maybe I could find my way to all the places again” (27). She also remembers that when she did gather pine nuts with her family “a long way from San Diego” and what is now Baja California, Mexico, she used to meet “Indians from all over Kum ya•y territory” and “even some Indians from the reservations” (28). Cuero’s stories emerge as part of a continuum of those collective voices that resist erasure. And her memories and place naming are types of “evidence” that counter state-sanctioned notions of citizenship and belonging. Even though particular landscapes have been exploited by mass development Cuero’s stories about specific places “proves” that her memories are more reliable than any formal act of documenting and “fact finding” by an ethnographer. In describing the colonialist disruption and forced removal of her people from their native lands and places they once called home by the Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo Americans, Cuero’s stories not only excavate her genealogy but also painfully recount moments of historical and contemporary deterritorialization. Many of her stories are directly related to forced removals that prohibited self-sufficiency. For example, Cuero’s parents, Vincente and Cidilda, moved from Mission Valley and El Cajon to Jamacha, California, where she was born in 1900. She, along with other nonreservation Kumeyaay Indians, lived or camped in areas outside San Diego County such as Lakeside, Monte Vista, El Cajon, Jamacha, and Otay. These mountain valleys served as home for Cuero and her family as they frequently moved from one location to the next in search of work. Cuero’s narrative recalls these frequent moves and the hardships she and her family endured as a result of the large non-Indian populations moving into the San Diego area. This deterritorialization is further discussed as she talks about the encroachment of Anglo and Chinese settlers: My father and mother left Mission Valley, they told me, when a lot of Chinese and Americans came into the Valley and told them that they had to leave. They did not own the land that their families and ancestors had always lived upon. They moved east into ?ewi∙ Ka•kap (Mission Gorge). There were many Kumeya•y villages all through that way. . . . My mother and father went to one village, and then the next one, and on and

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on. After they had to leave their own place, they lived around wherever there was work or wild food to be gathered. They lived in El Cajon, then Jamacha. That’s where I was born. Later we lived in xamu•l (Jamul) and then s mu•xu• (Cottonwood or Barrett). We just worked at a place and then my father would tell me we had to move again. (23–24) Cuero’s recollections of her multiple dislocations illustrate the difficulty she or even Shipek might have in obtaining any written documentation of displaced indigenous populations of Southern California. As transborder citizens (a citizenship not defined by the nation-states of Mexico or the United States), the Kumeyaay did not conform to Eurocentric concepts of land ownership usually associated with allotment. Rather, their identities and everyday lives were necessarily tied to places and a migratory lifestyle unhindered by borders. This unrestricted movement for the purposes of harvesting, hunting, and participating in ceremonies would later transform into a life dictated by forced removals and uprooting by a changing economic system of capitalist exchange. Thus, her memories of traveling are associated with her father’s ability to find work: I remember my father used to work all around El Cajon and Jamul and many places. He did ranch work. We just camped as close as we could most times. We never lived in a house. We just lived out away from the ranch houses in the brush of some small canyon. My father would pick a place where the wind couldn’t hit us. (25) The systematic removal of Kumeyaay from their homeland is underscored by Cuero’s stories of displacement and exploitation of indigenous peoples for cheap labor.36 The exploitation and genocide committed against Native Americans in California escalated with the gold rush and subsequent land theft by Anglo Americans.37 The subjugated Indian populations along with mestizos who had formerly worked on the Spanish missions were often bound through debt peonage to the new owners of the land. And it was common for the elite Californios and Anglo Americans to have Indian servants who maintained their large ranchos in exchange for food, shelter, and clothing as opposed to wages.38 In her narrative, Cuero refers to the legacies of these ranchos and contemporary forms of ranch work. She recalls, “The

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ranchers that my people worked for gave us some food or sometimes some old clothes for the work. They never gave the Indians money. We didn’t know what money was in those days” (25). She states that after her husband died she could not provide her family with food: I had to beg for food from neighboring Indians and ranchers. Some neighbors helped me sometimes. I went hungry and my children were hungry. Sometimes for two or three days we found nothing. I didn’t have anybody to help me any more, I just went here and there looking for food. I finally had to sell Aurelio to a Mexican to get food. . . . They were mean and made him work like a man all the time and even beat him. The food they gave us to pay for him lasted a month. . . . He finally ran away. . . . he was never paid in money for any work, just food. (61) Cuero’s memories about selling her son and subsequent abuse by Mexican owners represent the real material histories of indigenous peoples in Southern California as indentured servants and slaves. Several other times in the narrative Cuero recalls how the old ways of trading were replaced by a capitalist system that erased traditional ways of living: My husband used to hunt a lot. He was a good hunter for deer. We would use some of the meat and some we would trade for sugar and flour and coffee. . . . There was one Mexican family that lived near there with an old woman who wanted herbs. They would bring food and trade it for my herbs. There was no store. We didn’t understand money then; the only thing we did was to trade for food or cloth. (56) There are too many people all through the mountains now for Indians to live by hunting and gathering the wild food the way we could when Sebastian Osun was alive and I was young. (64) She also recalls, “a white man that comes from someplace near Los Angeles. He has some of the people going all over looking for gold. . . . We carry the rocks on our back from where we dig them to his machine. He pays us with food. He wouldn’t pay money! It’s real hard work” (64). When she and her family were unable to fish and look for abalone at the

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San Diego beaches, they began moving farther south to Ensenada and Rosarito Beach, Baja California. She remembers “the Indians ate everything possible in those days,” because otherwise “they were hungry if they didn’t” (28). Thus, the Kumeyaay’s forced removal from their homelands also meant the loss of traditional foodways: When I was young we had to move too much to plant anything. Always being told to leave, it was no use to plant. My grandmother used to tell me that when Indians could live in the same place . . . they would always clear a little place near their house. . . . That way, they had some food close to their house and it would grow. But when I was young it was no use to plant like that when we couldn’t stay to get it. (32) According to Richard Carrico, “the continuing failure of the federal government to establish a reservation system in San Diego County was, by 1875, hastening the cultural, economic, and social decline of the Indians.” Indian Affairs Commissioner Edward P. Smith reported that all available agricultural lands had been seized or occupied by white owners (76). For example, in 1932 the Kumeyaay were forced off their ancestral land on the San Diego River in order to make way for the El Capitan Dam and its reservoir.39 Although one layer of Cuero’s narrative unearths a history of colonialism and exploitation, particularly the genocide of California Indians, another layer rewrites those histories of subjugation through a remapping and rewriting of Kumeyaay indigenous-based shared knowledges that continue to live though her blood memories and place naming. And if cartography is a weapon of imperialism, Cuero disrupts the literal and figurative boundaries that restrict her from freely traversing through her ancestral homelands. By doing so she espouses a different notion of citizenship than that imposed by nation-states. Scholars’ attempts to map out specific boundaries and markers of Kumeyaay territory are insufficient for understanding the complexities of Kumeyaay worldviews. Thus, it is not surprising that in the first two editions of the book, Shipek included a hand-drawn foldout map with a caption that reads: “territory known and traversed by Delfina Cuero in southern San Diego County, California, and northern Baja California.” The latest edition (1991) also includes a smaller version of the map at the end of the text. Similar maps of Southern California can be found published in numerous published

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articles and anthropology or history books about California Indians. And in the tradition of cartography, these maps provide readers with a visual representation of places and names that draws on Western notions of place, which in turn contribute to mythmaking based on Eurocentric notions of authenticity, accuracy, and citizenship. Since the colonial enterprise of mapmaking is rooted in the idea of exploiting people and land, the territorial markers and names on the maps included in Cuero’s life story signify erasure, forced removal, and genocide of the Kumeyaay. Ironically, Shipek’s maps can be read as yet another Eurocentric colonial practice to hyperauthenticate the validity of Cuero’s stories, since they are intended to provide readers with a visual marker of the places Cuero references in her oral stories. But they can never serve as official documents that would allow Cuero to return home. Perhaps unintentionally, Shipek erases the very place names that Cuero describes, because she does not include the major Southern California tribal names—for example, Luiseño, Ipai, Tipai, Cupeño, and Cahuilla. In fact, her map only includes the Spanish names of places with no Kumeyaay translation, a practice that differs from the written narrative where translations are provided. Although the map allows readers to visualize space and the possible migration routes of the Kumeyaay, these places are depicted onedimensionally from an ethnographic centered framework. And Cuero’s original motivation for telling her story, to “prove the truth of her claim to a San Diego origin,” is never accomplished (17). When Cuero asks her children and grandchildren: “Is there room for us in America? Can we come home legally?” the answer is, ultimately, no (67). In her oral stories Cuero recalls forced removal and coming to consciousness about the border. She says, “In those days the Indians didn’t know anything about a line. This was just a place in the whole area that had belonged to the Indians where nobody told us to move on” (54). Her discussion of intertribal contact when she joined other San Diego Indians who were deterritorialized as they migrated south across the Mexico-US border is significant, because it relates another way of thinking about the borderlands. We often view this space in binary terms, a line separating two cultures (i.e. Mexican and American), but we rarely think of the borderlands area in terms of its intercultural significance for the multiple indigenous groups who claim this geopolitical space as their ancestral homelands. Whether in opposition to or perhaps in dialogue with the ethnocentric

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maps, Cuero uses sovereign stories to provide her listener-readers with a remapping or even unmapping of place through storytelling and place naming. She not only reconstructs her subjectivity and her people’s histories but also reclaims place or Kumeyaay ancestral homelands by challenging colonial practices to demarcate space. Cuero’s body and her presence in the very places she calls home compel Shipek and her readers to remember the importance of blood memories that transgress temporal and physical boundaries. Cuero also subverts colonial spatial practices, because her sense of belonging is defined in relationship to place and landscape rather than geopolitical borders. And many of her blood memories, especially those related to family, are associated with particular locations. For example, her return to the coast triggers memories about how her family caught fish and prepared their meals: We caught fish and cleaned them. We took the fins, tail. And head off and used those parts to make a good soup. The eyes, especially, were good for you. . . . When we got a lot, we would cut it all up and dry the meat in the sun for later. We used cactus thorns on a long stick to spear fish. We also made traps out of agave fiber. We put the traps in the ocean, put a piece of rabbit meat in it, and could come back later to get the fish. We made nets out of tall grasses; ropes and nets were made of agave too. We had other ways to catch fish too, but I don’t remember them all. (29) The oral stories Cuero retells about the tools used to catch fish and “remember[ing] the old timers talk about making k yuš (boat) out of tamu. (reeds),” illustrate Cuero’s land-based language and complicates the reader’s conception about how the land, ocean, cosmos, and animals are intertwined with one’s blood memories (29). Her stories about place are embodied knowledges that emerge from oral histories about her family and community and are intrinsically linked to the landscape and environment. As noted earlier, when Shipek accompanied her “informants,” including Cuero, to these places in San Diego County as a means to cross-check for accuracy, there were obvious changes in the landscape as a result of development and destruction. Thus, Cuero’s sense of belonging, her knowledge of places, affirms her subjectivity through Kumeyaay-centered epistemologies rather than a citizenship that is grounded in settler-colonial constructs. She recalls,

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There was a story about the olivella shell; they were babies that fell from the stars. They used to say: When the dipper in the sky [the Big Dipper] gets too full, it is dumped out. Then these small shells fall all around near the ocean. There was more to it but I am not a storyteller and that is all I can remember. They used to name all the stars and tell stories about them, and explain why the Dipper is lying differently in summer and winter. (29) Through this memory, Cuero is transforming our understanding of national citizenship by strategically proposing a US citizenship whose frames of reference are cosmic and hyperlocal. Her claim to land and desire to come home as a citizen are not meant to efface indigenous sovereignty; rather, her blood memories illustrate how legal rhetoric is antithetical to Kumeyaay worldviews and their sense of belonging to place as a relationship with all things (e.g. animals, plants, rocks, ocean, cosmos, relatives living and dead, etc.). She negotiates her shifting positionality in a strategic act of survivance by revealing to Shipek only partial stories and histories of her people. When she repeatedly states that she is not a storyteller or she cannot remember everything when discussing tribal ceremonies, practices, or sacred sites, she is consciously aware of her multiple audiences and hence subverts the ethnographic as-told-to form. Cuero’s narrative supersedes colonial spatializations that seek to erase indigenous presence. Further, her oral stories revise the act of mapping by offering her listener-readers a visual representation of the animals, the rocks, the old trees, the beaches, the ocean, the campos, the ranches, the villages, the canyons, the valleys, the mountains, the place where a lot of wild gourds grow, the place where abalone were gathered, the places where ceremonies were performed, the place where she was born, the moments of displacement, forced relocation, and hunger. Cuero’s life story weaves back and forth recalling the memories of her grandparents who talked about how they used to plant greens, seeds, and roots, and how this changed when they could no longer stay in one place for a long period of time. Cuero’s storytelling and place naming represent collective expressions of survivance where cultural knowledge is passed on from one generation to the next. She affirms a Kumeyaay-centered knowledge that subverts the genre of as-told-to autobiography. Through her sovereign stories and blood

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memories, listener-readers learn about medicinal herbs, numerous ceremonies, fiestas, foodways, the significance of tattoos, the power of dreams, and the importance of place. As Basso argues, “whenever the members of a community speak about their landscape—whenever they name it, or classify it, or tell stories about it—they unthinkingly represent it in ways that are compatible with shared understanding of how . . . they know themselves to occupy it” (5). Thus, Cuero unearths histories from places that can never be forgotten and disrupts our readings and notions of land ownership and rights. Her narrative does more than simply “prove” or “claim” citizenship, it reminds listener-readers that we inhabit lands that continue to live through names, spirits, and our very presence as a people who now “occupy” this territory. She ruptures epistemologies that privilege linear, chronological ways of knowing and remaps her life story through her relationship to place. In the end, Shipek never recovered any written documentation regarding Cuero’s birthplace, and this narrative never served to legally authenticate her status as a US citizen. In 1967, after taking care of an elder Kumeyaay woman, Cuero was assisted by a social worker to attain an old-age pension. She was then allowed to live on the Campo Reservation with Rosalie Pinto Robertson, who also cared for and provided shelter to other elderly Kumeyaay. Cuero’s two daughters remained in Baja California, Mexico, while her two sons came to live with their mother at Campo. It is unclear the exact “identity papers” given to the sons that allowed them to live in San Diego during this time, but her son Santos worked regularly for ranchers on both sides of the border. When he disappeared for two months, Cuero was unaware that he had been detained by the police for drunk driving. His inability to speak English and the cultural misunderstandings by sheriffs, nurses, doctors, and psychiatrists resulted in a legal hearing to determine if he was “dangerously schizophrenic” (74). In addition, he was given an operation without his consent after a “physical examination” in jail determined he needed a colostomy (73). Shipek notes that there were multiple cases of Kumeyaay, especially the elderly, who were “caught in such language and cultural difficulties when no one was available to speak for them” (75). These circumstances were similar to those related to Cuero’s death in 1972, after she suffered a burst appendix. Cuero was placed in a hospital hooked to monitors, intravenous tubes, and a catheter with only minimal visits from Shipek and Robertson. She expressed her fear of the “strange surroundings” and the ways in which the “medical

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people” were treating her. When her daughters came across the border to visit, with the assistance of Anna Sandoval, a member of the Sycuan band, the nurses were reluctant to let them visit. “The lack of anyone to communicate with her everyday, combined with the total strangeness of her surroundings and the tubes was just too much. She became more and more fearful and lapsed back into a coma” (79). Within a week Cuero died; Robertson held the clothes-burning and funeral and buried her in Campo. Several years later her son Santos died from cancer of the colon. Shipek notes that perhaps if the doctors had been more forthcoming with his diagnosis, he might have been able to acquire the care he needed. After her death Cuero’s daughters were unable to return to the United States where all their relatives still live. Shipek writes, “To date [1991] we have not been able to get any help from the United States Consular offices in Baja California. Yet, for years this country has accepted refugees from many countries around the world” (80). More significantly, Cuero’s stories resonate with current events on the US-Mexico borderlands where indigenous peoples from Mexico continue to be excluded from freely traversing their ancestral homelands. Decolonizing the Border and Reclaiming Indigenous Sovereignty

Cuero’s story is only one of many more by descendants of the Kumeyaay who are unable to freely traverse the borderlands region in order to “return home.” A report about Baja California’s Tijuana River watershed in the Nejí Ranchería in Mexico underscores the significance of the stories told by Cuero and other indigenous peoples, whose lives within the “borderlands” region are steeped in histories of genocide and blood memories, intricately tied to homelands that are now bifurcated by two nation-states. In their report, landscape archaeologists Lynn H. Gamble and Michael Wilken-Robertson note that the Kumeyaay regard the landscape as a “living home—the rocks, springs, mountain peaks, plants, people, animals, and sites are all interrelated, as is the fluidity of time and space” (147). The cultural authorities in this study are women who face decimation and overwhelming pressures to assimilate into the new political, cultural, and economic systems of Mexico. And it is these same women who courageously struggle against multiple forms of oppression by continuing the oral tradition and locating their blood memories in specific places. They continue to speak their language, gather

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traditional foods, and visit sacred sites regularly. For example, Josefina López Meza, Aurora Meza, Enriqueta Mata Meza, Teodora Cuero, and Julia Meza Thing, among others, maintain a strong sense of presence in the face of unimaginable circumstances. Similar to Delfina Cuero, these women— whose ancestors were forced to migrate to Baja California as a result of missionization and settler colonialism in San Diego County—talk about the significance of place in relationship to their everyday living, including the gathering and drying of acorns, the performance of rituals on sacred sites, and the use of medicinal herbs for curing ailments. But their testimonios also reveal a sense of urgency in their struggle to maintain rights to ancestral homelands that are not recognized by the Mexican government. Thus, the Kumeyaay in Baja California, Mexico, are caught between two nation-states with few resources to fight against such powerful entities that prioritize legal documentation as proof of US citizenship. The cultural, linguistic, and economic separations as well as the increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border have caused a constant struggle to maintain ties between communities on both sides. Since the 1990s there have been increasing efforts to reunite families who were bifurcated by the border as well as to establish programs to preserve cultural traditions and knowledge with the help of cultural authorities. In January of 2000, after 150 years of separation, the US government, at the recommendation of Louis Guassac, executive director for the Kumeyaay Border Task Force, approved a policy that allows approximately sixteen hundred Kumeyaay from Baja California, Mexico, to cross the border with the use of “pass/re-pass” cards.40 In order to avoid the complexities and political backlash from US Customs and Border Protection, these B-1/B-2 visas are not intended for the purposes of acquiring legal citizenship but to allow members to reunite for cultural ceremonies and social gatherings.41 Ironically, the main port of entry for members is through Tecate, a sacred site for the Kumeyaay. In an article by Victor Morales, Guassac describes the disconnect between communities on either side of the border as a “broken vase.”42 That is, the majority of Kumeyaay bands in San Diego, as a result of establishing successful gaming operations, now have substantial economic power, whereas the Kumeyaay of Baja California, Mexico, are extremely impoverished and live on ejidos, large communal farms that are not federally recognized as sovereign nations by the Mexican government.43 Nevertheless, Kumeyaay, who now live in San

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Diego, California, spearheaded the issuance of the visas and have since hosted their southern relatives regularly. Currently, “Baja artisans sell their art and crafts at reservations, and the northern Kumeyaay are helping set up vineyards in Baja California, Mexico and looking into other economic partnerships.”44 In several interviews, Guassac emphasizes the urgent need for “a program right now for that our elders can get over here” [sic] in order to preserve cultural and linguistic knowledge. 45 For many, the Kumeyaay language, which is now taught at Kumeyaay Community College on the Sycuan Indian Reservation, serves as a bridge between communities who were forcibly divided and collectively suffered a long history of colonialism and genocide. Certainly, Cuero’s narrative is a precursor to these efforts because she, too, articulates a communal sense of urgency that calls for a much broader act of decolonization through oral traditions and unmappings of imperialist state-sanctioned concepts of citizenship and identity. As noted earlier, her ultimate goal to return home, to reclaim place and ancestral homelands for her people, was unsuccessful because the border continues to bifurcate and restrict the movement of bodies across spaces once freely traversed by the Kumeyaay. Although the efforts of the Kumeyaay in San Diego, California, to reunite relatives for the purposes of maintaining cultural ties is commendable, the reality remains that such efforts have done little to reduce increasing militarization of the border and the lack of infrastructure, health care, education, and economic development in the eight indigenous communities that reside in northern Baja California, Mexico.46 In addition there have been political and legal battles waged against the Kumeyaay by scientists at the University of California, San Diego, who refuse to repatriate remains found in La Jolla, California. Such battles underscore the persistence of settler colonialism regardless of the Kumeyaay’s current access to more political and economic resources.47 Thus, the struggle against cultural genocide continues as Kumeyaay affirm their indigenous sovereignty and an identity that is rooted in the land and oral traditions.48

CHAPTER 3

“The Land and the People Are Inseparable” Writing the Oral and Visual in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Memoirs Sacred Water and Turquoise Ledge

Leslie Marmon Silko states, “the Pueblo people and the land and the stories are inseparable. In the creation of the text itself, I see no reason to separate visual images from written words that are visual images themselves” (Yellow Woman, 14). She defines more fully this concept of inseparability for her audience in her self-published life story Sacred Water, where she interweaves the concepts of space, place, and time in a nonlinear format.1 The stories included in this narrative are shaped not only by the written prose but also the images of landscape, clouds, sky, and animals. The photographs she includes become characters whose stories are equally important as the written narrative and problematize our preconceived notions of traditional narrative structures, literary devices, and testimonio. In addition, Sacred Water reconceptualizes the notion of autobiography, as it is not characterized by a singular life story but connected to tribal blood memories, family history, and photographs that serve as storytellers. It is through her multiple voices and images that her sovereign story becomes the authority on an alternative American history and worldview by way of a specialized knowledge based on her life experiences. Through storytelling and photography Silko creates an indigenous feminist practice that redefines colonial spacializations of indigenous land and peoples. In “(Re)Mapping Indigenous Presence on the land in Native Women’s Literature,” Mishuana Goeman argues that “stories are a narrative tool that must be part of Native feminisms” because “they

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serve as fertile ground wherein the layers of geography are unfolded, explored and expounded upon.”2 In Sacred Water, Silko not only disrupts colonial narrations and mappings of indigenous stories and cultural practices but also utilizes the medium of photography as a literary device—a tool that also counters the history of landscape photography, pictorialism, and most importantly photographs that have historically shaped dominant notions of Native American identity. Thus, Silko becomes an agent of history whose work problematizes the notion of literacy and challenges Western notions of subject formation. She also uses landscape photos to articulate authorial and ancestral identity. In rethinking the use of photographs by Native American writers, I contextualize and briefly review the historical circumstances under which photography has typically been used as a tool of domination against Native American communities. Photography and the Shaping of Native American Identity

Most people have seen photographs, picture postcards, and random tourist keepsakes sold nationwide that depict images of Native Americans. Since the invention of the camera in 1839, photographers (both professional and amateur) have been taking and publishing photos of indigenous people. Some of the most well-known and widely dispersed collections of Native American photographs were taken by Edward S. Curtis at the turn of the century. From 1896 to 1930 Curtis photographed Native American populations as he traveled throughout the United States. By 1930 he had made over forty thousand negatives of over eighty tribes that were produced in a twenty-volume book titled The North American Indian. This collection was issued in a limited edition from 1907 to 1930 and is now entirely available in digitized format online from the Library of Congress.3 It should be noted that the Library of Congress does not contextualize the outright offensiveness or egregious stereotyped images of Native Americans in this collection but merely makes them all readily available for public consumption. These images are so widespread that it would be nearly impossible to have them completely removed from the Internet or websites, and on occasion you will see them advertised for purchase in major newspapers.4 Curtis’s images can be used as a point of departure to discuss Native American identity and representation, because his photos are fraught with

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misconceptions that continue to mythologize and shape dominant notions of indigenous people today. For example, he blurred the focus on many of his snapshots, staged scenes, often retouched, and inserted fake night skies, storm clouds, and lighting effects. And when he arrived at sites where tribes were no longer practicing “traditional” customs and ceremonies, he would recreate them. According to Lucy Lippard in Partial Recall, he would carry wigs with him for those who had cut their hair and give them primitive or traditional clothing in order to make his photos appear more authentic.5 This desire to photograph Native Americans in their “authentic” clothing and settings is not unlike contemporary characterizations of Native Americans as uncivilized, savage, and primitive. Such representations in Hollywood movies, advertisements, travel literature, and postcards continue to perpetuate stereotypes of Native people and culture. In his preface to a special edition of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal on photographs of Native Americans, Ira Jacknis reviews the representational ethics of the many photos that have been produced and reproduced since the mid-nineteenth century. He states that groups who believed that photography had the ability to appropriate and remove a certain essence of a person’s character or their soul used the phrase “shadow catcher” to describe the camera.6 The contemporary issues and debates usually deal with questions regarding access and ownership. Jacknis has described the ontology of photographs as objects that are tangible and enduring and that generally outlive the moment of their generation. Therefore, they can be detached from their original context and interpreted by many different people in different times and places so that the intentions of the photographer or subject are lost (Jacknis, 4). Furthermore, the photos are seen through various lenses or perspectives that may conflict with one another. For this reason the reconstruction of original intent might prove difficult and lead to misinterpretations that either negate or silence the subjects and their life stories. According to Willow Roberts Powers in “Images Across Boundaries,” archival photographs of Native Americans in the Southwest can be viewed from the following perspectives: from the vantage point of the archivist whose role is to help, give access, and protect and preserve the information for everyone; from the Indian user who comes to the archives with a specialized knowledge about specific communities and histories and therefore has a unique approach to historical images; and from the non-Indian user who

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is unaware of the various differences between tribes and pueblos and may not be aware that one photograph cannot represent “all” Native people or tribes.7 Since representations are often inaccurate, stereotypical, or meaningless it is crucial to understand that photos of and by Native Americans have a vexed history that must necessarily be considered when discussing contemporary works by Native American writers such as Silko, who incorporates photos into her written narratives. In her essay “The Indian with a Camera,” Silko states, The Indian with a camera is frightening for a number of reasons. EuroAmericans desperately need to believe that the indigenous people and cultures that were destroyed were somehow less than human; Indian photographers are proof to the contrary. The Indian with a camera is an omen of a time in the future that all Euro-Americans unconsciously dread: the time when the indigenous people of the Americas will retake their land. (Yellow Woman, 177–78) Thus, in Sacred Water, Silko subverts the medium of photography as a colonizer’s tool for capturing the “vanishing Indian,” and instead points the camera toward her homeland in order to take pictures of the environment, landscape, sky, and animals in order to retell a sovereign story through photos and prose. Sacred Water: Storytelling and Photomemories

In the introduction to Yellow Woman, Silko discusses her first experience with photography. She remembers that her Grandma Lily kept a tall Hopi basket full of family photos that were usually looked at in order to complement the narratives and stories told by her relatives. She states that she and other children would look at the photographs and try to remember the exact location of where each was taken. “We children would look intently at the faces, study the clothing, and always we looked for any indication of landscape to tell us if the photograph was taken around Laguna” (Yellow Woman, 15). Even as a child Silko was conscious of how landscape and place were integral to shaping her self-identity and worldview. She was exposed to the process of photography as a child because her father, Lee Marmon, was a

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professional photographer. Lee Marmon’s first camera was a Speed Graphic. He learned about photography from books and spending hours in the darkroom. He photographed Laguna and Acoma Pueblos beginning in 1947, and in 1966 photography became his profession when he moved to California and began photographing the Bob Hope Classic golf tournament. He returned to Laguna Pueblo in 1983 and his work has been published in Time, the New York Times Magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Los Angeles Times. In addition his work has been exhibited at several museums and cultural centers.8 Silko recalls, I have been around trays of developer and hypo under red safelights since I was old enough to perch on a high stool. My father, Lee H. Marmon, learned photography in the army. But to me it is still magic. The more I read about the behavior of subatomic particles of light, the more confident I am that photographs are capable of registering subtle electromagnetic changes in both the subject and the photographer. (Yellow Woman, 180) Silko’s fascination with taking photos continued in 1971 when she enrolled in a photography course and began to think about “telling a story with photographs and written narrative” (Sacred Water, 78). In the author’s note to Sacred Water Silko states she “never stopped thinking about the relationship between text and visual images which accompany the text” (Sacred Water, 79). So how do we interpret this experimental multigenre life story where she incorporates pictures, glyphs, and written text? In a letter to Laura Coltelli, Silko states that this book was meant as an antidote to her previous novel, Almanac of the Dead, but in reality the stories told and the images evoked also speak to the issues of conquest and oppression.9 In her author’s note Silko states that she became cynical about the mainstream publishing industry after her tours with Almanac and therefore decided to self-publish Sacred Water. “I wanted to have complete control over the book, from the design of the book to the actual sewing, and gluing of the book. The appearance of the book itself forms part of the reader’s experience of the text” (Sacred Water, 80). She describes the first handmade editions as “covered with Stephen Watson’s Blue Corn paper, which is made in Albuquerque, and actually contains bits of blue corn. A limited edition was covered in Watson’s white Volcanic Ash paper, which contains small amounts of fine ash obtained from the volcanoes just west of Albuquerque”

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(84). The original copies of her book are also her own design and she even hand glues the jacket, which features photocopies of Silko’s own drawings. On one copy of a first edition, she glues a hand-drawn picture of a snake along with the title and author’s name on the front of a light-pink cardboard cover that evokes the pink adobe clay used to construct rooms. In “Interior and Exterior Landscapes” Silko recalls how “the ancient Pueblo people buried the dead in vacant rooms or partially collapsed rooms. . . . Even the pink clay adobe melting with each rainstorm had to be prayed over, then dug and carried some distance” (Yellow Woman, 26). On the back jacket is another hand-drawn picture of a snake where the ISBN is written. And on the inside jacket at the end of the book there is a copy of a hand-drawn black-and-white picture on a white background that resembles an ancient Pueblo petroglyph. The glyph contains a picture of a parrot, mountains, ruins, flowers, and insects along with other designs. In a letter to Coltelli, Silko states that this drawing is a glyph she “invented to signify the phrase ‘sacred water’” (22). In Pueblo mythology the parrot represents a rain bird, so Silko’s autobiography begins with an invocation to rain, the water that is sacred to her people and to the survival of all living beings. Silko’s inclusion of glyphs also functions to challenge the limitations of the written tradition and to counter its hegemonic and imperial role in Western culture. By inserting the glyph along with the handmade jacket cover, Silko not only resists dominant notions of autobiography as written text, she also resists publishing practices. The entire process of constructing the book herself calls her audience to rethink the notion of a text as fixed and unchanging, especially after it has already been published. In addition, Silko counters the written word as static and unchanging by rewriting her book several times and self-publishing multiple editions. For example, in the newer editions she changes words or phrases, and the text evolves—similar to the oral tradition and communal storytelling, where the stories and events may change over the course of time. She states: “When I see a word or phrase or a punctuation in SACRED WATER which I don’t like, I simply change it the next time I run-off a hundred copies of SACRED WATER” (Sacred Water, 84). Thus, Silko further challenges the restrictions that limit creativity and authorial agency, because she is not only the storyteller but also the editor, publisher, and printer. In a letter to two concerned professors who had “carefully listed all the errors in the first edition,” Silko replies,

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Thank you so much for your letter with the list of misspellings and punctuation flubs, plus the missing article “a” on page 66. I am currently re-typing the entire text of SACRED WATER for the second edition and your corrections came just in time to be part of the second edition. . . . I didn’t even bother to show it to my agent or the “big publisher” because I knew they would whine about the odd format. . . . Now that you have so generously and graciously provided help with the proof-reading, SACRED WATER has taken on a bit of the communal, collaborative spirit which informs the old storytelling tradition. . . . Of course, spelling and punctuation errors are no problem in the oral tradition. (Sacred Water, 83) Silko’s sarcasm and cynicism about “big publishers” and the anticipated critiques they might make about her “odd format” speak to the larger issue of the publishing industry and the inevitable negotiations that must occur between editors and authors. Of course this letter indicates that Silko’s previous work with major publishers has garnered an attentive, national audience; thus, she is relatively free to experiment with publishing forms. On another level her self-published work represents a type of communal or collaborative project. Although not every reader will write letters to Silko correcting her misspellings and typos, they will interpret the format and stories differently based on their own biases about the visual images she includes. Thus, Silko’s identity is shaped by the landscape as told through her stories, and the stories in Sacred Water are shaped by the landscape characters and the photos that serve as storytellers themselves. Sacred Water crosses the boundaries of genre and style, as Silko is much more interested in the effect that a visual image has on our reading of her text. She states: SACRED WATER is my experiment. Whereas the goals of photographers of the “realism” school are to make pictures which speak for themselves or speak a thousand words or “tell a story themselves,” I am interested in photographic images which obscure rather than reveal; I am intrigued with photographs which don’t tell you what you are supposed to notice, which don’t illustrate the text, which don’t serve the text, but which form a part of the field of vision for the reading of the text and thereby become part of the reader’s experience of the text. The influence of the

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accompanying photographic images on the text is almost subliminal. (Sacred Water, 80) Silko complicates the notion of photography as objective, pure, and authentic and instead argues that photography, at least in Sacred Water, is juxtaposed with the written narrative as another form of storytelling: what I have called phototelling or photomemories. She rejects the idea that photos alone speak for themselves or that they disclose reality. Instead she is interested in how photographs obscure rather than reveal. Thus, for Silko photographs cannot be seen as capturing some authentic truth, whether taken by an anthropologist for use as evidence or taken by an individual in order to capture memories. Silko continues her analysis by arguing that photographs are in fact parts of the entire narrative that tell a story. They serve as “part of the field of vision of the text,” and can, therefore, also be interpreted in a similar manner as poetry or prose (80). Silko’s description of photographs and their purpose or meaning within her narrative echoes the idea that photos can always be detached from their original context and interpreted by many people in different times and places. She states that the photos will become a part of the reader’s experience of the text and therefore, since each reader will interpret the text and photos differently, Sacred Water will continue to be a collaborative and communal project that necessitates the participation of the reader to tell or read a story. Thus, Silko succeeds in her attempt to write the oral and visual alike and creates a collective or collaborative sovereign story. On one level Silko’s explanation about the interpretation of her photos in Sacred Water follows the school of pictorialism, a style popular in the United States around the turn of the century. Pictorialism emphasized photos as more than mechanical reproductions and often utilized soft-focus lenses that rendered a hazy view. But in the case of Silko, her photographs function as much more than romanticized visions of western landscapes. In fact, in the context of the narrative they disrupt the notion that the land, the snakes, the arroyos, the clouds, and even the rocks are somehow separated from human presence that is outside or even within the photographic frame. In fact, Silko argues that a viewer is not outside or separate from the land or territory that he or she surveys and that “viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on” (Yellow Woman, 27). Silko begins her photographic narrative with a picture of clouds. The

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black-and-white photos in her text contrast starkly with the white background on which they are placed. And the first photograph she includes is not accompanied by any narrative except for the opposite page, where a dedication reads, “In the memory of the nine Thailand Buddhists assassinated in their temple near Phoenix, Arizona on August 10, 1991” (Sacred Water). She explains this dedication in a letter to Coltelli: I was exhausted in every way, and I questioned the dark vision in Almanac. I decided I needed to re-read Zen Buddhist writings, and to focus myself on the calm and timelessness and oneness which surrounds us. I developed myself to this appreciation of Zen Buddhism about three months, and just as I was beginning to feel as if the vicious world of Almanac was truly fictional, the nine Thailand Buddhists were killed in their temple near Phoenix, Arizona. It was as if vicious destructive forces which Almanac was about, sent me a message through those murders: “This is what we do with Buddhists in southern Arizona.” (Coltelli, 25–26) Silko’s dedication to the nine Buddhists creates awareness of the material reality of a brutal world that contrasts with the photos of sky and clouds she chooses to juxtapose with the text. Her blood memories are intricately intertwined with the space she inhabits in southern Arizona and with the space these Thai Buddhists occupy transnationally. The narrative does not allow the reader to escape into a static, romanticized, one-dimensional vision of Tucson; rather, she grounds her photos in real material histories and lived experiences of those who share this space across time and space. Her story fittingly begins with memories of childhood and water. And the rain clouds (i.e. narrative form and images) function as characters as they carry and bring the water to her people. “Spring rain clouds follow early morning gusts of wind, and sudden drops in temperature. By dawn, the smell of rain is heavy in the air” (Sacred Water 3). She remembers as a child “the people used to watch the sky for changes in weather” (Sacred Water 5). Her anticipation and excitement for the coming of rain relates the sense of importance she felt for the arrival of water through rainstorms. The significance of water to the ecosystem and to their survival as a community—as a people—is invoked in warnings they received as children:

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We children were seldom scolded or punished for our behavior. But we were never permitted to frolic with or waste fresh water. We were given stern warnings about killing toads or frogs. Harm to frogs and toads could bring disastrous cloudbursts and floods because the frogs and toads are the beloved children of the rain clouds. (Sacred Water, 6) Silko’s vivid descriptions of her “smelling of rain” and the “beloved children [frogs and toads] of the rain clouds” evoke the sacredness of water, as it is highly valued as a living entity. And her photos of rain clouds and the landscapes in Sacred Water underscore its significance to all living beings. In addition, the importance of landscape to humans, animals, and inanimate beings is reflected in the structure of Silko’s text, which does not attempt to capture the entirety of landscapes in one photo of the sky, clouds, or rocks or even through a descriptive prose piece; rather, she employs this experimental genre to give her readers a glimpse of communal storytelling practices. In fact the prose pieces and the images can be read apart from each other—each narrative sequence telling its own story. And Silko’s sequence of photos parallels with the spontaneity that occurred when she first took some of these photos of Tucson in 1978. She recalls, “I didn’t want to have to think about aperture and shutter speeds or even focusing, because those technical details made me self-conscious and my photographs had no spontaneity” (Yellow Woman, 23). Similarly from 1980–1981 she photographed rocks because they moved and changed with each rainstorm. Like the rocks that move and change, Silko’s photos of landscapes and animals evoke a sense of fluidity where images, similar to characters in a novel or autobiography, contribute to the communal storytelling. In “Interior and Exterior Landscapes,” she states, “A rock has being or spirit, although we may not understand it” (Yellow Woman, 27). And “So long as human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and sky, the term landscape, as it has entered the English language, is misleading” (Yellow Woman, 27). Silko continues her narrative with descriptions of her coming of age in Laguna Pueblo as she rides her “horse into the sandhills after a summer rain storm” (Sacred Water, 11). She recalls seeing hundreds of little toads popping out of the sand. These childhood memories trigger a later memory in Tucson when she uncovers “four Sonoran red-spotted toads in the damp earth. Their backs were the colors of ivory and copper speckled with red. They slept head

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to head, each with its rear-end pointed in one of the four directions” (Sacred Water, 12). The toads, which signify a connection to water (children of the rainclouds) are her relatives and shape her blood memories and sovereign stories. She finds these toads pointed in the four directions, evoking their sacredness and interconnectedness with all beings; they, too, are a significant element of survival and the interrelationships between humans and animals. This memory is then contrasted with a later one, when she recalls her time spent in Ketchikan, Alaska. She writes, For a long time I had a great many Sonoran red-spotted toads around the rain water pool behind my house. . . . Hundreds of toads used to sing all night in magnificent chorus with complex harmonies. One summer . . . a man I had recently met brought his two sons and his dog for dinner at my house. . . . After dinner, the boys took the dog outside . . . when the man and I joined the boys, we found them with the dog by the rain water pool. Strewn all around the pool were the remains of toads smashed flat by the boys and the dog. (Sacred Water, 64) The destruction of the toads was not meaningless for Silko, who understood that even this “isolated” incident of destructive behavior and its consequences were as significant as any other major global ecological disaster. She follows this passage with one that parallels the toads’ destruction to the “Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster” that happened not long after this event (Sacred Water, 66). She writes of the aftermath and the hope of healing and survival. In spite of these major disasters, “last summer the pool had pollywogs again, the descendants of the red-spotted toads which had survived radioactive fall-out and the boys with the dog. The night-long choirs have not resumed yet; the toads need a few years more to recover” (Sacred Water, 66). Silko’s blood memories resonate with the themes of survival, healing, and resistance as she elucidates how even after all the man-made destruction to the environment, the toads still overcome their formidable desecration. The toads are personified and, similar to the rain clouds, there exists a cyclical pattern of death and life as rebirth emerges from this pond. This sense of the importance of interrelationships between all beings is a larger aspect of survivance as she remembers and retells her sovereign stories about the ancient Pueblos.

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Silko continues her narrative with descriptions of the rain and the clouds conveying images of rebirth as she writes about her great-grandmother, Maria Anaya, who belonged to the Water Clan. She explains that after her great-grandmother passed, “the Clan people made sure she had a big pottery jar full of water at the head of her grave” (Sacred Water, 15). These descriptions are all juxtaposed with photographs of a pond, water lilies, and rain clouds. She writes that as a child her memories of death were not negative and explains that her family would rarely use the term “died” to describe a loved one who was deceased. Instead, Silko invokes images of celebration and festivities that occurred to remember those who had passed on to another life. She states: “On All Souls Day, November 2, the people take oven bread and red chile stew to the graves to feed the spirits of the dead. . . . I learned there is nothing to fear from the dead. They love us and they bless us when they return as rain clouds” (Sacred Water, 17). Silko relates a transnational tradition practiced by her family, which signifies that life is cyclical and her family members and friends will return as rain clouds.10 The importance of rain and water is related to those who are still living in this world, and the members of her community embody her ancestral identity, her blood memories of survivance that will continue to be told from one generation to the next. The next series of photographs in Sacred Water are of snakes swimming in water. The narrative sequence juxtaposed with these photos is a story of the giant water snake Ma’sh’ra’tru’ee. This snake “lived in the beautiful lake which was connected to the four worlds below and which allowed the gentle snake to travel down below. Down there, clear streams run all year round, and flowers are everywhere because the Mother Creator is there” (Sacred Water, 23). This sacred messenger “carried prayers of the people to the Mother Creator below. Ma’sh’ra’tru’ee always made sure the people had plenty of rain for the plants and the animals, and of course, to keep the beautiful lake full of fresh water” (Sacred Water, 24). She states, “The old-time Pueblo people believe that natural springs and fresh-water lakes possess great power” (Sacred Water, 20). Silko’s specialized knowledge of her environment, as it was passed down to her, functions as a form of survivance. And the very presence or absence of snakes signifies aspects of the environment that are constantly evolving. In many cases, given the exploitation of natural resources, these sovereign stories hold even stronger significance, as in this

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passage where snakes are forever grounded in historical material reality, in the very idea that water is sacred. And more importantly the stories do not convey a colonialist narrative regarding space and place; rather, Silko’s literary strategies challenge spatial belonging. Her effort to convey that fresh water is sacred and life-giving is significant, especially when she relates the story of how a strange red algae once devastated her water pool. She says “I did not visit the pool often after that; red algae slime covered everything. But sometimes, when I did visit the pool, I found the floating remains of drowned creatures, deceived by the red algae which gave the surface of the water the appearance of solid material” (Sacred Water, 70). Silko attempts to use water plants to rid the pool of the algae and “at first the red algae overpowered and smothered the roots of all the water plants I tried” (Sacred Water, 70). It is not until she places a mass of hyacinths in the pool that the red algae receded. “The water in the pool began to clear and smell cleaner because water hyacinths digest the worst sorts of wastes and contamination . . . Water hyacinths even remove lead and cadmium from contaminated water” (Sacred Water, 72). For Silko these hyacinths are healers, because they allow the water pool to breathe life again. Therefore, she says, “I write in appreciation of the lowly water hyacinth, purifier of defiled water” (Sacred Water, 72). Similar to the rest of her narrative, she juxtaposes this story with photos of the plants, giving her reader a visual image of both their power and delicacy. Silko’s story continues as she compares the relationship that Mother Nature and humans have with water. This is especially apparent in a section where she recalls her old ranch house in the Tucson Mountains: Tucson sits on an aquifer which has receded so far that the two hundred year old cottonwood trees along the Tanque Verde wash are dying. City wells on the southside of Tucson are contaminated with trichlorethylene and other industrial wastes and are no longer pumped. Hundreds of miles of concrete canals costing billions of tax dollars carry salty Colorado River water up-hill to Phoenix, and most years, to Tucson. . . . In the driest years when the flow of the Colorado River declines, there will not be enough water to go around, and the canal to Tucson will be dry. (Sacred Water, 52) Silko’s social commentary about water contamination and lack of water

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supply speaks to the larger issues of environmental and ecological disasters as well as the public’s refusal to embrace water as sacred, a natural resource that no living sentient being can survive without. Furthermore, her narrative addresses more specifically our culpability in this pollution of natural resources. For Native North America, the issue of radioactive contamination has been of serious concern. And the irreparable damage to ecosystems and human lives caused by radioactive contaminants represents internal colonialism. For example, approximately one-third of all western US low-sulfur coal, one-fifth of known US reserves of oil and natural gas, and over one-half of all US uranium deposits lie under reservations. One notable example of a disastrous result from mining and nuclear testing occurred at a nuclear facility in Hanford, on the boundary of the Yakima Nation in central Washington State. In 1990 a spokesman admitted that since the early 1950s the weapons facility had been secretly dumping radioactive wastes into the environment at a level at least two thousand times greater than that officially deemed safe. The result was that 444 billion gallons of water laced with plutonium, strontium, tritium, ruthenium, cesium, etc. had simply been poured into a hole into the ground over the years. Officials also admitted that this contamination would reach the Columbia River by the end of the decade.11 Thus, as Goeman argues, in “Notes toward a Native Feminism’s Spatial Practice,” “Native women authors are not just representing space as a return to an ‘original’ land or an ‘original’ past/nation/being and thus erasing the layers of time, geography, and history, but also are mediating multiple relationships and, by doing so navigating ways of being in the world that reflect contemporary Native experiences.”12 Thus, Silko ends her narrative by aptly describing how the earth has managed to survive while humans are only destroying themselves. She states, Across the West, uranium mine wastes and contamination from underground nuclear tests in Nevada ruin the dwindling supplies of fresh water. Chemical pollutants and heavy metals from abandoned mines leak mercury and lead into aquifers and rivers. But human beings desecrate only themselves; the Mother Earth is inviolable. Whatever may become of us human beings, the Earth will bloom with hyacinth purple and the white blossoms of the datura. (Sacred Water, 76)

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Her commentary on environmental destruction caused by humans is juxtaposed with photos that depict serene and tranquil clouds, ponds, mountains, rocks, and snakes. I argue that the photos compel readers to problematize the inherent contradiction between the framed images of nature in photographs and the reality of a land desecrated by man-made pollutants. The photos serve as visual witnesses whose sovereign stories are narrated by Silko’s prose, and it is these landscape photos, as photo-blood-memories, that serve to inform and shape her collective ancestral identity. In the introduction to Yellow Woman, Silko discusses her initial interest in and affinity for the landscape as a young girl. “Sometimes I stopped, tied up my horse, and investigated interesting petroglyphs on sandstone cliffs or searched for arrowheads in the ruins of older settlements. I preferred to be without human companions so I could give my complete attention to the hills” (Yellow Woman, 16). She continues, “I have always felt safer alone in the hills than I feel when I am around people. Humans are the most dangerous of all animals, that’s what my mother said” (Yellow Woman, 17). These statements resonate in Sacred Water, where Silko criticizes the destruction caused by colonialism and the greed of man. It is the photos of landscape that become an integral part of the story and in effect, continue the belief that the “Pueblo people and the land and the stories are inseparable” (Yellow Woman, 14). In Sacred Water, the written story is both dependent on and independent of the photographs, as Silko’s descriptions are as visual as the photos; they, too, tell a story. Similar to the use of dialogue or multiple voices as a narrative strategy, Silko’s photos function as a narrative technique in writing the visual. In addition, her narrative emphasizes the inherent and critical connection that humans have with their environment. There is a cyclical aspect to this belief where one cannot survive without the other, and balance requires our understanding of this worldview: The dead become dust, and in this becoming they are once more joined with the Mother. . . . Creator of all things. . . . Rocks and clay are part of the Mother. They emerge in various forms, but at some time before they were smaller particles of great boulders. At a later time they may again become what they once were: dust. A rock shares this fate with us and with animals and plants as well. A rock has being or spirit, although we may not understand it. (Yellow Woman, 26–27)

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And it is this ancient Pueblo worldview that informs Sacred Water, a story that is not simply a singular autobiography but rather a story of survivance for humans, nature, and animals alike. Turquoise Ledge and the Power of Stories: Landscapes, Animals, Grinding Rocks, Star Beings, Ancestors, and Glyphs

In numerous essays, creative pieces, and interviews Silko relates the significance of her relatives and how they have strongly influenced her writing and thinking about life as it relates to indigenous peoples, especially the Laguna Pueblo. It is through the experiences of her great-grandmother, Grandma A’mooh, and her aunt Susie—who had both been sent away to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania—that Silko becomes even more aware of the power of books. In “Books: Notes on Mixtec and Maya Screenfolds,” she notes that one book in particular caused a quarrel between Grandma A’mooh and her daughter-in-law Susie (Yellow Woman, 161). It was a propaganda book published by the US government that was intended to convince graduates of Indian boarding schools to maintain their new assimilated and “civilized” identities instead of returning to Pueblo life. According to Silko, the book—Stiya, the Story of an Indian Girl (1881)—was written as an “authentic” autobiography from the point of view of a young Pueblo girl. The actual author, Marion Burgess, was a white woman who worked as a teacher at the Carlisle Indian School and published the novel under the pseudonym Tonka. The story relates how Stiya is nauseated by the sights and smells of her Pueblo community and describes how she refuses to dress in traditional clothing, speak her native language, or even participate in “pagan dances” (Yellow Woman, 162–63). The character Stiya is meant to portray the revulsion felt by outsiders toward the Pueblo community. Silko writes that unlike the memoirs and autobiographies by Native American women leaving boarding schools who are ecstatic to be returning to their homelands, Stiya feels a detachment from her land and from her village life. In fact, Stiya feels no affection toward her family, as every aspect of their Pueblo life seems repugnant (Yellow Woman, 163). It is this xenophobic and stereotypical portrayal of Pueblo life and people that causes Grandma A’mooh to become outraged and want to burn the book. On the other hand, Silko’s aunt Susie is intent on saving the text as evidence of the lies and racism perpetuated by the US

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government. Ultimately, the book was given to Silko’s aunt Susie, and it was not until years later that Silko actually saw a copy of it in the rare book collection at the University of New Mexico Library in Albuquerque (Yellow Woman, 164–65). Thus, for Silko, it became evident that books were in fact powerful tools, in this case used to “civilize” and perpetuate self-hatred among her people, while simultaneously proving how cultural genocide was instigated against the Laguna Pueblo through propaganda books. These stereotypical characterizations, images, and untruths are partly why Silko became so interested in the use of words, books, and stories to speak back and tell the truth, countering and resisting these egregious misrepresentations. For Silko, her self-written novels and memoirs become forms of empowerment to share embodied knowledge through stories of survivance, but she is also keenly aware that a propaganda book such as Stiya also serves as a witness to the atrocities committed against her people and can be useful; that is, it reveals the blatant outright lies that were regularly disseminated about her community as a tool of cultural genocide. Silko also became aware of the power of the written word in relation to the judicial system when the Laguna Pueblo filed a lawsuit against the state of New Mexico for six million acres of land. Silko recalls, “the Pueblo people realized the power of written words and books to secure legitimate title to tribal land” (Yellow Woman, 160). It was because of documents that stated the land had been granted to them by the king of Spain before the end of the Mexican War in 1848 that they fared better than other tribes. The Laguna Pueblo land claims lawsuit lasted twenty years, and the US Court of Indian Claims found in favor of the Laguna Pueblo. Since the court never gives back land that was wrongfully taken, the tribe was instead paid the amount it was worth at the time it was pilfered, that is, twenty-five cents for each of the six million acres stolen by the state (Yellow Woman, 19). At the age of five or six Silko watched expert witnesses, such as archaeologists, meet at her house and prepare to testify in court. However, it is not the documents themselves that leave an impression on Silko, but the “old folks who were also expert witnesses” (Yellow Woman, 18). Aunt Susie . . . interpreted English for the old folks because she knew them very well; in her own studies of Laguna history she had talked with them many times. . . . It was explained to me that the old folks testified

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with stories—stories of childhood outings with adults to gather piñons or to haul wood, stories they had heard as children. The old folks were going up against the state of New Mexico with only the stories. (my emphasis, Yellow Woman, 18) This notion of witnessing and how the “old folks” testified with “only the stories” speaks to the power of the oral tradition, blood memories, and the act of testifying. For Silko, the strongest impression was made through these eyewitnesses and not the written documents, although in a court of law the latter might take precedent. Silko recalls how she heard “the old folks cry as they talked about the land and how it had been taken from them” (Yellow Woman, 19). It is for this reason that Silko decided to seek justice herself by attending law school. Ironically, after realizing that injustice was built into the legal system and “to this day, money and power deliver ‘justice’ only to the rich and powerful,” she dropped out and “decided the only way to seek justice was through the power of the stories” (Yellow Woman, 20). It was then that she decided to enroll in English graduate courses and a beginning photography course. Since then Silko has published numerous books and is regarded as one of the most prominent Native American women writers. Turquoise Ledge embodies this strong sense of writing as a form of empowerment, justice, and truthtelling. In her introductory remarks at a writing conference in Denver, Silko humorously remarked about the genre of memoir: “It’s a memoir,” she warns, “but one that drifts into fiction and poetry. . . . Even just the word memoir is almost kind of a joke, talking about it, ‘well now I will retire and write my memoirs.’ . . . So I thought, ‘I’m an enemy of genres.’”13 As noted earlier, the genre of autobiography is complex as it relates to Native American life stories. Similarly, the genre of memoir, as Silko rightly points out, cannot be confined to its dictionary definition that states it is simply a record of events written by a person who has intimate knowledge of those events from personal observation. Turquoise Ledge can best be described as integrating and interweaving multiple genres. She recalls,

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I was the one to propose it because for years I’ve been making notes about just little things around my place: the rattlesnakes, and the ants and the bees, and things like that. I sort of have an easier relationship even now with rattlesnakes, and bees, and things, probably easier than with my family or human beings. I mean they are my family. I wanted to do something with that sort of material, and but then also collide it with all of these expectations of what a memoir could be like. (Richey) I argue that Silko’s memoir is a continuation of the type of writing style that is characteristic of her other life stories, Storyteller and Sacred Water. But instead of her primary “characters”—that is, humans—Turquoise Ledge highlights her surrounding environment in the Tucson Mountains to tell sovereign stories that transcend time, space, and place.14 For example, she tells stories about her relationship with her friends the rattlesnakes, grasshoppers, spiders, wild bees, lizards, hawk moths, scorpions, packrats, tortoises, and even her pet mastiff dogs and parrots. Her love of animals, insects, and rodents is evident as she describes the intrinsic relationship she has with nature: the arroyos, rocks, turquoise, water, gems, saguaro cacti, and even her ancestors who come in the form of rain clouds and Star Beings. In an interview she says of Tucson, Tucson is a very segregated city. There’s a whole town called “South Tucson,” and that’s where the Spanish-speaking people . . . that’s where they’re sort of pushed. It’s an unfriendly town. So, when I settled up in the hills, the most friendly beings were the rattlesnakes, and the packrats, and just the wild things—the bees and the hummingbirds. With just a little bit of showing that I didn’t mean harm, it was really wonderful. The animals and birds and things were ready to be friends of mine. And so, those are my longest friends in the more than thirty-two years I’ve been there. So when I wrote the book I wanted to pay notice to them and in a way to help protect their lives because they are the ones who get crushed under the bulldozers. I wanted other people to understand that these creatures want to be connected with us, and that they in a sense are part of us. And that they can really give us sustenance and hope when nothing else in the human world can.15

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At the same time, her narrative echoes some of her other well-known works such as Almanac of the Dead and Ceremony when she harshly critiques the destroyers, who in this case have desecrated the land for the purposes of material greed.16 The spiritual world of her ancestors is intertwined with a narrative that unapologetically calls for the death of man who dares destroy the sacred land of indigenous people. In an interview with Barbara Howard, Silko states, I decided that if I was ever going to acknowledge the few people in my life that had been helpful and go over those facts, I better do it fairly soon while my memory was good. And so I had all of this material and I decided I wanted to do a sort of hybrid form for the memoir. And so each of the most of the little sections can be read—you don’t have to read it from beginning to end and the incidents I wanted it to be different. I didn’t want t it to be like other memoirs. . . . I felt that the memoir as a genre needed to kind of have the boundaries pushed out. So that’s what I tried to do is make a sort of hybrid piece that’s different from most memoirs that are published nowadays.17 Similar to her previous works, Silko does not adhere to a linear narrative that takes its reader from a beginning to a middle and an end. Unlike traditional autobiographies, Turquoise Ledge weaves between time, space, and regions without regard for a linear timeline. When asked about this narrative structure, she replies, It was not very conscious at all. I tend to work that way. As a young child growing up in the Laguna Pueblo community, there were a lot of old folks who had grown up in a completely different world, meaning that clocks and calendars just weren’t very important. My great-grandmother never knew exactly what day she was born. When I was very young I spent a lot of time around these old folks who didn’t look at the clock and they didn’t look at the calendar; they reckoned time in a more cyclic way in which things long ago and things yesterday do link up. In the human imagination something that just happened and something that happened long ago really can be immediate and present.18

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Similar to her essays in Yellow Woman, Silko extends her narrative voice of resistance about the environment and the interdependence of all beings as fundamental to ecology. Turquoise Ledge begins and continues throughout with Silko walking briskly or “speed walking” through the Tucson Mountains and over the old trails that were made by ancient tribal people who lived in this region for thousands of years (5). Her walks allow her to see the “ant palaces,” the “big arroyo,” “animal tracks,” birds, and other beings who have made the trails that humans now use (5). It was only after several walks that she began to pay attention to the stones or gems and, more specifically, the turquoise she found on her journeys. She explains the scientific terms to describe turquoise and notes that it does not originate deep in the earth but rather on the surface. She writes that water is necessary to form this “precious mineral”: It forms when certain chemical reactions take place during the weathering of surface minerals. Water is a necessary component of the formation of turquoise—no wonder indigenous people of the deserts connected turquoise with water and rain—it wasn’t just the color of blue or green— turquoise meant water had been there (6). Silko’s blood memories, which are shaped by her walks through the desert landscape and her vivid descriptions of the Tucson Mountains, are not entirely different from the way she describes how people often see themselves outside of landscape, when in reality they are just as much a part of it as the boulders or, in this case, the paths and mountains they stand on. In an interview Silko states, When I started my walks being on the lookout for these pieces of turquoise stones or turquoise colored stones since some of them aren’t technically real turquoise. That became the focus of the walk. Also, it became a larger metaphor for the unexpected beauty, unexpected things that one does not expect. And, also, too, I noticed that sometimes I would walk past a certain spot and see nothing. And then the following day, find a big piece of turquoise rock, and, so, there was a sort of mystery connected with these pieces of stone I was finding.19

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A nonindigenous-centered reading of Turquoise Ledge might characterize Silko as a “nature writer” or even call her an “environmental conservationist” using ecocriticism or even ecofeminism as a methodology to examine her text. But I resist these reductionist methods, because at its core Turquoise Ledge is about survivance of indigenous peoples and indigenous homelands as well as animals and all sentient beings. She references the ancient ones or ancestors as she walks through the footpaths that have been there for thousands of years and describes how these foothills hold everything that the people needed to survive. And early in her memoir she even recalls the ancestors who left their grinding stones “handed down from generation to generation” (12). She says, these grinding stones were fundamental to survival on the mesquite and palo verde seeds or ‘beans’ that the trees bear in June. The beans, though plentiful and nutritious, were indigestible unless they were ground into flour first then cooked in tortillas. . . . For a woman, her grinding stones were her partners in feeding and caring for her family. (11–12) She is appalled that anyone would remove them and now when she sees them she brings them to her house so they will have a “home” again. She writes, “Up here late in November sometimes in the wind I’ve heard the voices of women singing their grinding songs. After dark . . . I’ve seen as many as a dozen figures walk past in a group” (12). Silko is remapping and unearthing indigenous spaces through blood memories that she translates into written narrative or sovereign stories. The ancient ones appear to her as ethereal forms in the landscape, and also “beloved family members and the ancestors show their love for us when they return as clouds that bring precious precipitation” (13). As Silko reminds her readers, she never feels alone in the hills, and she realized when she got older that the “clouds and winds and rivers also have their ways of communication” (45). And more importantly, “stories themselves have spirit and being, and they have a way of communicating different levels” (my emphasis, 45). Silko’s description of stories in her memoir underscores my argument that as a storyteller of shared indigenous knowledge, she is actually participating in a communal storytelling process that is underscored by her blood memories, because she says “they [stories] can survive and continue in some form or other resembling themselves

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regardless of how good or how bad the storyteller is, no matter what language they are told or written in” (45). I also argue that Silko uses a landbased language or a language that is tied to a spiritual place. Several other prominent Native American writers have described this land-based language in their works. For example, Harjo states “I consider first a certain lyricism, a land-based language . . . [where] the spirit of place is recognized, fed, not even paved over, forgotten. . . . The strongest writers have always been the ones with a well-defined sense of place—I don’t mean you have to be a nature writer.”20 Similarly, when Ortiz reflects on expressing the oral in written work, he defines place as recognizing where you were born—not just physically but spiritually. He says “Place is the source of who you are in terms of your identity, the language that you are born into and that you come to use.”21 Ortiz also associates the use of language or the oral tradition and its transformation to the written word as “part of that path or road or journey that you are walking.”22 Thus, Silko’s physical walks through the ancient paths of the Tucson Mountains can also be intricately tied to the land-based language she is utilizing to express her stories in writing. She is rooted in the spirit of place, where she is inextricably linked to the landscapes, animals, and spirits that inhabit this place. What is perhaps most intriguing about Silko’s memoir is her attention to detail and descriptions of the animals she encounters daily. She has a reverence and sense of responsibility to tell her readers about these encounters as a way to illustrate the delicate and intricate ways in which our ecosystems are dependent on even the smallest animals that may go unnoticed in a busy, fast-paced environment. She recalls, “As I walked along the path, I paid special attention to the ant palaces along the way . . . each colony did something different—perhaps owing to the unique conditions of their location in the desert. Some went underground at sunrise while others stayed on to work in the heat” (154). She recollects the storm that came violently that day and is amazed at how the ants managed to maintain the ocotillo flowers at their entrance without them washing away. Upon closer observation she realized that ants get the dried flowers to stay put during storms by interlocking the tendrils to larger grains that formed a blanket of blossoms (156). When she comes across Gila monsters (big lizards), hummingbirds, wild bees, and rattlesnakes, to name a few, she says hello and attempts to introduce herself so they will not be frightened by her presence. And her keen observations and

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stories are not limited to animals, because she is also acutely aware of the desert plants or foliage such as night-blooming cactus, jojoba bushes, mesquite trees, and catsclaw bushes. My reading of these numerous descriptions throughout Turquoise Ledge are that they provide for readers the stories of life, of movement, as well as death and rebirth. In other words, the popular perception of the desert as an arid landscape and a harsh environment where few could survive without knowing how to do so in such a climate are not the prominent images that Silko recalls in her memoir, although she does provide ways to protect oneself from the excessive heat. It is the energy and active everyday lives of the animals and landscapes that take precedence and are the primary characters in her narrative. And the reader cannot deny that the desert is alive and that its inhabitants, which include all sentient beings that occupy this land and space, continue to endure and survive the colonizing processes of progress and development. The respect and reverence she imparts for all those she crosses paths with is characterized by something beyond nature writing. And I would argue that her work should not be categorized as such.23 Uranium Mining: Desecration of Indigenous Homelands

In addition to the ways in which Silko’s memoir illustrates the desert as a home to numerous animals and plants, she also interrogates her readers with information about the man-made desecration of landscape and calls her readers to action. Her memoir is not absent of the material history and pressing issues facing this sacred indigenous space. Among her descriptions of all that is alive in the desert are her unapologetic indictments of those who are killing and destroying indigenous homelands and valuable, necessary ecosystems. On her walks she notices the remnants of humans: trash, shards of glass, and plastic bottles. But even more significant is the destruction to the environment by uranium mining and more recently housing development. Through her blood memories she recalls the mining that occurred on her Laguna Pueblo homeland and states, “The old folks used to admonish us to leave things as they are, not to disturb the natural world or her creatures because this would disrupt and endanger everything, including humans” (69). Through the hummah-hah stories from long ago Silko retells what some humans did and the consequences that followed. Her people were forced by

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the Department of the Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs to allow Anaconda Copper Mining Company to blast open the earth for an open-pit uranium mine, the Jackpile-Paguate Mine (69). Silko tells stories of how the mine was built as a way to obtain uranium to produce atomic bombs, should the Cold War bring forth a conflict. She also recalls how the Red Scare bled into the fabric of the government and how the company did much more than erect the mine—it also tested weapons.24 She notes that all forty-eight contiguous states have been affected by radioactive fallout from nuclear tests, although the most fallout occurred in Nevada, Utah, Colorado, northern Arizona, and New Mexico (69). Since Anaconda was not required to dispose of the radioactive tailings, they remained on her people’s land, beneath piles of clean dirt. The big business of uranium mining during the 1950s brought with it major prospectors who, Silko remembers from childhood, descended on the Southwest with their Geiger counters (71). She tells a story of when she accompanied her father to one of the Kerr-McGee yellowcake mills at Ambrosia Lake, where they were shown open barrels of refined yellowcake held in shipping drums, which she was tempted to touch (71). She recalls they were never warned about the deadly consequences that exposure to it could cause and she believes as a “downwinder” exposed to fallout and yellowcake she has only lived this long because of her genetic inheritance from her Paguate ancestors who, over centuries, may have acquired a resistance to radiation (74). It is now well known that radioactive waste, such as that created from uranium, can contaminate water, cause cancer, and bring forth mutations in plants and animals. And the effects of the mining can be felt for years after the mining has stopped, because it lives in the beings it infects. In her nonlinear memoir, Silko follows this story of the mines with her near-death experience in 1977 at the age of twenty-eight, three months after Ceremony was published. She wakes from this experience with a “profound sense of responsibility for how I lived my life” (77). She says, “I did have more books I wanted to write but not if I stayed where I was. . . . So I moved to Tucson in early January of 1978, two months after the emergency surgery” (77). Destroyers: Grotesque Houses and Rock-Moving Machines

Silko continues her stories of spiders, owls, lizards, rats, rattlesnakes, bees, grasshoppers, and her pet macaws and dogs. On one of her walks she is again

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stunned by man’s desecration of the land; this time the “graceful sandbars with delicate patterns of pebbles and small stones were gone—gouged out and removed by the same machine that smashed the gray basalt boulder and took it away in pieces” (169). She was so outraged by the destruction and damage she did not want to write about it. She states, I didn’t want it to be in the Turquoise Ledge manuscript. I had decided before I started the memoir that I wanted as much as possible to avoid unpleasantness and strife and politics as much as possible. But the beautiful gray basalt and pale orange quartzite boulders had been torn loose from the sides of the arroyo and dragged out of the wash and skidded up the old road to “landscape” the yard of the preposterous house with its prison tower and prison wall. (170) As with all her other books, including Sacred Water, which was supposed to be an antidote after writing Almanac, Silko finds it impossible to not write about the “politics” and “unpleasantness.” She says of the grotesque house, “the owner . . . could have easily afforded to buy rock and sand excavated legally from a quarry. Instead he acted out what he saw as his manifest destiny: to destroy whatever he wanted . . . no matter the impact on others or himself—that’s the credo of southern Arizona, and much of the West” (170). Her outrage stems from the ecological effects that will occur as a result of the mass development she sees surrounding her. She tells how this type of desecration destroys the natural flow of the arroyo that are supposedly protected by federal water laws. And she is surprised by how easily the wealthy of Pima County can “flout laws intended to protect the desert terrain and groundwater” (170). Her antidote for this incident was “to visualize the man with the rock-moving machine as he pulls the wrong lever one morning and drops a boulder on himself. He lives alone in the huge house so he lies squashed under the rock for a good while before anyone finds him” (171). Shortly after, just past the machine’s destruction, she finds a “flat stone with a deposit of sky blue turquoise in the shape of the United States and Mexico. The Earth doesn’t cease her blessings just because humans foul Her” (171). Based on her previous publications, it is difficult to imagine Silko writing a book that avoids politics and strife. The intergenerational trauma that exists among Laguna Pueblo and indigenous peoples globally is not easily forgotten. And

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in an interview she states “My notion of the witchery is that which takes delight in destruction and destroying. I like to feel that with the stories and narratives, I’m working to confront these destructive impulses and more than confront them to sort of turn them back on themselves.”25 As Hogan argues in Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World, politics cannot be separated from the human relationship with nature because they are fundamentally intertwined. She states, “there has been a narrowing down of the difference between species, and we are forced to ask ourselves once again: what is our rightful place in the world, our responsibility to the other lives on the planet?” (114). That is, “Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time” (115). Silko echoes these sentiments about how politics will forever be intricately tied to her sense of identity, writing, and responsibility when she says, Humans who do terrible things to the Earth or to its beings—and humans are part of nature, too—so humans who kill other humans or destroy rainforests, they don’t desecrate that rainforest spot. They desecrate themselves, you know. I truly believe that the Earth will continue on and that in a sense, we don’t matter very much. And so we can easily disappear, and we’re liable to. But at the same time, as long as I’m still able to raise my voice, and as long as there’s still some chance, then my inclination is to try to speak out or to do something.26 But however apocalyptic Silko’s stories might be she still manages to also give us sovereign stories of beauty, healing, redemption, and rebirth that are only possible by interweaving stories about the destroyers with stories about the earth healing itself from all these destructive forces. Rattlesnakes: Reverence and Respect

Rattlesnakes are perhaps the animal she mentions the most in her book. They are creatures who have been so demonized by the general public that there are even legal roundups to dispose of them. According to the Humane Society these roundups were originally used by farmers to control the population, but they are now spectacles where snakes are captured, abused, and killed for entertainment. According to the Humane Society,

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Collectors from Texas to Pennsylvania pull rattlesnakes from their dens using poles tipped with fishhooks or spray gasoline or other toxins into the dens, poisoning local endangered and threatened wildlife. Carted to roundups without food or water in dirty, cramped conditions, snakes arrive starved, dehydrated, or crushed. The survivors are used in exhibitions and daredevil acts, and some are decapitated and served up as exotic meat.27 In Turquoise Ledge Silko writes about rattlesnakes with great reverence in order to represent what is most feared and misunderstood about the natural desert environment. She does not fear these animals and has learned, with time and patience, to coexist with the different species of snakes on her land and in the arroyo, finding beauty in each one. When snakes do strike it is because someone has disrupted or antagonized them. And rattlesnakes’ removal from the land by either relocation or eradication disrupts the ecosystem. The land that the snakes used to inhabit begins to degrade in their absence, and pest populations increase. According to Rulon Clark in “Social Lives of Rattlesnakes,” the importance of rattlesnakes cannot be overlooked or dismissed because “snakes influence prey populations and perform vital ecosystem functions through their natural effect on the dynamics of the food web, helping to maintain balances between herbivore populations, plants, and predators.”28 He explains the social habits of the rattlesnakes through observation and argues that they are not solitary creatures but are very social. Silko echoes these sentiments in Turquoise Ledge, writing that rattlesnakes are only predatory when they are threatened or are seeking food for survival. In fact, snakes, specifically rattlesnakes, are significant to Southwestern tribal communities such as the Navajo and Pueblo tribes due to their propensity toward survival despite mistreatment. They are not only vitally important to the ecosystems in which they live but are seen by indigenous peoples and others as symbolic of wisdom, fertility, rebirth (due to the shedding of old skin), healing, and representative of the underworld. Although rattlesnakes are potentially dangerous, Silko feels a sense of calmness when near them, in part due to her respect and trust that they will not cause her harm unless she threatens them. She writes, “An emergency room doctor told me that all rattlesnake-bite victims he’d seen were people who were actively

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molesting the snakes—holding them or poking them with sticks.”29 According to the Rattlesnake Museum of Albuquerque, Rattlesnakes will make every effort to avoid contact with people. We are far more dangerous to this secretive animal than it is to us. In almost every case, we are treading on the snakes’ home territory when we encounter them, and in almost every case, the rattlesnake loses its life.30 Another testament to the rattlesnake’s significance to the interdependence between all beings is their ability to provide healing attributes for humans. For example, Silko tells us that “snake oil has many medicinal uses” and “The Raramuri, the Tarahumara Indians of the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua, use rattlesnake venom to treat cancer tumors” (Turquoise Ledge, 82). Thus, Silko views the rattlesnake as she does other wild animals in the desert, with reverence and respect. She writes, “If you go to a place where the rattlesnakes don’t know you or places where humans attack snakes, then you must be much more careful. It is wise to cultivate a certain self-discipline before that requires you to look before you step or reach” (95). She recalls, I still regret the summer after my divorce from John Silko in 1979 because I allowed the neighbor boys to kill the big dusty red rattler on the west side of the house. I tried to persuade the big rattlesnake to relocate by splashing buckets of cold water on him three times. My younger son Caz was seven at the time and I was afraid he’d get bitten. But after that day, I promised myself to protect the rattlesnakes. (83) Silko realizes, even as a mother of a young child who fears her son might get bitten, that the rattlesnakes were simply living in their natural habitat, and it was her responsibility to make a conscious effort to coexist with them. And she recalls that when loved ones die, they manifest their energy into animals, including rattlesnakes, that visit to let relatives know “they are in a good place” (14). This experience happened to her one day when she was riding a horse by the Catalina Mountains in the summer of 2001, and two blue rattlesnakes stopped in her path. Silko immediately thought of her mother, who died four days earlier. She recognized that her mother’s human energy had changed, combined with the silver blue light of morning. “The twin

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rattlesnakes caught my attention; they were her message to me. Where she was now was in this world and nearby me, but not as she was” (98). Thus, Silko’s stories of rattlesnakes in Turquoise Ledge go beyond simply explaining to readers how to be conservationists. Her numerous sovereign stories are intricately tied to her sense of place, belonging, and spirituality as they relate to her ancestral identity and blood memories. These creatures who have been so negatively characterized and demonized are survivors in the desert landscape she calls home. And this can be likened to a mutualistic partnership. In science, mutualism is defined as a relationship in which two organisms benefit one another. Thus, Silko participates in this mutualism—even to the point of rescuing rattlesnakes and bringing them to her home. In return the rattlesnakes do not bite or rattle when she approaches them, and they consume the rodents in her house. As Silko noted in an interview, she wanted Turquoise Ledge to be about “the kind of friendship and even affection that I receive from the wild animals.”31 She addresses her audience directly when she states, The Rattlesnakes that live in your garden or under your house will prevent unfamiliar rattlesnakes from moving too close until they learn how to get along with humans and dogs. Unfamiliar snakes are usually refugees from the real estate developers’ bulldozers that scrape the desert bare and kill everything in their path. Understandably these uprooted snakes may be edgy, so back off and give them space; they will learn quickly that you mean no harm. (Turquoise Ledge, 114) Once Silko was at a ceremony when her friend Vernon (Hopi) told her of the other ways that rattlesnakes inspired and helped humans. He reminisced about the ways of Hopi farmers and explained the way they copied the coil of the rattlesnake’s rattler in order to better water their garden soil. The technique was designed to copy the way “rattlers caught rain in their coils” (104). Another way rattlesnakes have inspired human innovation is through architecture. Silko writes that the rattlesnake taught the Maya how to “build the great pyramids” based on their coils (104). The impact that rattlesnakes have had on indigenous communities, such as the Hopi and Maya, is a form of continued mutualism and even survivance that includes both humans and animals. This is perhaps the reason why Silko makes this animal a central

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character in her memoir and retells numerous stories about them. For example, in 1980 during the uranium mining that occurred on her people’s land, the sacred messenger snake Ma’shra’true’ee appeared in the form of a sandstone formation: Two Jackpile Mine employees whose job it was to inspect the tailings piles for instability or erosion had found a strange object only thirty feet away . . . a twenty foot long sandstone formation in the shape of a giant snake appeared only a few yards from the base of tailings pile. The sandstone formation looked as if it had been there forever—but it hadn’t. . . . For hundreds of generations, this area had been familiar ground to the Paguate people who farmed and hunted the area everyday, yet no one had ever seen the giant sandstone snake before. Traditional medicine people came from all directions and all the tribes to see the giant stone snake. What a wonder it was to find something so sacred and prophetic; it was as if Ma’shra’true’ee, the sacred messenger snake, had returned, but not to some pristine untouched corner of the land, but instead to the uranium tailings of the Jackpile Mine. (73) Silko is fully aware of the destructive repercussions the uranium mines have had on her people in the form of cancer, water contamination, destruction of ecosystems, and countless deaths of plants, animals, and humans alike. Thus, she uses her land-based language to reveal a truth that is more provocative than the undisputable facts of mining and years of colonialism that have destroyed her community. She recalls her blood memories and retells this sovereign story to her readers, underscoring the truth about the destroyers that continue the legacies of genocide against her people and the subsequent story of a prophetic sandstone formation, the messenger snake, that is representative of her people’s resilience and survivance. I do not mean to suggest that any one prophetic image can heal the destruction of Anaconda—or that Silko’s retelling is enough to alone resist the oppressors. But I argue that the power of story and land-based language is rooted in place and ancestral identity. In an interview with Ellen Arnold, Silko discusses why the power of snakes, and rattlesnakes in particular, have always fascinated her and served as a source of artistic inspiration. Every year Silko paints a snake, and when she suffered writer’s block with the Turquoise Ledge

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manuscript she began painting a large mural of a snake. While she was painting it struck her that the giant stone snake she saw at the uranium plant was a unifier: “it was always a unifying figure or image” and it was meant as a messenger originating from the underworld where the Mother Creator resides (Conversations, 99). As Harjo states in Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, We are still dealing with a holocaust of outrageous proportion in these lands. Not very long ago, native peoples were 100 percent of the population of this hemisphere. In the United States we are now one-half of one percent, and growing. All of the ills of colonization have visited us in its many forms of hatred, including self-doubt, poverty, alcoholism, depression, and violence against women, among others. We are coming out of one or two centuries of war, a war that hasn’t ended. Many of us at the end of the century are using the “enemy language” with which to tell our truths, to sing, to remember ourselves during these troubled times. Some of us speak our native languages as well as English, and/or Spanish or French. . . . But to speak, at whatever the cost, is to become empowered rather than victimized by destruction. In our tribal cultures the power of language to heal, to regenerate, and to create is understood. (my emphasis, 21) Thus, when Silko relates her stories of the animals, who are her friends, she is speaking a land-based language that is inherently tribally centered and rooted in the landscape and places occupied by that space including the cosmos, humans, animals, arroyos, rocks, hills, mountains, clouds, minerals, stones, water, and the ancient ones whose spirits continue to traverse the land. Wild Bees

It is perhaps timely to discuss wild bees as they have become so critical to the conservation movement to preserve our ecosystems. Silko states, A few months ago on a ridge near my house, a bulldozer destroyed the hives of the wild bees to clear a building site. The bees have lost their

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stores of food in the hive, and now they want me to feed them until their scouts locate a new site for their hive. (115) Silko’s intimate description of how she attempts to feed these bees as best she can speaks to the larger message throughout the memoir of our interrelatedness to all beings. Her memoir echoes the numerous essays she has written in Yellow Woman that speak to how humans can only survive through the interdependence with animals and all living beings, including trees, natural waterways, rivers, lakes, and oceans. She says of the bees, they “understand kindness” and never try to sting her; every year when they return, she reminds them that she is their friend (115). As if they were the ones that would save humans, Silko says, “Years ago when I kept water hyacinths in the rainwater cistern pool, the wild bees ate the outer layer of the plants during the hottest and driest part of the summer. If you are lost and need water, follow the honeybees and they will take you to water or at least to damp earth” (116). Silko sees these wild animals that surround her as the protectors, the ones who will not only survive the desecration but provide humans the tools needed to survive as well. As much as Silko discusses the despoliation of land, she simultaneously reminds her readers that there is still hope. And perhaps humans are simply too blind to realize that because of the efforts of the animals to survive—and many do, in harsh climates and in spite of mass exploitation—they will be the ones that lead us to a better understanding of our integral relationship with all beings and the impetus to struggle for social justice for all. Arroyos, Macaws, and Owls

Silko recalls that on one of her walks to the big arroyo on New Year’s Day 2008, she saw that more boulders and sand had been removed with even more damage by the “man and his machine” (202). She regrets not reporting the damage earlier because a buffer zone that extended from Saguaro National Park might have protected the boulders (202). When she does finally report it, the Pima County Environmental Protection Agency said they had no jurisdiction over strip mines in desert arroyos, regardless of how close they were to the park (202). She was directed to the Floodplain Management Division and realized, of course,

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the removal of the boulders, rocks and sand accelerated erosion—that lovely mesquite tree whose roots had helped stabilize the sides of the arroyo was about to topple in the next rainstorm because the man and machine had gouged out the rocks and sand at its base. Without the boulders, the runoff flowed faster, and there was nothing to slow it—no sandbars to hold the precious rainwater so it could soak in (203). But when a hydrologist finally visits the site, she finds “no significant” damage (203). Silko now understands why “much of the landscape in Pima County looks the way it does—trashed and ruined” (202). This incident is significant because it illustrates how Silko attempts to work with the institutions meant to protect the environment and report or explain to others the relations between all beings—including boulders, rocks, and sand, but in the end there is only so much she can do to fight against a system that has systematically destroyed in the name of progress; from manifest destiny or settler colonialism to what Silko calls capitalist greed. And the man she references throughout the memoir is blinded by what he sees as his right to desecrate, destroy, and kill anything that prevents him from obtaining wealth and power. Shortly after this incident Silko suffered the death of her caged macaws to a wild owl. As long as she had these birds in her aviary this type of attack had never occurred. And that “the owl attacked not one but two aviaries in the same night seemed excessive until I thought about it” (206). She describes a strange energy in the atmosphere in the hills and realizes that the big arroyo itself is an ecosystem. Thus “the excavating machine not only tore up the boulders, it disrupted the entire area, and left many creatures homeless as well as hungry and thirsty” (206). She blames this desecration of the landscape and the consequent fury of the owl that could not find game elsewhere, on the “cheap mortgage money” that had brought the bulldozers to the desert hills to make grotesque mansions where the owls once hunted (206). She of course never blamed the owl for the death of her beloved birds but rather the inept county authorities and the bulldozers that also signify man-made despoliation. These descriptions of desecrated land and man’s greed are significant enough for Silko to record in her memoir. And she cannot escape the politics and unpleasantness that she had aspired to do when she first began writing Turquoise Ledge. I argue that Silko’s stories of the landscape, the

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animals, and their destruction is characteristic of a testimonio that gives witness or voice to what is occurring in spaces that few others care to acknowledge. Her memoir recalls the life of those she calls her family and friends, the wild animals and all sentient beings that surround her. Thus, her voice is not an individual “I” that relates a story of self but rather a collective sovereign story about a community—that is, desert landscapes, animals, rocks, boulders, and even Star Beings. Star Beings, Petroglyphs

Silko had always wanted to be a visual artist before she became a writer. She recalls this love of painting in relationship to stories about the Star Beings. She says that many indigenous tribes have multiple stories about how the stars came to earth (Turquoise Ledge, 129). When she was a child she would roam the sandstones mesas of Laguna and sketch the old petroglyphs she came across on her walks (129). After looking at old photos of petroglyphs she began to think that the Star Beings only visited earth every seven or eight hundred years (130). All these years she recalls she has carried their images in her memory. And “as I sketched the petroglyph figures, I realized that the Star Beings wanted me to paint their portraits. They insisted I use the largest canvases possible and that their portraits must always be hung at a height that dwarfs the human viewers in order to intimidate them” (130). Throughout the memoir Silko does her best to relate how these Star Beings wanted their images painted and how they communicated to her as she painted or even when she neglected to paint them. “The portraits of the Star Beings are a great success for me. I feel a close relationship with them because of the process of painting—each stroke of the paintbrush brought the form of the being a bit closer to its emergence in the world. Sometimes I felt the canvas on the frame shiver as I painted” (134). She recalls that the Star Beings first contacted her years ago when she saw a Navajo war shield at a small museum and she was strangely affected by the star map painted on the shield (135).32 Perhaps to some readers Silko’s communication with the Star Beings is implausible, but they are as real as any story she has ever written or told. And it is through conversive relational and indigenous-centered readings of Silko’s experiences that allow for better understanding that spirituality, blood memories, and land-based languages have given Silko the gift of

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writing to narrate and translate these sovereign stories for her readerlisteners. Silko states that the Star Beings return from time to time with little concern for humans, or at least that is what she imagines. She wonders why they may not care about the upheaval on earth or that humans slaughter one another (138). But after questioning their purpose for choosing her, she relates that when she was having financial difficulties and intended to sell some of the paintings, with the intention of painting even bigger ones later and replacing them, the Star Beings “refused to allow this” (137). Thus, the Star Beings, as messengers, make a statement about selling art or sacred images for the purposes of financial gain. Her final chapters of this nonlinear memoir continue to rebuke the damage that has been done to the arroyos and the habitat of the great horned owl, among other creatures. Since none of her ideas to stop the destruction had previously worked, she began to ponder what else could be done. It was the Star Beings who gave her the idea of using children’s white tempura paint to paint the boulders that were in danger. “The Star Beings directed me to paint their glyph, the white cross figure of the star, on all sides of the boulders, and especially on the scars left by the metal claw of the machine or cracks or other damage inflicted by the machine” (308). “Then I realized: once the Star Beings’ small white crosses were painted on the boulders and rocks in the arroyo they worked a kind of magic. All human beings were put on notice that the boulders were under the protection of the Star Beings and must not be disturbed or damaged; all violators would pay terrible consequences” (308). Silko asserts that, “The ancient petroglyph the ancestors incised into the boulders in big arroyo was done only for the most important spiritual purposes” (308). And she reiterates that her resistance is being directed by the Star Beings. “If others mistook them for Christian crosses it would be fitting because Jesus Christ was also known as the Morning Star or Venus among indigenous worshippers in the Americas” (309). Silko’s memoir ends with the reactions to the small white crosses she painted on the boulders by the owners of the grotesque houses nearby. She writes, “How interesting that the small white crosses were interpreted as ‘gang graffiti’ and not connected somehow with Christianity. Apparently the emblem of the Star Beings penetrated the psyches of the newcomers who got the message: indigenous forces are present to oppose you” (317). And one of the newcomers that Silko crossed paths with on her walk said she would now have to “install an expensive gate

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on their private driveway,” because like the “machine man” they thought an “urban gang had driven miles out of town to the big arroyo to paint ‘gang graffiti’ on the rocks he was excavating” (318). She recalls New Year’s Day, 2009: It was a year ago today that I found the second attack by the man and the machine on the beautiful boulders and sandbars in the big arroyo. But this morning the place was very still, and felt at peace. The boulders with the crosses, even the ones the man flipped over, were beginning to lose the appearance of sudden violence; the machine tracks were smoothed by the rain. A number of the small white crosses already looked old and faded; they recede into the basalt and quartzite with every raindrop. (318–319) Silko’s memoir, similar to her fiction and essays, relates the power of story and the spiritual power of books that are authored by indigenous people. Her intricate attention to detail about the landscape and her daily walks where she encounters numerous animals convey the significance of interconnected relations, and as a storyteller she gives voice to all her characters. Her memoir is not nature writing and it is certainly not a travelogue. Similar to other nonlinear texts she challenges her readers to think about the writing process, about their relationship with each other, and more importantly their responsibility to interrelationships between all beings and the environment. Her conversations with bees, hummingbirds, rattlesnakes, lizards, birds, ancient ones, clouds, and rocks among others illustrate her ability to unearth and recuperate sovereign stories that have always been told within her community and embody a spiritual sense of place and belonging.

CHAPTER 4

The Power of Story and Resistance Pretty-Shield, Zitkala-Sa, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s As-Told-To and Self-Written Autobiographies

In a book about Native American women’s autobiography, I would be remiss to not include a chapter on several major nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century writers and storytellers whose works have been widely anthologized and used extensively in introductory courses on Native American and American literature courses. In addition, as-told-to or ethnographic autobiographies, defined earlier, are important points of departure to argue for a more complex indigenous-centered reading and interpretation of these texts and their potential to reright and rewrite Native American history and culture. I begin by reviewing the ethnographic autobiographies published by Truman Michelson that complicate the issue of misrepresentation of indigenous women’s sovereign voices and collaborative as-told-to narratives. Michelson, a linguist and anthropologist, was born in 1879 and studied at Harvard University. He went on to work as a government ethnologist for the Bureau of American Ethnology and as an anthropologist at George Washington University. His primary research focused on the languages of the Algonquian, and many of his original manuscripts are now available from the Smithsonian Libraries. Some of his publications and recordings do not include the names of the people he interviewed, but only their tribal affiliations. Whether this unnaming was purposeful or at the request of those he spoke to is unclear, but it illustrates the unequal power relations

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that existed between Michelson and his research “subjects.” The problematic objectification of indigenous peoples by anthropologists is beyond the scope of this book but is significant to understanding the colonialist foundations of early ethnographers and their attempts to salvage or record what they believed to be the “vanishing Indian.” In Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, Miranda underscores this problem of representation, storytelling, and the power of story: Prior to 1969, who was telling our story? Non-Indians, for the most part. Self-representation was almost unheard of, stereotypes and biases were bleeding into American culture freely. So who tells a story is a mighty piece of information for the listeners; you must know what that storyteller has at stake. (xvi) As noted in my first chapter, and as Miranda points out, there are ways that we can now read these collaborative works as subversive forms of agency and as ways to begin unearthing the truth so that indigenous peoples can then reweave, remember, and continue to tell their own stories. Miranda notes, Story is the most powerful force in the world—in our world, maybe in all worlds. Story is culture. Story, like culture, is constantly moving. It is a river where no gallon of water is the same gallon it was one second ago. Yet it is still the same river. It exists as a truth. As a whole. Even if the whole is in constant change. In fact, because of that constant change. (xvi) Miranda’s memoir is an ideal example of what can be done with these types of recordings, as she, too, has masterfully written about California Indian tribes and her ancestral identity (i.e. Esselen, Costanoan, and Chumash). Her people endured unimaginable acts of genocide and she uses, in part, the recordings of J. P. Harrington, an ethnologist and linguist, and Alfred Kroeber, an anthropologist, to reweave and retell the fractured stories of her ancestors. In order to counter the mythological and romanticized stories of “mission Indians” as told by outsiders about California Indians, Miranda tells the ruptured stories of her people, making them whole and telling the truth that exists—like a river constantly flowing, always changing.

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“The Autobiography of a Fox Indian Woman”

I adapt Miranda’s methodology to rewrite/reright ethnographies, as I examine other earlier works that utilize recordings, translators, and processes that were anything but collaborative. In his introduction to restoring “The Autobiography of a Fox Indian Woman,” Michelson reassures his audience that “no attempt was made to influence the informant in any way” by Harry Lincoln, who originally recorded this story in the Mesquakie language (295). Bataille and Sands state that the narrative was told in Mesquakie to Lincoln, corrected by his wife, Dalottiwa, and then translated by Horace Poweshiek (36–37).1 Thus, Michelson’s edited and restored version becomes three times removed from the original, and his editorial intrusions are noted in the introduction as he states, “at times the original autobiography was too naive and frank for European taste; and so a few sentences have been deleted” (295). The question of agency is complicated as we read a narrative whose primary editor is more interested in the linguistic and ethnographic value of the narrative than the personal story. As Bataille and Sands note, “His interest in the individual lives of these women was secondary to his interest in the languages, the tribes, and the general cultures, so he could justify omission of detailed information given by the informant” (33). And there are extensive ethnological and linguistic notes that Michelson has placed at the end of the narrative in order to make it more “serviceable to students of American ethnology” (295). Although the collaborative process of these narratives is extremely problematic, these women’s stories and personal experiences locate them within their larger communities. The emphasis on their role as women, combined with the importance of mothers, grandmothers, and aunts, is significant to their selfdevelopment and identity formation as reflected in their women-centered experiences. Although Bataille and Sands argue that the literary merit of American Indian women’s autobiography is dependent on “the narrative skill of the subject and on the editorial skill of her collaborator and on the effectiveness of literary techniques employed,” I argue that is important to also read these narratives, however fractured, as sovereign stories that relate blood memories and shape the ancestral identities of communities and individuals alike (13). I do not mean to suggest that these texts are examples of absolute truth but rather, following Beverley’s concept of “the real thing,” that these women become agents “of a transformative project that aspires to become

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hegemonic in its own right.”2 These collaborative ethnographic autobiographies become a means by which subalterns are created in literature and are not an end in themselves. Unlike as-told-to autobiographies, the narratives republished by Michelson are more problematic given their ethnographic intent. They also allow for a conversive relational reading of these women’s lives. In at least three narratives edited by Michelson, the “informant” emphasizes her role as a woman and the cultural practices of females within her tribe. In contrast to their male counterparts, who speak of wars, relate tribal politics, and criticize white society, these women tell of their relationships with men and the importance that motherhood played in their lives. Since Michelson’s publications are up to three times removed from the original recorded narratives, it’s unknown whether the questions posed to these women were specifically about their marriages and children. Evidence of how anthropologists during this historical time period perceived the recorded autobiographies of Native American women as unique is illustrated in Michelson’s introduction when he states, “It may be added that though autobiographies of Indian men have previously been published, this autobiography of an Indian woman is nearly unique” (295).3 It is within all of these narratives that the importance of one’s upbringing is illustrated. In her stories about chores and duties carried out by women in her tribe, Fox Woman4 states that her mother encouraged her to learn early how to cook what she raised and how to weave and make bags, rush mats, and moccasins. Her mother told her that “no one continues to be taken care of forever. The time soon comes when we lose sight of the one who takes care of us. I never got to know how my mother looked. My father’s sister brought me up. To-day I treat you just as she treated me. She did not permit me to be just fooling around” (299). Through her mother’s words, Fox Woman not only relates the importance of the duties learned at a young age, she also relates the generational bond between women within this tribe. It is Fox Woman’s mother who informs her at age thirteen about menstruation, telling her what she should do when this occurs. According to Bataille and Sands, Michelson mistranslates when he writes, “The state of being a young woman is evil.” Instead they suggest that the Mesquakie word myanetwima means literally bad and, in this context, unclean (36). The isolation practiced during this time was actually positive, since it meant the beginning of womanhood and potential motherhood. “Rather than the manitous or gods ‘hating’ the event, they took pity on

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her, or felt sorry for her, knowing the loneliness of isolation and the fear associated with the first experience of womanhood” (36–37). Although such mistranslations speak to the inconsistencies within these ethnographic autobiographies, the story itself is critically important to reclaiming Fox Woman’s voice and further understanding the significance of this event as a source of power for women within matrilineal societies.5 Fox Woman says that her grandmother came to be with her during that time in order to instruct her. Bataille and Sands state, “The label grandmother was assigned to several women; in fact, almost any older woman or medicine woman is likely to be referred to as grandmother. The label connotes wisdom and evokes respect” (37). Fox Woman’s self-identity is inextricably linked to her mother and other women in the tribe. It is the wisdom and sovereign stories passed on to her through the oral tradition by her mother and grandmothers that speaks to her significant role as knowledge keeper. This shared knowledge relates the important role mothers and women embodied in her tribe and especially as it relates to pregnancy and childbirth: For we women have a hard time at childbirth. We suffer. Some are killed by the babies. But we are not afraid of it, as we have been made to be that way. That is probably the reason why we are not afraid of it. Oh, if we were all afraid of it, when we all became old, that is as far as we could go. We should not be able to branch out (to a new generation). (317) Her sense of self is linked to her tribe and her role as mother as she talks about “new generations” that sustain her community and the practices and traditions that she retells. Her sovereign stories of survivance allow those generations who come after to painstakingly recuperate and unearth the fractured histories. This recuperation of blood memories is perhaps best described by Miranda in her memoir about California Indian communities: Putting the pieces back together and burying them might be one solution, even if it’s only a metaphor. Sometimes something is so badly broken you cannot recreate its original shape at all. If you try, you create a deformed, imperfect image of what you’ve lost; you will always compare what your creation looks like with what it used to look like. As long as you attempt to recreate, you are doomed to fail! I am beginning to realize

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that when something is that broken, more useful and beautiful results can come from using the pieces to construct a mosaic. You use the same pieces, but you create a new design from it. (135) Miranda’s theories of rereading and rewriting our histories and stories from the fractured pieces that remain is essential for an indigenous-centered decolonizing project that seeks to unpack the multiple layers of colonialist history embedded within these ethnographic narratives. She argues, Matter cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. If we allow the pieces of our culture to lie scattered in the dust of history, trampled on by racism and grief, then yes, we are irreparably damaged. But if we pick up the pieces and use them in new ways that honor their integrity, their colors, textures, stories—then we do those pieces justice, no matter how sharp they are, no matter how much handling them slices our fingers and makes us bleed. (135) Some may argue that our readings of these as-told-to works are useless, that they can never reveal any remnants of truth, and I might agree on one level, but I argue that the fragments of stories we do have are significant for not simply information gathering or teaching, but more fully understanding the storytelling practices of indigenous peoples whose oral traditions are dynamic and transformative and can never be contained, recorded, or manipulated by any one ethnographer or anthropologist for the purposes of mere research that speaks to one audience. As Miranda underscores in Bad Indians, these bits and pieces allow us to create new ways of telling the stories we have always known to be true, the shared knowledge that will always be passed down from one generation to the next within and between Native American communities. “Narrative of an Arapaho Woman”

Michelson’s introduction to the “Narrative of an Arapaho Woman” echoes that of the “Fox Indian Woman,” as he informs the audience how he has only slightly changed the original narrative. Jesse Rowlodge obtained the narrative near Geary, Oklahoma, in July 1932, from a seventy-seven-year-old

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informant. Michelson states he “corrected Rowlodge’s English slightly, but otherwise the narrative is given as written out by him” (596). Similar to the Fox Woman, Arapaho Woman emphasizes the role of women within her tribe. Her specific references to the moral upbringing of young girls can possibly be explained through Michelson’s introduction. He states that prior research done on Arapaho women is negative, because they were seen as immoral. For example, in literature, newspapers, and ethnographic recordings, Native Americans were characterized as savage and uncivilized. The popular imagery of indigenous people was dehumanizing and readily exploitable. These notions and images of inferiority were used to justify not only the genocide of indigenous peoples but also the sexual violence committed against Native American women. Michelson claims to ignore all of these “sensational and unreliable ‘authorities’” that portrayed Native Americans negatively and chooses to publish a more credible portrait as seen through his extensive explanatory notes referring to specific practices. For example, Arapaho Woman states, “The custom of the Arapaho mothers was to watch their daughters at all times. They would even accompany us girls to the brush when we went there to attend to nature’s demands, for fear some young men might be ambushed, watching their chance to have even an opportunity to talk to us girls” (599). From his extensive footnote on this passage, I argue that Rowlodge and then Michelson’s main interests were to document and republish anthropological findings for an academic audience. Nevertheless, his notes include information pertaining to Arapaho Woman’s mother, who had specialized knowledge about specific herbs. She states, “As my mother was a doctor I learned through her the use of many herbs, roots, bark, leaves, and seeds of certain plants for the treatment of various ailments, before I was married” (602). But Michelson only writes a brief footnote: “it is a custom that a woman doctor instruct her daughter.” In comparison to the page-long footnotes for practices regarding marriage and “women’s work” (i.e. porcupine quill work, bead work), this brevity illustrates his bias (602n23). Similar to Fox Woman, Arapaho Woman marries the man chosen by her brother. A year after her first child was born, her husband became sick and died. Arapaho Woman was married again and had three children, but her second husband also died from an unknown cause. Whether her husband and child’s “serious illness” and consequent death was caused by disease is not

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clarified in the narrative; Michelson only explains, through footnotes, the practice of mourning and custom of marriage. It was after her second husband’s death that she was “determined to live single,” which she did until she was advised by a cousin to get married again. It is when her new husband decides to marry another woman that she says, “I told him that I would rather that he marry and leave me as I did not wish to be a plural wife with her” (607). Her determination results in his leaving and her severing the relationship with him entirely. As with Fox Woman, there is little information revealed that deals with her community’s interaction with settler-colonialists. She states her unwillingness to reveal all of her “personal experiences,” because it would not be respectful to her brothers and male cousins. But her story does reveal communal shared knowledges as seen through the roles of multiple women within her story. Similar to my reading of Cuero’s as-told-to work, I argue that these narratives reveal more in their silences and refusal to tell everything they have witnessed. Clearly, neither Rowlodge or Michelson are concerned with critiquing the atrocities of genocide being committed against indigenous peoples at this historical moment, nor the egregious acts of brutality during the boarding school era. Rather, they are intent on recording and rewriting this story from an anthropological perspective that perpetuates a romanticized and stereotyped notion of indigenous women. The very act of not naming the “informants” was not to protect any one individual person but rather to portray the Fox and Arapaho people as homogenous groups with identities constructed from preconceived Eurocentric ideas of Native Americans. These recordings are perhaps the most difficult to reread, reinterpret, and argue for their value, since they are so fraught with layers of settler-colonialist preconceptions. But as noted in my first chapter and underscored by Miranda, it is the “pieces” of the stories that will ultimately recreate what she calls a mosaic. Sarris echoes this sentiment in his discussion of three Pomo women who told him they were fully conscious of what the anthropologists wanted, but they would never give them the “whole picture,” only pieces of this and that” (439). In the close reading that follows this is clearly the case, as Pretty-Shield is fully aware of the ethnographer’s intentions and conscious of her audience. Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows

Unlike Michelson’s narratives, the as-told-to autobiography Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows, written and edited by Frank B. Linderman,

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allows us to better unpack the types of questions that he may have asked Pretty-Shield.6 Instead of using footnotes or explanatory remarks, Linderman interjects his voice, and his presence is felt by way of commentary and dialogue between Linderman, the interpreter Goes-Together, and PrettyShield. Linderman began working among Native American communities in 1885 after leaving the East for Montana in order to hunt and trap. Three tribes “adopted” him into their tribe, and in 1888 he met the Crow chief PlentyCoups. Plenty-Coups gave Linderman the name Sign-talker, and forty years later in 1928 Linderman returned to record Plenty-Coups’s life history. According to Arnold Krupat, In the nineteenth century, historians—whether journalists, painters, poets, novelists, or biographers—had often accompanied or followed immediately after the army to do “justice” to the dispossessed and defeated Indian, at least in their representations if no way else, preserving what the “law” of progress decreed must otherwise vanish. (72) And it is from these encounters and interviews that Linderman thought he would preserve and record an “authentic” voice of the “Indians.” When analyzing these “bicultural composite compositions,” Wong suggests that although “the final shape and content of the life story were determined by Euro-American editors . . . Indian narrators seem to have told their life stories in their native narrative forms—forms that were shaped originally by the cultural patterns of the tribe, but that then were modified according to the needs of a new audience, purpose, and setting” (88). Thus, even though the narrative was shaped by specific questions directed at Plenty-Coups and was not initiated by the informant himself, he relates to Sign-talker (Linderman) that he wants his “people to keep their lands” because “they love them as I do and deserve to have them for the help they gave the white man, who now owns all” (Wong 96). The authenticity of the narrative is problematized further as we learn that Plenty-Coups was not the one who initiated contact and asked for his story to be told. Nevertheless, Plenty-Coups does retain his agency in the collaborative process and not only tells but performs his stories through an interpreter, Braided-Scalp-Lock. And it is Plenty-Coups who insists that his old friends Coyote-Runs and Plain-Bull participate in this process in order to help with remembering the details.7 Like testimonio, the story is not simply Plenty-Coups’s, but that of the entire community. It is Plenty-Coups’s

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emphasis on recalling and telling collective memories that is most important, and his control over the process allows for the narrative to be read as both a communal and individual life history. It is under the same circumstances, the desire to preserve the stories and traditions of the “vanishing Indians,” that Linderman returns to Montana four years later (1932) to record the life story of Pretty-Shield. Years before Shipek attempted to authenticate Cuero’s story with a mark in the shape of t on the introductory page, Linderman uses Pretty-Shield’s thumbprint on the foreword of the narrative with a statement that reads, “I told Sign-talker the things that are in this book, and have signed the paper with my thumb” (7). Although this technique supposedly lends credibility to Linderman’s published text for his audience, it is problematic given the history of Indians who often signed documents in good faith without the full understanding of their entire content and consequences. Similar to Michelson’s statement about the uniqueness of his recording a woman’s story, Linderman admits that “throughout forty-six years in Montana I have had much to do with its several Indian tribes, and yet have never, until now, talked for ten consecutive minutes directly to an old Indian woman” (9). It is clear from his interjections throughout the as-told-to work that Linderman was specifically directing Pretty-Shield to tell him what he thought was a uniquely woman’s story. Some of his formal questions and instructions to her are “Tell me more about your life when you were a little girl, about things you liked, and things you feared”; “Tell me of your marriage, about your man, I suggested”; “Will you tell me about the care of newly born babies?” “Now tell me your medicine dream” (99, 130, 145, and 165, respectively). At their first meeting, Pretty-Shield asks Linderman, through the interpreter Goes-Together, what he would like her to tell him. He replies that he wants to know about her girlhood and says, “I want only a woman’s story, a woman who has lived a long time” (16). It is this request that PrettyShield repeatedly refers to jokingly throughout her story, as she finds it difficult to contain her storytelling within the rigid boundaries that Linderman has instructed her to follow. For example, before she tells the story of RedWoman she asks, “Shall I tell you the story? There is a man in it, or a boy who had the heart of a man,” and in her account about the medicine gun she states, “I am trying to tell you only a woman’s story, as you wished. I am telling you my own story” (55, 78). Pretty-Shield’s obvious sarcasm and

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questioning of Linderman about his insistence on recording a unique women’s story illustrates her agency and resistance to dominant colonialist and anthropological constructs. In the same way that Plenty-Coups informs Linderman that his people have asked him to tell his life history, Pretty-Shield says, “young people know nothing about our old customs, and even if they wished to learn there is nobody now to teach them. I believe that you know more about our old ways than any other man of your age, Crow or white man. This is the reason why I hide nothing from you” (24). This statement is what Sarris discusses in his examination of the Pomo women who knew exactly what the ethnographers wanted but chose to tell only pieces of stories about their lives. And this echoes Cuero’s narrative when she states that she is not a storyteller and cannot remember much, but she will tell what she can. I argue that PrettyShield’s statement about “hiding nothing” from Linderman is actually a subversive way of gaining the trust of her interviewer and manipulating the as-told-to form by implying she will tell him everything. Her use of sarcasm and humor is perhaps lost on Linderman, who does not realize that his request to tell a strictly women’s story through his gender-biased lens is seen as absurd by Pretty-Shield. And the desire to preserve her history gives Pretty-Shield control of her own sovereign stories and voice. Even though Linderman constructs and shapes the written narrative, Pretty-Shield maintains her agency and sovereign voice by only telling some stories about her community. She consistently talks back, both subtly and explicitly, and chooses not to divulge how her people had to adapt to deterritorialization, genocide, and the rapid decline of the buffalo population. She states, “There is nothing to tell, because we did nothing” (10). Pretty-Shield’s agency is not subsumed within the confines of Linderman’s directives; rather, she manipulates his questions in order to tell stories that might not otherwise be related to a mainstream audience. And it is through the written narrative as well as her blood memories that Pretty-Shield tells historical and personal stories about her people’s customs and tribal myths. Thus, Pretty-Shield becomes the teacher. It is her role not only as a mother but also as a medicine woman of the Crow tribe that Linderman suggests qualifies her to tell what he believes to be an “authentic” account of the “natural life of her people on the plains” (9). For example, when she relates the chickadee story and tells how the tongue is significant in determining the moon of the winter that they

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were in, Linderman instructs, “‘Tell me about his tongue, Pretty-Shield,’ I begged, again whistling his spring-call to salve her disgust for my ignorance” (153). One can only imagine the absurdity of Linderman acting out this call in front of Pretty-Shield and her reaction to his paternalistic and patronizing manner toward her. The autobiography, a genre that historically represented male selfexpression and constructed an individual life story, is manipulated by Pretty-Shield, who not only reclaims a communal sovereign story through the oral tradition, but also performs parts of her stories. Linderman attempts to describe these moments of performance in the written narrative. For example, when she recalls childbirth he writes: “In her description of the maternity lodge Pretty-Shield placed a common kitchen chair, with its hard seat toward her, its back representing the two stakes, its seat the pile of rolled robes, and knelt to show me the exact position she had assumed at the birth of her daughter” (147–48). The performance becomes an integral part of the entire story and is significant to understanding the problematic collaborative process and translation from the oral to written text. But it is also significant to understanding how Pretty-Shield is fully aware of her positionality and chooses to engage as an active participant in the telling of her stories. Thus, it is through the form of the autobiography, meant to restrict her voice and confine her within the space of a written text, that Pretty-Shield resists the popular image of Native American women as passive herb gatherers whose roles are subordinate to their male counterparts. According to Alicia Kent, “since contact, Native American women have been doubly marginalized by the male colonial (and then the male anthropological) gaze, which focused on men and assumed women to be only a subgroup of the larger Native American culture.” 8 Pretty-Shield counters this imagined Native woman through sarcasm, humor, and silences. Her stories are not unlike those of Cuero, who was also fully aware of her interviewer’s objectives and motivations. Although they told their sovereign stories at different historical moments and for different reasons, both women unearthed their blood memories without compromising their agency. For example, Pretty-Shield implies she will tell Linderman everything while simultaneously maintaining silences that subvert the narrative and make her an agent of storytelling rather than simply an ethnographic informant.

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Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883)

If story, as Miranda states in Bad Indians, is the most powerful force in the world, then the act of telling one’s own story is that much more powerful. Cook-Lynn asserts that to deny indigenous people the right to collectively tell their stories and their histories is a violation of human rights and perhaps more immoral than physical genocide (86). Thus, it is ironic that the autobiography, a traditionally Eurocentric, male-driven genre, has been strategically used as way to talk back and rewrite official histories about indigenous peoples. These sovereign stories told by indigenous women are rooted in the oral tradition, and their use of this genre and the English language are only two of several ways they have challenged the status quo and what Harjo and Bird call “reinventing the enemy’s language.” In the introduction to their coedited anthology, Harjo states that “many of us at the end of the century are using the ‘enemy language’ with which to tell our truths, to sing, to remember ourselves during these troubled times” (21). Bird echoes this notion, stating that “‘reinventing’ in the colonizer’s tongue and turning those images around to mirror an image of the colonized to the colonizers as a process of decolonization indicates that something is happening, something is emerging and coming into focus that will politicize as well as transform literary expression” (22). I argue that life stories provide indigenous women the space to talk back, as they rewrite history and reclaim their blood memories. One of the first autobiographies written by a Native American woman was Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). Winnemucca recounts the history of her tribe and her role as a mediator between her people and the government. The Northern Piute Indians, known as the Numa, traveled freely in what is now western Nevada, northeastern California, and southern Oregon until the invasion by settler-colonialists in the midnineteenth century. Winnemucca was born about 1844 to Chief “Old” Winnemucca and Tuboitonie. According to biographer Gae Whitney Canfield, her maternal grandfather, Captain Truckee, was “a guide to early emigrants crossing the Great Basin.”9 Truckee also took frequent trips to California and fought on the side of Anglo Americans in the US-Mexican war. From an early age, Winnemucca was terrified of the white men her grandfather called “brothers.” She remembers that in 1858 she and her sister

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accompanied her grandfather to California and lived with Major Ormsbey’s family, where they learned the English language quickly (58). Her later attendance at San Jose’s convent school and self-education allowed Winnemucca to become a translator and interpreter as she mediated her tribe’s negotiations with Indian agents and eventually became an activist for her people. Winnemucca was seen as a controversial figure for her involvement as a scout for the US government and her participation in the theater, but more recently literary critics and historians have debated the authenticity and historical validity of her autobiography. In comparison with the ethnographic and as-told-to works, Winnemucca’s narrative was self-written and subsequently edited by Mary Mann, who states in her introduction, “My editing has consisted in copying the original manuscript in correct orthography and punctuation, with occasional emendations by the author, of a book which is an heroic act on the part of the writer” (2). Following the tradition of nineteenth-century slave narratives and novels where the editor “legitimized” the authenticity of the story, Mann says of Winnemucca, “In fighting with her literary deficiencies she loses some of the fervid eloquence which her extraordinary colloquial command of the English language enables her to utter, but I am confident that no one would desire that her own original words should be altered” (2).10 Mann’s intent is to solicit sympathy from a white, middle-class audience as she portrays Winnemucca as a patriot who “has a single aim—to tell the truth” (2). She further implicates the audience in Winnemucca’s story by stating, “at this moment, when the United States seem waking up to their duty to the original possessors of our immense territory, it is of the first importance to hear what only an Indian and an Indian woman can tell” (2). Thus, Winnemucca’s narrative is significant not only because it relates a sovereign story, but also because it relates the stories of her collective community. It becomes a tool in the face of conflict between Anglo Americans and Native Americans as it serves to prove the injustices committed by settler-colonialists against indigenous people. According to Canfield, the process of printing and binding was hurried in order to get the book out before the next session of Congress when the legislators were meeting to consider legislation pertaining to American Indians (206).11 How, then, does this narrative function to simultaneously claim an American allegiance but also resist assimilation by providing a space to critique the hegemony that subordinates and dehumanizes Native Americans?

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Winnemucca’s autobiography does not allow for simple categorization. And as seen through Canfield’s historical study of Winnemucca’s life, there were various factors contributing to the publication of this text. While Bataille and Sands suggest that her narrative was “heavily biased by her acculturated and Christianized viewpoint,” autobiography theorist David Brumble argues that it differs from accounts written by “educated Indian autobiographers,” and “is essentially an oral performance put down on writing” where she “retain[s] an essentially tribal sense of self.”12 He argues that every Piute response to an accusation is either autobiographical or historical and that the white characters reply with dismissals, flat denials, or authoritative assertions (67). He states that the historical memory required to write this text and the concern with self-vindication proves that the narrative is told from an Indian point of view (66). In addition, he disagrees with LaVonne Brown Ruoff, who suggests that popular literary forms such as captivity and slave narratives have influenced Winnemucca’s text, because we cannot “simply assume [her] degree of literacy and [her] breadth of reading” (63).13 Both of these arguments raise the question of authenticity and authorship. Although Brumble may be correct in his review of the text, which does contain elements of the oral tradition, we should not ignore the various literary and cultural influences that Winnemucca might have been exposed to. In the tradition of nineteenth-century sentimental literature, Mann wrote an introduction that gives credibility to the author and its content. In addition, Mann and her sister Elizabeth Peabody decided to include an appendix to the book that contained letters of recommendation and a defense of her character (Canfield, 204). Canfield’s historical study shows that Winnemucca could have been influenced by the “culture of sentiment” as she was regularly traveling and giving lectures on behalf of her people. The controversy surrounding Winnemucca is partly due to her participation in theaters as well as her view on assimilation. For example, Chief Winnemucca and his two daughters performed at music halls and theaters. One report from the Daily Alta California newspaper described Chief Winnemucca’s opening lecture as eulogistic and the dances as “favorites,” especially among the children (Canfield, 40). These performances on stage are similar to minstrelsy, which was also regularly performed during the late nineteenth century. Another article from “City Items” in the Daily Alta California even parallels the two, stating that “people like novelty, let them have

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it. Opera and minstrelsy will pall after a season or two, and if we do go now and then to see an aboriginal entertainment or a Chinese theatrical troupe, whose business is it? we would like to know” (quoted in Canfield, 41).14 In effect, the performers became exotic objects for the audience to safely view from a distance, perpetuating the stereotypes of indigenous peoples during this historical period. After a headline from the San Francisco Chronicle described her as “The Princess Sarah,” Winnemucca became known publicly as the Princess (Canfield 162). The signifier princess has been used historically and continues to be used today to stereotype Native American women who were recognized as primitive nobility contributing to American progress.15 Although Winnemucca was romanticized by the dominant culture during her performances and lectures, she intentionally and subversively used these forums to educate and inform her audience about the history of her people. On several occasions she openly accused reservation agents and the government for the deplorable conditions that Native Americans lived under. And for this reason she was continuously discredited and demonized in newspaper articles by such people as Agent Rinehart, who is named in her autobiography. Major W. V. Rinehart was a soldier in command of the Klamath Reservation beginning in 1874, when the Paiute band accepted a treaty and agreed to live there. In contrast to the former agent, Parrish, Rinehart exploited their labor and did not readily give them needed food and clothing from the government. Instead he threatened to take the land that he claimed was the government’s if they did not work as they were told (Hopkins, 124). Thus, her text becomes one medium in which she chose to speak out and not only solicit sympathy from her audience but also resist hegemony, revise history, and claim national citizenship or sovereignty for her people. While some contemporary readers might see her participation in theatrical performances, including her use of “traditional” dress, as perpetuating egregious stereotypes of Native Americans, I argue that her ability to navigate between worlds at this historical moment and use of this space to speak on behalf of her tribe is a form of resistance similar to her written autobiography. One example of the romanticized language used to describe Winnemucca as an exotic performer reads: San Francisco was treated to the most novel entertainment it has ever known. . . . The Princess wore a short buckskin dress, the skirt bordered

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with fringe and embroidery, short sleeves, disclosing beautifully-rounded brown arms. . . . On her head she wore a proud head dress of eagle’s feathers, set in a scarlet crown, contrasting well with her flowing black locks. The lecture was unlike anything ever before heard in the civilized world. . . . Nature’s child spoke in natural, unconstrained language. . . . The constraint which was naturally expected by the audience . . . was nowhere visible as the Indian girl walked upon the stage in an easy, unembarrassed manner, and entered at once upon the story of her race.16 This critique of Winnemucca demands a closer reading to illustrate how Winnemucca was subverting oral and visual discourses (i.e. theatrical and political speeches and performance) to assert her presence in spaces usually reserved for whites. The description of her “proud head dress,” and “flowing black locks” romanticize her visually, whereas she is paternalized with descriptions such as “nature’s child spoke.” But what is most interesting is the description of her lecture as “unlike anything ever before heard in the civilized world” and “unconstrained language.” Since indigenous peoples were regularly characterized as “savages” and “uncivilized” compared to their white counterparts, Winnemucca’s speech act and her unapologetic use of the enemy’s language in an “unembarrassed manner” indicates a form of survivance. Her very presence on stage and ability to speak in front of this audience moves beyond a spectacle and places her in a position of authority—acting out her sovereign status as a citizen through subversive and overtly indigenous-centered speech acts. Another significant aspect of Winnemucca’s life worth noting occurred in 1885 when she and her brother Natchez formed an Indian school on her brother’s land that he received from the Central Pacific Railroad Company. Mary Mann’s sister, Elizabeth Peabody, sent them donations in order to help build the school. With assistance from Peabody and other Indian reformists, the school continued for a short time until the government decided to stop funding the project because Winnemucca refused to surrender her directorship of the school and place it under the reformists’ control. Winnemucca’s school differed from the boarding schools at Hampton, Virginia, and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, because it was not run by whites and children were not separated from their families. Her school was not intended to “kill the Indian, save the man,” but instead encouraged children to use their native

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languages (Canfield 238–39). Winnemucca continued teaching children even after the passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 that required Indian children to be educated in boarding schools specifically designed to assimilate and “civilize” them (Canfield 249).17 Since Winnemucca felt that the boarding schools would “repress creative self-respect and the conscious freedom to act” she decided to resist the government by promoting her school as an industrial school for the Paiutes that would prepare her students for such jobs as blacksmiths, shoemakers, and carpenters (Canfield 249). But since the school was run primarily by Native Americans and supported the promotion of their languages and traditions, she received little support and gave up on the idea of an industrial school in 1888. Winnemucca’s autobiography cannot be read without taking her various roles as activist, teacher, mediator, performer, and lecturer into account. At a time when Native Americans were viewed as subhuman, her text speaks back to the racist and stereotypical characterizations made against her people. After discussing her childhood she begins chapter 3 with, “I will now stop writing about myself and family and tribe customs, and tell about the wars, and the causes of the wars” (58). The sovereign stories she tells are not only about her individual experiences but also about her blood memories, and they serve to rewrite her people’s history. She not only informs and educates her readers but also calls them to action. Her awareness of audience and political intentions are made decisively clear when she implicates her readers by addressing the hypocrisy, deceitfulness, and racist attitudes that her people have endured. She states, “All these white people were loved by my people; we lived there together, and were as happy as could be. . . . yet my people never said, ‘We want you to give us something for our land’ ” (59). Winnemucca’s references not only reflect the injustices committed by settler-colonialists but also characterize Native Americans as possessing high morals and behaving civilly, traits that were rarely attributed to indigenous people in the late nineteenth century. Instead, Winnemucca’s autobiography inverts the typical characterizations of Native Americans onto whites as she portrays the government, soldiers, and settlers as savage and barbaric. For example, although Winnemucca’s father holds his white “brothers” with high esteem, from a young age she deeply feared these people and refers to them as “owls” (19–20). She states that it was these owls who waged a physical and psychological war on Winnemucca’s tribe simply because they were Indians.

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Winnemucca finds it difficult to call the whites her brothers and, in reference to a massacre that occurred on the reservation of Pyramid and Muddy Lakes, in 1865 she writes, Oh dear readers, these soldiers had gone only sixty miles away to Muddy Lake, where my people were then living and fishing, and doing nothing to any one. The soldiers rode up to their encampment and fired into it, and killed almost all the people that were there. Oh it is a fearful thing to tell, but it must be told. Yes, it must be told by me. It was all old men, women and children that were killed. . . . This almost killed my poor papa. Yet my people kept peaceful.18 Throughout the narrative Winnemucca addresses her audience, another technique of sentimentalism that functioned to evoke an emotional response in its readers as they became engaged in the political scene. When she says that this story must be told by her, there is a sense of urgency. I argue that this sovereign story of collective oppression is characterized by blood memories that assert one’s ancestral identity through a communal consciousness of survivance. What does it mean for her to tell these stories of genocide and systematic deterritorialization? How does her autobiography function to not only rewrite history but also unearth the voices of her people? Similar to contemporary testimonios, there was a sense of urgency that Winnemucca felt to tell her story. She lectured regularly around the country and, according to Mann, Winnemucca’s primary motive for writing her autobiography was, “to influence the public mind by the details of the Indian wrongs she can give them rights to defend them in courts” (Canfield 203). Further, in an effort to gain sympathy from women readers, Winnemucca implicates white men as she addresses the subject of rape and explicitly writes about instances of sexual violation committed against Native American women: Oh, if your father only knew how his children were suffering, I know he would kill that white man who tried to take your sister. I cannot see for my life why my father calls them his white brothers. They are not people; they have no thought, no mind, no love. They are beasts, or they would know I, a lone woman, am here with them. They tried to take my girl from me and abuse her before my eyes and yours too, and oh, you must go too. (37)

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Winnemucca calls out these men later, stating, “He said there were very bad men there. Sometimes they would throw a rope over our women, and do fearful things to them. ‘Oh, my poor cousins,’ he said, ‘my heart aches for you, for I am afraid they will do something fearful to you. They do not care for anything. They do most terrible outrageous things to our women’” (228). White settler-colonialists and soldiers were not only raping the land, they were systematically raping Native American women. Indigenous people were seen as obstacles in the path of progress and, since indigenous women were dehumanized, these sexual violations were justified by settler-colonialists. According to Margo Culley, the popular image of Native American women as imagined by male colonizers in the late nineteenth century was as a “primitive sexual object or dusky virgin ‘royalty’—an abstraction to be manipulated for political or physical motives-easily abandoned because she has no distinct personal identity” (268). Thus, Winnemucca’s narrative incriminates the readers in this othering of Native American women. Life among the Piutes implicates the readers by questioning their political and moral authority while simultaneously countering dominant notions of Native American women as squaws, thus reclaiming their humanity.19 Winnemucca’s text also appeals to a female audience through the rhetoric of domesticity, as seen in the chapter “Domestic and Social Moralities.” She claims cultural citizenship for her people by describing their high moral character and paralleling their behavior with that of her white middle-class audience. She builds on the discourse of the nineteenth century that defined the “cult of true womanhood” as those traits by which a “woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society.”20 The virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity that defined this womanhood are what Winnemucca strategically describes as she details the upbringing of children, as young women are instructed about marriage after “they come to womanhood” and “our boys are introduced to manhood by their hunting of deer and mountain-sheep” (48, 50). By describing the “proper” behavior and upbringing of Native American youth she strategically engages in a critique that reveals the hypocrisy of her white readership. She says of her tribe that they love the white man as their brother and are taught to love their fathers and mothers without being told. And she emphasizes that it is the whites who always begin the wars “for their own selfish purposes,” as her people are forced off their land by the settlers, agents, and

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soldiers. More significantly, Winnemucca enters the discourse of politics as she counters the notion of the uncivilized Indian by describing her tribe’s own republic, which they call a council-tent. And unlike the United States Congress, she explains that anyone can speak at these gatherings, even the women. Thus, Winnemucca strategically underscores the hypocrisy of a socalled democratic America that claims freedom for all and appeals to women readers engaged in the suffrage movement as they also attempt to gain full citizenship. Winnemucca’s autobiography asserts agency for her people, counters dominant images of the savage, and complicates notions of a monolithic national identity. In response to the forced removal of her people to the Yakima Reservation, she writes, Oh for shame! You who are educated by a Christian government in the art of war, the practice of whose profession makes you natural enemies of the savages, so called by you. Yes, you, who call yourselves the great civilization; you who have knelt upon Plymouth Rock, covenanting with God to make this land the home of the free and the brave. Ah then you rise from your bended knees and seizing the welcoming hands of those who are the owners of this land, which you are not, your carbines rise upon the bleak shore, and your so-called civilization sweeps inland from the ocean wave; but, oh, my God! leaving its pathway marked by crimson lines of blood, and strewed by the bones of two races, the inheritor and the invader; and I am crying out to you for justice, —yes pleading for the far-off plains of the West, for the dusky mourner, whose tears of love are pleading for her husband, or for their children, who are sent far away from them. Your Christian minister will hold my people against their will; not because he loves them,—no, far from it,—but because it puts money in his pockets. (207) Her direct indictments of the US government are shown through speeches and documents that reveal a flawed democracy. Winnemucca attacks America’s national values and moral identity, and her narrative serves as a communal witness to the atrocities committed against her people. Her blood memories and sovereign stories navigate between multiple spaces and identities where she creates new narratives (i.e. oral, written, and performative) that resist hegemonic definitions of citizenship, sovereignty, and ancestral

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identity. And her indigenous-centered storytelling practices are evident in her writing and lectures that seek to reright and rewrite dominant national narratives about settler colonialism and genocide in the late nineteenth century. Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird): American Indian Stories (1900–1920s)

At the turn of the century more Native American writers were publishing books without editorial assistance. Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, who renamed herself Zitkala-Sa, or Red Bird, is an example of one such writer who published numerous essays, works of fiction, and life stories. Zitkala-Sa, a Sioux of the Yankton band, was born in 1876 to Ellen Tate’Iyohiwin (Reaches for the Wind), a full blooded Sioux, and a man named Felker who deserted the family before her birth. Zitkala-Sa took on the name of her halfbrother, Simmons, before leaving home and later naming herself Zitkala-Sa. This is significant because Zitkala-Sa’s writings address her difficulties with self-identity, as she lived between two cultures. This conflict is a result of her leaving—or rather, being forcibly removed from—her reservation at the age of eight. In her first autobiographical story, “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” her mother warns against the palefaces whose promise of “red apples” will result in Zitkala-Sa’s suffering.21 Her mother states, “The palefaces, who owe us a large debt for stolen lands, have begun to pay a tardy justice in offering some education to our children. But I know my daughter must suffer keenly in this experiment” (44). At the age of eight, Zitkala-Sa did not fully understand the implications of her leaving the reservation for a so-called education in the East. Her mother, on the other hand, had already experienced the consequences of her son Dawee’s acculturation after returning from the “boarding schools.” Zitkala-Sa writes, “Within the last two seasons my big brother Dawee had returned from a three years’ education in the East, and his coming back influenced my mother to take a farther step from her native way of living” (40). Throughout the narrative Zitkala-Sa struggles with this loss of identity and traditional cultural values as she is forcibly “assimilated”—rather, physically and mentally traumatized by cultural genocide. But similar to Winnemucca, Zitkala-Sa uses the “enemy’s language” to indict her oppressors, her readership, and those who felt that the “boarding schools” were beneficial for Native American children—when in

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reality they were prisons and military-like institutions where horrific and egregious acts of terror and genocide were committed against indigenous children. Moreover, Zitkala-Sa’s identity and political position are complex, because she not only lectured and wrote essays that openly critiqued the government but also supported the assimilationist ideology that allowed some Native Americans full citizenship and active participation in politics. In “Reading American Indian Intellectual Traditions,” Robert Allen Warrior asserts that those people who worked to “civilize” American Indians through the federal government included graduates and other Natives connected to Richard Henry Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School.22 Thus, for some, their ideologies were largely influenced by these institutions whose goal was to force Native Americans to assimilate and conform to the values of dominant society. I argue that although Zitkala-Sa’s autobiographies reflect a sense of loss of her Native culture and identity, they also resist acculturation. In fact, her later work as an activist for her people and multiple indictments of these prison-like institutions and “friends of the Indians” in her fiction and short stories confirm her efforts to decolonize her people. Through her writing and participation as an activist, she was clearly conscious that the boarding schools’ only intention was to dehumanize and commit genocide against Native American children. The boarding schools of the late nineteenth century were not educational institutions but prisons where Native American children served in slave-like conditions and were tortured, sexually abused, and killed. Among other policies to exterminate Native Americans, these “schools” were seen by some as way to acculturate indigenous people through cultural genocide. The first offreservation boarding school was initially a prison, which opened in 1875, at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. In American Indian Education: A History, Jon Allan Reyhner and Jeanne M. Eder state that Pratt was supposedly “friendly to his prisoners,” which allowed him to persuade the War Department that the Native American prisoners actually wanted to learn the ways of the white man.23 Pratt began finding work for the prisoners, but this did not last for long as “townspeople complained to Washington, DC, that the Indians were taking the jobs of local residents.”24 Pratt also persuaded local townswomen to “teach” the prisoners English and considered his work a success because “twenty-two out of the younger adult prisoners refused to return to their tribes,” which was one of Pratt’s major goals.25 After this “experiment”

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he began establishing a school for Indians at an abandoned army barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. According to Smith in Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, Pratt insisted that he was a friend to the Indians because he “advocated cultural rather than physical genocide.”26 Once he opened his off-reservation boarding school he adopted the slogan for Indian education, which was to “kill the Indian and save the man.”27 Pratt developed a plan that included the forced removal of Native American children from their parents in order to “inculcate Christianity and white cultural values, and encourage/force them to assimilate into the dominant society through off-reservation schools.”28 In his comprehensive study, Kill the Indian, Save the Man, Ward Churchill likens these institutions to prisons and gives extensive evidence to prove how three types of genocide were being committed against children: physical, cultural, and biological: Taken, often by force, from their homes at ages as young as four, transported to facilities remote from their families and communities, confined there for a decade or more, relentlessly stripped of their cultural identities while being just as methodically indoctrinated to see their traditions— and thus themselves—through the eyes of their colonizers, chronically malnourished and overworked, drilled to regimental order and subjected to the harshest forms of corporal punishment. (xviii) Although the schools were initially founded to acculturate Native Americans, many became a means of providing servants to white families in what was called the “outing” program. Zitkala-Sa, a young girl at the time of her kidnapping, was a product of these institutions. She survived to tell her life story through multiple genres: autobiography, essays, and fiction. And she resists the best way she knows how, through the enemy’s language, as she becomes an advocate and voice of resistance for her people. In “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” she first survives the dehumanizing journey on a train to the East. “We had anticipated much pleasure from a ride on the iron horse, but the throngs of staring palefaces disturbed and troubled us” (47). The gaze that Zitkala-Sa describes is typical of the stereotypical characterizations attributed to Native Americans as barbaric and savage: I sank deep into the corner of my seat, for I resented being watched.

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Directly in front of me, children who were no larger than I hung themselves upon the backs of their seats, with their bold white faces towards me. Sometimes they took their forefingers out of their mouths and pointed at my moccasined feet. Their mothers, instead of reproving such rude curiosity, looked closely at me, and attracted their children’s further notice to my blanket. (48) This scene is significant as it introduces Zitkala-Sa to dominant society soon after her recent removal from her homeland. The hypocrisy of adults not reproving their children’s rudeness parallels with the current historical moment and the hypocrisy of those who called themselves “friends of the Indian” or Indian reformers, yet routinely dehumanized indigenous people. Thus, through her blood memories, Zitkala-Sa underscores her community’s long relationship with their ancestral identities and homelands. In fact, the first parts of Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, originally written in monthly sections for the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s magazines, were extensively about her life before her boarding school experience. She strategically uses the voice of her mother, who rebuked the palefaces and gave her daughter warnings about the “sickly sham” (9). In addition, her autobiography subversively uses the English language to illustrate the hypocrisy of her audience by characterizing herself, before the boarding schools, as a “dignified little individual” who was respected by her elders and who “was wild with surplus spirits, and found joyous relief in running loose in the open again” (20–21). This diction changes dramatically when Zitkala-Sa describes her experiences at the school, where she feels confined by the “civilizing machine” and “chains which tightly bound my individuality like a mummy for burial” (66–67). Her references to learning about beadwork that her mother patiently taught her and the legend of the dead man’s plum bush also show her audience how the education she received at home contrasted considerably with the so-called education she was receiving at the prison. Zitkala-Sa continues her sovereign stories of survivance by recalling her experiences at the institution and critiques its strict regimentation. But it is the cutting of her hair that serves to illustrate perhaps one of the most horrendous forms of cultural genocide that occurred at the “boarding school.” She was held down and forced to submit to torture, similar to the other children that arrived at these institutions. She recalls, “Our mothers taught us

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that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled by the enemy and among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled hair by cowards” (54). This incident—along with the beatings of her friends for speaking their native tongue and the deaths of children she witnessed—caused Zitkala-Sa to talk back and resist her oppressors, not only in her writing but also in her later actions as a political activist and advocate for her people. She worked tirelessly to have these schools eliminated or reformed. As resistance literature, Zikala-Sa’s sovereign stories and blood memories forced readers to engage in the processes of acculturation and torture endured by numerous children. And unlike the rhetoric of “civilizing” that was viewed positively by Indian reformers, her narrative counters the false notions of “good intentions” shamelessly promoted through propaganda. She recalls contemplating her fate with her good friend Judéwin: “We discussed our fate some moments, and when Judéwin said, ‘We have to submit, because they are strong,’ I rebelled. ‘No, I will not submit! I will struggle first!’ I answered” (54). After running away and hiding under a bed she writes, I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly. In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit. (55–56) Through her blood memories and retelling these extraordinary moments of resistance Zitkala-Sa reclaims not only her individual voice, but also the voice of her community and those who did not survive. For example, she recalls the death of a classmate: At her deathbed I stood weeping, as the paleface woman sat near her moistening the dry lips. Among the folds of the bedclothes I saw the open pages of the white man’s Bible. The dying Indian girl talked disconnectedly of Jesus the Christ and the paleface who was cooling her swollen hands and feet. I grew bitter, and censured the woman for cruel neglect of our physical ills. (67) Zitkala-Sa’s critique forces her readers to question their own Christian ideals

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and hypocrisy. The Bible as a symbol of healing and Judeo-Christian thought would have been familiar to her readers. Therefore, she strategically juxtaposes this with the cruel neglect that results in her friend’s death. As if turning a mirror on the reader, Zitkala-Sa shows her audience the uselessness and hypocrisy of their prayers and religious beliefs, as her writing serves to illustrate the true intentions of this civilizing machine. She writes: “I blamed the . . . ignorant woman who was inculcating in our hearts her superstitious ideas” (67). Zitkala-Sa ironically calls the woman’s religion “superstitious,” a term typically used to describe the spiritual beliefs of indigenous peoples who were routinely punished or massacred for openly practicing their ceremonies. She continues to critique her readership’s Christian values through her defiant sovereign voice. She writes that upon her return home from the school her mother attempted to comfort her by giving her a Bible. “I took it from her hand, for her sake; but my enraged spirit felt more like burning the book, which afforded me no help, and was a perfect delusion to my mother” (73). Zitkala-Sa uses the enemy’s language and multiple narrative strategies to critique and call to action her audience in an effort to struggle against the systematic genocide against her people at the hands of settler-colonialists. And her blood memories are witnesses to the atrocities of the boarding school-prisons whose legacies have caused irreparable intergenerational trauma to indigenous communities. In later years, Zitkala-Sa became involved politically to actively struggle against the civilizing machine. Similar to Winnemucca, she was an advocate for her people and gave lectures to those willing to listen to her demands for change. Zitkala-Sa became a well-known author, although not always wellreceived, since her autobiographies and essays had first been published in popular magazines such as Harper’s in 1900 and the Atlantic Monthly in 1901. In 1902 she was married to Raymond T. Bonnin, also a Sioux, and they moved to the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, where they lived for fourteen years. Raymond Bonnin was an employee of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and this affiliation allowed Zitkala-Sa to participate in organizing community activities for the Utah Indians. In 1916 she was elected secretary of the advisory board for the Society of American Indians (SAI), which was founded in 1911. According to Dexter Fisher, the SAI was founded and governed exclusively by American Indians and allowed Native Americans to participate in reform as they “sought to redress the multitude of inequities

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they had suffered.”29 Consequently, she moved to Washington, DC, where she edited SAI’s journal, the American Indian Magazine. After the SAI dismantled in 1920 Zitkala-Sa began working with various organizations such as the Women’s National Indian Association and the Indian Rights Association. In 1926 she founded her own political organization, the National Council of American Indians, of which she was president until her death in 1938.30 Winnemucca’s and Zitkala-Sa’s autobiographical works dispel the myths and negative connotations about Native American identity and culture. Through their narratives we are introduced to sovereign stories that seek to relate blood memories of ancestral identity. Their works also parallel with testimonios, where a storyteller and knowledge keeper feels a sense of urgency to tell the truth about the atrocities committed against their communities, whether through wars and massacres or an educational system that sought to destroy them physically and spiritually. In the case of Winnemucca and Zitkala-Sa, the editing and mediation involved in the production of their written narratives was minimal or nonexistent, yet questions of authenticity and authorship still arise. Similar to earlier ethnographic or as-told-to narratives, these autobiographies relate the story and history of a community—that is, “we” as opposed to the individual “I”—thus countering traditional notions of selflife-writing. These indigenous-women-centered stories can also be compared to the defining characteristics of a testimonio as outlined by Lynda Marin in “Speaking Out Together”: Although the testimonial has a long and varied history, it has always been seen as a kind of writing from the margins. Those privileged to belong to the dominant class, race, and/or gender write Scripture, literature, autobiography, or ethnography. From the point of view of privilege, the testimonial has been seen as the means by which those who are not privileged tell about themselves and particularly about their struggle against the powers that claim privilege over them. It would seem, then, that almost all writing of women constitutes the genre of testimony, that is, a kind of speaking from the margins to and about the systems which oppress that speaking.31 Is it possible, then, to read these narratives by Native American women

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within the larger framework of feminism? How can these works and literary criticism help to define a Native American feminist theory? Although this may be difficult to imagine—especially given the overlapping layers of editing and translation seen in the earlier ethnographic autobiographies, I argue that these works are in fact, protofeminist strories that assert resistance and agency alongside contemporary self-written works. Although Native American written expression “first appeared as nineteenth-century autobiographies” and “initially served as a means for the colonizer to control the representations, meanings and interpretations of Native American cultures,” Native American women have adapted the genre as a “tool to respond to the cross-cultural and cross-gendered encounter Native American women face under patriarchal colonialism.” 32 And similar to the earlier works by Winnemucca and Zitkala-Sa, contemporary writers such as Silko produce works that are “polyphonic, multiform, even impersonal” as self-life-writing is constructed through the collective.33 These writers who also “negotiate a complex bicultural world” use autobiography to represent the “survival of the individual and the tribal collective self.”34

CHAPTER 5

Indigenizing the Internet through Cyberactivism, Social Media, and Communo-Blographies The Zapatistas, Idle No More, and Activist-Bloggers

This chapter is meant to think more expansively about the notion of blood memories and the new ways in which indigenous peoples have utilized the Internet as a tool for decolonization. I extend my use of the concepts of stories, memories, history telling, testimonios, and sovereignty to include new media, which has become such a huge part of our everyday lives. In many cases blogs, digital newspapers, and social media have rapidly become the only ways that many people acquire information about emerging or ongoing social justice movements and pressing or urgent news about communities of color. To that end, this chapter provides a synopsis of new media along with two case studies that review the use of blogs and social media sites by indigenous organizations, indigenous social movements, and individual activists-bloggers. I argue that new social media has allowed some opportunities for internationalizing a global movement for indigenous rights, activism, and networking. And there is a movement to indigenize the Internet, where some individuals and groups collectively participate in what I call communo-blographies—that is, virtual sites where one’s testimonios and truthtelling about indigenous communities are rapidly disseminated and, therefore, has the potential to create even larger movements of solidarity for human indigenous rights and social justice. As an undergraduate and graduate student during the early and late 1990s,

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I recall that the Internet and even e-mail as a major tool for communication, information gathering, and dissemination of news was still in its beginning stages. Yet, one movement over multiple years made me more conscious about how new media could perhaps be a way to serve activist and social justice movements in unprecedented ways. This indigenous resistance movement was the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, whose leader Subcomandante Marcos captured global attention, in large part due to the strategic ways in which information was disseminated about this revolution.1 After living in Mexico City and traveling to Chiapas, Mexico, in 1996, I saw firsthand how the rebellion had transformed places like San Cristóbal de las Casas. Throughout my travels in the region there were armed military checkpoints, at which I had been advised to never reveal my US passport, but instead show my Mexican student visa. My personal experience during this time in Chiapas is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it nevertheless shapes the way in which I have come to understand the significance of new media as a vital resource for truthtelling and countering dominant narratives of social activist movements. As Kyra Landzelius describes in “Paths of Indigenous Cyber-Activism,” the Zapatista Rebellion used the “Net to boldly ‘take on’ the Establishment, they access a (presumed democratic) global civil society in order to put corrupt regimes and power asymmetries on trial.”2 She argues that these types of sovereignty campaigns prove that the Internet is an important ally to indigenous peoples for organizing, lobbying, publicizing, and ultimately liberation and insurrection. In the case of the Zapatistas the Internet allowed members to gain support for their resistance and demands; which had previously been silenced by the status quo. In addition, since the Zapatistas lived in remote areas with little to no access to the technology needed to reach those outside of their geographic locations, the news media and especially the Internet were critically significant to have their voices heard. According to Marisa Belausteguigoitia in “The Zapatista Rebellion and the Use of Technology: Indian Women Online?” the Internet “shaped and constructed the image and discourse of the Zapatistas and especially the indigenous women.”3 In particular, Comandanta Esther was one of EZLN’s most visible female voices of the movement. For example, she appeared before the Mexican Congress of the Union on March 28, 2001, declaring in the form of a testimonio that in part states:

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The ones who represent the civil part of the EZLN are here, the political and organizational leadership of a legitimate, honest and consistent movement are here, which is, in addition, a movement which is legal, due to the Law for Dialogue, Conciliation and a Dignified Peace in Chiapas. We are thus demonstrating that we are not interested in provoking resentments or suspicions in anyone. And so it is I, an indigenous woman. No one will have any reason to feel attacked, humiliated or degraded by my occupying this tribune and speaking today. Those who are not here now already knew that they would refuse to listen to what an indigenous woman was coming to say to them, and they would refuse to speak because it would be I who was listening to them. My name is Esther, but that is not important now. I am a zapatista, but that is not important at this moment either. This tribune is a symbol. That is why it caused so much controversy. That is why we wanted to speak in it, and that is why some did not want us to be here. And it is also a symbol that it is I, a poor, indigenous and zapatista woman, who would be having the first word, and that the main message of our word as zapatistas would be mine. Deputies, Ladies and Gentlemen. Senators. I would like to explain to you the situation of the indigenous woman who are living in our communities, considering that respect for women is supposedly guaranteed in the Constitution. The situation is very hard. For many years we have suffered pain, forgetting, contempt, marginalization and oppression. We suffer from forgetting because no one remembers us. They send us to live in the corners of the mountains of the country, so that no one will come any more to visit us or to see how we are living. Meanwhile, we do not have drinkable water, electricity, schools, dignified housing, roads, clinics—let alone hospitals—while many of our sisters, women, children and old ones die from curable illnesses, malnutrition and childbirth, because there are no clinics or hospitals where they can be treated. Only in the city, where the rich live, do they indeed have hospitals with good care, and they have all the services. For us, even in the city, we do not receive any benefits, because we do not have any money. There is no way to come back, if there were we would not have come to the city. We return to the road, dead already. Primarily the women, it is they who feel the pain of childbirth. They see their children die in their arms from malnutrition, for lack of care. They also see their children without shoes,

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without clothing, because they do not have enough money to buy them, because it is they who care for the homes, they see that they do not have enough for food. They also carry water for two or three hours, walking, with pitchers, carrying their children, and they do everything that is to be done in the kitchen. From the time we are very young, we begin doing simple things. . . . The mestizos and the wealthy mock us indigenous women because of our way of dressing, of speaking, our language, our way of praying and of curing, and for our color, which is the color of the earth we work. Always in the land, because we live there. Nor do they allow us to participate in any other work. They say we are filthy, because, since we are indigenous, we do not bathe. We, the indigenous women, do not have the same opportunities as the men, who have all the right to decide everything. Only they have the right to the land, and women do not have rights since we do not work the land and since we are not human beings, we suffer inequality. The bad governments taught us this entire situation.4 This address and other statements made by multiple leaders of the movement were subsequently translated and reproduced on the EZLN website and sent out globally in electronic formats such as e-mail, formal news broadcasts, radio talk shows, and newspapers. I argue that it was the strategic use of the Internet, which could reach millions globally, and the Zapatistas’ collectivist struggle that appealed to members of the international community who sympathized and provided support for the rebellion. The representation of indigenous peoples as incapable of self-determination, illiterate, and weak was countered by collective resistance narratives that described nonviolent struggles against systematic oppression against indigenous peoples in Mexico. These representations made available through new media were being broadcast widely. And these sovereign stories took on new meaning in the age of the Internet. I argue that the cyberactivism occurring at this historical moment was perhaps as significant as other forms of resistance. In addition, the use of imagery and symbols to represent Mexican indigenous peoples, such as the widely recognized masked Zapatista, worked to not only strategically conceal the identities of the rebels but also to represent them as a collective in solidarity with other indigenous peoples, who are typically homogenized in mainstream misrepresentations. Although the mask can be

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interpreted in multiple ways, Belausteguigoitia argues that this “‘masked’ citizenship exposed a common view in Mexican society, that all indigenous peoples are the same based on racist thinking” (20). Thus, similar to the postscripts used by Marcos in letters, this representation of the masks was “deployed for a similar purpose: to underlie what lies below, below the masks, below the letter or below the discourse of modernity in which everybody is supposed to be treated equally by the state” (20). For women, this symbol was even more profound, because they became equals and part of the collective movement when they wore the masks. In fact, the Zapatista Rebellion highlighted the voices of women, and the Revolutionary Women’s Law was the final stipulation that was integrated into the Zapatista Declaration of War of 1994.5 In part this declaration called for the equality of all indigenous peoples, especially women who were being systematically oppressed through silence within their own communities and by the Mexican government. In regard to the use of the Internet as a strategy for indigenous revolutionary movements, it should also be noted that contrary to popular belief or myth, Subcomandante Marcos was not sitting behind a desk in a remote village typing these speeches on a computer and then uploading them to the Internet. The communities he and others represented were extremely poor and located in remote areas that were entirely cut off from communications either through the computer or telephone. Therefore, much of what was read by audiences outside these villages were a result of handwritten communications that were then given strategically to the mass media for distribution and eventually uploaded to the Internet. For example, in “The Mirror of Dignity: Zapatista Communications and Indigenous Resistance” Brock Pitawanakwat argues that Subcomandante Marcos was well aware of the internal workings of the mass media and allowed some access to the Zapatista movement while simultaneously banning others, such as the country’s leading television networks. That is, some journalists were allowed freedom of movement within the rebel zone as well as ready access to interview the EZLN leadership while others who were “deemed unfair” were prohibited from gaining access.6 I call attention specifically to this historical moment because, although the Internet and the use of social media has changed substantially since the late 1990s, at this time the strategic use of new technologies captured global attention about the oppression of indigenous people in Chiapas, Mexico. The

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Internet provided a collective voice, a testimonio of the Zapatistas. This international attention developed rapidly as a means of disseminating information and sovereign stories about indigenous issues, especially the plight of indigenous women. In fact, these communications put a spotlight on a collective struggle that resulted in the international community providing digital spaces (i.e. websites) that were dedicated to addressing the marginalization of the Zapatistas. According to Belausteguigoitia, soon after the uprising, several sites were dedicated to disseminating information about indigenous women, such as Zap Women and Creatividad Feminista (22). Zap Women was designed by graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin and provided weblinks to social justice organizations, essays, art, and the demands of the Zapatista women. This site also provided the first digitized access to the voices of female comandantes and access to publications of women’s testimonies (22). Belausteguigoitia also notes that it was never updated after 1999, which speaks to the decline in “cyber attention” of the movement and perhaps the sustainability of the Internet as a primary source of disseminating information and revolution via new media. She states that a second website, Creatividad Feminista (translated into Spanish from English), was dedicated to combating the oppression of all women and included solidarity campaigns from celebrity activists-writers such as Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, and Susan Sarandon, who at the time supported the Zapatista cause (23). I agree with Belausteguigoitia and her assessment that such sites, where public figures speak on behalf of an oppressed group, do little to address local struggles and resolve the problems that the Zapatista women were and are still enduring (23). And it should be noted that twenty years later there is still much to be done in the struggle for social justice by and for indigenous peoples in Chiapas.7 I began this book by arguing that the multiple autobiographical discourses of indigenous women examined are intricately tied to place, space, and shared knowledges. The sovereign blood memories these women recount in their testimonios, self-written narratives, as-told-to works, and memoirs are rooted in a land-based language that centers indigenous women’s voices and bodies at the forefront of decolonial struggles for self-determination and social justice. Thus, this chapter extends this argument to rethink the ways in which the Internet and social media in the twentieth-first century have been used as a medium to indigenize the Internet and work toward

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decolonization through traditional indigenous storytelling practices. Can the Internet provide a space for revolution, healing, and ultimately survivance where the collective voices of indigenous women participate in cyberactivism through websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.? In “From Cyberspace to Offline Communities,” Kristy A. Belton discusses the indigenous use of globalizing spaces as a means of preserving indigenous culture, building alliances, and resisting and modifying misrepresentation. She notes that although globalization tends to threaten indigenous ways of life and knowledges, it also allows for indigenous populations to achieve selfdetermination and other goals.8 She argues “that indigenous peoples are no longer simply reacting to external events and processes that occur at them, but are placing themselves in a position whereby others have to contend with them” (Belton’s emphasis, 194): The idea that the world is changing, becoming more interconnected and allowing events and actors from afar to influence the happenings and actions of others in other lands is not new to the twentieth or the twenty-first century. As any student of colonial history knows, change from afar—in the form of new technologies and ideas and novel ways of living and dying—has been thrust upon indigenous peoples without their consent since well before the term globalization was introduced. What makes this current wave of change and interconnectedness more palpable, however, is not only the strength and speed by which it evolves but the ability of indigenous peoples to rise along with it and harness its energy to help them achieve goals pertaining to indigenous rights and recognition. (Belton’s emphasis, 194) I agree with Belton’s assessment, which celebrates the potential for greater interconnectedness and agency of indigenous voices via the Internet, but navigating the interstices of cyberspace can also be complex and daunting. For example, indigenous peoples’ identities and cultural practices are often times misappropriated by unknown sources. Although there are advantages to utilizing cyberspace to rewrite and reright indigenous histories and address long-held settler-colonialist misrepresentations, many communities still do not have access to such technologies. Belton argues that the advantages outweigh such disadvantages as nonindigenous people posing as

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indigenous people and misrepresenting them on websites, indigenous youths seeking information via the web rather than from their elders, and the manipulation and theft of indigenous cultural productions shared on the Internet (198). This is, after all a new age in which anonymity, especially as it relates to representation of others, is rampant. Belton does address this issue but argues that “the Internet and other forms of ICT [information and communications technology] offer indigenous peoples spaces from which to correct misrepresentations rapidly, raise awareness about human rights issues, engage in interpersonal communication, and tell their stories,” often in their own native languages (198). She cites several websites created and maintained by indigenous populations as spaces primarily for information sharing and solidarity building (199). Moreover, she notes that the Internet is useful because of its “compatibility with indigenous communication styles,” which are communal and often involve visual imagery (199–200). In addition, she argues that cyberspace is useful because it is less regulated by state governments than other venues (197). And she asserts that it gives indigenous peoples the ability to exercise their voices and acquire power in the globalized world. Through participation in these spaces, indigenous peoples have become active agents in their own representation and “influence international institutions, organize and attend international conferences, and help create the declarations and policies that concern them” (207). Thus, indigenous peoples may appropriate global tools and ideas, both online and offline, as a means of countering the repressive forces of globalization. I argue that cyberspace and new social media are ways in which indigenous organizations, tribal communities, indigenous social justice movements, and individual bloggers have “indigenized the Internet,” thus creating and participating in a communal space of testimonio that resonates with the storytelling practices of indigenous peoples. As Silko reminds us through a Laguna Pueblo-centered understanding of storytelling, the stories told from one generation to the next adapt and speak to the changes that are happening in the world around the Laguna Pueblo. Silko states that in Pueblo expression, stories are like a “spider’s web—with many little threads radiating from the center, crisscrossing one another.” I liken this concept of storytelling to websites and hyperlinks that can be similarly seen as a web in which a new story emerges from a different perspective each time someone tells the story and every time a new listener entrusts themselves to make

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meaning of the “structure” that “emerges” (Yellow Woman, 48–49). The diversity of indigenous voices and multiple types of websites become useful for disseminating information to a worldwide audience and provide the opportunity for alliances, solidarity movements, and retelling sovereign stories and blood memories. Some examples of these websites and social media sites are: Indian Country Today, Indigenous Environmental Network, National Indian Education, National Museum of American Indians, National Congress of American Indians, Indian Law Resource Center, Native Times, Our Language, Native Languages, Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, Cultural Survival, Make No Bones About It, Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources, Native American First Nations Literature, International Indian Treaty Council, Native Writer’s Circle of the Americas, Native Feminisms, Historical Trauma, as well as numerous tribally specific sites. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of Internet or social media sites dedicated to the dissemination of news and cultural resources related to indigenous peoples, and it does not adequately take into account the numerous Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and global websites—of nations, tribes, cultural centers, museums, individual news bloggers, scholars, freelance writers, artists, and academics—that currently exist.9 And given the expansive number of web pages that appear in a simple search online it might be impossible to accurately count the number of individual legitimate sites dedicated to indigenous peoples. As I have conducted research on numerous subjects relating to indigenous issues over the years, I have found that specific websites that are dedicated to social justice, selfdetermination, and sovereignty are actually reeducating their public audience while providing spaces for solidarity, coalition building, and healing. For example, there are multiple sites dedicated solely to articulating the ways in which indigenous peoples in various regions are working collaboratively toward language revitalization efforts in order to counter cultural genocide. Other sites are dedicated to indigenous-centered and tribally specific education and history telling as they participate in efforts to tell their own stories, which counter previous misrepresentations of their communities. There are still other sites and social media outlets dedicated to issues for sovereignty, environmental justice, water rights, and reclamation of land. I am especially interested in sites that are multilayered, communal, and echo the autobiographical discourses I outlined in the first chapter.

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Similar to the ways in which the Zapatistas utilized the Internet for the purposes of cyberactivism, I see contemporary movements, such as Idle No More and #NoDAPL, emerging as communal voices of struggle that speak to the legacies of injustice such as genocide committed against indigenous peoples globally. Gyasi Ross writes that the Idle No More Movement is not a new movement. Instead, it is the latest incarnation of the sustained Indigenous Resistance to the rape, pillage and exploitation of this continent and its women that has existed since 1492. It is not the Occupy Movement, although there are some similarities. It is not only about Canada and it is not only about Native people. Finally, and probably most importantly, it (and we) are not going away anytime soon. So get used to it (and us).10 Ross continues, saying that this movement is about protecting the earth, the mothers of our nations, the women, and she reiterates that this type of resistance is not new. It is also significant that the movement is grassroots and localized, and its founders—Nina Wilson, Sheelah Mclean, Sylvia McAdam, and Jessica Gordon—were responding to Canada’s Bill C-45, which overhauled the Navigable Waters Protection Act and removed protections for many waters that go through First Nations. Those who originally mobilized to form Idle No More argued that the struggle for clean water resources was not just for indigenous children and future generations but all children, including non-Natives. The fact that we are still arguing that environmental desecration of vital water resources has no borders or boundaries is beyond explanation since it is well known that dumping toxins into rivers and lakes will affect non-Native populations as well.11 What makes this movement particularly interesting for my discussion of blood memories and sovereign stories of women is that Idle No More shaped itself as an indigenouswoman-centered movement that recognized the historical and ongoing violence against indigenous women by nation-states. On their current web page one of their calls to action reads as follows: Actively resist violence against women and hold a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and involve Indigenous women in the design, decision-making, process and

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implementation of this inquiry, as a step toward initiating a comprehensive and coordinated national action plan.12 Although founded in Canada, this movement moves beyond geopolitical and digital borders. Similar to movements such as the Occupy Movement, Idle No More reaches a much wider audience as a result of social media and the Internet. Local demonstrations and protests were posted on Facebook and Twitter and picked up by larger national media outlets. According to the women who founded Idle No More, activists and social media users rapidly embraced the call to action and what followed were protests, rallies, and teach-ins: Although Bill C-45 became law in mid-December 2012, the movement only intensified, drawing international attention after Theresa Spence, the chief of Attawapiskat First Nation, started a six-week hunger strike. McAdam and the other Idle No More founders were not the first to speak out about the issues affecting First Nations, of course, but this was something different. What had begun as a protest against government legislation quickly transformed into a national movement that used the Internet to rally supporters of all stripes behind a call to reframe Canada’s relationship with Aboriginal Peoples.13 According to Karissa Donkin, the increasing number of Facebook posts and tweets dedicated to the Idle No More movement was documented by such applications as Makook, and there was a dramatic spike in activity after Tanya Kappo created a Facebook page for the movement and included the hashtag #idlenomore. And according to Joanne St. Lewis, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, “Idle No More has been the most focused use of social media in aboriginal activism. And while youth may not have started Idle No More, they’re the people that have ‘captured’ the movement.”14 It should also be noted that cyberactivism has its limitations, because many First Nations and indigenous communities live in rural areas or have no access to the Internet. Although I argue that that the Internet and social media have the ability to indigenize cyberspace for the purposes of activism and social justice, I also caution against an uncritical celebratory tone of this medium. There are many ways in which indigenous peoples have continued their survivance without

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the help of new media, but I argue that the power of stories—as described throughout this book—parallels the ways in which new technologies allow readers, viewers, and listeners to hear stories and watch testimonies of indigenous knowledge keepers who are speaking for their communities directly. And the nonlinear form of the Internet and social media that allows anyone to post narratives, poetry, and articles as well as photographs, videos, and hyperlinks that open up even more links and websites of shared information about current and pressing issues facing indigenous peoples—is more powerful than any one book, newspaper article, or protest that only reaches a small audience. Instead, the Internet and social media give these previous types of autobiographical discourses a new space that allows for a broader definition and understanding of “communal storytelling” and the oral tradition. Livestreaming protests and rallies, videos, digitized archives, recordings, and interviews uploaded to the Internet and social media can now be instantaneously shared with thousands and in some cases millions of other people within a matter of minutes. This provides the potential for not only innovating ways of coalition building, but also sustaining radical revolutionary grassroots movements such as Idle No More, which began locally but became internationalized within days. The most recent example of how the Internet was indigenized is the #NoDAPL movement, which was not covered in mainstream media until the live-streaming social media reports from indigenous water protectors went viral.15 The #NoDAPL movement emerged at the Missouri River at Cannon Ball in the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), which would carry half a million barrels of heavy crude oil a day across four states. Camp Oceti Sakowin, Red Warrior Camp, and Sacred Stone Camp—along with multiple other indigenous groups standing in solidarity to struggle against DAPL— brought together the largest mass gathering of Native Americans and allies in more than a century. Ironically, the struggle of “water protectors” against this pipeline is rooted in historical colonizing violence and war that has continued since the encroachment of Anglo settlers and subsequent forced deterritorialization of indigenous peoples from their homelands. The historical and current “acquisition,”—rather, stealing—of land by colonists and subsequent “protests” against land desecration, genocide, and intergenerational trauma are often erased from mainstream media. But the #NoDAPL

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movement, as it was daily livestreamed on social media, provided a medium for indigenous people to tell their historical and contemporary sovereign stories to a larger audience. It should be noted that the movement to halt the pipeline began in part when the project was redirected from Bismarck, ND, where 90 of the population is white and objected to the risks the pipeline would pose to their drinking water. Bismarck residents were accommodated, which resulted in the pipeline route shifting to treaty lands. In effect, by indigenizing social media, indigenous people and their allies were victorious for a short time in halting the pipeline from further construction on their homeland. Although this victory was short-lived after the transition to a new administration, the larger movement for indigenous civil rights, self-determination, and other struggles to combat climate change, institutional violence, and systematic discrimination against indigenous people continues in multiple ways via social media. In addition to these movements and cyberactivist sites, there are also other forms of autobiographical discourse in digital format such as blogs that reflect women’s sovereign voices and blood memories. Here, I briefly review several scholar-blogger-activist sites that continue to indigenize the Internet through communo-blographies. The first is Margo Tamez’s blog, Lipan Apache Women Defense, which discusses the rights of indigenous peoples and more specifically informs readers of the “Nde’ Truth Commission of Genocidal Violence.” Formed in 2007, LAWD addresses “centuries and recent decades of landbased struggles, recognition, territories, self-determination, and indigenous peoples’ world views.” This educational forum gives a collective voice to the people who were forcibly dispossessed of their homelands on the TexasMexican border when a wall was constructed by the US government in 2007. Tamez, a human rights advocate and scholar, uses multiple Internet sites to publish past and active lawsuits against the Department of Homeland Security. According to Tamez, these documents and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) serve as a foundation for a truth commission that calls for federal recognition of Lipan Apache and social justice. Similar to the memoirs and life stories by Silko and Cuero, Tamez’s blogs and Internet sites are an alternative space where the human rights violations, land dispossession, and genocide against Lipan Apache people can be documented and readers can actively participate as supporters in the collective struggle for decolonization. Thus, Tamez indigenizes the

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Internet with communo-blography and Internet archives that advocate for social justice, sovereignty, and recognition.16 Similarly, Deborah Miranda’s blog “when turtles fly,” renamed “badndns” after her most recent book publication, seeks to educate her audience about the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation and provide a space for her to publish poetry. One of the blog’s primary goals is to rewrite the history of indigenous peoples in California by countering official histories that romanticize and erase the cultural and physical genocide against California Indians. For example, as part of the required history curriculum in California, all fourth graders are required to complete a mission project, but as Miranda states, “The Mission Unit is a powerfully authoritative indoctrination in Mission Mythology against which fourth graders have little if any resistance, and intense pressure is put upon students (and their parents) to create a ‘Mission Project’ that glorifies the era and glosses over both Spanish and Mexican exploitation of Indians, as well as American enslavement of those same Indians during American rule.” In response to this “project,” Miranda uses her blog as a site that rerights history from the perspective of California Indians. Her blog is multigenre and includes history lessons, poetry, photographs, ethnographies, and archival material. Miranda’s blog was essentially the impetus for her multigenre book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, where she brings together ethnographic tape recordings, family stories, mission reports from priests, archival records, and photographs as a way in which to tell her sovereign stories.17 Both Tamez and Miranda indigenize the Internet with their communoblographies that advocate for social justice, sovereignty, and tribal recognition. They both also have a major presence on Facebook, which has become a new way to disseminate powerful stories that seek to rewrite indigenous communities back into history. It is their weekly and sometimes daily posts/reposts that not only inform their follower-friends but advocate for social justice and call their audience into action. With the phenomena of Facebook and other social media sites, I argue that individual posts—or stories of survivance, sovereignty, and healing—are powerful narratives that resonate with traditional storytelling practices, because there is a realtime dialogue with writer-scholar-activists who raise the consciousness of their followers and advocate for their people through indigenous-centered shared knowledges.

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There is still much to be learned as one peruses the Internet for information about indigenous peoples. With rapidly changing technology one can only imagine what new ways we will be communicating, storytelling, and truthtelling in the near future. I included this chapter on indigenizing the Internet because, as a teacher-scholar, I argue that these types of digital formats are integral to Native American studies and, more importantly, asserting sovereign voices and stories of indigenous people, especially for our youth. If traditional indigenous sovereignty and nationhood are rooted in interrelatedness and responsibility that counters nation-states who assert control over indigenous homelands, then the blood memories that are spoken, written, and disseminated across digital borders and boundaries can empower us to think differently about the ways in which indigenous peoples can utilize the Internet and social media as a decolonizing tool to impact their communities through collective efforts and shared resistances to colonialism, racism, and genocide.

CHAPTER 6

Not For Innocent Ears Decolonial Pedagogies and Indigenous-Centered Storytelling Practices in the Classroom

As a teacher first and foremost, I have always prioritized students and community service. For this reason, I have chosen to end my book with a chapter on teaching Native American women’s autobiographical discourses. This chapter provides readers with practical ways in which to teach the narratives previously discussed in Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories. My enthusiasm for teaching stretches from the Ivy League to juvenile detention, institutional settings that have given me the opportunity to develop pedagogies for students from diverse backgrounds. And this chapter serves not only as a reflection on pedagogy, but also a praxis-oriented discussion on teaching Native American literature and culture. My teaching philosophy is informed by the indigenous-centered decolonial methodologies as defined by Mihesuah, who calls for indigenizing the academy by challenging the status quo and debating the controversial issues that adversely affect the lives and representations of Native Americans. I argue that an indigenous-centered pedagogy and multidisciplinary approach gives students the opportunity to critically examine those instances of cultural tourism and popular media stereotypes that continue to perpetuate gross misconceptions about American Indian identity and culture. In addition, I highlight the ongoing challenges that instructors face when teaching students to “unlearn” Eurocentric histories and dominant national narratives. I have taught Native American studies courses to a wide range of

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students from multiple backgrounds and this chapter is based on the various experiences I have had in the classroom. Interdisciplinary Approaches: English, History, American Studies

As a scholar of comparative ethnic studies one of the prevalent issues I face when teaching interdisciplinary courses is that many students are unwilling to move beyond their assumptions about specific disciplines. Thus, it is critical for me to challenge students’ assumptions about traditional disciplines, such as history and English, and introduce methodologies to critically examine rigid disciplinary boundaries. I do this in part by asking students to consider the complexities of indigenous identity through a Native-centered perspective and consider the importance of self-representation as we examine historical and contemporary representations of Indianness. In addition, I ask them to complicate and challenge generic and confining disciplinary boundaries by reading primary works within their appropriate historical and cultural contexts. I ask several primary questions throughout the semester: What does it mean to tell a life story? Whose stories and histories are valued and legitimized and whose are forgotten within traditional national narratives? And how can we problematize the binary constructed between the oral and written traditions by complicating our notions of literacy? In my experience, one of the most useful exercises is a freewrite that I require during the first week of class. I ask students to define the canon of American literature and then extend their responses to include reflections on how they have come to understand American identity and culture and the dominant national American narrative. They are then asked to define Indianness—that is, the ways in which they have come to understand and define Native American identity and culture. These core questions form the basis of my class and one of my primary objectives is to provide students historical, theoretical, and practical lenses through which they can critically examine their worldviews and interactions with both real and imagined (likely stereotyped) perceptions of and about indigenous peoples. This exercise is extremely useful and is followed up at the end of the semester with a reflection essay that asks students to critically examine their intellectual growth and their previous assumptions about Native American identity and culture. The students’ comments and dialogue that are generated from this initial

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freewrite can be characterized in two ways. First, the majority of students typically respond with a dominant rhetoric that echoes the western-movement narrative and eastern-centered historical origins. Many discuss their perceptions of American identity by referring to the “American dream” and using such words as liberty and freedom. Next, some students critique this dominant narrative by referring to the concept of “American exceptionalism” and openly critique long-held assumptions and myths about American identity and cultural values. These preliminary writing prompts lead to more complex questions about ideology and preconceived notions about the American national imaginary. It is my intention with this exercise to frame the major themes and concepts for the course, especially teaching students to become critical thinkers as they respond to each other’s notions of Americanness. I then facilitate these lively discussions by interjecting my own responses to students’ comments, which usually take the form of questions and remarks about the ways in which dominant, official histories are legitimized by erasing historically underrepresented voices and stories. Since many students enter my courses with assumptions about oral stories or oral histories as unreliable sources, I often take this as a point of departure to further critique Western-centered notions of history telling. I underscore the argument in which historians themselves admit that historical research begins with assumptions. In addition, this freewrite exercise serves as a foundation for building a community in the classroom and maintaining a student-centered pedagogy. Instead of students being passive recipients of lectures, I provide a space where they have an increased awareness and responsibility for their critical comments and dialogue with one another. Although I facilitate the discussions and provide guidance, students are encouraged to respectfully respond to their peers and ask questions. As noted on one of my syllabi: It is my hope that as a collective group we can grapple and work through the material to develop an intellectual community that is able to skillfully and respectfully debate pressing issues. This class will require that you regularly participate in class discussions. And although some discussions might evoke strong emotions and debate about particular subjects, we must remember to respect everyone’s opinions and comments throughout the course.

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Course Content: Introductory Courses in Native American Studies

In my experience of teaching Native American studies courses, it is no surprise that the majority of students come to class with no background in the course content and unfortunately have only learned about Native American identity and experience through distorted stereotypes that continue to dominate the national collective consciousness. Therefore, I consistently grapple with the best methodological approaches and choice of texts that will give students, at the very least, an introduction to some of the major events and stories that have shaped Native American history and culture. This is further complicated when I am assigned to teach a general survey course that makes it difficult to teach Native American studies from a tribally specific lens. In such cases, I am challenged to choose a small sample of representative works, which are intended to contribute to students’ knowledge about Native American literature in one semester. For this reason, my syllabus always includes secondary sources that are not only accessible but also specifically address these issues in the classroom.1 One of my main learning objectives for introductory courses is to provide students with the ability to enhance their knowledge of Native American literature, history, and culture. And I want to problematize their understanding and experience of Indianness—their thinking, speaking, and actions in relation to Native American communities. I accomplish this in part by providing students with N. Scott Momaday’s essay “The Man Made of Words” and Leslie Silko’s collection of essays Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit. Both writers provide a foundation for students and introduce concepts such as storytelling and the oral tradition from a Laguna Pueblo and Kiowa-centered perspective. Throughout the semester, these concepts are applied to other autobiographical discourses. In anticipation of students who are entering my courses from multiple disciplinary fields, I provide various primary and secondary sources based on the course level and topic for the class. For example, in my courses on Native American women’s autobiography I teach a combination of well-recognized writers such as Hopkins, Zitkala-Sa, Hogan, and Silko alongside lesser-known authors such as Cuero, Modesto, and Pretty-Shield.2 In all courses, I emphasize the sociohistorical context and do not simply assign readings for their supposed aesthetic value or inclusion in the American literary canon. For

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example, when assigning Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories, I also include supplemental readings that discuss the systematic genocide committed against indigenous people through the boarding schools. The following works have proved useful for an overview of this era: Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families by Brenda Child (1998); Education for Extinction by David Wallace Adams (1995); and Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith (2005). Smith’s work not only provides students with the historical context of the boarding schools but engages in discussion about the continuing legacies of these institutions in the twenty-first century and their impact on contemporary indigenous communities. She begins her discussion by reviewing the state-sanctioned boarding schools from the 1880s to the 1980s and makes connections between different forms of violence perpetrated by the state and society against Native American women. She also includes a discussion of the Boarding School Healing Project, whose main goal is to provide healing resources for survivors of boarding schools. It is integral for students to realize that Native American history is not simply a story of victimization but rather a story about survival, resistance, transformation, and healing. American Indian Identity: Countering Popular Stereotypes

In response to questions of identity, one topic that is frequently raised in my courses is the pervasiveness and perpetuation of Native American stereotypes, especially in popular culture. I argue that it is integral to confront these issues early in the semester in order to provide students with the necessary tools to critically examine their own misconceptions and biases about Indianness. Mihesuah states that distorted images of Native Americans can be found in every medium—TV shows, textbooks, movies, cartoons, commercials, logos, and insignia.3 The dominant imagery and understanding of Native Americans, especially the idea of the vanishing Native with its roots in the nineteenth century, continues to challenge those scholars who teach American Indian literature courses. My experience in the classroom with such misconceptions is varied and differs depending on the institution and student population. Although some students self-identify as indigenous, many are non-Native. Their initial responses to how they identify “Indianness” usually echo stereotyped internalized assumptions. Since these

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misrepresentations usually surface in the first two weeks of class, I always provide a space where students can openly discuss these misconceptions. I facilitate the dialogue and periodically interject when necessary in order to make clear that stereotypes of indigenous people are not only problematic but also highly offensive. I then use this discussion as a point of departure to talk about critical thinking in order to make students more aware of their own sociopolitical and subject positions that might cause a disconnect between themselves and Native American studies. I then underscore one of my primary objectives for the course: I ask students to critically examine those instances of cultural tourism and popular media stereotypes that continue to perpetuate gross misconceptions about Native American identity by examining Native American history and literature from an indigenouscentered perspective. And throughout the course I explicitly reiterate the following student-centered approach: It is expected that as a class we will often disagree and rarely come to a consensus about the material. This should be seen as positive, rather than negative. Your participation is key to creating a more dynamic class, one that allows us to learn from each other. I expect everyone to be respectful of their fellow peers and come to class with open minds that will allow for constructive debate and discussions about the material presented in class, especially during student presentations. In addition, students may not be aware that even their seemingly positive comments that romanticize Indians can be offensive. I attribute some of this to New Ageism as well as the depictions of indigenous people in Hollywood blockbuster films (Dances With Wolves, Pocahontas, Avatar, the Twilight saga, the Lone Ranger, and the Revenant, among others) that continue to perpetuate the tropes of indigenous peoples in redface as stereotypical Indian princesses, noble savages, and shapeshifters. The perpetuation of this imagery and students’ exoticized descriptions of indigenous peoples occurs more often in my Native American environmentalism courses, where students do not adequately complicate the ways in which the writers are discussing sacred sites, landscape, spirituality, religious rights, and environmental racism. Thus, in anticipation of such responses my syllabus for this particular course states:

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The purpose of this theme-based course will be to acquaint students with social, political, economic, and ethical aspects of current Native American environmental issues. And contrary to stereotype, Native Americans do not have a natural affinity with environmentalism, but rather they have lands with a long history of being the dumping ground for toxic chemicals, nuclear waste, and uranium tailings. Therefore, through the fields of literature, science, sociology, and history, we will think critically about the ties of culture to place and the nature of cultural relationships to specific animals and environment, health concerns, cultural genocide, and sovereignty. One book I consider essential for any introductory courses in Native American studies is Mihesuah’s American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities, where she asserts that there is “no other ethnic group in the United States [that] has endured greater and more varied distortions of its cultural identity.” Her book is extremely accessible for all levels and provides readers with narratives to counter some of the most egregious stereotypes about American Indians. For my advanced courses, I require Mihesuah’s books Natives and Academics and Indigenous American Women.4 In addition, I utilize the works of Paula Gunn Allen and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn to explore further and frame the major issues surrounding Native American studies as a discipline.5 Another text that has been useful for discussions about indigenous identity is Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird’s edited anthology, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, which not only introduces students to creative writers from multiple tribes, but also discusses the contentious issue of blood quantum and questions of authenticity. As we read these works, I underscore the importance of complicating simplistic definitions of Native American identity and emphasize that each primary text should be read from tribally specific histories and perspectives. Therefore, I assign secondary sources from CookLynn, Mihesuah, and Allen, who all complicate Eurocentric notions of indigenous identity. I then provide further background material to discuss the differences between government-imposed definitions that determine which groups are federally recognized. This is especially relevant when teaching in regions where local tribes continue to struggle for federal recognition.

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Documentaries and Storytelling: Testimonies of Survival and Healing

In addition to written works, I utilize documentaries to supplement the primary texts. These visual representations provide students with another method to critically examine Native American literature and culture. In particular A Century of Genocide in the Americas: The Residential School Experience, directed by Rosemary Gibbons and Dax Thomas, and In the White Man’s Image, produced by Christine Lesiak, provide students with the ability to compare and critique the ways in which history is told and by whom.6 Both of these works give an overview of the Indian boarding schools era, but they relate the information through extremely different lenses. Each documentary provides students with the ability to critically examine and question the ways in which Native American history is represented—or, in some cases, misrepresented—as well as underscoring the significance of the oral tradition and testimonio. In fact, this comparative approach to reading, screening, and listening to multiple stories from various points of view and through different genres gives students the tools to reexamine their own positionalities and interrogate long-held assumptions about American history and historiography. By including interdisciplinary materials, I provide students with a tangible way to think about the ways in which narratives are constructed and rethink the notion of absolute truths. More importantly, this pedagogical approach echoes the defining characteristics of communal storytelling as defined by Silko, who states, “The ancient Pueblo people sought a communal truth, not an absolute truth. For them this truth lived somewhere within the web of differing versions” (32). That is, “there are no pure truths, but rather only stories, many stories” (33). More importantly, documentaries that include testimonies are inherently significant to better understand the importance of storytelling as a form of survivance and healing. For example, when teaching the history of the boarding schools, I emphasize that colonialist projects of cultural and physical genocide—that is, the very idea of “killing the Indian and saving the man” as instituted by Richard Henry Pratt—are not simply ideologies of the past but legacies that persist today and are manifested in different forms of contemporary institutionalized racism and discrimination against indigenous people. In her discussion of boarding schools and the case for reparations, Smith argues that

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today, the effects of boarding school abuses continue to play out throughout indigenous communities, largely because these abuses have not been acknowledged or addressed by the larger society. As a result, silence continues within Native communities preventing Native peoples from seeking support and healing as a result of the intergenerational trauma.7 For example, the documentary Our Spirits Don’t Speak English, produced by Rich-Heape Films, a Native-owned film company, is a valuable tool that provides a space for survivors to give testimony about their experiences and relates an indigenous-centered perspective about these institutions. In the classroom, the multiple testimonies included in Our Spirits are even more profound than the written works, because students have the opportunity to listen to the blood memories and sovereign stories of survivors, storytellers, poets, and community activists. In my experience, the oral and visual representations of history and lived experience are as important as the written works and contribute to an indigenous-centered pedagogy where the oralvisual is privileged over the written. The use of testimonies is especially pertinent to underscore the oral tradition as a legitimate way in which to record history. For example, in their creative works and essays, writers such as Wendy Rose, Silko, Bird, and Harjo discuss the importance of memory as it relates to language and history telling within their own communities, whether this is through song, ritual, prayer, storytelling, or writing. In the introduction to Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, Elizabeth Woody—who is of Yakima, Warm Springs, Wasco, and Navajo descent—discusses her own struggles with the loss of language. She states that it was “US government policy, until just a few years ago, to eradicate all Indian languages. . . . I am a part of the generation in which this language massacre reached its final stage: I learned only English.” But she also recognizes that those “older languages are active in my brain” (14). And now she is of the generation in which the possibility of regaining those languages has occurred. “It is through my own story and the stories of my family and my circle of people that I become whole. . . . The skill of telling and listening was ‘handed down’ a legacy from a very ancient art form of imparting and storing knowledge and wisdom. It requires patience to listen to hours of testimony” (13–14). She challenges Western notions of literacy and interpretation as she articulates her understanding of blood memories and

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specialized knowledge as that which also requires one to listen to hours of testimony. Thus, as teachers of Native American history and literature, it is crucial that students not only read works by contemporary writers but also listen to sovereign stories through film, documentaries, and even taped recordings. Teaching and Practicing Storytelling in the Classroom

In all my courses, I emphasize the importance of not only listening to others but also responding respectfully to peers as we collectively grapple with material that at times may become emotionally and politically charged. For this reason, I insist that each class counter traditional structures of a university-classroom environment where chairs are usually lined up in rows. Instead students are asked to create a talking circle where they can converse with one another through an indigenous-centered model. In addition, my courses underscore the importance of bringing in one’s lived experience to the discussion as a way in which to build communities within the class and provide students alternative models to engage scholarly articles or creative works. Therefore, students’ stories and testimonies become sites of specialized knowledge that inevitably creates a more dynamic class and open dialogue where students can contribute more freely to the discussion. This pedagogical approach provides an ideal model for courses where testimonies, life stories, and autobiographies are central to the course content. In my experience of teaching Native American women’s writing, I have found multigenre identity-based anthologies especially useful for introductory courses. For example, Through the Eye of the Deer, edited by Carolyn Dunn and Carolyn Comfort, and A Gathering of Spirit, edited by Beth Brant, gives students access to various writers, many of whom are lesser known. I argue that these multigenre collections are communal life stories that participate in community building between contributors and readers alike. Through the Eye of the Deer anthologizes works that retell traditional stories in a modern context. The retelling of these stories follows the oral tradition, so they are not necessarily fixed or unchanging. The editors state that the stories “have been reshaped in the telling and retelling over the years; yet, the essence of the stories, the essence of what was true and still is true for American Indian communities remains an integral part of the narratives.” 8 Another anthology, Sister Nations:

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Native American Women Writers on Community, edited by Heid Erdrich and Laura Tohe, echoes themes such as Native American women’s roles in the community. As noted earlier, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, edited by Harjo and Bird, is also useful for discussing not only the experiences of Native American women but also the inherent difficulties of publishing an anthology that intends to be representative of Native American women writers. This anthology painstakingly chooses and includes over eighty writers from fifty different nations, both well-known writers as well as first time contributors. Decolonizing the Academy: Building Bridges with Elders and Community Activists

In addition to assigning articles that broaden students’ understanding of the unique experiences of Native Americans in relationship to the history of colonialism, genocide, and patriarchy, I emphasize how these primary and secondary sources are in every way connected to living communities. It would be a disservice to students if these works were taught in isolation of their sociohistorical contexts and disconnected from indigenous voices. This pedagogical approach to teaching is crucial to not only building bridges within the classroom with students but also building bridges between indigenous communities and the academy. Similar to my teaching philosophy, in Red Pedagogy Sandy Grande calls for decolonizing the academy, a crucial model that is needed to achieve any type of intellectual sovereignty, especially when teaching Native American studies courses. She argues that the sociopolitical and material conditions of Native American communities should not be obscured by questions of identity and authenticity. She states, “as we raise yet another generation in a nation at war, it is even more imperative for schools to be reimagined as sites for social transformation and emancipation.”9 I agree that as educators of Native American studies during the twenty-first century we must consider our classrooms as sites of consciousness raising where students feel empowered to enact social change. The relationship between Native American communities and academia has historically been contentious; therefore, these tensions must be addressed, since classes are taught within the confines of the academy—an institution that has historically misrepresented and silenced the blood memories, sovereign

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stories, and histories of indigenous people. One approach to building bridges is to invite guest speakers and encourage students to become actively involved in social justice organizations within the community. This methodological approach—integrating service learning and guest speakers—is not difficult because regardless of region there are always active members of the community and multiple organizations working and advocating for social justice of indigenous people. By actively engaging local communities and foregrounding their voices in class, one can counter the tendencies to essentialize accounts of Native American history that continues to erase contemporary issues. For example, Grande argues for a liberatory project that destabilizes the isolationist narratives of nationalism and cultural chauvinism. She calls for an “indigenous theory of subjectivity” that “addresses the political quest for sovereignty, the socio-economic urgency to build transnational coalitions, and creates the intellectual space for social change” (118). Although not every institution provides support for guest speakers, I would argue that inviting elders and members of indigenous communities to share their specialized knowledge with a class is an integral component in any course on Native American studies. In my experience multiple speakers have provided invaluable information to students as they discuss their personal experiences about current issues facing Native Americans in the twenty-first century. And these talks provide students with the ability to better contextualize the course content. In preparation for these visits, students are assigned articles, creative works, and essays by the speakers. In addition, they screen relevant documentaries about the specific tribes and regions to be discussed. The preparation of students before welcoming indigenous community members to speak is essential to ensure that students actively engage in substantive and respectful dialogue with community members. These types of interactions provide students with the opportunity to hear scholar-activist-teachers discuss the ways in which they are working toward social justice for indigenous people and listen to their sovereign stories about indigenous identity. It is imperative that as scholars of Native American studies we continue to counter dominant paradigms that perpetuate romanticized notions of Indianness in and outside of the classroom. Grande aptly underscores this point and suggests that we abandon essentialist accounts of Indian history, usually framed as good versus bad and, more importantly, that we counter distorted myths that invisibilize American

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Indians in the twenty-first century (103). As Hogan states in The Woman Who Watches Over the World, “Few people outside of our cultures can comprehend the depth of the pain, despair, and, for many of us Native peoples, anger. To other Americans, this history, if thought of at all, belongs to a far past, but in truth these events are recent and remembered” (79). Thus, centering indigenous perspectives and voices in all aspects of the classroom provides students with the tools for rethinking Western concepts of temporality, history, storytelling, truth telling, and language. In addition, I inform students that current events may modify the syllabus for the purposes of discussing relevant topics that can actually contribute to a better understanding of long-standing legacies of genocide against Native Americans and resistance movements in the United States. In fact, I usually begin my courses each week by asking students about issues facing indigenous communities in the news. For example, in 2012 it would have been remiss of me as an educator of Native American studies to not consider discussing the Idle No More movement that was founded that year as an indigenous response to neocolonialism. In addition, I certainly had to incorporate a discussion of the canonization of Junípero Serra by Pope Francis in the fall of 2015 when we were discussing the assigned historical readings of the California Missions. And each fall semester I include a brief history and discussion of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving from multiple critical and historical perspectives. By incorporating relevant world news into the classroom, I provide students the opportunity to become more conscious of how history is intricately connected to current events and social justice movements. These are only a few examples of how I create flexibility in my class without compromising rigor or requirements in order to create a class that does not simply view indigenous people as relics of the past but rather as contemporary writers, poets, filmmakers, artists, social activists, bloggers, etc. During fall 2016, I contextualized the ongoing battle by indigenous people from the northern Great Plains to protect sacred land threatened by an encroaching crude oil access pipeline and the subsequent resistance movement #NoDAPL.10 The Standing Rock Sioux are perhaps most well known for the Great Sioux War of 1876 who stood their ground against Colonel George A. Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn. But their struggle continues today in the form of protest against large corporate oil companies, echoing the Wounded Knee standoff in 1973 by American Indian Movement activists. Thus, my pedagogical philosophy underscores

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that indigenous peoples’ histories and stories should never be disengaged from the communities that are being discussed or the long historical legacies of violence, genocide, and forced relocation perpetuated against indigenous peoples in the United States. Not for Innocent Ears: Strategies for Teaching an As-Told-To Narrative

I have chosen Not for Innocent Ears as a case study for teaching Native American women’s autobiographical courses, because it speaks to every aspect that I have reviewed in Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories. This text provides the opportunity to not only teach students about the complexities surrounding as-told-to ethnographic life stories, but also gives students the opportunity to critically examine a work that can be read through a conversive relational methodology. The convoluted collaborative aspect of this narrative also provides students with a way in which to reread this work through a lens that also seeks to rethink questions of authenticity and agency. In the introduction to Ruby Modesto’s text, Guy Mount reassures his audience that “It was Ruby’s wish that a book be written about her people, ‘a book which told the truth,’ and together we decided to create this manuscript: a blend of previous anthropological research combined with her knowledge, memory and personal experience” (2). Although the introduction echoes Cuero’s edited life story by Shipek, since Mount also seemingly speaks for Modesto as the coauthor, he also underscores that “it is hoped that Not for Innocent Ears will be useful in Ruby’s classes serving Cahuilla children as well as California school public school programs” (2). Thus, given the coauthors’ intent and motivation for telling and writing these stories, I argue that this as-told-to work is not simply an ethnographic autobiography, but also a useful book for teachers to teach, learn, listen, and discuss the blood memories and sovereign stories told by Modesto. In fact, Mount has even included an appendix that outlines a unit of study titled “Our Indian Heritage” and suggests curriculum for teachers. In his introduction Mount explains that there is a lack of teaching material on Desert Cahuilla but that Mrs. Modesto is locally well known and a “respected depository of knowledge” who has been an informant for other anthropologists, coauthored an article, and been a guest lecturer at local colleges (1).11 Thus, Mount states that it is Modesto’s knowledge and personal experience along with her anthropological contributions that

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will ultimately serve to counter the distorted history that is taught about Native Americans in high schools. But what is not clarified by Mount is the actual methodologies a teacher should use to critically examine this coauthored work, especially because Mount is an ethnographer whose original motivation for this work was a “strong personal interest in native medicine and childbirth” (5). After introducing the narrative structure Mount outlines his preparation and background for the ethnographic work he has conducted. And this chapter echoes other as-told-to works where the ethnographer provides credibility for the work through a patronizing tone that indicates the obvious unequal power relations between Mount and Modesto. Ironically, Mount further provides evidence for his own credibility as an expert by asserting that he has been trained for ethnographic research by Dr. Lowell Bean of the California State University at Hayward. Bean is “recognized as an authority on southern California Indians, especially the Cahuilla, and their cultural ecology” (7). Thus, similar to the ways in which Bean asserted his authoritative position as an expert in his field, Mount also underscores, in this introduction, a certain type of anthropological control that I read as objectification of his “subjects.” Mount continues to describe Bean’s research as “salvage ethnography,” where one “could reconstruct the past by digging for ideas and values in the minds and hearts of living Indian people” (7). By using Bean’s methodology, Mount is not writing as a coauthor with Modesto but instead embraces the settler-colonialist notion of the vanishing Indian that needs to be preserved. And his introduction suggests the book was not written for a Cahuilla audience but rather for readers that believe this national narrative as an absolute truth. In addition, Mount’s claim to “authenticity” as it relates to ethnography and his relationship with the Cahuilla is partly underscored by his supposed knowledge of the act of childbirth, which he claims is an intimate experience. He states that his own interest in folk medicine and childbirth was inspired by the preparation he received from midwives in Santa Cruz who helped to deliver his son and daughter at home. Thus, one of Mount’s arguments to recording an authentic cultural history, specifically with regard to medicinal herbs used by Southern California Indians during childbirth, is only connected to his individual experience with childbirth. He states, “It was necessary for me to be very intimate with Ruby’s family in order to obtain information on traditional healing strategies, as the reader

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will soon discover” (5). Thus, instead of a collaborative narrative, this statement highlights for his audience that simply by reading this text, they too can make an “intimate” connection with the tribe. One example of how Mount uses Bean’s methodology to gather information occurs when he visits Modesto’s aunt, Magdalina Nombre. Mount first met and interviewed Nombre in 1968 and was now returning in 1976, where he would learn of Nombre’s niece Ruby Modesto. Mount visits Nombre in a hospital, where she is recovering from a stroke and being taken care of by her daughter. Although this interaction is only briefly referenced in the text, it is interesting to note the exchange between Mount and Nombre. Nombre is fully aware of Mount’s motivation for visiting her. After getting her hand massaged by Mount, Nombre says, “something else that felt real good was the birth of my son” (10). Mount is surprised that Nombre knew about his ethnographic research interests and admitted to Nombre that he “wanted to learn more about Serrano/Cahuilla healing traditions . . . but felt embarrassed asking about her personal life, especially since she was so sick” (10). Nombre replies that she would not mind talking about it and thus, Mount’s strategy for becoming “intimate” with his subject in order to obtain the necessary information is accomplished. Consequently, it is in this exchange that Nombre tells Mount that he should speak with Modesto who knows more about the plants in the desert. The next section, “Meeting Ruby,” is where Mount’s first interaction with Modesto is discussed. This short excerpt romanticizes the relationship that Mount begins with Modesto as he states, “I had to clear my mind through meditation, and trust that I would be guided on a path that was mysterious in nature” (12). Mount’s subsequent inquiry about plants results in his belief that he is becoming more informed about the “mysterious nature” of the Cahuilla. Ironically, during Mount’s visit, Modesto refuses to be marginalized or silenced by Mount and is completely self-aware and conscious of his intentions. After Mount explained his interest in healing strategies: Ruby raised one eyebrow and looked at me skeptically, “Tell me,” she said. “Have you read any of the books by Carlos Castaneda?” “Yes,” I admitted guardedly, not knowing what else to say and feeling self-critical since the authenticity of Castaneda’s work was under fire from the academic community.

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“Well, what do you think of him?” she asked. “I think he’s pretty good,” I said. Ruby immediately wanted to know why. Modesto’s questions portray her agency and ability to control the narrative that Mount is attempting to construct. She does not allow him to completely dominate the narrative but rather subversively questions his true motive. Thus, Modesto’s familiarity with Castaneda’s controversial work forces Mount to be more self-aware and conscious of his position as an ethnographer who claims in his acknowledgments that “Modesto, and other Southern California Indian people . . . are in all truth the real creative sources of this book” (np). I argue that this conversation allows Mount to justify his written as-told-to ethnographic work to his audience. Mount answers Modesto by stating that Castaneda “humanized anthropology” by focusing on people rather than culture and showed “great respect for the thoughts and values of an old Indian medicine man, and daring to let Indian people speak for themselves at length and explain their own spiritual heritage” (13). Thus, his reference to the notion of “humanizing” and foregrounding his credentials as a seemingly self-aware ethnographer speaks directly to his own anxiety and anticipation of the criticism he might receive about his positionality in relationship to Modesto. He underscores his expertise further, stating “Prior training in the methods of ethnography by Dr. Bean and library research provided me with many questions for Ruby to answer in out sessions. The Santa Cruz midwives and my own experience with natural childbirth sensitized me to holistic healing techniques” (14). And he warns those readers interested in this type of work that they should be properly trained and experienced before taking on such an endeavor. “Those readers who are considering ethnographic field research with American Indian people should note that a further year of active listening was required before my ears were considered experienced enough to hear many of the details which follow” (14). Mount concludes with a statement about the next chapter that interweaves anthropological and archaeological records with Modesto’s stories in order to narrate a short period of Desert Cahuilla cultural history. It is not until chapter four, “Autobiography of a Pul,” and chapter five, “Desert Cahuilla Folktales,” that Mount claims to “step out of the picture and let Ruby speak entirely for herself ” (5). What is not clear in this short

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narrative are the actual questions that Mount asked Modesto or any explanation of his editorial choices for the final publication. And Modesto’s story is in separate sections, each various lengths with the following subtitles: “Ruby’s Childhood,” “Cahuilla Religion,” “Songs for the Dead,” “Spiritual Politics,” “The Plants Have a Spirit Too,” “Women’s Songs and Plants,” “Good Puls and Bad Puls,” “Healing Soul Loss,” “Portrait of a Pul,” “Healing Soul Damage,” and “Raising Children.” It is perhaps fitting, then, that this as-toldto work be used in a class not only to introduce students to the complexity involved with “collaborative” ethnographic autobiographies but also provide them with tools to critically examine the stories from an indigenous-centered perspective by using such methodologies as conversive relationality. Ruby Modesto’s Sovereign Story

In her narrative, Modesto states that she was born in 1913 on the Martinez Reservation and did not begin attending school until the age of ten. She relates blood memories about her grandparents who used to pick her up from the schoolhouse on the Torres Reservation and then take her to their kish. Modesto remembers the house made of arrowweed and palm fronds. She says her grandfather Francisco would tell her many stories and legends, some of which she remembers. “Grandfather told me many stories and legends too, some of which I do remember. I listened to the stories, but I dropped off to sleep before the end many times. It was my real education, you might say, in the ways of our people” (24). He was chosen by his tribe to be the net, or chief, of their clan. It is through her grandfather that she first learns of Umna’ah, the creator: Grandfather Francisco taught me how to pray to Umna’ah, our creator. He told me to go alone into the mountains, to find a quiet beautiful place and to pray. He said I should talk out everything, say whatever I felt or needed, and then listen for an answer. That’s the secret: to listen. You have to say everything that’s in your mind, cry until your empty. Then listen. He will speak to you. (25) Modesto also tells stories about her grandmother’s Uncle Charlie, who was a pul or shaman with healing and dreaming power. It is from him that she

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learns “that a real pul is born, destined to be one” (25). Modesto explains how a pul is distinguished by his ally or dream helper who is obtained through dreaming. She says young boys and sometimes girls were initiated into their visionary powers with the datura plant or kikisulem, but at the age of ten her helper Ahswit, the eagle, came to her spontaneously. Modesto met Ahswit at the thirteenth level of dreaming and because of her youth, slept in a type of coma for several days until her Uncle Charlie managed to bring back her spirit. She was told not to dream like that again until she could come back on her own. Modesto was born a dreamer, but she explains how this conflicted with Christianity. I was born a dreamer. My mother used to take me to the Moravian church here on the Reservation. I always fell asleep and my soul would fly right out of the building through a little hole in the ceiling. I was a Christian for a long time. My father said it was OK. He said that Umna’ah could do anything. . . . But now I know that you cannot be a Christian and a pul too. You have to choose between them, because Christians teach that a pul gets power from the devil and I don’t believe that way. (27) Even though Modesto admits that there are both good and bad puls, she says she would never use her power to harm anyone. Modesto’s blood memories about her “ancient religion” are central to her sovereign stories about Cahuilla traditional practices. More importantly, her life story centers indigenous women’s voices and contributes to a decolonial land-based struggle for Cahuilla self-determination and sovereignty against settler colonialism and Christianity. After 1891, the federal government closely supervised the Cahuillas as Protestant missionaries became influential in Cahuilla culture. Thus, Modesto’s recollections about ceremonies and Cahuilla spirituality counter Mount’s methodology of “salvage ethnography” and the notion of the “vanishing Indian.” And even though Mount claims to “step out of the picture and let Ruby speak entirely for herself,” he inserts titles to her stories, such as “Ruby’s Childhood,” “Cahuilla Religion,” and “Songs for the Dead,” in order to create a chronological autobiography which Modesto’s stories resist since they are nonlinear. Instead, Modesto’s stories are characteristic of the oral tradition and not Eurocentric traditional self-life-writing. Her life story is shaped by blood memories and shared knowledge that she has

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received from her grandfather and other members of her community. In addition, she regularly incorporates Cahuilla’s traditional stories and songs. For example, she relates that her father had taught her about whirlwinds and one day she made one angry by poking a stick in its home. Modesto then recites a song that relates this experience. Ya-ee, The Wind Ya-ee with clouds of fury it blowed Silky dry alkali swirling about. Where are my senses? Where are my thoughts? Even in footsteps stumble and stop. Gaily in mischief she tangles my hair Powdering desert sand all over my face. The juxtaposition of song with stories integrates the communal voices interweaved throughout the narrative. This communal storytelling continues in chapter five where Mount includes coyote stories and Cahuilla folktales. Even though Mount has chosen to separate these stories in an attempt to write a linear narrative, they are blood memories that should be included in Modesto’s personal and communal sovereign life story. These folktales are in every way connected to Modesto’s community and a part of the communal stories that construct Modesto’s subjectivity. They cannot be detached from her other stories or separated if listener-readers are to better understand the complexity of the narrative that defies traditional Western notions of the autobiography. As Sands argues, we must turn our focus from the editor in order to recognize the “power of Native narratives” that many times “actively resist the collector’s cultural and ideological agenda.”12 In the section titled, “Cahuilla Religion,” Modesto talks about the central location where her community visits to give thanks for food, dances, and even funerals. “In our ancient religion, and still today, we have a ceremonial house where everybody comes to sing and pray. Umna’ah means ‘Big’ or ‘Huge,’ like God. Kish Umnawet means ‘Big House’ or ‘God’s House,’ and that is the name of our ceremonial house” (31). After dreaming that the ceremonial doors to the house were closed, Modesto decides she needs to have a ceremony called “feeding the house.” She interprets her dream to mean that

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her people were departing from their customs and the ancient ones were waiting for them to return. The anxiety that Modesto feels regarding this loss of tradition is expressed in her explanation of the songs for the dead that tell the story of creation. I don’t know all the songs. Many are forgotten. Originally “The Songs for the Dead” were men’s songs. There were different songs for dying women called “Moon Songs,” but we don’t sing those anymore. They are not remembered. The songs for the dead used to take four nights to sing entirely through. The whole story is told by Patencio, a Palm Springs Cahuilla man. Now we only sing one night over the body. (32) Thus, the section titled “Songs for the Dead” becomes even more significant for Modesto who tries to explain its meaning. “Each of the animal/people at the cremation were ancestors of different Cahuilla clans” (35). She names some of the clans, symbolized by animals, which attended these ceremonies and could trace their lineage to the cremation: the dog, mountain lion, bobcat, bear, and badger. She notes that many other clans have died off “mostly from disease, but also from out-marriage losing their lineage” (35). According to Mount, it was Modesto’s wish that a book be written about her people that told the truth. Thus, Modesto’s seemingly subtle and somewhat nostalgic statement regarding the clans is significant. In this short narrative we are left with the question of what particular diseases Modesto is referring or the specific number of people in these clans that may have died.13 In addition, there is no historical or cultural context that explains the significance of outmarriage and how this might be connected to settler colonialism. But after listening to her blood memories, it is clear that Modesto views out-marriage as a colonist legacy of biological genocide that has directly affected a clan’s lineage and their subsequent death. In the next section, “Spiritual Politics,” Modesto tells us that her Grandfather Francisco was clan net and the last to maintain a kiva, the sacred underground council chamber. It was here that as many as twenty-five puls would go to meditate or discuss issues regarding their people. One hundred years ago, during my great grandfather Petrucho’s time, kivas were found in every clan village. But my Grandfather’s kiva was

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the last. There are none in use now. Instead we have the white-man’s law. Maybe that is better, because a bad net would kill people too fast. When my Grandfather Francisco became net he changed things. He accepted the whiteman’s law and quit using the kiva. He only used the Big House for our other ceremonies. Unfortunately, when he died our sacred bundle and eagle feathers were destroyed too. I was just a girl then. (37–38) Modesto’s sovereign story about the kiva underscores the cultural genocide committed against her people as she recalls the loss of particular ceremonial practices. Modesto’s storytelling can be read as nostalgic or a longing for the past and urgent desire to preserve one’s cultural heritage. But her story also illustrates survivance and provides readers some insight to the complex cultural and political history of Modesto’s people. Although this passage might suggest to some readers that the transition from using the kiva to the white man’s laws was better, there is also a melancholy tone that illustrates the decimation of such a loss. The death of her grandfather with the simultaneous destruction of their sacred bundle and eagle feathers underscores the significance of her storytelling. Although she was just a girl when this loss occurred, it is the blood memory of her grandfather and the kiva that counters the ethnographic “vanishing Indian” narrative and instead writes her people back into history. And as Sarris reminds us in our examination of these types of “collaborative” works, those telling their stories were aware of the power relations—and would only reveal pieces of stories. Thus, although she states this was the last time the kiva was used, it should not be read literally because as part of decolonization, indigenous people adapted and transformed their cultural and spiritual practices, as a matter of survivance. In “The Plants Have a Spirit Too,” Modesto relates the use of the kikisulem plant, which she describes as a powerful shaman or chief pul as well as a water plant. She says the plants are like friends and some have powerful spirits. And she recalls that sometimes the puls would get together in the kiva during a time of drought and pray to the spirit in the kikisulem plant. “Our puls could See the spirit, talk to it and ask for their needs to be met” (38). Another use of the plant was to assist in the interpretation of powerful dreams. Modesto remembers that one time several puls, including her Grandfather Francisco, took the kikisulem together and compared what each saw within the same powerful dream. Her Uncle Charlie, a pul and

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expert in dream interpretation, agreed with the others that the Indians they saw coming down the trail to the Y in the road meant that the people were falling apart. Therefore, they held a ceremonial dinner to feed the house. “All the people were invited and they were told by the puls about the dream and the importance of unity” (39). Modesto’s blood memories about the kikisulem plant and spiritual ceremonies that occurred in the kiva as well as her multiple sovereign stories about the puls is a way in which she rerights and rewrites Cahuilla history, underscoring the significance of their cultural traditions from an indigenous-centered perspective. As a point of departure for students when teaching this as-told-to work, it may be helpful to begin by asking students if this seemingly collaborative work resists ethnographic colonization. And why is Mount so insistent on underscoring his credibility as a way in which to counter any criticism. For example, he states in his introduction that “Historically, full communication with non-Indians has proven risky and dangerous” (2–3). Therefore, he chose the title Not for Innocent Ears because “it represents the esoteric nature of stories on Cahuilla shamanism . . . certain spiritual beliefs and healing strategies that have been withheld from outsiders” (2). And he incudes a statement by Modesto, who replies, “The times were not right. People were not ready to hear” (3). That is, Spanish priests and Protestant missionaries condemned the spiritual practices by Indians, and shamanism was considered witchcraft and devil worship (3). Similar to Cuero’s wish to have her story heard, Modesto also states that she wishes to have a book written about her people “which told the truth.” Thus, it is imperative that decolonizing methodologies be used to critically examine this cowritten as-told-to testimonio that seeks to truth-tell through communal storytelling. As previously discussed, for ethnographers, the collaborative process was a means of preserving what they felt was significant information, such as the identification of plants for medicinal purposes and folk medicine as it relates to childbirth. But what is not explicitly discussed is the importance of these women’s voices as individual storytellers. That is, regardless of Shipek’s and Mount’s original objectives for gathering information on the Kumeyaay and Cahuilla, the final publication of these sovereign stories provides a way for indigenous people to subversively decolonize ethnographic autobiographies, while simultaneously rewriting and rerighting their histories.

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Conclusion

In Yellow Woman, Silko writes about the power of stories and how all written work comes from the oral tradition. She defines storytelling as something much bigger than, for example, a bedtime story: “I’m talking about something that comes out of an experience and an understanding of that original view of Creation—that we are all part of a whole; we do not differentiate or fragment stories and experiences” (50). Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories underscores Silko’s definition of communal storytelling and more importantly the power of story as a strategy for survival and healing. Thus, survivance depends not only on the telling of these stories, but also on the listener-readers to engage with these women’s voices. And it is my hope that this book provides readers with new approaches to critically examine and teach indigenous women’s autobiographical discourses.

NOTES

Chapter 1 1. I, Rigoberta Menchú, ed. Burgos-Debray (New York: Verso, 1994). For further discussion on this controversy and genre, see Gugelberger, The Real Thing. According to Gugelberger, testimonio is a genre that emerged in the immediate years after the Cuban Revolution and is “representative of the oppressed subaltern, the repressed and homeless, the exiled and the migrant” (11). 2. The terms used to define indigenous peoples are complex. Throughout this book, I will use tribally specific names whenever possible and American Indian, Native American, and indigenous interchangeably, depending on the context. Since self-identification and self-naming are inextricably linked to cultural sovereignty, the historical and contemporary debates surrounding nomenclature should always be acknowledged when writing a book in the field of Native American studies. It should be added that even the term indigenous, although it seemingly attempts to collectivize populations globally, is also problematic given that it refers to persons whose experiences are from extremely different cultural and geographical backgrounds. At the same time, as was the case during the American Indian Movement of the 1960s, umbrella terms were used as means to unite communities as they engaged in politics of empowerment. And in some cases, the term Indian has been reclaimed and accepted within some communities even though it was originally seen as a derogatory term applied by colonizers. Other terms used to identify indigenous people are First Peoples, Native Peoples, First Nations, People of the Land, Aboriginals, and Fourth-World Peoples. 3. Mithlo, “Blood Memory and the Arts,” 106. 4. Allen, “Blood (and) Memory,” 94.

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5. My use of the word survivance throughout the book is borrowed from Gerald Vizenor’s definition: “Native survivance is an active sense of presence over historical absence, the dominance of cultural simulations, and manifest manners. Native survivance is a continuance of stories” (Vizenor, Native Liberty, 1). 6. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 2. 7. Ibid., 34–35. 8. Hogan, Woman Who Watches, 59. 9. Krupat, For Those Who Come After, 29. 10. Krupat, ed., Native American Autobiography, 3–4. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Krupat, For Those Who Come After, 33. 14. Ibid., 35. 15. Wong bases this definition on her readings of Robert F. Murphy, who defines “a boundary culture” as the point of contact or interaction between two distinct cultures, mainly Anglo-American and Native American, that results in a third culture (89). 16. Beverley, “The Margin at the Center,” in Smith and Watson, De/Colonizing the Subject, 92–93. For a more comprehensive discussion of testimonio and the controversy surrounding Rigoberta Menchú, see Gugelberger, The Real Thing; Beverley, Against Literature; Arias, Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. In “How Scholarship Defames the Native Voice,” Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that the work of Beverley and others included in the anthology The Real Thing, in attempting to “sort out what was textually authentic and what was not,” actually contributed to substantiating the anthropological criticism of Menchú’s text. In other words, by placing Menchú’s text and other Native American astold-to works at the margins of the accepted literary canon, scholars inadvertently negated the Native voice. Even though the indisputable facts are that Menchú witnessed “unbelievable torture, mass starvation, and countless murders of innocent people by the armies of Guatemala,” and she told the story of her people, the Mayan Indians, who were killed and displaced, there were still voices, such as David Stoll’s, casting doubt on the truthfulness and authenticity of her words (81–82). 17. Bataille and Sands, American Indian Women, 9. 18. Some examples they give of these ethnographic autobiographies are “Fox Indian Woman”; “Narrative of an Arapaho Woman”; and “Southern Cheyenne Woman,” all edited by Truman Michelson. 19. Some examples they give of these as-told-to autobiographies are: Underhill, Papago Woman; Linderman, Pretty-Shield; and Wilson, Waheenee. 20. Some examples they give of these self-written narratives are Hopkins, Life among the Piutes; Bonnin (Zitkala-Sa), American Indian Stories; and more contemporary works, such as Campbell, Halfbreed, and Silko, Storyteller.

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21. Brill de Ramírez, Native American Life-History Narratives, 14. 22. Sarris, “Hearing the Old Ones Talk,” in Krupat, New Voices, 425; Colson, Autobiographies of Three Pomo Women. 23. Although there is no definitive history of the New Age movement, my reference to New Ageism as it relates to indigenous peoples is in particular reference to the mass misappropriation of spiritual practices and “selling” of cultural practices by non-Indigenous people. This cultural appropriation includes people claiming an Indigenous identity and/or labeling themselves “shaman.” These are people who appropriate and sell indigenous culture with an egregious misunderstanding of indigenous spirituality. One example of such outrageous “plastic shamanism” occurred in Sedona, Arizona, on October 8, 2009, when James Ray, a nonindigenous self-identified self-help guru, was arrested and charged with manslaughter after several people died and others suffered from burns, respiratory arrest, kidney failure, loss of consciousness, and dehydration during a “Spiritual Warrior retreat” he was sponsoring. He charged each participant ten thousand dollars, and his actions led to widespread condemnation by indigenous peoples regarding the co-opting, selling, and misrepresentation of traditional Native practices (http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork. com/2011/03/02/james-ray-sweat-lodge-trial-begins-20535). For a more comprehensive critique of New Ageism, see God is Red by Deloria. 24. Silko, Yellow Woman, 52. 25. Hogan adopted her daughters partly as a result of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which allowed Indian families to adopt children of the same tribe; if no family was available, adoption was allowed from another tribe. She notes in her memoir that at this time in her region there were six hundred American Indian children in foster homes who needed Indian families to adopt them (75). Hogan finds it difficult to relate the egregious atrocities of abuse and neglect committed against her daughters, and she is distraught that her love could not heal their pain as they embodied the “undeniable, unforgettable aspect of every American Indian life” (77). The Indian Child Welfare Act was originally intended to curtail the exceedingly large number of Native American children who were being removed from their homes by private and public agencies. It was and is meant to secure the stability of American Indian tribes and family. I argue that this removal of children from homes is an extension of what happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with the forced removal or rather kidnapping of children who were taken to “boarding schools” under a mandated policy that was originally proposed by Captain Richard H. Pratt, whose slogan was “kill the Indian and save the man.” For further discussion on the boarding schools see: Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, 2005; and Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools, 2004.

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26. In Native Liberty, Vizenor articulates similar arguments: “The native stories of survivance are successive and natural estates. Survivance is an active resistance and repudiation of dominance. . . . The practices of survivance create an active presence, more than the instincts of survival, function, or subsistence. Native stories are the sources of survivance. . . . Native storiers of survivance are prompted by natural reason, by a consciousness and a sense of incontestable presence that arises from experiences in the natural world” (88). Likewise, Goeman argues in Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations that “maps remain today in oral traditions, contemporary stories, and experiences conveyed through story, and these stories are often carried on through women. . . . Stories, songs, and rituals still remain and continue to be passed down through generations” (25). 27. Blood quantum was and still is a standard racial identification used to document indigenous people based on one’s purity of bloodlines. Thus, indigenous people with “mixed blood” were and are considered genetically separated from their tribal identity and affiliation. This complex issue has never been resolved and in some cases is even more contentious since there are numerous tribes who continue to use blood quantum for their census rolls as well as numerous nonrecognized tribes that reject the notion of federal recognition by government-imposed standards that erase their existence as sovereign nations. 28. According to Hopkins, “Epigenetics may provide hard scientific evidence of intergenerational trauma among American Indians and link it directly to diseases that currently afflict us, like cancer and diabetes. The term ‘intergenerational trauma’ has been used to describe the cumulative effects of trauma experienced by a group or individual that radiates across generations. For Natives, intergenerational trauma has presented itself in the form of genocide, disease, poverty, forced assimilation via removal of children from their families to boarding schools, the seizure and environmental destruction of homelands, and other routes of European colonization. The effects of intergenerational trauma include substance abuse, depression, anxiety, and a variety of other emotional problems. Emotional stress has also shown to effect gene expression via the epigenome. Studies show that the withholding of affection by a mother elicits brain changes in her infant that impairs their response to stress as an adult. Epigenetics offers remarkable potential for the prevention of disease among American Indians as well. We can use epigenetic inheritance to restore the action of our genetic code from one generation to the next. Once environmental stressors are removed and behavior is corrected, our DNA will revert to its original programming. We could cure diabetes through behavioral changes that allow our epigenome to operate correctly. The elimination of toxins and pollutants could greatly reduce the incidence of cancer and birth defects. Such modification of environmental exposures and behaviors will restore and even improve the overall health and capacity of our genetic line.” See Hopkins,

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30. 31. 32. 33.

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“Epigenetics: Scientific Evidence of Intergenerational Trauma,” Indian Country, November 26, 2011, https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/ epigenetics-scientific-evidence-of-intergenerational-trauma/. In a keynote address David Wilkens, an associate professor of American Indian studies, political science, and law, defined “inherent tribal sovereignty” as “not crafted by human made laws or actions.” Rather, sovereignty “comes from the creator, that’s how people talk about how they came to be.” Quoted in Barsewisch, “‘Tipai Uam,’” 67. He described tribal sovereignty in a “culturalspiritual sense” where the “collective and integrated soul of each indigenous community” becomes empowered “by the actions of the people themselves, not the economic elites, not the most educated among us, and not even the elected leaders” (quoted in Barsewisch, “‘Tipai Uam,’” 68). In “Imagined Geographies,” Thomas Biolsi complicates national sovereignty and national citizenship further by examining four types of indigenous space imagined fought for, achieved, and lived by American Indians in the United States. He states: “The first is tribal sovereignty within a Native homeland (a modern tribal government with its tribal citizenry on its reservation). . . . The second is territorially based rights to off-reservation resources that imply comanagement of (or perhaps even shared sovereignty over) overlapping territory by tribes, on the one hand, and the federal and state governments, on the other hand. . . . The third is generic (supratribal) indigenous rights within an inclusive space that ultimately spans all of the territory of the contiguous United States, what I will call ‘national indigenous space’ (I leave Alaska and Hawai’i out of the picture in the interest of making the argument as directly as possible). The final one is hybrid indigenous space in which Indian people claim and exercise citizenship simultaneously in Native nations and in the United States” (240). Barker, “For Whom Sovereignty Matters,” in Sovereignty Matters, 5. Shanley, “‘Born from the Need to Say,’” 3. For a comprehensive definition of genocide in relationship to indigenous communities, see Churchill, Kill the Indian. Mihesuah, Indigenizing the Academy.

Chapter 2 1. It should be noted that there are several versions of the Kumeyaay creation story told by people who are made up of diverse clans or Sh’mulqs. This extremely brief synopsis is taken from the following sources: http://www. kumeyaay.com/kumeyaay-history/80-kumeyaay-creation-story.html; http:// www.kumeyaay.com/kumeyaay-history/81-creation-story.html; and Shipek, “Kuuchamaa.” In Red Earth, White Lies, Deloria argues that “tribal elders did not worry if their version of creation was entirely different from the scenario

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held by a neighboring tribe. People believed that each tribe had its own special relationship with the superior spiritual forces that governed the universe. . . . Tribal knowledge was not fragmented data arranged according to rational speculation. It was simply the distilled memory of the people describing the events they experienced and the lands they had lived in” (36). All citations are taken from the third edition of Delfina Cuero’s autobiography: Shipek, Delfina Cuero (1991). Without the actual transcripts or notes, it is unclear if the phrase witch doctor was an appropriate translation. At one point in the text Shipek translates witches to the Kumeyaay word kust yay (49). In a much later article, Shipek refers to them as shamans, which she translates from the Kumeyaay word kuseyaay. See Shipek, “Kuuchamaa,” 72. Michael Connolly Miskwish, of the Campo Indian Reservation, refers to them as healers and leaders and explains that certain sites, such as the “nesting eagle sites,” were viewed as a source of spiritual power where social and religious gatherings were held. See Miskwish, Kumeyaay, 25. In more recent essays about the Kumeyaay, persons having extensive knowledge about their communities (history, cultural traditions, place names, etc.) have been referred to as cultural authorities. This term contrasts with the term informant, which connotes unequal power relations and designates indigenous peoples as subordinate objects of study, usually by anthropologists. See Barsewisch, “‘Tipai Uam’”; Gamble and Wilken-Robertson, “Kumeyaay Cultural Landscapes.” The sacred site also known as Tecate Peak had already been documented before Shipek wrote her article on Kuuchamaa, but as a result of possible exploitation of the site as a recreation camp and power-transmission lines being built over the mountain, the elders allowed Shipek to publish their stories in her article so that they would no longer be represented by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) or archaeologists as “primitive and lacking higher mystical and abstract concepts” (Shipek, “Kuuchamaa,” 72). Although not all secrets were disclosed to Shipek regarding the sacred sites, they insisted on having their voices heard in order to protect this mountain from further abuse and to correct previously published information about their community. “The elders debated the propriety of going on the mountain (since they were uninitiated) or of speaking about their religious beliefs concerning the mountain. They concluded that protection of the mountain was paramount and that they must go and tell their beliefs in spite of the injunction to maintain them in secrecy. With BLM officials, two trips to the peak were made by the existing religious elders. Each time, they prayed before entering the mountain. Then, when on the top, they prayed to Kuuchamaa to understand that they had come onto the mountain and were speaking about their religion in order to protect the mountain. They had come in deep reverence, not to violate their beliefs, nor to violate the

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mountain, nor for personal advantage, but to protect the sacred mountain for the sake of the Kumeyaay and all peoples. During the interview, they repeatedly informed the non-Kumeyaay present that too many people on the mountain for non-religious purposes would destroy the sacred place. They also stated that taking a plant or rock from the mountain would cause the death of the person taking it. Putting something on or near the peak was also forbidden” (Shipek, “Kuuchamaa,” 69). Dozier, The Heart Is Fire, 55. This indigenous sense of belonging and collective understanding of oneself in relationship to place and landscape is shared with other tribes who articulate similar worldviews. See Silko (Laguna Pueblo), “Interior and Exterior Landscapes,” in Yellow Woman, where she states: “The land, the sky, and all that is within them—the landscape—includes human beings” (29). “The web of memories and ideas that create an identity . . . was intimately linked with the surrounding terrain, to the landscape” (43). “Indeed, stories are most frequently recalled as people are passing by a specific geographical feature or the exact location where a story took place” (33). Also see Momaday (Kiowa), “Man Made of Words,” in Writing as Revision. He states: “None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable” (39). See Woody (Navajo/Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakima), “Voice of the Land,” in Speaking for the Generations, who states: “Despite intrusions, disruptions, anger, and numb sorrow, I still feel the holy aspects of the land. Because it draws upon ancestral power and a belief in healing, this knowledge is nurturing” (169). See Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo), “Wah Nuhtyuh-Yuh Dyu Neetah Tyahstih,” in Speaking for the Generations, who states that Shipapu, the mythic place of origin for Acoma Pueblo, “precedes the advent of European cultural civilization in the Americas, and as such it is a traditional concept of originemergence (or some similar version of it expressed as a belief-story) that all Indian people throughout the Americas share. The sense that we have always lived here is reiterated continually in oral narrative. The young are frequently reminded by their elders: these lands and waters and all elements of Creation are a part of you, and you are a part of them; you have a reciprocal relationship with them” (xiv). See Hogan (Chickasaw), Woman Who Watches: “There are places deemed sacred sites by people who have known and inhabited the land for tens of thousands of years. There are places of power on the earth. They have meaning not just because humans associate meaning with them, but because they resonate. . . . They are alive. Stone. Clay. Mica. Minerals. They are associated with healing” (149). The Mexican bands of the Kumeyaay occupy four ejidos in Baja California, Mexico and use the spelling Kumiai (Miskwish, 16). For a more comprehensive study of missions in California, see Miranda, Bad Indians; Tinker, Missionary Conquest; Hyer, “We Are Not Savages.”

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10. Although Native writers were producing work much earlier, during the late 1960s a group of Native writers emerged that was recognized for expanding the American literary canon, collectively known as the Native American Renaissance. This moment is usually marked by N. Scott Momaday’s publication of House Made of Dawn (1968), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. To date, the three major journal articles that examine Cuero’s narrative are Round, “‘There Was More to It’”; Fitzgerald, “Intimate Geographies”; and Portillo, “Performing a Strategic Transborder Citizenship.” 11. See chapter 1 for an overview of the defining characteristics for autobiography and testimonio. 12. See Shipek, “California Indian Reactions”; “Mission Indians”; “Kumeyaay Plant Husbandry,” in Before the Wilderness, ed. Blackburn and Anderson; “Kumeyaay Socio-Political Structure”; “Native American Adaptation to Drought”; Pushed into the Rocks. 13. One case included Shipek working with the San Pasqual band, which had lost their original village to settlers in 1871 and subsequently dispersed throughout the region. In order to claim their only inheritance—a small, mislocated reservation—they would have to prove their Indian band and identity to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. 14. Chet Barfield, “In Loving Memory, Florence Connolly Shipek, Kumeyaay Anthropologist,” San Diego Union-Tribune (2003), http://www.kumeyaay.info/ whoswho/inmemory/shipek.html. 15. Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks, xv. 16. Shipek, Delfina Cuero, 11. 17. Ibid. 18. Kehoe, “Revisionist Anthropology,” 514. 19. See Bean, “Indians of California”; Bibliography of the Cahuilla; California Indian Shamanism; Mukat’s People; Blackburn, Native Californians; Saubel, Temalpakh; and Vane, California Indians. 20. It should also be noted that this mark is omitted from the most recent edition (1991) of her autobiography. In the 1970 version the cover consists of a painted illustration by Sorony Schott from 1857, depicting a romanticized illustration of an indigenous person in a long shawl standing next to a horse being ridden by a woman and young child. The 1970 cover is reminiscent of picturesque illustrations that romanticize indigenous peoples as seen in numerous paintings and ethno-photographs. 21. A similar example of this is seen in an earlier as-told-to work by Linderman, Pretty-Shield, 7, where Pretty-Shield makes an imprint of her thumb above her picture. It reads, “I told Sign-talker [Linderman] the things that are in this book, and have signed the paper with my thumb.” Although this technique lends credibility to Linderman’s and Shipek’s final published books, it is problematic given the history of indigenous peoples who often signed documents in

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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good faith without the full understanding of the document’s content and consequences of their signing. Round, “‘There Was More to It,’” 180. Ibid. Ibid., 181. Ibid. Maloney, Native Voices, 2003. See Shipek, Pushed into the Rocks. A note on translation and brackets versus parenthesis in the written narrative: Mrs. Rosalie Pinto Robertson translated from Kumeya•y into English. Shipek’s explanatory notes are placed in brackets. According to Shipek, “Indian lineage, or clan, names are presently used in several ways. The most direct is the lineage name written in Spanish orthography with the original Indian sounds shifted to the closest Spanish sounds. Another form of usage is to translate the Indian name into the Spanish or English equivalent in meaning. Some names have been changed into a Spanish name closely related in sound but not in meaning. Other Indian families have simply taken an unrelated Spanish name for convenience in usage” (Shipek, Delfina Cuero, 13). See chapter 1 for a more comprehensive definition of sovereignty. During the mission period (1769–1822) Spanish Franciscan missionaries settled into Southern California and forcibly converted many indigenous peoples to Christianity. Although the primary intention of California missions was to civilize, educate, indoctrinate, and baptize Indians, the missions served as a means to “supply the army with food, livestock, and laborers for mission pueblos and private ranch holdings granted by the Spanish government. Kumeyaay coastal land was confiscated and the people captured and forced to work for the Spanish. Soldiers scoured the countryside for Indians to be rounded up for conversion and indentured slave labor. After a period of indoctrination and servitude, some were released to return to their homes. The women were often raped and used as property of the militia” (Anthony Pico, kumeyaay.com). An increase in deaths occurred during this time mainly due to diseases. In addition, animals such as cattle, horses, and sheep brought by the Spaniards overgrazed the lands and destroyed the major subsistence pattern for indigenous peoples, causing them to starve (Carrico, Strangers in a Stolen Land, 14). The years between the arrival of Spaniards in 1769 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 saw a rapid decline in the coastal Indian population, movement and abandonment of villages, disintegration of moral fiber, and cultural chaos. The Indians were forced into a marginal existence in a land that had previously provided an ample supply of food and resources (Carrico, Strangers in a Stolen Land, 14). “During the Mexican period, the missions became parish churches and mission lands, rancheros. Prior commitments made to Hispanicized Kumeyaay for

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small plots of land by the Spanish were dismissed. Mexican governors gave the best mission lands to Mexican nationals, and conceded large land grants, absorbing farms of Hispanicized Indians granted by the Spanish, as well as Kumeyaay villages within their boundaries. Kumeyaay living on former mission properties were turned over to Mexican nationals to serve as peon labor. Missions were placed under majordomos, who used the Indians as servants for their large families. Majordomos allocated passes to the Kumeyaay laborers to leave the rancheros to visit their families, and sent patrols to recapture those who did not return. The Kumeyaay became prisoners on their own land, trading one form of enslavement for another” (Anthony Pico, kumeyaay.com). 32. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War (1846–1848), and the United States acquired Mexican territory that included Texas, Utah, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. Although the treaty guaranteed US citizenship to those Mexicans who chose to remain, they were never treated equally or given the civil rights promised in the treaty. Since the US now had control over the Mexican and Indian populations in these territories, racial and economic tensions ensued. According to James Rawls, although disease was one of the primary reasons for the decrease in Native American population, there were also instances of violent deaths that resulted from extermination campaigns and vigilante groups who regularly murdered and lynched California Indians. There was an estimated decline in Indian population from 150,000 in 1845 to 30,000 in 1870 (Indians of California, 171–201). For a more comprehensive study on the “white crusade against California Indians” in the form of lynchings, indentured servitude, rape, kidnapping, and genocide, see Almaguer, Racial Faultlines; and Miranda, Bad Indians.. 33. In Indians of California, James Rawls notes that since there was no more “farther west” after California, alternative methods of relocating Indians followed, especially after the discovery of gold. In 1851, eighteen treaties that involved twenty-five thousand California Indians were negotiated regarding reservations. Edward Beale, military general and superintendent of Indian affairs for California, called for a reservation system that concentrated Indians on small parcels of land whose borders were to be precisely defined. His proposal was different than the former in that the reservations were to be located on government land where American Indians would be subjected to discipline and instruction, as opposed to land recognized by treaty as belonging to the Indians (149). The new reservations were eventually abandoned or closed as a result of corruption and negligence, as the agents would subject Native Americans to “cruel outrages.” In San Diego County it was not until January 31, 1870, that government approved two reservations, Pala and San Pasqual. After numerous legal battles waged by Manuel Olegario, President Ulysses S. Grant finally set aside land for the Indians in San Diego on December 27, 1875. Ironically, this legal attainment of land did not guarantee indigenous people citizenship, even

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though they were expected to pay taxes and observe US laws. Inevitably, there were various instances of forced abandonment of the reservations due to hostile ranchers and the reality that much of this land did not allow for indigenous populations to sustain themselves through traditional harvesting practices or land management, since they were impeded by reservation boundaries. After the Indian Homestead Act of 1883 and the Public Domain Allotment Act of 1887 were passed, individuals began filing for their lands, even though this meant separating from a tribal group. It was not until the New Deal era that reforms were made to US policy in relationship to tribes and they were offered minimal self-government. For a more comprehensive history of California Indians see Rawls, Indians of California; Carrico, Strangers in a Stolen Land; Miskwish, Kumeyaay; Anthony R. Pico, “The Kumeyaay Millennium,” www. kumeyaay.com; and Miranda, Bad Indians. 34. According to Almaguer, “One key aspect of the bitter hostility that Indians initially confronted during the last half of the nineteenth century was their unambiguous representation as subhuman beings. There were a number of crucial features of the European Americans’ racialization of the California Indians. Some Anglos simply believed that the Indians were remarkably dirty, ugly, and very dark complexioned. Others inscribed racial difference because of the alleged ‘animal-like’ nature of the native peoples’ existence” (Racial Faultlines, 111). In literature, newspapers, and ethnographic recordings, the “Indian” was characterized as savage and uncivilized. The image popularly portrayed was that of nonhumans occupying land that Anglo Americans wanted to exploit. This inferior status not only justified the killing of Indians, but also the sexual violence committed against Indian women. According to Richard Carrico, even though California Statute 133, Section 11, explicitly forbade vigilante action, such activities were common in the early years of San Diego County. In addition, the rape of Indian girls and women was a common occurrence, and white or Mexican men would frequently take Indian women as temporary wives or mistresses (Strangers in a Stolen Land, 19–23). 35. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, 6. 36. According to Shipek, by 1900 the Jamul band was not living in their “aboriginal village” but still within their band territory. Their primary territory was granted as a rancho during the Mexican period (1821–1848), and they were forced to move to the outskirts of the Indian cemetery. It was not until 1976 that the Jamul band finally obtained federal recognition. In 1912, the president of the Spreckles Sugar Company, John D. Spreckles, became the new “owner” of the land and deeded title to 2.5 acres that included the Indian cemetery to the Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Los Angeles. In a meeting, he told his “ranch hands” that they would always have this place and could never be evicted. The reality of the situation is that Indian populations were systematically being relocated and forced off their own land (Pushed into the Rocks, 104).

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37. “The land-tenure system led to the rapid crystallization of a class structure dominated by individual families monopolizing ownership of immense expanses of land known as ranchos” (Almaguer, Racial Faultlines, 47). 38. The Californios or Mexican ranchero elites were those families who had acquired large amounts of land in California and dominated economic and political affairs during the Mexican period. The Californios attempted to maintain their privileged status within the new social order but were also disenfranchised by the 1851 Land Law that placed the burden on them to prove the validity of their Spanish-Mexican land grants. It was usually only the skilled laborers, such as vaqueros (cowboys) or mayordomos (foremen), who were paid. When discussing California and borderlands history, it is important to underscore the cross-cultural contact and complex unequal relationships between the upper-class landowning Californios and indigenous populations. For example, it is estimated that Mariano Vallejo “relied on an estimated six hundred Indian vaqueros and laborers to work his 66,000-acre Rancho Petaluma and 90,000-acre Rancho Suscol” (Almaguer, Racial Faultlines, 48–49). 39. For a more comprehensive discussion regarding this forced removal, see Thorne, “Removal of the Indians.” Thorne outlines the political negotiations and resistance to relocation, when the city forcibly removed several bands from their reservations in order to build a dam and reservoir that would supply the county with water, which was critical for the city’s growth. 40. Barsewisch, “‘Tipai Uam,’” 72–73. 41. Ibid. The cards are identical to those used by other Mexican citizens who cross the Tijuana–San Diego border daily; they allow the bearers to travel up to twenty-five miles north of the border and stay for seventy-two hours. After 9/11, the visas withstood the transition from Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to the Department of Homeland Security, although with harsher security enhancements. More recently, there have been efforts to explore how southern Kumeyaay members can obtain working visas in order to work in the tribe’s four casinos in San Diego, which provide the bands’ economic self-sufficiency. 42. Morales, “Checkpoint.” 43. Ibid. The official recognition of indigenous groups in Mexico is complex and includes a “special status” compared to the sovereignty model within the United States. See Barsewisch, “‘Tipai Uam.’” 44. Ibid. 45. Barsewisch, “‘Tipai Uam,’” 73. 46. Several nonprofit organizations and community-based projects in Mexico working toward building bridges and the betterment of indigenous Baja California residents include the Instituto de las Culturas Nativas (CUNA), founded in 1995 by anthropologist Peter Ralphs, which specializes in medical services, transborder contact, and strengthening pre-border cultural ties; Flying

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Doctors, founded in 2002, which specializes in direct assistance to indigenous communities by providing transportation of tribal members to health care facilities from remote areas; the Baja California Intertribal Council, which collaborates with “region-wide cultural and social assistance programs such as Medicinal Aid Network, the Indigenous Scholar Program, support of indigenous artisans, traditional gatherings, applied research and sustainable development projects; and Comunidad, an NGO in the US that began collaborative efforts with CUNA in 2004, which specializes in medical service trips, health education fairs, improvement of infrastructure, and education outreach projects in partnership with US schools and institutions.” For more extensive discussion and interviews with active members of these organizations see Barsewisch, “‘Tipai Uam.’” 47. For further information on these repatriation efforts, see Larson, “UCSD and the Land.” 48. The Kumeyaay of San Diego have created multiple websites that seek to inform mainstream readers about their history and heritage through the Internet. The websites are dedicated to promoting and preserving Kumeyaay culture from a Kumeyaay-centered perspective. As with other tribal communities, the websites provide a space where Kumeyaay rewrite themselves back into history while simultaneously negotiating their relationship with non-Native audiences. The websites include historical narratives, photographs, links to language revitalization programs, news articles and opinion pieces that address the ongoing conflicts of indigenous sovereignty. There are also links to several tribes in Baja California, Mexico, and various artisans. One project of particular interest is the “Online Place Name Project,” which serves to map Kumeyaay place names on an interactive map. According to the project coordinators, the act of reclaiming places that have cultural and spiritual significance to the Kumeyaay by providing their original names is an act of decolonization. It also serves as an educational tool to “communicate indigenous concepts about spatiality, ecology, and history to a non-Native California audience” (http:// www.kumeyaaymapping.com/).

Chapter 3 1. The original self-published copies of this book are difficult to obtain given the minimal number produced. Thus, unless otherwise noted I will refer to the second edition (Silko, Sacred Water [1993]) which numbered twenty-five hundred copies and was designed and typed for the printers. Silko also notes this paperback edition was designed in order to make her book more accessible and affordable for students (84). 2. Goeman, “(Re)Mapping Indigenous Presence,” 295.

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3. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ecur/. 4. As a way to struggle against the misrepresentation of indigenous peoples and cultural appropriation and exploitation, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act was passed in 1990, providing a process for museums and federal agencies to return certain Native American cultural items, human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony to lineal descendants, culturally affiliated Indian tribes, or Native Hawaiian organizations. And some tribes have made claims to archival and photographic material as well, which has caused even further debate regarding intellectual property rights of indigenous peoples. 5. Lippard, Partial Recall, 25. 6. Jacknis, “Preface,” 1. 7. Powers, “Images Across Boundaries,” 129–130. 8. Lee Marmon’s work has also appeared in the following books: Peggy Roalf, ed., Strong Hearts: Native American Visions and Voices (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1995); Alfred L. Bush and Lee Clark Mitchell, eds., The Photograph and the American Indian (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 9. See Coltelli, “Leslie Marmon Silko’s Sacred Water”; Silko, Almanac of the Dead. 10. I read Silko’s reference to “All Souls Day” as a syncretism, where several traditions to honor and remember the dead are intermixed to create new and emerging spiritual practices. In this case, the description parallels with the tradition of Día de Los Muertos, a celebration of the dead through altars, food offerings, etc., that has roots in Mexico. Silko’s mixed identity and the history of Pueblo Laguna in New Mexico—including her personal stories as characterized in her personal essays—indicate her cultural syncretism between Catholic and indigenous spiritual practices. 11. For a more comprehensive background on radioactive contamination and environmental racism, see Churchill and La Duke, “Native North America,” in Jaimes, State of Native America. 12. Goeman, “Notes,” 183. 13. Joe Richey, “Women Writers Shine Brightly at Denver Events,” Boulder Reporter (April 12, 2010), http://boulderreporter.com/women-writers-shinebrightly-at-denver-events/. 14. Storyteller is a multigenre book that interweaves poetry with first-person narratives and family photographs. Silko retells oral stories passed down to her from family and community about Laguna Pueblo. The new edition includes previously unpublished photographs. 15. Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko, “How to Connect to Nature, Even in the City,” Zocalo Public Square (Nov. 19, 2010), https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=g9PH1rd9QTc. 16. In her novel, Almanac refers to an ancient notebook whose prophecies bring together indigenous peoples of the Southwest and Mexico to reclaim their

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

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ancestral lands. It is centered in Tucson and includes stories of resistance by revolutionaries against the European and mestizo masters. Ceremony tells the story of protagonist, Tayo, whose return from WWII has left him traumatized. The multiple timelines interweave a spiritual reawakening by Tayo, whose mixed identity underscores his ability to reclaim Laguna healing practices through ceremonies. Barbara Howard, “Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko, The Turquoise Ledge,” Miami Book Fair, Barbara Howard Media (November 21, 2011), https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=LmnPOECYVHk. Kimberly Banti, “A Conversation with Leslie Marmon Silko on The Turquoise Ledge.” Seattlest (Oct. 2010), http://seattlest.com/2010/10/19/interview_leslie_ marmon_silko_on_th.php. Howard, “Interview.” Coltelli, Winged Words, 63. Ibid., 105. Ibid. My opposition to Native American writing that is categorized as “nature writing” is beyond the scope of this book, but I am also aware that without such labels, mainstream audiences might never pick up a book written by Native American authors. For example, Linda Hogan, an acclaimed and globally recognized Native American author, was awarded the 2016 Henry David Thoreau Prize for Nature Writing on March 10, 2016. The PEN American Center (New England) described her work: “Intimately connected to her political and spiritual concerns, Hogan’s poetry deals with issues such as the environment and eco-feminism, the relocation of Native Americans, and historical narratives, including oral histories” (http://www.pen-ne.org/henry-david-thoreau-prize/). On July 16, 1945, in Alamogordo, New Mexico which is 191 miles from Pueblo, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was detonated for a test that would benefit the Manhattan Project, culminating in the creation of the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs. The bomb destroyed the pedestal on which it rested and caused massive fallout. A giant mushroom cloud swept downward and covered communities in “snow,” which was actually radioactive waste. Some people in the area became ill and developed cancers (see Boutte, “Compensating for Health”). The nuclear tests that occurred at the Nevada Testing Site that were above Frenchman Flat yielded similar results. Downwinders—those who were affected by the radiation and fallout—had an increased risk, if not guaranteed diagnosis, of some kind of cancer. Boutte, in her review of compensation efforts from the downwinders, notes that the community of Ely, Nevada, had to turn streetlights on to adjust for the darkness that was brought by the looming mushroom cloud, which blocked their sunlight. Silko, “Interview.” Native American Novelists, Films Media Group, 2005. Ibid.

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27. See http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/rattlesnake_roundups/; also Center for Biological Diversity: “‘Rattlesnake roundups’ are contests calling for hunters to bring in as many snakes as they can catch in a year, at which point the snakes are slaughtered and sold for skin and meat. Six states still host these killing contests: Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. Roundups are driving some species of rattlesnakes toward extinction. A recent study analyzing 50 years of roundup data found eastern diamondback rattlesnakes in sharp decline due to roundup pressure and habitat loss. Rattlesnakes play a key role in the food web, especially in terms of rodent control. And roundups are harmful to many species, not just rattlesnakes. To catch snakes for the event, hunters spray gasoline into tortoise burrows, destroying the burrows and often killing the animals inside. More than 350 species depend on tortoise burrows for food and shelter. Roundup organizers claim that hunters no longer use gassing to catch snakes, but in January 2010, wildlife officials in Georgia apprehended four men who had gassed fifty tortoise burrows to collect snakes for the rattlesnake roundup in Whigham. Although roundup organizers claim that the events provide environmental education, no meaningful wildlife education—emphasizing the importance of saving native species—is provided. Handling venomous snakes in front of the public and then killing the snakes is the opposite of wildlife education. Nor do roundups protect public health. There are many more annual fatalities in the United States from dog bites, lightning strikes, and bee stings than from venomous snake bites. And in fact, the majority of snake bites occur when humans try to capture or kill snakes—so rattlesnake roundups themselves endanger public health by encouraging the public to do just that” (http://www.biologicaldiversity. org/campaigns/outlawing_rattlesnake_roundups/). 28. Clark, “Social Lives of Rattlesnakes,” 36. 29. Silko, Turquoise Ledge, 86. 30. “How Dangerous Are Rattlesnakes,” rattlesnakes.com. 31. Silko, “How to Connect to Nature.” 32. This experience is familiar to many who understand that “sacred” objects or what anthropologists consider “artifacts” and now housed or imprisoned in museums still have a spirit and energies that are not easily explained. As Amanda Cobb reminds us, many tribal museums have taken into consideration that “many cultural objects are alive rather than inanimate and often require curators to allow them to ‘breathe’ rather than suffocate in sealed plastic containers” (493–94). See Cobb, “National Museum of the American Indian.”

Chapter 4 1. Lincoln was half Mesquakie and Winnebago, Dalottiwa was Mesquakie, and Poweshiek was Mesquakie and lived on the settlement near Tama, Iowa.

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2. Beverley, “The Real Thing,” in Gugelberger, The Real Thing, 280. 3. This is comparable to Frank Linderman, who specifically wants a woman’s story when he interviews Pretty-Shield. 4. I use “Fox Woman” because there is no other specific name to use. This underscores the inherent unequal power relations between indigenous storytellers and anthropologists. In his introduction to the republication of this narrative, Michelson notes that her name is “withheld by agreement” (295). This explanation further illustrates an egregious erasure of an indigenous woman’s selfidentity. She becomes objectified as an “artifact” or “informant” by these linguists and anthropologists. 5. According to Sands, “At the center of kinship systems in matrilineal societies, tribal women may control substantial amounts of property. Tribal societies consider menstruating women extremely powerful, and mature women are held in high esteem for their wisdom and knowledge.” See Sands, “Indian Women’s Personal Narrative,” in Culley, American Women’s Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, 269. 6. For a more comprehensive biography of Linderman, see H. G. Merriam, ed., Montana Adventure; and Celeste River, “The Great Stillness,” in Krupat, New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism, 291–316. 7. See Linderman, Plenty-Coups: Chief of the Crows (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 4. 8. Kent, “Native American Feminist Criticism,” 102. 9. Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 4. 10. For comparison, see Lydia Maria Child’s introduction to Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 3–4; William Still’s introduction to Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (1893), (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 1–3. 11. Gae Whitney Canfield argues for the validity of Winnemucca’s narrative as “authentic” and written by herself based on historical and archival records that are housed in various libraries and collections. See Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca. 12. Bataille and Sands, American Indian Women Telling Their Lives, 21. Brumble, American Indian Autobiography, 61, 71. 13. See Ruoff, “Early Native American Women Authors,” in Kilcup, NineteenthCentury American Women Writers, 84–90, note 28. 14. Daily Alta California, Oct. 23. 1864, “City Items,” quoted in Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 41. It should also be noted that in one letter to the editor, a woman who knew the Winnemucca family reported that Chief Winnemucca had told her he “condescended to making a show of their [Indians] habits” because his people suffered from poverty and he wanted “to raise money to buy food and blankets for his people.” Bancroft Scraps, quoted in Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 41–42.

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15. The opposite image of the princess is the squaw, a derogatory term used to denote the hypersexualization of indigenous women seen as objects of sexual abuse and violence. 16. Daily Silver State, Nov. 28, 1879, reprinted from San Francisco Chronicle, quoted in Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca, 163–64. 17. For a comprehensive overview of the Dawes Act, see Hurtado and Iverson, Major Problems in American Indian History, 369–91. 18. Winnemucca, Life among the Piutes, 77–78. Before this massacre Winnemucca’s tribe had been accused of stealing cattle from their white neighbors in Dayton, Nevada. 19. This parallels with slave narratives and nineteenth-century novels that countered the popular images of black women as impure, exotic whores. In her discussion of the ideologies of womanhood under slavery, Hazel V. Carby states, “rape has always involved patriarchal notions of women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not outwardly inviting a sexual attack. The links between black women and illicit sexuality consolidated during the antebellum years had powerful ideological consequences for the next hundred and fifty years.” Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 39. 20. Ibid., 23. 21. “Impressions of an Indian Childhood,” “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” and “An Indian Teacher Among Indians” were all first published in the Atlantic Monthly (Jan, Mar, 1900). They were subsequently published in a collection of essays and autobiographies, American Indian Stories (1921) with multiple editions thereafter. All citations will be from Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), with a foreword by Dexter Fisher. 22. Warrior, “Reading American Indian Intellectual Traditions,” 237. 23. Reyhner and Eder, American Indian Education, 133. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Smith, Conquest, 36. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Dexter Fisher, foreword to Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories, xv. 30. Ibid., xiv–xvi. 31. Marin, “Speaking Out Together,” 52. 32. Kent, “Native American Feminist Criticism,” 102–3. 33. Browdy de Hernandez, “Writing (for) Survival,” 56. 34. Ibid. Browdy de Hernandez also discusses how contemporary works “replace egocentric monologue with polyphonic, interactive autobiographical discourse, the written equivalent of a chorus of voices from the past, present, and future

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that offer a very different understanding of history than the conventional Euramerican autobiography” (40).

Chapter 5 1. The Zapatista Movement gained international attention on January 1, 1994, the same day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. On that day the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), also known as the Zapatistas, took over five major towns in Chiapas with armed women and men. This incident sent shock waves through the Mexican government, which had no idea that this rebel army had been secretly organizing. 2. Landzelius, “Paths of Indigenous Cyber-Activism,” 11. 3. Belausteguigoitia, “Zapatista Rebellion,” 19. 4. Comandanta Esther, “Comandanta Esther Speech, Congress 2001,” http:// www.schoolsforchiapas.org/library/comandanta-esther-speech-congress-2001/, accessed January 30, 2013. 5. According to Belausteguigoitia, “The Revolutionary Women’s Law contained ten rights for an alternative order, including the right of a woman to be married to a man of her choosing, the right of a woman to be part of the liberation struggle, the right of a woman to be protected from physical attack by either family or strangers, the right of a woman to command the military and to hold political office, and women’s rights to education and healthcare (especially in the area of maternal and reproductive health). These laws represent the emergence of the voices of indigenous women from below. There was an additional right, not specified in these laws but stated repeatedly by Indian women at meetings with other mediators. This right was the ‘right to rest,’ to have time ‘outside’ of work time, to have time enough to reflect and to think. The ‘right to rest’ demand was not phrased inside the movement nor was it included in the Revolutionary Law. It was located even lower, below the postscript and below the surface. This is one of the reasons why we rarely have indigenous women in front of the screen learning how to use technologies such as the Internet. There is no time to rest, to learn, to demonstrate online. Below the letter and behind the ‘face’ of the Zapatista movement there have been mainly male Indian faces and male-authored postscripts. Despite the multivocality of the Zapatista mask, behind it stands an Indian man, not an Indian woman” (“Zapatista Rebellion,” 21–22). 6. Pitawanakwat, “Mirror of Dignity,” 74. 7. Albeit shortsighted, media and international attention was once again focused on Chiapas on February 15, 2016, when Pope Francis visited the Cathedral San

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Cristóbal de las Casas and the tomb of Bishop Samuel Ruiz García, who defended indigenous people and died in 2011. He denounced the systematic way that indigenous peoples have been exploited and participated in what was essentially a syncretic mass blending of indigenous cultural practices with Catholic rituals. But the material inequities and social injustice suffered by indigenous peoples cannot be simply resolved by empty rhetoric and hypocrisy from the Pope who also canonized Junípero Serra on September 23, 2015. Serra’s legacy of establishing missions resulted in the genocide of California Indians, and he is viewed by the descendants of Mission Indians as a murderous torturer who enslaved, starved, and beat indigenous peoples. 8. Belton, “From Cyberspace to Offline Communities,” 193. Belton borrows David Held and Anthony McGrew’s definition of globalization as “a process (or set of processes) that embodies a transformation in the spatial organization of social relations and transactions, generating transcontinental or interregional flows and networks of activity, interaction, and power” (194–95). See Held and McGrew, “Globalization,” in Mingst and Snyder, eds., Essential Readings in World Politics. 9. It should also be noted that there are numerous fraudulent websites that misrepresent and exploit the cultural heritage and identity of indigenous peoples. My assessment and review of these websites has primarily been during my research for a second book project in which I am reviewing the visual-photographic misrepresentations of Native Americans. For example, if you search for “Native American art” or “Native American spirituality,” you are likely to find sites that are not indigenous-centered but rather characterized by New Ageism and cultural appropriation where “plastic shamans” sell, romanticize, and stereotype indigenous identity and culture. 10. http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/01/16/idle-no-moremovement-dummies-or-what-heck-are-all-these-indians-acting-all-indian-ey. On December 10, 2012, National Day of Action, the Idle No More movement gained momentum through widespread media attention as articles, photographs, and videos were spread through cyberspace via social media sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook (#idlenomore). Although this movement came almost one year after the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, and Ross admits that Idle No More may have been emboldened by it, he gives clear reasons why Idle No More is not the Occupy Movement. He states: The Occupy Movement was powerful and necessary—yet the foundation was frankly not strong enough to sustain. Occupy was about a sloweddown economy and a lot of folks who were, unfortunately, out of work from that slowdown. As the economy began to improve in 2012 and also, significantly, the weather got colder, the Occupy Movement got noticeably weaker. As the economy got stronger, the sheer amounts at the Occupy

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events got smaller. Now, it looms very strong in everyone’s psyche, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not; Occupy emboldened the Idle No More Movement, just like Syria, Egypt, and Libya emboldened the Idle No More Movement. Absolutely. Still, Idle No More is NOT Occupy for these reasons: The Primary Reason #IdleNoMore is Not Occupy—Native economies are NOT getting any better. In many of our communities, there is 70 PLUS unemployment—more than a simple “boom and bust” economic upturn can fix. There are structural problems that will prevent a quick-fix, and therefore most Indigenous Idle No More will not have an economic incentive to stop their activism. #2 Reason #IdleNoMore is Not Occupy—We’re Native . . . Hello? You’re not going to scare us off with the cold weather. My friends have literally texted me pictures of sisters and brothers in Alberta and Saskatchewan standing outside with #IdleNoMore signs in -35 degree weather; I have spoken at events where it is freezing and brothers and sisters are outside in t-shirts. If we’re mobilizing 2,000, 2,500 people at an event in the freezing cold in January, just imagine how that number is going to multiply when it’s 65, 70 degrees outside. #3 Reason #IdleNoMore is Not Occupy—Occupy was snapshot response to a 3 year economic downturn. #IdleNoMore is a continued response to more than 500 years of destroying the Earth and exploiting women. The foundation on which we’re building is literally centuries of resistance. Finally, it’s not Occupy because we are surrounding our advocacy around the specific substantive areas that were discussed earlier—protecting the environment and protecting Native women via the Violence Against Women Act. Yes, like Occupy, this is grassroots—the people are fluid and definitely can change. Indeed, the specific subjects that we choose to organize around certainly could change in the future—whatever we need to be Idle No More about. Still, for now fighting against gratuitous exploitation of our lands and fighting against violence against women are areas where good organization can make a difference. 11. The fact that indigenous lands that have been polluted by toxins and desecrated by mass development and uranium mining is uncontested. In addition, there have been numerous oil spills that have polluted our water resources and the pressing issue of environmental racism persists. This ongoing desecration of indigenous land has been widely addressed via the Internet and between nations who realize the power of coalition building and communal struggles against social injustice. 12. www.idlenomore.ca/calls_for_change. 13. Heather Yundt, “How Idle No More Became a Movement,” www.popular resistance.org/how-idle-no-more-became-a-movement/ (October 31, 2013). 14. Karissa Donkin, “Social media helps drive Idle No More movement,” http://

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www.thestar.com/news/canada/2013/01/11/social_media_helps_drive_idle_no_ more_movement.html, accessed January 11, 2013. 15. For further information on this movement see: https://nodaplsolidarity.org and https://twitter.com/NoDAPL. 16. There are currently two websites, older and newer, online: https:// lipancommunitydefense.wordpress.com and http://lipanapachecommunity defense.blogspot.com. 17. http://whenturtlesfly.blogspot.com and http://badndns.blogspot.com.

Chapter 6 1. The following Native American theorists are useful for addressing these complex issues: Jack Forbes, Robert Warrior, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Philip Deloria, Shari Hundorf, Devon Mihesuah, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith. See bibliography for some suggested titles. 2. I base my definitions of “well recognized” and “lesser known” on the secondary sources produced about these works. Obviously, some of these works will be more familiar to others depending on the audience. My experience from teaching undergraduates is that most students are unfamiliar with any of the following writers and narratives: Zitkala-Sa, American Indian Stories; Hopkins and Mann, Life among the Piutes; Hogan, Woman Who Watches; Silko, Storyteller; Shipek, Delfina Cuero; Modesto and Mount, Not for Innocent Ears; Underhill, Papago Woman; Linderman, Pretty-Shield; Wilson, Waheenee; Michelson, “Fox Indian Woman”; and Michelson, “Narrative of an Arapaho Woman.” 3. Mihesuah, American Indians, 9. 4. Mihesuah, Indigenous American Women; Natives and Academics. 5. Allen, Off the Reservation; Sacred Hoop; Cook-Lynn, Anti-Indianism in Modern America. 6. Gibbons and Thomas, dir. Century of Genocide in the Americas; Lesiak, dir. In the White Man’s Image. 7. Smith, Conquest, 52. 8. Dunn and Comfort, eds., Through the Eye of the Deer, xi. 9. Grande, Red Pedagogy, 165. 10. From https://nodaplsolidarity.org/about/: The ‘Dakota Access’ Pipeline (DAPL) is a $3.8B, 1,100 mile fracked-oil pipeline currently under construction from the Bakken shale fields of North Dakota to Peoria, Illinois. DAPL is slated to cross Lakota Treaty Territory at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation where it would be laid underneath the Missouri River, the longest river on the continent. Construction of the DAPL would engender a renewed fracking-frenzy in

NOTE S TO PAGE S 150 – 15 7

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the Bakken shale region, as well as endanger a source of fresh water for the Standing Rock Sioux and 8 million people living downstream. DAPL would also impact many sites that are sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux and other indigenous nations. The DAPL is a massive project being organized by a shady group of the world’s largest fossil-fuel companies and banks. They have offices in cities around the world. Putting direct, nonviolent pressure on the corporations building and funding this project is critical for supporting frontline resistance to DAPL. 11. Lando and Modesto, “Temal Wakish.” 12. Ibid., 5. 13. According to James Rawls, “During the first quarter century following the American occupation of California in 1846, the state’s Indian population declined from an estimated 150,000 in 1845 to less than 30,000 in 1870” (171). He also notes that “60 percent of the population decline in the years 1848–1870 was due to disease” (Indians of California, 175). Regarding the 1863 smallpox epidemic that killed a large number of Cahuilla Indians, see “The Cahuilla,” in Bean and Heizer, Handbook of North American Indians, 575–87.

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INDEX

interconnectedness between humans and, 63; photos of, 62; as protectors, 85; starvation caused by, 169n30; stories of, 77–78. See also specific types Arapaho Indians, 97, 98 Arnold, Ellen, 83 arroyos, 85–87 artifacts, 23, 176n32 assimilation, 50, 105 as-told-to autobiographies, 8–9, 48, 91, 99; as inadequate, 96; by Linderman, 168n21; reading of, 28–29; teaching of, 150–54 atomic bombs, 77, 175n24 Aubel, Katherine, 24 authenticity, 6, 151; of autobiographies, 8, 68; of citizenship, 46, 49; of clothing, 55; of Cuero, 100; doubtfulness surrounding, 162n16; of Hopkins, 103–4, 177n11; questions surrounding, 143, 150; of truth, 60; verifying of, 38 authorial agency, 58

Acoma Pueblo, 57 activism, 131–32 Adams, David Wallace, 141 alcoholism, 13 Allen, Chadwick, 3 Allen, Paula Gunn, 143 All Souls Day (Día de Los Muertos), 64, 174 Almanac of the Dead (Silko), 57, 72 American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 55 American Indian Education: A History (Reyhner and Eder), 113 American Indian Magazine, 118 American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities (Mihesuah), 143 American Indian Stories (Zitkala-Sa), 112–19, 141 American Indian Women Telling Their Lives (Bataille and Sands), 8 ancestral identity, 17 animals: coexistence with, 81; damage to, 88; as friends, 71, 84; as humans, 35; humans relationship with, 18;

193

194

INDEX

authoritative agency, 30 autobiographies: authenticity of, 8, 68; collaboration needed for, 154; comic interpretation of, 35; genre of, 70, 102; as linear, 38; as non-traditional, 72; roots of, 5–6; as survivance method, 119; writing as root of, 5–6; Zitkala-Sa style of, 113. See also as-told-to autobiographies Autobiographies of Three Pomo Women (Colson), 10 “The Autobiography of a Fox Indian Woman” (Michelson), 93–96 bad (myanetwima), 94 Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Miranda), 26, 92, 95–96, 134 Barker, Joanne, 14 Basso, Keith, 41, 49 Bataille, Gretchen, 2, 93 Bean, Lowell John, 32, 151 bees, 84–85 Belausteguigoitia, Marisa, 122, 125, 126 belonging, 41, 47, 82, 167n7 Belton, Kristy A., 127 Beverly, John, 7, 93 big dances (keruks), 30 biological genocide, 114, 157 biological heritage, 2 Bird, Gloria, 19, 84 Bismarck, North Dakota, 133 blogs, 133, 134 blood memories, 7, 87, 121; in blogs, 133; of Cuero, 39; as identity, 13; importance of, 47; of mining in Laguna Pueblo, 76–77; naming and, 45; recuperation of, 95; retelling of, 129; silencing of, 147–48; of Silko, 63, 73; sovereignty through, 11, 126; specialized knowledge and, 145–46; of Zitkala-Sa, 116

“Blood Memory and the Arts” (Mithlo), 2 blood quantum, 13, 143, 164n27 Boarding School Healing Project, 141 boarding schools, 163n25; English taught at, 113; freedom limited by, 108; horrors of, 112–16; irreparable trauma from, 117; overview of era of, 144; as state-sanctioned, 141 Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families (Child), 141 Bonnin, Gertrude Simmons. See Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird) Bonnin, Raymond T., 117 “Books: Notes on Mixtec and Maya Screenfolds” (Silko), 68 “Born from the Need to Say” (Shanley), 15 bridges, 147–50, 172n46 Brill de Ramírez, Susan, 2, 9, 31, 33, 39–40 Brumble, David, 105 Buddhists, 61 Burgess, Marion, 68 California Indians, 25–27, 92, 170nn32– 34, 179n7 Canfield, Gae Whitney, 103–4 capitalist system, trading replaced by, 44 Carlisle Indian School, 68 Carrico, Richard, 45 cartography, 4, 45 celebration, 64, 131 Central Pacific Railroad Company, 107 A Century of Genocide in the Americas: The Residential School Experience, 144 ceremonies, 27, 36, 156–57, 174n16 Ceremony (Silko), 77 chauvinism, 148 Chernobyl disaster, 63

INDEX

Child, Brenda, 141 Christianity, 114, 116–17, 155, 169n30 Churchill, Ward, 114 citizenship: authenticity of, 46, 49; definitions of, 3; demanding of, 110; documentation for, 51; hegemonic definitions of, 111– 12; models of, 17; naming for reclaiming territory and, 39; for Native Americans, 113; new model of, 21; as transborder, 30–31 Clark, Rulon, 80 collective consciousness, 15, 140 collective memories, 18, 23, 99–100 colonialism, 21, 39, 45, 52; as destructive, 67; histories of, 11; as patriarchal, 119; presence of internal, 33 colonialist paradigms, 38 colonial spatial practices, 47, 48 colonization, 2, 84, 159. See also decolonization Colson, Elizabeth, 10 Coltelli, Laura, 57 “Comandanta Esther Speech,” 123–24 community contributions, 5 community service, 137 communo-bio-oratory, 5 communo-blographies, 20, 121 Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Smith, A.), 114, 141 conversive relationality, 9 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 1, 15–16, 17, 143 corporal punishment, 26 cosmic interconnection, 5 Court of Indian Claims, US, 69 Crow Indians, 101 Crying Rock, 26 Cuero, Delfina, 21, 133, 140; authenticity of, 100; birthplace of, 38; blood memories of, 39; death of,

195

49–50; dislocation of, 42–43; echoing of, 101; genealogy of, 42; geographical spaces known by, 40; as informant, 41; interviews with, 31, 36; as keeper of cultural authority, 35; map of known territory by, 45; personality of, 33–34; Pretty-Shield compared to, 102; sacred sites remembered by, 23; son sold by, 44; stories of, 37–50; storyteller denial of, 48; storytelling motivation of, 46 cultural authorities, informants and, 166n4 cultural genocide, 16, 52, 69, 112 cultural knowledge: generations passing on, 48; urgency in passing on, 37 cultural tourism, 142 culture: boundaries of, 162n15; loss of, 112; preserving of, 96; relationships within, 143 culture of sentiment, 105 Curtis, Edward S., 54 Custer, George A., 139 Customs and Border Protection, US, 51 cyber activism, 122 cyclicality, 16, 63 Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), 132–33, 182n10 Dawes Act, 108 Dax, Thomas, 144 death, 116, 158; of ecosystem, from uranium mines, 83; increase in, 169n30; memories of, 64; rebirth and, 76 decolonial methodologies, 10–14 decolonization, 3, 50–53, 135, 147 Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Smith, L.), 3, 10–13

196

INDEX

decolonizing project, 96 dehumanizing, 104, 113 Delfina Cuero’s Autobiography, 17 Department of Homeland Security, 133, 172n41 Department of the Interior and Bureau of Indian Affairs, 77 desecration: of homelands, 76, 181n11; of land, 42; from machines, 86 deterritorialization, 42, 46, 101 Día de Los Muertos (All Souls Day), 64, 174 dialogue, 9; engaging in, 36; as realtime, 134; as strategy, 67; for students, 142 digital borders, 135 displacement, 42–43, 48 documentaries, 144–46 domesticity, 110 Donkin, Karissa, 131 dreams, 30, 156–57 drought, 31 Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (Hogan), 79 Earth Mother, 11 ecocriticism, 18, 74 ecological disasters, 63 economic system, uprooting of, 43 ecosystem: bees as critical for, 84; death of, from uranium mines, 83; rattlesnakes as critical for, 80; water significance in, 61 Eder, Jeanne M., 113 Education for Extinction (Adams), 141 El Capitan Dam, 45 elders, 24, 147, 167n7 encroachment, 40, 42 enemy language, 84, 112 engaged pedagogy, 19 English language: at boarding schools, 113; hypocrisy illustrated by,

115; learning of, 104, 145. See also enemy language environment: destruction of, 63, 67; knowledge of, 64; Native American issues with, 143; protecting of, 86 environmentalism, 142 epigenetics, 14, 164n28 Erdrich, Heid, 147 ethnographic framing, 33 Euro-American culture, 7 excavating machines, 86 exceptionalism, 139 executions, 16 exploitation, 18, 43, 106, 174n4 feminist spatial practice, 18 Fisher, Dexter, 117 Fitzgerald, Stephanie, 35 Floodplain Management Division, 85–86 Flying Doctors, 172n46 forced removal, 172n39; from homelands, 39, 115; of Kumeyaay Indians, 43; of Native Americans, 45, 111, 114, 163n25 For Those Who Come After (Krupat), 4 “For Whom Sovereignty Matters” (Barker), 14 Fox Indians, 98 Gamble, Lynn H., 50 genocide, 1, 39; of California Indians, 179n7; injustice of, 130; legacies of, 83, 149; towards Native American children, 113; resistance to, 135; types of, 114. See also biological genocide; cultural genocide; physical genocide geographical spaces, 17, 40 Gibbons, Rosemary, 144 globalization, 127, 180n8

INDEX

glyphs, 58, 68 Goeman, Mishuana, 53, 164n26 Grande, Sandy, 147–48 Great Sioux War of 1876, 149 grinding rocks, 68, 74 grotesque houses, 77–79 Guassac, Louis, 51 Gyasi, Ross, 130 Harjo, Joy, 19, 75 Harrington, J. P., 92 healing, 144; through ceremonies, 174n16; power for, 154–55; practices in, 37; resistance, survival, 18; strategies for, 159; survival as strategy for, 160 hegemonic historiographies, 2 histories, 2–3; as fractured, 95; as illness, 14; oral and visual representations of, 145; preserving of, 96; social justice movements connected to, 149; teachers of, 146 Hogan, Linda, 3, 4, 140, 149, 163n25, 175n23 homelands, 3–4, 13, 135; desecration of, 76, 181n11; forced removal from, 39, 115; reclaiming of, 47 Hopi Indians, 82 Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca, 18; authenticity of, 103–4, 177n11; brother of, 107; as chief, 106; critique of, 107; on politics, 111; as princess, 106; romanticizing of, 107; storytelling style of, 112 House Made of Dawn (Momaday), 3, 168n10 Howard, Barbara, 72 Humane Society, 79–80 Hyer, Joel, 26 hypocrisy, 108, 110, 115 identities: as ancestral, 111–12; blood

197

memories as, 13; as changing, 5; as civilized, 68; collective consciousness of, 15; complexities in, 138; landscape shaping, 56; loss of, 112; misconceptions around, 142; as moral, 111–12; of Native Americans, 3, 19, 137; photography and Native American, 54; place and, 75; questions surrounding, 147; of self, of women, 177n4; unmapping of, 2; of Zitkala-Sa, 113. See also ancestral identity; tribal identity Idle No More, 130–31, 149, 180n10 “Images Across Boundaries” (Powers), 55 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 172n41 “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” (Zitkala-Sa), 112 Indian Affairs, 45 Indian Child Welfare Act, 163n25 Indian Homestead Act, 170n33 Indian Rights Association, 118 “The Indian with a Camera” (Silko), 56 indigenization, of Internet, 20, 128, 132 indigenous ecology, 18 indigenous epistemologies, 23 individualism, 4, 115 informants, 34, 47; Cuero as, 41; cultural authorities and, 166n4; not naming of, 98 INS. See Immigration and Naturalization Service insects, 22 intercultural collaboration, 5 intergenerational trauma, 78 “Interior and Exterior Landscapes” (Silko), 58, 62 Internet: beginning stages of, 122; indigenization of, 20, 128, 132;

198

INDEX

Internet (continued) indigenizing of, 121; Kumeyaay Indians utilizing, 173n48; misrepresentations corrected by, 128; for revolutionary movements, 125; storytelling through, 128; strategic use of, 124; Zapatistas using, 130 In the White Man’s Image, 144 Ipai. See Kumeyaay Jackpile-Paguate Mine, 77, 83 Jesus Christ, 88, 116 Kappo, Tanya, 131 Kehoe, Alice, 32 Kent, Alicia, 102 keruks (big dances), 30 kidnapping, 114 Kill the Indian, Save the Man (Churchill), 114 Klamath Reservation, 106 Kroeber, Alfred, 92 Krupat, Arnold, 2, 4–6, 99 Kumeyaay: A History Textbook (Miskwish), 25 Kumeyaay Indians, 17, 49; creation story of, 22, 165n1; enslavement of, 169n31; forced removal of, 43; Internet utilized by, 173n48; landscape per, 50; language of, 52; remapping of presence of, 21; sacred area protected for, 166n5; spirituality of, 26; storytelling of, 36; worldviews of, 48 kuseyaay (shaman), 22 Kuuchamaa, 22, 166n5 Laguna Pueblo, 11, 56–57, 76–77, 128, 140 land: desecration of, 42; markers of, 38; Native Americans connection to, 11; ownership of, 40, 49; reclaiming of, 174n16; rights

to, 31; spiritual relationship with, 13 landscape, 23–24; of desert, 73; per Kumeyaay people, 50; photos of, 62; place, belonging and, 41, 47, 82; self-identity shaped by, 56; stories of, 86–87 Landzelius, Kyra, 122 language: as native, 108; revitalization of, 129; translation of, 169n28. See also English language Lesiak, Christine, 144 Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (Hopkins), 103–12 Lincoln, Abraham (President), 16 Linderman, Frank B., 18, 98–103, 168n21 Lipan Apache Indians, 133 Lipan Apache Women Defense, 133 Lippard, Lucy, 55 listening-reading technique, 30 Little Bighorn, 149 macaws, 85–87 “The Man Made of Words” (Momaday), 140 Mann, Mary, 104, 105, 107 maps, as ethnocentric, 46–47 “The Margin at the Center of Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative),” 7 Marin, Lynda, 118 Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (Goeman), 164n26 Marmon, Lee, 56–57 marriage, 98 massacres, 118; of Native Americans, 171n34; Pyramid and Muddy Lakes, 109; Sand Creek, 17; Wounded Knee, 17 Maya Indians, 82, 162n16 memories, 165n1; of childhood, 61; of death, 64; geography

INDEX

triggering, 47; importance of, 145; as internalized, 2–3; naming as proof of reliability of, 42; oral tradition, selfdetermination and, 15; recuperation of, 4; unearthing of, 13; of water, 61 Menchú, Rigoberta, 1, 162n16 mestizos, 43 Mexican-American War, 39 Michelson, Truman, 18–19, 91, 94, 98 Mihesuah, Devon, 19, 137, 143 militarization, 51 Miranda, Deborah, 26, 92, 93, 95–96, 134 “The Mirror of Dignity: Zapatista Communications and Indigenous Resistance” (Pitawanakwat), 125 Miskwish, Michael Connolly, 25 Mission Indians, 25, 26, 37 missionization, 21, 28 Mithlo, Nancy Marie, 2 Modesto, JoMay, 24, 140 Modesto, Ruby, 150–58 Momaday, N. Scott, 3, 140, 168n10 Mother Creator, 64, 67, 84 Mount, Guy, 150–54 mourning, 98 myanetwima (bad), 94 myths, 118, 148 NAFTA. See North American Free Trade Agreement naming, 21; as alternative history, 40; of animate and inanimate, 40; complexity in, 25; informants, as not, 98; power of, 25–28; as proof of memory reliability, 42; for reclaiming territory and citizenship, 39; as resistance tool, 38 “Narrative of an Arapaho Woman” (Michelson), 96–98

199

narratives: nationalism, 148; of native American women and feminism, 119; photography in, 56; as problematic, by Michelson, 94; ruptures in, 35; stories as tool for, 53 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 174n4 Native American Renaissance, 168n10 Native Americans: abuse of, 44; characterization of, 4, 171n34; citizenship for, 113; community of, 140; dehumanizing of, 104, 113; environment issues of, 143; exploitation of, 43; forced removal of, 45, 111; identities of, 3, 19, 137; of Laguna Pueblo, 68; language ability lacking for, 49; massacres of, 171n34; morals of, 108; as narrators, 99; negative representation of, 124; resistance by, 27; romanticized illustrations of, 168n20; as savage, 97; as stereotyped, 54; support for schools for, 107–8; term analyzed by, 161; traditional dress of, 106; Zitkala-Sa as advocate for, 117. See also vanishing Indian Native American studies, 19, 140–41, 148 Native Liberty (Vizenor), 164n26 Natives and Academics and Indigenous American Women (Mihesuah), 143 natural medicines, 37, 97, 151 Navajo Indians, 87 Nevada Testing Site, for nuclear tests, 175n24 New Ageism, 11, 142, 163n23 Nombre, Magdalina, 152 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 179n1

200

INDEX

The North American Indian (Curtis), 54 Northern Piute Indians (Numa Indians), 103 nostalgia, 37, 158 “Notes Toward a Native Feminism’s Spatial Practice” (Goeman), 66 Not for Innocent Ears, 150–54 Numa Indians (Northern Piute Indians), 103 oppression, 50, 57 orality, 5 oral tradition, 144; as dynamic and transformative, 96; locations of, 10–11; memories, selfdetermination and, 15; sovereignty embodied by, 14; stories unearthed through, 41 origin-emergence, 167n7 Ortiz, Simon, 37 Our Spirits Don’t Speak English (Films), 145 outing program, 114 owls, 85–87, 108 pagan dances, 68 Paiute Indians, 108 Partial Recall (Lippard), 55 pass/re-pass cards, 51, 172n41 “Paths of Indigenous Cyber-activism” (Landzelius), 122 Peabody, Elizabeth, 105, 107 petroglyphs, 23, 58, 87–89 photography: of animals, 62; contemporary issues with, 55; fluidity in, 62; of landscape, 62; as narrative writing technique, 67; Native American identity and, 54; Silko fascination with, 57; spontaneity in, 62; as storytellers, 59; in written narratives, 56

photomemories, 18, 56, 60 physical genocide, 16 Pico, Anthony, 31 pictographs, 4 pictorialism, 54, 60 Pinto, Tony, 26 Pitawanakwat, Brock, 125 Piute Indians, 105 place: identity and, 75; landscape, belonging and, 41, 47, 82 plastic shamanism, 163n23 Pomo Indians, 10, 101 power: from dreams, 30; for healing, 154– 55; of naming, 25–28; of snakes, 83; stories, resistance and, 91; of storytellers compared to anthropologists, 177n4; of storytelling, 160; tribal beliefs of women and, 177n5 Powers, Willow Roberts, 55 Poweshiek, Horace, 93 Pratt, Richard Henry, 113–14, 144 Pretty-Shield, 18, 99; agency of, 101; Cuero compared to, 102 Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows (Linderman), 98–103 problematic hero, 8 Public Domain Allotment Act, 170n33 Pyramid and Muddy Lakes massacre, 109 racism, 68–69, 125, 135 radioactive waste, 66 rain, 64 rape, 109–10, 169n30, 178n19 Raramuri Indians, 81 rattlesnakes: ecosystem needing, 80; extinction of, 176n27; medicinal use of, 81; power of, 83; reverence and respect for, 79–84; in Turquoise Ledge, 80; violent roundups of, 176n27 Ray, James, 163n23

INDEX

Reaches for the Wind. See Tate’Iyohiwin, Ellen readers: assumptions of, 10; as incriminated, 110; participation of, 60 “Reading American Indian Intellectual Traditions” (Warrior), 113 realism, 59 rebirth, 76 re-collecting, 3 Red Bird. See Zitkala-Sa Red Pedagogy (Grande), 147–48 Reinventing the Enemy’s Language (Harjo and Bird), 19, 84, 147 remapping, 21, 45 “(Re)Mapping Indigenous Presence on the land in Native Women’s Literature” (Goeman), 53 Renville, Eliza Grey Cloud, 16–17 reservation system, 170n33 reservation system, failure to develop, 45 resistance, 3, 13; forms of, 106; to genocide, 135; of Native Americans, 27; through protofeminist works, 119; to racism, 135; survival, healing and, 18; as tradition, 26; through voice, 116; in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, 73; Zitkala-Sa literature on, 116 revisionist anthropologist, 32 Revolutionary Women’s Law, 125, 179n5 rewriting, 91, 96 Reyhner, Jon Allan, 113 Rich, Adrienne, 126 Richard Henry Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 113 Rinehart, W. V., 106 Robertson, Rosalie Pinto, 26, 49 rock-moving machines, 77 Rowlodge, Jesse, 96–97, 98 sacred sites, 17, 23, 142, 166n5, 167n7

201

Sacred Water (Silko), 18, 56, 59, 60 SAI. See Society for American Indians salvage ethnography, 151, 155 Sand Creek Massacre, 17 Sandoval, Anna, 50 Sands, Kathleen Mullen, 2, 93 San Pasqual band, 168n13 Sarandon, Susan, 126 sarcasm, 59, 102 Sarris, Greg, 2, 9–10, 33, 101 “The School Days of an Indian Girl” (Zitkala-Sa), 114 Secularization Act of 1833, 27 self-determination, 3, 155; incapacity for, 124; memories, oral tradition and, 15; social justice and, 126 Sending My Heart Back Across the Years, 4 sentimentalism, 109 service learning, 148 Seven Hands, Seven Hearts, 145 sexual violence, 97, 109–10, 171n34, 178n15. See also rape shadow catcher, 55 shaman (kuseyaay), 22. See also witch doctors shamanism, 154, 158, 159. See also plastic shamanism Shanley, Kathryn, 15 Shipek, Florence Connolly, 17, 21, 31, 100; living habits studied by, 38; questions formed by, 41; as revisionist anthropologist, 32; San Pasqual band and, 168n13 silence, 19, 34, 35, 102 Silko, Leslie, 3, 15, 18, 119, 133; as agent of history, 54; Almanac of the Dead, 57, 72; blood memories of, 63, 73; “Books: Notes on Mixtec and Maya Screenfolds,” 68; Buddhist dedication of, 61; Ceremony, 77; coming of age of, 62;

202

INDEX

Silko, Leslie (continued) ecocriticism towards, 74; “The Indian with a Camera,” 56; inseparability defined by, 53; “Interior and Exterior Landscapes,” 58, 62; land based language of, 75; law school attendance of, 70; photography fascination of, 57; politics used by, 78; Sacred Water, 18, 53, 56, 59; sarcasm of, 59; Star Beings portraits by, 87; Storyteller, 71, 174n14; storytelling defined by, 144; Turquoise Ledge, 18, 80, 84; as visual artist, 87; writing as non-linear, 89; Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, 11, 56, 67, 73, 140, 160 Sioux uprising of 1862, 16 Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community (Erdrich and Tohe), 147 Smith, Andrea, 114, 141 Smith, Edward P., 45, 114 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 3, 10–13 social justice, 121, 179n7; organizations for, involvement in, 148; selfdetermination and, 126; struggle for, 85 social justice movements, 20; histories connected to, 149; media serving, 122 “Social Lives of Rattlesnakes” (Clark), 80 social media, 20, 125; communal space created by, 128; DAPL influenced by, 132–33; decolonization through, 135; indigenous sites of, 129; nonlinear forms of, 132; social justice movements served by, 122; synopsis of, 121 Society for American Indians (SAI), 117 sociohistorical context, 140

solidarity, 20, 129 songs, 156 sovereignty: adoption of, 15; through blood memories, 11, 126; dedication to, 129; description of tribal, 165n29; importance of, 14; as intellectual, 147; reclaiming of, 50–53; responsibility for, 135 “Speaking Out Together” (Marin), 118 spiritual heritage, 153 Standing Rock Sioux, 132, 149 Star Beings, 68, 87–89 starvation, 169n30 stereotypes, 106, 137, 140, 141–43 Stiya, the Story of an Indian Girl (Burgess), 68 St. Lewis, Joanne, 131 stories, 2; absolute truth in, 93; of animals, 77–78; of Cuero, 37–50; as culture, 92; as healing strategy, 160; intimacy in, 8; of landscape, 86–87; of Modesto, R., 154; as narrative tool, 53; of Native American women, 19, 28–31; pieces of, 98; power of, 68–76, 89; remembering of, 11; spirituality of, 89; of survivance, 68; urgency in, 37, 109 storms, 75 Storyteller (Silko), 71, 174n14 storytellers, 31; context of, 9; photos as, 59; power of, compared to anthropologists, 177n4 storytelling, 10, 21; awareness in, 139; in classrooms, 146–47; as communal, 2, 17, 58, 74, 132, 144; Cuero motivation for, 46; documentaries and, 144–46; fact finding compared to, 42; Hopkins style of, 112; importance of, 12; as indigenous-centered,

INDEX

112; through Internet, 128; of Kumeyaay, 36; nonlinearity, time and, 12; photomemories and, 56; power of, 160; practice of, 3; Silko defining, 144; survivance, healing and, 144; teaching as purpose for, 150; traditional indigenous, 127; truth through, 159 subjectivity, 47, 148 submissiveness, 110 subversive collaboration, 19 suffrage movement, 111 suicide, 13 superstitions, 117 survivance, 162n5; autobiographies as method for, 119; as cyclical, 67; interrelationships and, 63; knowledge and, 11; through nature, 85; resistance, healing and, 18; story of, 68; storytelling, healing and, 144; strategy for, 34 Sycuan band, 50 Tamez, Margo, 133 Tarahumara Indians, 81 Tate’Iyohiwin, Ellen (Reaches for the Wind), 112 Tecate Peak, 166n5 temporality, 149 territorial integrity, 15 territorial rights, 14 territory, 11, 14–15, 39, 45 terror, 4 testimonios: as contemporary, 109; as genre, 161n1; use of, 145; as writing form, 7 Thing, Julia Meza, 51 Tipai. See Kumeyaay toads, 63 Tohe, Laura, 147 tools: ancestors leaving, 74; books as,

203

69; lies as, for cultural genocide, 69 traditions: of cartography, 46; as chronological, 155; honoring of, 174n10; of indigenous storytelling, 127; of resistance, 26; of silence, 34; as stolen, 163n23; as transnational, 64 Trail of Tears, 13 treaty lands, 133 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 170n32 tribal identity, 7, 164n27 tribal memories, 24 tribal museums, 176n32 tribal myths, 101 tribes, 5; federal recognition for, 143; intimate connections with, 151–52; movement of, 23 truth, 3; as authentic, 60; as communal, 144; in stories, 93; through storytelling, 159; telling of, as critical, 104 Tucson, Arizona: mountains in, 73; as segregated, 71 Turquose Ledge (Silko), 18, 68–76; empowerment and justice in, 70; as non-linear, 72; rattlesnakes in, 80; snake mural in, 84 Umna’ah, 154 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), 133 United States (US), 14, 68–69 unity, 159 unmapping, 52 uranium mining, 76–77, 83 US. See United States US-Mexican war, 103 vanishing Indian, 56, 100, 151

204

INDEX

victimization, 141 Viejas tribe, 31 Vizenor, Gerald, 34, 162n5, 164n26 voice: agency of indigenous, 127; as communal, 156; diversity of, 129; negating of native, 162n16; resistance through, 116 Walker, Alice, 126 War Department, 113 Warrior, Robert Allen, 113 water: contamination of, 65–66; need for sources of clean, 130; pollution of, 181n11; power of, 64; rights to, 31; as sacred, 65 Water Clan, 64 Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner (Cook-Lynn), 16 Wilken-Robertson, Michael, 50 witch doctors, 22, 30, 166n3 witchery, 79 The Woman Who Watches Over the World (Hogan), 4, 149 women, 2; bodies of, 3; duties of, 94; feminism and narratives of, 119; life stories of, 19; as objects of sexual violence, 178n15; as passive, 102; resisting violence against, 130–31; rights for, 179n5; self-identities of, 177n4; sexual violence towards, 109–10; tribal beliefs of power of, 177n5 Women’s National Indian Association, 118 Wong, Hertha Dawn, 2, 4 Woody, Elizabeth, 145

World War II, 14 Wounded Knee Massacre, 17 writing: as autobiography root, 5–6; without editorial assistance, 112; as empowering, 69; forms of, 7; as gift, 88; judicial system relationship with, 69; labels of, as influential, 175n23; Silko style of, as nonlinear, 89 Yakima Reservation, 111 Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (Silko), 11, 140; introduction to, 56, 67; power of stories represented in, 160; resistance in, 73 Zapatista Declaration of War of 1994, 125 Zapatista Rebellion, 122, 179n1 “The Zapatista Rebellion and the Use of Technology: Indian Women Online?” (Belausteguigoitia), 122 Zapatistas, 122, 130 Zap Women and Creatividad Feminista, 126 Zen Buddhism, 61 Zitkala-Sa (Red Bird), 18, 140; as advocate for Native Americans, 117; American Indian Stories, 112–19, 141; autobiography style of, 113; blood memories of, 116; identity of, 113; kidnapping of, 114; myths dispelled by, 118; resistance literature of, 116; “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” 114