Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture 9780801458804

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Mapping the Americas

Mapping the Americas The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture

Shari M. Huhndorf

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2009 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2009 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huhndorf, Shari M. (Shari Michelle), 1965–   Mapping the Americas : the transnational politics of contemporary native culture / Shari M. Huhndorf.    p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8014-4800-3 (cloth : alk. paper)   1.  Indians of North America—Ethnic identity.  2.  Indians of North America—Politics and government.  3.  Indian arts—North America. 4.  Eskimos—Alaska—Ethnic identity.  5.  Eskimos—Alaska—Politics and government.  6.  Inuit—Canada—Ethnic identity.  7.  Inuit— Canada—Politics and government.  I.  Title.   E98.E85H84  2009   323.1197—dc22 

2009000524

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For Enrique and our amazing children Rita, Emilio, and Miguel

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Note on Terminology

xiii

Introduction: Native American Studies and the Limits   of Nationalism

1

1. C  olonizing Alaska: Race, Nation, and the Remaking of Native America

25

2. “From the Inside and through Inuit Eyes”: Igloolik Isuma Productions and the Cultural Politics of Inuit Media

71

3. I ndigenous Feminism, Performance, and the Gendered Politics of Memory

105

4. P  icture Revolution: “Tribal Internationalism” and the Future of the Americas in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

140

viii    Contents

Coda: Border Crossings

172

Works Cited

179

Index

193

Illustrations

1. E  xhibition poster of drawings from the 1890s by Eskimo students, 1928

27

2. Cascade Court, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909

54

3. Official seal of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909

56

4. “Educated Eskimos”: official postcard of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909

58

5. “ Igorotte Baby from the Phillipines [sic] and Eskimo Baby from Alaska”: official postcard of the AlaskaYukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909

60

6. Igorot village, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909

64

7. Eskimo village, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909

66

8. S helley Niro, The Border, 1997 installation at the Longyear Museum of Anthropology, Colgate University

173

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to thank those who have contributed in many and various ways to this book. Numerous friends and colleagues generously read chapters, engaged in critical conversations, suggested sources, offered valuable advice, and provided other kinds of support. I am especially grateful to Rachel Adams, Chadwick Allen, Jean Barman, Jayna Brown, Lynn Fujiwara, Warren Ginsberg, Sangita Gopal, Michael Hames-Garcia, Linda Kintz, Brian Klopotek, Arnold Krupat, Leece Lee, Jeffrey Ostler, Jeanne Perreault, Beth Piatote, Scott Pratt, Irmary Reyes-Santos, Richard Stein, Martin Summers, Analisa Taylor, Cynthia Tolentino, Tania Triana, Henry Wonham, and David Vázquez. Invitations from Eric Cheyfitz and Faye Ginsburg led me down paths that ended in two of the chapters, while Jeane Breinig, Michael Hames-Garcia, Patricia Penn Hilden, Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, Robert Dale Parker, Beth Piatote, and Cheryl Suzack provided opportunities to develop and refine my ideas. I owe special debts to Karen J. Ford, Dalia Kandiyoti, and Cheryl Suzack for their substantial intellectual engagement with this project. Timothy J. Reiss has provided support over

xii    Acknowledgments

many years that enabled me to undertake this research. Patricia Penn Hilden remains my most important adviser and intellectual inspiration, and she has influenced all that follows. Funding from the American Association of University Women, the Oregon Council for the Humanities, and the University of Oregon provided necessary time for research and writing. At Cornell University Press, I am grateful to my editor Peter J. Potter for his exacting critical attention to the manuscript and for guiding it through the acquisitions process. Two readers for the Press, who remain anonymous, offered astute comments that improved the work immensely. I thank Ange Romeo-Hall and Amanda Heller for fine copyediting that clarified my ideas as well as my prose. Carol Ann Lorenz at the Longyear Museum of Anthropology, Colgate University, provided images of Shelley Niro’s installation The Border and granted permission to publish them. My deepest gratitude belongs to my family. My parents, Roy and Charlene Huhndorf, and my sister, Charlsie Huhndorf-Arend, have always provided unwavering encouragement. Enrique Lima has been a loving supporter and generous interlocutor. He is also my toughest critic, and his thinking has deeply influenced my own. My work on this book coincided with the arrival and first years of our daughter, Rita, and our twin sons, Emilio and Miguel. For me it will always be tied up with the joy and wonder they have brought into our lives.

Note on Terminology

Throughout this book I use “Native,” “indigenous,” and (less frequently) “aboriginal” more or less interchangeably, usually in lieu of the narrower and more contested term “Indian” (which does not include, among other groups, Alaskan Eskimos and Canadian Inuit, the subjects of the first two chapters). Reflecting conventional usage among Native peoples, I use “Eskimo” in the Alaskan context and “Inuit” in the Canadian one. “First Nations” refers specifically to Canadian indigenous communities. All of these terms, of course, are products of colonization that are used to distinguish indigenous peoples from Europeans and, more recently, to denote their common historical and political situations, but they fail to indicate the diversity among them. When referring to particular indigenous societies, I use tribal names.

Introduction Native American Studies and the Limits of Nationalism

“No More Sacrifices” (1980), a mixed-genre work of history, autobiography, poetry, and traditional narratives by the Acoma writer Simon Ortiz, begins with a conflict of place-names. “I was raised in McCartys which is one of the small villages in the Acoma community,” Ortiz writes. “The people say Aacqu. Aacqumeh hanoh, we call ourselves. New Mexico and U.S. maps say Acoma, The Sky City. . . . U.S. and New Mexico maps and tourist bureaus do not know the Aacqumeh hanoh’s name for the local community. It is Deetseyamah—The North Door” (47). These opening lines juxtapose the community’s name for itself, an act of self-definition underscored by the phrase “we call ourselves,” with the name that appears on official maps, conventional instruments of colonial possession. This conflict of names sets in motion clashing stories about the Southwest that unfold throughout the work—stories about the land, contemporary life in the region, and the social relations that portend its future, their differences shaped by rival indigenous and European interests. “No More Sacrifices” focuses in particular on the stories, largely unknown and untold outside

2    Mapping the Americas

Native America, that render the place meaningful to the indigenous communities that call it home. In this way it defies the colonial erasure of Native peoples exemplified by absences on the map, and it traces a continuous indigenous presence on the land that challenges U.S. possession. Ortiz thus draws together a number of issues—indigenous land claims, pan-tribal connections, and the critique of colonialism—which, as I shall show throughout this book, have preoccupied other Native writers and artists beginning in the 1980s. They mark a shift away from the nationalist orientation that has dominated critical work in Native literary studies, toward a more “transnational” perspective. Nationalist literature and criticism are primarily concerned with the cultural distinctiveness and political autonomy of individual tribes and with the redrawing of community boundaries after colonization. Although Native art and literature since the 1980s similarly engage issues of landownership and political control, they do so in a context that has been increasingly shaped by global—­ that is, transnational—movements of capital and empire which have refashioned indigenous cultural expression along with social and political structures. In Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture I show how continuities and contradictions between these two orientations—the national and the transnational—have shaped Native cultural production, first historically, then with a focus on fiction, performance, photography, and film of the 1980s and 1990s. Specifically, I examine both the possibilities and the limits of indigenous nationalism and transnationalism first in cultural events surrounding the acquisition of Alaska by the United States, then in the Arctic films of Igloolik Isuma Productions, feminist performances by indigenous women, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s monumental novel Almanac of the Dead. Transnationalism, as I use the term here, refers to alliances among tribes and the social structures and practices that transcend their boundaries, as well as processes on a global scale such as colonialism and capitalism. Concentrating on the connections that tie indigenous communities together rather than on the boundaries that separate them allows me to raise questions about gender, imperialism, class, and the worldwide circulation of culture which have garnered little sustained attention in Native literary studies. Such a focus challenges us to rethink critical assumptions that remain rooted in the literature of earlier decades.

Introduction    3

Throughout Mapping the Americas I read Native literature and culture in relation to the new, “postnationalist” American studies. My goal in doing so is to engage critical tendencies in Native American studies, and American studies more broadly, that emerged beginning in the 1980s but are rarely brought together in dialogue. While the field of postnationalist American studies has offered powerful critiques of U.S. national myths and imperial ventures, it has paid little heed to Native America, thereby extending the colonial erasure of indigenous peoples.1 The transnationalist viewpoint in Native American studies makes possible a critical analysis of the ways in which colonization has reshaped Native societies, culture, and modes of resistance, as well as an examination of the challenges that indigeneity poses to global capitalism, empire, and the colonial nationstate. Up to this point the parallel transnational tendencies in American studies and Native American studies have actually worked at cross­purposes: as pan-tribal alliances direct attention to internal colonialism in the United States and its connection to global imperialism, American studies deflects attention from these ongoing processes of conquest. What I am asking is, what happens to American studies if you put Native studies at the center?2 Ironically, this absence of colonial critique also characterizes Native literary nationalism, the critical discourse that has come to the fore since the mid-1990s. Nationalist approaches cohere around the conviction that Native literary studies must be shaped by indigenous perspectives, especially those rooted in traditions and campaigns for tribal sovereignty. Although nationalism is an essential anticolonial strategy in indigenous settings, nationalist scholarship neglects the historical forces (such as imperialism) that increasingly draw indigenous communities into global contexts. The concern of nationalism with cultural and political restoration deflects questions about the economic, environmental, and social changes that ongoing

1.  I refer here to the scholarship that constitutes the mainstream of postnationalist American studies. There is, however, a small but growing body of work by Native scholars that situates itself, at least in part, in American studies and challenges these dominant tendencies. My point is not to diminish the significance of this important work but rather to show its marginality, especially in the new American studies’ critical engagement with U.S. imperialism. 2.  I am reprising the title of Mary Helen Washington’s 1997 presidential address to the Ameri­ can Studies Association, “Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?”

4    Mapping the Americas

colonization has brought to Native America. These influences include patriarchy, a key European legacy across the Americas. Literary nationalism itself has been a predominantly male endeavor. Nationalist critics have devoted little attention to writing by Native women, especially those works that attend to issues of gender, and they have thereby reinforced the marginalization and political containment of indigenous women under colonialism.3 The ways in which colonization has positioned indigenous women demand a feminist rethinking of Native politics and culture, a task to which nationalism is inadequate. Mapping the Americas, by contrast, places front and center the questions that emerge from transnational analysis. Situating indigenous cultural production within these broader historical and political frameworks opens an array of critical possibilities. Analyses of gender run throughout the chapters that follow, in discussions of the role of patriarchy in colonization, figures of Native women in colonial national origin stories, and the emerging transnational politics of indigenous feminism. Questions of culture— including visual forms of expression along with more familiar literary topics—are also woven throughout this book, focusing attention on the connections between cultural practices, colonization, and indigenous resistance. I address these subjects by analyzing U.S. and Canadian Native literature, film, performance, and photography, with a special emphasis in chapters 1 and 2 on the Arctic, an area that has received little attention in Native studies despite its large indigenous populations and its cultural vitality. Identifying national boundaries as colonial impositions, my crossborder analysis points to the challenges indigeneity poses to nation-states as it expands the range of Native studies, which has focused most heavily on the U.S. Plains, the Southwest, and the Southeast. And I consider how the histories of other places, not always defined by the treaty relationships that are central to the nationalist paradigm, reshape scholarly inquiry in the field. I hope thereby to broaden the political concepts

3.  This is evident in the underrepresentation of women writers in works by nationalist critics, their judgments as to which writers best represent nationalist ideals, and the issues they focus on in their analyses. For some the perceived incompatibility of feminism with nationalism and indigenous traditions, along with concerns that gender issues fracture (imaginary) national unity, lead to what the Ojibway literary scholar Cheryl Suzack characterizes as the sacrifice of indigenous women for the sake of the nation. Personal communication, December 17, 2007.

Introduction    5

that have dominated recent critical work in Native studies as well as the geographies that provide its focus.4 As Ortiz’s “No More Sacrifices”—and indeed his writing as a whole— demonstrates, these issues are central to contemporary Native literature and culture. “The unfortunate truth,” admits nationalist writer and scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, “is that there are few significant works being produced today by the currently popular American Indian fiction writers which examine the meaningfulness of indigenous or tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first century” (85). Although Cook-Lynn sees this as a failure of Native writers, her criticism points to the wide spectrum of thematic and aesthetic concerns that fall outside the scope of nationalist understandings.5 I begin with Ortiz in part because he is a contested figure whom literary nationalists have only recently identified as their progenitor (see Weaver, Womack, and Warrior). Theirs is, however, a partial interpretation that neglects the breadth of Ortiz’s political engagement. The gaps between cultural production and nationalist critical paradigms call for approaches that scrutinize the limits of nationalism as they take up the full range of political issues and aesthetic traditions that shape Native culture. In “No More Sacrifices” Ortiz offers a rigorous critique of ongoing colonization in stories about land, the enduring center of indigenous politics. The name “Acoma, The Sky City” itself emerges from a history of invasion that, in Ortiz’s retelling, undermines celebratory myths of U.S. nationalism. In the nineteenth century, writes Ortiz, after indigenous communities in the Southwest found themselves in “the hands of a ruthless, monopolistic U.S. empire” waging a “destruction that was total and undeterred” (56, 58), they grew dependent on wage labor, as mining, railroads, and industry contaminated the water, ravaged the land, and largely destroyed traditional means of subsistence. U.S. national interests rationalized the ruthless

4.  Although transnational approaches and the questions that arise from them have been largely overlooked in published literary scholarship, important emerging work includes dissertations by Enrique Lima and Victoria Bomberry. Both analyze Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, and Bomberry’s work focuses in particular on questions of gender. For an astute analysis of Native literary history that takes account of issues of gender, labor, and cultural appropriation, see Parker. 5.  For a discussion of the possibilities and limitations of nationalism for understanding aesthetic representation, see Leuthold. For an argument for a hemispheric approach to Native studies, see, for example, Hernandez-Avila and Varese.

6    Mapping the Americas

exploitation of Native land and labor which continues today. Ortiz’s title invokes the designation of the “Four Corners” region of the Southwest as a “National Sacrifice Area,” so called because of the nuclear contamination (the combined result of uranium mining and nuclear testing) which has poisoned the land, making it virtually uninhabitable. Such environmental devastation, along with a hazardous, grueling wage labor system, extends a history of land theft and cultural destruction designed to sustain “the momentum of capitalism and its need to be continually profitable” (64). As “No More Sacrifices” exposes the violence of U.S. nation building, it weaves together personal reminiscences and traditional Aacqumeh stories to reveal the indigenous meanings of the land. Contradicting histories that commence with Europeans winning the West, it tells a story of older indigenous settlement and contemporary indigenous survival. Because these stories illustrate deep, long-standing ties to the land, they carry profound implications for questions of present-day possession. “No More Sacrifices” was originally published in 1980, a time of shifting political currents. In Native America the activist years of the 1960s and 1970s, when Ortiz’s writing first appeared, marked a high point of cultural and political nationalism. As this period waned, transnational indigenous endeavors gained momentum. Both national and transnational concerns find a place in “No More Sacrifices.” Although stories about Aacqu form its center, the work recounts colonial histories as well as contemporary problems of land loss, poverty, class, and environmental exploitation that cross tribal and racial lines. It recalls that such ties across boundaries of nation, culture, and language drove the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, the pan­indigenous uprising joined by African slaves against “the oppressive rule of the civil, church, and armed guard of the Spanish colonialist” (57).6 At its conclusion, Ortiz foresees contemporary rebellions based on similar alliances among indigenous peoples and “the poor and workers of this nation” (71). “No More Sacrifices” thus registers the growing importance of transnational issues and the powerful possibilities they present for resistance. The works of indigenous literature and culture of the 1980s and 1990s that I discuss in the chapters that follow expand the critical questions raised by Ortiz as they draw out the political implications of 6.  Fight Back, the collection in which “No More Sacrifices” first appeared, commemorates the tricentennial of the Pueblo Revolt.

Introduction    7

transnationalism. At the same time, these works illustrate the enduring importance of indigenous nationalism and its uneasy relationship with transnational endeavors.

Nationalism and the Transformation of Native American Literary Studies Because of the unique histories and legal status of indigenous communities, political sovereignty arguably constitutes the most pressing issue in Native North America. Consequently, to a greater degree than related fields, Native studies remains grounded in questions of nation. Little understood outside Native studies, indigenous nationalisms have roots in the pre-contact autonomy of Native communities, the relationships these communities subsequently developed with American nation-states, and their contemporary social place as the original occupants of the land. Native communities in the United States, as David Wilkins explains, “are nations in the most fundamental sense of the word. That is, they are separate peoples inhabiting specific territories that they wield some governmental control or jurisdiction over” (45). This inherent status is enshrined, however contradictorily, in the treaties, public policies, and laws that developed over centuries of interaction with Europeans. Federally recognized tribes hold the oxymoronic status of “domestic dependent nations,” a term coined in the 1820s and 1830s “Marshall trilogy” of Supreme Court decisions, which now constitute the linchpin of federal Indian law and provide tribes with legal grounds to assert self-determination, resist forced assimilation into the dominant society,7 and guard their cultural and geopolitical boundaries.8 Although this legal status is specific to the United States, efforts to achieve self-determination unite indigenous communities globally. The “politics of Aboriginality,” as Roger Maaka and Augie Fleras define them, 7.  In the nineteenth century, as the Indian wars drew to a close, federal policies increasingly emphasized assimilation through mandatory boarding school education, missionization, and allotment of reservation lands; these found twentieth-century counterparts in termination, relocation, and ever more restrictive definitions of Native identity. See, for example, Deloria (1985). 8.  This is especially true because indigenous people constitute only a small portion of the total population (about 1 percent in the United States and 3 percent in Canada) and confront the constant threat of engulfment.

8    Mapping the Americas

“revolve about the key issue of self-determination—or more accurately, Aboriginal models of self-determining autonomy. Central to all Aboriginal aspirations . . . [is] the injustice of alien rule in contrast with Aboriginal aspirations for self-government that reflects indigenous realities” (228). Always integral to Native politics, nationalism, reshaped against the background of global decolonization and the activism of people of color in the United States, gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s. Treaty violations and impositions of state control incited Red Power activism, most famously the American Indian Movement (AIM), which spawned new policies of self-determination in education, the justice system, and economic development (see, for example, Ponting, Deloria and Lytle).9 In Canada, where the federal government accords First Nations less autonomy, judicial decisions during this era paved the way for land claims in subsequent decades (see Franks 2000b).10 Ultimately this “drive for nationhood,” as Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford Lytle explain, aimed to achieve “some kind of parity with the other nations of the world, as each tribe believes it had prior to contact with Europeans. . . . Here the idea of peoplehood transcends the contemporary political organizations and speaks to generations of people, people past and people yet to come” (242). This “idea of peoplehood” suggests the importance of culture, in both traditional and contemporary forms, in Native nationalisms. Not only does cultural distinctiveness relate to political autonomy, but also indigenous traditions provide models for re-creating societies that oppose the colonial order.11 Traditional culture occupied a prominent place in the literature of the 1960s and 1970s (hence the label “Native American Renaissance”), and

  9.  For a history of this period, see Smith and Warrior. 10.  The different status of First Nations in Canada stems in part from the legislative dominance of the assimilationist Indian Act. For a brief comparison of policies affecting indigenous people and their status in the United States and Canada, see Franks 2000a. 11.  Taiaiake (Gerald) Alfred describes, for example, the central importance of traditions in militant Kahnawake (Mohawk) nationalism beginning in the 1970s: “The Kahnawake case has demonstrated that through the revitalization of traditional indigenous cultural symbols, and the re-implementation of key elements of traditional indigenous political institutions, the Mohawks were able to construct a viable alternative ideology in opposition to further integration into the Canadian state. The re-emergence of traditional values and principles in Kahnawake nationalism is an important indicator of the fact that, in terms of both identity and institutions, ethno-nationalism in the Native context is more than rooted in the past—it is the present mani­ festation of a continuous assertion of national self-determination” (1995, 14, 178).

Introduction    9

some writers drew direct connections between their work and indigenous activism.12 While these connections cut across literary genres, the novel in particular treated themes of reconstructing individual and communal identity in stories about protagonists who either literally go home to the reservation or else figuratively return by reclaiming traditions. “Homing in,” William Bevis argued in an early essay, is “the primary story” of the Native American novel, and these returns reflect a tribal sense of identity, the value placed on the past, and a collective rejection of assimilation (582–84).13 Such return narratives, in Arnold Krupat’s terms, are “realist legitimations of nationalism” (1996, 39). Leslie Marmon Silko’s celebrated 1977 novel Ceremony is among the works of fiction that best exemplify this pattern. Ceremony tells the story of a soldier’s reintegration into his home community of Laguna Pueblo after his service in World War II. Tayo returns physically ill and haunted by memories of violence, an affliction that stems not only from his wartime experiences but also from his longtime alienation from the traditional Laguna world. The mission schools and the church, with which he was involved in the past, represent historical assimilationist policies, which the novel exposes as forms of colonial destruction. Tayo’s ceremonial healing entails re-creating his ties to the community and relearning its traditions. His reintegration culminates in a scene in which he tells stories to elders in the kiva, the spiritual and spatial center of Laguna. In Ceremony, such returns provide a necessary defense against ongoing colonization, and the novel’s emphasis on storytelling (both traditional stories and their revision as the novel itself   ) underscores the importance of culture in these endeavors. Although indigenous nationalism reached its high point in the 1960s and 1970s, it remains central in Native politics and has more recently coalesced as a literary-critical position that develops analytical concepts based on indigenous epistemologies, traditions, and campaigns for political sovereignty. Finding parallels between academe and the broader social 12.  The label “Native American Renaissance” comes from the title of Kenneth Lincoln’s 1983 book. Hanay Geiogamah, founder of the American Indian Theater Ensemble in the early 1970s, for example, defined this first all-Native company as “a component of the overall movement to achieve true equality and self-determination” (cited in Brown 173). Consequently, some of the group’s performances depicted activist events of the era, such as the occupations of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee in Foghorn. 13.  Here Bevis is citing Lincoln.

10    Mapping the Americas

situation that compels indigenous activism, literary nationalists maintain that colonial dynamics which privilege European issues and authority have shaped Native American studies and disconnected the field from indigenous communities. They aim to shift the focus of intellectual work to those issues that are most pressing for Native peoples.14 The ethnographic approaches that previously dominated literary interpretation, for instance, displace political questions, locate the importance of indigenous culture primarily in engagement with the West, and replicate colonial structures of authority that perceive Natives as informants and non-Native critics as the producers of knowledge. Most critically, such approaches neglect urgent matters within Native America. “The beauty of sovereignty,” Craig Womack writes, “is that it liberates tribes from anthropologically based cultural definitions by recognizing them as legally defined political entities, thus providing an alternative to the problem of ahistorical essentialist modes of analysis” (2006, 111). The primary task of contemporary writers and critics, argues Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, should be to “examine the meaningfulness of indigenous or tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first century” (85) and to consider what “fictive mythmaking has to do with the reality of their [the tribes’] post­ colonial conditions as nations of people” (89), a description that encompasses the various projects of nationalist critics. The first full-length work of nationalist criticism, Robert Warrior’s Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (1995), adapted activist discourse to argue that Native scholars must exercise “intellectual sovereignty” by determining the critical terms of Native studies and using intellectual work to address social issues within Native communities (see also Weaver 1997). Other scholars have undertaken to unite literature and the politics of nation building by exploring the connections between traditional culture, tribal identity, self-representation, and political autonomy. “Tribes recognizing their own extant literatures, writing new ones, and asserting the right to explicate them constitute a move toward nationhood,” argues Womack, because “a key component of nationhood is a people’s idea of themselves, their imaginings of who they are” (1999, 14; see also Justice). This powerful constellation of purposes grounds Native literature in history and politics, and it

14.  For an overview of critical tendencies in the field, see Huhndorf (2005) and Cheyfitz (2006).

Introduction    11

thus undercuts a tendency of culturalist criticism, as Maureen Konkle has observed, to elide Native legal and political claims (35).15 Even as these assertions of autonomy and distinctiveness render indigenous nationalism a subversive force, it nevertheless remains an inherently limited, contradictory mode of anticolonial resistance. Arif Dirlik warns against positioning the local (in this case the tribal) solely as a site of resistance: not only is the local itself shaped by rather than outside of global capitalism and imperialism, but “in its promise of liberation, localism may also serve to disguise oppression and parochialism” (22). Even a cursory examination of indigenous nationalism as a scholarly and activist practice reveals such limitations and exclusions. Nationalist criticism, as I have noted, disregards global social dynamics and colonial critique, often opposing struggles for sovereignty to the interrogation of European ideologies and practices (even though these projects, as I will demonstrate, are inseparable in Native culture).16 At the same time, it neglects indigenous communities that fall outside the legal category of “nation”—those without treaties, for example, or urban communities whose histories render “restoration” and political autonomy irrelevant. This creates a paradox within indigenous nationalism because it challenges some colonial relationships while leaving others unquestioned. The problem also surfaces in the treaty relationships on which nationalist paradigms are premised. As nation-tonation agreements, treaties recognize tribes as sovereign entities, but they also implicitly grant authority and legitimacy to colonial nation-states. Thus, within both politics and scholarship, the treaty paradigm simultaneously reinforces and contests colonial national power and boundaries. 15.  Predictably, indigenous nationalisms often generate skepticism and hostility in broader scholarly contexts as they place Native studies outside recent trends in American, postcolonial, and ethnic studies. On Western antagonism toward Third World nationalisms in general, see Lloyd. Indigenous nationalisms in particular frequently draw accusations of essentialism (see, for example, Pulitano). A partial consequence of the broad neglect and misunderstanding of Native issues, these perceptions also signal a defense against the ways indigenous nationalisms, emerging from deep roots in traditional places and cultures, challenge state hegemony and the global political order. 16.  For example, Jace Weaver writes: “[Native American studies] is more than any text or class about Indians or in which Indians play a part. It must seek to understand the material from the perspective of the Natives. . . . History of white/Native interaction told largely or exclusively from the perspective of the settler colonizers is not NAS. As important as exposing and deconstructing non-Native representations of Indians is . . . , ultimately the story being told is about white people. It has little or nothing to do with Natives” (2007, 236).

12    Mapping the Americas

Additionally, nationalism ironically imports problematic political structures and ideologies derived from Europe.17 These include patriarchy as well as the relatively recent acceptance by some tribes of blood quantum and a static notion of culture as criteria for Native identity. Initially imposed by federal Indian policies, these criteria fracture indigenous communities even as they enable them to guard their boundaries. (This problem, which I do not explore specifically in this book, is the subject of a voluminous scholarly literature.) These contradictions reveal nationalism as a perilous strategy for indigenous resistance. While indigenous nationalism is in many respects antihegemonic, undercutting state power and supporting Native autonomy, “nation,” in the words of Choctaw historian Brian Klopotek, risks becoming “its own prison, one created on the terms of colonial ideology.”18

The Transnational Turn in Contemporary Native Culture In the same period when nationalism was gaining a powerful hold over indigenous activism and was emerging in scholarship, a number of social changes arose that strengthened the crosscurrents and affiliations tying indigenous peoples to one another, and sometimes to other groups, across boundaries of language, culture, and nation. These changes transformed indigenous politics to emphasize transnational issues and, beginning in the 1980s, heavily influenced cultural expression. In the post–World War II era, Natives moved to cities in record numbers, driven by assimilationist federal programs and drawn by economic possibilities, so that by 1960 urban populations in the United States outnumbered their reservation counterparts.19 These population shifts, which continued throughout the rest of the twentieth century, invert the return narratives in “Renaissance”

17.  Because “self-government is not an Indian idea,” contend Deloria and Lytle, “it cannot be regarded as the final solution to Indian problems” (15). Similarly, Taiaiake Alfred rejects sovereignty as an inherently hierarchical concept that is “incompatible with traditional indigenous notions of power” (1999, 55), while Anne McClintock, writing about nationalism more broadly, argues that it is “constituted from the very beginning as a gendered discourse” (354–55; see also my analysis in chapters 3 and 4). 18.  Personal communication, November 17, 2007. 19.  Although Canadian indigenous populations have undergone the same shifts, a smaller proportion (over 40 percent) now resides in urban centers.

Introduction    13

novels, and Native writers, as we shall see, have revised this literary paradigm to reflect the new reality. At the same time, tribes are increasingly being drawn into global relationships that render it ever more difficult to understand them as isolated or autonomous entities (see Ponting and Symons, Stewart-Harawira). Finally, changes in the international political arena, including decolonization and the struggle against fascism, set the stage for the transnational indigenous peoples’ movement, which is facilitated by Internet communication and has often centered on organizing through the United Nations (see Niezen).20 “International law and the human rights movement,” Ronald Niezen explains, provide “the source and place of nurturance of the concept of ‘indigenous peoples,’ giving rise to a new global identity . . . [and] opening up new strategies of resistance to the centralizing tendencies of nation-states” (xvi). Common histories of colonization and shared relationships to the land that predate the arrival of settlers provide a foundation for such global political alliances and compel a “commitment to find stability and restorative justice—even if it means using the very tools of literacy and law that, in other hands, are responsible for their oppression” (23).21 While the transnational indigenous movement is largely bound to local, even national, concerns, it brings to the fore issues that extend beyond the tribal. Women’s organizing, for example, has gained significant momentum in this new constellation of relationships (see Delgado-P. 38), suggesting the possibilities that transnationalism creates for indigenous feminism.22 These alliances have substantially reshaped public perceptions of Native issues. Indeed the concept of “indigenous peoples” itself gained its current meaning only in the 1980s because of these new forms of organizing (Niezen 2–3, 46).

20.  The dramatic increase in the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) associated with the United Nations, Niezen observes, marks the growing importance of transnational indigenous organizing. In 2000 the UN listed 441 NGOs dedicated to indigenous issues (see Niezen 42–44). See also Delgado-P. 21.  Similarly, the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development observed that the “growing need for cross-border solutions to domestic concerns” and the “continuing impact of globalization on Native American communities” mean that Native peoples are more often “reaching beyond their own territories and beyond the confines of U.S. law into the international arena” (83). 22.  The EZLN, popularly known as the Zapatista movement, perhaps provides the bestknown example of this constellation of purposes. A pan-indigenous revolutionary group that has declared war against the Mexican state, it includes in its revolutionary law a strongly feminist declaration of women’s rights.

14    Mapping the Americas

Although they have come to the fore in recent decades, anticolonial indigenous alliances have a long history. Ortiz’s “No More Sacrifices” demonstrates that they reach back to (and even beyond) the seventeenth century, the period of the Pueblo Revolt. Pan-tribal military alliances, most famously those led by Metacomet, Pontiac, and Tecumseh, find a twentiethcentury corollary in the flourishing of pan-Native political organizations throughout the United States and Canada, many of them fostered by the boarding school experience (see, for example, Hertzberg). While such organizations have frequently supported nationalist endeavors, they cohere around points of common interest among indigenous communities as well as issues that extend beyond discrete social boundaries. This was true even at the zenith of nationalist activism in the 1960s and 1970s, when George Manuel coined the term “Fourth World” to denote the shared predicament of indigenous peoples globally (see Manuel and Posluns).23 The American Indian Movement, for example, advocated for non-tribe-­specific issues such as education, housing, and health care in addition to treaty rights. But pan-tribal alliances during this period remained fragile, Deloria and Lytle explain, because of inconsistencies between the goals of traditional people, who “preached the doctrine of tribal integrity,” and those of urban Indians, who created community identities and common political cause by setting aside tribal differences (236). These conflicts exemplify the political shifts that concern me here, illustrating how Native politics is increasingly characterized by tensions between transnational and national endeavors. Despite these conflicts in the 1960s and 1970s, pan-tribal alliances subsequently coalesced into international organizations that gained prominence in the decades that followed (Niezen 42). Although they figure more prominently in the period under discussion in this book, transnational issues find an important, though largely overlooked, place in earlier cultural production, including the works of Simon Ortiz and even exemplary nationalist texts of the “Native American Renaissance.”24 Silko’s Ceremony, for example, traces the contemporary 23.  For a discussion of the emergence of the “Fourth World” concept and the ways it shaped activist discourse and indigenous theory, see Chadwick Allen’s Blood Narrative, especially “Conclusion: Declaring a Fourth World.” 24.  I should note that these alliances also find a place in nationalist criticism. Although Womack, for example, focuses on the connections between Creek narrative and nationalism, he considers the tribal and pan-tribal dimensions of Joy Harjo’s work, and in a final chapter his concern

Introduction    15

connections among tribes that emerge from colonization, recounted in the “witchery” story at the novel’s spatial and conceptual center. Here the destroyers “take this world from ocean to ocean” (1977, 137), ensnaring everyone in the same web of death that explains the novel’s contemporary problems at Laguna and draws the community into lethal global politics. In Ceremony, uranium mining contaminates the community as it provides the material for global annihilation, just as the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were tested in the desert Southwest.25 Initially perceived as evidence of madness, Tayo’s vision of his uncle’s face in that of a dying Japanese soldier realizes these global connections. While the process of Tayo’s healing centers on his reintegration into the Laguna community, it involves his apprehending events at home as part of the same deadly pattern as global historical violence, including the war. In Silko’s 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead (the subject of chapter 4), these global relationships become the foundation for anticolonial revolution. The different emphases of these two seminal novels—the earlier of which puts the community at the center of indigenous resistance while the latter finds revolutionary possibilities in transnational alliances—reflect the transition I am exploring here. By focusing on connections among indigenous communities, Almanac also draws out the implications of pantribal resistance for contemporary colonial nation-states, especially the United States. This brings Native studies into closer relation with other fields engaged in critiques of nationalism and colonialism, including the new American studies.

The Absence of Native America in American Studies Although it has devoted little attention to Native America, the new, postnationalist American studies poses questions about U.S. imperialism and the power and centrality of colonial nation-states that resonate with issues of sexuality leads him to analyze the plays of Cherokee author Lynn Riggs (although Womack does not reflect on the implications of Riggs’s inclusion for his central argument). In addition, Cook-Lynn finds similarities between the works of Native writers and Third Worldists. Less obviously, Warrior’s examination of conceptions of land and community in the works of Deloria and Mathews implies convergences between indigenous worldviews. 25.  For a discussion of these histories in Ceremony, see Zamir.

16    Mapping the Americas

with challenges presented by Native studies. Amy Kaplan’s foundational critique of earlier tendencies in the field links the emergence of American studies in the 1950s to the resilient paradigm of American exceptionalism, the notion of “the ‘uniqueness of the American experience’ as antithetical to the historical experience of imperialism” (4). Consequently, the myth of a monolithic American culture defined by domestic relations provided the initial foundation of the field and obscured the U.S. role in the global dynamics of imperialism and slavery that helped bring about the birth of the nation. “Imperialism,” she argues, “has been simultaneously formative and disavowed in the foundational discourse of American studies.” The new, postnationalist American studies, by contrast, takes as its subject “the multiple histories of continental and overseas expansion, conquest, conflict, and resistance which have shaped the cultures of the United States and the cultures of those it has dominated within and beyond its geopolitical boundaries” (4–5). This focus unsettles conceptions of national identity as stable and homogeneous, and it illuminates the U.S. role in the global dynamics of imperialism that were integral to its formation. Such endeavors, other scholars argue, necessitate taking account of the “perspectives of dominated and excluded classes or groups within America [that] have long helped us to challenge the ideological and nationalist presumptions of American scholarship” (Curiel et al., 11). Of these “dominated and excluded” groups, Native America presents the most radical challenges to U.S. nationalist myths and imperial practices. As the foundational event in American history, the colonization of Native America exposes U.S. identity, from its origins to the present, as constituted through conquest, the imposition of political control, and the appropriation of indigenous lands. Contained by neither geographical region nor time period, this ongoing process cannot be marginalized; it implicates all non-indigenous peoples in that conquest. This history challenges national ideals of freedom and democracy. Because U.S. title to much of the land within the nation’s borders remains tenuous even according to its own laws, Native land claims also disrupt U.S. geopolitical boundaries and counter the global movement of capital and empire that supports colonial nation-states. Furthermore, Native histories upset conventional resistance narratives, since every wave of immigration, whether forced or voluntary, dispossesses indigenous peoples, whatever complicated social relationships

Introduction    17

ultimately emerge from these interactions.26 Thus, while the notion of a multicultural nation of immigrants potentially counters that of a monolithic U.S. culture (see Rowe 2000b, 23–24), both contribute equally to the subordination and erasure of Natives. These ongoing processes of conquest place the United States squarely within the global dynamics of imperialism, while the status of Native communities as “nations within” contests state sovereignty as it unsettles distinctions between the global and the domestic. As the only history shared by all colonial nation-states throughout the Americas, Native conquest situates the United States within hemispheric politics, and it reveals important parallels between U.S. and European expansion. Nevertheless, critical work in the new American studies tends to devote little if any attention to Native America. Even as the “effusions of ‘post-’ and ‘trans-’ nationalism attempt to redress the field’s historical complicity with a now-suspect model of U.S. exceptionalism,” Michael Elliott argues, these tendencies in the new American studies have “shifted attention away from the ongoing colonial relationship between the U.S. and the American Indian tribes within its borders in favor of critical projects that foreground U.S. imperial relations beyond the continent of North America” (157, 159).27 This marginality is evident in, among other places, the underrepresentation—sometimes even the absence—of Native studies in the major works that define the field and of Native studies scholars in American studies departments. Kaplan, to take only one prominent example, symptomatically defines Africa as the repressed “imperial unconscious of national identity” (4)—including the paradigmatic “errand into the wilderness,” a stark instance of the erasure and displacement of indigenous peoples on which “American” identity was built—and she describes frontier history primarily in relation to Chicanos. Most studies that do address Native America focus on the past, leaving unexamined the challenges presented by contemporary indigenous communities. Even 26.  Because indigenous peoples cannot be considered a single, homogeneous group, this is true even of indigenous migrations, as the ongoing Navajo-Hopi land dispute, to take only one key example, attests. On the complicated interrelationships between Native and African American communities, see, for example, Miles and Holland. 27.  Scholars who similarly argue for greater attention to Native America in American studies, though in very different ways, include Bergland, Deloria (1998), Maddox, and Trachtenberg (2004).

18    Mapping the Americas

rarer are works that engage indigenous perspectives. This neglect renders contemporary Native communities invisible and deflects attention from ongoing colonization, including land conflicts, in part by leaving sufficiently intact national narratives and scholarly paradigms such as those of “virgin land” and the “errand into the wilderness” that erase Native peoples.28 It is no coincidence that the postnationalist turn in American studies coincided with increased political threats to Native sovereignty beginning in the 1980s (Wilkins and Lomawaima 8). Critiques of nationalism decenter the nation-state at the very moment when tribes level legal and ethical claims against it, particularly in the form of demands that treaties be honored. In all of these ways, the neglect of Native America risks repeating the disavowal of imperialism that revisionist scholarship takes to task. Thus even the new American studies remains implicated in the colonial histories mapped by Ortiz and other Native writers.29 Among other things, the inattention to Native America in American studies suggests a fundamental conflict between the projects of these two fields. Native American resistance and survival radically challenge not merely American studies paradigms but even the existence of “America” itself (on which “American” studies, despite its postnational turn, continues to depend). At the same time, because of its commitment to cultural distinctiveness and political autonomy, Native American studies resists categorization under the rubric of American studies—or, for that matter, any other field. This creates a predicament for American studies: while the inclusion of Native America risks repeating colonial processes of forced assimilation and incorporation and becoming, in Philip Deloria’s words, a form of  “intellectual imperialism” (2003, 678–79), the neglect of indige­ nous issues extends the erasure of Native people that was integral to conquest. Although it has heretofore neglected Native America, postnationalist

28.  These are commonplace historical paradigms as well as titles of foundational American studies texts. 29.  An important recent example of the ongoing nature of conquest can be found in the U.S. refusal to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, passed in 2007. The United States was joined in its refusal by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, nations with parallel histories of conquest and continuing struggles over indigenous rights. Their objections centered on the declaration’s support of indigenous rights to political self-determination and control over land and other resources. The declaration emerged from the transnational indigenous organizing discussed here.

Introduction    19

American studies nevertheless offers the most promising possibilities in the field for addressing this problem because its questioning of  both the formation and the contemporary geopolitical boundaries of colonial nation-states opens the door for analyses of ongoing Native conquest and campaigns for self-determination. A truly revisionist American studies must engage these issues and define the state itself as a category of inquiry. As the following chapters demonstrate, indigenous transnationalisms in particular extend existing American studies critiques of national identity and imperialism as they radically challenge the histories, geographies, and contemporary social relations that constitute America itself.

Culture and Colonialism in Native America Mapping the Americas takes up questions of transnationalism at the intersection of Native American and American studies by analyzing the role of culture, including literature, in ongoing colonization and resistance in Native North America. Literature is a key site of political struggle in colonial situations. Not only has it been “a constitutive force in U.S. imperialism,” as John Carlos Rowe argues, by obscuring colonial violence and perpetuating national myths and imperial attitudes (2000a, 15), but also conflicts surrounding the ownership and occupation of land, as Edward Said contends with regard to imperial situations in general, are “reflected, contested, and even . . . decided in narrative” (xiii).30 Such interrelated struggles over national history, identity, and possession of land persist in the North American context.31 A vision of the United States, both past and present, without a significant Native presence remains an integral feature of the cultural imaginary, and it obfuscates conquest so as to naturalize European ownership of the land. Native writers have long contested such representations, creating what Michael D. Wilson labels “indigenous narratives of resistance” that challenge ongoing colonization and envision a postcolonial future.

30.  Said, however, barely mentions Native America in his seminal work, reflecting how postcolonial studies, like American studies, neglects this critically important aspect of European imperialism. For an argument for greater attention to Native America in postcolonial studies, see Cheyfitz (2002). 31.  Studies of the representation of Natives in literature include Bellin, Cox, and Maddox.

20    Mapping the Americas

Although the political dimensions of literature have garnered much critical attention, less notice has been paid to visual expression in indigenous contexts. This is true despite the increasing importance of images in colonial studies more broadly and the fact that Natives are among the most commonly represented people in the world, their images circulated in museums, photographs, films, ethnographic displays, and national monu­ ments. The role of visual expression—in colonization as well as indigenous resistance—constitutes a secondary focus of this book. Here, too, Ortiz’s “No More Sacrifices” offers a useful starting point as it illustrates the connections between visuality and Native conquest. The work not only invokes the role of cartography in expansion but recounts other colonial uses of visual and spatial practices as well, including the transformation of indigenous territories into national parks and monuments. Writing about Mesa Verde National Park, Ortiz underscores how U.S. identity depends on the appropriation of indigenous land and the erasure of Native peoples, who are safely relegated to “antiquity.” The park also provides a heinous example of the colonial practice of exhibiting indigenous people, both the living and the dead, in “Esther,” the thousand-year-old body of an indigenous child displayed as a specimen of “U.S. heritage” (49).32 Such displays have commodified indigenous people and transformed them into curiosities, sometimes for pseudo-scientific purposes, while undercutting the challenges Natives pose to the colonial order. It is not accidental that this cultural work takes place on the terrain of the visual. Parallel modes of representation, spatiality and visuality have historically depicted unknown lands and people in ways that facilitate conquest. As maps erase indigenous people and assert European ownership of land, images of Native peoples situate them in colonial social hierarchies. Because the racial ideologies that support imperialism depend on the legibility of bodies, or the idea that physical appearance reveals underlying traits, displaying colonial subjects became a means to establish the

32.  Ishi, the so-called last Yahi, who lived his final years as a museum display until his death in 1916, remains the best-known example and a frequent subject for Native writers. For a moving account of the display of Minik and other Polar Eskimos in the American Museum of Natural History around the turn of the twentieth century, see Harper. Zwick provides a longer history of displays of Inuit, while Rydell (1984) analyzes displays of colonized people more broadly at world’s fairs.

Introduction    21

differences that naturalized inequalities.33 As racial ideologies solidified in the nineteenth century, “live” displays of colonized peoples gained popularity, especially at world’s fairs that in turn influenced photography and film (see, for example, Sekula, Rony, Shohat and Stam 1994). These displays were also gendered, often defining Native women by their sexuality and assigning them social places according to the norms of European patriarchy. The very acts of display and spectatorship themselves objectified and dehumanized racialized peoples as they consolidated white identities across boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and class (see Bennett), even as the ostensibly objective gaze masked the violence of conquest and the complicity of visual forms in that violence.34 Certain aspects of these visual practices are specific to the indigenous context. Popular images have conventionally relied on progressivist racial logic to define Native peoples as inferior to Europeans and to confine them safely to the historical past. They also contributed materially to conquest. Silko describes, for example, the Pueblo leaders’ fear that their “photographs would be used to prosecute the caciques and other kiva members” whose spiritual practices had been outlawed by the U.S. government (1996d, 176). In these and other ways, photography, in James Faris’s words, “became symbolic in the West’s history of conquest, of defeat, of assimilation or disappearance, a force by which white men’s power was validated” (14). Such images thus generate a key paradox: the hypervisibility of Native peoples underlies an abiding social invisibility, the “disappearance” of the “vanishing race” (tropes of conquest themselves emphasize the visual) from the cultural landscape. Rendered timeless and placeless, Native peoples have been stripped of a contemporary political presence and, hence, of any legitimate claims to land. Nevertheless, visual practices are not bound by their conventional uses. Arguably the openness of visual signifiers enables images, to a greater degree

33.  For an analysis of the ways racial ideologies shape visual cultural representations of African Americans, see Harris. 34.  See, for example, Vicente Rafael’s argument that photography serves as a “technology of subjugation” as well as of “disavowal” (77). The “seeing man,” or “he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess,” Mary Louise Pratt similarly argues with regard to colonial rhetorical strategies, is the “main protagonist of the anti-conquest,” or the means by which “European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony” (7).

22    Mapping the Americas

than narrative, to disrupt as well as to reproduce discourses of power (see, for example, Barthes, Chow, and Poole). Indeed, Native writers and artists, as I will demonstrate, frequently refer to visual representations to reveal and potentially neutralize their colonial function, turning these images to subversive purposes. Maps, for example, are recurring motifs as Native artists explore their historical uses and re-create them to support indigenous land claims. These maps are figurative as well as literal, fashioning Silko’s “storied landscapes” centered on indigenous meanings and long-standing Native occupation. In some ways visual technologies are uniquely suited for contemporary Native politics. Their ability to mediate across time and space facilitates historical recovery and the constitution of transnational communities across geographical distances. Additionally, because of the association between visual technologies and modernity, unorthodox indigenous uses counter the progressivist racial logic that predicts the disappearance of Native peoples in modernity and underlies colonial nationalism. Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (as I argue in chapter 4) not only scrutinizes the role of images in the conquest of Native peoples but also uses visual practices, including cartography, to rewrite a history of the Americas that culminates in indigenous revolution. Similarly, Igloolik Isuma Productions (discussed in chapter 2) employs film and cartography to support Inuit land claims, while Native women use performance, with its long history of displaying indigenous bodies, to conceptualize Native feminism (the subject of chapter 3). In the chapters that follow, I analyze literary and visual practices at times as separate, distinct modes of expression that circulate and signify differently, but I am also concerned with the ways writers such as Ortiz and Silko allude to visual materials in literary texts. These analyses position visuality alongside literature as a ground of political contestation that potentially counters the invisibility of Native peoples and redefines their social place. Throughout this book my analyses of images are informed by Deborah Poole’s notion of “visual economy.” In contrast with “visual culture,” which connotes shared meanings within a discrete community, the term “economy,” writes Poole, “suggests that the field of vision is organized in some systematic way . . . [that] has as much to do with social relationships, inequality, and power as with shared meanings and community,” as it “allows us to think more clearly about the global . . . channels through which images (and discourses about images) have flowed . . . across national and

Introduction    23

cultural boundaries” (8). For my purposes, the notion of visual economy is useful because it illustrates that the meaning of images derives in part from their global circulation and their complex role in transnational social relationships, especially colonialism. Because the production, circulation, and consumption of images take place in multiple, intersecting social contexts, this notion opens the possibility of subversive visual practices and different, sometimes conflicting interpretations of images. I depart from Poole in focusing most heavily on indigenous appropriations of visual technologies, the critical engagement with dominant discourses and practices, and the connections between colonialism and the meanings of culture. Considering indigenous practices as part of a visual economy requires taking account of the global political contexts in which images emerge and circulate and situating them in representational traditions across time and space. As the following chapters demonstrate, even as indigenous practices scrutinize and revise European conventions, the long history of colonial representations inevitably influences their interpretations, sometimes in unforeseen ways. *  *  * The chapters that follow cohere around these interrelated questions about indigenous cultural politics, nationalism, and transnationalism at the intersection of American and Native American studies. Broadly speaking, the first two chapters examine the connections between national and global issues, demonstrating how the colonization of Native America brings them into relation to set the terms for indigenous resistance. The next two chapters emphasize conflicts between national and transnational endeavors and the ways each illuminates the limits of the other. Chapter 1, “Colonizing Alaska: Race, Nation, and the Remaking of Native America,” considers how the underanalyzed colonization of Alaska inaugurated the United States’ overseas empire as it redefined relations among Native Americans, other colonized peoples, and nation-states in global terms. Focusing on turn-of-the-century gold rush narratives and displays at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, it sets the stage for subsequent chapters by recounting the indigenous colonial histories that trouble the coherence of the nation-state and established political relationships that shaped late-twentieth-century indigenous culture. Extending this discussion of the Arctic, chapter 2, “ ‘From the Inside and through Inuit Eyes’: Igloolik Isuma Productions and the Cultural Politics of Inuit

24    Mapping the Americas

Media,” analyzes how Isuma’s feature films Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen disclose the vexed relations between the national and transnational in contemporary Inuit politics. While Inuit nationalism and land claims provide a critical context for Isuma’s productions, their global circulation both enables and obscures the challenges these films present to the colonizing society. Chapter 3, “Indigenous Feminism, Performance, and the Gendered Politics of Memory,” further complicates connections between the global and the national in Native politics by examining the emergence of transnational indigenous feminism in women’s performances and the ways these works dispute Native and colonial nationalisms. Chapter 4, “Picture Revolution: ‘Tribal Internationalism’ and the Future of the Americas in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead,” broadens the discussion of the political possibilities of transnational alliances by examining how Silko’s novel turns them into the foundation for hemispheric indigenous revolution as it inadvertently illustrates the limits of transnationalism in indigenous contexts. Mapping the Americas concludes with a brief coda on artist Shelley Niro’s mixed-media installation The Border. In my reading the installation draws together the thematic threads of this book to envision the intersecting national and transnational forces that increasingly animate contemporary Native culture.

1

Colonizing Alaska Race, Nation, and the Remaking of Native America

In 1967 researchers at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History discovered in the anthropology archives an unknown collection of drawings by Alaskan Eskimos (see Phebus). Created by Yup’ik and Inupiaq students in government and mission schools in the 1890s, they were displayed at turn-of-the-century world’s fairs to promote Bureau of Education programs and then transferred to the Smithsonian Institution in 1910, where they were soon forgotten (Collins 8). The drawings illustrate Native perspectives on Alaskan life during a period of sweeping change following the 1867 U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia and the subsequent establishment of a territorial government. In the years immediately following the purchase, most Americans found little of interest in this new territory, popularly disparaged as “Seward’s Folly” for William H. Seward, secretary of state at the time. But all of this changed after the discovery of gold in the 1890s, and hundreds of thousands of fortune seekers descended on the region. Consequently the artists who penned these drawings saw their world transformed more dramatically in a few short years

26    Mapping the Americas

than it had during the entire period of Russian rule. The gold rush commenced an era of settlement and resource exploitation that would culminate in statehood in 1959. If the drawings reflect the beginnings of these sweeping changes, their later transfer to the Smithsonian Institution, the “nation’s attic,” anticipates the story’s end, in which the once distant colony was fully incorporated into the United States. In the museum the drawings became fragments of the U.S. national past, and as “natural” history they represented the fading cultural remnants of a “primitive” people who created, in the words of one Smithsonian archaeologist, “the last major prehistoric art style of the western arctic” (Collins 7). Yet placed in the context of this tumultuous era in Alaska, the Eskimo drawings gain meanings beyond being documents of U.S. history or the ethnographic-prehistoric. Rather their subjects and the circumstances of their creation express ongoing challenges to colonization and the power of the nation-state that tie these Natives to other indigenous peoples throughout and beyond the hemisphere. The drawings depict a wide range of activities constituting both historical and contemporary Yup’ik and Inupiaq life in western Alaska (see figure 1). Walrus, seal, and caribou hunting, along with fishing and whaling, provide the most popular subjects. Often these activities are painstakingly detailed and are at times even instructional: a sequence depicting a walrus hunt, for example, demonstrates the operation of an intricate pulley system, while other pictures show the use of fish traps and weirs. Some allude to traditional belief systems embodied in ceremonies and stories. The drawings thus extend a long history of pictographic art in the region.1 But they also contributed at the time of their creation to the continuity of traditional subsistence and spiritual practices—knowledge that, not incidentally, the mission schools sought to obliterate. Documents of the survival, adaptation, and persistence of individual Native communities, they tell the story of Native life on the land which preceded the newcomers and endures to this day, a story that runs counter to colonial narratives that negate the presence of indigenous

1.  Inspired by pictographic art that used ivory engravings to illustrate various aspects of Eskimo life (see Phebus), these works also inaugurated a new artistic tradition that developed in the twentieth century in the drawings and engravings of George Ahgupuk, Kivetoruk Moses, and Robert Mayokok, which also took as their subjects the historical and contemporary nature of Alaska Native life (see Jones).

Colonizing Alaska    27

Figure 1.  Exhibition poster of drawings from the 1890s by Eskimo students, 1928. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, MNH 1928c.

peoples in order to establish European claims. Placed in this context, the drawings gain profound political meanings that engage ongoing conflicts over land and subsistence rights, thus challenging U.S. possession—a project shared by Native groups throughout Alaska, despite the cultural and historical differences among them.

28    Mapping the Americas

The transformations wrought by colonization and the transnational affiliations among colonized peoples that emerged from these histories are critical contexts for reading Native literature and culture. Not only has colonization helped to define the terrain of contemporary Native politics centered on land and political autonomy for indigenous communities, but also it ties indigenous people in the Americas to one another as well as to other racialized and colonized groups throughout the world. As I show in this chapter, the history of Alaska illustrates particularly clearly the nexus of forces joining colonized peoples in global relationships that defy containment by categories of nation. The young Yupiit and Inupiat who created the drawings shared the assimilationist mission school experience with indigenous peoples throughout the United States and Canada, while Alaska Natives as a group were integrated through colonization into racist social structures and categories that bound them to African Americans in the U.S. South and Filipinos abroad, among others. Throughout Native America these intersecting histories have in turn created anticolonial alliances, the political convergences at the center of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, the subject of chapter 4. Just as the colonization of Alaska redefined the social position of indigenous peoples and the relations among them, it exposes the centrality of conquest to U.S. nation building. The first noncontiguous U.S. acquisition, the Alaska purchase was designed to facilitate global commercial dominance. This is a neglected history that illuminates integral connections between continental and overseas expansion. As I noted in the introduction, these connections stress the enduring importance of indigenous issues in American studies despite their recent neglect even in scholarship on U.S. empire, and they counter understandings of imperialism as an isolated or anomalous period in U.S. history by showing how national identity and geopolitics are always grounded in expansion. Although U.S. imperial endeavors have been (and continue to be) undertaken in the name of democracy, shifts in national ideals to rationalize new forms of expansion instead reveal the primacy of aspirations to political and economic power. At the same time, the racial logic of imperialism exposes contradictions within national ideologies that champion equality as they enact domination and exclusion. These challenges to conventional understandings of U.S. history and identity denaturalize the nation-state itself by revealing the ongoing violence that is integral to its creation and its contemporary coherence.

Colonizing Alaska    29

In Alaska and elsewhere, as the Eskimo drawings illustrate, colonial struggles have played out in part in the realm of culture. While colonial representations of indigenous peoples have been used to support imperialism, Native writers and artists have critically engaged these images, illuminated their political implications, and appropriated Western technologies and representational conventions for anticolonial purposes. In Alaska at the turn of the twentieth century, forms of cultural expression ranging from gold rush stories to photographs to the 1909 Alaska-YukonPacific Exposition helped to redefine the territory as part of the nation as they fostered the material processes of settlement and resource exploitation. As we shall see in the next chapter, when Canadian Inuit a century later adapted visual technologies to support indigenous land claims and nationalist endeavors, they joined other indigenous peoples who have used these same visual and narrative practices to contest ongoing colonization in ways that unite communities across boundaries of nation, culture, and history.

The Alaska Purchase and the Emergence of  U.S. Empire In 1867, when Secretary of State Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia, the popular response was deeply ambivalent. Opponents of “Seward’s Folly” dubbed the region “Icebergia” and “Walrussia,” arguing that its remoteness and barrenness rendered it worthless. But for others, Alaska’s bountiful natural resources more than justified the acquisition. Furs, timber, fish, and mineral resources held the promise of increased trade and economic growth after the devastation of the Civil War. At the same time, because of Alaska’s geographic location, its purchase seemed a logical extension of continental expansion, especially in the historical context of the Indian wars that erupted in the West during the same period. The United States, many believed, was preordained to control all of North America, and as the “last frontier,” Alaska would provide a northwestern stronghold to facilitate this goal. Seward’s purchase, the New York World reported, thus constituted “an advancing step in that manifest destiny which is yet to give us British North America,” a longtime national preoccupation (cited in Welch 108). In 1959, nearly one hundred years after Seward’s purchase, Alaska was granted statehood.

30    Mapping the Americas

If, in the 1860s, the acquisition of Alaska seemed to be the latest episode of an expansionist process with origins in the colonial period, in other ways Seward’s plan marked a critical transition in this history. Alaska was the nation’s first noncontiguous acquisition, separated from the western states by rugged terrain and vast distances. (Later in the century, gold seekers had to travel up to 1,700 miles from Seattle, depending on the route, to reach Alaska’s easternmost goldfields.) Other factors distinguished Alaska from previous acquisitions. While earlier expansion had aimed primarily to obtain land for European American settlement, the Alaska purchase contributed instead to the emerging goal of U.S. commercial dominance in the Pacific, one of Seward’s obsessions. “The main importance of this acquisition,” in the words of a popular newspaper, “grows out of its bearing upon our future trade with Japan, China, and the other countries of Eastern Asia” (cited in Welch 108). In the decades that followed the Alaska purchase, especially from the 1890s on, U.S. global interventions were increasingly characterized by indirect political control aimed at securing economic advantages. This set the stage for U.S. foreign policy throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, in stark contrast with the “lower forty-eight” states, Alaska has functioned primarily as a colony for resource extraction and the facilitation of international trade, as well as a strategic site for military bases (see Haycox). The Alaska purchase, then, links internal colonialism with overseas imperialism because it represents a continuation of earlier U.S. expansionism while marking a transition to the growing emphasis on global commercial empire in the late nineteenth century. The region provided, in the words of one of Seward’s prominent political contemporaries, a “drawbridge between America and Asia,” an apt metaphor for its geography as well as for its economic and political role (cited in LaFeber 1963, 29). Not only would Alaska enable strategically placed military sites to support U.S. commercial dominance, but also its purchase anticipated the emergence of what Walter LaFeber labeled “the new empire” inaugurated by the acquisition of the Philippines, Guam, and other Pacific possessions three decades later. This history provides a means of exploring changes in national policy and identity during the mid- to late nineteenth century that made possible the incorporation of Alaska and set the stage for overseas imperialism, a transition that was necessarily both political and ideological. Empire, as William Appleman Williams asserts, has long been an American “way of

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life,” a “combination of patterns of thought and action” that “defines the thrust and character of [U.S.] society” (4). In the latter part of the nineteenth century, both thought and action shifted, facilitating the emergence of new imperial forms that reshaped popular understandings of the nation’s identity and its role in the world as they also transformed the lives of indigenous people in these new colonies. Expansion had been integral to nation building since the colonial period. The United States was descended from one of the most powerful empires in history, and European settlement throughout the Americas was achieved through conquests of Native peoples. Moreover, from the middle of the seventeenth century, the settlers engaged in imperial wars with European nations that laid the groundwork for the massive territorial acquisitions of the following two centuries (LaFeber 1963, 2–3). Predictably, then, the rhetoric of empire was built in to the nation’s foundational discourse. U.S. identity pivoted on European Americans’ “civilized” difference from “savage” Indians (see Pearce), and landed expansion became essential to a society founded on the promise of boundless opportunities, economic growth, and democracy—a notion articulated as early as the 1750s by Benjamin Franklin. If this expansion seemed at odds with republican ideals, a governmental structure based on reciprocity and political representation appeared to resolve this contradiction and, in practical terms, provided a means to administer populations dispersed across vast geographical areas (LaFeber 1972, 10 –11). In the nineteenth century, manifest destiny—the notion that U.S. expansion was divinely ordained—served as a “national ideology” that, Anders Stephanson writes, constituted “a whole matrix, a manner of interpreting the time and space of ‘America’ ” (5). When John O’Sullivan coined the phrase in 1845 in the context of the events leading to the U.S.-Mexican War, he contended that the United States would inevitably “overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions” (cited in Stephanson xi). Although O’Sullivan gained fame as the originator of the term, his ideas were far from original. The expectation that the nation would one day encompass the entire continent had roots in the colonial period, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, the notion that U.S. national identity depended on the perpetual struggle to settle “empty” land was commonplace. In the 1890s, the decade that saw the emergence of overseas imperialism, these ideas found their most

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famous spokesperson in Frederick Jackson Turner. His 1893 frontier thesis speech reflected back on the settlement of the “Great West,” while his declaration that “free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement explain American development” and “promot[e] democracy” threw into doubt the nation’s future after the completion of continental expansion (Turner 31, 53). The sense of crisis inherent in the closing of the frontier provided an implicit rationale for overseas acquisitions as the century drew to an end (see Drinnon). Although overseas imperialism did not emerge as national policy until the 1890s, global commercial empire had been a goal since the early years of the nineteenth century, when American agriculture began to rely on foreign markets (see, for example, Van Alstyne 1972a). These markets grew increasingly necessary and desirable as the century wore on until, in the 1890s, their acquisition was among the most compelling reasons for overseas expansion. Seward, the architect of the Alaska purchase, was the pivotal figure in this transition. For him, “the common interests of empire” served a range of political purposes. In 1854, early in his Senate career, he announced that empire would “bind the Union together,” repairing the social schisms wrought by slavery; in addition, it would inevitably lead to “the control of this continent” and, eventually, to “the controlling influence in the world” (cited in Van Alstyne 1972b, 120). Of these goals, attaining global commercial dominance was perhaps the most critical because, in his assessment, “the nation that draws most materials and provisions from the earth, and fabricates the most, and sells the most of productions and fabrics to foreign nations, must be, and will be, the great power of the earth” (cited in Crapol and Schonberger 186). With this in mind, the United States implemented its first trade agreement with China in 1844, and interest in overseas markets intensified over the next decade after the acquisition of the Pacific Northwest and the development of the national industrial economy and infrastructure. Seward then set his sights on Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Canada as steppingstones to global economic dominance. With the exception of the 1867 Alaska purchase, Seward’s grand imperial plans came largely to naught, at least in the short term. But the Alaska purchase, as well as the evolution in foreign policy inspired by Seward, laid the foundation for overseas imperialism in the decades that followed. As the century drew to a close, economic changes within the United States rendered the need for foreign markets increasingly urgent. By the

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1890s the nation led the world in agricultural and industrial production, and this fact, combined with the completion of a continental railroad network and a series of crushing depressions culminating in 1893, made overseas commercial empire seem an obvious, and perhaps the only, means of ensuring domestic prosperity. In many ways the events of 1898 extended, rather than departed from, earlier forms of continental expansion. In mid-century, Oregon and California had been described as “windows to the Orient” because, after the completion of the transcontinental railroads, they provided strategic sites for expanding U.S. commercial and naval power in the Pacific (Crapol and Schonberger 191–92). The justifications for overseas acquisitions sounded remarkably similar: Hawaii, Guam, and the Samoan Islands offered “sea lanes” for trade as well as sites for military bases. “A strong foothold in the Philippine Islands” would enable the United States to “take a large slice of the commerce of Asia” (Crapol and Schonberger 197). But these later acquisitions sat uneasily with the notion of manifest destiny, which initially applied only to continental North America, and they inaugurated new political relationships between the United States and its colonies that carried implications for national identity. In earlier eras, proponents of expansion had reconciled colonialism, however uneasily, with republican ideals by providing for equal participation and political representation. Democracy, nevertheless, had always supported white hegemony, and race provided an efficacious justification for genocide, slavery, dispossession, and disenfranchisement. But the contradictions between democratic ideals and racist practices proved more resilient in the context of overseas expansion, in part because imperialism seemed increasingly incommensurate with the nation’s self-conception. While the founding fathers were, for the most part, unapologetic about their territorial aspirations, their successors found colonialism difficult to reconcile with democracy; Americans, as John Carlos Rowe describes the contradiction, “are shaped by a powerful imperial desire and a profound anti-colonial temper” (2000a, 3). As a result, nineteenth-century expansionists obscured their imperialist practices and attempted to recast conquest as benevolence ( Williams viii–ix). The problem of annexation without representation provided a compelling argument against overseas acquisitions because it bore an uncomfortable resemblance to European imperialism, the system against which the colonies had rebelled. As a result, empire, in

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the words of  William McKinley, was “foreign to the temper and genius of this free and generous people” (cited in Stephanson 90). Overseas expansion thus entailed a fundamental paradox: to preserve democratic institutions, the United States could acquire territories only as full members of the union; but successful political incorporation depended on racial homogeneity, which would inevitably be compromised by these new acquisitions. Clearly American identity was bound to change (Stephanson 90, 100–102). This possibility had troubled Benjamin Franklin in the middle of the previous century, leading him to warn that “Scouring our Planet” and “clearing America of Woods” could, to ill effect, “darken its People” (cited in LaFeber 1972, 13). A century later O’Sullivan echoed Franklin’s caution by identifying homogeneity as essential to an enduring empire. In the following years, racial issues thus weighed against the annexation of Mexico. In the 1890s opposition to annexing Hawaii and the Philippines similarly mobilized around racial anxieties (see LaFeber 1963, 363, and Stephanson 78). Changing national ideologies and racial discourses offered a critical means of resolving—or, perhaps more accurately, obscuring—this contradiction by recasting the nature and implications of overseas expansion. Manifest destiny, by now an integral part of the nation’s self-conception, was adapted to explain new events. Whereas it had once denoted national destiny confined by continental boundaries, now, in Stephanson’s words, “the American mission was reconceived as a kind of civilizational imperialism under Anglo-Saxon impress,” a destiny “imagined more in historical than spatial terms” (67, 125). This “civilizational imperialism” relied on a social evolutionary racial discourse that drew heavily on the work of Herbert Spencer, who adapted Darwin’s ideas to explain hierarchies in human societies. For Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest,” societies proceeded through sequential stages from anarchic savagery to despotic militarism and ultimately evolved into industrial capitalism. Race determined the capacity for advancement and accounted for hierarchies in biological rather than social terms. Moreover, history advanced only through the inevitable struggle between savagery and civilization: superior racial instincts had, throughout time, driven the white race to expand and colonize, while the weaker races inevitably succumbed by perishing or else, in the case of those at the higher end of the evolutionary scale, became more civilized. Such struggles, even when they took violent forms, ultimately benefited colonizer and colonized alike. For the colonizer, struggle

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provided a means to avoid stagnation and degeneration, while colonial domination helped the colonized, who were themselves innately incapable of proper self-government, ascend the ladder of evolution. Empire, in circular fashion, constituted both proof of and a means for attaining racial superiority. Not only did this explanatory framework carry implications for U.S. imperialism abroad, but it reflected on struggles at home as well: racial whiteness served as a unifying identity that ostensibly trumped class divisions and naturalized domestic racial hierarchies.2 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, this logic freed the United States to realize Seward’s vision of global empire. If the Alaska purchase constituted a turning point in the establishment of U.S. global empire that links it to continental expansion, it also reveals the complicated nexus of material and cultural practices that facilitated this transition, transformed national identity, and accomplished the incorporation of Alaska, a process that began in 1867 and accelerated around the turn of the century. More than any previous event, the discovery of gold redefined Alaska in the national imaginary and set the stage for the events that would lead to statehood sixty years later. Gold rush narratives of the period marked and helped to achieve this transformation by drawing Alaska and its Natives into the U.S. national realm. But the gold rush did not merely define Alaska as the source of great wealth and a desirable place for settlement, however temporary. It also linked exploitation of domestic resources to the emergence of the United States as a global power in the twentieth century, a relationship that would emerge as a theme in the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition a decade later. As the exposition illustrates, the new status of the United States positioned Alaska Natives in the intersecting realms of national and international politics, creating links with other colonized peoples within and outside the nation.

The Gold Rush and the Incorporation of Alaska Alaska officially became an American colony in 1867, but the transformations that set the stage for statehood occurred gradually over the course of several decades. The problems that arose in the process had long troubled 2.  For an overview of social evolutionary thought, see Stocking, esp. chapter 6. Stephanson discusses Spencer’s ideas with a particular focus on their myriad political implications.

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histories of  U.S. expansion. A homogeneous population, as Franklin, O’Sul­ livan, and other political luminaries had observed, was a necessary foundation for national unity, especially since the United States encompassed territories across a vast geographical area. Alaska posed particular difficulties in this regard. The few Russians who had resided in the territory mostly departed after U.S. acquisition, leaving a population made up almost completely of Eskimos, Indians, and Aleuts living in small villages. The European cultural influences that remained were largely Russian: some Natives spoke the language, and a larger number practiced a religion that combined Russian Orthodox and traditional elements. (Nearly a century and a half later, this is still the case.) Alaska’s remoteness augmented the problems created by these racial and cultural differences. Although nationhood depended in theory on fundamental similarities that preexisted the inclusion of new territories, in the case of Alaska incorporation involved creating such similarities for the sake of establishing colonial control, a process that unfolded in intersecting political, economic, and cultural realms. Too distant and formidable to attract large numbers of white settlers, Alaska initially drew only those with an interest in its natural resources, as well as the few government officials needed to administer the new territory. Shortly after the treaty with Russia was signed, the opportunities for great wealth began to bring miners to the region, and venture capitalists, seeing potential in Alaska’s fisheries, soon followed; later in the century, the famed Harriman expedition generated scientific knowledge about Alaska that contributed directly to resource exploitation (see Goetz­ mann and Sloan, Grinnell). The army became a prominent presence as well; in these early years it oversaw a territorial government that heavily emphasized economic development, commerce, and navigation (Coates 146). Beginning in the 1880s, Alaska’s great natural beauty enticed growing numbers of tourists. In 1884 the Organic Act established a rudimentary civil government, and the following year the Bureau of Education opened the first schools in Alaska. White settlement and the development of the territorial administration proceeded gradually until the final years of the century, when gold was discovered in the Canadian Klondike. In 1898 major strikes in Alaska brought 200,000 prospectors in a frenzy that rivaled the California gold rush half a century earlier. In the next two years alone, the value of their discoveries surpassed $50 million (Haycox 203–5).

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Stories of fantastic wealth spread rapidly and catapulted Alaska into the national limelight. For Alaska Natives, such fortune seeking and its consequences were in many ways familiar. Beginning in the 1740s, Russian fur traders had violently conscripted Native workers (mostly Aleuts), destabilized communities, and threatened their subsistence base, ultimately forcing the sea otter and other furbearing animals to the brink of extinction. These problems persisted throughout the Russian era, and as the gold rush commenced, it similarly threatened subsistence resources and the survival of entire communities, in part by pressing Natives into wage labor. But the gold rush also created new problems. However harmful Russian incursions had been, they had drawn only a few hundred traders and administrators to Alaska. The vastly larger number of gold seekers brought devastating epidemics and initiated land conflicts virtually unknown during the Russian period. In addition, the gold rush increased the U.S. government’s commitment to developing the industrial infrastructure and attracting the new residents required to maintain it. Consequently the permanent population more than doubled in the few years following the first gold strikes, making whites the majority and expanding their settlements over a broader area of the state, unlike the Russians, who had mostly confined themselves to the coastal regions (see Drucker). These changing demographics transformed social relationships between Natives and the newcomers and soon led to Jim Crow–like segregation supported by a rapidly expanding territorial government. In 1905 the Nelson Act mandated a “dual system” of segregated education for Native and non-Native children, while theaters, restaurants, and other businesses either barred Natives or created “whites only” sections (see Cole 2002). Signs warning “No Natives or dogs allowed” remained commonplace even after the 1945 passage of the antidiscrimination bill, which was driven in large measure by Native protests, officially abolished segregationist policies in Alaska (although the bill, of course, did not eliminate myriad other racist practices). Exclusive hiring procedures, wage disparities, and other formal mechanisms of discrimination were the norm. The situation of Alaska Natives, as one World War II correspondent aptly observed, was “equivalent to that of the Negro in Georgia or Mississippi” ( Joseph Driscoll, cited in Cole 2002, 315). Natives constituted (and still do) a significant part of the population, but such structural hierarchies as well as more informal daily

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practices enabled the newcomers to establish a racially exclusive “American” society in Alaska that facilitated their own interests, especially the exploitation of resources. Cultural production played a critical role in these economic, political, and social transformations. Around the turn of the twentieth century, stories of the gold rush, along with other popular and mass culture events, redefined the region in the U.S. imagination as a site for tourism, settlement, resource development, and, eventually, formal political inclusion through statehood. Gold rush narratives—some by luminaries such as Jack London, others by journalists writing for national magazines and newspapers, and most by obscure prospectors—garnered large audiences among those who aspired to try their own luck in the goldfields as well as those who simply craved good adventure tales. These popular stories about the “last frontier” rewrote the region’s history as an extension of previous U.S. acquisitions, thereby transforming Alaska into a quintessentially American place. Among gold rush narratives, William B. Haskell’s Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold-Fields, 1896–1898 was among the most popular tales, in part because it was deemed a reliable account for prospective miners. “The east is being flooded with worthless publications about the Klondike,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 1897, but Haskell’s book distinguished itself from such spurious, sensational accounts by providing detailed information about his years of hard-won experience in the goldfields (Cole 1997, 19, 22). The story commences with Haskell’s flight from eastern society, for which he was clearly unfit, and it unfolds as a somewhat conventional autobiography of self-realization in the West. It is part history, part travel narrative, part geography, and part natural history—a generic ambiguity that frequently characterizes autobiographies of this kind and establishes their truth value. The text’s ostensible reliability had consequences beyond earning it a wide readership. Two Years in the Klondike, as the editor of the reissued edition describes it, “has been a major source for every thorough history of the gold rush era in the past century” (Cole 1997, 18–19). Haskell utilized a wide range of materials to construct a literary narrative that itself achieved significance in the realms of history and politics. As part of the larger body of gold rush literature, the story contributed to the shifting meaning of Alaska and the sweeping social changes that transformed the territory at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Critics of the 1867 purchase had seen Alaska as a remote and mysterious land with few significant connections to the United States, and this attitude persisted as the gold rush commenced. Haskell took this perception as a central problem of his narrative. In language that evokes centuries of European discoveries and appropriations of hitherto unknown lands, Has­ kell writes that “a large part of Alaska is entirely unexplored, is a real terra incognita” (Haskell 536). Accordingly, the project of the book is to render the unknown known in order to promote settlement, and thereby, in the words that conclude the narrative, to transform the territory into “our own Alaska” (558). To this end Haskell undertakes a literal and metaphorical project of mapping. The opening pages of the book include two maps: one shows the entirety of Alaska (with the exception of the westernmost Aleutian Islands) and the adjacent regions of the Northwest Territory with the Klondike goldfields spanning the U.S.-Canadian border; the second, smaller image details the goldfields themselves and highlights overland and steamship travel routes. These two images introduce the narrative, which itself undertakes another kind of mapping aimed at rendering the territory familiar, thus subjecting it to control and, ultimately, complete possession. The narrative contains descriptions, often detailed to the point of tedium, of the terrain along the journey and the goldfields themselves, as well as exhaustive information that includes lists of necessary supplies, instructions on how to build a log cabin, the location of known and prospective mines, directions for measuring and filing a claim, weather conditions, and even details of mail delivery. The book in fact frequently reads like an instructional manual, so explicit is its aim to facilitate settlement by prospectors as well as innkeepers, restauranteurs, and other emissaries of civilization. Gold, of course, supplied the most persuasive attraction; Alaska held out the hope of sudden and spectacular wealth, and while Two Years in the Klondike offers no promises, or even the likelihood, of success, its numerous tales of “fortunate ones” as well as its catalogs of Alaska’s vast resources provided incentive enough for many. But for those who were less fortunate in the goldfields or were unable to endure the arduous demands of prospecting, the more mundane tasks of supporting the booming population offered surer possibilities for prosperity. While the immediate purpose of Haskell’s account was to lure settlers north, it also reflects back on the acquisition of Alaska in a way that portends the territory’s future importance. Two Years in the Klondike makes

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several references to Seward’s purchase, concluding near the end that although the purchase “was almost universally decried,” Alaska’s marvelous riches rendered Seward “doubtless even wiser than [he] knew,” for the “future of Alaska may have a great deal to do with society in general” (547). If Alaska’s vast resources had provided the rationale for Seward’s purchase, in the decades to come, Haskell predicted, they would make the territory essential to the nation, as long as settlement ensured their development. But it was not only its resources that made Alaska important. Following conventional western narratives, Haskell describes it as an ideal place for realizing and renewing U.S. national values. In the opening pages of the story he compares Alaska to other “frontier” sites, labeling it part of “the great West” (37). These descriptions define Alaska not simply as part of U.S. geography but as part of the national mythology in which the West embodies American identity and, in the Turnerian tradition, the extension of democracy. The names of the region’s two most spectacular gold strikes, “Eldorado” and “Bonanza,” also place the gold rush within a long history of European discoveries driven by fantasies of riches even as they link democracy with prosperity, both elements of the “American dream.” Indeed, in Haskell’s narrative Alaska is a place that is more “American” even than the continental United States itself. In their quest for wealth, the prospectors create the kind of community that embodies the nation’s self-proclaimed ideals of justice, egalitarianism, and brotherhood, a community founded on the myth that wealth abolishes rather than creates social inequalities. In the mining towns, in Haskell’s words, “every one is on a perfect equality” (165); relationships among the miners are characterized by mutual support and absolute trust because they depend on one another for survival. Despite their perilous circumstances and the constant threat of scarcity, crime is extraordinarily rare, and when it does occur, the prospectors themselves are best able to enact fair and effective punishments. Even the Harvard- and Yale-educated men who number among the gold seekers possess no advantages over those of lesser social standing, because “grit,” shrewdness, determination, and a bit of luck, rather than privilege, are the necessary qualities for success. Remarkably, equality extends even to women, who, though somewhat disadvantaged by their lesser physical strength, frequently fare as well as men in the goldfields. The story describes several successful women prospectors, some of whom even “pass” as men, and to attract women to the

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region, Haskell devotes a number of passages to instructing them about what they should wear and the kinds of work they are best suited to do. He praises the “new woman” over the “mere lady” (406), and in this way Two Years in the Klondike diverges from conventional turn-of-the-century western narratives that buoy male power and diminish the increasing social influence of women (see Tompkins and L. Mitchell). In Rousseauian fashion, the story offers a critique of the hierarchies created by “civilization,” and gender provides a compelling example: women undergo a complete “transformation” in Alaska because, having “thrown off the fetters which civilized society imposes,” they frequently exhibit “fortitude superior to the men” (68, 81). In Haskell’s rendering, Alaska thus constitutes a stark contrast to the overcivilized East from which he flees at the beginning, and like other frontier stories, it offers the possibility of U.S. cultural regeneration and renewal. Yet by contending that the prospectors’ community is uniformly just and egalitarian, Haskell obscures the fact that the incorporation of Alaska into the national domain and the exploitation of its resources necessarily involved displacing and dispossessing Natives. Their very presence challenged the legitimacy of the prospectors’ claims, as did the legal campaigns that commenced immediately after the U.S. purchase. (Alaska Native land claims date to 1867 and continued unabated until the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act [see Berger 22]). While the book’s project of mapping terra incognita extends a tradition of discovery narratives to establish ownership of Alaska’s land, Two Years in the Klondike draws upon racial discourses established through colonialism and slavery to position Alaska Natives as inferiors and to strengthen U.S. claims to the territory. Significantly, the first mention of Natives appears immediately after Haskell’s initial sustained discussion of Alaska’s resources, a conjunction that suggests anxieties over possession. It is worth quoting at length: A few explorers had wandered over some of the rough Indian trails. . . . [F]or several years poorly maintained trading posts had been collecting furs from the Indians, and here and there over the vast region were mission stations which had produced little effect on the dull and dirty natives. Dogs and Indians were the beasts of burden, the dogs being far superior, for, though born thieves, they would work under the lash; but the Indians were lazy, and, after exacting the most extravagant prices for packing over the trails, were

42    Mapping the Americas quite likely to throw down their packs and return home, leaving the explorer helpless in the desolate regions. As all contracts with these Indians included their keeping, and as no one had ever discovered a limit to their appetites when others provided the food, the poor explorer usually found that the Indian packers would eat up all they could carry before going far into the interior. (46–47)

This passage begins by evoking a problem central to Haskell’s text: longtime Indian occupation of the land, of which the trails provide physical evidence, throws into doubt the legitimacy of the explorers’ presence and pursuits. The passage then proceeds to address this conflict through several related strategies. It illustrates the innate savagery of the “dull and dirty” Natives, who, uninspired by the gold frenzy or even by the loftier goals of the missions, were suited only to be “beasts of burden.”3 This portrayal is consistent with the ways Natives usually figure in the remainder of the text: they are “filthy” and “smelly” creatures who are irredeemably lazy, habitual liars, frequently drunk, and too “dull” to be motivated by gold; they are in short “exceedingly poor specimens of humanity” (115). Betraying a fantasy vision of their disappearance, images of death pervade the narrative, including repeated references to Indian fatalities, graves, and funerary rituals, and at one point a description of Natives as “evil spirits.” Their dispossession and marginalization appear inevitable, a function of their innate inferiority rather than of colonial violence. The passage further obfuscates the effects of colonization by inverting the true power relations of these encounters: here it is not the miners who exploit the Natives because of their limitless appetite for wealth but rather the Indians who manipulate the miners by extorting extravagant wages and consuming vast quantities of their food. In other words it is the miners, not the Natives, who are dispossessed and rendered helpless in this encounter.

3.  The idea that Natives’ “savagery” justifies their dispossession has a long history that includes federal Indian law. Perhaps most strikingly, Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), the first of the “Marshall trilogy” of Supreme Court decisions that together formally established U.S. governmental control over what it labeled “Indian Country,” uses “savagery” as an explicit rationale for conquest and the seizure of Native lands: “The tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness” (cited in Clinton, Newton, and Price 4–5).

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Yet in other passages depictions of Natives are at odds with one another, and these contradictions reflect the broader representational tradition that influences Two Years in the Klondike even as they expose the prospectors’ paradoxical circumstances. Although Haskell’s descriptions are overwhelmingly derisive, the text fleetingly mentions occasions when Natives aided the prospectors by directing them to resources (49, 135 ), providing food for their survival (185 ), and at one point rescuing a woman from certain death by pulling her from an icy river (80–81). In general terms, these contradictions exemplify ambivalent colonial stereotypes of noble and ignoble savages with a long representational history. Both roles support colonialism—on the one hand the violent Native and on the other the Native eager to help the newcomers—the first by providing a rationale for violence and the second by indicating the Natives’ assent to their own subjugation. More specifically, these paradoxical descriptions reveal that the prospectors depend on the labor and knowledge of the Natives and, at the same time, on their removal. The few instances when Haskell describes Natives sharing the prospectors’ desire for gold are more difficult to explain. These present conflicts over land and resources as a source of political and representational contradictions, and they threaten to unsettle racialized contrasts between shiftless Natives and enterprising prospectors. Such conflicts also come to bear on place-names, the markers of habitation that evoke the region’s past and thus become sites of colonial contestation. Two Years in the Klondike frequently mentions the Native names of settlements, rivers, mountains, and even the legends that render these places meaningful to their original inhabitants; but in the end, the story always privileges the names given by white settlers. “The traveler finds the names of all the prominent features of the landscape of recent origin,” Haskell states early in the narrative, only to contradict his claim about their newness: “Of course the natives have long had their names for the prominent objects, but they are seldom adopted by explorers” (116 ). This enduring Native presence challenges the inscription of new names and new histories on the land, acts of representation essential to possession. As a result, Haskell repeatedly acknowledges Native names merely to trivialize or disavow their significance: Lake Lebarge, for example, described as a “favorite spot for the Tagish Indians,” has a Native name that the book does not specify (133), while Hammer Creek is known to the Natives as Troan-Dik, a name of “uncertain” meaning (147–48). Haskell refers to

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Indian place-names less and less frequently as the story unfolds, and this is also true of Native peoples themselves. A constant, unwelcome presence in the opening chapters of Two Years in the Klondike, they scarcely appear in the last half of the narrative as the processes of renaming and reinscription, along with the simultaneous erasure of a Native presence, unfold. Further strengthening European claims to the land, the maps at the beginning of the book use only English names, making them both instruments and documents of white possession. Two Years in the Klondike includes a series of twenty-five photographs of prospectors going about their daily lives which serves similar purposes. At first glance the images appear to follow the narrative closely, depicting various points on the journey to the goldfields (“Along the Dyea Trail,” “Rafting Down the Yukon,” “A Long and Hard Journey over the Skagway Trail”), the range of activities associated with gold seeking (“Testing a Stream for Gold”), and difficulties encountered along the way (“A Hard Place on the Trail,” “Snowed In. Waiting for Better Weather”). Because they complement Haskell’s painstaking descriptions of the journey and the terrain, the images facilitate his project of promoting settlement and contribute to the book’s status as a historical “document.” Read together, images and narrative illustrate how white possession and development transform the land. The first photographs depict the arduous journey and meager encampments dwarfed by the harsh landscape. Subsequent photographs show larger numbers of gold seekers and the beginnings of potentially permanent settlements, including a rescue camp and rudimentary “hotel” and “restaurant” accommodations (actually large tents). Nearer the end of the story, photographs represent permanent fixtures of civilization such as a steamer on the Yukon, log cabins, and Canadian mounted police assigned to collect customs fees and to maintain law and order. Together these photographs constitute a kind of documentary narrative that, like the maps, presents the incorporation of Alaska as already accomplished. None of them portrays the land as uninhabited or untransformed by the prospectors, nor do any Natives appear. The photographs, in other words, represent white ownership and transformation of Alaska as an uncontested fact, and in this way they serve, as Allan Sekula says of other images, an “instrumental” function as “visual document[s] of ownership” (6 ). If the story portrays Alaska as a frontier space that cultivates democracy,

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the photographs similarly position the prospectors as the embodiments of national ideals. Haskell’s images work within a nineteenth-century photographic tradition of “illustrious Americans” that, in Alan Trachtenberg’s terms, disseminated “the ideology of American success,” an ideology that “corresponded to an idea of American society shared by the established and the rising classes” (1989, 38). In these renderings, too, Alaska becomes more than a part of U.S. society; it holds out all the possibilities of the “American dream,” an appealing fantasy to a society recently shaken by economic upheavals and political fractures. Yet at the same time, Two Years in the Klondike cannot entirely escape the limits of that dream and the racialized paradoxes of U.S. national mythology, which are strikingly evident in a vignette Haskell titles “A Queer Old Darkey.” In the goldfields, he repeatedly insists, “nearly every nation of the earth was represented and everybody was as good as everybody else,” and this was true not only of women but also of people different “as to color, or previous condition.” To illustrate this point, Haskell tells the story of St. John Atherton, a former slave who strikes a claim that brings him instant wealth. If Atherton’s success seems to prove the social leveling that occurs in the goldfields, his plans for the money complicate the matter: “The daughter of the man who owned him during the war is living [in Atlanta] . . . on the plantation but very poor,” another prospector relates, and Atherton “says he is going back to buy that plantation, and then he is going to have that woman do nothing but live like a lady all the rest of her days” (336–37 ). In using his money and perhaps his labor to support a plantation, Atherton chooses a social position that mimics the hierarchy of slavery. Not incidentally, this vignette also restores the slaveholder’s daughter to the position of a “lady,” a term that Haskell had used earlier to criticize women’s inequality. Atherton’s story, then, embodies a national fantasy in which democracy is reconciled with social inequality because racialized peoples and women opt for subservience, a resonant myth in the Jim Crow era. As Haskell’s narrative reinvents the territory as “our own Alaska” by encouraging settlement and showing it as a quintessentially American space, it draws Natives into the same racial relations that fractured turn-of-the-century U.S. society. Indeed, through Atherton’s story and its representations of Indians, Two Years in the Klondike anticipates the emergence of a segregationist system in Alaska and the racial dynamics that reshaped Native life as the century unfolded.

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These paradoxes of national history and mythology in turn-of-the­century U.S. society grew even more obvious in the following decades as the nation realized its global imperial goals. In a few short years the ostensibly egalitarian communities that Haskell described gave way to large-scale enterprises that changed mining into a corporate industry. This transformation strengthened the U.S. hold on Alaska even as it provided resources for global commercial expansion. The 1867 purchase had marked the transition of the United States to overseas imperialism, and in the early years of the twentieth century the incorporation of Alaska fortified the link between nation building and empire. Once again race played a critical role as the emerging imperial order relied on social hierarchies and ideologies developed during continental expansion to support new national aspirations. These interrelated processes came to the fore at the 1909 Alaska-YukonPacific Exposition, where the United States celebrated past colonial acquisitions and anticipated its role in the new world order. These emerging forms of expansion transformed the lives of indigenous peoples as well. As incorporation extended existing U.S. racial hierarchies to Alaska Natives, it drew them into relation with newer subjects of overseas empire.

Displaying the Colonies at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition On June 1, 1909, in the speech that opened the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, James Hill announced that the occasion marked “the incorporation of Alaska,” with all its marvelous wealth, “into the national domain” (Hill 5). The fair drew inspiration primarily from the gold rush, the most influential event in the transformation of Alaska’s relationship to the United States. In the years leading up to the exposition, more than $5 million of Alaskan gold had passed through Seattle, and fair organizers, including Hill, saw the exposition as a means to encourage development of the “splendid and manifold resources” of the country’s northermost acquisition (Chealander). Development required settlement, so the fair sought to dispel “the prevalent idea of Alaska as a land of snow and ice” and to “show the world that Alaska is no longer a place where only the Eskimo and Indian can live” (Report and Rydell 1983, 56 ). When the success of Portland’s 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition gave these plans momentum,

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organizers decided to expand the Seattle exposition to encompass “all the countries bordering upon the Pacific Ocean” in order to celebrate overseas empire and advance U.S. aspirations to monopolize Pacific markets (Frykman 90). As the “drawbridge” to the Pacific, Alaska was instrumental in acquiring new resources and larger markets. The fair, as one commentator observed, thus inaugurated “a new era of commercial and industrial expansion which should make Seattle the leading trading center of the Pacific rim territories” (Frykman 89). The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, in other words, aimed to carry on the incorporation of Alaska, a process that had accelerated in the final years of the previous century, as well as to help establish the United States as a global commercial power. This latter goal distinguished the Seattle fair from previous exhibitions.4 Emerging out of the related contexts of industrialism and continental expansion, earlier fairs served the interrelated purposes of promoting Western technology, increasing trade possibilities, and securing national economic interests. As the first U.S. mass culture events, they also popularized changing conceptions of nationhood and responded to the conflicts that fractured U.S. society.5 The Civil War, Reconstruction, violent class conflicts, increasing numbers of nonwhite immigrants, and economic upheavals rendered urgent the quest to define a distinctively national identity, and world’s fairs played a crucial role in this process. From the beginning, U.S. expositions had memorialized national historical events, most of them related to territorial acquisitions. These included independence from Britain at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the Louisiana Purchase at the 1904 St. Louis fair, and the Lewis and Clark expedition in Portland in 1905, the event that immediately preceded the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Such reflections on a collective national past aimed to create a sense of

4.  For a pathbreaking analysis of early U.S. world’s fairs, see Rydell, All the World’s a Fair ; my brief discussion here of the Chicago fair is based largely on Rydell’s work. For an analysis of the relationship between Native America and U.S. identity at the Philadelphia and Chicago expositions, see my Going Native (Huhndorf 2001). 5.  Together, admissions for nineteenth-century U.S. fairs totaled 100 million; the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago alone reported 25 million admissions, a figure equivalent to one-third of the U.S. population at that time. Publicity, news accounts, and the sale of memorabilia widened the influence of the fairs even beyond these numbers.

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unity in the present, achieved in good measure through racialized displays rendering “whiteness” an identity that transcended class, gender, and in some cases ethnic differences among European immigrants. At the same time, these expositions drew upon the nascent science of social evolution to explain domestic racial hierarchies, account for internal colonialism, and, at the fairs held in the 1890s, set the stage for overseas imperialism, although they did not address this issue explicitly. The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, by contrast, was the first fair to take as its theme new global forms of U.S. imperialism. “The expositions of the past had a historic motive,” Hill announced in his speech, but the “nation today faces forward, not backward” (1). Specifically the fair aimed to establish U.S. commercial dominance in the nascent “Pacific rim” economy in part through strengthening the nation’s power over its new colonies. Alaska was the centerpiece of the exposition, but the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Hawaii, dubbed the “Crossroads of the Pacific,” featured prominently as well. Together these possessions constituted an emerging constellation of imperial relationships that supplied valuable resources for trade and industry, provided strategic sites for military bases, and in the case of the Philippines in particular, created a gateway to Asian markets. These new aspirations to global commercial empire required the United States to extend the national narrative defined in earlier fairs to incorporate geographically distant and culturally distinct territories. Although proponents of imperialism adapted manifest destiny to these changing purposes, the erosion of territorial and racial boundaries, as well as different ways of incorporating the new colonies, unsettled notions of U.S. identity established at earlier fairs by casting into question the nation’s commitment to democracy and the racially inflected premises of national unity. Although the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition focused broadly on U.S. possessions and trade relationships throughout the Pacific, the vast resources of Alaska, popularly known as the “Northern Empire,” garnered the most attention. At the opening of the fair President Taft announced that “the exposition [is] designed to exploit the natural resources and marvelous wealth of Alaska,” while another observer declared, “Alaska heretofore has been known to the world chiefly for its mineral resources, but the exposition is expected to show that the great territory’s fisheries, furs, and agriculture are equally if not more important . . . [and to ensure that] the almost unknown coal, iron, copper and tin resources of the country

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[will receive] proper exploitation” (“Alaskans”). Consequently, Cascade Court, the main exhibition center, featured opulent displays of the territory’s wealth. In the Alaska Building, visitors found the “biggest, most costly single exhibit at any world’s fair,” a display of Alaskan gold valued at $1.5 million—a mere token of the gold worth $150 million that constituted, in the words of the government report on the exposition, “Alaska’s principal gift to mankind” (Report 78). Nearby a map charted the territory’s oil-producing regions, an elaborate architectural display demonstrated uses of Alaskan marble, and the Alaska Industrial Company showcased piles of newly mined copper. On the surrounding walls, heads of moose, caribou, and Dall sheep from “untouched scenery” depicted Alaska as a “sportsmen’s paradise,” and exhibits of bountiful local produce completed the display. Alaska, in the world of the fair, thus figured primarily as a fount of resources, a characterization that made the region seem more desirable and less alien.6 Organizers used a range of strategies to assert U.S. ownership of these resources. Dozens of American flags framed the displays, and the major exhibits were located in the Alaska Building, which was sponsored by the federal government and sited next to the Government Building in Cascade Court. The spatial proximity not only suggested possession and political unity but also enabled visitors to experience Alaska as part of the United States. This message found a parallel in the historical narrative described in the displays, most obviously those organized by the Smithsonian Institution. Focusing on geography, history, and ethnography, this exhibit, according to the public act that authorized it, aimed to “impart a knowledge of our national history” that included “Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands and that part of the United States west of the Rocky Mountains” (Report 10). Depicting the new colonies as part of “our national history” obscured conflicts over U.S. imperialism as well as ongoing struggles over social control, land, and resources; instead U.S. possession was presented as a fait accompli. The layout of Cascade Court reinforced the illusion of legitimate U.S. possession by placing these new territories in the historical lineage of continental expansion. Its major exhibition centers surrounded a placid 6.  Nineteenth-century European world’s fairs used these same strategies to naturalize empire (see Greenhalgh 53–54).

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pond labeled the “Arctic Circle,” an arrangement that represented control over the Arctic regions and suggested that expansion was integral to the achievements—indeed the existence— of U.S. society. Displays inside the Government Building reinforced this message. Here a series of maps and treaties showcased previously conquered territories that made up the continental United States, along with the elaborate weaponry—Gatling guns, canons, armor-piercing shells—that helped realize these conquests. In the courtyard organizers prominently placed a statue of William H. Seward inscribed with the caption “Let us make the treaty tonight.” The statue’s proximity to the Government Building displays, along with the caption’s evocation of historical treaty-making processes, presented the Alaska purchase as a natural extension of previous territorial acquisitions. The realism of the exhibition augmented this effect. As Timothy Mitchell argues, the visual mode of representation and the scientific basis of the displays encouraged visitors to experience the exhibit as “reality,” as an unmediated vision of “the world itself  ” (13). “To see is to know,” as one organizer of the World’s Columbian Exposition put it (G. Brown Goode, cited in Rydell 1984, 44), and the displays lent a convincing aura of stability to a political situation in flux. (In Two Years in the Klondike, Haskell’s use of history, geography, and photography served a similar purpose.) Meanwhile, the experiential mode of the expositions transformed white visitors into participants in the colonial order represented by the displays. Walking through the exhibits, as Tony Bennett demonstrates in another context, white spectators were encouraged to identify with the colonial power of the state: “This ambition towards a specular dominance [was] . . . evident in the conception of international expositions which, in their heyday, sought to make the whole world, past and present, metonymically available in the assemblages of objects and peoples they brought together and, from their towers, to lay it before a controlling vision.” This “exhibitionary complex” produced a collective racialized sense of national identity that both depended on and advanced the colonial project, a “we” conceived of “as the realization, and therefore just beneficiaries, of the processes of evolution and identified as a unity in opposition to the primitive otherness of conquered peoples” (Bennett 66, 79). In the context of the Seattle fair, representation supported material practice in other ways as well, since the idea that the United States firmly controlled Alaska encouraged white settlement, tourism, and industrial development.

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Throughout the fairgrounds, racial displays further strengthened the sense of colonial control as they illuminated the connections between continental expansion and overseas empire. These displays were heavily influenced by previous fairs, especially the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, where organizers had used the concept of social evolution to create segregated exhibition centers that reflected and solidified racial divisions in U.S. society. In 1877 Lewis Henry Morgan published Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, the book that proved most instrumental in popularizing social evolution in the United States and, along with Herbert Spencer’s ideas, provided the ideological foundation of the Chicago fair. Human societies, according to Morgan, inevitably progress through sequential stages of savagery and barbarism before eventually attaining civilization. Material culture, especially the modes and tools of subsistence, manifested these transitions and demonstrated that the “slow accumulations of experimental knowledge” constituted “a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress” (3, 8). Inspired by Morgan’s theory, the organizers of the Chicago exposition arranged the fairgrounds to depict these sequential stages of development embodied in the stark distinction between the White City, the fair’s illustrious main attraction, and the sideshow-like Midway. Visitors entering the Midway first encountered Africans and American Indians, who represented the earliest stages of human development, then they scaled the ladder of evolution to see peoples in higher stages of savagery and barbarism before reaching the White City, where Western achievements represented the pinnacle of civilization. The Chicago fair, in the words of its organizers, thus constituted an “illustrated encyclopedia of civilization” in which visitors could experience the “sliding scale of humanity” (Rydell 1984, 45, 65). An obvious tribute to racial whiteness, Chicago’s White City lauded Western technology, industry, and the arts to demonstrate the superiority of European and Euro-American societies. Imposing neoclassical buildings housed elaborate displays of machinery, manufactures, and the arts as a tribute to white civilization, particularly white manhood; not only were warfare and technology male domains, but also, as Gail Bederman has contended, men were “the agents who lifted their race toward the millennial perfection God and evolution intended for them” (32). Such achievements contrasted sharply with the primitive tools and weaponry

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that represented nonwhite societies in the anthropological exhibits. In the ideological framework of the fair, such differences between “civilization” and “savagery” were natural consequences of evolution. On the Midway, village displays underscored this contrast by showing so-called primitive peoples in their “natural”—and much more modest—environments. Here visitors encountered scenes designed, in the words of one guidebook, to “strike pity and disgust upon the minds of enlightened beholders”; these included Dahomey animal sacrifices, West Indian Voodoo ceremonies, and highly sexualized Egyptian belly dances (Cameron 313–16). Spectators frequently likened the people on display to animals. In these contrasts they found confirmation of their own superiority as well as moral justification for racial hierarchies at home and abroad. The Chicago fair was the first U.S. event to feature “live” displays in a systematic way, and in this respect it drew inspiration from the 1889 Paris Exposition, where the new anthropology cast French colonialism as part of the natural evolutionary order. But the World’s Columbian Exposition invoked social evolution for different purposes than had the Paris fair: in 1893 the United States held no overseas possessions, so the fair reflected primarily on internal colonialism and on domestic racial and class conflicts.7 Observers, for example, frequently drew comparisons between African Americans and the Africans displayed on the Midway, especially in the Dahomey exhibit, designed to represent the depths of savagery. In the words of a souvenir book, “one of the most striking lessons which the Columbian Exposition taught was the fact that African slavery in America had not, after all, been an unmixed evil, for of a truth, the advanced social conditions of American Africans over that of their barbarous countrymen is most encouraging and wonderful” (cited in Rydell 1984, 53). In this context, notes Robert Rydell, “the political and economic situation of American blacks would easily be explained as an outgrowth of their ‘savage’ heritage” (1984, 60). Similarly, in the years following the Indian wars and their culmination in the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, displays of “savage” Native warriors explained ongoing colonial violence, while exhibits of Asians on the Midway buoyed popular support for exclusion. In each case the fair interpreted social conflicts as the inevitable struggles that 7.  U.S. world’s fairs, as Paul Greenhalgh observes, did not explicitly treat the theme of overseas imperialism until after the turn of the twentieth century (76).

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accompany progress (Rydell 1984, 71). At the same time, the World’s Columbian Exposition foreshadowed the emergence of overseas imperialism at the end of the decade. Similarities between the Chicago fair and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, which did treat global imperialism, expose the connections between continental expansion and the reach of U.S. empire abroad. Whereas the World’s Columbian Exposition used Europe’s colonial order to support internal racial and class relations in the United States, the Seat­ tle fair deployed domestic racial hierarchies to provide both precedent and rationale for U.S. global imperial aspirations. The new imperialists not only explained overseas expansion as an extension of manifest destiny but also used American Indian and African American racial formations to locate Alaska Natives and Filipinos in the social order. The policies of Alaska’s territorial government, as we have seen, mimicked Jim Crow segregation; in later years assimilationist programs such as boarding schools would address this new “Indian problem.” Likewise, Americans commonly referred to Filipinos as “niggers” and “savages,” and they drew explicit comparisons between military campaigns in the Philippines and the Indian wars (events that involved many of the same military personnel).8 At the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition these parallels found a clear expression in its most popular exhibit, the Philippine Reservation, where the dispossession of American Indians provided an explicit precedent for the subjugation of Filipinos (Breitbart 54, Stephanson 91). In public discourse as well as political practice, overseas imperialism was integrally connected to continental expansion. The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition adapted social evolution, the organizing framework of the World’s Columbian Exposition, to interpret emerging imperial relations in the Pacific rim. Chicago’s segregated exhibition centers found an equivalent in the distinction between Cascade Court, the main exhibition center (see figure 2), and the Pay Streak, a sideshow on the margins of the fairgrounds which was the site of racial displays. Like Chicago’s White City, Cascade Court celebrated the achievements of white civilization. Its major exhibition sites, including the Administration 8.  See Rydell 1984, 176 –77, and Miller 58 –59 and 196 –218. For an analysis of the ways U.S. racial discourses shaped by African slavery and the conquest of Native America influenced the colonization of the Philippines, see Balce-Cortes.

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Figure 2.  Cascade Court, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909. University of  Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Nowell x1569.

Building, the Government Building, and the Court of Honor, attested to the complex organization of U.S. society and celebrated its attainment of democracy, both markers of progress in the dominant social evolutionary schema (Stocking 128), while the Machinery Building and the Manufacturing Building touted its technological advancements. Whiteness was its most crucial quality, and in this way, too, Cascade Court imitated Chi­ cago’s White City: the major structures were literally white, an embodiment of the exposition’s racialized vision of U.S. society. Yet the changing nature of U.S. imperialism, as many of its critics worried, rendered Cascade Court’s ideal of a racially pure nation impossible to sustain. Embodying the contradictions between colonialism and democracy, displays of the colonies appeared both in Cascade Court, creating the semblance of proximity and inclusion, and on the Pay Streak, where village exhibits depicted colonized peoples as racial inferiors. In Cascade

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Court the Alaska, Philippines, and Hawaii buildings were situated next to the Government Building, a spatial arrangement that created the illusion of political unity and control. Like the Alaskan exhibits, the Philippines and Hawaii buildings focused most heavily on natural resources, but they also included live displays that raised questions about social inclusion and compromised the whiteness of Cascade Court. In these ways the exhibits gestured, however inadvertently, toward the changes in U.S. society that would inevitably be caused by colonial acquisitions. Anthropological exhibits answered these worries by depicting the Natives’ future as bleak. In the Alaska Building woven baskets, ceremonial drums and masks, and harpoons sharply contrasted with the Western technological wonders displayed throughout Cascade Court, depicting the primitiveness of Native societies. Finally, the centerpiece of the Alaska Building, “Alaska dog team and outfit,” featured a musher adorned in Native furs with his sled and dog team preceding a European horse and carriage with a driver symbolically dressed in white. Not only did the dog team appear technologically primitive in relation to the carriage, but also their sequence resonated with Morgan’s stages of progress and implied that Native societies would inevitably give way to European ones. An anthropologist’s lecture clarified the meaning of this display: the “wild tribes” of “our own American Indians . . . will not long survive the onslaughts of civilization” (“Exhibit”). Allaying anxieties about the racial purity of the nation and the ownership of its resources, such predictions imagined a future in which Natives had conveniently vanished along with the challenges they presented to European power and possession. *  *  * The iconography of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was animated by gender as well as race. The official emblem of the exhibition shows three women representing regions essential to U.S. commercial empire: Japan holds a steamship, Alaska offers a handful of gold nuggets, and the Pacific Northwest grasps a railroad engine (see figure 3). Linking natural resources with industrialism and expansion, the emblem brings together Asia and the United States, now including Alaska, in a vision of empire that portrays the distant regions freely surrendering their resources and commercial control. Alaska appears dressed in white, perhaps evoking the colonial trope of “virgin” land. Similar gendered images rationalized

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Figure 3.  Official seal of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 12430.

colonial access in other displays as well. Land, Peter Hulme observes in another context, “is named as female in passive counterpoint to the masculine thrust of European technology” (18), and this patriarchal convention shaped displays that associated indigenous women with land and resources that they offered for colonial consumption. The Forestry Building, an immense structure of unfinished logs that advertised Alaska’s superior timber resources, featured an “Indian maid” decked out in feathers and Native regalia. Although an indigenous presence potentially challenged U.S. ownership, within the explanatory framework of the fair the woman’s clothing and her position as an object of display placed her outside the white masculine civilization celebrated in Cascade Court, while her gender and her youth emphasized her inability—and, by implication, that of all Natives—to manage the land and its resources. Similarly, in the Hawaii Building, Native “girls” offering samples of sugar, pineapple, and coffee “were in themselves an excellent exhibit for Hawaii, for their beauty, amiability, and lady-like demeanor made a deep impression and gave to visitors a favorable idea of the cultivation of the better class of the natives” (Report

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87), their “cultivation” aligning these Native women with the resources they offered while redefining colonization as racial uplift. By deploying femininity to signify the availability of the colonies for exploitation, these displays illustrate how imperialism developed through the reordering of gender (see chapter 3). The “civilizing” mission, in one historian’s words, “demanded that Indians adopt the same economic and household arrangements as whites; private property, patriarchal marriage, a gendered division of labor that conformed to whites’ ideology of separate spheres—all these . . . were crucial to bringing about Indian equality with whites” (Newman 125). Exemplifying the commodification of indigenous peoples at the fair, two official postcards from the exposition depict these conjunctions of gender, dominant domestic ideologies, and expansion. The first, an image of two young women captioned “Educated Es­ kimos, of Alaska, Graduates of Carlisle University,” re-creates the representational codes of nineteenth-century domestic portraiture: one young woman stands behind her seated companion, and both are demurely posed and dressed in long skirts and neatly pressed shirts with brooches at the throat, the accoutrements of turn-of-the-century bourgeois femininity (see figure 4). One wears a pendant and a string of beads, possibly the crucifix and rosary of devout Catholicism. At the same time, their identification as “Eskimos” in the caption renders the image at odds with conventional domestic portraiture: traditionally the domain of middle-class whites, the genre, as Laura Wexler argues, has historically served as “the gatekeeper of social existence,” expressing the need “for separation, for a visible difference in display and deportment that could squelch any challenge to the distinctive privileges” claimed by middle-class whites (66–67). Nevertheless, these women appear to embody fully the norms of white middle-class femininity, and the fact that they meet the gaze of viewers (presumably the white middle classes for whom such souvenirs were created) appears to place them in the same social realm. Illustrating these Native women’s social ascendancy through conformity to bourgeois feminine ideals, the postcard seems to promise equality for colonized subjects. In this way it obscures the actual experience of most Alaska Natives in this segregationist era that prompted comparisons with the post-Reconstruction South. Even as it casts colonialism as benevolent inclusion, the postcard betrays the gendered violence of conquest. The invocation of Carlisle (despite the caption, not a university but rather Carlisle Indian Industrial Training

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Figure 4.  “Educated Eskimos”: official postcard of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909. Courtesy of the author.

School)—the premier Indian boarding school, which took as its motto, in the famous words of founder General Richard Henry Pratt, “Kill the Indian and save the man”—situates the Eskimos within a history of forced assimilation inflicted on Native peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.9 As Pratt’s motto suggests, by obliterating differences 9.  In the United States these assimilationist efforts included, most prominently, the prohibition of traditional practices, the policy of sending Natives to special boarding schools (implemented in 1879 with the opening of Carlisle), and the 1887 General Allotment Act, which, among other things, provided for the conversion of collectively occupied reservation land into private property.

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between Natives and white Americans, these controversial policies aimed to hasten the disappearance of  Native peoples from U.S. society while freeing land for white ownership.10 In the boarding schools and elsewhere, assimilationist endeavors played out in part through gender, and training for indigenous women focused largely on domestic skills (see, for example, Wall). Boarding school photographs, another key representational context for the “Educated Eskimo” image, propagandized Pratt’s mission. They frequently illustrated the transformation of their female pupils by depicting them engaged in domestic activities such as sewing. By representing these women as conforming to bourgeois feminine ideals, the “Educated Eskimos” image exemplifies this broad connection between gender and conquest. Such transformations also lent support to specific arguments for the incorporation of Alaska into the United States. By portraying Natives as fully domesticated (in the intersecting gendered and national senses of the term), the photograph creates the illusion of sameness that rationalized the extension of U.S. power. While gender served as both an instrument of conquest and a means of obscuring its violence, patriarchy also defined the different places of colonized subjects in U.S. empire. Nations, Anne McClintock has argued, are figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space that depends on the patriarchal subordination of women and children (357). The second photograph, a postcard captioned “Igorotte Baby from the Philli­ pines [sic] and Eskimo Baby from Alaska,” reasserts the racial hierarchies obscured in “Educated Eskimos” as it deploys the patriarchal iconography McClintock describes to situate Eskimos and Igorots in the national family (see figure 5). A common colonial trope (see Shohat and Stam 1994), the infantilization of Igorots and Eskimos in this photograph characterizes them as subservient and suggests the impossibility of their independence. The U.S. government customarily employed familial rhetoric to these ends to account for colonial incursions in the Pacific. Filipinos, declared William McKinley, were “orphans of the Pacific” in need of Western education to “uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” Thus did he eclipse the brutality of U.S. military campaigns that cost half a million Filipino lives and trivialize ongoing independence struggles by suggesting that Filipinos 10.  This goal was clearest in the case of the Allotment Act, which caused the loss of two-thirds of Indian reservation lands to white settlement.

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Figure 5.  “Igorotte Baby from the Phillipines [sic] and Eskimo Baby from Alaska”: official postcard of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909. University of  Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 18952.

were incapable of self-government or even of understanding U.S. aims. (The First Philippine Commission of 1899 described Filipino opposition as a “great misunderstanding” stemming from the failure of these “errant children” to grasp “the pure aims and purposes of the American government and people” [Ileto 20–21].) Childishness was the most commonly depicted trait in popular representations of Eskimos of the period, to similar effect (see Huhndorf 2000). Drawing out the implications of this patriarchal colonial discourse, the postcard of the “babies” (in fact young children) presents indigenous peoples as dependent “children” in need of the reform lauded in the “Educated Eskimos” image. The “babies” postcard also invokes the discourse of social evolution that placed these “children” in a subordinate relation to the United States. Just as it recalls the family as the organizing figure of the nation, the trope of the child marshals the evolutionary notion, prevalent in all turn-of-the-century fairs, that “savage” races were developmentally like white children. At the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exhibition their racial inferiority was manifested spatially in the distance between Cascade Court and the Pay Streak, home

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to the village displays described in the fair’s publicity as “cultural zoos.” The Eskimos and Igorots occupied different locations on the Pay Streak, reflecting the separate imperial interests and histories that distinguished their relationships to the United States. While the colonization of Alaska took place through resource exploitation and the gradual encroachment of settlers, the conquest of the Philippines was a bloodier affair involving mass slaughter and, as a result, intense public controversy. In the three years following 1898, when the United States purchased the Philippines after the end of the Spanish-American War, U.S. troops fought a brutal campaign of mass slaughter, torture, and “scorched earth” policies. Although Theodore Roosevelt declared victory in the Philippine-American War in 1902, U.S. military campaigns and guerrilla warfare continued until 1912, three years after the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Following the official end of the war, allegations of U.S. torture and mass slaughter aggravated controversies about ongoing violent struggles and the possibility of Philippine independence. President Theodore Roosevelt’s vigorous opposition to immediate emancipation represented popular opinion: U.S. influence, his supporters contended, would eventually sponsor democracy in the Philippines. (This argument held sway until the United States, in a different political climate, promised independence in the Jones Act of 1917, a pledge that nevertheless took nearly thirty years to fulfill [Miller 261–65].) These controversies, along with a willed amnesia that led to what Stuart Creighton Miller has labeled “the triumph of American innocence,” provided a critical context for the Seattle exposition. In U.S. accounts, Filipino savagery explained the bloody resistance struggles and placed the Igorots, as representatives of their country, on a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder than the Eskimos, a critical context for the “babies” photograph. The differences between the Igorots and the Eskimos are also delineated by gender, for resistance is figured as male.11 Clad in a fur parka and boots, the Eskimo girl, with her appealing smile and lighter skin, is rendered more racially advanced and altogether unthreatening, suggesting the possibility of assimilation. By contrast, the darker Igorot boy appears only in a loincloth and wears a more closed expression, indications of a lesser degree of evolutionary advancement that 11.  Although their appearance is somewhat ambiguous, one can ascertain the gender of these children through their clothing and its correspondence with the attire of adults in the villages.

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place him outside civilization. The Eskimo girl invokes gendered colonial narratives that position indigenous women as submissive and acquiescent to colonization. Although such narratives reflect on colonized societies as a whole to represent colonial compliance (even Eskimo men, for example, were feminized), it is significant that they play out on the bodies of Native women. In doing so they set in motion indigenous women’s vexed relationship to the nation, a relationship that still shapes colonial and indigenous cultural production: as ostensible traitors to their own communities, these women become key figures in colonial national origin stories that undertake to resolve contradictions between democracy and expansion. The gendered positioning of colonized subjects in the national family became more explicit on the Pay Streak, where racial displays contrasted Native savagery with civilization, as represented in Cascade Court, thus interpreting the new imperial order. The distinct designs of the two exhibition centers rendered their differences obvious: while Cascade Court featured stately architecture, the Pay Streak was popularly labeled the “play and fun street.” Linking amusement with economic exploitation, it drew vast crowds to its circuslike displays, which included simulated gold mining camps; Alkali Ike’s Wild West and Indian Show, where fifty “wild Indians” staged mock attacks on hapless settlers; a Chinese gallery with acrobats, dancers, swordsmen, and strongmen; and the largest Ferris wheel in the world. Racial displays figured prominently among these amusements, constituting cultural maps of a sort that, like geographical maps, located the colonies in relation to the imperial center and created knowledge so as to facilitate the control of bodies and wealth. On the Pay Streak totem poles connected by strings of Japanese lanterns lined the entryway, a peculiar conjunction of styles that organizers dubbed “Jap-Alaskan” to signify the emerging political and economic relationships celebrated at the fair. The centerpieces of the Pay Streak were the live exhibits. In the Eskimo and Igorot villages, organizers displayed colonized people as objects for the entertainment of white spectators in ways that confirmed their racial inferiority and facilitated colonial exploitation. While these village exhibits appeared much like those on Chicago’s Midway, their organization carried different meanings related more specifically to the emerging global imperial order. While the Midway ranked societies hierarchically to represent the “natural” racial typologies of the entire colonial world, the displays on the Pay Streak focused primarily on the Eskimo and Igorot villages, which

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had not been a prominent feature at Chicago.12 The most popular displays at the fair, they appeared on opposite ends of the Pay Streak, with the Eskimo village at the top, nearest Cascade Court, and the Igorot village at the bottom, signifying the places they were destined to occupy in relation to U.S. society. Broader debates about ongoing U.S. military campaigns in the Philippines influenced the organizers’ choice of the Igorots to represent their country on the Pay Streak. The Igorots, as the Seattle Times described them, represented the least “modified” tribe in the Philippines, who were “until recently addicted to the practice of headhunting” (“Exhibit”). Their “savagery” reflected on the controversy surrounding the war by justifying U.S. violence and making Philippine independence unthinkable. This choice marked a significant shift from earlier fairs. Americans’ fascination with Filipinos emerged after the Spanish-American War, and although the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition and the 1901 Pan-American Exposition both included Filipino exhibits, the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition staged the largest and most elaborate displays at any world’s fair. About 1,200 Filipinos of different ethnicities inhabited the “Philippines Reservation,” and the exhibit stressed the capacity for social advancement of the Igorots in particular: “scientists,” noted one guidebook, “have declared that with the proper training [the Igorots] are susceptible of a high stage of development, and, unlike the American Indian, will accept rather than defy the advance of American civilization” (Rydell 1984, 176; see also Breitbart). By contrast, the Alaska-YukonPacific Exposition not only depicted Igorots as irredeemable savages but also represented the Philippines in cultural rather than national terms, an approach that deflected questions about political sovereignty while lending itself to social evolutionary comparisons. Inevitably the Igorot village elicited widespread Filipino protests for being “indecent” and “immoral” and conveying “an incorrect idea of the civilized status of the natives of the Philippines.” Although concerns about the exhibit’s political implications were well founded, such protests were themselves premised on colonial ideologies that defined non-Europeans as inferior and failed to distinguish Igorot society from the fair’s representation of it. 12.  Although Cascade Court included a Hawaii Building to represent the colony, there was no Hawaiian village on the Pay Streak.

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Figure 6.  Igorot village, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909. University of  Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Nowell x2164.

The Igorot village proved to be the most popular attraction at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (see figure 6). Near its entrance a sign boasted that the exhibit featured “50 wild people, head hunters, dog eaters from the Philippine Islands”; they were shown as savage, childlike, animalistic, and most of all warlike. The official guide to the exposition gave a more elaborate description: Here, in the greatest of all the special attractions, there are fifty of these strange, head-hunting, dog-eating people, living as they live at home, in quaint grass-thatched huts, with their womenkind and cute little children. . . . [The display] shows pasttimes of a remarkable people in the childhood of a race, a wild, uncultured people, struggling to break through their environment and emerge from the superstitions which enslave them, and to solve the mysterial play of forces of nature and rise to higher conceptions of truth, of freedom and liberty. (Official Guide)

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Here the guidebook reiterates McKinley’s depiction of Filipinos as savage children who benefited from U.S. colonization as it underscores the connections between gender and race. The village inhabitants were implicitly gendered male: “their womenkind and cute little children” provided only a secondary attraction to the men, engaged in the hypermasculine occupations of hunting and warfare. While these images resonated with the militarism celebrated in Cascade Court, the Filipinos’ unrestrained violence, in the ideological framework of the fair, contrasted with white men’s controlled mastery to place them outside civilization. Colonization took the form of an emasculation that brought these “wild people” under control: a sign posted near the entrance assured visitors that the site was “under in­ spection of the War Department of the U.S. government.” If such depictions explained U.S. military power as a tool for containing savagery, the guidebook also deflected attention from actual political relations by insinuating that it was the Filipinos’ own environment and “superstitions,” rather than colonization, that enslaved them. In this account the United States had acted not to subjugate but rather to rescue Filipinos by bringing them enlightenment, freedom, and liberty. Reflecting Alaska’s particular history—the absence of outright warfare and its inclusion in the nation—Eskimos, by contrast, were represented as peaceful, gentle, and primitive people who welcomed their participation in U.S. society. The differences between the Eskimos and Igorots explained the relative locations of their villages on the Pay Streak, where racial progress was rendered in spatial terms: the nearness of the Eskimo village to Cascade Court indicated racial advancement and the possibility of assimilation, while the Igorots’ place at the bottom of the Pay Streak signified their irremediable savagery. The Eskimos’ place, too, marked a departure from earlier expositions.13 At the Chicago fair the Eskimo village was somewhat less prominent, and its location at the bottom of the Midway near the American Indian and Dahomey exhibits signified Alaska’s low place on the racial scale. As the histories of colonization in Alaska and the Philippines unfolded between earlier fairs and the opening of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the racial places assigned to Eskimos

13.  For a history of Inuit performers in the United States, including those at world’s fairs beginning in 1893, see Zwick (although his account focuses on indigenous peoples from Labrador).

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Figure 7.  Eskimo village, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909. University of  Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Nowell x1766.

and Igorots shifted accordingly, exposing the political (rather than natural) origins of racial typologies. The Eskimo village at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition was the largest at any world’s fair (see figure 7). Although every U.S. exhibition since Chicago had featured an Eskimo village, the greater size and prominence of the Seattle display indicated Alaska’s increasing importance. Arctic trader A. M. Baber won the contract for the village, a choice that reflected the commercial significance of the territory. Well in advance of opening day, Baber “collected” thirty-four Siberians for display, and in the months leading up to the exposition he housed them in a Seattle cold storage plant and staged preview exhibits in towns throughout the West. When the fair commenced, Baber expanded the display to include Alaskan Eskimos, raising the number of people in the exhibit to fifty. Its size and the nature of its displays made it, along with the Igorot village, one of the exposition’s most visited attractions.

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Like the Igorot display, the Eskimo village exhibited its inhabitants in cultural terms that deflected attention from colonial conflicts: here, Natives figured as quaint and primitive curiosities who could not legitimately compete for political control or ownership of resources.14 Advertising the village, an official guidebook described the attractions of Alaska and suggested the roles Native peoples should occupy in U.S. society: The Eskimo village, to all appearances, was picked up bodily with the Eskimos themselves, so true a picture is it. The snow and ice are there and there are igloos of caribou hide. . . . The deftest craftsmen of the tribe are in the village, and they carve curios from the ivory tusks of the walrus and hammer crude jewelry from the bars of gold and silver. One of the most interesting features of the village is the nursery in which are several little “micaninies,” one of whom was born since the tribe was brought to Seattle. (  Alaska-­YukonPacific Exposition)

While Alaska’s resources, especially gold and silver, again provided the primary attractions, the fact that the village depicted craftsmen creating “crude jewelry” indicates the potential usefulness of Natives as labor in commercial development. In Alaska, those Natives who were “partly educated” and “who have reached an advanced stage of civilization,” according to Baber, could “conduct our business affairs, operate mills and canneries” (Rydell 1983, 56). A playing card sold at the fair expressed this idea even more obviously: titled “Evolution,” it contrasts Eskimos in traditional dress with a figure in a Western-style suit and tie, suggesting the possibility and desirability of assimilation. At the same time, however, the place of Eskimos in commercial development would clearly not be equal. Caribou hide igloos as well as “crude” tools and creations made Eskimos inferior contributors to civilization, defined, in the world of the fair, in terms of technological achievements. Moreover, in the guidebook’s description, the resonance of “micaninies” with “picaninnies” showed the integration of Eskimos into the existing racial order in a place analogous to that of African Americans (a connection confirmed by segregationist policies in Alaska). If “natural” racial 14.  Although this marked a change for Filipinos, who were represented at earlier world’s fairs in national terms, this culturalist framework was consistent with previous exhibitions of Eskimos and American Indians despite the oxymoronic legal status of some tribes in the United States as “domestic dependent nations.”

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differences explained these inequalities, the guidebook’s insistence on the verity of the display similarly obscured colonial dynamics: Eskimo inferiority, rather than politics, determined the nature of the exhibit and, by implication, the social reality it purported to represent. Here, too, gender intersected with race to distinguish Eskimos from the whiteness celebrated in Cascade Court. While hypermasculinity defined Filipino savagery, Eskimos were feminized. In addition to being depicted as acquiescent, they were often displayed engaged in domestic activities: the nursery was a focal point of the village, and most photographs of the site focused on women, children, and family units. While the family emphasis likened Eskimos to their “civilized” counterparts and earned them a place within the nation, their feminization, through recourse to patriarchy, established their subservience and inferiority. Although the exhibits lent an aura of stability to a social order in flux, historical events in the years following the fair belied its controlled political vision. In the Philippines assiduous campaigns for independence eventually succeeded, and in 1946 the islands freed themselves from direct U.S. control (if not, in the emerging neocolonial world, U.S. influence). But for those territories that became fully incorporated in the United States, battles against ongoing colonialism have been longer and more attenuated. In the case of Alaska in particular, conflicts over the land and resources that shaped the displays at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition set the stage for Native political struggles over the next century. *  *  * On June 1, the opening day of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, over ninety thousand spectators flocked to the displays, and by the time the fair closed on October 16, admissions had exceeded 4 million.15 But its influence was even broader than these numbers suggest. Through films, newspapers, mementos, and its influence on subsequent expositions, the fair helped shape the way Americans thought about the relationship between nation, race, and imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. It also laid the groundwork for the events that would unfold in Alaska in years to come. The next decade saw the building of an elaborate railroad

15.  The Seattle fair was the only U.S. exposition credited as a financial success (see Chilberg).

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designed, in the words of Woodrow Wilson, to “unlock” the “storehouse” of Alaska, and other challenges soon followed for Alaska Natives. In 1925 the new Alaska Game Act further limited Native subsistence. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, Alaska, by now a state, experienced a sequel to the gold rush as 200,000 immigrants arrived in search of oil wealth. The Eskimo drawings discovered in the Smithsonian, discussed briefly at the beginning of this chapter, implicitly challenge the representations at the fair and underscore the colonialism inherent in white settlement and resource development. Neither an empty land awaiting discovery nor a wilderness populated by primitives, Alaska, as rendered by these artists, had long been home to Native peoples with remarkable skills and a complex cultural life. Other Natives, seeing U.S. expansionism as motivated by the will for power and greed rather than by the desire to promote progress, protested these developments in more overt ways. In the words of Athabascan Chief Starr of Tanana in interior Alaska: White men are coming out and taking up all the land; they are staking homesteads, cultivating the land raising potatoes and all kinds of crops. . . . [They] are going to keep taking up this land until all the good land is gone, and the Indian people are going to have to move over[,] . . . and when all the good land is gone, the white men are going to keep on taking more land. After a while the Indian will have no land at all. (cited in Mitchell 1997, 176)

A few years after the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, the newly formed Alaska Native Brotherhood undertook to defend subsistence rights and attain compensation for seized Native lands. In the late 1960s these tasks, rendered more urgent because of the discovery of oil, compelled the formation of the Alaska Federation of Natives, a pan-tribal coalition whose efforts contributed to the 1971 passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), the largest land settlement in U.S. history. Supported in part by the Native corporations formed as part of ANCSA, the Alaska Federation of Natives has waged an ongoing campaign for self-determination and subsistence rights for Alaska Natives. Despite obvious similarities to struggles across Native America, Alaska Native politics confronts obstacles different from those facing most U.S. Native groups. Although previous conquests of American Indians provided a precedent for the colonization of Alaska and shaped the place of

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Alaska Natives in U.S. society, the federal government has not acknowledged the same rights for indigenous peoples in Alaska. If the absence of warfare helped determine the ways they were racialized, it also meant that Alaska Natives did not sign treaties that, for other groups, have provided a legal premise for sovereignty campaigns. ANCSA as a result favored economic development over political autonomy and aboriginal land title. Consequently the major goals of Native activists include the restoration of tribal governments and subsistence rights (see Berger). For Native peoples, more than a century after the gold rush and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Alaska remains a U.S. colony, and struggles over land, resources, and political control continue. Notwithstanding their particularities, these challenges connect Alaska Natives to other indigenous peoples, whose critical engagement with the colonial histories that have remade Native America and drawn Native communities into global relationships are the subjects of the chapters that follow. We attend now to a very different moment in Arctic politics, the turn of the twenty-first century, to see how Canadian Inuit have appropriated visual technologies to support indigenous land claims and nationalism against the power of the Canadian nation-state. Yet, as was the case with the Eskimo drawings with which I began this chapter, even as indigenous peoples use such representational practices to contest ongoing colonialism, the global imperial relationships explored here inevitably shape the meanings of culture and threaten to undermine Native political purposes. In this colonial dynamic, culture itself becomes a key tool of indigenous selfdetermination and an important battleground of political contestation.

2

“From the Inside and through Inuit Eyes” Igloolik Isuma Productions and the Cultural Politics of Inuit Media

The 2001 release of Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) marked a watershed in the history of North American popular cinema. Based on a traditional Inuit story, Atanarjuat was the first Inuit-produced feature and wide-release film in an indigenous language (Inuktitut). If the history of popular media is any indication, these qualities should limit its appeal; but on the contrary, Atanarjuat garnered widespread popularity and critical praise.1 Not only was it the highest-grossing film in Canada that year and an international box office success, but also it won the Cannes Film Festival’s coveted Camera d’Or for best first feature and numerous other prestigious prizes.2 This success, it seems, arose from the range of conflicting meanings that viewers found in Atanarjuat.3 Nearly unanimous in their acclaim, many film critics

1.  On the history of Native media in the United States and Canada, see Singer and Weatherford. 2.  A complete list of these prizes can be found on the film’s Web site (www.atanarjuat.com). 3.  See Bessire’s discussion of the critical reception of Atanarjuat. For a deft analysis of the film’s multiple audiences and the potentially different meanings they find in it, see Krupat 2007.

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praised the universal mythic appeal of the film’s story about love, jealousy, revenge, and the struggle for power, likening it to such fictional literary and film classics as Macbeth, the Odyssey, and Lawrence of Arabia. Remarking on Atanarjuat’s careful attention to cultural practices, other commentators placed it in the ethnographic tradition. “Picking up where Robert Flaherty’s 1922 ‘documentary,’ Nanook of the North, left off,” wrote one reviewer, “Atanarjuat steeps itself in the everyday details and traditions of the region’s Inuit people, as they lived for hundreds of years until the midtwentieth century[,] . . . against the framework of a story straight out of Shakespeare, or the soaps” (Chun 21). Whether they characterize Atanar­ juat as a “universal” story or an ethnographic account of Inuit cultural particularities, such interpretations render the film meaningful in terms of European narrative conventions and ideologies that create a sense of familiarity. Although this helps to explain the film’s international appeal, it raises questions about the political possibilities of indigenous representations in the global circulation of culture. Such mainstream interpretations overlook Atanarjuat’s local contexts, especially the long-standing ties between media and politics in the Canadian Arctic that create rival meanings. Although Atanarjuat’s release marked director Zacharias Kunuk’s entry into the international feature film arena, his media career commenced in the 1980s with productions designed primarily for Inuit communities.4 In 1990 he co-founded Igloolik Isuma Productions, the first Inuit independent film company, along with screenwriter Paul Apak Angilirq, actor Paul Qulitalik, and cinematographer Norman Cohn (see Kaufman).5 By 2008 Isuma’s repertoire included thirtyseven films created, as its Web site states, “from the inside and through Inuit eyes”: two television series, Nunavut (Our Land) and Unikaatuatiit (Storytellers), and a number of short works designed primarily for local audiences. Atanarjuat and a second feature, The Journals of Knud Rasmus­ sen (2006 ), number among Isuma’s more recent creations. Born of Inuit struggles for media access that commenced in the 1960s, Isuma is one of

4.  Some of these works, I should note, also reached international audiences, though on a much smaller scale, on the film festival circuit. But unlike that of the features, this was not their primary purpose. 5.  Members of the collective cite various dates for its founding, but 1990 is the year used on Isuma’s Web site (www.isuma.ca).

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several pioneering regional projects that include community radio, the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, and a dedicated indigenous satellite network in northern Canada. Initially these endeavors were driven by government assimilation policies and the expansion of mainstream media into the Arctic (see Marks). Kunuk writes of the influence of these changes on his own childhood: While my parents lived on the land I stayed in town and learned the English language. Most weeks they showed movies at the Community Hall. . . . I remember John Wayne in the West. He spearheads the U.S. cavalry and kills some Indians at the fort. . . . That’s what I learned in my education, to think like one of the soldiers. . . . Four thousand years of oral history silenced by fifty years of priests, schools, and cable TV? This death of history is happening in my lifetime. (2002a, 17–18)

If media can advance the cultural destruction begun by missionaries and Western educators, so too can they stem the tide of such losses. This conviction underlies Isuma’s work as well as that of other indigenous media makers. As Kunuk describes Isuma’s purpose, “We had to make [media] work for us, to preserve the culture” (quoted in Chun 22). Through interviews with elders and documentary-like accounts of traditional life, the company aims to “recreate the past” (Kunuk 2002b; see also Soukup). Although such projects counter the ruptures and losses of colonization, they also suggest the inevitable tensions between cultural preservation and the adaptation of visual technologies that animate Isuma’s work. Additionally, the goals of cultural preservation and historical re-creation bear similarities to those of conventional ethnography, an object of critique in Isuma’s films which nevertheless shapes popular interpretations of them. In the Canadian Arctic, cultural preservation relates to land claims and campaigns for political autonomy in an emergent Inuit nationalism, and this is what in part distinguishes Isuma’s films from the anthropological projects they scrutinize. Not incidentally, the creation of Isuma preceded by a short time the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, which was the largest indigenous settlement in Canadian history. Signed in 1993, the agreement to establish Nunavut (the Inuktitut term for “our land”) transformed 350,000 square kilometers of the eastern and central Arctic into a new territory controlled by Inuit, who make up about 85 percent of its population.

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Cultural distinctiveness was a key rationale for the settlement, strengthening connections between media and politics that took other forms as well. Across Canada the emergence of indigenous media facilitated land claims by enabling communication and creating a sense of collective identity between communities divided by geography. Between 1970 and 1985 indigenous peoples made 280 land claims in Canada, many of them aided by advances in media (Meadows 31). Mass communication became particularly important in the Arctic, where small settlements spread over vast, often impassable terrain. “The geopolitical entity of Nunavut, together with the technological community made possible  . . .  by the IBC [Inuit Broadcasting Corporation],” writes media scholar Laura Marks, “makes it feasible for geographically dispersed Inuit communities to think of themselves as a nation in a way that was not possible before” (4; see also Meadows). Isuma’s television series in particular have played a key role in this endeavor as they represent the region’s collective past for local audiences, facilitate language preservation, and provide a forum for debating contemporary issues, including land claims. Land and self-determination are central issues in all of Isuma’s work, although this remains overlooked in popular interpretations. The series Nunavut takes its name from the newly established Inuit territory, and the films, including the features, illustrate longtime indigenous occupations and cycles of subsistence that underlie contemporary land claims. These stories counter the colonial erasures of indigenous peoples from the land which support European ownership. Furthermore, the act of selfrepresentation, as Steven Leuthold argues, entails a shift in authority that “relates in a fundamental way to identity formation and expression” and positions “indigenous peoples as active political agents” (32), a process that Faye Ginsburg labels a “rhetoric of self-determination” (1995b). Locating representational and political authority among Inuit, Isuma challenges popular images and the power relations embedded in Western practices. As Kunuk puts it: For 175 years, since the Parry expedition of 1822–23, Igloolik Inuit have been observed, examined, measured, and studied by other cultures. To our knowledge, this practice of “anthropology/ethnography” has been entirely a one-way street. Qallunaat [Europeans] study Inuit, but Inuit do not study qallunaat. This uneven exchange influences all levels of relations between

“From the Inside and through Inuit Eyes”    75 the two cultures: political, economic, social, and so forth with qallunaat values and assumptions defining both cultures. (cited in Ginsburg 1999, 169)

Ethnographic conventions, as Kunuk suggests here, draw particular scrutiny as Isuma’s films position Inuit as self-reflective subjects rather than objects of study, thus buoying campaigns for land and political control. Not only does Atanarjuat, for example, illustrate “our [ Inuit] way of seeing ourselves,” but also, according to its creators, it aims to “convinc[e] people that a group of Eskimos from the end of the world could be sophisticated enough to make a movie” (Kunuk 2002a, 18; Kaufman 87),6 “to show the global community it might be worth listening to an Inuit voice” (Kunuk and Cohn, cited in Ginsburg 2003, 830). These purposes partially explain Isuma’s extension into the global film arena: by challenging popular perceptions and depicting Inuit as masterly authors of their own stories (on a par, to cite the reviewers’ examples, with Shakespeare and Homer), the feature films represent them as potentially equal members of the inter­ national political community. Indeed global visibility is in some ways necessary to Inuit nationalist endeavors. As Isuma’s work, along with that of other indigenous media makers, critically engages conventional representations and supports political autonomy, it disputes ongoing colonial control, European occupation of Native land, and the containment of indigenous communities within colonial national boundaries. Waging such struggles in the global arena rallies international support for indigenous causes and facilitates indigenous coalitions that contest the power of nation-states (see Niezen). Yet at the same time, as we saw in the reviews of Atanarjuat, even when colonialism is the object of scrutiny, it shapes the terrain on which meaning develops. Because interpretation is socially contingent, Isuma’s films, when entering Deborah Poole’s global “visual economy” (see my introduction), ironically acquire meanings that sometimes reinforce the same colonial narratives and political implications that they aim to supersede. Interpretations of Atan­ arjuat as a universal story, for example, obviate the cultural distinctiveness that is essential to nationalist endeavors, while ethnographic readings resurrect European authority and bring to bear ahistorical and depoliticized 6.  These are the words of Kunuk and Norman Cohn, respectively. Cohn is the only non-­ Inuit member of Igloolik Isuma Productions.

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notions of culture that still confine indigenous representations and blunt their critical potential. Furthermore, even as Isuma’s films challenge the nation-state, Atanarjuat, as Monika Siebert has argued, “serve[s] the needs of the Canadian national cinema developing in the age of multiculturalism[,] . . . contribut[ing] to an ongoing Canadian effort to shape a national cinema by locating Canada’s diverse communities within the imagined national community” (547). The medium of film itself creates some of these contradictions. On the one hand, numerous commentators, including Kunuk, define film as a logical extension of traditional storytelling because it is a visual and aural medium (see, for example, Soukup), and they laud its ability to reach broad audiences. Its capacity to mediate across temporal and geographical distances—“bringing past into present, distant to near,”7 in the words of film critics Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1996, 156)—supports an imagined Inuit community with deep historical roots. Additionally, they suggest, “cinema’s institutional ritual of gathering a community—spectators who share a region, language, and culture—homologizes, in a sense, the symbolic gathering of the nation. Anderson’s sense of the nation as ‘horizontal comradeship’ evokes the movie audience as a provisional ‘nation’ forged by spectatorship” (155). On the other hand, the production and distribution mechanisms of film, the quintessential global medium, may limit its counterhegemonic potential. “Is it indeed possible,” Ginsburg asks, “to develop an alternative practice and aesthetic using forms so identified with the political and economic imperatives of Western consumer culture and the institutions of mass society?” While indigenous media emerge from the highly politicized “First Nations” or “Fourth World” identifications of their creators and their engagement in “broader movements for cultural autonomy and political self-determination,” they also evoke “the huge institutional structures of the television and film industries that tend to overwhelm local specificities 7.  In her seminal analysis of this process in the specific context of indigenous media, Ginsburg argues that it can “transcend boundaries of time, space and even language [and] can be used effectively to mediate historically produced social ruptures that link past and present. In so doing, producers are engaged in a powerful new process of constructing identities on their own terms but in ways that address the relationships between indigenous histories and cultures and the encompassing societies in which they live” (1995a, 260). In this essay Ginsburg’s analysis centers on Aboriginal media in Australia, but she uses it as a representative case of indigenous media more broadly.

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and concerns for relatively small populations while privileging commercial interests that demand large audiences as a measure of success” (Ginsburg 1995a, 256–58). To these problems I would add issues of interpretation: as indigenous media circulate globally, because few viewers question (let alone reject) hegemonic interpretive frameworks, these films inevitably evoke colonial discourses and histories of representation that shape their meanings. Thus, even as indigenous media challenge global histories of colonialism and the power of nation-states, they simultaneously risk reinforcing the representational practices and political structures of dominant societies. In the case of Atanarjuat, produced in conjunction with the National Film Board of Canada, this occurs in the popular reception of the film as well as in the mechanisms of production and distribution that identify the film with (rather than against) the nation-state. In addition, as we shall see, Isuma’s work invokes a long colonial tradition of visual images of the Arctic that continues to influence popular understandings of the region. In this chapter I examine the vexed politics of Inuit media in the example of Igloolik Isuma Productions by analyzing the films’ frequently contradictory relationships to intersecting transnational and national systems and practices, specifically Inuit nationalism, the Canadian nation-state, global imperialism, and historical representations of the Arctic. In several respects Inuit nationalism is itself a transnational phenomenon produced by imperialism. While it draws together previously distinct communities that find a common identity through the dramatic changes wrought by colonization, it also adapts transnational representational strategies, including media, to support land claims and political autonomy. Additionally, as media productions facilitate the emergence of Inuit nationalism, they forge pan-indigenous alliances beyond Nunavut (for instance, with Inuit communities throughout the polar regions) that further undermine colonial national boundaries. Yet even as Inuit media and politics challenge the power of nation-states and their containment of indigenous populations, Isuma’s films also appear to legitimate, however inadvertently, Canada’s image as a diverse, multicultural democracy (see Siebert), an image that obscures ongoing colonial relationships. Furthermore, as Inuit revisions of colonial discursive conventions contest imperialism, they lend themselves to reinscription, a problem David Spurr describes as the ability to “readily incorporate [the Other] into the fabric of Western values” (128). The global

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reach of media contributes contradictorily to all of these endeavors: as it makes possible the creation of a collective Inuit identity and increases its visibility, it potentially diminishes the challenges that indigenous societies and issues pose to dominant political and discursive practices. To consider these issues, I analyze Isuma’s feature films Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen in two intersecting contexts: the collective’s locally distributed, explicitly political productions, and the history of colonial, especially visual, representations of the Arctic. When Atanarjuat and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen are placed in the context of Isuma’s work as a whole, we see how the feature films contribute to the collective’s projects of colonial critique, land claims, and cultural recovery in local political endeavors. Isuma’s engagement with historical images of the Arctic further illuminates how its films question the same conventional representations and colonial power relationships that shape popular interpretations of them. Examining side by side these local and global contexts and the rival meanings they create reveals the ongoing process of colonialism in the Arctic while it positions indigenous media as a key ground of political contestation. As indigenous media participate in struggles for land and autonomy, they expose persistent tendencies of the dominant culture either to place indigenous people in a depoliticized, temporally anterior space of absolute difference or to render them the same as Europeans (as we saw in the reviews cited at the beginning of this chapter). Two sides of a coin, both obscure the challenges posed by indigenous politics in an interpretive conflict that frequently manifests itself as a contest over the meanings of culture and history.

Picturing Colonialism in the Canadian Arctic In challenging European political control and possession of the land, Isuma’s films emerge against a backdrop of colonial representations that at times form an explicit subject of the collective’s work. This is especially true of visual representations, which have long been central to colonial endeavors. “The Inuit,” political leader John Amogoalik remarks, “are probably the most photographed race of people on earth. . . . Government officials or tourists . . . always had cameras and they projected what we considered to be the wrong images of the Inuit—the Hollywood image or the

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stereotype image” (cited in Geller 14). Beginning around 1880, when the Arctic archipelago (previously a British possession) fell under Canadian control, these “wrong images” gained explicit political meanings as tools to establish Canada’s control over Inuit land, create a governmental infrastructure, and develop commerce in the far North. Long a source of European wealth through the fur trade, the Arctic in the waning years of the nineteenth century gained symbolic importance in an emerging Canadian nationalism: like the U.S. West, it figured as a frontier space that presented opportunities for adventure, riches, and self-realization as well as a means to forge national ideals. If Canada’s hold on the remote region initially seemed tenuous, photography provided a key “instrument of possession” (Stern 47) that extended the intersecting influences of government, church, and commerce. This history of image making in the Arctic provides a critical context for the emergence of Inuit media in the twentieth century. Inuit media makers, including those associated with Isuma, critically engage these images while using visual technologies to support indigenous land claims and political autonomy. As signifiers and instruments of power, images of the Arctic remain central to struggles for control of the region. In the decades after Canada took control of the Arctic, the government commenced a series of expeditions for the purposes of exploration, mapping, and asserting sovereignty over the territory. Photography played an important role in each journey, but never more so than on the 1903–4 voyage of the Neptune. The photographic legacy of the Neptune, Jim Burant writes, “extensively documents the first concerted Canadian government effort to claim the north, and demonstrates clearly the ongoing government commitment to using photography to maintain and to enhance its influence” (84). The commander’s official report, titled “Canada’s Position and Prospects in the Eastern Arctic,” relied heavily on photographs taken on the voyage. Not only did the images document the activities of the expedition, which itself asserted Canadian possession of the Arctic, but also they supplied geographical and cultural information about the region and its indigenous inhabitants (Geller 19). Widely circulated after the Nep­ tune’s return, these images familiarized Canadians with the unknown land and created a sense of proximity to and ownership of the Arctic (Stern 50). Strikingly, many photographs document flag-raising ceremonies and the creation of posts of occupation, the symbolic and material gestures of

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territorial control (Geller 43). The Neptune’s voyage decisively changed the place of the Arctic in the national imagination, transforming it from a distant and unfamiliar territory into an outpost of Canadian identity. It also set the stage for the expansion of government, missionary work, and commerce that together consolidated Canadian control in the following decades. The discourses generated by these intersecting endeavors, some of them expressed visually, either erased the Inuit or represented them as irredeemably primitive; either way they symbolically eliminated the challenges that the Inuit posed to Canadian possession of the land. Photography also contributed to the widening influence of the Anglican Church in the early part of the twentieth century, disseminating images of the land and indigenous people that shaped popular understandings and generated support for missionary endeavors. Archibald Lang Fleming, perhaps the most important figure in Arctic mission work during these years, was an avid photographer and a novice filmmaker with a particular interest in the Inuit. In most Arctic images of the period, Inuit occupied a place akin to that of other Natives in similar colonial situations: when they were present at all, they usually figured as part of the landscape to be tamed, but at other times, particularly when possession of land and resources was at issue, they remained notably absent. Promoting the civilizing mission of the church, Fleming’s work was somewhat different. Inuit, in his description, were “primitive children of the snow” in dire need of salvation (Geller 57), and his photographs were meant to advertise the success of his church’s missionary efforts. Reprising the conventions of boarding school photography, these images contrasted unredeemed “pagans” with portraits of Inuit transformed by conversion. In addition to portraying obvious changes in clothing and demeanor, some images used photographic effects that rendered literal the symbolic transformation from darkness to light (Geller 75–77). Because such images drew on and supported racial typologies that showed Inuit, at least in their “unredeemed” state, as inferior to Europeans, they complemented the photographs created on the voyage of the Neptune, which represented Arctic Natives primarily as objects of scientific knowledge who posed no significant obstacle to Canadian expansion. Perhaps more pointedly, Fleming’s images recast colonialism as benevolence, depicting Inuit as benefiting from conversion and suggesting the possibility of their assimilation into the dominant society.

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Film and photography found a significant place in the work of the Hudson’s Bay Company as well, long a prominent commercial force in the Arctic and, what is less well known, a major producer of images during this period. In addition to its publicly circulated corporate magazine, The Beaver, the HBC created a promotional film, The Romance of the Far Fur Country (1920), about Inuit life and the profit potential of the fur market. Both celebrated the progressive influence of commerce and showed the HBC as helping European Canadians and Inuit alike: because of the expansion of the Hudson’s Bay Company throughout the eastern Arctic, one company official declared, “new wealth has been created and the Eskimo has benefited from the use of the white man’s products brought to him in exchange for his furs” (J. W. Anderson, cited in Geller 131). Despite some important differences in their designs for the Inuit (the missionaries, for example, sought a complete transformation of traditional life, while the Hudson’s Bay Company relied on the Natives’ traditional hunting and trapping skills), these commercial agents shared with missionaries and government officials a conviction of Inuit “primitiveness” as they obscured the exploitation and violence of colonization. Although all of these images circulated widely, popular fascination with the Arctic and its Native peoples reached new heights with the 1922 release of Robert Flaherty’s celebrated documentary Nanook of the North. The most enduringly influential depiction of the region, the film catapulted the Inuit into the global spotlight and remains a classic even today. Initially designed as a feature-length advertisement for the French fur traders Revillon Frères, a fierce competitor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the film supported broader efforts to open the far North for commercial development and to reveal its mysteries to Western audiences. Nanook draws together the intersecting interests of exploration and commercial development in a narrative of Inuit disappearance. Flaherty was first lured to the Arctic as a prospector in search of iron ore; the film emerged from his journeys to the region during the years 1912–1919. Predictably Nanook employs instruments and tropes of exploration in its depictions of the land and its people. Its early scenes feature two mostly blank maps of the eastern Arctic, the quintessential emblems of possession, and the camera pans the landscape and ice floes of Ungava, described as “mysterious barren lands[,] . . . the illimitable spaces which top the world.” Land remains a persistent fascination throughout the film,

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highlighting its complicity with territorial expansion and the exploitation of resources.8 The film’s explicit subjects, however, are the Inuit, represented by Nanook, the “great hunter” and “chief ” of Ungava, and his family, including his wife, Nyla, and their children. As I have argued elsewhere (see Huhndorf 2000), Nanook of the North drew inspiration from what Johannes Fabian labels the “episteme of natural history” that equates cultural difference and temporal distance, subjecting the Inuit to an evolutionary logic that renders inevitable their “disappearance.” According to this logic, the “primitive” Inuit, embedded in the cycles of nature, perish after contact with progressive European modernity. From the beginning the film stresses the perils of daily existence in the “country of death,” the cold and barren Arctic, where “the sterility of the soil and the rigor of the climate no other race could survive,” in the words of an early intertitle. Nanook’s family, who barely eke out a living, are constantly menaced by the specter of starvation. In this way the story recapitulates the quintessential struggle of man against nature as Nanook hunts seal, polar bear, and walrus while “almost perishing from the icy blasts.” Though the film thus sites Inuit outside the time frame of modernity, it subjects them to its progressivist logic. Nanook concludes with a metaphorical death scene in which a “threatening drifter” buries the sleeping family’s igloo in snow while outside their master dog howls mournfully. This scene occurs, not coincidentally, shortly after the family’s encounter with the world of modernity represented by the fur trader. Within the ideological framework of the film, the same “primitive” abilities that enable Nanook and his family to endure the rigors of Arctic life render them unfit for modernity. Their fate is thus explained by natural progress rather than colonial violence, which in turn opens the way for Western appropriation of land and resources. When Inuit media emerged later in the twentieth century, they called to task such representations of indigenous peoples as well as depictions of the Arctic as a symbol of Canadian national identity and a region available for European possession and exploitation. By appropriating visual

8.  More than advertising and rendering available the lucrative resources of the North, Nanook of the North turned the people themselves into commodities, catalyzing a marketing frenzy, labeled by one prominent observer “Nanookmania,” which catered to the fascination with the exotic (see Balikci 7).

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technologies and turning them into “instruments of possession” for indigenous land claims, Inuit media aimed to redefine Native peoples’ relationship to modernity and their contemporary social place. While in the colonial renderings discussed here traditional culture (such as spiritual beliefs and subsistence practices) marks the Inuit as “primitives” unable to withstand modernity and in need of European control, Inuit media invert the meaning of culture to support contemporary struggles for land and political autonomy. Yet at the same time, those media confront resilient perceptions, shaped by this same history of Arctic representation, which threaten to undercut Inuit land claims and potentially neutralize the films’ political purposes.

Land, Politics, and the Emergence of Inuit Media When Kunuk characterized representation as a “one-way street” in which Inuit are “observed, examined, measured, and studied by other cultures,” he was pointing to a problem with profound political dimensions. In the latter part of the twentieth century, Inuit media emerged out of ongoing conflicts over land and sovereignty and were closely tied to broader efforts to regain indigenous autonomy in the far North. These media grew out of two related histories: the reorganization of indigenous communities in the Arctic by colonization, and the subsequent activism that drew together previously distinct communities for common goals. If self-representation is itself an act of authority, it is also, as Ginsburg contends, “part of a broader project of cultural resistance and transformation” that enables indigenous people “to articulate and enhance their own histories, political concerns, and cultural practices” (1999, 166). In the case of Canadian Inuit, the use of media has facilitated cultural revivals and the sense of common history that culminated in the founding of Nunavut. Contemporary Inuit politics finds its roots in the sweeping changes brought by missionaries, traders, and government officials, which accelerated in the middle of the twentieth century. Before then, Inuit lived in small, family-based groups and followed patterns of seasonal migration determined in part by subsistence needs. While early missionaries encouraged Inuit to form village communities, whalers and traders were probably more successful in creating semipermanent settlements because they provided

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trade goods on which indigenous people increasingly depended. Later the arrival of health care workers and the establishment of schools made settlement life increasingly desirable, and by the 1950s most of the several hundred small groups that had been scattered across the Arctic regions now resided in forty permanent communities. More dramatic changes followed the collapse of the fur markets after World War II, when the Inuit resettled in a handful of central villages and grew ever more dependent on the Canadian government. In turn, government policies exerted increasing control over their lives, as Canada intensified efforts to undermine indigenous traditions and social autonomy through missionization, boarding schools, and extensive bureaucratic regulation of subsistence practices (Hicks and White 45–50, Jull 121–22). Ironically, centralization also provided the foundation for a collective Inuit identity that soon became highly politicized. In the 1960s a growing consciousness of shared political, economic, and ideological domination, as well as the fact that outsiders treated the Inuit as a single and homogeneous group, created a pan-Inuit social and cultural movement. From its inception, then, Inuit nationalism was a pan-tribal phenomenon: born from social transformations created by colonialism, it drew together distinct communities to resist Canadian control. The 1970s became a turning point in Native activism when a series of legal and political events redefined the place of indigenous peoples in Canadian society. In 1973 the Calder Supreme Court decision set the stage for Native campaigns for land and political sovereignty by establishing the legal basis for aboriginal title as “long-time occupation, possession and use” of traditional lands.9 These changes, in the words of one scholar, “erupted in the eighties as a

9.  The Calder decision pertained specifically to Nisga’a land claims in the Prince Rupert area, and it was the result of decades of Native activism in British Columbia, begun in the 1880s when Nisga’a and Tsimshian chiefs publicly demanded recognition of land title and rights to self-­government. These efforts continued into the twentieth century and resulted in the formation of a number of political organizations, including the Interior Tribes of British Columbia, the Indian Rights Association, the Nisga’a Land Committee, and the Allied Tribes of British Columbia. In 1955 the newly formed Nisga’a Tribal Council directed its efforts toward land claims settlements, ultimately bringing its claim to court in 1969. Courts in British Columbia ruled against the Nisga’a, and the case was sent to the Supreme Court. While the Court ruled against the Nisga’a on a technicality, its ruling paved the way for other Native settlements. The other landmark event of the period was the report of the Berger Inquiry. Its assessment of indigenous-white relations recommended significant changes in public policy (see Jull 122).

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major rallying force” (M. Mitchell 117–19, 139–40). As the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC), the national Inuit organization founded in 1971, stated its position: Inuit have certain collective rights under international law because colonization has violated the right of Inuit to govern themselves and their lands. Colonization is recognized by the international community as a serious violation of the right of peoples to self-determination. Inuit are entitled to assert this right of self-determination within Canada and to have it recognized in the Constitution. (cited in M. Mitchell 405)

Inuit political organizations demanded the creation of an independent territory under their own control, the official recognition of Inuktitut language, and significant participation in Canadian governmental forums. The 1999 founding of Nunavut gave the Inuit, as the majority population, substantial control over traditional lands and public policies, although the territory nevertheless remains part of Canada and is ultimately subject to its authority. From the beginning, culture played a key role in Inuit nationalism. Initially, cultural distinctiveness provided a rationale for political autonomy, and revitalizing traditions (language, subsistence practices, and spiritual beliefs) was an explicit goal of the Nunavut settlement.10 Breaking from their historical colonial uses, media played a key role in these revivals. When the Canadian government brought television to the North in 1978, many Inuit saw it as an extension of long-standing assimilationist efforts. Echoing Kunuk’s conjunction of “priests, schools, and cable TV,” John Amogoalik, then president of the ITC, declared that “the introduction of television has meant the last refuge of Inuit culture, the home, has been invaded by an outside culture” (cited in M. Mitchell 415). Protests led to the development of limited Inuit programming on mainstream stations and, later, the creation of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC). The IBC, which aired its first program in 1982, takes as its mandate to strengthen Inuit “language, culture and identity” (cited in M. Mitchell 416 ) with a

10.  The Nunavut Implementation Commission explicitly mandated that “the Government of Nunavut will undertake to protect and preserve the distinct society which has existed in Nunavut for thousands of years” (Légaré 411).

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focus on historical, cultural, and entertainment programs in Inuktitut (Sørensen 173; see also M. Mitchell 416 and Starting Fire). Explicitly political goals consistent with the establishment of Nunavut also find a place in the IBC’s mission. In addition to its focus on language and culture, the IBC aims to “integrate the different isolated communities in the Nunavut region” and to “accelerate the economic, cultural and political development process in the region” (Sørensen 171). So strong has the IBC’s role been in the creation of an Inuit regional identity that some have speculated that “Nunavut would not have become a reality had IBC not existed” (Sørensen 176).11 Zacharias Kunuk was among the first to train at the IBC, but he departed shortly thereafter to pursue independent projects, producing his first video, From Inuk Point of View, in 1985. Like his subsequent productions, From Inuk Point of View, as its name suggests, emphasizes selfrepresentation in its depiction of traditional culture for Inuit audiences (it has never been translated from Inuktitut). Five years later he co-founded Igloolik Isuma Productions. Extending the IBC’s concern with cultural and language preservation, Isuma’s work engages the history of the Arctic regions in a way that reflects on contemporary relationships between Inuit and Euro-Canadians. Filmed in Inuktitut and written, produced, directed, and acted by Inuit people, Isuma’s works—the television series as well as the feature films—portray traditional lifestyles, render a critique of colonization, and give voice to the perspectives of community members, especially elders, on issues such as education, missionization, and the Nunavut settlement. Contesting colonial representations, cultural traditions in these films are dynamic and enduring, and they provide a key foundation for land claims and political autonomy. Unikaatuatiit (Storytellers), an eight-part series produced between 1989 and 2002, dramatizes traditional cultural practices, stressing their deep roots and the continuities between past and present that support self­determination. The cover of the boxed set features an endorsement by three 11.  Although the IBC has contributed substantially to the creation of a collective Inuit identity that enabled the Nunavut settlement, the relationship between the two is somewhat more complicated than my cursory account suggests, in part because the Nunavut government has provided little support for the IBC (Sørensen 176 ). In addition, Kunuk, who began his media work as an IBC employee, cites as his reason for leaving the IBC’s lack of autonomy from the federal government (Kunuk 2002b).

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Igloolik elders: “We strongly believe these films have helped in keeping our traditional way of life alive and to our future generations it will make them see how our ancestors used to live.” This emphasis on traditions most obviously shapes the first works in the series, Qaggiq (Gathering Place), Nunaqpa (Going Inland), and Saputi (Fish Traps), all dramatic re-creations of life in the 1930s, the period immediately before the Canadian government intensified settlement and assimilationist policies in the Arctic. The stories unfold over the course of a year, beginning in Qaggiq with the activities of a winter camp and concluding in Saputi with the building of a fish trap at summer’s end, thus tracing the patterns of traditional life that followed seasonal cycles and animal migrations. In this way they bear apparent similarities to the ethnographic tradition, including Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. In contrast with Nanook, which represented subsistence practices through tropes of the past, the remaining works in Isuma’s series, all documentaries, emphasize their continuity in the present. Nanugiurutiga (My First Polar Bear), for example, depicts Kunuk’s young son capturing his first polar bear while an elder tells stories of hunting in the old days. Arviq! (Bowhead!) explains the social significance of whaling in the 1990s and recounts the controversies surrounding it. Rather then positioning Inuit as embedded in nature and doomed to extinction, the depiction of subsistence practices in this context establishes deep ties between the people and the land, the “traditional occupancy” that underlies contemporary legal claims. Taken together, the films in Unikaatuatiit draw the community’s past and present into close relation, creating a historical narrative that emphasizes and promotes cultural continuity. These representations of the value and endurance of traditions in turn encourage anticolonial critique. In Ajai­ naa! (Almost!), elders describe the cultural losses, erosion of autonomy, and collective sense of shame that have resulted from European control. This translates into an argument for contemporary self-determination that becomes explicit in Nipi (Voice) when elders and political leaders insist on the necessity of their own forms of leadership and government. Isuma’s second series, Nunavut (Our Land), strengthens these ties between culture and contemporary politics by focusing more heavily on land. Typical of Isuma’s work, images of the region figure prominently throughout the series, and its story revolves around subsistence patterns and migrations throughout the Arctic year which illustrate long-standing Inuit connections to the land. A thirteen-part fictional series set in 1945–46,

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Nunavut follows five families engaged in fishing and hunting practices that have defined indigenous life since time immemorial as it dramatizes colonial incursions in the Arctic during that watershed decade. In the second episode a priest tries to persuade Inuit to “turn away from your old way of life,” an event that transpires against the backdrop of the ravages of World War II and the arrival of imperious government agents. Underscoring the connections between spiritual and political transformations of Arctic life, the series concludes on Christmas Day. Nunavut, in short, represents Inuit at a crossroads where colonial pressures threaten to undermine traditional practices, spiritual beliefs, and social structures. Significantly, the series was produced in 1994 and 1995, shortly after the Nunavut settlement was signed (but before the 1999 establishment of the territory). The juxtaposition of these two transitional decades—the 1940s, when incursions by church and state dramatically undercut Inuit autonomy, and the more hopeful 1990s, when the Inuit regained significant social control— are central to its meaning. While in conventional narratives European incursions (such as those in the 1940s) inevitably lead to the demise of indige­ nous peoples, Nunavut, in the context of Isuma’s work as a whole, revises such narratives to tell a story of survival, continuity, and restoration. Tracing a history that begins in Unikaatuatiit before the dramatic colonial transformation of Inuit life, proceeds in Nunavut to the transitional mid-1940s, and jumps to the land claims period (an explicit subject of Uni­ kaatuatiit and the title reference of Nunavut), the two series together create an unbroken narrative of cultural and community survival that culminates in the restoration of land and political self-determination. Although Nu­ navut scrutinizes colonial disruptions of community life that began in the 1940s, it does not linger on their effects, and glossing over the dire post– World War II period further minimizes the importance of European intrusions. “In looking back to a time just prior to the Inuit having lost their freedom,” media scholar Avi Santo contends with regard to Nunavut, “the series points ahead to a moment in which that freedom will be restored” (389). This notion of “restoration” is partly strategic: the imagined community of Nunavut is itself a recent creation, an amalgamation of distinct groups drawn together through colonial policies and projected into the past. Indeed the films themselves register concerns that the organization of Nunavut departs from traditional values and social structures. In Nipi ( Voice), for example, an elder castigates Inuit politicians for being driven by power and money, while in Ajainaa! (Almost!) another laments how

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elections designate younger people rather than elders as leaders. Nevertheless, both series stress continuity over disruption. As one elder in Nipi says about the transformations in Inuit life, “We have just adapted the old beliefs we had to the ones of Christianity[,] . . . [but it] hasn’t really changed our culture.” Cultural distinctiveness and pre-contact autonomy in turn ground contemporary self-determination figured as historical restoration. Before southerners took control of Inuit life, “we managed our own lives” and “we made our own decisions,” recalls one community member in Nipi, supporting the consensus that “Inuit should control Nunavut.” Together, then, Unikaatuatiit and Nunavut deploy representations of traditional culture to promote Inuit land claims and political autonomy. As “a site where Inuit can both learn and practice their cultural identities,” Santo argues, the series “allow for the emergence of a political consciousness rooted in traditional cultural practices” and cultivate “  ‘cultural citizenship,’ which stresses identity politics as a significant site of political and civic engagement” (381–82).12 The endurance of traditional culture over time also creates an Arctic history that is specifically indigenous. In this way, too, the series unsettle European claims to the land just as they trouble the authority, and even the existence, of the Canadian nation-state. Atanar­ juat and The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Isuma’s feature films, bring these issues to the world stage in stories about traditions, cultural and social destruction, and restoration that similarly support land claims and political autonomy. Nevertheless, the same discourses and practices that these films contest inevitably shape their reception and even create contradictory political meanings.

Indigenous Nationalism on the Global Stage: Atanarjuat ( The Fast Runner) Atanarjuat, the first feature film by Isuma, extends the connections between traditional culture and politics that animate the collective’s previous work. Writing about the film’s creation, Kunuk recounts finding inspiration in a legend retold by his mother. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, when his family spent winters in a sod house at Kapuivik, storytelling provided 12.  Santo is referring specifically to the Nunavut series, but this point applies to Isuma’s work as a whole. The notion of “cultural citizenship” is John Hartley’s.

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a sense of community and historical continuity. “We were still living on the land,” he recalls, “traveling from place to place just like our ancestors did in this region for four thousand years. . . . Our mother would put us to sleep at night with all these stories about [them], how they lived, and what would happen to us if we were like this one or that one when we grew up” (2002a, 17). In the mid-1960s Kunuk’s life changed dramatically when he and his brother were sent to a government school in the town of Igloolik. Along with the missionization, dominant media, and government relocation programs that reshaped Inuit life during this transitional era, Western education has contributed to what Kunuk labels the “death of [Inuit] history” and oral culture (2002a, 18). Combating these losses, Atanarjuat retells a traditional legend with important contemporary implications. Probing the connections between oral traditions and sovereignty, Craig Womack argues that traditional stories enable indigenous peoples to “[set] themselves apart as a nation of people with distinct worldviews that deserve to be taken seriously.” People “formulate a notion of themselves as an imagined community,” he contends, “through stories” (1999, 29, 60). Like the Native novels discussed in the introduction, Atanarjuat depicts a return to traditions that sanctions indigenous nationalism.13 Its story about a community ruined by outside influences which then reconstitutes itself resonates with events in the Arctic over the past several decades. In these ways the film extends the work of Isuma’s earlier, locally distributed productions, except that Atanarjuat was designed to reach an international audience. In this context, as it shows Inuit possessing a distinctive culture and history that merit national status, the film has the potential to bring global visibility to contests over land and political control. As a dramatization of a traditional legend, the story of Atanarjuat transpires in an era before the colonial transformation of Inuit life. Critics have often remarked on the story’s “timelessness” (see Bessire), a characterization that disengages it from history and politics. Instead the story unfolds in a realm that is enduring rather than atemporal, depicting ways of life 13.  Arnold Krupat (2007 ) remarks on the similarity of Atanarjuat to Silko’s Ceremony, both of which illustrate the dire consequences of departures from traditions and entanglements with “evil.” Both also conclude with the expulsion of evil, the recovery of traditions, and the reconstitution of community. Set in the twentieth century, however, Ceremony takes colonialism as an explicit manifestation of evil. As I will show, colonial history also informs Isuma’s rendering of the pre-contact story of Atanarjuat.

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that persisted for centuries and thus cannot be tied to a particular historical moment preceding colonization. The companion Web site does, however, situate the legend in time, “at the dawn of the first millennium,” as well as in place, locating the story’s events on a map anachronistically (but strategically) labeled “Nunavut.”14 While the ethnographic convention of timelessness transforms indigenes, in Eric Wolf   ’s terms, into “people without history” and thus without a future, Isuma’s framing of Atanarjuat instead conveys that Inuit have occupied the land for millennia, a long history that sets a precedent for continued control. In these terms, Atanarjuat’s narrative of “return” and community reconstruction allegorizes contemporary land claims and autonomy figured as restoration, thus contradicting Canadian national origin stories that depict the Arctic as empty frontier space. This focus on the pre-contact era emphasizes historical Inuit independence while refusing to define indigenous peoples solely in relation to Europe, and this, too, supports contemporary autonomy. Atanarjuat opens as, in the words of the narrator, “evil came to us like death” in the form of an unknown shaman who visits Igloolik and casts a curse that devastates the community for two generations. In the first scene Sauri, son of the camp leader, collaborates with the interloper to murder his father, usurp his position, and displace his chosen successor, Tulimaq. As the narrative progresses, the conflict extends to the next generation as Oki, Sauri’s son, vies with Amaqjuaq and Atanarjuat, the sons of  Tulimaq, over women and their own relative status in the community. Although the evil centers on Oki, his sister Puja, and their allies, the entire community suffers when family relationships shatter and the threat of violence, including rape and murder, silences and terrorizes its members. Eventually Oki and his friends kill Amaqjuaq, and the assassins pursue Atanarjuat (the fast runner) over miles of treacherous ice floes. In the end his miraculous escape precipitates events that lead to the expulsion of Oki and his allies from the community. The story is in one sense instructive: the myths he learned from his mother, Kunuk writes, centered on the “lessons we kids were supposed to learn about [the consequences] if you break . . . taboos” (2002a, 17). In the film, the evil shaman’s curse causes characters to depart from their traditions, including respect for elders, proper family relations,

14.  See www.atanarjuat.com.

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and the sharing of resources in times of scarcity. The community nearly collapses as a result. By exposing the disastrous consequences of rejecting traditions, Atanarjuat suggests their contemporary value and relevance. The film in fact devotes careful attention to the cultural details and practices of traditional Inuit life. The action often pauses for scenes of ceremonial activities, and as some characters break taboos, others explain them. “How can you make love to your brother-in-law when you’re not even supposed to speak to him,” Ulluriaq reprimands her sister-in-law Puja for seducing Ulluriaq’s husband, Amaqjuaq, while Sauri forbids Oki to pursue Atuat, Atanarjuat’s wife, because “we don’t steal women” (although his warning goes for naught when Oki rapes Atuat then murders his father in defiance of this prohibition). Because shamanism provides both the source of evil and a means to expel it, the film emphasizes its power. Most obviously, Atanarjuat illustrates the traditional seasonal cycles of subsistence— seal hunting in the winter, egg picking in the spring, caribou hunting in the summer and fall—that tie the people to one another and to the land. The characters range widely in seasonal migrations that number among the events traced on the film’s map of Nunavut on the Isuma Web site.15 In both the film and the map, connections between land and culture ground contemporary Inuit nationalism in the geography of Nunavut, and they give the imagined community a long and distinctive history. The consolidation of community boundaries finds a central place in Atanarjuat’s story in a way that reflects on colonization. Its final scene depicts elders rallying spiritual power to expel the evil that has overcome them. The film’s narrative is circular, beginning with the appearance of the evil stranger and concluding with the restoration of social and spiritual order; the closing ceremonial scene mirrors the opening one. In a key sense, as a story about a community ravaged by outside influences, the film functions as a colonial allegory and a narrative about reconstruction in the wake of this catastrophe. The evil that descends on the community and disrupts its leadership starkly parallels the ways in which colonization devastated social relations and traditional practices (which would become the subject of Isuma’s next feature film). This parallel offers a critique of 15.  The map is in this way similar to Silko’s five hundred–year map (discussed in chapter 4): both recount the indigenous histories and practices that render the land meaningful and support contemporary indigenous possession.

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colonization and its effects, suggesting that a return to cultural traditions and political autonomy offer the possibility of community reconstruction. This consolidation of community boundaries and the distinctions Atanar­ juat draws between insiders and outsiders resonate in the way the film positions non-Inuit audiences, who frequently lament their incomprehension, their sense of being outside its story. As I see it, this is part of its nationalist purpose. As one character says in the opening scene, “I can only sing this song to someone who understands it.” The film solidifies boundaries between insiders and outsiders by highlighting Inuit cultural differences while leaving most of them unexplained. At the conclusion of Atanarjuat, outtakes interrupt the pre-contact setting of the film with scenes of its creation, drawing the film more explicitly into contemporary debates about representation (in both its political and discursive senses) and the social places of Inuit. Juxtaposing images of the actors in character, wearing traditional dress, with shots of cast members in contemporary clothing, the outtakes create continuities between the world of the story and that of the performers, thus challenging expectations that confine the Inuit to the historical past. Further dismantling the colonial opposition between indigeneity and modernity, they establish Inuit mastery of the same Western technologies that, in earlier representations such as Nanook, defined them as primitives and placed them outside the progress of history. As the outtakes assert a contemporary Inuit presence with deep historical roots, they position Inuit as self-reflective subjects, rather than objects, of representation. This in part defines Atanarjuat’s difference from conventional ethnographic film. Demonstrating, in Kunuk’s words, that Inuit are “sophisticated enough to make a movie,” as I have already pointed out, easily translates into a case for political autonomy. Yet perhaps because of the challenges they pose to dominant discourses, the outtakes have generated critical and popular consternation. Reviewers in the popular media often ignore them, leaving intact the notion of a “timeless” culture safely distant from contemporary affairs, while others find them baffling. “Why offer an almost-three-hour-long narrative rooted in the mythical Inuit past,” as one scholar states the dilemma, “only to undermine it in the film’s concluding minutes with sixty seconds of explosive self-reflexivity?” (Siebert 536). This complaint expresses enduring assumptions about the incommensurability of traditional culture, politics, and modernity that the outtakes aim to dismantle but that nevertheless

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shape dominant interpretations of Atanarjuat in a global context. Similarly, reviews, such as those cited at the beginning of this chapter, that place the film within European literary and ethnographic traditions serve as a mode of containment, neutralizing the challenges presented by indigenous politics by undercutting Inuit autonomy and drawing Atanarjuat into colonial relations and systems of meaning from which the film seeks to sever itself. In addition to demonstrating the resilience of colonial ideologies, the gaps between the dominant reception of Atanarjuat and its local meanings illustrate the contradictions of Inuit nationalism and its filmed expressions, which depend on a global visibility that threatens to mute nationalist arguments for autonomy.

Colonial Encounters: Ethnographic Authority in The Journals of  Knud Rasmussen Contemplating Atanarjuat’s vulnerability to reinscription, critics have pointed to the absence of any critique of colonialism in the film. “If rhetorical sovereignty hinges on an emphatic engagement with the present in order to clear space for discursive, social, political, and economic autonomy for indigenous people,” asks Monika Siebert, “why edit out altogether the narrative of colonization and of the gradual disappearance of traditional lifeways, along with the serious critique of Canada’s ongoing exploitation of the First Nations’ lands that such a narrative would imply?” (541). As if to respond to such challenges, Isuma’s second feature, The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (2006 ), scrutinizes the disastrous impact on Inuit communities of traders, explorers, and missionaries in the 1920s. Missionization is the film’s central concern, and it inverts Archibald Fleming’s celebrations of Inuit conversions by casting the consequent demise of traditional shamanism as tragedy. Journals, as Kunuk describes it, is designed for “a first audience that is Inuit: elders who are still alive and young people looking for a future beyond boredom, unemployment and suicide. It tries to answer two questions that haunted me my whole life: Who were we? And what happened to us?”16 By delving into the effects of contact, Journals engages

16.  Cited on Isuma’s Web site (www.isuma.ca).

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issues that have long preoccupied travel writers, ethnographers, and other witnesses to these changes. But Journals differs from such historical accounts because it privileges an Inuit audience, positioning contact and its aftermath as community history that illuminates the present, and because it inverts paradigms of encounter to serve the purposes of cultural and political restoration which animate Isuma’s work. At the same time, the film challenges the discourse of expansion, revealing ethnographic representations in particular—inevitably, it seems, the West’s interpretive framework for indigenous stories—as embedded in colonial power. Specifically, it scrutinizes the problems Kunuk has identified, in a passage cited earlier, in the “practice of ‘anthropology/ethnography’ [as] entirely a one-way street” and the way this “uneven exchange influences all levels of relations between the two cultures: political, economic, social.” Unsettling ethnographic paradigms that depoliticize and dehistoricize indigenous culture, Journals, like Isuma’s earlier productions, highlights the connections between tradition, representation, and politics in colonization as well as in Inuit resistance. The film’s critique centers on the Danish polar explorer Knud Rasmussen and his encounter with the indigenous inhabitants of the Iglulik region during his Fifth Thule Expedition (1921–1924).17 Eliciting comparisons to Lewis and Clark’s transcontinental voyage, Rasmussen’s twenty thousand– mile trek from Greenland to Siberia is among the most celebrated journeys of discovery, and it became the mission to which all future Arctic ventures would be compared (Cole 1999, xi). The early twentieth century marked the zenith of Arctic exploration, which was fueled by quests for the North Pole which captivated the world’s attention, by the lucrative fur trade, and by consolidations of colonial power throughout the region.18 Even before he commenced his most famous expedition, Rasmussen had long been a key figure in the transformation of the Arctic; he began his explorations in 1902, and in the years that followed he helped found a mission as well as 17.  The town of Igloolik, the site and subject of Isuma’s films, was not established until the 1950s, when the Canadian government intensified its efforts to settle Inuit in permanent communities. I use the spelling employed in Isuma’s materials, “Iglulik,” to denote the region depicted in Journals, and “Igloolik” for the contemporary community referred to throughout the rest of their film work and written materials. 18.  I discuss travelers’ accounts of the Arctic and their role in the region’s changing political place elsewhere (Huhndorf 2001, chap. 2).

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a trading post “meant to be like a gentle preparer for civilization and the white man,” changes he believed inevitable (cited in Cole 1999, xx). The most ambitious of his seven major journeys, the Fifth Thule Expedition aimed to establish the common origins of the Eskimo through identifying cultural similarities (Rasmussen 20). Although this proved an elusive goal, Rasmussen collected more than twenty thousand artifacts and wrote a ten-volume account of his journey, feats that earned him the moniker “the founder of Eskimology” (see Cole 1999, xi). Rasmussen’s elegant account of the voyage drew a wide readership and remains influential even today.19 Although the Fifth Thule Expedition was more studiously ethnographic, it bore key similarities to previous journeys of discovery. Undertaken in the name of science, it included researchers in “archeology, geology, botany and cartography” who “did notable work in mapping territory known before [to non-Inuit] only in a vague way” (Rasmussen xxxii). Laying bare the mysteries of Arctic lands and peoples, the expedition laid the foundations for colonial impositions of power in the decades that followed. Its prominence and this constellation of purposes suggest the reasons why Rasmussen is the focal point of Isuma’s Journals: the expedition both “revolutionized the world’s view of the Eskimo” (Cole 1999, xxi) and exemplified the multiple facets of nascent colonial power, and it thus draws together issues of representation, culture, land, and politics that are at the center of Isuma’s work. Rasmussen’s journals at once depict traditions (especially spiritual beliefs, his special interest) and mark their loss, a process in which the explorer himself was complicit. As Journals challenges the power relations Rasmussen represents, it turns his work into a source of cultural recovery and colonial critique. In the film, Rasmussen’s story brings to light largely forgotten histories and traditions of the Iglulik region. Inspired by Rasmussen’s journals as well as oral accounts of community elders, the narrative revolves around the renowned shaman Avva (Aua), his wife, Orulu, and their family, especially their daughter Apak, who has inherited her father’s spiritual gifts. When Rasmussen first passed through Iglulik on his journey west, he

19.  Rasmussen’s ten-volume Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, a “foundation for virtually every substantial work written about the Eskimo since the 1920s” (Cole 1999, xii), was pared down into a popular two-volume work, originally published in 1927 in Danish, translated as From Greenland to the Pacific: Across Arctic America. The English translation has been reissued by the University of Alaska Press as Across Arctic America: Narrative of the Fifth Thule Expedition.

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paused to collect Avva’s stories. But on his return, despite Avva’s traditionalism, Rasmussen found that the shaman had converted to Christianity. Although his journals indicate that Rasmussen lauded Avva’s conversion (Rasmussen 118), the film marks it as a tragic watershed in Inuit history. Not only was Avva the last traditional shaman in Iglulik, but also missionization unleashed other changes that shattered social practices and relationships which had endured for centuries—losses, Kunuk suggests elsewhere, that underlie contemporary problems. Avva’s story provides both a means and a rationale for cultural recovery, and to these ends Journals stresses the authenticity of its account. “Real people, actual events,” the collective advertises the film, while still images from the 1920s frame the narrative and position it on the boundary between fiction and historical document.20 The story thematizes memory, too, as it unfolds through characters’ recollections. The brief opening scene, set a decade before Rasmussen’s arrival, depicts Apak remembering her early life, when European intrusions began to influence the community and foreshadowed massive social disruptions in the years to come. Later, Rasmussen’s interviews with Avva and Orulu prompt reminiscences that contribute to the community history sketched by the film. “I came to hear songs and legends if you will share them and to learn about your beliefs,” Rasmussen’s character explains his intentions, and the ensuing exchanges offer occasions for representing memories and traditions that are as much the subject of the film as the story itself. Like Atanarjuat, Journals lingers on these elements, frequently interrupting the narrative to recount, for example, Avva’s explications of shamanism, to depict dances and songs integral to ceremonial life, or to display age-old skills such as igloo building. “By remembering my youth, I relived it,” Orulu concludes her interview, and this statement also reflects the film’s purposes. By illustrating forgotten histories and traditions, Journals contributes to their continuance. Just as Journals conveys the value of traditions, it limns the consequences of their loss. The community rapidly falls into disarray once colonial incursions gain momentum. “We follow our ancestors’ rules because they work,” Avva tells Rasmussen early in the film. “They protect us so we can live without worry.” Misfortunes stem from broken taboos, he further instructs, and this increasingly describes the community’s plight as the story progresses.

20.  See www.isuma.ca.

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The arrival of missionaries, traders, and ethnographers, all colonial agents, spurs conflicts that divide community members, including families, whose survival depends on unity and cooperation. Even Avva’s family, known for its traditionalism and its rejection of European influences, falls victim to the destruction when he spars with his daughter, Apak, over relationships with the Christian faction. Two murders—first of Apak’s husband, then of a trader—transpire on the fringes of the story; the latter brings the threat of European law, and meanwhile, famine threatens starvation. The story connects these events, suggesting that such misfortunes arise from the characters’ failure to follow traditions. This underscores the power of shamanism, and when events culminate with Avva’s conversion and banishment of his spirit helpers in the final, mournful scene, Journals casts the choice as tragic. Represented as rigidly, even pathologically hierarchical, oppressive, and conformist, Christianity is contrasted starkly with shamanism, and the story’s bleak ending foreshadows future calamity. Unlike Atanarjuat, which similarly depicts the perils of departing from tradition but concludes with the restoration of social order, Journals narrates the community’s decline. In this way it seems to mimic conventional narratives about the demise of indigenous communities in the wake of contact. Such stories, as we have seen, rely on a progressivist logic that opposes “primitive” and “modern” and depicts Natives’ euphemistic “disappearance,” though perhaps lamentable, as inevitable. Identifying the inexorable momentum of modernity as the culprit, these narratives obscure the violence of conquest and represent indigenous lands as available for European possession. Although it, too, illustrates the disastrous effects of contact, Journals, on closer consideration, actually counters these narrative conventions and their political implications. The problem, in Isuma’s rendering, is not the innate opposition between indigeneity and modernity; the collective studiously undermines this opposition throughout its work, not least by using film as a tool of cultural revival. Instead, Journals casts conversion to Christianity as the problem. A disastrous choice driven by community pressures and the threat of starvation, it remains a choice nonetheless, and as such, Kunuk suggests, it carries the possibility of reversal: People lived in the Igloolik area for 4,000 years and they lived all that time with shamanism. I think the system was wonderful, and it worked. Then in

“From the Inside and through Inuit Eyes”    99 the last 83 years Christianity comes, and the Inuit throw away their law of nature for the Ten Commandments, throw away shamanism and spirits, so nobody could ever see them again. So this film will probably make a lot of Inuit think twice about what has happened. (cited in Said 2006, 39)

The possibility of revival gains strength not only from the endurance of traditions—the events of eighty-three years seem trivial when set against a belief system that persisted for millennia—but also from other aspects of the film and the broader context of Isuma’s work. Journals begins with a brief scene set in 1912, a decade before the dramatic changes that drive the community to disaster. Commencing with this period suggests the possibility of restoration. Like Isuma’s earlier works, especially the documentaries, this film juxtaposes past and present to bring them into closer relation. A recurring scene of Apak engaged in sexual relations with the spirit of her dead husband, for example, stresses the permeability of temporal boundaries. As Journals rejects the progressive logic of time that underlies colonial narratives, it invokes the possibility of cultural revival and community reconstruction. This, of course, is the story of Atanarjuat. Differences between the two films stem in part from conventions of genre. While Atanarjuat, operating in the realms of myth and fiction, depicts cultural restoration as a resolution to social problems, Journals, which positions itself as a historical account, advocates for the same by recounting the destructiveness of colonization. Journals’ critique extends to the entire colonial enterprise, but it is brought to bear most directly on the historical figure of Rasmussen. In particular, the film scrutinizes the structures of authority and political contexts that render his ethnography among the most influential sources on the Arctic. Although Rasmussen first appears as a rather benign figure, Journals stresses his incomprehension of and even hostility to Inuit beliefs when Avva attempts unsuccessfully to explain the “shadow people,” and his coerciveness comes to light when he presses his guides to proceed to Iglulik under life-threatening conditions. Highlighting the silences and erasures that are as much a part of the colonial project as its material economic and political dimensions, Kunuk notes, “We know Knud Rasmussen’s journals, but Aua and Umik [Avva’s Christian adversary] didn’t have a journal, so we had to dig [their stories] out of oral history” (cited in Said 2006, 38). Journals solidifies ties between access to representation and

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political power by placing Rasmussen among the traders, missionaries, and other colonial agents who transformed Native life in this watershed era. If representation connects to the establishment of European power, the reverse is also true, and the film dismantles ethnographic paradigms to shift the locus of representational—and, by implication, political—authority to the Inuit. While Rasmussen collected information “in order that the white man might better understand . . . the people of the northern ice country” (Rasmussen 6 ), Journals reverses the ethnographic gaze to focus on Native impressions of the interlopers. “I was thirteen years old when I saw my first white man,” Apak recollects at the beginning of the film in an overt revision of the encounter scene, which narrates the explorer’s response to seeing an Inuk, that opens Rasmussen’s grand narrative (see Rasmussen 2–7). This shift in perspective continues throughout the story. Rasmussen’s request for songs and stories meets with the retort, “Sing us something in your language.” So he does, and this depiction of the peculiar practices of white men finds parallels elsewhere, as when community members watch with rapt attention while he eats and then curiously sample his food. Even as the film subjects Rasmussen (as emblematic colonial figure) to ethnographic scrutiny, it renders the European characters marginal. Instead it concentrates on the Inuit’s experiences of the dramatic changes sweeping their community, of which Rasmussen and his companions are both agents and, for the most part, silent witnesses. Extending the shift in perspective, Isuma privileges contemporary Inuit audiences so that its depictions of cultural practices become subjects of community memory rather than objects of ethnographic salvage. Although the film’s critique centers on Rasmussen, it encompasses the broader terrain of colonial representations. In particular, Journals, like Atanarjuat, invites inevitable comparisons with Nanook of the North, in part because it is set in 1922, the year of Nanook’s release. Like Atanarjuat, Jour­ nals inverts the way Nanook positions the Inuit in relation to modernity, and it also challenges the power dynamics that authorize representations such as Flaherty’s film. As I described earlier, Nanook obscures colonial destruction (the subject of Journals) by situating its story in the past, and it employs a progressivist logic that creates a “narrative of death” for the Inuit. This logic shapes the famed gramophone scene, in which Nanook exhibits primitive wonderment as he encounters Western technology, the quintessential symbol of modernity. By opposing “primitive” and “modern,” this scene sets the stage for the metaphorical death at the end of the

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film. Journals restages the gramophone scene twice, recasting the Inuit encounter with modernity to interrupt its historical implications. Recalling the outtakes at the conclusion of Atanarjuat, the opening sequence of Jour­ nals features an array of European technologies: a camera, a gramophone, syllabic writing. While in colonial representations including Nanook such technologies are harbingers of the Natives’ demise, this scene depicts Inuit characters appropriating them for their own purposes, recording events that, in the film, serve the purposes of memory and cultural continuity.21 A later, more overt revision begins by showing the faces of Apak and other characters, rapt with curiosity, as a gramophone plays in the background. Here the film marshals expectations shaped by ethnographic conventions only to undercut them: seconds later it reveals that it is not the gramophone itself (which is treated as commonplace) but Rasmussen who elicits this reaction. This scene does not simply dismantle the opposition between indigeneity and modernity but reverses the ethnographic gaze to draw attention to the explorer and his role in the ravages of conquest obscured by Flaherty. By identifying European expansion rather than evolutionary momentum as the reason for this destruction, Journals characterizes the disintegration of the community as tragic but not inevitable, and it opens the possibility for social restoration. The challenge posed by Journals to European authority ultimately turns to the possession of land. The film is structured by two intersecting journeys: Rasmussen’s epic trek across what he called “Arctic America” and Avva’s family’s journey to the settlement. Clearly, Rasmussen’s expedition is a triumph of European expansion. By contrast, Avva’s journey, undertaken reluctantly at Rasmussen’s behest, leads to his conversion, and it anticipates the mid-century relocations of Inuit to permanent settlements which solidified Canadian control. Yet, although both journeys have to do with land loss, Journals uses them to illustrate long-standing Inuit ties to the land and to contrast this history with that of Europeans in the Arctic. Early scenes show Inuit ranging over broad territories, and Rasmussen’s dependence on them to navigate between places further demonstrates their intimate knowledge of and connections to the region that underlie contemporary land claims. Shortly after his arrival, Rasmussen scans a 21.  This scene also recalls the legendary writing lesson in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques, in which the technology of writing figures as an instrument of indigenous cultural alienation, oppression, and degeneration.

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rudimentary map that reveals the cartographic mission of his expedition and the foreigners’ lack of knowledge about the region. When Rasmussen cannot locate even nearby Iglulik, Umik produces a more authoritative map, a product of long Inuit occupation and itself an instrument of possession that counters European claims. In these ways this early scene denaturalizes contemporary European control of the land and opens questions about its future. That Journals draws attention to Europe’s responsibility for cultural and social devastation is perhaps a major reason it has garnered far less attention and critical praise than Atanarjuat. “The earlier film by its very nature was allegoric and the decision not to specify its era underlined its universality,” writes one film critic, contrasting the two. “This time there’s more rumination than momentum with long sections in which tribal elders appear to wrestle with both the obscure and significant incursions on their daily life” (Klady). Allegory, in this reading, evacuates cultural and historical specificity, the incursions on Inuit life that provide the ground on which Jour­ nals unfolds. As a story about “cultural genocide” (see Sasano), it limits its audience even further. Writes another film critic: “There is no mistaking its message. . . . In abandoning the old ways—in effect, the film states, being starved unto Jesus—the Inuit lost the crucial sense of community that afforded them a living in the snow and ice. They lost their way, and became refugees, on their own land, in one of the richest countries on Earth. No wonder Toronto’s suits were squirming” (Griffin). Bringing intersecting dimensions of Inuit nationalist endeavors to global audiences, Atanarjuat and Journals confront different but related challenges: while Atanarjuat’s focus on the cultural distinctiveness that defines community boundaries ironically lends itself to interpretation as universal sameness or ahistorical cultural difference, Journals, in its direct confrontation with colonial history, narrows and alienates its audience. Both responses illustrate the continuing influence of colonial discourses that undercut indigenous autonomy and obscure the violence of European expansion, and they limit the counterhegemonic possibilities of indigenous representations in the realm of the global. *  *  * Although Journals positions Rasmussen as a quintessential colonial figure, one scholar contends that his convictions about the singularity of Inuit culture across the Arctic inaugurated an era of pan-indigenous politics

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embodied most obviously in the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (see Cole 1999). Founded in 1977, the ICC represents over 150,000 Inuit in the United States, Canada, Chukotka (the Russian far east), and Greenland, promoting Inuit interests globally in part through its consultative status with the United Nations. Designating Rasmussen as the founding father of the ICC diminishes the agency of Inuit organizers and is at odds with the story the ICC tells about itself.22 It would be more accurate to say that colonization, a history represented in this case by Rasmussen, necessitated new political strategies that transpire in the realm of the global, of which the ICC is one key example. Media, too, have been instrumental in such political endeavors. While film in particular, as we have seen, supports indigenous nationalisms and land claims, it reaches beyond indigenous and colonial national boundaries to create a sense of relation across places. The media scholar Laura Marks writes: The phenomenal work the IBC and other aboriginal broadcasters have done to resynthesize traditional cultural identities can be considered part of a progressive form of nation building. At the same time their work contributes to a process of national deterritorialization. Satellite technology is inherently anti-nationalistic because it is able to construct communities of common interests that are only partially based on geographic proximity, and this geographic proximity need not be confined within national borders. . . . [W]e will witness First Nations and other groups not defined only or primarily by national borders use satellite to make transnational connections. Broadcasters like the IBC are tracing atop current national boundaries a fluid, porous map that will reconfigure our ideas of nationhood. (8)

Since their emergence in the 1970s, Arctic pan-indigenous alliances have gained increasing power and prominence. How they will reshape Native politics—and in particular how they will connect with local endeavors centered on land and the challenges they will pose to colonial nation-states— remains to be seen. In this regard, Arctic politics exemplifies shifts taking place across Native America. But while transnational alliances often remain grounded

22.  The Inuit Circumpolar Conference maintains an active Web site that covers its history and current activities (see www.inuitcircumpolarconference.com).

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in issues of nation, as is the case with the topics I discuss in this chapter, at other times they arise from social constellations created by colonialism that supersede colonial and indigenous national boundaries. These include issues of gender, which also find a place in Isuma’s work. In Atanarjuat, for example, the social disruptions precipitated by evil carry gendered dimensions, including sexual violence (most obviously Oki’s rape of Atuat) and the disempowerment of women elders. Not incidentally, one of those elders, Panikpak, regains social prominence in the final scene of social restoration, and it is she who leads the ceremony to expel evil which restores order to the community. If Atanarjuat, as I have argued here, functions as a colonial allegory, this gender trouble reflects, at least in part, social disruptions precipitated by European expansion. Significantly, the role of women became a source of contention in the Nunavut settlement, particularly in the gender parity debate over the proportionate representation of women in the new government (see Gombay and Minor). Similar debates about the roles of women are taking place across Native America, and they occupy an increasingly prominent niche in indigenous literary and cultural expression. Beginning in the 1980s, the period under scrutiny in this chapter, indigenous women throughout North America began to conceptualize a feminist project based on shared experiences of violence, sexualization, and marginalization across boundaries of language, culture, and nation. As the next chapter shows, questions about the historical place of Native women and the ways colonialism has reshaped their social roles came to the fore in indigenous drama of the 1980s and 1990s. These works conceive indigenous feminism as a transnational political project as they scrutinize the limits and exclusions of Native nationalisms.

3

Indigenous Feminism, Performance, and the Gendered Politics of Memory

In her radio play Birdwoman and the Suffragettes: A Story of Sacajawea (1991), Monique Mojica illustrates the complexities of colonial memory in the case of one of the few legendary indigenous women in American culture. Celebrated for her role in the Lewis and Clark expedition, a foundational event in nineteenth-century U.S. expansion, Sacajawea numbers among those Natives lauded for their complicity in the conquest of Indian lands. She was, in the words of one of Mojica’s characters, the “trusty little Indian guide . . . [whose] faithful servitude resulted in the successful completion of the famous expedition of Captains Meriweather [sic] Lewis and William Clark . . . opening her country” (67–68). For this allegiance she is memorialized in countless national sites and monuments; “Sacajawea mural in Montana / Sacajawea Park in Washington / Sacajawea Camp in Wyoming / and Sacajawea Museum in Idaho” are among those named in the play. Yet these memorials also encourage historical forgetting: by depicting indigenous people as acquiescing to their own demise, they obfuscate the violence, and even the fact, of conquest.

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While this is true of many dominant representations, the role of traitor falls most frequently to Native women, who are remembered, if at all, almost exclusively as collaborators in the invasion.1 They stand in stark contrast to the chiefs and warriors, gendered male in popular memory but not always in historical fact, who resisted conquest and became objects of an ambivalent American fascination with “savagery.” In the gendered paradoxes of colonial memory, such commemorations accompany the silencing, trivialization, and erasure of indigenous women and obscure their complicated historical roles.2 In Birdwoman, Mojica rebuts such understandings of Sacajawea by countering them with other stories, including the Birdwoman character’s critical accounts of the expedition and memories of the “grandpas and grannies” from Sacajawea’s home on the Wind River reservation. These stories depict her instead as a revered Shoshone leader, multilingual interpreter, negotiator of treaties, and spokesperson on behalf of her nation, roles typically imagined as male. The play thus aims to unsettle popular narratives about Native women, expose their patriarchal and colonial aspects, and replace them with oppositional histories. Birdwoman also ties such popular narratives to the material processes of conquest. As Mojica’s depiction suggests, not only has colonization involved sexual violence, the removal of indigenous women from positions of power, and the replacement of traditional gender roles with Western patriarchal practices, but also it has exerted social control through the management of Native women’s bodies.3 In particular, the historian Jean Barman has argued, representations of indigenous women’s sexuality as

1.  The other best-known examples are Pocahontas and La Malinche, who appear in Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (discussed later in this chapter), a companion piece to Birdwoman and the Suffragettes. Rewritings of these historical figures that contest the dominant view include Diane Glancy’s Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea and Paula Gunn Allen’s Pocahontas; see also critical analyses by Alarcón, Bell (1994), and Green (1975). 2.  To make this point, Carol Lee Sanchez asks: “How many famous Indians do you know offhand? Certainly the great warrior chiefs come to mind first, and of course the three most famous Indian ‘Princesses’—Pocahontas, Sacajawea and La Malinche. . . . [But] can you name at least five Indian women you know personally or have heard about?” (164). 3.  On the transformation and disruption of traditional women’s roles, see, for example, Allen (1986), Mihesuah, and Wall. For a discussion of the connection between sexual violence and ongoing colonialism in the Native context, see Smith (2005). Newman describes the relationship between Europe’s global “civilizing” mission and the instantiation of patriarchy (see esp. chap. 5).

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uncontrolled became both a primary instrument of and a rationale for colonialism by demonstrating the supposed need for social reform.4 She writes: The campaign to tame Aboriginal sexuality so profoundly sexualized Aboriginal women that they were rarely permitted any other form of identity. Not just Aboriginal women but Aboriginal women’s agency was sexualized. In the extreme case their every act became perceived as a sexual act and, because of the unceasing portrayal of their sexuality as wild and out of control, as an act of provocation. By default, Aboriginal women were prostitutes or, at best, potential concubines. Their actions were imbued with the intent that men in power had so assiduously ascribed to them, thus vitiating any responsibility for their or other men’s actions toward them. (264)

Consequent efforts “to desexualize Aboriginal everyday life” aimed to ensure that “the home to which women returned would emulate its colonial counterpart” (251), illustrating the importance of domesticity to the project of conquest. The conjugation of femininity with whiteness in dominant domestic ideologies further defined indigenous women as in need of reform, while their transformation became a means to re-create indigenous societies according to Western ideals. Because indigenous women have historically represented the “New World,” sexuality also provided metaphors for the willing submission of Native societies and the availability of their territories, the “virgin land” that ostensibly offered itself for capture. Although these processes have reshaped Native societies as a whole, they carry particular consequences for indigenous women because they transform sexual victimization into colonial complicity to limit women’s possible roles. From the earliest days of contact, as Rayna Green wrote in a foundational essay, “matriarchal, matrifocal, and matrilineal societies were neither acceptable nor comprehensible to members of European patriarchies” (1980, 250). Stories of sexualized “traitors” such as Sacajawea and Pocahontas offered models of Native-European relations that became colonial national origin stories as they redefined the roles of indigenous women in order to diminish their power (see also Green 1975). In colonial

4.  Barman’s account pertains specifically to nineteenth-century British Columbia, but her argument illuminates colonial processes in broader historical and geographical contexts.

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narratives, Native “ ‘heroines’ serve white males,” she continues, “and it is they, not those who fought white males, who are beloved” in the dominant society (1980, 265). Such stories of women’s complicity become instruments of erasure and political containment, and they have enduring consequences in both Native and non-Native communities. Even militant women activists such as Bobbie Lee and slain American Indian Movement leader Anna Mae Aquash “rarely push the ‘braids-and-shades’ rhetoric of urban, militant Indian men off the newspaper page” (1980, 259), an erasure that characterizes literary and scholarly writing about Native peoples as well. Conversely, the history we do have defines Native cultural authenticity and political resistance as male domains. In Birdwoman, Sacajawea’s story exemplifies these gendered symbolic and material aspects of U.S. expansion. Enslaved by the Mandan and later gambled away as a wife to Charbonneau, Lewis and Clark’s interpreter “known for raping Indian girls” (72), Sacajawea unwittingly joins the expedition as an unpaid member at her husband’s behest in a retelling that emphasizes the hidden history of conquest: sexual violence, the disempowerment of indigenous women, and the exploitation of their labor. By revealing gender as a key signifier and instrument of colonial power, Birdwoman expresses the urgency of an indigenous feminist project that emerged in Native politics in the 1980s and 1990s and occupied a more central place in indigenous women’s theater than in any other literary genre. During this period, playwrights and performers, including Mojica, began to challenge patriarchal colonialism by exploring Native women’s shared experiences of sexual violence, social marginalization, and political containment across boundaries of nation, language, and culture. Their transnational perspectives reveal the colonial logic and persistence of violence and narratives of indigenous women’s betrayal, while their attention to the centrality of patriarchy in colonization makes possible a critical analysis of Native women’s places in the dominant society and in tribal communities, even though these places, both shaped by patriarchy, are often not the same. In these performances, popular icons such as Sacajawea, as well as other, more generic figures, though not a new subject of critical engagement, became for the first time a means for indigenous women to identify shared experiences across social and historical boundaries, scrutinize the obscured gendered dimensions of conquest, and ultimately forge a common political identity. These figures not only exemplify the silencing, marginalization, and sexualization of indigenous women but also illustrate the enduring

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power of colonial representations to circumscribe Native women’s social spaces. In contrast with the earnestness of nationalist literary expressions, indigenous feminist performances often use piercing satire and irony to undercut such conventional representations and explore possible alternative meanings. The plays by Monique Mojica, Spiderwoman Theater, and Marie Clements analyzed in this chapter revise familiar narratives of sexualized, traitorous indigenous women to transform them into subversive models for individual identity reconstruction and anti-patriarchal, anti­ colonial politics. Predictably, however, these efforts have not been without controversy. Mojica’s play points to some of the problems of indigenous feminism, including its relation to a mainstream movement that emerged out of a predominantly white, middle-class community. In scenes that expose how colonialism shapes relations between Native and white women, Birdwoman begins and ends with suffragettes gathering to celebrate the 1905 unveiling of a statue of Sacajawea in Portland, Oregon. Here the suffragettes themselves become catalysts of colonial memory as they re-create her as a hero for their own cause: “I . . . hunted up every fact I could find about Sacajawea,” one boasts, and “out of a few dry bones I created Sacajawea and made her a living entity” (76). Their depictions of her as the “princess of the Shoshones,” the “Madonna of her race,” the “modest, unselfish, enduring little Shoshone squaw,” along with one suffragette’s fantasy of becoming an “Indian maiden dancing naked in the wilderness to the light of the bonfire!” (75), find an uneasy parallel in the sexualized and racialized renderings of the male characters. In both, her transformation into a mute icon—whether as symbol of the suffragettes’ cause or monument to the conquest—mobilizes a long history of colonial image making and exemplifies the silencing of indigenous women scrutinized by the play (under­ scored here when the statue is paradoxically given voice): Captured again! Frozen! Cast in bronze, this hollow form with my name— Tsakakawea! Who are these strange sisters?

(83)

*  *  *

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In the theater as elsewhere, the question of indigenous feminism has spurred contentious political, cultural, and scholarly debates that provide a crucial context for Native women’s performances (see Hilden). Some of these, like Mojica’s play, stress the disconnections between the situation of indigenous women and the goals of mainstream feminism. Others take up the conflicted relationship of indigenous feminism to Native traditions and thus to various nationalisms. Mainstream feminism’s “concept of ‘patriarchy’ alone is inadequate for explaining the many levels of violence that Native women face,” argues Bonita Lawrence (5), while others identify social priorities that are unique to indigenous women and ignored in most white feminists’ work. In an early essay Kathryn Shanley explains the reluctance of Indian women to join the broader feminist movement: Issues such as equal pay for equal work, child health and welfare, and a woman’s right to make her own choices regarding contraceptive use, sterilization and abortion—key issues to the majority women’s movement—­ affect Indian women as well; however, equality per se, may have a different meaning for Indian women and Indian people. The difference begins with personal and tribal sovereignty—the right to be legally recognized as peoples empowered to determine our own destinies. Thus, the Indian women’s movement seeks equality in two ways that do not concern mainstream women: (1) on the individual level, the Indian woman struggles to promote the survival of a social structure whose organizational principles represent notions of family different from those of the mainstream; and (2) on the societal level, the People seek sovereignty as a people in order to maintain a vital legal and spiritual connection to the land, in order to survive as a people. (214)

Shanley emphasizes connections between cultural revitalization, traditions, and decolonization in indigenous politics that further complicate the possi­ bilities of indigenous feminism. “There is no word for feminism in my language,” protests poet Laura Tohe in the title of an often cited essay that opposes indigenous feminism. Because of the economically, culturally, and politically powerful roles women occupy in traditional Diné society, she argues, there is no need for feminism in a matrilineal culture. She does reluctantly concede, however, that feminism becomes relevant for Native women in the dominant society. Tohe’s essay carries considerable weight within indigenous political contexts; nevertheless, her nod to the need for

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feminism in the non-Diné world suggests the limits of her argument. Tohe not only neglects the ways patriarchy has reshaped indigenous societies but also writes from a particular situation in which women traditionally held and, in her account, retain widespread influence (though the position of contemporary Diné women is not as monolithic as she suggests). Others counter that women occupied a range of roles in pre-contact societies— some influential, some not—and that colonization has deformed even traditionally matriarchal cultures (see Allen 1986 and Mihesuah). Advocating a more discerning stance on traditions, Emma LaRocque warns that as women we must be circumspect in our recall of tradition. We must ask ourselves whether and to what extent tradition is liberating to us as women. . . . There are indications of male violence and sexism in some Aboriginal societies prior to European contact. . . . As Native women, . . . we are challenged to change, create, and embrace “traditions” consistent with contemporary and international human rights standards. (14)

These arguments from within the indigenous women’s community underscore the necessity of a feminist practice that addresses the many contending particularities of indigenous women’s experiences within and outside tribal communities. Nationalism, however, poses yet another problem to indigenous women working to articulate a feminism appropriate to their worlds, and this tension places indigenous feminism outside dominant Native politics. Although she herself insists on Indian feminist consciousness and commitments, Rayna Green observes that the “concerns which characterize debate in Indian country, tribal sovereignty and self-determination, for example, put Native American tribes on a collision path with regulations like Title 9 and Equal Opportunity” (1980, 264). Indigenous feminism’s criticism of gender dynamics within Native communities and its transnational dimensions, based on connections between women across social and political boundaries, also sometimes elicit accusations of tribal and/or national divisiveness, or worse, charges that feminism actually under­ mines more pressing struggles for sovereignty. Some have even alleged that “those who have most openly identified themselves [as feminists] have tended to be the more assimilated of Indian women activists, generally accepting of the colonialist ideology that indigenous nations are now legitimate sub-parts of the U.S. geopolitical corpus rather than separate nations” (Jaimes and Halsey 331).

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In an influential essay on the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, HaunaniKay Trask similarly opposes feminism and Native nationalisms: [As] I decolonized my mind and my commitments, the political and cultural environment at home splintered my acquired feminism from my Hawaiian existence. . . . Given our nationalist context, feminism appeared as just another haole intrusion into a besieged Hawaiian world. Any exclusive focus on women neglected the historical oppression of all Hawaiians and the large force field of imperialism. Now that I was working among my people, I saw there were simply too many limitations in the scope of feminist theory and praxis. The feminism I had studied was just too white, too American. Only issues defined by white women as “feminist” had structured discussions. . . . [H]ere, in Hawai‘i, we were asserting our cultural posture, including our own style and language of argument, as defining of the political arena. (1996, 909)

Here Trask verges on joining those who would subordinate women’s concerns to those of the (ostensibly male) nation. Her reticence about identifying patriarchy within indigenous communities is illustrated by her contradictory characterization of feminism, but not nationalism, as a “haole intrusion,” although both political strategies emerge from imperial contexts. Problematically defining feminism as an “exclusive focus on women” that addresses only white women’s issues, she ignores fundamental connections between patriarchy and colonialism. Trask does acknowledge the importance of indigenous women’s issues in the sovereignty movement, including those pertaining to health, reproduction, equal employment, and domestic violence; elsewhere she describes how the colonization of Hawaii unfolded through the exploitation of Native women’s bodies and the sexualization of indigenous people (see Trask 1993). Nevertheless, she remains ambivalent about feminism, arguing that “the answers to the specifics of our women’s oppression reside in our people’s collective achievement of the larger goal of Hawaiian self-government, not in an exclusive feminist agenda,” concluding that “sovereignty for our people is a larger goal than . . . equality with our men” (910, 914). This opposition between sovereignty and feminism positions male­articulated nationalism as the sole site of indigenous resistance to ongoing colonization, and it deflects questions about the ways patriarchy shapes the internal dynamics of Native communities and activist movements. In

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a stark recapitulation of colonial narratives about Native women’s complicity, this lack of sustained critical analysis of nationalism from within indigenous communities posits assimilation (an accusation frequently leveled at feminists) or submission to patriarchy as the only paths available to indigenous women. In fact the myriad processes by which colonization has positioned indigenous women, none of them captured in simplistic binary arguments, require a feminist rethinking of Native politics across tribal boundaries, a task to which nationalism, as critical discourse and political practice, is inadequate. Notwithstanding Trask’s contention that sovereignty holds the solution to patriarchy, the gender politics of some Native activist groups, most famously the American Indian Movement (AIM), have elicited criticism from some prominent indigenous women. Indeed, Lisa Mayo identifies sexism within AIM as one of the reasons why she, along with her sisters Gloria Miguel and Muriel Miguel, formed Spiderwoman Theater, the first Native feminist drama company: When the women were working with the men [in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s], things came down—the women with AIM, on Alcatraz, all the different things that happened at Wounded Knee. This was early on. . . . [Muriel] was as angry as hell because when it came down to really negotiating and talking with the powers that be, no women were allowed in the room. They’d say, “Go ahead. Make the coffee. Write the letters.” Things like that. It was awful. So this is what we were talking about, part of what we were talking about. We said it out loud. (Haugo 2000b, 338–39)

In addition to these activists’ marginalization of women, described by one critic as “male-dominated tribal politics under the guise of ‘tribal sovereignty’ ” (Jaimes Guerrero 67), scholarly accounts of these histories, some written by Native men, often erase or diminish the substantial participation of indigenous women (Mihesuah 12).5 Many hesitate to identify such forms of sexism and their similarities to gender dynamics in the dominant society, wary of accusations of divisiveness and alert to the possibility that

5.  Mihesuah cites Paul Chaat Smith’s and Robert Warrior’s neglect of women in Like a Hurricane, their celebrated account of AIM activism, and this underscores again the male-centeredness of nationalism as a critical discourse.

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these challenges draw perilously close to colonial stereotypes about indigenous men. Thus it is no accident that some of these criticisms of Native politics should arise, as Mayo’s comment illustrates, not out of scholarly or political activist discourses but rather from within the theater community. As we shall see, the urban origins of Native theater companies and their multiple, necessarily pan-tribal influences enable alternative political practices and revisions of dominant literary paradigms that engage pressing transnational questions, including those surrounding gender and feminism. These issues and literary revisions come to the fore in Mojica’s work and in the performances of her feminist contemporaries in the 1980s and 1990s. *  *  * Drama and performance broaden the range of political questions that bear on Native cultural production and revise conventional literary models, not only because of their cross-tribal (or transnational) nature but also because they redefine the urban, rather than only the tribal, as a key center of indigenous experience. As debates surrounding indigenous feminism demonstrate, the tribal remains an enduring source of identity and the terrain on which the most visible Native politics unfolds. In literature, as we have seen, this is expressed particularly clearly in novels of the Native American Renaissance, many of which recounted their protagonists’ return and reintegration into tribal communities. These tended to be men’s stories: in the major novels of the early Renaissance period, there were no female protagonists, even in works by women authors. (Women novelists of the next generation, most famously Louise Erdrich, revised the return plot to focus on female protagonists.) Meanwhile, the literal and metaphorical returns of Native novels find a counterpoint in population shifts in the opposite direction during the same period. Rather than returning home to reservations and other tribal communities, large numbers of Native peoples migrated to cities—some driven by government relocation programs, some by tribal termination, others by economic necessity—until Native urbanites outnumbered their reservation counterparts. The preponderance of return narratives in fiction was in some sense compensatory, a means of strengthening tribal ties loosened by historical currents and government policies. These other movements from tribal home to urban center find a place, however neglected, in Native literary

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production, including theater. Although they emerge in large part from assimilationist policies and pressures, such stories engage questions about indigenous survival, identity, and politics in urban, cross-tribal contexts, and they redefine cities as Native spaces. Not yet a sustained focus of literary scholarship, these narratives introduce a set of critical paradigms and questions not contained by—though not always incompatible with—­ issues of nation and their fictional corollary of return. These include gender and feminism. Arguably more than any other cultural or scholarly realm, drama and performance have long explicitly engaged issues of gender and indigenous feminism. This is true because of the political possibilities of drama as well as the particular circumstances of Native theater groups. The first Native companies emerged in the 1960s and 1970s following the collective move to urban centers. From the beginning, theater was closely tied to the politics unfolding in urban Native communities; and because most Native drama groups were products of urban settings and the work of those educated in pan-tribal or non-Native educational institutions, they tended to address urban experiences and other issues that cut across tribal (and sometimes racial) affiliations.6 Indeed, writes Hanay Geiogamah, founder of the Native American Theater Ensemble in the early 1970s, “the emergence of pan-Indian consciousness” actually made possible the creation of Native theater (2001, 13). In many dramatic works characters move to cities from their reservation homes, the reverse journey of that undertaken by their best-known counterparts in fiction. The questions they raise about identity, dislocation, and intercultural relations in urban contexts broaden the range of Native identities, experiences, and politics. One of the most pressing issues arising in this new work is that of the struggle for indigenous women’s equality beyond individual tribal boundaries. The first feminist theater company was founded in that most urban of spaces, New York City. From its inception it crossed all the boundaries that restrict and confine nationalist arguments and practices. Spiderwoman 6.  Although this is true of most Native theater companies, an important exception is community theater that aims to revitalize indigenous languages and traditions. Additionally, although I am identifying the 1960s and 1970s as the period when major Native theater groups emerged, there is a small body of plays and performances that dates to earlier periods, most famously the work of Lynn Riggs and E. Pauline Johnson. For a fuller history of Native drama, see Huhndorf 2006; for a history of Native women’s performances, see Haugo 2000a.

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Theater was created in 1975 as a multiracial group with roots in feminist experimental drama (an alliance that points to the ways indigenous issues could transform mainstream feminism). In 1981 sisters Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel, and Muriel Miguel split from the original company to focus more exclusively on Native issues and to use the group to further their broader political activism. Spiderwoman Theater takes its name from the female figure in Hopi tradition who originated the art of weaving. Reflecting the dual influences of their indigenous activism and feminist experimental theater, the group dubbed its creative process “storyweaving,” described as a collective endeavor in which everyone “has a voice and doesn’t hesitate to use it to express herself” (cited in Canning 68). All the ideas and experiences are then incorporated into the production. The performers of Spiderwoman Theater frequently render sharp critiques of gender relations among Native peoples and in the colonizing society. Exhibiting the dual influences of feminist experimental theater and Native politics, their work covers a broad range of themes that include the nature of contemporary (including urban) indigenous identities, history and memory, and social issues within Native families and communities. Spiderwoman’s conjunction of questions of gender with issues that are more obviously “Indian” challenges commonplaces about Native identities and experiences. The fact that its sister founders are of mixed Kuna and Rappahannock descent itself unsettles conventional notions of identity centered on the United States, as do their urban origins, and these provide two foci of the group’s work. Power Pipes (1992), for example, casts English- and Spanish-speaking indigenous characters in mythological and contemporary stories about such topics as family relations, sexuality, and social violence, thus contesting definitions that confine Indianness within narrow cultural and national borders. It also addresses the dual marginalization of racism and sexism particular to women of color, which in turn provides a basis for shared community. The performers use slapstick humor to explore these painful topics, explaining that “the reason we’re funny is very unfunny. It’s very tragic. Our way of coping with surviving is to cover up a lot of things. Indians are like that. . . . You find a way to survive” (quoted in Burns and Hurlbutt 169). Still active, Spiderwoman Theater is the longest-standing Native theater company, and its groundbreaking work has heavily influenced other women playwrights

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and performers including, as we have seen, Monique Mojica, daughter of Gloria Miguel and a founding member of Native Earth Performing Arts in Toronto. The most public of genres, theater lends itself to such political uses. The stage, as Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o has written of the postcolonial Kenyan context, serves as a “sphere of power” and as a “self-contained field of internal relations” constituted through its “conflictual engagement with all the other shrines of power”—a position that enables social critique and potentially inspires political action (39–40). In the United States this was especially true during the activist years of the 1960s and 1970s, as theater historian Christopher Bigsby explains: The splintering of the audience and its reformation as a series of groups allied by race, gender or political persuasion was a reminder not of anomie but of communal strength, of a realignment with clear social and political implications. . . . [For these groups] theatre was in large part a means to an end, a way of clarifying process into image, of displaying the mechanisms of manipulation and suppression and thereby identifying the possibility and direction of change. (268)

As a mirror of social experience, theater provided a mechanism for scrutinizing social relations and, ideally, compelling action aimed at social transformation. This held true for Native companies, which often explicitly allied themselves with activists during this period. Thus the Native Ameri­ can Theater Ensemble, Geiogamah has contended, allowed Natives to “look at our situation in politics and the social environment. We believe the Ensemble can function as a component in the overall movement to achieve true equality and self-determination” (cited in Brown, 173). Mainstream feminism of this early period also used drama in its politics (see Canning and Case), and from its beginnings in 1975 Spiderwoman Theater drew techniques as well as themes from feminist experimental theater. Scrutinizing the racial and gender dimensions of sexual violence, Power Pipes, for instance, employs mainstream feminist consciousnessraising techniques aimed at behavior transformation in a repeated rape scene: at first the victim submits to the violence, but in the repetition she resists it with the help of other women. Spiderwoman Theater, like Native women’s theater in general, has produced an extensive body of work

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culminating in the efforts of the daughters’ generation, here represented by Mojica’s performances.7 While the very conventions of the stage—enacted through the presence of Native people and the articulation of their perspectives—counter colonial myths about the euphemistic “disappearance” of Indians and assert the right of Native people to define their own situations, they gain particular currency for indigenous women, for whom problems of invisibility and cultural authority are amplified. Because Native women’s occupation of public space is fraught with prior acts of containment that presume their subservience or their active complicity in conquest, theater, as it marshals a long history of sexualized displays of women’s bodies, becomes an important means to engage gendered colonial narratives and to redefine women’s political identities in transnational and transhistorical ways. By broadening conventional notions of Indianness, indigenous women’s performances reterritorialize urban spaces and open the way for questions of gender, probing the ties and disconnections among indigenous women from across the Americas as well as the vexed relations between patriarchy and colonialism, feminism and sovereignty. Countering oppositions between indigeneity and questions of gender, these works imagine an identity and an anticolonial politics that is both Native and feminist. Yet at the same time, they inevitably confront the dangers of public space, which for indigenous women is always sexualized, laden with histories of violence and displays of commodified Native bodies. Issues of social presence and cultural authority central to Native theater as a whole are also brought to bear on Birdwoman and the Suffragettes. Mojica’s rewriting of Sacajawea’s story reflects a broader tendency in Native American literature that, beginning in the 1980s, focused more heavily on women and directed attention to their absence in earlier literary and historical works. In the play, conflicting stories—told by Lewis and Clark, the suffragettes, Shoshone tribal members, and Sacajawea herself—vie for prominence, contrasting a silent, acquiescent, sexualized Sacajawea with a vocal resistance leader. Not incidentally, many of the characters’ subversive countermemories of Sacajawea center on voice: not only is she a translator and spokesperson on behalf of the Shoshone, but also her character speaks 7.  For a list of published plays, performances, and critical works, see the Web site of the Native American Women Playwrights Archive at Miami University (http: //staff.lib.muohio.edu /nawpa).

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in the first person to revise her role in the Lewis and Clark expedition. As the play draws to a close, she exhorts listeners: If you remember me, remember a child fighting to stay alive remember a slave girl gambled away remember a mother protecting her child remember a wife defying the whip remember an old one who loved her people remember I died at home on my land. (84)

Nevertheless, the play ends where it begins, with the suffragettes’ memorials, illustrating perhaps the intransigence of conventional narratives about Native women. The structure of the play is fragmentary and episodic, layering conflicting stories about Sacajawea as it lets stand the gaps and erasures in the historical record. The uncertainties registered in the epigraph—“Dedicated to Sacajawea, 1786–1884 / whoever she may have been; and to / all the unnamed women who share her story”—­ underscore the erasures and social inscription of colonial memory even as they point to the difficulty of historical recovery. In the play such questions of memory dramatize the complexities of gender, illustrating the need for new stories about Native women that ties Mojica’s work to that of other playwrights and performers conceptualizing an indigenous feminism. The three plays analyzed in the remainder of this chapter— Spiderwoman Theater’s Sun Moon and Feather, Marie Clements’s Urban Tattoo, and Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots—redefine urban spaces and issues of gender as Native, critically engage popular culture icons to scrutinize the role of patriarchy in colonization, and in so doing create a political project that reconceptualizes the social place of indigenous women.8

8.  I focus on these performances not because of the ways the playwrights identify themselves—the members of Spiderwoman Theater and Monique Mojica describe themselves as “feminists,” though I am not certain whether this is true of Marie Clements—but rather because of their relevance to what I am articulating in this chapter as an indigenous feminist project that scrutinizes Native women’s historical and contemporary experiences and redefines their social roles.

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“Living in a Memory”: Sun Moon and Feather Spiderwoman Theater’s best-known performance, Sun Moon and Feather (1981), centers on the family life of sisters Gloria Miguel, Muriel Miguel, and Lisa Mayo in their childhood home in Brooklyn, New York.9 The title (a translation of their Kuna names), a backdrop of indigenous fabric designs, and stage props that include Kuna objects (a rattle, a calabash, and a mola) identify this performance as both indigenous and autobiographical, but this is an unconventional Indian story. Sun Moon and Feather layers three kinds of performances: an audio-taped discussion of poverty, home movies of the father’s family in the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama (“home of the Kuna nation”), and the staged performance. While the home movies, along with the title and props, bespeak an identity rooted in Kuna tribal traditions, the stage set itself—a familial space awash in pink—registers another meaning of “home” linked to domesticity, and the tape recounts the poverty that plagued the sisters’ early lives in the city. Resisting conventions of display that sexualize indigenous women, the performance opens on an empty stage, and the poverty tape, the props, and the home movies serve to shift the terms of the performance before the sisters appear.10 As it subverts gendered conventions of looking, the performance directs the audience’s attention to issues of domesticity, poverty, and violence. An urban story about women, Sun Moon and Feather confronts dominant conceptions of Nativeness centered exclusively on the tribal and on men’s experiences, and it redefines the urban and domestic as spaces for the creation of Native identities, foregrounding questions of gender. These intersections of gender, class, and race establish the terrain on which the autobiographical story unfolds. Sun Moon and Feather limns the discontinuities and losses in the sisters’ lives, marked by turbulent family relationships and their distance from their Kuna tribal origins, as it also narrates sustaining ties between indigenous women. A sense of loss, in fact, pervades the performance from its

  9.  Sun Moon and Feather is available as a published text (Spiderwoman 1999b) as well as a videotaped performance (Spiderwoman 1989); the two differ somewhat. My analysis here is based on the text with occasional reference to the videotape. 10.  The videotaped performance opens with scenes of domestic space, presumably the sisters’ childhood home, accompanied by audio narration that describes their early lives.

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beginnings. The opening discussion of poverty provides the framework for the rest of the story: “So we were talking about that layer of worthlessness, selflessness, coming out of being poor, being dirty, not having enough to eat,” having to endure “a cold house, no food, a drunken father, a depressed mother, a neighborhood that’s very hostile to you” (291). As the poverty tape continues to play, the home movie begins: “The film is beautiful. It shows all of our uncles and our father. Beautiful Indian faces. Then shots of the lovely islands that they come from, The San Blas islands, home of the Kuna nation. The juxtaposition of that sad tape [about poverty] and the lovely islands where they come from. The worry about money in the city against a coconut culture” (292). The beautiful island film contrasts starkly with the gritty reality of the sisters’ New York lives recounted in the tape, lives of economic deprivation punctuated by episodes of domestic violence and, the opening dialogue implies, sexual violence as well (or at least the threat of it). But rather than a marker of irremediable loss, of idyllic indigenous origins, now degenerate, the footage of the San Blas Islands becomes in the context of the performance a home movie with deeply personal meanings that facilitate memories, community connections, and ultimately the creation of an urban Indian identity. As the film mediates across time and space so that the father’s family and the Kuna nation become part of their story, the sisters’ narratives of their lives in Brooklyn, told episodically throughout the performance, add domestic, urban, and economic themes to the film’s more familiar representation of Indianness. The poverty, social ostracism, and domestic conflicts they recount refer to the dislocations and cultural losses that follow the family’s move to New York. In these tellings, Sun Moon and Feather redefines gender and class as Indian issues as it situates stories of indigenous identity formation and cultural survival in urban contexts. While the sisters’ story unfolds at a distance from the traditionally tribal domain of the Kuna nation, Sun Moon and Feather also charts the differences between the sisters’ lives and the ideals of the social world they inhabit. These come together in an early scene in which the adult performers reenact a girlhood fantasy about tea parties with rare china, hand-rolled linen napkins, and cream and crumpets while they play mother to their dolls. Clearly this is a dream world far beyond their reach, in which proper femininity is synonymous with wealth and whiteness. Lavish plates piled high with fresh creampuffs and crumpets, cream “so thick you can eat it

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with a spoon,” china “so fine you can see straight through it,” and elaborate mannerisms (“You must keep your pinky up like this and talk fancy”) emphasize the poverty and austerity of their lives (294). Throughout the performance the sisters express their desire to escape economic and social deprivation, “to be clean . . . to be educated . . . to be cultured” (296), in a way that centers on the domestic (Lisa Mayo: “I’m going to marry a rich man and he’s going to give me things like a fur coat and a refrigerator full of food” [308]). Sun Moon and Feather thus turns the popular conjunction of domesticity and middle-class whiteness into the subject of critique, and the sisters perform the tea party scene to register both longing born of poverty and a parody of dominant domestic ideals which exposes their racial and class dimensions. Extending this critique, a later scene links domestic and feminine ideals to colonial practices when the sisters perform “Indian Love Call,” the song made famous by Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the 1936 film Rose Marie. As the scene begins, the sisters clamor to play MacDonald, a screen icon who embodies ideals of beauty and femininity that Sun Moon and Feather chides: “I’m Jeanette MacDonald and I have great big green eyes and long red hair that comes down to there. And I have a low cut white dress that goes down to there and goes in like this and out like that and lace all around the bottom. And I’m standing on a mountain . . . and I look down and there he is on a big white horse” (310). This description of MacDonald underscores the racial dimensions of femininity and heterosexual desirability in a highly clichéd romance narrative. The performance includes the movie scene in which the emphatically white characters use “Indian Love Call” to serenade each another, and as it plays, Gloria Miguel and Lisa Miguel mimic the actors: So echoes of sweet love notes gently falls Through the forest stillness are fond waiting Indian lovers call . . . This is the time of the moon and the year. When love dreams to Indian maidens appear. And this is the song that they hear. (310–11)

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These lyrics evoke racial stereotypes of sexualized Indian “maidens”— here attuned to the cycles of nature, rendered timeless and unchanging through the ethnographic present—to sexualize Marie de Flor (MacDonald’s character) and to facilitate her romantic attachment to Sergeant Bruce (Eddy). But the movie scene does more than reiterate sexuality and submissiveness as qualities associated with indigenous women (representations with a long history in colonial discourse); it renders those images available for the purposes of white characters. The contrast between two parallel performances—MacDonald playing an Indian maiden and Gloria Miguel playing MacDonald—reveals racial crossing as a privilege of the colonizing culture.11 While MacDonald plays Indian successfully to beckon a suitor, Gloria Miguel’s imitation of MacDonald, by contrast, illustrates the racialization of feminine ideals to which she can never conform. While this scene develops Sun Moon and Feather’s critique of the racial and class ramifications of dominant gender ideals, the performance ultimately turns the “Indian Love Call” serenade around to engage issues of Native women’s identity crystallized by the performance. When the sisters clamor to play MacDonald, they seem to affirm the feminine ideals she represents as well as stereotypes of Native women, but their mimicry quickly slides into parody of MacDonald’s character and those stereotypes she voices.12 As Sun Moon and Feather expands Indian identities to encompass urban and gender issues, it uses these identities to unsettle such gendered stereotypes. The performance displays the sisters in a way that counters representations of indigenous women in popular media, including Rose Marie’s “Indian Love Call” scene (the performers do not embody the physical attributes of “Indian maiden,” nor are they vacuous, passive, or submissive). As it sets images in the performance against those in popular film, Sun Moon and Feather reappropriates these same popular images for its own purposes.13 Instead of invoking romantic clichés, the sisters’

11.  This phenomenon, more broadly defined, is the subject of my earlier book Going Native (2001). 12.  The parodic aspects of this scene contribute to a critique of heteronormativity in another scene that scrutinizes her sisters’ reactions when Muriel Miguel reveals that she is gay. 13.  This is also true of other visual images in the performance, including film footage of Indian “snake oil shows” and powwows; the contrast between these events, however—one staged for non-indigenous audiences and the other for a mostly Native community—is complicated by the Miguel family’s participation in both.

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rendition of “Indian Love Call” expresses their familial love for one other, and in this way the scene anticipates the transformations of identity in the remainder of the performance that develop through connections with other indigenous women. Early in Sun Moon and Feather, looking back on the hardships of their childhood (poverty, cultural losses, and family and community instability), Lisa Mayo wonders, “How did we make it?” (291). Although the performance depicts their occasional squabbles and competitiveness, it presents the sisters’ relationship as sustaining because it enables them to endure social isolation and compensates, however imperfectly, for the loss of their parents (Muriel Miguel: “My mother never talks to me. I live in a house with my mother and father. . . . I am the only child of my two sisters” [295]). Connections to other women across time and space, primarily through memory, are also important, as the sisters strive to create an indigenous sense of belonging despite their distance from the Kuna nation. In one prominent scene another serenade likens the act of remembering to the sisters’ bonds with one another: We three, were all alone Were all alone Living in a memory Ah memories My echo, my shadow and me. (297)

And indeed Sun Moon and Feather is in itself a collective reminiscence of their early lives together. The performance extends this exploration of the significance of memory as a source of strength, identity, and community in scenes that illuminate ties between Indian women across generations. These provide a sense of historical continuity that offsets the ruptures between the sisters’ daily lives (described in the poverty tape) and their tribal origins (represented in the home movie). Memories of mothers and grandmothers frame the performance, as Mayo, in the first instance, traces the sisters’ lineage through women ancestors: “I am the granddaughter of Elizabeth Ashton Mourn, a beautiful Rappahannock Indian woman. . . . My great-grandmother Felicia was a midwife and she taught my grandmother how to deliver babies. My grandmother

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delivered me and both my sisters” (295). Here the performance reprises a key convention of Native autobiographies in which acknowledging ancestors foregrounds connections between self and community, past and present—connections integral to indigenous identities. Because these ancestors are women, the performance resists conventions that define indigenous women through relationships with men, and it offers an alternative to the dominant domestic ideals criticized throughout the performance. In the closing scene, memories bind the sisters to their mother, whose loss is recounted at the beginning of the performance, when Lisa Mayo describes how, out of despair, “Mama gave up a long time ago” (291), and at its end, when her physical death devastates them. Sun Moon and Feather sets these scenes of deprivation against fragments of memory that provide continuity and sustenance. In the concluding lines Muriel Miguel relates, “I don’t know why my heart is so light. This morning I got up and I remembered it was my birthday and I remembered when I was a little girl and Mama was still alive,” while Gloria Miguel ruminates, “I’m the only grandmother now, the only grandmother in the family” (313), a role that ties her to her women ancestors and creates a sense of continuity into the future embodied by her grandchild. Sun Moon and Feather thus provides a narrative of cultural identity that unfolds primarily through relationships among women across time, and it challenges notions of Indian identities premised on maleness and unbroken ties to rural or reservation communities. Yet in the performance this new narrative is sometimes tenuous. The vacillations between memory and forgetting in the final lines—“I’m already beginning to forget [Mama’s] face. . . . Just as we won’t be remembered either. . . . They’ll forget us. . . . No, she’ll go on in us, in me and my family” (313)—find a parallel in the fragmentary, episodic structure of the performance itself, expressing the continuities and ruptures that form the contours of urban Indian life.

Those “Tainted Scars”: Social Inscription in Urban Tattoo Marie Clements’s Urban Tattoo (1999) extends Spiderwoman Theater’s exploration of the social positions of urban indigenous women. But while Sun Moon and Feather positions urban and domestic spaces as sites of indigenous identity formation, Urban Tattoo draws out their explicitly political aspects. Clements’s play tells the story of Rosemarie, who, in her youth,

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flees her remote hometown of Fort Good Hope in Canada’s Northwest Territories to seek a glamorous life in the big city of Edmonton. Founder of the First Nations theater company “urban ink productions,” Clements has written ten plays, all of them overtly political. Burning Vision (2003), for instance, links uranium mining on First Nations land with the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima during World War II, and The Unnatural and Accidental Women (2005) tells of serial murders of indigenous women in Vancouver. Urban Tattoo unites Clements’s concerns with gender, violence, and transnational connections among racialized peoples in Rosemarie’s story. A onewoman show set in the present, Urban Tattoo is an “image journey” (209), a flight through time that carries the adult Rosemarie between Edmonton, her current home, and the indigenous community of Fort Good Hope, where she spent her childhood in the 1940s. The performance, as the production notes describe it, “takes the themes of identity, displacement, and survival and redesigns them into an urban context” (208). Another reversal of the nationalist “return” narrative, Rosemarie’s journey from tribal community to urban center revises stories about the city as a space of assimilation. In Edmonton, Rosemarie develops a political consciousness about the imbrications of patriarchy and colonialism, and this transformation strengthens and expands her sense of Native identity. Urban Tattoo is staged in a series of spaces—trading post, church, and a “tight polite house” where Rosemarie finds employment—that position urban and tribal communities as related sites of colonization and illuminate the role of patriarchy in conquest. Like Sun Moon and Feather, Urban Tattoo deploys visual images of popular culture icons to scrutinize the ways in which the lives of urban Native women are embedded in dominant racial, class, and gender formations. As a girl, Rosemarie becomes obsessed with Hollywood film legend Jane Russell, and her consequent pursuit of stardom leads her to Edmonton, where the realities of her social position as an indigenous woman shatter her dreams. These experiences exemplify colonialism’s sexualization and marginalization of indigenous women and draw out their violent consequences. At the play’s end, Rosemarie arrives at a critical understanding of her “tattoos” and “tainted scars” (228), the social relations inscribed on her body that delimit her social place. This illumination leads her to reject the European ideologies and institutions she had previously embraced and transform her story into one of colonial critique. Through acts of memory she re-creates ties to the home community she had fled, and the performance unites the landscapes of Edmonton

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and Fort Good Hope as the terrain on which Rosemarie’s new identity emerges. Early in the performance, Rosemarie’s childhood encounters with an African American soldier lay out the entanglements of race and gender that shape the rest of her story. Traveling with her grandfather to the Hudson’s Bay store, she finds her curiosity piqued by the black soldiers in a U.S. Army road-building crew. Her rude stares elicit a sharp retort from one whom she observes flipping through a magazine of Hollywood pinups: “He looked at me because I was staring at him. ‘Whatcha looking at girl’ he said. . . . I said I was looking at the magazine. He just said ‘Uh-huh’ like he didn’t believe me” (212). This scene summons two critical discourses about the social significance of looking, reinflecting them to articulate the unique subject positions of indigenous women. The encounter is initially a Du Boisian instance of racial othering in which the soldier registers Rosemarie’s astonishment at his blackness; for him this look inevitably invokes the positioning of blackness as a subordinate otherness. As Urban Tattoo marks the social distance between these characters, however, it also draws them together when the soldier invites Rosemarie to look at the magazine with him. Their relationship anticipates the racial dynamics that will shape Rosemarie’s experiences in the remaining scenes, and it connects indigeneity and blackness, which, despite their differences, occupy analogous spaces in the dominant society. When Rosemarie becomes captivated by a photograph of Jane Russell posed on a haystack, the soldier tears out the page for her, and she carries it with her for years to come. A recurring image throughout the performance, the picture inspires dreams of stardom that eventually lead her away from home (“That’s when I thought I could be just like Jane Russell the movie star and maybe even take the man from Africa’s road to somewhere” [213]). More than a plot device, the picture catalyzes the second series of looks that shed light on the racial and gender aspects of Rosemarie’s story. On the one hand, the Jane Russell photograph conveys the privileges of whiteness and marks its boundaries. For Rosemarie and the soldier, the photograph signifies a world unavailable to them, a world in which sexual desire and desirability pertain to wealth and whiteness. A subsequent confrontation with a white trapper renders explicit their shared exclusion: When I came out [of the store] some big white trapper was in the big black guy’s face. Called the black man a nigger and no nigger should be reading

128    Mapping the Americas a magazine with white women in it. No nigger should be looking at any white woman. . . . The black man just sat down all sad sorta. “What’s a nigger?” I said. He said “That’s what white men call black men back where he comes from in the United States and that’s how white men treat Indians in Canada.” I said “I guess we are just two niggers then.” (214–15)

The performance also foregrounds the class dimensions of Russell’s photograph: “She didn’t look like she had to do a damn thing. Just sit there all pretty. From where I come from this is called lazy. . . . My sister says that her Dad is probably rich and that’s what rich people do. They sit around all day and do nothing” (213). This strengthens the ties between Rosemarie and the soldier when she later enters the ranks of the working class after her move to Edmonton. Yet on the other hand, as the confrontation with the trapper suggests, Rosemarie’s and the soldier’s relationships to Russell’s photograph carry gendered dimensions that distinguish their social positions. The photograph, after all, exemplifies a patriarchal economy of images that sexualizes and commodifies women’s bodies through spectacle, and the characters’ acts of looking are refracted through gender as well as race. For the soldier, looking is an act of patriarchal power, what Laura Mulvey famously described in the context of film as vicarious control and sexual possession. For him the gaze is also racially transgressive, and the fact that such looks by black men have historically elicited violent retribution, including lynching, illustrates their potential subversion of the racist social order. Rosemarie’s relationship to the image, by contrast, underscores her social powerlessness in multiple, less contradictory ways. She emulates Russell by positioning herself as a sexual object, as a spectacle for male consumption: “[I] sit under the stars and press my lips together like this, and cross my legs like this and stick my boobs out. . . . And just sit there all pretty like Jane Russell” (213; ellipsis in text). Arguably, because the photograph delineates the racialized boundaries of proper femininity that fall outside Rosemarie’s grasp, her emulation of Russell is transgressive in some limited way. But more fundamentally, her ill-fated dreams underscore her exclusion. “No Indians ever been a movie star” (214), Rosemarie’s sister mocks her fantasies and undercuts her delusion that she and Russell are “almost identical” (213). Predictably, Rosemarie’s aspirations of stardom prove impossible (here, Clements’s performance repeats Sun Moon and Feather’s critique of the racialization of

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femininity). Urban Tattoo thus troubles Du Bois’s account of the racialized gaze by asserting the importance of gender, and the performance complicates Mulvey’s analysis because the subject positions and power relations in this scene cannot be reduced to a male/female binary. Instead, Rosemarie’s social position takes shape through race, gender, and class. This is also true of the female star, who functions here simultaneously as sexual object and icon of capitalist, colonial power. In the remaining scenes these dimensions of Rosemarie’s social position as an indigenous woman shape her experiences in Edmonton. Rather than bringing admiration and success (as in Russell’s case), her sexuality begets only humiliation and abuse. As Urban Tattoo aligns Rosemarie’s experiences with those of other indigenous women, it embeds them in the broader colonization of indigenous peoples in part through the interconnected settings of the performance. Rosemarie’s encounter with the soldier occurs at the Hudson’s Bay store, a product of the economic transformations brought by the fur trade, and her fascination with Jane Russell recalls an earlier scene at the church in Fort Good Hope, another colonial space. The performance plays on the double meaning of “star” when, in the opening scene, Rosemarie remembers the church’s walls and ceiling, long ago beautifully painted with stars by a French priest. The church, she imagines, “must have been his haven from us. His place to come when the brown faces engulfed him on the land. . . . He controlled the stars here and the front door and the Good Indians could come and go as they liked as long as He was holding the door” (210). The church recalls the use of Christianity as a tool of social transformation and control, the unrelenting efforts to “civilize” Indians who, with few exceptions, inevitably fell short of Christian ideals. As Rosemarie is enraptured by the photograph of the Hollywood star, so is she captivated by the stars in the church, and she chips away tiny paint fragments which she carries, along with Russell’s picture, throughout much of the play. This conjunction of images and places draws together missionization, patriarchy, and sexuality as complementary colonial instruments with enduring consequences for indigenous women. The performance thus extends a critique of colonial paternalism with a long history in Native literature in order to take account of gender.14 These conjunctions anticipate 14.  See, for example, the critique of paternalism in D’Arcy McNickle’s seminal 1936 novel The Surrounded, a work that has heavily influenced the development of the contemporary Native novel.

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the scrutiny of social institutions in Urban Tattoo’s closing scenes as they set the stage for Rosemarie’s experiences in Edmonton. Rosemarie travels to Edmonton to pursue stardom, but her social position as an indigenous woman limits her possibilities to those of a domestic worker, a job arranged by her father with the warning “Don’t disappoint me “(216). She winds up as a maid in the “tight polite house,” another colonial space that underscores the importance of domesticity in conquest, where she endures a silent and lonely life. Its violent and coercive underside comes to the fore when her employer sexually assaults her. Her account of the event emphasizes her powerlessness and consequent passivity: “I just knelt there . . . he said to be quiet. . . . I just knelt there . . . he put his two hands on my breasts . . .” (216; ellipses in text). Despite her tears, the employer willfully misinterprets her passivity as acquiescence, a mistake shared by his wife when she discovers them: “She said she was going to call Dad and tell him what a whore I was. . . . I said it wasn’t my fault. She said I just stood there” (216). As this scene exemplifies how, in Jean Barman’s words, indigenous women’s “every act [becomes] perceived as a sexual act and . . . an act of provocation” (264), it demonstrates the risks of violence associated with the dual roles of menial laborer and sexual object assigned to indigenous women. The assault is a turning point in Rosemarie’s story; it instills a consciousness about the social place of indigenous women that ultimately leads her to reject the patriarchal and colonial ideals she had previously embraced. Although it first appears as an episode of madness, Rosemarie’s transformation involves “delusions” that are in fact revelations about how patriarchal colonialism delineates the boundaries of contemporary indigenous lives. In this hallucinatory scene Rosemarie encounters Jane Russell, a figure freighted with gendered colonial meanings; her father, an authority figure who, in an act of patriarchal complicity, encourages passivity and conformity to dominant domestic ideals; the Holy Trinity, representing the colonizers’ religion; the baby Jesus, who recalls the play’s opening scene in the church; a religious fanatic who threatens Rosemarie with hell unless she converts; and “Jackal,” a “slimy” character who reduces her to a sexual commodity: “$$$$$$ Man says honey you belong on a cruise ship with that body” (222). In a surreal Hollywood dream sequence Rosemarie appears as a “beautifully dressed and manicured Hollywood persona à la Jane Russell” (223), but the scene reiterates indigenous women’s sexuality

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as a source of humiliation and an instrument of social control when the audience mocks her and demands that she “take it off.” Instead Rosemarie “take[s] off her dream” (223); she rejects the popular icons that had previously elicited her desire, castigating Jack Kerouac and the Beats, for example, as “a bunch of self serving men and their self serving pricks.” (A recurring figure until this point, Jane Russell does not reappear.) In the remainder of the play Rosemarie condemns the social institutions that circumscribe the lives of the poor and marginalized, including “the food line, the booze line, the welfare line,” as well as the government officials and church leaders who exert control, encourage conformity and passivity, and promote social exclusion (“No dogs, no Indians, no family. No clothes, no shoes, no service. No entrance. No exit” [225–26]). Although Rosemarie rejects the patriarchal and colonial ideologies she had once embraced, she cannot escape their influence. Her “tattoos” and “tainted scars,” after all, are permanent inscriptions, the bodily marks of patriarchal and colonial violence that delimit her social place. The performance leaves us pondering the nature of an indigenous female self, its sources of identity and community, as she joins the ranks of urban Natives. The city that begins as a scene of possibility ends as a place of exploitation and violence, and in the final lines Rosemarie returns to Fort Good Hope, though only in memory. Urban Tattoo begins and ends with photographs of her hometown that recall her childhood—the “memories getting caught on my skin . . . remember me the earth said” (227)—and tie her to her tribal home. Nevertheless, Rosemarie’s conditional language—“As if we had an understanding that in going past I know my place . . .” (228; italics mine)— expresses the tenuousness of these connections. Yet at the same time, Urban Tattoo stresses the continuities between Edmonton and Fort Good Hope, thus resisting the sense of displacement and cultural loss that dominates many urban Native stories. The “high cross that pierces the land” in Rosemarie’s childhood home finds parallels in the domestic spaces, welfare offices, and nightclubs of her urban life. The play’s final scene joins city and tribal landscapes by superimposing photographs of Fort Good Hope on the urban setting. As Urban Tattoo relates the histories and spaces of tribal and urban communities, it transforms the city into a Native place where many stories like Rosemarie’s unfold. Yet, although Edmonton is a place of political illumination about ties between indigenous women across tribal boundaries, this potential

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source of community is never realized in Urban Tattoo. This issue is taken up more fully in Monique Mojica’s Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, in which experiences shared by indigenous women ground transnational revolutionary politics.

The Politics of Memory: Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots A companion play to Birdwoman and the Suffragettes, Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (1990) extends Mojica’s concern with gendered historical memory through the stories of Pocahontas and La Malinche, indigenous women whose collaborations with Europeans form part of the origin stories of colonial nation-states. The play recounts the events, both fictional and actual, that have made Pocahontas an object of fascination for centuries: the alleged rescue of John Smith from execution by her father, her conversion to Christianity, her marriage to Jamestown settler John Rolfe, the birth of their son, and her death in England as a member of the British aristocracy. “My name is Lady Rebecca forever and always,” her character describes this transformation. “I am a Christian Englishwoman!” (31). Malinche, Pocahontas’s Mexican counterpart, is more often disdained than celebrated, but her story follows the same broad outlines. Christened Doña Marina by the Spanish invaders, she was interpreter for and mistress of Hernán Cortés. As a result, she is cursed as “la chingada” (the fucked one) and mother of the “bastard race” (22–23). In popular interpretations these collaborations seem to confirm European superiority, as both women supposedly renounced their own people, abetted the invaders, adopted their culture, and, through sexual relationships with colonial figures, founded a new race.15 Like Birdwoman, Princess Pocahontas criticizes and reinterprets these popular stories for indigenous feminist purposes. The play also attends to the connections between historical memory and political practice. In Princess Pocahontas, Mojica’s reinterpretations of Pocahontas’s and Malinche’s stories represent many forgotten histories of indigenous women

15.  For a discussion of the changing political meanings of Pocahontas’s story, see Tilton.

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throughout the centuries of conquest, among them the fur traders’ wives who “birthed the Métis,” anonymous victims of sexual violence and murder, and contemporary women who fight for tribal land and nationhood. In the play, such stories about indigenous women establish shared political commitments. Countering the association of traitorous indigenous women and colonial nationalisms, the play’s vision is hemispheric in scope, foregrounding the interconnected struggles for survival of Native women throughout the Americas. This alternative, oppositional history provides a precedent for contemporary Native women’s resistance. Mojica’s play thus clarifies the political implications of Rosemarie’s revelations in Urban Tattoo: because the contemporary social places of indigenous women are creations of patriarchal colonialism, feminism is necessary to anticolonial endeavors, including tribal nationalisms. In Princess Pocahontas, connections among indigenous women challenge origin stories and ongoing colonial practices of nation-states as they promise to redefine Native politics. In its bitingly satirical opening scene, “500 years of the Miss North American Indian Beauty Pageant,” Princess Pocahontas parodies popular representations of indigenous women as it introduces the play’s central concerns with transformation and narrative revision. Princess Buttered-OnBoth-Sides appears as a contestant who performs the most egregious sexual stereotypes for the audience: she emerges in a scanty buckskin dress singing “Indian Love Call” (also employed in Sun Moon and Feather), tosses “cornnuts to the four directions,” and assumes “a classic ‘spiritual’ Hollywood Indian pose” (18). For the talent competition, she rips off her dress and hurls herself over a precipice, “all for the loss of [her] one true love, captain john whiteman” (19). As Princess Pocahontas invokes sexual stereotypes of and colonial narratives about indigenous women, the beauty pageant’s host gives a welcome that embeds them in conquest. His name, George Pepe Flaco Columbus Cartier da Gama Smith, is a concatenation of the names of explorers and other colonial figures, and his welcome describes the pageant as an annual event for nearly five hundred years, the period of conquest. While the play thus emphasizes links between the material and discursive elements of colonization, it associates narrative revision with indigenous resistance, a process that is reflected in Princess Buttered-OnBoth-Sides. Although she initially appears as servile and dimwitted, her name suggests that she is a trickster figure who embodies contradictory

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qualities and whose humor functions subversively.16 Like traditional tricksters, she facilitates transformations, in this case by revising Native women’s roles. The satirical quality of this opening scene calls into question the stereotypes her character inhabits, as do her actions when she reappears later in the play. In a scene that calls for her to occupy again the role of sacrificial maiden, this time by leaping into an active volcano, she refuses her cue with a resounding “no!” and exits the stage with the flimsy excuse, “I think I left something on the stove” (25). This repetition suggests the formulaic nature of Native women’s stories and points to the play’s revisions of them. As a trickster, Princess Buttered-On-Both-Sides establishes these dual purposes: she embodies stereotypical gendered images to subject them to scrutiny, and she ultimately subverts them. Princess Pocahontas not only thematizes such metamorphoses but also structures its thirteen scenes as “transformations.” Each recasts the political significance of Native women’s stories. In “Transformation 7: Deity/ Woman of the Puna / Virgin Transfiguration,” colonization is described as the systematic disempowerment of indigenous women in the intersecting realms of culture, politics, and representation. A female deity, played by Mojica, addresses her story to the audience: Let me tell you how I became a virgin: I was the warrior woman rebel woman creator/destroyer womb of the earth mother of all —married to none but the sun himself or maybe the Lord of the underworld. [. . .] Grandmother Spiderwoman Spins the threads of stories as I tell them to you. [. . .] Of my membranes muscle blood and bone I

16.  These are general qualities of tricksters in many Native traditions. It is important to note that the nature of tricksters varies among indigenous cultures, and Mojica’s character seems not to be rooted in a single cultural tradition but is instead a kind of generic figure that has become a common feature in Native literature.

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But as Christianity displaced indigenous traditions, these powerful roles of thinker and creator gave way to notions of women as fallen, degenerate, and weak: Separated from myself my balance destroyed, scrubbed clean made lighter, non threatening chaste barren. [. . .] twisted and misaligned with the darkness of evil the invaders [sic] sinful apple in my hand! [. . .] without power[.] (37)

The deity’s monologue contrasts two sacred stories, the indigenous (Pueblo and Diné) Spiderwoman creation story and the biblical story of Eve, to distinguish the roles of women in these contexts. As the Spiderwoman story illustrates indigenous women’s traditional power, it connects women’s narration with creation. Throughout Princess Pocahontas monologues give voice to a range of female figures who have been silenced or reinterpreted in colonial discourse, and these rhetorical acts lead to social re-creation. In this particular scene, after the deity’s monologue, a woman of the Puna recounts the founding of a separatist society by women who, betrayed by their men, fled to the highlands to “honor the mother, / live without men, / demand our purity be / reclaimed” (36). This act of social reclamation anticipates the contemporary political project at the conclusion of the play. The disempowerment of the female deity under colonialism then finds a historical corollary in “Transformation 9: Marie / Margaret / Madelaine— Métis women Transfiguration,” a scene that depicts the labor and sexual exploitation of indigenous women who were traders’ wives and interpreters

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in the fur trade (the “traitorous” Native women in Canada’s history). “So many moccasins!” exclaims Marie, opening the scene: 1 pair of moccasins per day per man divided by 4 women times 15 men on a one year expedition equals 5,475 pairs of moccasins per year. . . . I am the best moccasin maker, so my father sent me. (41)

Marie provides sexual companionship as well as free labor for colonial expeditions, and her renaming—she nevertheless insists “my name is Atchagoos Isquee’oo” (43)—accompanies other forms of Europeanization that make her desirable to white men (she is washed, perfumed, and dressed in “proper” women’s attire). Although her story follows a colonial narrative about the “civilization” of “savages” through the domestication of indigenous women, these changes actually bring only death and destruction as these women inhabit roles assigned to them by European patriarchy: “We die from smallpox, syphilis, tuberculosis, childbirth. / We claw at the gate of the fort or we starve and freeze to death outside. / We birth the Métis. / When there is no more to trade, our men trade us” (46). Princess Pocahontas reveals the hypocrisy of the French civilizing mission when women such as Marie are “turned off,” a euphemism for being discarded after the arrival of a European wife. In later scenes Mojica draws parallels between such historical events and the experiences of contemporary Native women, including a thirteen-year-old Chilean girl whose torturers inserted a live rat into her vagina, and Anna Mae Aquash, the American Indian Movement activist who was beaten, raped, and murdered (possibly, it now appears, by other AIM members), her corpse then mutilated by the FBI. Although European colonialism is its primary target, Princess Pocahontas depicts the wide reach of patriarchy by scrutinizing the treatment of indigenous women by their own tribes. In the play, Pocahontas’s account of her father’s neglect (“What owe I to my father? Waited I not one year in Jamestown, a prisoner? . . . If my father had loved me, he would not value me less than old swords, guns, or axes: therefore I shall still dwell with the Englishmen who love me” [31]) echoes in Malinche’s declaration: “They say it was me betrayed my people! It was they betrayed

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me!” (22). These examples provide an explanation (though not necessarily a justification) for indigenous women’s European alliances other than willing complicity while castigating Native men who collude with patriarchy as the real traitors. Princess Pocahontas thereby undoes the colonial logic that positions indigenous women as collaborators, casting a critical eye instead on gender dynamics within their communities. These scenes scrutinize the transformation of indigenous women’s roles under patriarchal colonialism, and Princess Pocahontas also traces an alternative history of women’s cultural and political resistance that extends into the present. Drawing a strategy from Birdwoman and the Suffragettes, “Transformation 6: Pocahontas/Lady Rebecca/Matoaka Transfiguration” depicts an adolescent Pocahontas (as Matoaka) undergoing a puberty ritual initiating her into traditional tribal gender roles. The scene moves backward in time, beginning with a troubadour’s account of the famed rescue of John Smith and ending with Matoaka becoming a healer and entering “woman’s time.” It thus replaces colonial narratives of indigenous women’s complicity with stories that stress their tribal importance. Matoaka’s first-person narration underscores the centrality of voice in a work that condemns the silencing and erasure of indigenous women. The subversive potential of words gains importance throughout the play, which reinterprets even Malinche’s role as translator to the conquistadores. “I am the only one can speak to the Maya, to the Mexica,” she insists. “It is my words that are of value. . . . I can change words. I have power. . . . I am a strategist. Dangerous woman” (23). This connection between words and power comes to bear on the play’s final scene, in which “Contemporary Woman” enlists women “word warriors,” the “guerrilleras,” to engage in political struggle (59). These warriors include writers and activists, among them a courageous Kayapo woman, baby in arms, who “confronts a riot squad” and shouts: “I am here to speak for my brother and my brotherin-law. . . . You steal our land! I am calling upon you! I throw my words in your faces!!!!” (59–60). Here and elsewhere Princess Pocahontas redefines indigenous women as the agents of resistance and men as often unreliable supporters. In an earlier scene, for example, when “The Man”—the “husband, the lover, the friend, the ‘brother’ in the struggle whose oppression is fully understood but whom the women end up carrying anyway” (16)—is distracted by a white woman whom he follows “hungrily with [his] eyes,” he is the one who occupies the role of traitor through sexuality.

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A reprimand from “Contemporary Woman”—“We’re supposed to be rebuilding the nations, RIGHT?”—leads only to his hasty departure (40). More than transforming indigenous women into subversive figures, Princess Pocahontas stresses the connections between patriarchy and colonialism that make feminism necessary to a politics of resistance. The play concludes at an International Women’s Day celebration; this final scene revises the gatherings of suffragettes in Birdwoman to present the possibility of indigenous feminism. As did Sacajawea’s character, “Contemporary Woman” remarks on the colonial tendencies of mainstream feminism, but she also insists on a feminism that addresses the unique situation of indigenous women: “So many years of trying to fit into feminist shoes. . . . The shoes I’m trying on must be crafted to fit these wide, square, brown feet. I must feel the earth through their soles” (58). Yet as this provisional statement suggests, the specific contours of indigenous feminism, as well as its relation to tribal nationalisms (a reference point throughout the play), remain ambiguous. On the one hand, Princess Pocahontas revises indigenous women’s stories to support tribal rather than colonial nationalisms: the statement “We, native women, are the centre of the hoop of the nation” (39) echoes in “Women are the medicine, so we must heal the women” (20) and repetitions of “A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground” (60). Throughout the performance, fictional and historical figures—including Aquash, the Kayapo woman, and the “Contemporary Woman” committed to “re-building the nations”—devote themselves to tribal nationhood. Yet, on the other hand, these characters face exclusion and even violence because of betrayals by indigenous men and patriarchy within tribal communities. Consequently, in Princess Pocahontas the sources of feminist community and political identity are transnational and pan-tribal, uniting indigenous women across space, time, and culture (as one critic points out, this exemplifies the “oppositional transnationalism” that characterized much Native politics of the period [see Knowles 255]).17 “Una Nacion,” the title of the final scene, 17.  Knowles usefully describes the play’s historical context as a period when “Native political struggles were increasingly against the governments, legislative bodies and armies of Nation States, together with their constructions of national histories, identities, and (often coercive or exclusive) ‘imagined communities’ (Benedict Anderson). This was also a time when, on the one hand, political gains were increasingly made either through international courts or appeals to international (bad) press, and, on the other, resistance was proving effective through the creation of transnational Native communities through the Internet” (255–56).

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depicting the International Women’s Day celebration, registers these ambiguities in the relation between feminism and nationalism. Does this title suggest the necessity of eradicating patriarchy before rebuilding Native nations, thus defining indigenous feminism as a precondition for tribal nationalisms? Or does it reinterpret nation to mean a separatist indigenous women’s community, like that of the women of the Puna, founded as a rejection of patriarchy? Although the play itself offers no specific answers, each possibility undoes the opposition between feminism and Native politics by insisting on the crucial importance of indigenous feminism to anticolonial endeavors. *  *  * While the transnational, transhistorical feminist perspective of indigenous women’s theater offers to reshape Native politics, Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead, the subject of the next chapter, broadens the possibilities of transnational indigenous alliances by turning them into the foundation for hemispheric revolution. In the process, as we shall see, the novel subverts narratives of indigenous women’s betrayal through female characters who are the most militant leaders and brilliant strategists of revolution. In so doing, Almanac extends the feminist rethinking of Native culture and politics analyzed in this chapter as it draws out the implications of indigenous resistance for colonial nation-states throughout the Americas.

4

Picture Revolution “Tribal Internationalism” and the Future of the Americas in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko’s monumental novel that rewrites the history of the Americas, opens with a map. The “five hundred– year map” depicts the U.S.-Mexico border region, highlighting the boundary between the two nations, while its legends and inscriptions describe the colonial practices that created this demarcation of space. In this way it recalls the role of cartography in European expansion and initiates the novel’s critique of colonialism. “As much as guns and warships,” J. B. Harley observes, “maps have been the weapons of imperialism”: not only are they essential for claiming, settling, and exploiting the land, they establish boundaries for the “containment of subject populations” and “create myths [to] assist in the maintenance of the territorial status quo” (57). As graphic renderings of Europe’s global conquests and a means of “reifying power, reinforcing the status quo, and freezing social interaction within charted lines,” maps remain “preeminently a language of power, not of protest” (79). Yet while the map in Almanac testifies to such forms of conquest, it also serves, contra Harley, as an expression of protest that

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challenges colonial constructions of landownership and history in the Americas. Although the U.S.-Mexico border is the map’s most prominent feature, a legend counters that “Native Americans acknowledge no borders” and seek “nothing less than the return of all tribal lands.” Another reads, “The Indian Wars have never ended in the Americas.” These ongoing conflicts over land are the crux of Almanac. The narrative traces the shifting power relations and spatial formations of the region to a history of colonial violence as it undermines the imperial myths that maintain the territorial status quo. The map thus introduces the central concerns of the novel: it attests to the brutality of conquest (“sixty million Native Americans died between 1500 and 1600” alone, one legend reads) and turns this history into the impetus for transnational indigenous revolution centered on the issue of land. Exemplifying the trends I have been tracing throughout this book, Almanac revises indigenous politics by positioning transnational alliances— what the novel, reprising Marx, labels “tribal internationalism” (515)—as the most powerful (but nevertheless contradictory) form of anticolonial resistance and draws out the implications of Native revolution for contemporary nation-states, especially the United States. Confounding the nationalist paradigms that have dominated Native literary studies, Almanac rewrites the history of the Americas from a transnational perspective that unites imperialism, slavery, and class struggle in a single, ongoing story of land conflicts, and it attempts to negotiate a collective revolutionary identity based on histories shared by Native peoples across cultural and national boundaries. Such “confederacies between the tribes of the Americas” in the novel “mean the end of European domination” (530). Visual representation is central to these endeavors, as cartography, photography, and other technologies become tools for retaking land and redefining the contemporary political place of indigenous peoples. Anticipating the role of visuality in the novel’s revolutionary project, the five hundred–year map decenters the United States and contests its power, instead taking as its subject the Americas, an entity with a collective colonial past and revolutionary future.1 Although it fixes on the 1.  See Brigham on Almanac’s challenge to U.S. nationalism and the relationship between geographic scale, colonialism, and capitalism in the novel. For a discussion of the connection between nationalism and cartography in Almanac, see Bell 2000.

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southwestern border region, the site of most of the events in the narrative, the map names locations throughout the hemisphere that share a history of genocide, slavery, and dispossession. This assemblage of places finds a parallel in sections and chapters that take their titles from disparate geographical regions such as “The North” (Alaska), “El Paso,” “New Jersey,” and “Mexico,” as well as “The Americas.” Even Africa is included. The map conjoins colonialism and slavery, as it foreshadows revolt, by labeling Haiti the home of the first black Indians. Indeed the narrative itself constitutes a kind of map that re-creates such places as storied landscapes that contrast with the “blank spaces” of colonial cartography. As the only history shared by all American republics, the conquest of indigenous peoples places the United States within a hemispheric politics that both transcends national boundaries and yet is necessary for the creation of those boundaries. On the map, the United States remains unnamed (unlike Mexico, the center of indigenous revolutionary activity in the novel). This absence signals the instability of U.S. borders and even the transience of the nation itself, undercutting notions of American exceptionalism by defining U.S. geography only through fluid relationships with other places. Indigenous histories reveal borders to be recent inventions that bear little relation to hemispheric social interactions and Native connections to the land that stretch back to the pre-contact period. Cross-border activities persist throughout Almanac; lines on the map trace the characters’ incessant movements across borders, exposing these boundaries as nothing more than a colonial conceit. At the novel’s end, these movements culminate in the convergence on the border region of vast revolutionary armies intent on reclaiming indigenous lands. In these ways Almanac represents the particular challenges that indigenous histories and land claims pose to colonial nation-states, as contemporary indigenous rebellions and transnational hemispheric alliances threaten their very existence. While these hemispheric connections among indigenous peoples unsettle the authority and challenge the boundaries of nation-states, they also underpin a common revolutionary endeavor centered on land, bringing into play issues of Native nationalism and its literary expression. The place of nationalism in Almanac has generated significant critical debate, a scholarly dissensus that demonstrates, among other things, the novel’s uneasy fit with current critical paradigms. Whereas other scholars have variously argued that nationalism and transnationalism exist in either oppositional

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or dialectical relation to each other, I am concerned here with the ways in which these projects both complement and contradict each other, as well as their implications for Native studies.2 In some respects Almanac extends the articulation of nationalist endeavors in earlier novels of the “Native American Renaissance” such as Silko’s Ceremony. “Only a bastard government / Occupies stolen land!” intones the poet-lawyer Wilson Weasel Tail on live television near the end of Almanac: “Breach of the Treaty of the Sacred Black Hills! / Breach of the Treaty of the Sacred Blue Lake! / Breach of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo!” (714–15). Invoking the authority of treaties and the political status of Native nations within the United States, Weasel Tail’s tirade recalls the thefts and betrayals that catalyzed Native activism in the 1960s and 1970s and, in the novel, mobilize revolutionary armies to retake Indian land. Yet, although it takes up issues specific to particular indigenous communities, Almanac emphasizes their interconnections and presents the Americas as a singular entity with a shared colonial past and revolutionary future. In Almanac, plots involving “tribal internationalism” revise the “return” narrative, the central theme of earlier nationalist texts such as Cer­ emony, Silko’s best-known novel. Almanac invokes several returns, all of them named on the map: the return of tribal lands, the ultimate goal of

2.  Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, for example, identifies Almanac as “the foremost Indian novel in which we see the clear and unmistakable attempt to describe Indian nationalism in . . . modern terms,” but it ultimately “fails,” she argues, “since it does not take into account the specific kind of tribal/nation status of the original occupants of this continent. There is no apparatus that allows the tribally specific treaty-status paradigm to be realized either in Silko’s fiction or in the pan-­ Indian approach to history” (90, 93). Rather than failing in a nationalist approach, Arnold Krupat counters, Almanac does “not tak[e] such an approach at all,” for the novel “not only is committed to Pan-Indianism rather than tribal specificity—as Cook-Lynn herself realizes—but also is committed to a kind of Pan-Americanism, in which all those who adhere to tribal values of life and healing may join” (1996, 54). Despite their substantial disagreements, Cook-Lynn and Krupat both position indigenous nationalism and transnationalism in opposition to each other. Eric Cheyfitz, by contrast, argues that nationalism and transnationalism exist in a dialectical relationship in Almanac: because “the transnational cannot articulate itself except through national situations; the global is grounded in the local because it needs a place to give it form.” This dialectic, in Cheyfitz’s reading, “drive[s] the structure of Almanac’s vision of pan-Indian revolution in the Americas” since “the transnational bases itself . . . in local sites” (2002, 420). My understanding of this relationship is closest to Cheyfitz’s position, although I am also interested here in the tensions and contradictions between nationalism and transnationalism, their implications for Native studies, and their connection to debates in American studies (rather than postcolonial studies, Cheyfitz’s primary concern).

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revolution; the march of tribal armies north across the U.S.-Mexico border, a repetition of pre-contact indigenous migrations; the forces of ancestral spirits with their haunting monition “Return[,] We return” (496); revivals of pre-contact cultural and social life; and Sterling’s journey home to the Laguna reservation in the novel’s final chapter, a storyline which recalls that of Ceremony’s protagonist, Tayo (discussed in the introduction). Whereas “return” narratives in nationalist novels redraw the cultural, geographical, and social boundaries of indigenous communities after colonization, in Almanac, by contrast, they involve tribal movements and connections across time and space. Yet at the same time, Almanac’s intersecting “return” narratives expose, however inadvertently, the limits of transnational politics in indigenous contexts. As Silko’s novel registers the shift toward transnationalism that has brought Native American studies into closer relation with adjacent fields that critically engage the topics of nationalism and imperialism, it reveals the inherent paradoxes of indigenous politics that emerge from their grounding in both global and local concerns. *  *  * Because it contests colonial American geographies and centers Native politics on land, Almanac requires representational practices that engage the spatial and visual as well as the narrative aspects of European imperialism. American republics were created by Europeans exploring, mapping, and settling the land as well as removing indigenous inhabitants, processes that Paul Carter, writing about Australia, labels “spatial history.” This spatial history draws Native America into the global dynamics of imperialism. In Almanac, visual practices, including cartography, expose the processes of conquest scrutinized by the novel. At the same time, however, visual technologies facilitate indigenous resistance. As the five hundred– year map demonstrates, Native uses of cartography redraw American geographies to support indigenous land claims, while visual technologies in general dismantle the opposition between indigeneity and modernity to subvert the racial logic of imperialism. In addition, because visual media compress space and time, they facilitate geographical and historical boundary crossings that, in the novel, help make transnational indigenous alliances possible. Although Carter’s spatial history inevitably shapes cultural production in imperial contexts, scholars nevertheless frequently overlook or

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underemphasize crucial interrelationships of place and narrative. In Cul­ ture and Imperialism, to take one prominent example, “the main battle in imperialism,” Edward Said writes, “is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans its future—these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative” (xii–xiii). Yet this integral relation between narrative and spatial expansion, paralleled by Harley’s conjoining of discourse and mapping, figures only briefly in Said’s work. Focusing on the relation between narrative and history, Lisa Lowe argues that because “the cultural institution of the novel legitimates particular forms and subjects of history” while it “subjugates or erases others,” then “colonized literary production” (including U.S. ethnic novels, not a subject Said discusses) must be “grasped in terms of [its] constant interrogation of the discrepancies between canonical historical narratives and what Walter Benjamin would term the material ‘catastrophes’ those histories obscure” (97, 99). Whether or not this emphasis on history characterizes the novel as a genre,3 Lowe’s argument captures a critical aspect of Almanac: the novel places colonialism and slavery at the center of American histories in a move one critic has labeled “counter-chronicling” (Bell 2000). It also aims, as Silko writes elsewhere, “to shift the reader’s experience of time and the meaning of history” away from a colonial progressivist model to a traditional indigenous understanding based on myth and repetition (1996b, 140). Yet however important these dimensions of the text are, to focus on them exclusively would be to neglect the crucial significance of the intersections of time and place and risk reinforcing the colonial epistemologies that Almanac aims to supersede. In the five hundred–year map and throughout the novel, Almanac draws together time and place to counter the progressivist racial logic that relegates Native peoples to the past and thus negates their contemporary claims to the land. The Western story of “civilizational progress” that subordinates other cultures, as Timothy J. Reiss contends, is “a story rooted in time” (442–43), while Carter similarly observes that history that “reduces space to a stage, that pays attention to events unfolding in time alone, 3.  Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel, by contrast, argues for the central importance of geography in the nineteenth-century novel, but Moretti is not primarily concerned with the histories of colonialism and racism that are central to Lowe’s work.

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might be called imperial history” because it subsumes all events into a universal narrative that legitimates “unlawful usurpation” (xvi). Carter calls instead for a historical methodology that considers “the spatial forms and fantasies through which a culture declares its presence” (xxii). In a parallel endeavor, Almanac foregrounds the importance of place and recounts the repetitive histories of conquest and resistance that shape their meanings, thus overturning colonial paradigms of “wilderness” and “empty space” that justify European possession. In the novel, stories about a continuous indigenous presence and the ongoing violence that maintains colonial demarcations of space support contemporary Native land claims. These stories draw together the disparate places that compose the Native world, the foundation of Almanac’s “tribal internationalism.” By engaging the connections between visuality, imperialism, and indigenous resistance, the five hundred–year map sets the stage for the novel’s use of other visual practices.4 Almanac calls into question images of Natives in photography, film, and museum displays, revealing their role in sustaining racial hierarchies and the objectification, commodification, and political control of indigenous peoples. Yet the novel uses these same visual practices for the anticolonial purposes of memory, cultural continuity, political illumination, and ultimately efforts to retake land. While the ability of media to “transcend boundaries of time, space, and even language” and to “link past and present” (Ginsburg 1995a, 260) can support indigenous nationalisms, as in the case of Igloolik Isuma Productions (see chapter 2), in Almanac these qualities of visual technology facilitate the creation of a transnational identity premised on shared indigenous histories and contemporary politics across the Americas. In addition, because visual technologies connote modernity, indigenous uses of images counter the progressivist racial logic that opposes Indian savagery to European civilization. Native uses of photography in particular, argues Silko in essays that appeared around the publication of Almanac, extend traditional 4.  Although several scholars, most notably Brigham and Virginia Bell, have analyzed the role of the map in Silko’s novel, the broader visual practices of the novel have received little critical attention. For discussions of Native understandings of geography in Almanac and their implications for border studies and eco-criticism, see, for example, Muthyala, Hunt, and Bowers. For an insightful examination of how the novel transforms capitalist practices, including those with visual and spatial elements, into tools of indigenous resistance and the implications for postmodernist and whiteness studies, see Cherniavsky.

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image-making practices, exemplify the capacity of Native peoples to survive change, perpetuate community memories, and even expose suppressed histories of colonialism.5 Silko, who is herself a photographer,6 relates indigenous photography to revolution: The Indian with a camera is frightening for a number of reasons. Euro-­ Americans 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. Euro-Americans distract themselves with whether a real, or traditional, or authentic Indian would, should, or could work with a camera . . . [but the Indian with a camera shows] the people who would not die, the people who do not change, because they are always changing. (1996d, 177–78; see also my discussion in the introduction)

As indigenous appropriations of visual technologies, in Silko’s rendering, dismantle the dichotomy between primitive and modern, they counter the myth of the “vanishing” Native by making contemporary Native peoples creators as well as subjects of images. They thus facilitate Almanac’s rewriting of the role of indigenous peoples in American histories. In the novel, visual practices become key revolutionary tools for retaking land, and in its final scenes they refigure colonial iconographies and remap American geographies to drive the narrative to its revolutionary conclusion.

Seeing Colonialism An immense and ambitious novel, Almanac of the Dead uses dozens of characters and plotlines to narrate five centuries of European colonization and Indian resistance in the Americas. The novel depicts colonialism and 5.  Silko’s essay “The Indian with a Camera” was first published in 1990, and “On Photography” appeared in 1992. Both are reprinted in Yellow Woman and A Beauty of the Spirit (1996). 6.  In addition to her essays on photography cited in note 5, some of Silko’s literary works contain photographs. These include her semiautobiographical Storyteller (1981) and Sacred Water (1993), which she labels an “experiment” in “the effect which a photograph or other visual image has on our reading of a text” (80).

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capitalism, at times to the point of satire, as processes of unadulterated violence, degeneracy, and greed embodied in characters such as Beaufrey, a creator and seller of snuff films; the neofascist Serlo, who is obsessed with blood purity; Max, a crime family leader who derives his only pleasure from orchestrating assassinations; Trigg, who murders homeless people to sell their blood and organs in the biomaterials industry; and the corrupt Judge Arne, whose perversions include bestiality. These characters provide a critique of colonial institutions, especially the fraudulent justice system and capitalist enterprises that turn even human beings into commodities. Exemplifying the map’s claim that “the Indian wars have never ended in the Americas,” the novel’s characters show that conquest is ongoing by repeating the removals, dispossession, and slaughter of the conquest, events that occur over and over in the story, often involving figures with the same names. This repetition of names and incidents depicts colonialism as a cyclical history of bloodshed common to all places throughout the Americas. Just as these episodes overturn the celebratory creation myths of colonial nation-states, others expose the racial theories that justify European domination, exemplified in Serlo’s obsession with sangre pura, eugenics, and his aristocratic lineage, as well as his desire to annihilate the “brown people who would inherit the earth like the cockroaches” (561). Beaufrey’s fascination with blood similarly invokes racist notions of sangre pura as well as instances of colonial brutality, including the photographs of tortured and murdered human beings whose contemplation counts among Beaufrey’s primary pleasures. In his favorite childhood story, about Albert Fish, the Long Island cannibal whose prominent family traces its lineage to the Mayflower, these meanings reveal the racism and violence under­ lying U.S. national symbols and origin stories. Consistent with his interpretations of European history, this story convinces Beaufrey that “there had always been a connection between human cannibals and the aristocracy” (535). Through the characters of Serlo and Beaufrey the novel inverts the colonial sense of sangre pura to signify cruelty and exploitation rather than white racial superiority, a critique that comes to bear most directly on myths of U.S. nationhood. As these examples suggest, Almanac adapts Marxism as it draws together capitalism and colonialism, places Native histories in a global context, and ultimately predicts revolution in the Americas. The usefulness of

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Marx for tribal politics, as guerrilla leader Angelita La Escapía explains, lies primarily in the stories of suffering he told to catalyze social change. Although he was most concerned with the poverty of Europe’s working classes, in the novel’s account Marx had never forgotten the indigenous people of the Americas, or of Africa. Marx had recited the crimes of slaughter and slavery committed by the European colonials who had been sent by their capitalist slave-masters to secure the raw materials of capitalism—human flesh and blood. With the wealth of the New World, the European slave-masters and monarchs had been able to buy weapons and armies to keep down the uprisings of the landless people all across Europe. . . . This man Marx had understood that the stories or “histories” are sacred; that within “history” reside relentless forces, powerful spirits, vengeful, relentlessly seeking justice. (315–16)

When Angelita declares Indian revolutionaries “tribal internationalists,” she transforms orthodox Marxism into a tool for reclaiming indigenous lands (515). Revising the Marxist telos, Almanac foresees that the colonizing society’s intrinsic greed, corruption, and violence will inevitably cause its demise: “the system that starved and destroyed human beings for the profit of a few was a system that must fall from the sheer weight of the bodies of the dead,” it tells us, for the “history of the Americas made revolution against the European domination inevitable” (307, 290). The “fall” of colonialism is made literal in the fate of Iliana, a descendant of an original colonial family in Mexico, who falls to her death on the marble staircase of her lavish mansion, a monument to capitalism that recalls a colonial palace. At the novel’s conclusion a multiracial army of the homeless and hundreds of thousands of Indians from throughout the continents converge on Tucson, marking the beginning of the end of European domination and possession of land in the Americas. In the novel memory is both retrospective and anticipatory. Almanac, like Silko’s Marx, recounts the terrible violence of conquest in order to create a new future for the Americas by catalyzing rebellions that will reclaim tribal lands. “Stories of depravity and cruelty,” in the words of the novel, are “the driving force of the revolution” (316), an idea advanced by Clinton, an African American militant who dedicates his radio broadcasts to black history: “The powers who controlled the United States didn’t want

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the people to know their history,” because “if the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up” (431). Underscoring the political significance of memory, Almanac recites a litany of colonial brutalities as well as Native and slave rebellions throughout the Americas, events that include such well-known uprisings as the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, Tecumtha’s 1807 rebellion, the 1911 Indian insurrections that accompanied the Mexican revolution, and the 1923 founding of Sendero Luminoso in Peru, in addition to smaller, everyday but equally important acts of resistance (see, for example, 527–30). Not only do these stories counter imperialist history’s obfuscations of violence and myths of Indian acquiescence and “disappearance,” but also they illustrate the importance of land in conflicts ranging from the Apache Wars to African slavery to the mass slaughter of Indians in Central America. Indeed the histories and political struggles recounted by the novel always ultimately center on land, as do incidents involving contemporary capitalism and colonialism such as Leah Blue’s real estate developments, Alegría’s architectural projects, and the undertakings of Zeta’s and Lecha’s “failed geologist” father. Throughout the novel, visual and spatial practices occupy central roles in these historical revisions as they expose colonial violence and facilitate indigenous revolution. As we have already seen, Almanac foregrounds the role of visuality in colonialist and capitalist destruction. Even the name of the colonial epoch, Death-Eye Dog, links seeing with violence, while images in the story constitute a Foucauldian means of surveillance and social control. The novel’s crime photographs, spy cameras, snuff films, and torture videos objectify and commodify their subjects, rendering them objects of knowledge, consumption, and manipulation as well as patriarchy, a critical dynamic when these photographs sexually objectify women. In one critic’s words, such images offer “the horrific fantasy of an irresponsible present dissociated from the past” (Irr 237) and obfuscate the histories at the center of the novel. Because “ignorance of the people’s history had been the white man’s best weapon” (Almanac 742), film and television in particular deceive viewers about diverse subjects ranging from the Vietnam War to tribal rebellions as they cultivate disdain for indigenous peoples. Yet at the same time, seeing and image making serve a different purpose as the very technologies associated with colonialism become revolutionary tools. Lecha, the psychic or “seer” whose ability to discern the past

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recalls tribal prophecies, provides the most obvious example. She engages in the twin occupations of finding the dead (she works for a time as a television talk show psychic, locating corpses and describing their deaths for a fee) and of transcribing the ancient almanac bequeathed by her Yaqui grandmother, Yoeme. Lecha’s gift, described as an internal voice with eyes (163), is like that of the old medicine people whose quartz crystals “performed like tiny television sets” and allowed them to see events at great distances (156). Although Lecha’s venture as a television psychic feeds the colonizing society’s sensationalistic fascination with death, her twin occupations underscore the interdependence of history, prophecy (“seeing”), and revolution in the novel. By mixing history and prophecy, her psychic abilities defy the progressivist temporal logic that underlies colonialism. In addition, the almanac Lecha inherits from Yoeme is modeled on the Mayan codices, which, she explains, “don’t just tell you when to plant or harvest, they tell you about the days yet to come—drought or flood, plague, civil war or invasion” (137). Knowledge of the past, signified by Lecha’s ability to find the dead, is necessary to predict the future, the purpose of the almanac. Lecha’s role as seer thus represents the broader project of the novel itself, which is called an almanac and depicts historical knowledge as a means to compel change.7 Significantly, Lecha’s twin, Zeta, works as a drug smuggler and arms dealer, thus contributing to impending revolution in more concrete, though not more important, ways. The twins’ activities parallel those of the twin brothers El Feo and Tacho, leaders of the tribal armies south of the U.S.-Mexican border. Like Lecha, Tacho is a visionary; he sees the past and future in dreams and messages from sacred macaws. In the latter part of the novel he receives a sacred opal that is an instrument of prophecy and, like a camera’s eye, enables him to see events from a great distance. Meanwhile Tacho’s twin, El Feo, collaborates with Angelita La Escapía to train revolutionary armies. Visuality, as these examples illustrate, compresses space, enabling indigenous alliances to form across tribal and colonial national borders. “Seeing” also mediates ruptures in time (including colonial erasures of history, a problem central to the novel) so as to bring together past, present, and future and even to cross the ultimate boundary between life and death by summoning ancestor spirits.

7.  For a related discussion of the importance of witnessing in Almanac and Ceremony, see Moore.

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Almanac further strengthens the connection between seeing and indigenous revolution by associating photography and other media with historical memory on the one hand and political awareness on the other. Although the “white man’s toys,” including television and radio, cause people “to forget a great many important things” (433) and attest to the dominant society’s love of “destruction and death” (475), other media and visual technologies, such as Clinton’s radio broadcasts, expose suppressed histories of racial violence. Even conventional images can be interpreted against the grain, as when one character intuits that television images of “mobs of angry brown people swarming like bees from horizon to horizon” are harbingers of revolution. He realizes that “the broadcasting of mobs and riots was precisely what the terrorists [tribal revolutionaries] had wanted,” although “the use of video to control criminals and terrorists was entirely a different matter” (481–83). The broadcast images protect rioters from slaughter by the government because “blood [speaks] too loudly for television” (494). Similarly, the “Cop Cakes” calendar, featuring law enforcement officers in sexually incriminating poses, “incite[s] disrespect for the law and contempt for the [highly corrupt] police and court system” (460). Even torture videos can support revolutionary purposes, as Angelita La Escapía demonstrates when she distributes tapes depicting the severed heads of U.S. government officials in order “to terrify the young U.S. troops,” to make them “understand they are fighting an Indian war,” and to encourage them to become conscientious objectors (590–91). In the hands of a Yup’ik woman who “realized the possibilities in the white man’s gadgets,” television satellite weather maps become powerful weapons for causing airplanes to crash (155). If such examples illustrate the paradoxical role of images in Almanac, “the strange phenomenon of the Geronimo photographs” (225), an episode recounted early in the novel, epitomizes how the novel turns colonial visual technologies to indigenous revolutionary purposes. The episode fictionalizes events surrounding the late-nineteenth-century pursuit and capture of the Apache leader Geronimo. For years prior to his famous 1886 surrender, Geronimo eludes capture by the U.S. Army, in part, according to Silko’s version of the story, because the soldiers fail to realize that there are three or four different warriors called Geronimo, including the resistance leader they seek, ranging across the desert Southwest. This confusion leads to numerous cases of mistaken identity. Each of these “Geronimos” is photographed many times, often in absurd staged poses catering to the

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public’s demand for images of the “murderer” and “savage beast” (225): one Geronimo wears a huge feathered war bonnet unlike anything the Apaches ever made, while another menacingly brandishes a rifle. But inexplicably, in each of the developed images the visage of the same, unknown Apache warrior (later revealed to be an ancestor spirit) appears in place of the various Geronimos’ individual faces. This mystery, noticed only by the Apaches themselves, leads to a final case of mistaken identity. When an imposter called Old Pancakes surrenders to the army and jokingly claims to be Geronimo, the soldiers’ commanding officer, General Miles, attempts to verify his identity by allowing a journalist to photograph the prisoner and compare his image to those in the general’s dossier. Although the comparison yields ambiguous results, public fervor causes the press to announce the capture of the notorious outlaw. Rather than verifying Geronimo’s identity, however, the photographs only generate further confusion and lead to the fulfillment of Miles’s dream, in which “Geronimo had brushed away shackles and leg irons as if they were cobwebs, and walked away, disappearing as the troops looked on, paralyzed by an invisible force” (231). The real Geronimo, in Silko’s story, is never captured. In a crucial sense the Geronimo photographs illustrate the historical uses of such images for social control, a key theme of Almanac. Specifically, they exemplify nineteenth-century uses of photography for repressive purposes, as a means, in Allan Sekula’s words, “to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look—the typology— and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology” (7). Criminal photography, as a tool not just for identifying particular individuals but for defining criminal types, provided a vital means of control during a period of rapid social transformation, including racial and class stratification. Geronimo, however, was no ordinary criminal; he was a notorious character who embodied the alarming possibility of successful Indian resistance to colonization. Consequently the Geronimo photographs, historically as well as in Almanac, carry even wider significance. They are also examples of ethnographic photography, another nineteenth-century practice that defined “primitive” racial types and placed them in the historical past, thus masking ongoing colonial social dynamics.8 Designed to aid in the capture of the Apache leader most Americans considered a fearsome outlaw, the 8.  For an important example in the case of the Navajo (Diné), see Faris. On the connection between racial otherness and temporality, see Fabian.

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photographs garnered national publicity and support for the Indian wars by characterizing resistance as racialized criminality. Images of Geronimo displaying the accoutrements of war spurred public outrage; as a result, “U.S. newspapers from Tucson to Washington, D.C.,” Silko writes, “had the biggest headlines . . . demanding death for Geronimo” and insisting that his Apache followers “have their heads chopped off and their skins tanned for chair cushions” (228–29). Yet despite the ways they circulate publicly, these images in Almanac facilitate the Apaches’ escape and ultimately contest the ideological foundations of colonialism. The Geronimo episode, for example, refigures the “primitive” encounter with “modern” technology, a widespread discursive convention that differentiates “savagery” from “civilization” to justify European domination.9 This is what occurs when Old Pancakes encounters his own photographic likeness: “Old Pancakes did not go in much for photographs anyway. He held the photograph in his hands and turned it slowly around and over, sniffing it and sneezing from the strong smell of the chemicals. All the white men watching Pancakes would have laughed. . . . The journalists loved the ease with which this savage desert and its savage creatures so effortlessly yielded front-page copy” (231). Although this reaction seems to demonstrate his backwardness, in the end the Apaches have the last laugh. Old Pancakes refuses “to admire the piece of paper covered with brownish spots and smudges,” and his incredulity proves well founded when the images fail in their mimetic purpose and instead help the Apaches escape. Here it is the “civilized” white characters, not the “savage” Apaches, who misunderstand technology (General Miles, after all, “verifies” the identity of Old Pancakes by comparing his photograph—rather than the prisoner himself—to images of Geronimo), thus dismantling the racial logic of colonialism and inverting its historical implications. If such encounters with technology conventionally herald the inevitable dying out of colonized peoples, in Almanac the failure of the white characters to understand photographic images suggests a similar fate for them. In Silko’s story, the spirits of the dead that transform the Gero­ nimo photographs bring about the revolution to end colonial occupation. 9.  Academic (especially anthropological) and popular discourses provide countless examples of this paradigm. For an analysis of one prominent instance in Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, see Huhndorf (2000).

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While the Geronimo episode uses photography to overturn colonial racial logic and revise Native peoples’ roles in the history and future of the Americas, the five hundred–year map reworks European cartographic conventions to support indigenous land claims. The map, as we have seen, highlights the historical role of cartography as a “weapon of imperialism” through its use of geometric scale (however rough), European toponomies, and spatial divisions such as the U.S.-Mexico border. But because its legends recall the colonial histories that created these spatial practices and geographies, the map employs European cartographic conventions against themselves to engage in what Sherene Razack, citing Richard Phillips, labels “unmapping,” or the effort “to denaturalize geography by asking how spaces come to be but also ‘to undermine world views that rest upon it’ ” (5). In Almanac, “unmapping” exposes the links between European cartography and imperialism, then alters these cartographic conventions by reconnecting the geography of the land with its history. Whereas the depiction of the “New World” as “virgin land” erased indigenous peoples to create the illusion of uncontested European possession, the five hundred–year map depicts the human histories that shape American geography, while the narrative emphasizes an enduring indigenous presence that supports tribal land claims. “Sixty million Native Americans died between 1500 and 1600,” reads one of its legends, describing the violent struggles that accompanied the invasion and continue unabated in Indian “defiance and resistance to things European.” Exemplifying these ongoing conflicts, the map lists the novel’s characters and their interactions, which, as the narrative discloses, define land as both the site and the object of struggle. To support indigenous claims, Almanac draws inspiration from Mesoamerican cartographic traditions that, in contrast with European methods, define the meaning of a place in terms of social relationships over time. In the pre-contact period, writes Barbara Mundy, “communities across Mesoamerica established their singularity and encouraged the solidarity of their members by invoking a common history” through maps that “expressed their sense of self in relation to the space they occupied.” Such maps take two interrelated forms: “cartographic histories,” which represent the “establishment of the community,” including major historical events and ruling lineages, and “[define] the territory of the community by its boundaries,” and “social settlement maps,” which recount “how the groups that make up the community populace have organized both themselves and the space

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they inhabit” (106–7). Although these cartographic practices changed as the conquest unfolded, they continued to serve the explicitly political goal of creating community identities through shared histories, social practices, and spatial relations that supported Indian land claims after the invasion. In this later period such maps, Gordon Brotherston explains, typically appeared as title pages in the teoaxoxtli, literary accounts that, like Silko’s novel, represent historical and cosmic dimensions of Native experience while they “construct political space and anchor historical continuity” (4). Because they establish the histories and boundaries of Native occupation of the land, they constitute “political statements to defend land and home,” and they have been used as legal instruments to establish Native land title throughout the past century (90, 83). Almanac builds on these intersecting cartographic and narrative traditions for similar purposes of creating community and supporting Indian land title. The novel, however, extends their conventional uses by redefining community as a pan-indigenous, transnational entity united by shared histories and political goals rather than by geography and culture like those Mundy describes. As it redefines indigenous politics, this transnational community radically challenges the power and boundaries of nation-states. Characters from across the Americas converge on Tucson, the spatial center of the novel, described on the map as “home to an assortment of speculators, confidence men, embezzlers, lawyers, judges, police and other criminals, as well as addicts and pushers, since the 1880s and the Apache Wars.” The characters’ travels to and from the city— most often across the U.S.-Mexico border—draw them into a single story that undermines colonial spatial divisions, including national boundaries. Tucson’s history as well as its location in the border region is crucial to Silko’s transnational political vision. Just as drug and arms trafficking, organized crime, and revolutionary movements tie together locations in the novel throughout the Americas, so does Tucson’s past, exemplified by the Apache Wars and profiteering from conquest, represent the broader colonial histories described in Almanac. These “speculators, confidence men, embezzlers, lawyers, judges, police and other criminals” are colonialism’s contemporary agents; they demonstrate, as the map tells us, that “the Indian Wars have never ended in the Americas.” While conquest is ongoing, so too is Indian resistance. Tucson’s history includes rebellions that foreshadow the impending revolt, presaged, in the words of another legend, in

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“ancient prophecies [that] foretold the arrival of Europeans in the Americas” and the eventual “disappearance of all things European.” Almanac, then, employs cartography to challenge colonial geographies and to unite indigenous peoples across cultural and national boundaries in their quest to retake land. Yet as Silko’s novel charts the contradictory terrain of indigenous politics with its grounding in local and global concerns, it also reveals the limits of transnational politics in indigenous contexts.

Culture, Gender, and the Limits of Indigenous Transnationalism In Almanac, transnational alliances emerge from shared histories of conquest and resulting political issues, such as land claims. Consequently, indigenous culture, which distinguishes rather than unites tribes across the Americas, occupies a less central role in Almanac than in earlier nationalist novels. Here the move toward emphasizing history and politics rather than culture not only allows for the development of a pan-tribal identity but also widens possible roles for indigenous women. Again, a comparison with Silko’s earlier novel Ceremony is instructive. Ceremony links cultural restoration with community reconstruction, but in so doing it limits its women characters to one of two roles: either they exemplify the gendered effects of colonization, which erodes women’s social and cultural importance, or they personify tribal culture. For example, characters such as Laura, Helen Jean, and the nameless prostitutes in the arroyo illustrate women’s sexual debasement through colonization, while Native traditions are represented by characters such as Thought Woman, Reed Woman, and Corn Woman, by the Yellow Woman stories on which Cere­ mony is based, and by the novel’s contemporary manifestations of those stories in the figures of Ts’eh and Night Swan. These traditional characters are figurative mothers who assist in Tayo’s social and cultural reintegration into Laguna. Even though Ceremony considerably broadens conventional definitions of tradition, the “return” narrative creates relatively static, limited roles for the women who embody that tradition and thus make cultural continuity possible, while their counterparts (Laura, Helen Jean, and the nameless prostitutes) represent social disintegration when they lose their cultural bearings. By contrast, the male protagonist

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exemplifies dynamic change, the ability to “shift and grow” (126) that Cere­ mony associates with survival. In the historical and political framework of Almanac, women occupy radically different and more varied roles: freed from the function of representing cultural traditions, they serve instead as the most militant revolutionary leaders. Almanac thus refutes two gendered representational traditions: one associated with nationalism (including indigenous nationalism) which assigns women the tasks of cultural and biological reproduction (see McClintock), and colonial conventions (discussed in chapter 3) that position indigenous women as collaborators with European colonizers and traitors to tribal communities, often through their sexuality. Almanac’s revision of the roles of indigenous women commences in the opening scene. Set in Zeta and Lecha’s kitchen, this episode overturns the conventional definition of the kitchen as domestic space with its description of the pistols, shotguns, and drug paraphernalia that litter the table and countertops. As the novel unfolds, unveiling the connections between weapon and drug trafficking and indigenous insurgency, Zeta and Lecha gain prominence as revolutionary leaders. They number among the female characters who challenge the centrality and conventional meanings of indigenous women’s reproduction, in both the cultural and biological senses. Instead, Almanac positions its male characters, such as the Barefoot Hopi, Tacho, and El Feo, as the bearers of culture (a role that is less confining for men in a patriarchal society),10 while the women in various ways refuse motherhood and use their sexuality in the service of revolution. This is especially true of Angelita and Lecha. A scene near the end of the novel when characters from throughout the Americas conspire in Room 1212 (another transnational, revolutionary space) exemplifies how Almanac reverses conventional gender roles so that women fulfill the most critical and sometimes the most violent tasks of insurgency: [Calabazas] had trusted the men who had been in Room 1212, but he wasn’t sure about the women, especially not the Eskimo [Rose] or the Maya woman [Angelita]. Those two looked like troublemakers; they looked like killers if a man didn’t cooperate. . . . Calabazas would sit back and let the others make the decisions and give the orders, the way he always had. . . . [M]aybe 10.  I am grateful to Enrique Lima for this insight.

Picture Revolution    159 the women would give him something easy to do, something that wasn’t too strenuous or too dangerous—maybe answering the phone or mailing letters. (740)11

Jettisoning colonial narratives of indigenous women’s complicity, this gender reversal winds throughout Almanac in the stories of Zeta and Lecha as well as that of Angelita, the commander of armies south of the border. “The [colonial] epoch of Death-Eye Dog,” writes Silko, “was male and therefore tended to be somewhat weak and very cruel” (251). This gendering of colonial history accounts for the horrific acts of sexual violence and for the colonizing figures’ repudiation of women, including what the novel labels “Mother Earth.”12 The waning of Death-Eye Dog in turn marks the ascendancy of women who occupy major leadership roles in Native resistance. But even as Almanac thus redefines indigenous women’s political roles, it highlights their sexualization, trivialization, and invisibility, as when Lecha realizes that although the twin brothers Tacho and El Feo have garnered the most media attention, Angelita was their true but un­ acknowledged leader (739).13 Although the less prominent place Almanac accords traditional culture supports an indigenous politics that is both transnational and feminist, traditions nevertheless remain integral to Almanac’s revolutionary vision, and they reveal the point at which indigenous transnationalism reaches its limits. Throughout Almanac, indigenous cultural traditions defy colonialism’s efforts “to strip [tribal peoples] of everything—their languages and histories” and even their “gods” (416), as they also provide a foundation for an anticolonial, anticapitalist society. But problematically, in its creation of a pan-tribal identity Almanac collapses different traditions— interpreting, for example, snake figures from Laguna, Yaqui, and African 11.  Calabazas’s revelation seems almost a direct response to Lisa Mayo’s criticism of 1970s AIM politics (cited in chapter 3) that women were relegated to gendered roles of making coffee and writing letters. 12.  This explains the logic of the novel’s indefensible representations of male homosexuality, which it uses to epitomize colonial cruelty and exploitation. For a discussion of male homosexuality in the novel, see St. Clair. 13.  Silko’s revisions of traditional culture, gender, and their intersections find a prominent place in her next novel, Gardens in the Dunes (1999). Also a transnational story centered on atypical women characters, it defines resistance culture broadly to encompass even European traditions. On the novel’s use of gnosticism, for example, see Brassaw.

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traditions (astonishingly, Africa is here represented as a singular entity) as essentially alike—to create a pan-indigenous culture that distorts its diverse sources by operating above tribal identities and sacrificing cultural specificity. Mexico, which serves as the center of indigenous revolutionary political activity in the novel, also anchors this pan-indigenous culture. In addition to its use of Mesoamerican cartographic traditions, Almanac draws inspiration from the Mayan codices—the pre-contact, omen-bearing texts collected in the almanacs—to rewrite the history of the Americas. The codices instruct on astronomy, calendrics, medicine, ceremonies, and agriculture and predict recurring time cycles associated with particular deities, events, and auspicious days. Almanac uses a model of historical repetition similar to the time cycles in the codices, and a significant storyline centers on portions of another codex that is smuggled north during the early years of the invasion and eventually ends up in Lecha’s care. The novel quotes this fictional almanac, and in fact itself resembles a codex, as Silko has claimed (1996b, 140). Another source for the novel is the Popul Vuh, the sixteenthcentury Mayan text that links mythic and historical time; like the codices, it traditionally served as a “seeing instrument” to foretell “distant or future events” (Tedlock 21). The Popul Vuh, along with other Mayan books, uses indigenous histories and cosmogonies to establish Native peoples’ long occupation of the places described in its story; such texts have consequently served to support Indian land claims, or in Brotherston’s words, “to define and defend territory, even in law where necessary, and especially as responses to the invasion begun by Columbus” (39). Almanac, then, does not merely recount various Native histories and spiritual practices for similar purposes; it rewrites the Popul Vuh story about the quest of hero twins to defeat the lords of death, which is echoed by the two sets of twins in Silko’s novel who battle “the Destroyers.”14 As Almanac generalizes its sources to create a pan-indigenous culture, it exposes the internal contradictions of the novel. These are illustrated most clearly in the story of Bartolomeo, the Cuban who is executed for “crimes against the revolution.” While training Indian guerrilla armies, 14.  Underscoring the importance of visuality in the novel, Silko comments that such texts “combined painting and writing” to make “aspects of the divine world . . . actually present, at least for awhile, in these images” (see 1996a, 157).

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Bartolomeo grows suspicious of “treacherous tribalists” when he receives “reports that these mountain villages were hotbeds of tribalism and native religion. Marxism did not tolerate these primitive bugaboos!” Consequently Angelita puts Bartolomeo on trial for “the denial and attempted annihilation of tribal histories,” and a guilty verdict leads to his execution (514–15). But Almanac’s annihilation of cultural specificity creates similar problems, and the novel also overlooks the complexities of historical relationships between the dispossessed groups that, in the story, unite with indigenous peoples in the interests of revolution (these include African Americans, “eco-terrorists,” workers, and the homeless). Historically such groups have had much more conflicted relationships with Native peoples than the novel allows, and their own political goals have taken forms different from, and at times opposed to, indigenous autonomy and land claims. Almanac ignores the complexities of these histories to preserve a transnational revolutionary vision that centers on indigenous endeavors to retake land. In these ways the novel exemplifies the inherent paradoxes of contemporary indigenous politics, which must inevitably negotiate between the distinctiveness of individual tribal communities and the histories and social issues that render them a collective political force. Almanac develops its notion of “tribal internationalism,” with its vexed cultural and political features, through the story of Sterling, a revision of the nationalist “return” narrative of earlier novels. Although the novel as a whole ambitiously takes as its subject the history of the Americas, Sterling’s story relates to the Laguna reservation and invokes that of  Tayo in Ceremony. But whereas Tayo’s healing redraws the cultural and geographical boundaries of Laguna, Sterling’s transformation involves a political consciousness developed outside the boundaries of the reservation, entailing revelations about the ties between indigenous peoples. Almanac’s final scene places him on the margins of Laguna looking outward, ruminating on the connections between the reservation and the broader world, and the cultural illuminations that follow his homecoming relate Laguna traditions, however problematically, to those of other indigenous communities. His return parallels the march of tribal armies to retake Native land, a retracing of pre-contact indigenous migrations, and these intersecting storylines unite the hemispheric and tribal dimensions of Native politics as they ground the novel’s land claims project in specific places. Through these connections Almanac suggests critical questions for Native

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studies that extend beyond its recent nationalist orientation as it clarifies the implications of an enduring indigenous presence for American nation-states.

Visions of Home In Almanac the past and future of the Americas are embodied in the characters of Seese and Sterling, whose intertwined stories frame the immense narrative. At the beginning of the novel, Seese, a young white woman, has been unwittingly caught up in Beaufrey’s web of murder and destruction. Her story is an allegory of colonialism and its ultimate collapse. After her baby, Monte, is kidnapped, Seese solicits Lecha’s help to find her child. Unbeknownst to Seese, Beaufrey has had Monte murdered, but Lecha refuses to reveal Monte’s fate, insisting instead that Seese help transcribe the almanac, a process, she promises, that will provide Seese with the answers she seeks. Seese’s story, then, is tied to the histories and prophecies in the almanac, and as her name suggests, “seeing” sheds light on the imperialist narrative traced by the novel. The events that lead to Monte’s death stem in large part from Seese’s relationships with Beaufrey and Serlo, the emblematic colonizing characters in Almanac, after Seese’s lover, David, becomes sexually involved with Beaufrey. Another of David’s former lovers, Eric, remains part of the scenario, and these entanglements lead to jealousy, strife, and tragedy. For Beaufrey, whose most prominent quality is detachment, the situation provides opportunities for control, manipulation, and the pleasure he derives from the suffering of other people. Beaufrey makes destroying others a “game,” a kind of “theater” in which “players such as Eric or David and the cunt [Seese] were a dime a dozen” and Beaufrey was the distant, controlling “director and author” (537). This particular game, Seese soon realizes, is designed to end in their deaths. The reference to theater significantly connotes spectacle, and the connection between visuality and colonial violence shapes the ensuing drama. Eric becomes Beaufrey’s first victim when, tormented by David’s rejection, he commits suicide. Eric shoots himself and allows his naked body to fall on a bed covered with a white chenille spread; he thus makes his death “a sort of visual event or installation” that he knows will be “irresistible to a visual artist such as David” (537). Arriving at Eric’s apartment soon after

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the suicide, probably summoned by a desperate last-minute call from Eric, David callously photographs the body, creating high-contrast images with dark blood spilling across the white background. So aestheticized are the pictures that Seese at first sees only a “field of peonies and poppies—cherry, ruby, deep purple, black,” at the center of which is a nude “nearly buried in blossoms,” a figure “innocent and lovely as a field of flowers.” It takes her a moment to notice the “extreme angles of Eric’s limbs” and the “clenched muscles,” evidence of an anguished death (106). The photographs demonstrate David’s “clinical detachment” (107), a quality typifying all of the colonizing figures in Almanac, as well as the ability of images to obscure the truths of their subjects. David’s photographs transform Eric’s mutilated body, and thus his despair, into an object of beauty and fascination, a distortion that characterizes crime photographs, news images, and pornography in Almanac. David’s photographs are thematically significant in another way as well. Dodging lawsuits by Eric’s family, David displays the images in a high-profile and critically acclaimed gallery exhibition that attracts widespread public attention and eager collectors. These commodified spectacles bring David fame and fortune. In short, they embody colonial and capitalist violence, which systematically inflicts suffering and generates profits from destroying human bodies. It is perhaps predictable that David meets a similar fate at the hands of Beaufrey. Tired of their “games” with David, Beaufrey and Serlo surprise him with photographs of Monte’s tiny cadaver. When a horrified David flees on his mare, she falls to her death, crushing David beneath her. His corpse, too, provides images for profit in a scene that underscores Silko’s critique of capitalism. “David was worth more dead than he had been worth alive,” Beaufrey knew, and “here was what gave free-world trade the edge over all other systems: no sentimentality. Every ounce of value, everything worth anything, was stripped away for sale, regardless; no mercy. . . . Capitalism stayed ahead because it was ruthless, Beaufrey said after he had finished the roll of film” (565). The photographs of Eric’s and David’s bodies, callously sold for profit, resonate with capitalism’s literal consumption of bodies, exemplified in the novel by the slaughter of Indians and African slaves as well as by Trigg’s sale of biomaterials and Max Blue’s assassinations. David’s demise also parallels Iliana’s fate. Just as Iliana’s excesses lead to her death, David’s unabashed selfishness and greed ultimately destroy him.

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The characters in Seese’s story, then, are a focal point of Almanac’s critique of colonial and capitalist violence as they herald the collapse of European society under the weight of its own vices. Seese herself, however, does not engage in such callous violence, nor does she share the other characters’ selfishness and detachment. One of their victims, she is nevertheless complicit in her own ruin. Although baby Monte’s kidnapping and murder count among Beaufrey’s “games,” Seese’s irresponsibility, drinking, and cocaine addiction contribute to the tragedy. But she has redeeming qualities as well, most notably an all-consuming love for Monte that leads her after his disappearance to quit cocaine and seek Lecha’s help. For most of the novel Seese remains unaware of Monte’s fate, and she painfully struggles to remember him fully, often through photographs, despite the passage of time. But the kidnappers stole most of her photographs, leaving her with a handful of snapshots that, instead of eliciting memories, only heighten Seese’s awareness of her loss. Although she “shuffles the baby pictures like a deck of cards, trying furiously to deal up just the one that will bring her back to a moment with him,” her efforts prove futile. Instead she becomes haunted by nightmares of an older Monte, whom she does not know and therefore cannot remember and whom she realizes is dead because of “the remarks others make as they look at [his] photographs” (42). Seese’s futile struggle to remember recalls the almanac’s prophecy that whites “had no future” in the Americas because they “had no past, no spirits of ancestors here” (313).15 As Seese transcribes the histories and prophecies in the almanac, she gradually realizes that Monte is dead, and the revelation leaves her despondent and suicidal. Both her name (a homonym for “cease”) and the fate of her child predict her demise and, allegorically, that of things European as foretold by ancient prophecies. Through the figure of Monte, then, the novel clarifies the relationship between Europe’s past and its future in the Americas: because of his death, he is associated with the unrecoverable past, while the fact that he is an infant renders him simultaneously a symbol of the future—or rather, because he dies, its absence. This is why his photographs fail as a catalyst for memory, and

15.  Several characters represent this rootlessness, including the real estate developer Leah, who attempts to re-create Venice in the Arizona desert, and Menardo, who denies his Indian ancestry. Perhaps the clearest metaphor for this repudiation of history is Max’s obsession with golf because “the tee-off for every hole” was “the first time, a fresh start” (374).

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why they are contrasted with a picture of Marx in another passage. In this latter image a “glint of the man’s soul had been captured,” and a “flicker of energy belonging to Marx and Marx alone still resided within the blazing eyes. . . . [E]manations of this energy had reached out . . . from the page” (518, 522). If Monte is a figure of loss, Marx is linked in Silko’s novel, however ambivalently, to survival and social continuity—though significantly, the survival of Native rather than European societies in the Americas. The differences between these photographs—one that revives the past while the other marks its absolute loss—manifest this distinction. Although her story presages the downfall of European domination, Seese herself meets an ambiguous end. We last see her as a helpless, despondent passenger in Lecha’s car, escaping from an attack on Lecha and Zeta’s family ranch. For Sterling, by contrast, historical understanding carries different implications. When we first encounter him, he has long been absent from his home on the Laguna reservation, at first to attend boarding school, later to work, and finally because of banishment by the tribe. His story typifies those of “Indians flung across the world forever separated from their tribes and from their ancestral lands” (88). His boarding school experience, for instance, recalls a series of assimilation policies that, beginning in the nineteenth century, aimed to eradicate Native cultures and histories, while his long absence from the Laguna reservation (as a partial consequence of these policies) results in a deep-seated alienation from the community, a predicament common to a long line of protagonists in Native American novels. This alienation causes Sterling to stay away from home, a choice that only worsens the problem because it creates suspicion and eventually contributes to his banishment. His story, then, represents the collective homelessness, dislocations, and cultural losses caused by the European invasion. Sterling’s struggles between remembering and forgetting, like Seese’s, transpire in part through his responses to photographs. At the beginning of the story Sterling is a loner who has just been hired by Lecha’s son, Ferro, as a gardener at their Tucson ranch. His major interests are popular magazines and cowboy movies. Although his tastes tend toward crime magazines like Police Gazette, they also include such publications as Read­ er’s Digest whose clichéd wisdom he takes quite seriously: Sterling had been carefully following advice printed recently in a number of magazines concerning depression and the best ways of combating it. He

166    Mapping the Americas had purposely been living in the present moment as much as he could. One article had pointed out that whatever has happened to you had already happened and can’t be changed. Spilled milk. But Sterling knows he’s one of those old-fashioned people who has trouble forgetting the past no matter how bad remembering might be for chronic depression. (24)

Despite its apparently trivial subject matter, this passage resonates with the novel’s broader concern with the politics of memory: Sterling’s effort to forget the past is like the amnesia of the colonizing culture, while the notion that “whatever has happened . . . can’t be changed” recalls Clinton’s idea that “the powers who controlled the United States didn’t want the people to know their history. . . . If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up” (431). Memory in the novel facilitates political consciousness and revolt, and it eventually transforms Sterling’s relation to the Laguna community. Initially, however, Sterling’s attraction to crime magazines and cowboy movies emulates the perverse fascination with spectacle and death criticized by the novel. He first subscribes to the Police Gazette and True Detective as a misguided attempt to study legal issues. Sterling’s curiosity about the law stems from his experience in boarding school, where “everything the white teachers had said and done to the Indian children had been ‘required by law’ ” (26), and indeed the law becomes thematically important throughout Almanac as an instrument of injustice and oppression. “The law crushed and cheated the poor whatever color they were” (714), says the poet-lawyer Wilson Weasel Tail, and this is borne out by the corrupt police officers, lawyers, and judges who populate Almanac. Sterling’s magazines in some measure embody that corruption as well through the use of photography as a tool for social control: their “most wanted” images are designed to catch criminals, and their sensationalized crime scenes feature images of slain outlaws, “halos of black blood around their heads” and “later propped on snow-white marble slabs,” betraying a perverse fascination with violence and death. Their message is that “crime did not pay” (40), but crime, in these magazines, includes any kind of rebellion, however justified, against the corrupt legal system. Such images, like the cowboy movies that similarly fascinate Sterling, reduce historical events to a contest between good guys (officers of the law) and bad guys (Indians and outlaws), making them another instance of the colonial obfuscation of history.

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Yet for Sterling these images carry contradictory meanings. Although he is fundamentally unlike Beaufrey, Serlo, and other colonizing figures in Almanac, Sterling’s problem lies partially in willed amnesia and social disconnection. On the one hand, these tendencies are fed by the dehumanizing images in the photographs as well as their ability to obscure complicated political relationships. Yet on the other hand, the images function as catalysts for memory and illumination. Sterling knows, for example, that many “outlaws” had actually protested economic injustices, and the photographs reveal that a number of them, including Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, Billy Frechette, as well as some of the Jesse James gang, were Indians. These revelations redefine the outlaws’ “crimes” as instances of anticolonial rebellion. The magazines neglect to identify these outlaws as Indians, Sterling realizes, because “so-called Indian experts preferred that Indians got left out of that part of American history, too, since their only other appearances had been at so-called massacres of white settlers” (40). The photographs lead Sterling to take Seese on a tour of sites that uncover the history of Tucson, an act associated in the novel with revolutionary consciousness. Sterling’s complicated realizations contribute to a subversive chronicle of colonial injustice and Native rebellion traced by the novel, and they place his experiences in the hemispheric histories at its center. But Sterling’s story is also the vehicle for telling that of the Laguna reservation. As he travels to and from the reservation, Almanac draws the past and future of Laguna into global narratives of conquest and revolution. At the beginning of the novel Sterling leaves the reservation and winds up in Tucson because he has been banished, an event that transpires because of photography. When a Hollywood film crew begins production at Laguna, the tribal council assigns Sterling the impossible job of preventing the crew from violating sacred sites and entering sacred land. Predictably, the crew, engaged in drunkenness, drug use, and general disrespect for the tribe, soon gets out of control and films a stone snake that the tribal council had declared sacrosanct. The filming of the snake, which is a “sacrilege” because it transforms a sacred location into a commodified spectacle, is only one of the film crew’s infringements, which include taking pictures inside the kiva, sunbathing at a sacred water hole, and stealing prayer sticks from shrines (90). The tribal council fears that revealing the existence of the snake will cause further intrusions. Although Sterling could not possibly

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have controlled the film crew, the tribe nevertheless banishes him because of these violations. As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that the filming of the snake was the most recent in a long history of dispossession at Laguna that takes its place within the larger story of global imperialism, in part through the circulation and reinscription of images. The most crucial event occurred eighty years earlier, when anthropologists stole the “Little Grandmother” and “Little Grandfather,” sacred stone figures that “had been given to the people by the kachina spirits at the beginning of the Fifth World, pres­ ent time,” and who are regarded as the tribe’s “esteemed and beloved ancestors.” Because they were gifts from the spirits and “had accompanied the people on their vast journey from the North” (31), the little grandparents embody the spiritual beliefs and historical experiences crucial to the tribe’s identity. Decades after the theft, the “Little Grandmother” and “Little Grandfather” end up in a small anthropology museum in Santa Fe. The sacrilege surrounding the filming of the snake, Sterling realizes, is “the story of the stone figures all over again” (35), because both events threatened to eradicate Laguna culture and history, and this helps explain Sterling’s banishment, for “there were hundreds of years of blame that needed to be taken by somebody, blame for other similar losses” (34). Although the “Little Grandfather” and “Little Grandmother” are never recovered in the novel, the conclusion suggests that they, along with the stolen land, will ultimately be returned. After learning the location of the stone figures, a tribal delegation travels to the museum to inform the curator that they had been stolen and to arrange their homecoming. The curator predictably refuses, claiming that the donor was “a distinguished patron whose reputation was beyond reproach” (33). Upon seeing the figures in the museum’s glass case, one delegate responds in a way that portends the revolutionary future imagined by Almanac: “The old man kept bumping his fingers against the glass case until the assistant curator became alarmed. The Laguna delegation later recounted how the white man had suddenly looked around at all of them as if he were afraid they had come to take back everything that had been stolen. In that instant white man and Indian both caught a glimpse of what was yet to come” (33). The museum scene exemplifies centuries of theft at Laguna and throughout the Americas, and, like the almanac itself, it foreshadows the Indian revolts that will culminate in the restoration of tribal lands and possessions. These returns

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are represented by Sterling’s homecoming to the Laguna reservation at the end of the novel. “Home,” the final chapter of Almanac, refigures the “return” paradigm of earlier Native American novels to foreshadow this revolutionary future and advance the intersections between national and transnational indigenous politics. In this scene the various “return” narratives of the novel converge as Sterling’s homecoming invokes ancestor spirits, the march of tribal armies across the border, and acts of cultural recovery—all associated with the return of indigenous land. When Sterling returns to Laguna, memory triumphs over forgetting as he grows “haunted” by “ghost armies of the Americas leading armies of living warriors, armies of indigenous people to retake the land” (762). The magazines that had been his obsession, he realizes, “referred to a world [he] had left forever, a world . . . that had never really existed except on the pages of Reader’s Digest” (757), and he allows his subscriptions to lapse. At the same time, his interest in traditional Laguna knowledge grows, and he endeavors to remember, however partially, the stories he had always dismissed before: those told by his old aunts, the elders’ dire warnings about uranium mining at Laguna, and descriptions of their ancestors’ flight north centuries earlier, away from the sorcery that had overtaken tribes to the south. Sterling’s return inevitably carries nationalist implications as it draws together themes of cultural recovery, spiritual regeneration, and political illumination and ties them to that of indigenous land reclamation. Indeed many of the stories Sterling remembers have to do with land, and the sight of familiar places makes his homecoming a poignant one: “When Sterling caught a glimpse of the distant blue peaks of Mt. Taylor, his throat tightened and tears ran down his cheeks. Woman Veiled in Rain Clouds was what the old people had called the mountain. Sterling was home. . . . He had never spent so much time before alone with the earth; he sat below the red sandstone cliffs and watched the high, thin clouds” (756–57). He passes the first few days walking the reservation, experiencing a barrage of memories about family, his aunts’ stories, and tales of “the land a thousand years ago, when the rain clouds had been plentiful and the grass and wildflowers had been belly high on the buffalo that had occasionally wandered off the South Plains” (758). In contrast with the blank spaces and disembodied perspectives of colonial maps, this is a landscape made meaningful by longtime Laguna occupation.

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Yet while Sterling’s experiences cannot be separated from issues of nation, neither can they be contained by them. In this final scene Almanac renders land, culture, and their interrelationships significant in trans­ national as well as national terms as Sterling’s reflections connect Laguna to the global histories traced by the novel. The “grayish-white tailings” and “shattered, scarred sandstone” of the uranium mine that “had devoured entire mesas,” for instance, reveal ecological destruction at Laguna as well as its place in U.S. global interventions during World War II, when “the old folks had seen the first atomic explosion—the flash brighter than any sun—followed weeks later by the bombs that had burned up a half a million Japanese” (759). More than just recalling such global histories of colonial destruction, Sterling’s walk parallels the march of revolutionary armies to retake the land, and it thus participates in the indigenous decolonization and reoccupation of space that unites Native peoples throughout the Americas, the transnational political endeavor at the center of Almanac. While land gains its meaning from intersecting tribal and global histories in this final scene, this is also true of traditional stories: “Sterling tried to remember more of the stories the old people used to tell; he wished he had listened more closely because he vaguely recalled a connection the giant snake had with Mexico. Tucson was too close to Mexico. Tucson was Mexico. . . . Aunt Marie and the old people used to talk about how fierce the Mexican tribes were—how quickly and casually they had killed” (759). In one of these stories the Gunadeeyahs, or Destroyers, conquered neighboring tribes before the arrival of Europeans. This caused the Pueblos’ ancestors to flee north to escape the killing, while the Destroyers found common cause with the European invaders. Reflecting on this story, Sterling understands how the long history of colonization, beginning with Cortés and including Sterling’s own experiences in Tucson, deepened pre-contact connections between tribes as they shared the same fate after the invasion. In this way Almanac’s conclusion, like the five hundred–year map, helps to rewrite colonial history throughout the Americas as one of uninterrupted destruction beginning with the Gunadeeyahs and continuing in the contemporary events described in the narrative. Sterling’s revelation about this history and the connections among tribes catalyze his transformation and provide the foundation for revolutionary alliances throughout the novel. Ultimately, Sterling’s walk across the reservation leads him to the giant stone snake, an icon that draws together the major threads of the novel. It

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is at once part of Laguna and (problematically) global indigenous traditions, an object of colonial destruction, an occasion for Sterling’s banishment and later his homecoming, and finally a harbinger of hemispheric revolution. The spatial dimensions of this scene, along with the novel’s final words, strengthen the links between Laguna and indigenous communities throughout the Americas that portend future revolution. In contrast with the conclusion of Tayo’s story in Ceremony, which places him in the kiva at the center of the community, Sterling’s story ends on the margins of Laguna—a place at once on the reservation and part of the world outside its boundaries—where the snake is “looking south, in the direction from which the twin brothers and the people would come” (763). In its revolutionary narrative about the demise of nation-states and the return of Native lands, Almanac further departs from nationalist novels by positioning transnational alliances as the most powerful of anticolonial endeavors. Silko’s novel thus clarifies the political implications of the issues raised in Simon Ortiz’s “No More Sacrifices,” the 1980 work with which I began this book. Both texts relate Native conquest to global capitalism and imperialism and explore the subversive potential of the relationships these histories create among indigenous and non-indigenous peoples; and both focus on indigenous land reclamation, the enduring center of Native literature and politics. But Almanac develops these histories and relationships into a radical rewriting of the past and future of the Americas. Just as the tribal histories and social interactions recounted in the novel predate nation-states and extend beyond their borders, the shared experience of conquest culminates in revolutionary efforts that disrupt contemporary geopolitical boundaries and suggest the transience of colonial nation-states themselves. Exemplifying what I have characterized as a transnational turn in indigenous cultural production, Silko’s novel thus broadens the questions that currently define Native studies to account for the myriad issues that emerge from what it labels “tribal internationalism.” As it offers a profound critique of “U.S. hegemony and the constructedness of both national myths and national borders” integral to postnationalist American studies (Curiel et al. 3), the novel also recenters indigenous communities and issues hitherto frequently neglected in the study of the Americas, their history, and their future. In so doing, Almanac calls attention to the unique challenges a historical and contemporary indigenous presence poses to American identities, social formations, and political practices.

Coda Border Crossings

“The Border,” Mohawk artist Shelley Niro’s 1997 mixed-media installation (see figure 8), uses maps, photographs, and sculpture to visualize the national and transnational crossings that increasingly animate indigenous culture and politics.1 The installation inverts colonial representational (especially visual) traditions and spatial practices to contest the power of nation-­states, particularly their ongoing violence, containment of indigenous communities within imposed boundaries, and possession of land. In colonial iconographical traditions, for instance, images of defeated Native men represent the “disappearing” Indian as a relic of the U.S. national past and the triumph of “manifest destiny”; along with portrayals of illfated warriors such as Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, these include James Earl Fraser’s celebrated 1915 sculpture End of the Trail and the “Indian 1.  I am grateful to Rachel Adams for bringing Niro’s installation to my attention. Her astute analysis in “Before the Border” influenced my reading here.

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Figure 8.  Shelley Niro, The Border, 1997 installation at the Longyear Museum of Anthropology, Colgate University. Photograph by Warren Wheeler.

Head” nickel of his design. The Border, by contrast, replaces such male figures with a photograph of a young indigenous woman superimposed on a map of North America to revise the relationship between Indians and the nation-state. This image thus deploys cartography to dispute colonial spatial demarcations (there are no national borders) and possession of indigenous land, while it uses a contemporary photograph along with symbols of survival and continuity to counter the myth of the “vanishing” Native. As it employs the colonial representational tradition of displaying indigenous women’s bodies, the photograph in Niro’s installation subverts such sexualized depictions along with those of indigenous women as originary figures of nation-states (see chapter 3). Instead the installation alludes to the suppressed gendered violence of conquest. In The Border these challenges to the histories, boundaries, and power of nation-states

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materialize through representations of the tribal, the transnational, and their interconnections.2 The two photographs that frame the installation, flanking the metal construction at its center, use tribal imagery to invoke the long occupation of the land by indigenous peoples. The first photograph superimposes a Native woman’s picture on images that include a turtle, a Mohawk symbol rich in meaning: the turtle not only designates Niro’s clan but also recalls the Iroquoian origin story of  Turtle Island (North America), created when Sky Woman, pregnant with twins, falls from the heavens onto a turtle’s back.3 These connections between women, creation, tribal identity, and land gain contemporary meanings in the second photograph. Framed by a cut-out female silhouette, it depicts two children (a reference, perhaps, to Sky Woman’s twins) standing in a field of grass, presumably on Mohawk land, and reaching to the sky. Together these images invoke the long indigenous history that underlies contemporary claims to the land; and because they include multiple symbols of creation, reproduction, and survival (youth, children, seedpods, turtles), they anticipate a vital indigenous future as well. As these images point to ongoing colonial conflicts over land, they also emphasize the centrality of women in the Mohawk nation, a traditionally matrilineal society in which women have held powerful social roles. They thus counter the systematic European displacement of women from positions of influence, a project that comes to bear more explicitly on other parts of the work. As The Border uses tribal images to challenge colonial nation-states, it also emphasizes hemispheric indigenous connections that, in the installation, cohere around gender. While tribal issues play out horizontally along the plane of the installation, the axis of depth represents pan-tribal connections, especially among women. The woman in the installation’s central photograph is young and attractive, summoning associations of sexuality and fertility that shape representations of “traitorous” indigenous women, such as Pocahontas and Sacajawea, in U.S. national mythologies 2.  These concerns with stereotypical representations of Native people, especially women, and contemporary indigenous identities and politics also inform Niro’s other works. See, for example, her films It Starts with a Whisper, Honey Moccasin, and The Shirt. 3.  While the Mohawk context bears special relevance here, many other tribes share similar stories about the origins of “Turtle Island.” These similarities underscore the transnational indigenous allusions of the installation.

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(see chapter 3). Spawned by the European patriarchal legacy across the Americas, these figures play central roles in colonial national origin stories that obscure the violence of conquest and support European claims to the land, and in doing so they reinforce the ongoing marginalization of indigenous women. In The Border, the woman’s image is superimposed on a map of North America drawn from Western cartographical traditions. This might strengthen her connection to colonial mythologies and Native land loss—except, significantly, that the map includes no European placenames (other than “North America”) or national borders, the markers of colonial possession. By depicting the woman only in profile and from the shoulders up, The Border subverts popular notions of indigenous women as sexually available, conventionally a metaphor for the availability of land. By rejecting representational conventions, the figure reclaims the political place of indigenous women, further challenging European possession of land and colonial spatial boundaries. Embedded within tribal images (represented in the photographs on either side), this photograph, like Silko’s Almanac, reveals those borders to be recent, arbitrary inventions as it recalls the hemispheric histories and practices that predate colonization. In so doing it claims North America as an indigenous place. As the installation counters colonial narratives and claims to land by revising images of indigenous women, it also recalls the violence of expansion that unifies the disparate places represented on the map. This is expressed most obviously in the metal construction, a negative-space female profile that frames the woman’s picture and forms an arch over a second, three­dimensional map that spreads across the floor; the construction intersects the map at roughly the forty-ninth parallel, the location of the U.S.-­Canadian border which now severs the Mohawk Nation. Perhaps the most striking image in the installation, a hank of hair falls from the metal construction and spills across the map. The hair is a multivalent image. It suggests, among other things, a tree, another resonant Iroquoian symbol. It is also a figure of the sexualization and objectification of women; an exemplar of the severed body parts, including scalps, that counted among the trophies of conquest; and a symbol of indigenous mourning, traditionally expressed in many tribes by shorn hair. Its dark flow across the map resembles blood. The hair falls on the location of traditional Mohawk territory, obliterat­ ing the U.S.-Canadian border, while individual strands spread across the map, connecting Mohawk land and indigenous places all over the continent.

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It suggests that colonial violence, like pre-contact histories, provides a foun­ dation for hemispheric indigenous relations as tribes share the same bloody fate. Even as the installation contests colonial borders, it testifies to their enduring power and destructiveness by invoking this violence. Spatial relationships within the installation denote the complex intersections of the tribal (represented by width) and transnational (depth): while indigenous national issues frame transnational dynamics, the latter interrupt traditionally tribal concerns and set new terms for critical reflection and political action. It is therefore not incidental that the installation coheres through images of gender. In her artist’s statement, Niro recounts finding inspiration for The Border in the story of American Indian Movement activist Anna Mae Aquash, whose murder—she was raped and slain, her body mutilated—went unpunished for nearly three decades. “I feel Anna Mae represents the struggle many Native American women have encountered in North American society,” writes Niro. “Because she was a Native American and a woman, her death was apparently deemed too insignificant to be worthy of serious and persistent investigation” (1997, 8–9). As it links places across the map, the woman’s hair brings into focus the gendered violence of colonization, an obscured history that draws indigenous communities together across national boundaries. (The controversial indictment of two former AIM members for Aquash’s murder in 2003, six years after the creation of Niro’s installation, also raises questions about patriarchy and sexual violence within indigenous communities and about tensions between indigenous feminism and nationalism.) By making a female figure the visual center of the installation, The Border counters the invisibility of indigenous women that permits gendered violence as it redefines the political place of women in tribal communities and colonial nation-states alike. I conclude with The Border because it is, in my reading, a powerful distillation of the multiple conflicting forces that weigh on contemporary indigenous culture and politics. First exhibited in 1997, it also marks changes in Native cultural production during the period under scrutiny in this book. In some ways the installation extends questions raised in Ortiz’s 1980 “No More Sacrifices,” the work with which I began my discussion: both center on land, traditions, transnational indigenous connections, and the challenges these pose to colonial nation-states. Although The Border, however, like “No More Sacrifices,” renders the tribal and transnational inseparable,

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it accords the transnational greater space and foregrounds the new critical questions—in this case about gender—that it raises. The continuities and differences between Ortiz’s and Niro’s work map the critical terrain over which we have traveled as transnationalism has come to occupy ever more expansive ground in Native cultural practices in recent decades and will likely continue to do so in the years ahead.

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Works Cited    189 Santo, Avi. 2004. “Nunavut: Inuit Television and Cultural Citizenship.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7, 4: 379–97. Sasano, Mari. 2006. “Journals Explores ‘Cultural Genocide’ of Shamanism.” Edmonton Journal, October 6. www.isuma.ca. Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter): 3–64. Shanley, Kathryn W. 1988. “Thoughts on Indian Feminism.” In A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women. Ed. Beth Brant. Ithaca: Firebrand Books. 213–16. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 1996. “From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalization.” In Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke University Press. 145–72. ——. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London: Routledge. Siebert, Monika. 2006. “Atanarjuat and the Ideological Work of Contemporary Indigenous Filmmaking.” Public Culture 18, 3: 531–50. Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1999. Gardens in the Dunes: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster. ——. 1996a. “Books: Notes on Mixtec and Screenfolds, Picture Books of Preconquest Mexico.” In Yellow Woman and A Beauty of the Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. 155–65. ——. 1996b. “Notes on Almanac of the Dead.” In Yellow Woman and A Beauty of the Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster. 135–45. ——. 1996c. “On Photography.” In Yellow Woman and A Beauty of the Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster. 180–86. ——. 1996d. “The Indian with a Camera.” In Yellow Woman and A Beauty of the Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster. 175–79. ——. 1993. Sacred Water. 2nd ed. Tucson: Flood Plain Press. ——. 1991. Almanac of the Dead: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster. ——. 1981. Storyteller. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ——. 1977. Ceremony. New York: Penguin. Singer, Beverly R. 2001. Wiping the War Paint Off the Lens: Native American Film and Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, Andrea. 2005. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge: South End Press. Smith, Paul Chaat, and Robert Allen Warrior. 1996. Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. New York: New Press. Sørenson, Laila. 2000. “The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation and Nunavut.” In Nunavut: Inuit Regain Control of Their Lands and Their Lives. Ed. Jens Dahl, Jack Hicks, and Peter Jull. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. 170–79. Soukup, Katarina. 2006. “Travelling through Layers: Inuit Artists Appropriate New Technologies.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31, 1. www.cjc-online.ca /view article.php?id=1755. Spiderwoman Theater. 1999a. Power Pipes. In Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays. Ed. Mimi Gisolfi D’Aponte. New York: Theatre Communications Group. 149–200.

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Index

acquiescence rationale for colonization: and democracy, 45; and displays of Native people, 65; and nation-state, 62, 107, 132; and Native women, 62, 105 –106, 107–108, 136 –137, 174 –175; as paradox, 43. See also civilizing mission rationale for colonization African Americans, 45, 52, 67, 127–128, 142 Ahgupuk, George, 26 n AIM (American Indian Movement), 8, 14, 108, 113, 136, 159 n, 176 Ajainaa! (Almost) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 87, 88 – 89 Alaska, 25 –70; Alaskan Eskimo Life in the 1890s as Sketched by Native Artists, 25 –29, 69; Native activism (1960s–1970s), 69 –70; purchase (1867), 28, 29 –35, 39 – 40, 46; statehood (1959), 29. See also Alaska gold rush; Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (Seattle, 1909); Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold-Fields, 1896 –1898 Alaska Federation of Natives, 69

Alaska Game Act (1925), 69 Alaska gold rush, 25 –26, 35, 36 –38. See also Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan GoldFields, 1896 –1898 Alaska Native Brotherhood, 69 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) (1971), 69, 70 Alaskan Eskimo Life in the 1890s as Sketched by Native Artists (Phebus), 25 –29, 69 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (Seattle, 1909), 46 –70; and cultural homogeneity ideal, 54 –55; displays of Native people in, 55, 62– 68; and earlier U.S. world’s fairs, 47– 48, 51–53; family rhetoric in, 59 – 61, 68; and femininity, 57–59; goals of, 46 – 47; historical narrative in, 49 –50; influence of, 68 – 69; and natural resource exploitation, 48 – 49; social evolution in, 53 –54, 55 Alfred, Taiaiake (Gerald), 8 n, 12 n Allied Tribes of British Columbia, 84 n Allotment Act (United States), 59 n

194    Index Almanac of the Dead (Silko), 140 –171; on anti­ colonial resistance, 28, 161, 164, 168 –169, 170; on capitalism, 163; cartography in, 22, 92 n, 140 –142, 155 –157; colonial critique in, 140 –142, 146 –147, 148 –149, 164; on colonial violence, 147–150, 162; on cross-border activities, 142; on cultural traditions, 159 –162; on homosexuality, 159 n, 162; indigenous nationalism in, 142–144; land claims in, 144, 155 –156, 161; Marxism in, 148 –149, 165; memory in, 150, 166, 167; return narratives in, 143 –144, 157–158, 161, 169 –170; transnationalism in, 5 n, 15, 28, 141, 142, 156 –157, 159 –162, 170, 171; on violation of cultural traditions, 167–168; on visual representations as instrument of colonization, 146, 150; visual representations in, 22, 144, 146 –147, 150 –156, 160 n; on women’s roles, 157, 158 –159 American Indian Movement (AIM), 8, 14, 108, 113, 136, 159 n, 176 American Indian Theater Ensemble, 9 n American studies, 3, 15 –19 Amogoalik, John, 78 –79, 85 Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (Morgan), 51, 55 ANCSA (Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act) (1971), 69, 70 Anderson, Benedict, 76 Anderson, J. W., 81 Angilirq, Paul Apak, 72 anticolonial resistance: and cartography, 22, 156 –157; as crime, 166; foreshadowed success of, 161, 164, 168 –169, 170; and historical pan-tribal alliances, 14; and indigenous feminism, 13 n, 133; indige­ nous feminist theater on, 137–138; and indigenous media, 78, 83; as male, 4, 61, 108; and memory, 150, 166, 167; and Native women, 158 –159; and savagery/ primitiveness rationale for colonization, 61; and transnationalism, 6, 14, 28, 141, 170, 171; and visual representations, 21–22, 26 –27, 29, 150 –153, 154. See also colonial critique; indigenous nationalism; Native activism (1960s–1970s) Aquash, Anna Mae, 108, 136, 138, 176 Arctic. See Alaska; Canadian Arctic; Igloolik Isuma Productions

Arviq! (Bowhead) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 87 assimilationism, 7 n; Alaska, 53, 58 –59, 67; Canada, 8 n, 84; and femininity, 57–59; and indigenous media, 73, 85; and return narratives, 9, 165; and television, 85; and urban migration, 12–13 Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 89 –94; and colonial critique, 77; and ethnography, 72, 75 –76; gender in, 104; and genre, 99; loss of cultural traditions in, 90 n, 91–92, 98; mainstream reactions to, 71–72, 90, 93 –94 Atherton, St. John, 45 Atlas of the European Novel (Moretti), 145 n Baber, A. M., 66, 67 Barman, Jean, 106 –107, 130 The Beaver (Hudson’s Bay Company), 81 Bederman, Gail, 51 Bell, Virginia, 146 n Benjamin, Walter, 145 Bennett, Tony, 50 Berger Inquiry, 84 n Bevis, William, 9 Bigsby, Christopher, 117 Birdwoman and the Suffragettes: A Story of Sacajawea (Mojica), 105 –110, 118 –119 boarding schools, 14, 58 –59, 90, 165. See also assimilationism Bomberry, Victoria, 5 n The Border (Niro), 172–177 Brigham, Ann, 146 n Brotherston, Gordon, 156 Burant, Jim, 79 Burning Vision (Clements), 126 Calder decision (Canada) (1973), 84 Canada: land claims, 8, 73 –74, 84 – 85, 88; national identity, 76, 77, 79, 80; Nunavut, 73 –74, 83, 85, 86, 89, 104; urban migration, 12 n. See also Canadian Arctic; Igloolik Isuma Productions; indigenous media Canadian Arctic: colonization of, 83 – 84; land claims, 73 –74, 84 – 85, 88, 89; Native activism (1960s–1970s), 84 – 85, 88; visual representations as instrument of colonization, 78 – 83. See also indigenous media; Nunavut capitalism, 6, 34, 147–148, 163

Index    195 Carlisle Indian Industrial Training School, 57–58 Carter, Paul, 144, 145 –146 cartography: and anticolonial resistance, 22, 156 –157; and colonial critique, 22, 140 –142, 173; and colonial erasure of indigenous peoples, 2, 20, 141, 155; and critique of nation-state, 175; and cross-border activities, 142; in indigenous media, 92, 102; as instrument of colonization, 2, 20, 39, 41, 140, 141; and land claims, 22, 92 n, 144, 155 –156, 175; and transnationalism, 156 –157; “unmapping,” 155; and wilderness/virgin land rationale for colonization, 41 Ceremony (Silko): cultural traditions in, 90 n, 171; indigenous nationalism in, 143; return narrative in, 9, 143, 144, 157–158, 161; transnationalism in, 14 –15 Cheyfitz, Eric, 143 n Christian missionization: and civilizing mission rationale for colonization, 80; and loss of cultural traditions, 94, 97, 98; and Native women, 129; and recovery of cultural traditions, 98 –99; and visual representations as instrument of colonization, 80 civilizing mission rationale for colonization: and Christian missionization, 80; and displays of Native people, 65; and family rhetoric, 59 – 60; and Native women, 56 –57; and savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization, 34; and social evolution, 34 –35; and visual representations as instrument of colonization, 80 Civil War, 29, 47 Clements, Marie: Burning Vision, 126; The Unnatural and Accidental Women, 126; Urban Tattoo, 125 –132 Cohn, Norman, 72, 75 colonial critique, 5 – 6; and cartography, 22, 140 –142, 173; and colonial erasure of indige­ nous peoples, 99, 141; and foreshadowed success of anticolonial resistance, 164; in indigenous media, 75 –77, 78, 87, 88, 90, 92–93, 99, 102; and indigenous nationalism, 3 – 4, 11; and mainstream responses, 102; and Marxism, 148 –149; and Native audience, 94 –95, 100; and paternalism, 129 –130; and theater, 117; and visual representations, 22, 146 –147. See also anticolonial resistance; Native activism (1960s–1970s)

colonial erasure of indigenous peoples: and cartography, 2, 20, 141, 155; and colonial critique, 99, 141; and memory, 119; and narrative, 145; and Native women, 119, 132–133, 137; and place-names, 44; and postnationalist American studies, 3; reversal of, 2, 74, 151; and visual representations as instrument of colonization, 80; and voice, 119. See also vanishing race tropes; wilderness/virgin land rationale for colonization colonization: Canadian Arctic, 83 – 84; cartography as instrument of, 2, 20, 39, 41, 140, 141; and detachment, 162–163; and domesticity, 107, 130; effects on cultural traditions, 90, 92, 97; failure of, 164 –165; and gender, 56 –57; and gender reordering, 57; and literature, 19 –20; ongoing nature of, 18 n; and rootlessness, 164; and sexual violence /exploitation, 108, 130, 135 –136, 176; and transnationalism, 13, 14, 28, 84 – 85, 175 –176; violence of, 147–150, 162, 175 –176. See also assimilationism; Christian missionization; exploration tropes; rationales for colonization; U.S. imperialism; visual representations as instrument of colonization commerce, 28, 30, 32–33, 46, 47, 48, 81 continuity: of cultural traditions, 26 –27, 87, 89, 90 –91, 99; and memory, 124 –125 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 5, 10, 15 n, 143 n cross-border activities, 142 cultural homogeneity ideal, 34, 35 –36, 54 –55 cultural traditions: colonization effects on, 90, 92, 97; continuity of, 26 –27, 87, 89, 90 –91, 99; female roles in, 104, 110 –111, 132–133, 137, 157–158, 174; importance of, 86 – 87, 89 –90, 92; and indigenous nationalism, 8 –9, 85 – 86, 90; and long-term Native connections to land, 87– 88; loss of, 90 n, 91–92, 97–98, 104; and memory, 97; revitalization of, 73, 90, 93, 97, 98 –99, 110, 115 n; and transnationalism, 157, 159 –162, 170 –171; violation of, 167–168; and visual representations, 26 –27, 160. See also ethnography Culture and Imperialism (Said), 145 darkness/ light symbolism, 80. See also whiteness Deloria, Vine, Jr., 8, 12 n, 14, 18

196    Index democracy: and frontier thesis, 40; and gender, 62; and indigenous media, 77; and social evolution, 54; and U.S. imperialism, 31, 33 –34, 61; and visual representations as instrument of colonization, 44 – 45 detachment, 162–163 Dirlik, Arif, 11 disappearance of Natives. See vanishing race tropes displays of Native people, 20 –21, 51–52, 55, 61– 68 domesticity, 107, 120, 122, 130 Driscoll, Joseph, 37 Du Bois, W. E. B., 127, 129 “Educated Eskimos, of Alaska, Graduates of Carlisle University” (postcard), 57–59 Elliott, Michael, 17 empty land rationale for colonization. See wilder­ ness/virgin land rationale for colonization End of the Trail (Fraser), 172 Erdrich, Louise, 114 Eskimo drawings (Alaskan Eskimo Life in the 1890s as Sketched by Native Artists), 25 –29, 69 ethnography: critiques of, 10, 95, 100, 153 –154; and exploration, 96; and indigenous media, 72, 74 –76, 87, 93, 95; and indigenous nationalism, 10; reversal of, 100, 101; and vanishing race tropes, 100 –101; and visual representations as instrument of colonization, 81– 82, 87 exploration tropes, 81– 82, 95 –96, 101–102 Fabian, Johannes, 82 fait accompli rationale for colonization, 44 – 45, 49 family rhetoric, 59 – 61, 68 Faris, James, 21 femininity, 57–59, 107, 121–122, 128 –129, 136 feminist experimental theater, 116, 117. See also indigenous feminist theater Fifth Thule Expedition. See The Journals of Knud Rasmussen film. See Igloolik Isuma Productions Flaherty, Robert: Nanook of the North, 72, 81– 82, 87, 100 Fleming, Archibald Lang, 80, 94 Fleras, Augie, 7– 8 Fourth World, 14

Franklin, Benjamin, 31, 34, 36 Fraser, James Earl: End of the Trail, 172; “Indian Head” nickel, 172–173 From Inuk Point of View (Kunuk), 86 frontier thesis, 32, 40 – 41, 79. See also wilderness/ virgin land rationale for colonization fur trade, 37, 81, 95, 135 –136 Gardens in the Dunes (Silko), 159 n Geiogamah, Hanay, 9 n, 115, 117 gender: and displays of Native people, 65, 68; and family rhetoric, 59 – 61, 68; femininity, 57–59, 107, 121–122, 128 –129, 136; and frontier thesis, 40 – 41; and paternalism, 129 –130; and social evolution, 51. See also indigenous feminism; indigenous feminist theater; Native women; sexualization of Native women General Allotment Act (1887), 58 n, 59 n Geronimo, 152–153 Ginsburg, Faye, 74, 76 –77, 83 gold rush. See Alaska gold rush Goode, G. Brown, 50 Greenhalgh, Paul, 52 n Green, Rayna, 107, 111 Griffin, John, 102 Harjo, Joy, 14 n Harley, J. B., 140, 145 Haskell, William B.: Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold-Fields, 1896 –1898, 38 – 46 Hawaii, 56 –57, 63 n. See also Pacific possessions heteronormativity, 122, 123 n Hill, James, 46, 48 homosexuality, 159 n, 162 Honey Moccasin (Niro), 174 n Hudson’s Bay Company, 81 Hulme, Peter, 56 IBC (Inuit Broadcasting Corporation), 85 – 86, 103 ICC (Inuit Circumpolar Conference), 103 Igloolik Isuma Productions: Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), 71–72, 75 –76, 77, 89 –94, 98, 99; founding of, 72–73; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, 72, 94–102; Nunavut (Our Land), 72, 74, 87– 89; Unikaatuatiit (Storytellers), 72, 86 – 87, 88 – 89. See also indigenous media

Index    197 “Igorotte Baby from the Phillipines [sic] and Eskimo Baby from Alaska” (postcard), 59 – 62 immigration, 16 –17, 47, 48 Indian Act (Canada), 8 n “Indian Head” nickel (Fraser), 172–173 “Indian Love Call,” 122–124, 133 Indian Rights Association, 84 n Indian wars (United States), 29, 52 indigenous feminism: and anticolonial resistance, 13 n, 133; emergence of, 108 –109; and indigenous nationalism, 110, 111–112, 133, 138 –139, 176; problems of, 109 –110, 111–112; and transnationalism, 4, 13, 108, 111, 114, 138 –139. See also indigenous feminist theater indigenous feminist theater, 105 –110, 115 –139; on acquiescence rationale for colonization, 105 –106, 107–108, 132, 136 –137; on anti­ colonial resistance, 137–138; colonial critique in, 129 –130; on colonial erasure of indige­ nous peoples, 119, 132–133, 137; on domesticity, 120, 122; on femininity, 121–122; and feminist experimental theater, 116, 117; on indigenous nationalism, 138 –139; on memory, 124 –125, 126 –127; origins of, 116 –117; on poverty, 120 –121; public presence in, 118; on racism, 127–128; reappropriation of colonial images in, 123 –124; on sexualization of Native women, 106 –107, 122–123, 126, 128 –129, 130 –131; on sexual violence / exploitation, 121, 130, 135 –136; trickster figures in, 133 –134; voice in, 118 –119; on women’s traditional power, 132–133, 137 indigenous media, 71–104; and anticolonial resistance, 78, 83; and assimilationism, 73, 85; colonial critique in, 75 –77, 78, 87, 88, 90, 92–93, 99, 102; on continuity of cultural traditions, 87, 89, 90 –91, 99; and ethnography, 72, 74 –76, 87, 93, 95; on importance of cultural traditions, 86 – 87, 89 –90, 92; and indigenous nationalism, 73, 74, 75 –76, 77, 85 – 86, 90; and land claims, 73 –74, 88, 89, 91; on long-term Native connections to land, 74, 87– 88, 101–102; on loss of cultural traditions, 91–92, 97–98; mainstream re­ actions to, 71–72, 90, 93 –94; and nation-state, 76, 77; and Native audience, 93, 94, 95; and Native use of technology, 75, 76 –77; and transnationalism, 77–78, 102–103; and

visual representations as instrument of colonization, 78 – 83; visual representations in, 22, 77, 92 indigenous nationalism, 7–12; Arctic, 84 – 85; and colonial critique, 3 – 4, 11; and cultural traditions, 8 –9, 85 – 86, 90; and ethnography, 10; hostility towards, 11 n; and indigenous feminism, 110, 111–112, 133, 138 –139, 176; and indigenous media, 73, 74, 75 –76, 77, 85 – 86, 90; male focus of, 4, 108, 112–114; and Native activism (1960s–1970s), 6, 8, 9, 14; and postnationalist American studies, 18; and return narratives, 9, 115, 126, 169; and transnationalism, 2, 14 n, 142–144, 176 –177. See also Native activism (1960s–1970s) Interior Tribes of British Columbia, 84 n Internet, 13 Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC), 85 – 86, 103 Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), 103 Inuit. See Canadian Arctic; Igloolik Isuma Productions; indigenous media Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC), 85 Ishi, 20 n It Starts with a Whisper (Niro), 174 n Johnson, Pauline E., 115 n Johnson v. McIntosh, 42 n Jones Act (1917), 61 The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 72, 94 –102; cultural recovery in, 98 –99; and exploration, 95 –96; and genre, 99; loss of cultural traditions in, 97–98; and Native audience, 94 –95, 100 Kaplan, Amy, 16, 17 Klopotek, Brian, 12 Knowles, Ric, 248 n Konkle, Maureen, 11 Krupat, Arnold, 9, 90 n, 143 n Kunuk, Zacharias, 72, 73, 74 –75, 83; From Inuk Point of View, 86. See also Igloolik Isuma Productions LaFeber, Walter, 30 land: exploration tropes, 81– 82, 95 –96, 101–102; and narrative, 145. See also cartography; land claims; long-term Native connections to land

198    Index land claims: Alaska, 41, 69; and anticolonial resistance, 161; Canadian Arctic, 73 –74, 84 – 85, 88, 89; and cartography, 22, 92 n, 144, 155 –156, 175; and colonial critique, 146; and indigenous media, 73 –74, 88, 89, 91; and Native activism (1960s–1970s), 8; and visual representations, 22; and wilderness/virgin land rationale for colonization, 91. See also long-term Native connections to land LaRocque, Emma, 111 Lawrence, Bonita, 110 Lee, Bobbie, 108 Leuthold, Steven, 74 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 101 n Lewis and Clark Exposition (Portland, 1905), 46 Like a Hurricane (Smith & Warrior), 113 n Lima, Enrique, 5 n, 158 Lincoln, Kenneth, 9 n London, Jack, 38 long-term Native connections to land: and assimilationism, 58 n, 59; and cultural traditions, 87– 88; indigenous media on, 74, 87– 88, 101–102; and Native women, 56; and natural resource exploitation, 6; and placenames, 1–2, 43 – 44; and return narratives, 169; and savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization, 41– 42; and transnationalism, 13, 146; and visual representations, 174. See also land claims Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (1904), 53, 63 Lowe, Lisa, 145 Lytle, Clifford, 8, 12 n, 14 Maaka, Roger, 7– 8 La Malinche, 106 n manifest destiny, 29, 31–32, 33, 34, 48, 53, 172 Manuel, George, 14 maps. See cartography markets. See commerce Marks, Laura, 74, 103 Marxism, 148 –149, 165 Mayan codices, 160 Mayokok, Robert, 26 n Mayo, Lisa, 113, 116, 159 n McClintock, Anne, 12 n, 59 McKinley, William, 34, 59, 65 McNickle, D’Arcy: The Surrounded, 129 n memory: and anticolonial resistance, 150, 166, 167; and colonial erasure of indigenous peoples, 119; and continuity, 124 –125;

and cultural traditions, 97; and failure of colonization, 164 –165 Miguel, Gloria, 113, 116 Miguel, Muriel, 113, 116 Miller, Stuart Creighton, 61 missionization. See Christian missionization Mitchell, Timothy, 50 modernity. See Native use of technology; progressivist narrative Mojica, Monique: Birdwoman and the Suffragettes: A Story of Sacajawea, 105 –110, 118 –119; Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots, 106 n, 132–139 Moretti, Franco, 145 n Morgan, Lewis Henry: Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, 51, 55 Moses, Kivetoruk, 26 n Mulvey, Laura, 128 Mundy, Barbara, 155 museums, 26 Nanook of the North (Flaherty), 72, 81– 82, 87, 100 Nanugiurutiga (My First Polar Bear) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 87 narrative: and colonial erasure of indigenous peoples, 145; and land, 145. See also progressivist narrative narrative of death. See colonial erasure of indigenous peoples; vanishing race tropes national identity. See nation-state nationalism. See indigenous nationalism; nation-state nation-state: and acquiescence rationale for colonization, 62, 107, 132; critique of, 148, 172, 173 –174, 175; and indigenous media, 76, 77; and manifest destiny, 29, 31–32, 33, 34, 48, 53, 172; and Native women, 62; postnationalist American studies on, 16; and racism, 148; and transnationalism, 142; and U.S. imperialism, 28, 31; and U.S. world’s fairs, 47, 48; and visual representations as instrument of colonization, 79, 80 Native activism (1960s–1970s): Alaska, 69 –70; Canadian Arctic, 84 – 85, 88; and indigenous nationalism, 6, 8, 9, 14; and theater, 9 n, 115, 117; and treaties, 143. See also anticolonial resistance; indigenous nationalism

Index    199 Native American Renaissance, 8, 9 n, 12–13, 14, 114, 143. See also Ceremony (Silko) Native American Theater Ensemble, 117 Native audience, 94 –95, 100 Natives as primitive. See savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization Native studies, 4, 7– 8. See also indigenous nationalism; transnationalism Native use of technology, 22, 75, 76 –77, 93, 146 –147 Native women: and acquiescence rationale for colonization, 62, 105 –106, 107–108, 136 –137, 174 –175; and anticolonial resistance, 158 –159; and Christian missionization, 129; and civilizing mission rationale for colonization, 56 –57; colonial dis­ empowerment of, 21, 57, 104, 107, 174; and colonial erasure of indigenous peoples, 119, 132–133, 137; indigenous nationalist disempowerment of, 4, 108, 112–114; and nationstate, 62; and natural resource exploitation, 55 –57; in Nunavut, 104; and popular culture, 121–122, 126; traditional roles of, 104, 110 –111, 132–133, 137, 157–158, 174; and transnationalism, 174 –175; and visual representations as instrument of colonization, 55 –56, 123 –124. See also indigenous feminism; indigenous feminist theater; sexualization of Native women natural resource exploitation: Alaska, 30, 36, 38, 41, 46, 48 – 49, 69; and Native women, 55 –57; and transnationalism, 15; and U.S. imperialism, 5 – 6; and U.S. world’s fairs, 48 – 49, 55 –56 Nelson Act (1905), 37 Neptune, voyage of, 79 – 80 Ngu¯gı¯ wa Thiong’o, 117 Niezen, Ronald, 13 Nipi (Voice) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 87, 88, 89 Niro, Shelley: The Border, 172–177; Honey Moccasin, 174 n; It Starts with a Whisper, 174 n; The Shirt, 174 n Nisga’a Land Committee, 84 n Nisga’a Tribal Council, 84 n noble savage stereotype, 43 “No More Sacrifices” (Ortiz), 1–2, 5 –7, 14, 20, 171, 176 –177 Nunaqpa (Going Inland) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 87

Nunavut, 73 –74, 83, 85, 86, 89, 104 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (Canada) (1993), 73 –74 Nunavut (Our Land) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 72, 74, 87– 89 Organic Act (1884), 36 Ortiz, Simon: “No More Sacrifices,” 1–2, 5 –7, 14, 20, 171, 176 –177 O’Sullivan, John, 31, 34, 36 Pacific possessions: and Alaska purchase, 30; and Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 47, 48, 61– 65; and commerce, 33; and family rhetoric, 59; and racism, 53 pan-tribal alliances. See Native activism (1960s–1970s); transnationalism Paris Exposition (1889), 52 paternalism, 129 –130 patriarchy. See gender; indigenous feminism; indigenous feminist theater Philippines, 53, 59 – 60, 61– 65. See also Pacific possessions Phillips, Richard, 155 photography, 21. See also Native use of technology; visual representations; visual representations as instrument of colonization pictographic art, 26 place-names, 1–2, 43 – 44 Pocahontas. See Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots Poole, Deborah, 22–23, 75 popular culture, 121–122, 126, 165 –166, 169 Popul Vuh, 160 postnationalist American studies, 3, 15 –19 poverty, 120 –122 Power Pipes (Spiderwoman Theater), 116, 117 Pratt, Mary Louise, 21 n Pratt, Richard Henry, 58 –59 primitiveness/savagery rationale for colonization. See savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (Mojica), 106 n, 132–139 progressivist narrative, 21, 82, 98, 100, 145 –146, 151. See also savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization; social evolution; vanishing race tropes Pueblo Revolt (1680), 6, 14

200    Index Qaggiq (Gathering Place) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 87 Qulitalik, Paul, 72 racial segregation: and Alaska gold rush, 37–38, 45, 57; and U.S. world’s fairs, 53, 67 racial uplift rationale for colonization. See civilizing mission rationale for colonization racism. See civilizing mission rationale for colonization; cultural homogeneity ideal; racial segregation; savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization; social evolution; whiteness Rafael, Vicente, 21 n Rasmussen, Knud. See The Journals of Knud Rasmussen rationales for colonization: fait accompli, 44 – 45, 49; family rhetoric, 59 – 61, 68; and power inversions, 42; progressivist narrative, 21, 82, 98, 100, 145 –146, 151; racial uplift, 34 –35, 56 –57, 59 – 60, 65, 80; sexuali­ zation of Native women, 106 –107; wilderness/virgin land, 18, 41, 55, 91, 146, 155, 175. See also acquiescence rationale for colonization; savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization; vanishing race tropes Razack, Sherene, 155 realism, 38, 50 Red Power activism, 8 Reiss, Timothy J., 145 return narratives: and assimilationism, 9, 165; and indigenous feminist theater, 115, 126; and indigenous nationalism, 9, 115, 126, 169; and transnationalism, 12–13, 143 –144, 161, 170; and urban migration, 12–13, 114; and women’s roles, 157–158 Revillon Frères, 81 revolution. See anticolonial resistance Riggs, Lynn, 15 n, 115 n The Romance of the Far Fur Country (Hudson’s Bay Company), 81 Roosevelt, Theodore, 61 rootlessness, 164 Rose Marie, 122–123 Rowe, John Carlos, 19, 33 Russian fur trade, 37 Rydell, Robert, 52 Sacajawea. See Birdwoman and the Suffragettes: A Story of Sacajawea

Sacred Water (Silko), 147 n Said, Edward, 19, 145 Sanchez, Carol Lee, 106 n Santo, Avi, 88, 89 Saputi (Fish Traps) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 87 savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization: and anticolonial resistance, 61; and civilizing mission rationale for colonization, 34; and cultural vs. national depictions of Natives, 63, 67; and displays of Native people, 63, 64 – 65; and family rhetoric, 60 – 61; and gender, 62; and Indian law, 42 n; and long-term Native connections to land, 41– 42; and militarism, 65; and museums, 26; and nation-state, 31; and Native use of technology, 146 –147; reversal of, 154; and slavery, 52; and social evolution, 51–52; and U.S. Indian wars, 52; and U.S. world’s fairs, 51, 52, 55, 60 – 61, 62, 63, 64 – 65; and vanishing race tropes, 42, 55, 82, 100 –101; and visual representations as instrument of colonization, 80, 82, 100 –101, 154 segregation. See racial segregation Sekula, Allan, 44, 153 self-determination, 7– 8, 18 n, 74. See also anticolonial resistance; indigenous nationalism; Native activism (1960s–1970s) self-representation. See indigenous media “Seward’s Folly,” 25, 29 Seward, William H., 25, 32, 40, 50 sexualization of Native women: and displays of Native people, 21; and femininity, 128 –129; and popular culture, 126; as rationale for colonization, 106 –107; subversion of, 122–124, 173, 174 –175; and wilderness/ virgin land rationale for colonization, 175 sexual violence/exploitation, 104, 108, 121, 130, 135 –136, 176 shamanism, 92, 97, 98 –99. See also cultural traditions Shanley, Kathryn, 110 The Shirt (Niro), 174 n Shohat, Ella, 76 Siebert, Monika, 76, 94 Silko, Leslie Marmon: and cartography, 22, 92 n; Ceremony, 9, 14 –15, 90 n, 143, 144, 157–158, 161, 171; Gardens in the Dunes, 159 n; on photography, 146 –147; Sacred Water, 147 n; Storyteller, 147 n; on visual

Index    201 representations, 21. See also Almanac of the Dead slavery, 45, 52, 142 Smith, Paul Chaat, 113 n Smithsonian Institution, 26, 49 social Darwinism. See social evolution social evolution, 34, 48, 51–52, 53 –54, 55, 60 – 61 sovereignty. See indigenous nationalism Spencer, Herbert, 34, 51 Spiderwoman Theater: formation of, 113, 115 –116; influence of, 116 –118; Power Pipes, 116, 117; Sun Moon and Feather, 120 –125. See also indigenous feminist theater Spurr, David, 77 Stam, Robert, 76 Starr (Athabascan Chief  ), 69 Stephanson, Anders, 31, 34 stereotypes. See visual representations as instrument of colonization Storyteller (Silko), 147 n Sun Moon and Feather (Spiderwoman Theater), 120 –125 The Surrounded (McNickle), 129 n Suzack, Cheryl, 4 n Taft, William Howard, 48 theater: and cultural revitalization, 115 n; and Native activism (1960s–1970s), 9 n, 115, 117; and transnationalism, 114, 115. See also indigenous feminist theater timelessness, 82, 90 –91, 93 –94, 123. See also ethnography Tohe, Laura, 110 –111 transcontinental railroad, 33 transnationalism, 12–15; and anticolonial resistance, 6, 14, 28, 141, 170, 171; and cartography, 156 –157; and colonization, 13, 14, 28, 84 – 85, 175 –176; and cultural traditions, 157, 159 –162, 170 –171; defined, 2; and exploration, 102–103; historical background of, 14 –15; and indigenous feminism, 4, 13, 108, 111, 114, 138 –139; and indigenous media, 77–78, 102–103; and indigenous nationalism, 2, 14 n, 142–144, 176 –177; and long-term Native connections to land, 13, 146; and nation-state, 142; Native studies on, 5 n; and Native women, 174 –175; and return narratives, 12–13, 143 –144, 161, 170; and self-determination, 7– 8; shift to, 2,

6 –7, 12–13, 114 –115, 146; and theater, 114, 115; and UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 18 n; and urban Native identity, 12–13, 14, 114 –115; and visual representations, 23, 141, 144, 146, 151, 156 –157 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 112 treaties, 4, 11–12, 18, 70, 143 tribal autonomy. See indigenous nationalism Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Warrior), 10 trickster figures, 133 –134 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 32, 40 Turtle Island story, 174 Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan GoldFields, 1896 –1898 (Haskell), 38 – 46; on Alaska purchase, 39 – 40; cartography in, 39, 41; colonial images in, 41– 43; place-names in, 43 – 44; and realism, 38, 50; visual representations in, 44 – 45; on women, 40 – 41 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 18 n Unikaatuatiit (Storytellers) (Igloolik Isuma Productions), 72, 86 – 87, 88 – 89 United Nations, 13 “unmapping,” 155 The Unnatural and Accidental Women (Clements), 126 “urban ink productions” (Clements), 126 urban Native identity, 121, 125, 131; and return narratives, 114, 126; and transnationalism, 12–13, 14, 114 –115 Urban Tattoo (Clements), 125 –132 U.S. imperialism, 28 –35; and acquiescence rationale for colonization, 105; and Alaska gold rush, 38; and Alaska purchase, 28, 29, 30 –31; and commerce, 28, 30, 32–33; controversy about, 61, 63; and cultural homogeneity ideal, 34, 35 –36, 54 –55; and democracy, 31, 33 –34, 61; and family rhetoric, 59 – 60; and frontier thesis, 32, 40; and manifest destiny, 31–32, 33, 34, 48, 53; and natural resource exploitation, 5 – 6; postnationalist American studies on, 3, 15 –16; and Sacajawea, 105; and U.S. world’s fairs, 47, 48 –55. See also colonization; Pacific possessions U.S. Indian law, 7, 42 n, 58 n, 59, 67 n. See also treaties U.S. Indian wars, 29, 52

202    Index U.S. world’s fairs, 21, 47– 48, 51–53; World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 47 n, 51–53, 62, 65. See also Alaska-YukonPacific Exposition vanishing race tropes: and ethnography, 100 –101; and loss of cultural traditions, 98; and museums, 26; and Native use of technology, 147; and savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization, 42, 55, 82, 100 –101; and U.S. Indian law, 59; and visual representations as instrument of colonization, 21, 82, 172–173 virgin land rationale for colonization. See wilder­ ness/virgin land rationale for colonization visual economy, 22–23, 75 visual representations: and anticolonial resistance, 21–22, 26 –27, 29, 150 –153, 154; and colonial critique, 22, 146 –147; contemporary visual artists, 26 n; and cultural traditions, 26 –27, 160; and detachment, 163; and Eskimo drawings, 26; importance of, 20 –23; in indigenous media, 22, 77, 92; and long-term Native connections to land, 174; and Native use of technology, 22, 146 –147; and popular culture, 121–122, 126; and reversal of colonial erasure, 151; and transnationalism, 23, 141, 144, 146, 151, 156 –157; visual economy, 22–23, 75. See also cartography; visual representations as instrument of colonization visual representations as instrument of colonization, 20 –21; and anticolonial resistance, 154; cartography, 2, 20, 39, 41, 140, 141; and Christian missionization, 80; and civilizing mission rationale for colonization, 80; critique of, 146, 153 –154; and democracy, 44 – 45; displays of Native people, 20 –21, 51–52, 55, 61– 68; and ethnography, 81– 82,

87; and fascination with death, 166; and indigenous media, 78 – 83; and Native women, 55 –56, 123 –124; and realism, 50; reappropriation of, 82– 83, 123 –124; and savagery/primitiveness rationale for colonization, 80, 82, 100 –101, 154; and vanishing race tropes, 21, 82, 172–173. See also colonial representations voice, 118 –119 Warrior, Robert, 10, 15 n, 113 n Washington, Mary Helen, 3 n Weaver, Jace, 11 n Wexler, Laura, 57 whiteness: and femininity, 107, 121–122; and U.S. world’s fairs, 48, 51, 54, 55, 68; and wilderness/virgin land rationale for colonization, 55 wilderness/virgin land rationale for colonization: and cartography, 41; and land claims, 91; and postnationalist American studies, 18; reversal of, 146, 155; and sexualization of Native women, 175; and whiteness, 55. See also frontier thesis Wilkins, David, 7 Williams, William Appleman, 30 –31 Wilson, Michael D., 19 Wilson, Woodrow, 69 Wolf, Eric, 91 Womack, Craig, 10, 14 –15 n, 90 women. See gender; indigenous feminism; indigenous feminist theater; Native women World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 47 n, 51–53, 62, 65 world’s fairs. See Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition; U.S. world’s fairs Wounded Knee massacre (1890), 52 Zapatista movement, 13 n