Theorizing Native Studies 9780822376613

Citation preview

theorizing

NATIVE STUDIES

theorizing

NATIVE STUDIES Edited by Audr a Simpson and Andrea Smith

Duke University Press  Durham and London  2014

© 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­f ree paper ∞ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Arno Pro by Copperline Book Services, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­P ublication Data Theorizing Native studies / edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978–0–8223–5667–7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978–0–8223–5679–0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Indians of North America.  2. Indians of North America— Ethnic identity.  3. Indians of North America—Politics and government.  i. Simpson, Audra.  ii. Smith, Andrea. e77.2.t446 2014 970.004'97—dc23 2013047599

Contents

vii Acknowledgments 1

INTRODUCTION  | AUDRA SIMPSON AND ANDREA SMITH

31

There Is a River in Me: Theory from Life

43

The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny

56 99 122 149 188 207

CHAPTER ONE  | DIAN MILLION

CHAPTER T WO  | TERESIA TEAIWA

CHAPTER THREE  | GLEN COULTHARD

From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh CHAPTER FOUR  | ROBERT NICHOLS

Contract and Usurpation: Enfranchisement and Racial Governance in Settler-­Colonial Contexts CHAPTER FIVE  | CHRISTOPHER BRACKEN

“In This Separation”: The Noncorrespondence of Joseph Johnson CHAPTER SIX  | MARK RIFKIN

Making Peoples into Populations: The Racial Limits of  Tribal Sovereignty CHAPTER SEVEN  | SCOT T L AURIA MORGENSEN

Indigenous Transnationalism and the aids Pandemic: Challenging Settler Colonialism within Global Health Governance CHAPTER EIGHT  | ANDREA SMITH

Native Studies at the Horizon of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-­Reflexivity

235 266

CHAPTER NINE  | MISHUANA R. GOEMAN

Disrupting a Settler-­Colonial Grammar of Place: The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie CHAPTER TEN  | VERA B. PALMER

The Devil in the Details: Controverting an American Indian Conversion Narrative

297 Bibliography 321 Contributors 323 Index

vi  | Contents

Acknowledgments

This volume started (of all places) in a hotel room. Exhausted and yet wide awake in the middle of the night in Sydney, Australia, we started talking about work we were reading in Native studies that pushed conversations in the field toward different horizons. We kept returning to the work of five different scholars and were remarking on their use of  “theory.” Trained very differently, but with complementary notions of the centrality of power and effect to the project of scholarly inquiry, both of us were so excited by the direction analysis took when enlivened by different forms of literature. We decided then, in the middle of the night, to organize at a later time a panel that interrogated, or at the very least reflected, this question of theory; the venue was yet to be determined. And then we went about our business. That was six years ago. The field has changed significantly since then, with remarkable, book-­length studies that unabashedly mobilize theory in its many iterations. But this volume remains a testament to that earlier moment and its unfolding in different forms of analysis, demonstrating the articulation of Native studies to comparative literature, politics and political theory, social movement theory, religious studies, traditional narrative, and other forms of discourse. Our panel grew from an imagined five members in total to an actuality of four panels (and more than twenty papers), spread throughout an entire day, at the 2008 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (naisa) meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There we saw a packed room, with vigorous and engaged discussion around the utility of theory, the models in play, the ethics of knowledge production, and so on. We then assembled another panel for the American Studies Association (asa) meeting in 2009 with other contributors, who also spoke of the centrality of theory and critique to the work that they do. The overwhelming response of

participants there signaled to us that this should become a book. In 2010 we edited papers from those who could contribute to a book, and then we convened a workshop at Columbia University that allowed for a close reading of these texts by participants, invited discussants from the broader Columbia community, and had a day of exceptional conversations. This book is the fruit of that labor, and the labor of extraordinary reviewers and readers, who were attentive to our argumentation, our data, and our theorizing. We thank our anonymous reviewers for their careful and close readings. We would also like to thank our earlier participants: Chris Andersen, Jennifer Denetdale, Vince Diaz, Brendan Hokowhitu, Jackie Grey, John McKinn, Aileen Moreton-­Robinson, and Jacki Rand. We offer thanks to our discussants: Ned Blackhawk, Sora Han (naisa), Beth Povinelli (Columbia), and Dylan Rodriguez (asa). We also thank the terrific chairs who managed these panels beautifully, as discussions were lively and sometimes intense: Jessica Cattelino (naisa) and Lisa Kahaleole Hall (asa). We thank Columbia University for the resources to hold the seminar and workshop, “Theorizing Native Studies,” through the Diversity Initiative; it was expertly organized through the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (cser). We thank the director of cser, Frances Negrón-­Muntaner, for her institutional support and Teresa Aguayo for her elegant and tireless efforts on behalf of this final seminar at Columbia—a seminar so crucial to the life of this project that it that moved the papers into chapters. We thank Lakota Pochedley, who helped us with editorial and bibliographical assistance prior to submission. And we thank our wonderful editor, Courtney Berger, and her assistant, Deborah Guterman, for their support, their enthusiasm, and their stewardship of this project.

viii  | Acknowledgments

I N T R O D U C T I O N   | 

Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

It is ironic that at a time when there seems to be a turn against theory within the field of Native Studies, this volume proposes to center the importance of theory. Native studies, with its distinct intellectual and political genealogies, arrives at the question of theory from a different perspective than other fields. While there may be a backlash against theory in other fields (as seen in the publication of volumes such as Against Theory, Theory’s Empire, and so on), Native studies has made an explicit turn toward theory. The more recent focus in Native studies on theory could suggest that the discipline is simply following the intellectual trajectory of mainstream scholarship. In this volume, however, we propose that distinct engagement of Native studies with theory usefully intervenes not only in Native studies but also in the larger debate around the usefulness of theory in general. In particular, theory is often positioned as the opposite of other concepts considered more important, such as theory versus practice, theory versus community-­based scholarship, theory versus truth, and theory versus political engagement. Suspicion about the turn toward theory in Native studies also remains. It is not uncommon to hear the complaint within venues in Native studies that theoretical projects are inherently “Western,” are nonindigenous, and spoil the possibility of scholarly production outside the confines of intellectual traditions that have been used to uphold and contextualize forms of defining difference and thus dominating that which was and still is defined as different. As such, theoretical projects are often accused of being insufficiently grounded in the needs of Native communities. Rather than dismissing these critiques, however, we argue that these critiques actually provide a helpful theoretical foundation for a politically grounded and analytically charged form of Native studies. This volume proposes that the project of theorizing Native studies troubles these sim-

plistic and ultimately divisive theory-­versus-­practice dichotomies, reconceptualizes what theory is, and provides a critical framework for decolonizing political and intellectual praxis. The Truth of Theory

In mainstream academic discourse, theory is often conflated with the specifically European tradition of postmodern or poststructuralist theory. Rooted in a critique of the binary that governs structure or the organization of grammar in linguistics, poststructuralist theory (as seen in the works of Foucault, Derrida, and so on) sought to move beyond the presumed universality of this structure and organization of knowledge. Poststructuralist theory made this move through deconstructive method and took knowledge itself to be subject to inquiry, and in turn poststructuralist theory is equated with destabilizing all truth claims. Thus, theory, in this admittedly abbreviated but popularly held sense, is often posited as antithetical to truth. For example, in Theory’s Empire the editors complain that the turn toward theory has inhibited the ability to discern the differences between “true and false, right and wrong,” leaving us mired in a muddy world in which extreme forms of relativism dominate our apprehension of reality.1 These debates have also been present within Native studies. Elvira Pulitano, Craig Womack, Jace Weaver, and Robert Warrior have debated to what extent truth claims based on indigenous identity are essentialist. That is, are such claims to indigenous identity not subject to the very fundaments of the construction of reality and hence not subject to critique or skepticism?2 Other scholars, such as Sean Teuton, have posited a “post-­ positivist realist” approach to Native studies as a corrective to the problems of poststructuralism, which Teuton claims is a “rejection of our human capacity to make normative claims to knowledge.”3 Unlike the editors of Theory’s Empire, however, Teuton recognizes that not all theory is poststructuralist, and he advocates for a postpositivist theoretical engagement with Native studies that “allows for genuine debate and exchange across cultures, while still respecting how social location may grant special access to knowledge.”4 However, as poststructuralist thinkers have noted, “the fact that all knowledge . . . is socially situated and interested . . . does not mean that valid knowledge is impossible.”5 The argument that truth is relative under postmodern thought is simply the flip side of universalist notions of truth. That is, claims to universalism and objectivity rest on the notion that individuals can transcend their historicity to decide what is true cross tem2  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

porally and cross-­culturally. Similarly, relativism rests on the notion that one can escape the grid of intelligibility one lives in and see multiple truths. In our view, poststructuralism contends that all individuals live within a regime of truth that has its own logic, and consequently there is truth and the ability to adjudicate between truth claims. If that regime of truth were to become destabilized, it would mean that the individual is simply living under another regime of truth. Because we know that our regime of truth is historically conditioned, we also know that it is not stable, that it is flexible and changing; but we are not capable of not believing what we think is true under the regime we live in—and it is true, as long as we are living in it. That truth is historically conditioned does not make it less true for us. As Stanley Fish argues, postmodern analysis does not preclude the making of truth claims: While relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy. No one can be a relativist, because no one can achieve the distance from his own beliefs and assumptions which would result in their being no more authoritative for him than the beliefs and assumptions held by others. . . . When his beliefs change, the norms and values to which he once gave unthinking assent will have been demoted to the status of opinions and become the objects of an analytical and critical attention; but that attention will itself be enabled by a new set of norms and values that are, for the time being, as unexamined and undoubted as those they displace. The point is that there is never a moment when one believes nothing.6 Native studies concerns itself with more than the obvious misreading of poststructuralist thought and its relationship to truth. Native studies since its inception has steadfastly engaged the historical and political context that defines truth. Vine Deloria Jr.’s germinal texts, particularly God Is Red, argue that Native studies poses not just a political challenge to the transcendent and simultaneously universally held barometers of truth, but an epistemological challenge to the institutionalization of that truth— namely, the academy. He argued that Western imperialism and colonialism flowed from a Western epistemology that was premised on either-­or logic systems based on Christian precepts. God Is Red argues that Native traditions are spatial in that they articulate to particular land bases, whereas Christianity and other traditions are temporal in that they seek converts from any land base and rest on an eschatological framework that envisions and requires an end to history. Of course, this dichotomy proposed by Introduction  |  3

Deloria was later critiqued by other Native studies scholars, such as Scott Lyons, for its simplicity. Nonetheless, while it is important to nuance the Delorian argument, the significance of his intervention is that epistemologies have material consequences. In particular, Deloria argues that Christianity, because it is a temporally rather than spatially based tradition, is necessarily a religion tied to imperialism because it will never be content to remain within a particular place or community. Rather, adherents of temporal-­based religions will try to convince other people of the veracity of  these religious truth claims: “Once religion becomes specific to a group, its nature also appears to change, being directed to the internal mechanics of  the group, not to grandiose schemes of world conquest.”7 In his critique of liberation theology, Deloria contends that liberationist thought is entrapped by Western logic systems and hence is doomed to replicate the tenets of domination and, thus, fail: If we are then to talk seriously about the necessity of liberation, we are talking about the destruction of the whole complex of  Western theories of knowledge and the construction of a new and more comprehensive synthesis of human knowledge and experience. This is no easy task and it cannot be accomplished by people who are encompassed within the traditional Western logic and the resulting analyses of such logic provides. If we change the very way that Western peoples think, the way they collect data, which data they gather, and how they arrange that information, then we are speaking truly of liberation.8 While he often focuses on Christianity in particular, Deloria argues that Western secular thought is essentially Christian in its foundations: “Christian religion and the Western idea of history are inseparable and mutually self-­supporting. . . . Where did Westerners get their ideas of divine right to conquest, of manifest destiny, of themselves as the vanguard of true civilization, if not from Christianity?”9 It therefore follows that the pathway to decolonization requires a fundamental epistemological shift away from Western theory. Indigenous epistemologies, he concludes, will provide the foundation for indigenous liberation. Native studies in the 1970s had to struggle to articulate itself as an independent field where Native peoples would no longer be captured by the so-­called truth of particular intellectual traditions and disciplinary formations—anthropology in particular. As Philip Deloria and many others contend, Native studies scholars resist the colonial imperative within early anthropology to situate Native peoples as dying cultures to be as4  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

sessed, memorialized, and classified.10 Through the panic-­d riven mode of “salvage ethnography,” presumably vanishing Native bodies, cultures, and communities were rendered objects to be studied, advancing the careers of white anthropological “experts” as well as the institutionalization and disciplinary notion that Native people were, in fact, disappearing.11 The understandings of Native peoples of their own communities and cultures were interlocuted through the anthropologist, who was considered the expert in court cases and other sites of intellectual representation.12 As a recent example, the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples held an expert seminar in February 2013 that addressed this very issue.13 Many panelists argued that when indigenous peoples seek legal recognition for culture or land claims, courts dismiss them if indigenous communities do not appear to be living by paradigms prescribed the anthropologists who have studied these communities. The theory produced out of these anthropological modes of inquiry served to displace not only intellectual agency but also political agency, with deeply damaging consequences. Ned Blackhawk demonstrates the damaging effects of Julian Steward’s taxonomic “cultural ecology” framework with “Great Basin Indians” in their designation as too loosely structured (albeit timeless and primeval) to receive federal recognition. This was their rendering in the classificatory report written by Steward to the federal government.14 Vine Deloria Jr.’s foundational text, Custer Died for Your Sins, contained the seminal chapter “Anthropologists among Other Friends” that ridiculed anthropology’s ethnographic obsession with Native peoples, but the chapter was more than a humorously inflected lambasting; it was a critique of the structuring suppositions of the field. In this, the conceptual and material containment of Native peoples into ethnographic sites required anthropological translation.15 Similarly, Elizabeth Cook-­Lynn’s account of Native studies argues that the field should wrest itself from the grasp of anthropology through a focus on the political liberation of indigenous peoples.16 Thus, even the earlier works of Native studies, and more recent analyses such as Blackhawk’s, have pointed to the importance of theoretical interventions in the colonial constructions of truth. This intellectual history demonstrates that the theorization of Native studies points to the centrality of the historical method and critique to the field as a project that responds to forms of ethnographic entrapment and its relationship to settler colonialism as not only a material practice of dispossession but as a representational practice of social scientific discourse.

Introduction  |  5

Who Owns Theory

North America was brought into being as a nation-­state under conditions of Native elimination, African enslavement, and an ongoing structure of capitalist accumulation that seems unaware of its bodily and ecological consequences.17 As indigenous studies scholars argue, these conditions manifest themselves materially as well as epistemologically. The state is not only repressive; it is also educative—shaping common sense through ideological state apparatuses (such as the academy) that normalize the rule of settler colonialism.18 It is perhaps not a surprise then that a suspicion of theory developed within Native studies, as Native studies developed in response to the ethnographic possessivism and entrapment of those fields that were closest to settler colonialism.19 As Linda Tuhiwai Smith contends, any engagement with theory must take seriously the manner in which theory has been used against Native communities.20 In this, Native peoples have been subjected to a variety of theories throughout the centuries about, for example, why their ways of life are “primitive,” about why they should not possess title to their land, and about why they should not be allowed to raise their own children.21 In taking this history seriously, however, some scholars in Native studies reject theory altogether as inescapably Western, but more critically than just a geographic and historical designation as Western—this theory is also tied with histories of taxonomic practice, of designating some people as “savage,” as in the case of Steward cited above, and thus legal harm. Theory then can become exclusively associated with Western elites. Barbara Christian raises such concerns in her famous critique of the “race for theory.”22 Speaking to black literary criticism in particular, she asserts that the academic emphasis on “high” theory crowds out the voices of those who actually write literature. It was becoming more important to read literary critiques of literature than to read the literature itself. Nevertheless, Christian does not necessarily argue against theory per se, as she notes that black women have always produced theory. Rather, she contends that the theory produced by black artists and literary writers was not regarded as theory. This argument has also been forcefully made within Native literary studies; the literary scholar and fiction writer Craig Womack’s argument elaborating Cook-­Lynn’s position pronounces a mode of “separatism” whereby criticism would be generated from within communities, by thinkers and writers who emanate from those spaces. Womack and others who agree with him have not rejected theory as such but have called for the prioritization of theory produced within Native communities.23 6  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

Thus, the problem with dismissing the importance of theory on any grounds, no matter how understandable, is that this dismissal does not credit the intellectual work done within Native communities as critical or of  theoretical importance. In this respect, the critique of theory can unwittingly recapitulate colonial and capitalist assumptions about who is able to produce theory. As many scholars have noted, racialized and colonial Others become marked as those who can be theorized about, but not those who can theorize. Denise da Silva in particular traces how Western philosophy marks the Western subject as self-­determining and hence able to categorize and mark those deemed not self-­determining (the “affectable” Others of Western modernity).24 But if we demystify theory to understand it as the thinking behind why we think and do things, it is clear that all peoples, of course, “do” theory. Theoretical production is not always captured by the academy, however. In turning away from theory, Native studies risks isolating itself from the important theoretical production occurring within Native communities, past, present, and future, and from important analytical and critical possibilities for work. Perhaps the important intervention is not to reject theory per se, but to question the perceived ownership of theory. In this respect, this book does not promote theory in opposition to community but actually foregrounds the fact that important theorizing is happening in Native communities, and that different forms of theorization can produce forms of analysis that take up political issues in ways that have important consequences for communities of every sort. For instance, the Taala Hooghan Infoshop in Flagstaff, Arizona, creates a variety of intellectual spaces for community members to theorize the conditions of settler colonialism and possible forms of resistance to it.25 The Native Youth Sexual Health Network in Toronto is engaged in intellectual production in a number of forums where they theorize the relationships between indigeneity, colonialism, gender, and sexuality.26 Countless groups in Native communities are not just engaging in activism but are critically theorizing about what forms of activism are most effective. Thus, one cannot avoid theory in the interest of being more community centered without dismissing the theory being produced within communities. The real question on the table is not whether we should theorize. Rather, we need to ask how we can critically and intelligently theorize current conditions in diverse spaces inside and outside the academy, and how we can theorize our responses to these conditions. When we take account of the historical and political conditions that structure theory as a thing that appears through theory’s relationships to capital, or in relation to discourses of civilization and savagery, Introduction  |  7

we may ask how a heightened awareness about the history of ideas, and the practice of ideas, will not only allow us to theorize and critique robustly but also help us to build a more just set of relations between people.27 The Practice of Theory

When we demystify what theory is, then it is clear that theory is not antagonistic to practice. People who theorize are stereotypically depicted as divorced from practical realities. This argument presumes that there is such a thing as practice uninformed by theory. For instance, in their rather confused diatribe against theory, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels argue: “It is the name for all the ways people have tried to stand outside practice in order to govern practice from without. Our thesis has been that no one can reach a position outside practice, that theorists should stop trying, and that the theoretical enterprise should therefore come to an end.”28 This argument makes little sense; if practice and theory are inseparable, as Knapp and Michaels rightfully point out, then it is impossible to end the theoretical enterprise. If we understand theory more simply as an overall rationale for why we engage in the practices we engage in, then obviously all practice is informed by a theoretical rationale. Therefore, the question is not whether we should engage in theory or practice, but, rather, what is the context in which theory and practice became separated within Native studies? Elizabeth Cook-­Lynn recounts the development of Native American studies, which she traces to the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars at Princeton University in March 1970. Native studies was envisioned as a project that would break away from an anthropological focus on Native peoples as “exotics” and instead develop as an independent discipline concerned with “the defense of the land and indigenous rights.”29 The defense of  Native peoples and lands has remained a priority in much of  Native studies, but debate has arisen as to how academic practices can further these goals.30 Cook-­Lynn contends that education should focus on changing U.S. policies as they apply to Native peoples. Because the intellectual concerns of  Native studies were supposed to focus on the practical realities faced by tribal nations, theory was seen as a luxury at best, or at worst a distraction from developing projects with more immediate political effects. As Native studies developed, the field diversified and some subfields turned toward theoretical interventions deemed critical for advancing the goals of  Native studies. A turn toward theory may seem antithetical to the more so-­called practical focuses that would benefit Native communities. 8  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

Yet this divide between theory and practice became troubled as Native studies scholars increasingly identified the larger capitalist, white supremacist, and settler-­colonial logics that were shaping Native policies. These scholars argued that many practical strategies for changing Native policies were ineffectual because they often furthered rather than challenged these larger governing logics of rule.31 Consequently, a turn toward theory has become important in developing intellectual and political projects for indigenous aspirations for justice. In addition, with the growing attacks against Native studies and ethnic studies in the United States, many Native and ethnic studies scholars are seeking to develop alternatives to what some understand as “the academic industrial complex” as the primary site for Native studies and ethnic studies.32 Many of these models are informed by indigenous models of education in Latin America that eschew binaries between theory and practice. These spaces are challenging the current models of schooling by refusing to divorce theoretical knowledge from practical skills. They are not rejecting theory. To the contrary, they recognize the importance of theory in developing critical consciousness as people cooperatively work to build another world. Theoretical Promiscuity

In addition to the debate over whether or not to engage theory, there is also debate about what constitutes the proper contours of theoretical work in Native studies. In particular, how should Native studies engage with other fields? Given the previously described logics shaped by history and politics that undergird academic disciplines, does it make sense for Native studies to engage these fields? If so, is it possible to remain committed to an intellectual project of theorized political critique if  Native studies continues to inhabit the colonial logics of other disciplines? Even in the case of seemingly compatible ethnic studies projects, if the goals of Native studies are fundamentally different, then it would follow that the field’s intellectual presuppositions may also be fundamentally different. If Native studies is going to question the means by which truth has been articulated, generally at the expense of indigenous peoples, would the discipline then have to develop an autonomous intellectual framework—what Robert Warrior described as “intellectual sovereignty?”33 If so, does intellectual sovereignty require intellectual isolationism? In this volume, we suggest that intellectual sovereignty requires not isolationism but intellectual promiscuity. In “Who Stole Native American Studies?” Cook-­Lynn argues that NaIntroduction  |  9

tive studies was “stolen” by other academic disciplines. She warns against Native studies engaging with other fields, even those that might seem bene­ ficial, such as ethnic studies and postcolonial studies. But why would Native studies be endangered by intellectual engagement with other fields? Cook-­Lynn and others reason that the intellectual project of  Native studies is fundamentally different from that of other fields. In her rendering, while Native studies is located in the academy, its primary aim is not the advancement of knowledge within the academy but the defense of  Native communities. Cook-­Lynn contends that other projects that do not share this concern could unwittingly domesticate Native studies into a multiculturalist project of representation (and entrapment) within the academy instead of a project that defends Native nations’ claims to sovereignty. When one considers the distinct political commitments of  Native studies as well as its distinct epistemological foundations, it is understandable that many people in Native studies are suspicious of intellectual engagement with other fields that might seem to reify colonial epistemological and political presuppositions. These fears are certainly well founded given the genocidal logics that disappear Native peoples into intellectual and political projects that assume the continuation rather than the end of settler colonialism. At the same time, however, the logics of settler colonialism and genocide are not disconnected from the logics of imperialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy. As Glen Coulthard’s foundational essay “Subjects of Empire” (2007) notes, Native nations often claim that they are fighting for self-­determination when they are in fact fighting for recognition.34 Their work is not geared toward fundamentally calling into question the legitimacy of the settler state, or dismantling the settler state; rather their work is geared toward gaining recognition from the settler state and perpetuating its life, interpreting the small token of recognition as justice. The politics of recognition entails a different approach to coalition-­ building than the politics of decolonization. The politics of recognition entails a claim to uniqueness that justifies recognition by the state. For example, those indigenous peoples seeking recognition from the state invariably find themselves in competition with others who are also seeking recognition. This forces an adversarial argument that one’s own claims to cultural distinctiveness and political integrity, for example, are more worthy than the claims of others.35 By contrast, the politics of decolonization requires the building of mass movements capable of dismantling settler colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. The intellectual project of decolonization would necessarily be broad based as anyone and everyone 10  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

who can help think of and imagine ways out of the moral and political impasse of recognition and into different modes of possibility would have to be enjoined to this intellectual and political process.36 A politics based on recognition can be simpler in many ways. It does not require coalition politics. It does not require a serious engagement with broad-­based ideas that can fundamentally change social and political relations as well as relationships with the natural world. And one can gain some helpful concessions through recognition, at least in the short-­term. The negative impact of such a strategy is that it presupposes the permanent continuation of the conditions that oppress Native peoples. Because the settler state remains in full force, it has the ability to retract whatever limited forms of recognition it grants and never actually has to question itself or even consider its own history very deeply.37 And because those seeking recognition do not build sufficient political power through coalitions, they are not in a position to successfully resist the settler state when these concessions are withdrawn. If, however, the goal becomes a different political form, perhaps under the sign of decolonization and an end to genocide and settler colonialism, it is necessary to build forms of political power to make that happen. This would require a shift away from seeking recognition from those in power, focusing instead on those interested in changing power relationships. Because the conditions of Native peoples are inextricably linked to the conditions facing other oppressed groups, a different political imaginary would require an engagement with intellectual work from these other sites of struggle in order to build stronger intellectual and political solidarities. Similarly, other fields of thought dedicated to social transformation will be strengthened if they more critically engage with Native studies and its investments in ending settler colonialism. If the goal is no longer recognition, then Native studies has less to fear if it engages in coalitional work because it will no longer pursue recognition claims that could be overshadowed by the claims of others. Instead, Native studies should focus on dismantling the system that requires Native peoples to disappear in the first place. Then Native studies would be based not on intellectual isolationism but on intellectual promiscuity, sympathy, and solidarity. The works of Kimberly Robertson, Myla Vicenti Carpio, and Renya Ramirez on urban Native communities also help reframe some of these debates around intellectual engagement.38 Their work challenges the dichotomous categories of urban versus reservation, which rest on the premise that Native peoples are immobilized outside the frame of the reservation and cannot circulate meaningfully or on their own terms. Hence, the Introduction  |  11

movement of  Native peoples from reservations to urban areas is seen as a one-­way journey to assimilation and despair, if not disappearance from meaningful life and political community. These scholars question many of the prevailing assumptions about urban Native peoples—that they are less authentic, more assimilated, and more culturally alienated from their home communities. Carpio in particular challenges the notion that Native urbanization is a recent phenomenon. She argues that this presupposition elides the complex civilizations that existed in Native America prior to colonization. Building on Jack Forbes, Carpio argues that Native communities clustered around “urban” areas that became trade centers and places of dense interactions among large numbers of people. Essentially, Carpio suggests, the urbanization of  Native peoples marks less a one-­way journey to assimilation and more a reclamation of lands that are as equally indigenous as reservations. We could even say that this notion of  Native peoples who never move, travel, or talk to anyone else is less a demonstration of self-­determination and more a colonial trap in which Native peoples are placed in an anterior relationship to the rest of society. However, as Carpio and Ramirez demonstrate, prior to colonization Native peoples had a broad engagement with the world; they traveled and learned from other peoples without losing their governance systems or philosophical frameworks.39 In countering the call for intellectual isolationism, it is therefore important to engage rather than reject conversation with schools of thought that may have compatible intellectual and political goals, in particular Marxist theory, feminist theory, ethnic studies, and postcolonial theory. Native studies has often focused on incompatibility and conflicts with these fields. And while these critiques are essential, they should not be used to inhibit engagement with aspects of these fields that might be beneficial for Native studies projects. Ethnic Studies

Winona Stevenson argues in her essay “ ‘Ethnic’ Assimilates ‘Indigenous’ ” that the problem with ethnic studies is that it relegates Native peoples to the classification of “racial minority” rather than as sovereign peoples seeking decolonization.40 While her important critique of the traditional ethnic studies model is correct, it also presumes that this current model serves all groups well except Native peoples. As ethnic studies has generally developed along identity lines (Asian American studies, Native studies, and so on), it has done critical work that provides the foundation for looking at intersections of racism, colonialism, immigration, and slavery in 12  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

the U.S. context. However, ethnic studies models constructed solely on an identity-­based approach are limiting for all peoples, not just Native peoples. As Eliza­beth Povinelli and Rey Chow have demonstrated, liberal multi­ culturalism relies on a politics of identity representation that is domesticated by nation-­state and capitalist imperatives.41 Today we see the emergence of a critical ethnic studies that does not necessarily dismiss identity, but the discipline structures inquiry around the logics of race, colonialism, capitalism, gender, and sexuality in order to expand its scope. Such a shift in focus is essential to providing a space for all scholars to be part of an engagement with critical ethnic studies since these as well as other logics structure society in its entirety, not just those who are racialized or colonized. A critical ethnic studies is not a melting pot for diverse racialized identity-­based groups; it is a coalitional intellectual project that seeks to assess the intersecting logics of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalism. A critical ethnic studies does not erase the need for an autonomous Native studies field, but it provides the space for indigenous studies to expand its impact through diverse academic formations. In particular, a critical ethnic studies provides a space to insist on the primacy of settler colonialism as a logic that structures the world for everyone, not just for Native peoples. Increasingly, Native studies scholars such as Brian Klopotek, Tiya Miles, and Melinda Maynor Lowery are writing in conversation with ethnic studies by focusing on the centrality of the analytics of settler colonialism within history and critical ethnic studies.42 Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial theory is typically met with this dismissal: “Postcolonial? Have they left yet?” Cook-­Lynn has critiqued postcolonial theory’s disservice to the central aims of indigenous peoples in North America with the theoretician’s keywords of cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and postcolonialism. Cook-­Lynn has argued that this languaging detracts from rather than enhances Native communities and interest in their material and discursive territories.43 Of course, much of the work within postcolonial theory invites this critique. For example, in their introduction to Colonial Discourse and Post-­colonial Theory, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman describe postcolonial theory as emerging from the “uncontentious” fact that “the era of formal colonial control is over.”44 They go on to describe the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as former white colonies, thus erasing the reality of ongoing colonial rule over indigenous peoples in these countries. This erasure is all the more startling considering that Williams Introduction  |  13

and Chrisman include a chapter by Anne McClintock that takes post­ colonial theory to task precisely for this reason: “By what fiat of historical amnesia can the United States of America, in particular, qualify as ‘post-­ colonial’—a term which can only be a monumental affront to the Native American peoples currently opposing the confetti triumphalism of 1992.”45 But, as Emma LaRocque notes, postcolonial theory should not be understood as signifying the end of colonialism or even formal colonialism.46 Rather the post suggests the radical rupture in history created by the colonial moment. In this sense, a postcolonial analysis would be central to the development of  Native studies because it speaks to the (im)possibilities of preserving tradition (or even articulating tradition) after the radical transformation in Native communities and Native peoples created by the colonial moment. Perhaps for this reason, many Native studies scholars are engaging Frantz Fanon, who articulates this radical rupture in history and its implications for decolonization.47 And Native feminist and queer theorists are analyzing the costs of how tradition is articulated when it disavows the impact of colonialism in shaping what we remember tradition to be. Some Native studies scholars have engaged postcolonial theory. For instance, Kevin Bruyneel articulates indigenous political relationships in the United States within a conceptual framework of a “third space of sovereignty.” Bruyneel describes the tensions within Native law and policy that places Native peoples both inside and outside the U.S. polity. He argues that most legal scholars try to address this tension by eradicating this boundary, either by making Native nations more “inside” or more “outside” the United States. Rather than attempt to resolve this tension, Bruyneel asks us to understand this tension as a third space of sovereignty. He takes the term third space from Homi Bhabha,48 although he defines it differently. According to Bruyneel, the third space of sovereignty “resides neither simply inside nor outside the American political system but rather exists on these very boundaries, exposing both the practices and contingencies of American colonial rule.”49 Bruyneel provides a rich analysis of some of the central conflicts between Native peoples and the federal and state governments. He takes care to demonstrate that there are not simply “two sides” in these conflicts, but that there is a complex interplay of wide-­ ranging and conflicting interests that determine the terrain of struggle. Bruyneel asserts that the third space of sovereignty is “not an unqualified or unproblematic ideal” but instead tends to uphold the third space as an alternative to two “false choices”: independence and assimilation.50 In addressing these false choices, Bruyneel provides space to voice the logics of 14  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

those who support Native assimilation, as well as demonstrating that those policymakers who support assimilation are themselves not singular in their purpose and effect. Bruyneel and other postcolonial scholars such as Philip Deloria address the complex reality faced by Native nations today, but they do not necessarily call for complete decolonization and independence. Others, such as Scott Lyons, attempt to bridge a postcolonial analysis with a politics of decolonization. In his book X-­Marks, Scott Lyons argues that Native peoples who historically collaborated in treaty making or other governmental processes did so within conditions that were not entirely of their making, that were deeply imperfect, and that deployed sign systems that were not entirely their own. As such, their signatures, on treaties for example, were an assent of sorts and should not be read retroactively as treachery or a commitment to assimilation.51 Under the conditions Native peoples faced, they made the best choices available in order to preserve the well-­being of Native peoples in the future. But Lyons proffers a vision of a political future that is not premised on the continuation of capitalism and the nation-­state. He contends that the project of imagining this future begins with working with the apparatuses at one’s disposal. However, he does not presume that the settler state will necessarily continue. Whereas some postcolonial scholars tend to presume the permanency of settler colonialism, others, such as Lyons, call for a politics of decolonization mindful of settler-­ colonial realities. Probably the most extensive treatment of postcolonial theory can be found in the work of Jodi Byrd. In Transit of Empire (2011), Byrd takes seriously and theorizes from the critiques indigenous scholars have made about postcolonial theory. She argues that a stronger engagement rather than disengagement with postcolonial studies is helpful to the project of indigenous studies. On the one hand, she advocates for a stronger engagement with theory in general as a means to more fully ascertain how the (presumed) disappearance of indigeneity actually structures critical theory to achieve certain ends—more disappearance. At the same time, this engagement facilitates the development of indigenous theory, which she nuances as “critical indigenous theory” that does not rest on static and fixed notions of indigeneity: “Bringing indigenous and tribal voices to the fore within postcolonial theory may help us elucidate how liberal colonialist discourses depend upon sublimating indigenous cultures and histories into fictive hybridities and social constructions as they simultaneously trap indigenous peoples within the dialectics of genocide, where the only Introduction  |  15

conditions of possibility imagined are either that indigenous peoples will die through genocidal policies of colonial settler states (thus making room for more open and liberatory societies) or that they will commit heinous genocides in the defense of lands and nations.”52 Byrd demonstrates that contextualizing and closely reading postcolonial theory can provide a helpful intellectual apparatus to ascertain how it is that indigeneity disappears within postcolonial theory itself. Feminist and Queer Theory

Until more recently, feminist and queer theory was often regarded as unnecessary for the development of Native studies because, so the rationale goes, homophobia and sexism did not exist in many Native communities prior to colonization. Consequently, feminist and queer theory was read as inherently “white,” with no meaning for Native communities. This work was essential in pointing to the settler-­colonial logics embedded in (white) feminisms.53 However, these critiques were often made with essentializing claims that Native women cannot be feminists, thus erasing the diversity of thought that exists within both scholarly and activist circles.54 Also, to the extent that Native women’s writings on feminism are cited, their use is often limited to demonstrating the racism of first-­and second-­wave white feminism. Such rhetorical strategies limit Native women to a politics of inclusion; in vernacular terms the phrasing would be, “Let us include Native women in feminist theory (or if we do not think that they can be included, let us reject feminist theory completely).” This politics of inclusion inevitably presumes that feminism is defined by white women to whom indigenous women should or should not respond. However, many works have recently emerged that rearticulate the terms of engagement within feminist and queer theory. Some work helpfully focuses on the status of Native women and Native peoples who are lgbtq.55 Other works note that Native feminist and queer theory is not limited by the objects of its analysis.56 Rather, these theories shed light on the intersecting logics of settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy: gender violence and heteropatriarchy fundamentally structure the conditions of possibility for settler colonialism.57 Again, these projects do not dismiss identity, but they do not necessarily presume to know characteristics essential to indige­ nous womanhood or, in particular, essential characteristics that are graspable to the analyst. Rather, the projects help support a revolutionary politic emerging from the praxis of indigenous communities (both past and present) as well as the material conditions of heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and 16  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

white supremacy under which indigenous women live. Indigenous feminist theory, contrary to what even some Native scholars argue, is not simply a multicultural add-­on to white feminist theory (which itself is varied and complex). The theorizing produced by Native women scholars and activists make critical and transformative interventions into not only feminist theory but also a wide variety of theoretical formations.58 Their work has challenged many of the settler-­colonialist assumptions within postcolonial theory, ethnic studies, Marxist theory, and other theoretical formations. Similarly, queer theory brings our attention to the manner in which settler states impose heteronormativity on Native communities as a strategy to further colonization. The result is the reification of the heteronormative settler state that not only colonizes Native peoples but also structures the world of possibility for all peoples. Marxism

Many scholars in Native studies have rightfully critiqued engagement with Marxist thought under the rationale that Marxist theory necessarily presupposes a Western development model that seeks to liberate indigenous peoples from their land bases and move them into the capitalist work economy. A central text, Marxism and Native Americans by Ward Churchill, argues that Marxism and Native sovereignty are fundamentally incompatible.59 This text was written when splits developed within the American Indian Movement over the capital contra wars in Nicaragua. As detailed in Roxanne Dunbar-­Ortiz’s Blood on the Border, some American Indian Movement activists supported the U.S. counterinsurgency war against the Nicaraguan Revolution by arguing that Sandinistas were oppressing the Miskito peoples.60 Others argued that while Sandinista policies may have been problematic, they were certainly preferable to the U.S.-­backed Somoza regime that the Sandinista government replaced. This debate created a larger disagreement over whether Marxist-­based movements were supportive or antithetical to indigenous liberation. Some have argued that Marxism is not helpful for Native studies because of its investment in economic developmentalism, its Eurocentrism, and its emphasis on labor exploitation rather than land appropriation.61 As María Josefina Saldaña-­ Portillo’s recent work demonstrates, these critiques are well founded. She details some of the tensions between Marxist-­based movements and indigenous struggles.62 In her analysis of the problems with Sandinista policies as they pertained to indigenous peoples, she contends that the Sandinistas, as well as many revolutionary Marxist movements, fundamentally preIntroduction  |  17

supposed the same developmentalist model as the capitalists they claim to resist. Consequently, like their capitalist counterparts, these allegedly revolutionary subjects often frame Native peoples as primitive precursors to the revolutionary subject. Saldaña-­Portillo does not call for a rejection of Marxist analysis as did Marxism and Native Americans; she seeks a deeper inter­rogation and exchange between these strands of thought that can speak to a nondevelopmentalist model for economic liberation. However, as Paula Rojas notes, the reconfiguration of revolutionary movements in Latin America, in places such as Chiapas, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Brazil, has contributed to a new framework for movement building that is democratic rather than authoritarian, inclusive rather than elitist, and that centers indigenous peoples.63 As a result, they have been able to shut down entire countries and achieve the mass-­scale change that is absent in the United States. Native peoples, as well as everyone who wishes to challenge the U.S. empire, would benefit from learning from the success of these struggles. These mass-­based movements, which are completely changing the landscape of Latin America, have been informed by indigenous critiques of previous revolutionary movements. Nevertheless, Marxism does make important contributions to the “how” of revolutionary struggle that indigenous peoples will find helpful. That is, exactly how can visions of new political orders in North America join larger struggles against capitalist accumulation? How can struggles against land appropriation be tied to struggles over labor exploitation? Marxist theory provides a helpful lens for addressing these questions. Consequently, some Native studies scholars have called for more engagement with Marxist theory. Roberto Mendoza argues: “Traditionals do not really address the question of power. How can small communities tied in a thousand ways to the capitalist market system break out without a thorough social, economic and political revolution within the whole country?”64 He also labels those traditionalists who refuse to consider any Marxist analyses as “fundamentalists,” and he states: “I feel that dialogue and struggle with Left forces are necessary rather than rejection and isolation.”65 Similarly, Lee Maracle has critiqued the anti-­Marxist strands within Native activists, contending that without a Marxist analysis, Native activism does not “challenge the basic character or the legitimacy of the institutions or even the political and economic organizations of America.”66 Scott Lyons calls for a stronger conversation between Native studies and the Left given the current context in which “the world’s richest 2 percent . . . control half of humanity’s assets . . . as the bottom half—more than three billion people—struggles over a scant 1 percent in order to survive.”67 18  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

Book Overview

In this book we seek to demonstrate the variety of ways that scholars within Native studies operationalize multiple forms of theory to get analysis done and to enact forms of history and theorization that make for that analysis. Teresia Teaiwa’s and Dian Million’s reflections frame debates about theory in Native studies in terms of how the discipline is both internally and externally policed. In “There Is a River in Me,” Million details the manner in which theory has been used as a weapon against Native studies. In particu­ lar, she is interested in the manner in which Native peoples are situated as those who can be theorized about, but not those who can theorize. In particular, she challenges the dichotomy between theory and experience by demonstrating how the experiences of indigenous peoples become an important source of theory. Rather than presuming that claims to identity and experience are necessarily essentialist, Million demonstrates how an open-­ended articulation of experience and identity can be the foundation for the development of critical indigenous theory. Thus Native studies’ engagement with theory requires questioning what we perceive theory to be. Teaiwa, by contrast, focuses on the internal policing within Native studies. Against those who would say that you can’t cite Marx, Foucault, and so on because they are not indigenous, Teaiwa explores the benefits that result from engaging with such thinkers, even those from the majority culture. She contends that this engagement is itself an act of sovereignty rather than a sign of assimilation, since it represents Native peoples choosing their intellectual genealogies. Several of the authors in this volume bring Native studies into conversation with other fields of thought that are interested in challenging relationships of domination. Glen Coulthard reads Marxist theory through the lens of indigenous struggle. In his detailed analysis, he points to the limitations of Marxist theory for indigenous struggle, and he builds on the previously mentioned critiques by other indigenous scholars. However, Coulthard also identifies important contributions within Native studies that he argues can be helpful for indigenous struggle. In particular, he looks at how Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation can be a starting point for injecting a stronger analysis of settler colonialism into Marxist theory. This exchange is also helpful for articulating why struggles against settler colonialism also need to be anticapitalist. Robert Nichols brings critical race theory into conversation with Native studies to articulate his reworking of the framework of the “settler conIntroduction  |  19

tract.” In conversation with Carol Pateman’s “sexual contract,” and Charles Mills’s “racial contact,” Nichols contends that settler society is founded on the principles of the settler contract that erase the founding genocide that enables it.68 Furthermore, argues Nichols, Mills attempts to “close the gap” between the ideal of the social contract and the reality of the racial contract serves to reinstantiate settler colonialism in the name of antiracist critique. Scott Lauria Morgensen and Mark Rikfin both engage the intersections of queer theory and indigenous studies. Using a Foucauldian analysis of biopolitics, Rifkin assesses the shifting colonial strategy of categorizing Native peoples, from members of distinct nations to the racial category of “Indian.” Rifkin demonstrates that this tactic is based on heteronormativity. That is, in order to break up indigenous political orders (Native nations) that pose a threat to the legitimacy of colonial-­governance order, these collectivities are diluted into individual family units that can be absorbed into the colonial state. With national collectivities then disavowed, Native peoples become racialized Indians who are managed through the politics of biopower. As racialized subjects, argues Rifkin, they still constitute a threat to the well-­being of the colonial state and hence are never properly heterosexual or heteronormative. But this racializing logic masks the even greater threat that Native nations present. Indianization, as it were, allows colonialism to become a population problem rather than a political problem. The strategy of domesticating Native peoples into populations is further evidenced in global health policy, as Morgensen’s chapter demonstrates. In response to the global aids crisis, while some regions of the world, particularly Africa, get marked as permanently diseased within the current biopolitical regime, Native peoples are seen as already disappeared and beyond the concern of aids health activism. Within this context, Morgensen explores how indigenous aids activists counter biopolitical regimes by organizing under the framework of decolonization. Several contributors use theory to question the academic representational practice in which Native studies finds itself. Andrea Smith builds on Audra Simpson’s call for an ethnographic refusal to articulate how Native peoples are situated within the academy in a position of ethnographic entrapment.69 Building on the work of Rey Chow and Elizabeth Povinelli, Smith questions the politics of  Native representation within the academy.70 It is often presumed that greater visibility of Native cultures within the academy facilitates a politics of political transformation and decolonization. Smith, however, suggests that this quest to prove the worth of  Native 20  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

cultures facilitates rather than challenges colonization by rendering Native peoples as another cultural group to be incorporated within the multi­ cultural classificatory schemes of the academy. Christopher Bracken explores the presumed unitary Native self within academic representation as he investigates the vexed relationship between Native identities and Christianity in his textual readings of the works of Samson Occom and Joseph Johnson. Many Native studies scholars have argued that Native Christians cannot historically be understood to be simple apologists for U.S. Christian supremacy, but in fact they have often used Christianity as a means to counter settler colonialism. Bracken, however, builds on this work by rearticulating this relationship, starting from the premise that the Native self is not understood to be a transparent and unified whole. Consequently, the Native self that adopts Christianity is neither singularly resistant nor complicit but is a noncorresponding self that refracts multiple and conflicting desires. In this sense, Bracken’s work can be put into conversation with Antonio Viego’s Dead Subjects, in which he calls for a new representational politics that takes into account “how racism depends on a certain representational capture of the ethnic-­racialized subject—rendered as transparent to the signifier, potentially whole and unified—in order to manage this subject more masterfully in discourse.”71 If Bracken questions the notion of a singular Native self, Mishuana R. Goeman questions the colonial logics by which these singular selves are attached to land. Goeman uses the theory produced in Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s artwork to resist the biopolitics of population management in which Native bodies are attached to small, manageable, and bounded land bases, what Goeman identifies as a colonial understanding of land and space. Goeman contends that all of the United States is Indian land. Consequently, a different political future requires not simply recognition of the land bases currently occupied by Native peoples but a dismantling of the settler state and a complete rearticulation of the relationship between peoples and land. Land is not a commodity owned by Native peoples; land is part of an active relationship with Native peoples in multiple and complex ways. In addition, Goeman’s work methodologically serves to underscore the importance of artistic and literary production as sites of theoretical production. That is, as compared to others who might separate those who do art and literature from those who theorize it, Goeman seeks to resituate Native artists as theorists. Similarly, Vera B. Palmer challenges the dichotomy between Native traditions and theory by describing the theory implicit within Native spiritual Introduction  |  21

and cultural traditions. In her reading of Kateri Tekakwitha (Mohawk), who was recently canonized by the Catholic Church in 2012, Palmer explores how the indigenous epistemologies inherent in Tekakwitha’s praxis disappear within her Christian veneration. Palmer contends that writings on Tekakwitha should be properly understood within the context of Mohawk epistemologies and cosmologies. In doing so, Palmer demonstrates how indigenous methodologies can provide alternative theoretical frameworks for such interpretive analysis. Conclusion

The works in this collection share a political commitment to Native communities beyond representation within the academy. This book also affirms that Native studies is capable of developing its own analytic and methodo­ logical frameworks outside those determined by traditional disciplines or the Western academy. This volume builds on previous scholarship that has focused on developing an autonomous Native studies by arguing that an explicit turn toward theory can assist in these endeavors. By demystifying theory, we can look at the theoretical production that currently exists within Native communities. And by engaging in the theoretical production occurring in diverse intellectual streams and traditions, Native studies is in a position to build intellectual coalitions and the political power necessary to seriously destabilize the conceits of settler colonialism. In addition, these coalitions can then enable Native studies to have a broad impact on diverse intellectual and political formations. Notes

1. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral, eds., Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 23. 2. See Elvira Pulitano, Toward a Native American Critical Theory (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 2003); and Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Allen Warrior, American Indian Literary Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006). Ours is a gloss that still sustains more nuance than even Pulitano’s depiction of the field or her allegations of essentialism wages. Here we want to make clear that in taking up the problem of disagreement, theorists since Socrates have attempted to align differing views through the process of debate and so have engaged in a process that produces something—knowledge, substance, logical alignment, or misalignment. It might be argued that this is truly a transhistorical and human and intellectual imperative that takes many forms. The leverage of essentialist is to assert that knowledge production occurs outside the terms of engagement 22  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

and is a free-­floating signifier itself (something strangely outside the scene of its articulation, outside politics, and outside history). We understand this to be impossible and think that even the claim of essentialism removes itself from the political context of the assertion or the argument, which may take a nondialectical form (say of an assertion) but is occurring in political and historical contexts that may require that form. 3. Sean Kicummah Teuton, Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), xvi. 4. Teuton, Red Land, Red Power, xvi. 5. Steven Seidman, Contested Knowledges: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 325. 6. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in the Class? The Authority of  Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 309. 7. Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1992), 297. 8. Vine Deloria Jr. and James Treat, For This Land: Writings on Religion in America (New York: Routledge Chapman and Hall, 1999), 106. 9. Deloria and Treat, For This Land, 113. 10. Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). See also Tom Biolsi and Larry J. Zimmerman, eds., Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books, 1999); and Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999). 11. This is not to ignore or to deny the contributions of indigenous anthropologists and scholars such as the Seneca and Tuscarora scholars Arthur Parker and J. N. B. Hewitt—who enjoyed a very narrow but significant degree of institutional security and anthropological influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One might also consider the deeply fraught career of the Sac and Fox Columbia University-­t rained anthropologist William Jones, whose very framework may have contributed to his death by Ilongot “headhunters” in the Philippines in 1909. However, this significance accorded to some Native anthropologists (archaeologists and linguists) may have a gendered and raced cast as the lives and careers of scholars such as Ella Deloria (the Yankton Sioux who worked for and with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University) were very different. Her book, written first in Sioux, was not translated and published into English until the 1970s. She struggled for funding for much of her career and never held an institutional appointment. Her grandnephew, the cultural historian Phil Deloria, writes of her: “Deloria found working for Boas intellectually challenging, but she

Introduction  |  23

constantly teetered on the brink of economic disaster, frequently having to plead for more work and better compensation. She had skill and practical experience equal to that of any of Boas’s famous protégés, but she barely received a research assistant’s wage.” Phil Deloria, “Ella Deloria (Anpetu Waste),” in Encyclopedia of North American Indians, ed. Frederick Hoxie (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 359–­361. This is much like Zora Neale Hurston, the African American folklorist who also worked for and with Boas at Columbia and wrote monographs that are considered contemporary classics of African American ethnography and literature. For biographical and literary analysis of  both Deloria and Hurston, see Maria Cotera, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture (Austin: University of  Texas Press, 2008). 12. See, for example, the federal-­recognition requirements of the United States, which requires the documentation of an anthropologist, historian, archaeologist, or other “expert” on the precontact status of native claimants. See Jack Campisi, The Mashpee Indians: Tribe on Trial (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991); James Clifford, “Identity in Mashpee,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-­Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Renée Ann Cramer, Cash, Color and Colonialism: The Politics of Tribal Acknowledgement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005). And see Bruce Miller, Invisible Indigenes: The Politics of Non-­recognition (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 2003), for North American and global cases. For the most recent contemplation of this burden of proof from multiple cases in the United States, see Jean O’Brien and Amy den Ouden, eds., Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles and Indigenous Rights in the United States: State and Federal Recognition (Chapel Hill: University of  North Carolina Press, 2013). 13. This seminar for experts was held at Columbia University and was hosted by the Institute for Human Rights and convened by the faculty member Elsa Stamatopoulou. 14. Ned Blackhawk, “Julian Steward and the Politics of Representation: A Critique of the Anthropologist Julian Steward’s Portrayals of the American Indians of the Great Basin,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 2, no. 122 (1997): 75–­77. Blackhawk details the manner in which the Shoshone, constructed in a taxonomic schemata by Steward, were rendered as diffuse, landless, placed outside of time, and in need, not of a land base and federal recognition but total assimilation into U.S. society because of a conceptually flawed anthropological account of their lives and livelihood. Steward’s 1938 report was commissioned by the commissioner of  Indian Affairs, John Collier, who sought scholarly opinions on the political and cultural status of these “tribes” as he tried to implement the Indian Reorganization Act, an act that was to reverse the legacy of the dispossessive Dawes Act (1887) and now allow for electorally based tribal governments. See Blackhawk, “Julian Steward and the Politics of Representation,” 80, fn. 36, for reference to the report. 24  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

Steward recommended against recognition for these “loose” bands, and consequently against federal recognition, a land base, and the Indian Reorganization Act, but his report was countered most vigorously by Alida Bowler of the Carson Indian Agency, who confidentially wrote to Collier and said that based on what she had heard about his work with the Shoshone, she was “unshakably skeptical” of his findings and had reason to “doubt anything he has published in the field.” Quoted in Blackhawk, “Julian Steward and the Politics of Representation,” 76. Steward’s advice was rejected in 1937 and the Western Shoshone were granted reservation lands and recognition. 15. See the critical chapter “Anthropologists and Other Friends,” in Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969). This book was of such import to the field that it prompted a conversation at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting the following year on Native anthropological relations and the first ethics policy adopted by the field. For the legacy of this book to the field, see Biolsi and Zimmerman, Indians and Anthropologists. 16. Elizabeth Cook-­Lynn, “Who Stole Native American Studies?,” Wicazo Sa Review 12, no. 1 (1997). 17. See Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology; and Sylvia Wynter, “Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and Fables That Stir the Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters,” in Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, ed. Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997). 18. On the educative role of the state, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 12th ed., trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971); and Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (New York: Homes and Meier Publishers, 1978). On the academy as ideological state apparatus, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). 19. See Cook-­Lynn, “Who Stole Native American Studies?”; and Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. 20. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. 21. See, for example, Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of  Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); and Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies. 22. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987). 23. One need only look to Craig S. Womack’s paradigmatic Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) for the model of this form of criticism, and to Robert Allen Warrior’s Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (MinneapIntroduction  |  25

olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) for an anteceding, interdisciplinary historicization of the argument and the model. Subsequent works in the subfield of  literary studies have largely reworked this premise of culture, in a materialist and also a methodological sense in that their modes of analysis and have engaged most forcefully with the critiques of Elvira Pulitano’s charges of analytical myopia in Toward a Native American Literary Theory. 24. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). See also Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); María Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Smith, this volume. 25. See the Taala Hooghan Infoshop’s website at http://www.taalahooghan.org/ (accessed 10/07/2013). 26. See the Native Youth Sexual Health Network’s website at http://www.native youthsexualhealth.com/ (accessed 10/08/2013). 27. One need not look for evidence of theory’s relationship to capital or to its instrumentality in the service of capital accumulation and colonization. See, for example, John Locke’s Of Property for a seminal, “new world” example in Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 111–­21. Subsequent works that then interpret the imperial context and uses of his work include Barbara Arneil, John Locke in America: The Defense of English Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-­Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). For a cognate, historicizing reading of liberal theory in Canada, see Dale A. Turner’s This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). For a reading of social contract theory and its imperial context (and occlusions), see Nichols, this volume. 28. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (Summer 1982): 742. 29. Cook-­Lynn, “Who Stole Native American Studies?,” 9. 30. See, for example, Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland (St. Paul, MN: Living Justice Press, 2008); and Waziyatawin and Eli Taylor, Remember This! Dakota Decolonization and the Eli Taylor Narratives (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 2005). 31. See, for example, Glen Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007); Jennifer Denetdale, “Chairmen, Presidents, and Princesses: The Navajo Nation, Gender, and the Politics of  Tradition,” Wicazo Sa Review 21, no. 1 (2006); Emma LaRocque and National Clearinghouse on Family Violence, Violence in Aboriginal Communities (Ottawa: National Clearinghouse 26  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

on Family Violence, Family Violence Prevention Division, Health Programs and Services Branch, Health Canada, 1994); Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of  Indigenous Human Rights (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 2013); Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); and Andrea Smith, The Christian Right and Race Reconciliation (New York: Union Theological Seminary, 1997). 32. Andrea Smith, “Native Studies and Critical Pedagogy: Beyond the Academic Industrial Complex,” in Activist Scholarship: Antiracism, Feminism, and Social Change, ed. Julia Sudbury and Margo Okasawa-­Rey (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2009). For an example of these attacks, see the hostility to ethnic studies in “anti-­immigration” states such as Arizona, which has banned the teaching of ethnic studies in public schools, as well as the defunding of ethnic studies programs in the university itself. See Noliwe Rooks, White Money/ Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race and Higher Education (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006). 33. Warrior, Tribal Secrets. 34. Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire.” 35. See, for example, the Aboriginal land-­claim cases brought into being and adjudicated by the Wik decision in Australia, which makes determinations between groups of people based on their distinctiveness against each other, never questioning the fundamental right of the state to make such determinations in a scene of dispossession. See, for example, Aileen Moreton-­Robinson, ed., Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen and Unwin Academic, 2007); and Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition. 36. For an attempt at this sort, see Taiaiake Alfred’s Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2005). 37. Consider the reparative gesture of the public (and not so public, in the case of the United States) apologies by the United States, Canada, and Australia that took a form of responsibility for indigenous suffering and injustice but also sealed, semiotically, all further public discussions of these matters. Please see Audra Simpson, “Settlement’s Secret,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 2 (2011), for a discussion of the political efficacy of these public spectacles for ongoing projects of settlement. 38. Myla Vicente Carpio, Indigenous Albuquerque (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2011); Renya Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Kimberly Dawn Robertson, “Un-­settling Questions: The Construction of  Indigeneity and Violence against Women,” PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2012. 39. For a cognate study as it obtains to the specificity of the Iroquois (who were imagined as immobilized, sedentary, and even dwelling in “slums in the Wilderness” in various disciplines), see Jon Parmenter’s groundbreaking history of mobility, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–­1701 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). Introduction  |  27

40. Winona Stevenson, “ ‘Ethnic’ Assimilates ‘Indigenous’: A Study in Intellectual Neocolonialism,” Wicazo Sa Rview 13, no. 1 (1998). Stevenson now publishes under the name Winona Wheeler. 41. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism; and Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition. 42. See Brian Klopotek, Recognition Odysseys: Indigeneity, Race, and Federal Tribal Recognition Policy in Three Louisiana Indian Communities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Melinda Maynor Lowery, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (Chapel Hill: University of  North Carolina Press, 2010); and Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-­Cherokee Family in Slavery and in Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 43. Cook-­Lynn, “Who Stole Native American Studies?” 4 4. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-­ colonial Theory Theory: A Reader, 1850–­1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 3. 45. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 294. 46. Emma LaRocque, When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850–­ 1990 (Manitoba, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 2010). 47. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin: White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (Boston: Grove Press, 1998 [1967]); Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (Boston: Grove Press, 2005 [1963]). 48. More specifically, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004 [1994]). For further clarification on his conceptualization, see “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity: Culture, Community, and Difference, ed. John Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 207–21, esp. 208–12. 49. Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-­ Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xvii. 50. Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty, 1–­25. 51. Scott Lyons, X-­Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 52. Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of  Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxvi–xxxvii. 53. See Sandy Grande, Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); and M. Annette Jaimes and Theresa Halsey, “American Indian Women: At the Center of  Indigenous Resistance in North America,” in State of Native American: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992). 54. Andrea Smith, Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 55. Sue-­Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, eds., Two-­Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (Urbana: University of  Illinois Press, 1997). 28  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

56. See Chris Finley, “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body (and Recovering the Native Bull-­D yke): Bringing ‘Sexy Back’ and out of the Native Studies Closet,” in Queer Indigenous Studies, ed. Qwo-­Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Gilley, Scott Morgensen, et al. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011); Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, The History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Andrea Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies: The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism,” glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 61, no. 1–­2 (2010). 57. See Finley, “Decolonizing the Queer Native Body”; LaRocque and National Clearinghouse on Family Violence, Violence in Aboriginal Communities; and Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005). 58. See, for example, Andrea Smith and J. Kehaulani Kaunaui’s edited issue of American Quarterly and their introduction, “Forum: Native Feminisms without Apology,” American Quarterly 60, no. 2 (2008). Also see the articles introduced by Mishuana Goeman and Jennifer Denetdale in “Native Feminisms: Legacies, Interventions, and Sovereignties,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 9 (2009). And see Mishuana Goeman’s literary analysis Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); and Joyce Green’s Making Space for Indigenous Feminism (London: Zed Books, 2007). 59. Ward Churchill, Marxism and Native Americans (Boston: South End Press, 1983). 60. Roxanne Dunbar-­Ortiz, Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005). 61. See Churchill, Marxism and Native Americans; Russell Means and Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995); and George Tinker, Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004). 62. Saldaña-­Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. 63. Paula Rojas, “Are the Cops in Our Heads and Our Hearts?,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-­profit Industrial Complex, ed. Incite! Women of Color against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007). 64. “Traditionals” in this quote may be taken to mean those who are self-­ consciously living as so-­called traditional people in the context of a settler society; they are mindfully living according to their indigenous political and philosophical traditions. Roberto Mendoza, Look! A Nation Is Coming! (Phila­ delphia: National Organization for an American Revolution, 1984), 8. 65. Mendoza, Look!, 39. 66. Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism (North Vancouver: Write-­On Press Publishers, 1988), 100. Introduction  |  29

67. Lyons, X-­Marks, 162. 68. Pateman first theorized the “settler contract,” but Nichols works it over most robustly. 69. Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus. 70. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism; and Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition. 71. Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

30  |  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith

O N E   | 

Dian Million

There Is a River in Me Theory from Life

the desire is there to catch it knowing that i cannot; the water flowing rising up, falling through until flying through my fingers it goes back in is gone the moment . . . 1 The difficulty and the difference between the usual social historian and me might be my unwillingness to distinguish one suffering from another. Even though I know intellectually that the agony of the child in (name community) now is not the same experience as the child raised forty years ago in the confines of (name a residential school), I cannot shake the feeling of déjà vu. I feel a desire to feel/link these experiences that is stronger than any knowledge I might have of the value of their historical “specificity.”2 In Native way, these are experiences already related by an archipelago of stories, the ones that we tell among ourselves outside academia. That I find these stories a useful form of knowledge sets me apart from many of my academic colleagues. Thus, I find causal agency between certain acts and others that academia will not legitimate. In my gut I know that when our articulation has centered on a “something that has happened,” it has been necessary to establish our sanity, because what is really happening is too big, and we know that too. The stories, unlike data, contain the affec-

tive legacy of our experiences. They are a felt knowledge that accumulates and becomes a force that empowers stories that are otherwise separate to become a focus, a potential for movement. Each Canadian residential school survivor’s testimony is now a part of something bigger than its own witness. Each testimony carried the emotionally laden affective force to transcend the individual’s experience. That affective force made it necessary that these stories become a collective story told across the lands—in poetry, in memoir, and in our new oral medium, the documentary. While there are differences between the personal story and the collective stories we tell, I believe that it was and is necessary for Indigenous peoples in North America to make new ways of seeing ascendant, to move to shape the endless spin of the discourses in play, to act in a now to change the order. So, what do we know that we might act from? We are living in a time when the most vulnerable die (this includes many, many life-­forms), a worldwide experience that affects our vital relations with life itself. There is a struggle against the capitalization, the commoditization of life even as it is happening. And because I am a scholar, and in particular an Indigenous scholar, I must act in the present to establish links; I am inhabited by the ghosts of my dead and my devoured and subjectively I cannot ignore them, nor will they be ignored. As an Athabascan woman I know we live in a world filled with spirit and what I do will matter. I look for lessons on haunting. Our collective history-­fi lled space here is not a void as Avery Gordon once told us; the space is filled with the emotional resonance of our actions in this place, subsumed when power moves to crush voice, imagination, and spirit: “To look for lessons about haunting when there are thousands of ghosts; when entire societies become haunted by terrible deeds that are systematically occurring and are simultaneously denied by every public organ of governance and communication[,] . . . when the whole situation cries out for clearly distinguishing between truth and lies, between what is known and what is unknown, between the real and the unthinkable and yet that is precisely what is impossible.”3 In this chapter, I reiterate a position about the worth of our lives, our Indigenous lives as the stuff of theory.4 I interweave the idea of the affective life force that runs through us (in a poem) with several moments or instances of thought about what theory is and why we might have any investment in doing it. Theory, theorizing is, as I have argued in other places, a verb, an action. I think that theorizing is something that we do plainly every day, in any moment where we make a proposition about what is hap32  |  Dian Million

pening and why. I usually try to avoid prescription about how theory is done; I work in large suggestive brushstrokes about its action, to be suggestive about what the power of it is. If there are themes to my sections, they could be loosely described as follows: the power of our everyday stories, the theory of stories as theory, and Indigenism as theory. For some years now I have been engaged in thinking about narratives, narrativity, and discourse, in particular a discourse that has great resonance across many Indian lives, the discourse, the collective conversation (argument) on residential schools in Canada and the United States. These are stories told about historical trauma, past and present victimization, and the search for a redemption in personal and community healing. These are not simple stories, since their telling transitions a high-­stakes political composition of what is understood to be deeply personal experience. All people who were victimized as children who told their stories to adjudicate their perpetrators never told these stories in isolation from the larger meanings put on their experiences. Each First Nations community that produced survivors’ stories as an indictment of a colonial system came into this discourse in a particular way. I am exceedingly aware that our stories, whether they are told from painful secrets in an aa meeting, as traditional oral performance, or those we tell each other in these academic settings, are powerful. They are powerful because they are engaged in the articulations that interpret who we are in the discursive relations of our times. We engage in questioning and reformulating those stories that account for the relations of power in our present. That is theorizing. It offers new experiential frames, in our case, often from our lives, from our own felt experience, from our stories, from our communities, from our languages. Most important, from our experiences, from our lives, from our “what happened.” Theory is always practical first, rather than abstract. . . . momentum in his black, black eyes: there is a river in him rising from deep inside somewhere . . . scraps of his blood and skin and mind so that he flows on mumbling through all the rocks and debris . . . Generally, there is unease when we as Indigenous scholars move to theo­ rize. Are we using the master’s tools? Sometimes, we do, but dangerously; There Is a River in Me  |  33

we do so often without acknowledging that the universalized concepts available to us from almost all sources are theorized. We fail to question the sources of common knowledge. The struggle in our generation has been to honor our own paradigms, concepts that arise from our lives, our histories, and our cultures while knowing that these are often inextricably mixed with concepts growing from our subjugation. Barbara Christian warned of theory’s colonizing propensity for hegemony in a now-­classic essay titled “The Race for Theory.” Why should we as colonized peoples enter the race to use theoretical obfuscation and abstract language? Her first concern was practical. Theory was an intervention into her field of  literature that made her intellectual labor a commodity: “Theory has become a commodity which helps determine whether we are hired or promoted in academic institutions—worse, whether we are heard at all.”5 She was right. Academic labor is now increasingly measured by its use value, and the drive to produce new paradigms, new frames for conceptualizing, became fierce in those years. This race to find new analytical paradigms became fierce because the academy increasingly felt/experienced “siege” from then-­ emergent transnational, postcolonial, and Indigenous movements. The threat was exactly the scholarship that Christian as an African American scholar had helped produce, that catalyzed into an ardent challenge, with its own offer of new paradigms, new visions, and new ways of feeling/thinking about experience. Theory was once considered an arcane collection of logic; the universal underpinning for Western ways of knowing became a battle site enlivened by emerging and competing epistemological challenges. Theory became a vitalized site in a struggle to frame meaning. The producers of alternative ways of feeling/seeing/knowing peoples with colonized experiences already arrived. Christian knew this, but she would offer that she knew it differently. She thought that “people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. . . . Our theorizing . . . is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking.”6 She knew their “story-­ing” was integral to her people’s endurance: “How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?”7 Thus, she argued for us to understand the power and the values in our own language practices, rather than enter the race to acquire Western abstract logic. I consider her request here. I think of it as a necessary request, not always simple and more complex in practice. 34  |  Dian Million

As I have written elsewhere, American Indian, First Nations, and Indigenous scholars recognize orally based communal knowledges as organized epistemic systems that do exist and whose influence is active even though they might not be legitimized by academia.8 These systems are theory, since they posit a proposition and a paradigm on how the world works. Most important, indigenes have always had theories about their worlds and their lives and their communities, regardless of the disruption people suffered in confronting unprecedented change. These narratives may bear the marks of their production in chaos, but they cannot be ignored, since they too represent discursive strategy. These Indigenous concepts of how the world works, and how it came to be, can never be summarily dismissed. They work differently. Story has always been practical, strategic, and restorative. Story is Indigenous theory. If these knowledges are couched in narratives, then narratives are always more than telling stories. Narratives seek inclusion; they seek the nooks and crannies of experiences filling cracks and restoring order. Narratives lay boundaries. Narratives give orphans homes. Narratives both make links and are the links that have been made. Narratives are our desire to link one paradigmatic will to knowledge to discursive and material projects that have consequences. Narratives serve the same function as any theory, in that they are practical vision. Not least, Indigenous narratives are also emotionally empowered. They are informed with the affective content of our experience. The felt experience of  Indigenous experience in these Americas is in our narratives and that has made them almost unrecognizable to a Western scholarship that imagines itself objective. Academia is always a site of contestation, of struggle, a place where Native scholars have only been invited very recently, disciplined in the fields that we are supposed to use to examine our own lives and the lives of our families and communities. We occupy a place of unwritten rules, old implacable cultures, and high stakes. As Canadian residential school students stood to speak of their abuse in the 1990s, a number of Canadian historians immediately began to write critiques that would seek to contradict and undermine these emerging Native narratives. Why historians? The constitution of the categories that reduced a multiplicity to the subject “Indian” is indeed historical. Each act, negotiation, struggle, play, and defeat is part of the “knowledge and moments of history in which philosophical ideas are sometimes reformed and transformed,” as Linda Smith put it.9 Thus, ironically it is to history where all have gone to reconstitute what is known now. History in my analyses There Is a River in Me  |  35

will never be only the interminable chaos of “what happened”; it stands for the process that we go through to know, to find interpretation for what happened in terms that have relations with those whose history it is. From that we make propositions, and from that we attach our hopes, fears, and beliefs to dreaming and actualizing futures. It is an intense place, as I will continue to reiterate. Some fierceness in the struggle that goes on within the disciplinary site of academic history is not because it is invincibly impervious, particularly now, since those of us whose knowledges, experiences, and histories these are pose challenges to any reading that does not acknowledge the complexity of our presence. This, as we know, is because the playing field has also experienced ruptures; it is because any official way that this knowledge is argued into being is not immune any more to the effects of a radically multiplied field of enunciation. Indigenous truths are now told as often from multiple sites: from presses run out of storefronts in Toronto, or whispered in the streets of Minneapolis, or from the no longer “isolated” Yukon villages with their Internet access. As a colleague of mine said recently, “We talk.” “Yes,” I thought, “we do.” We also read, write, argue, and theorize. what matters is now laughter sweet and thick as blood flowing from your throat so that quietly you catch it some trick of the ear the murmur of water flowing hearts intent on now . . . so that sometimes i look real hard thinking i can feel the smooth substance running over my arms taste salt in the corners of my mouth . . . I think of theorizing as a part of a process of comprehension and reformulation, one that stimulates the creation of narratives and analytical narratives that are theoretical across a wide field of participation that is not necessarily bound by discipline. Why so? I have often used language to imagine theory as “practice [as] a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory as a relay from one practice to another, a linking.”10 36  |  Dian Million

Theories in this light are “essentially social,” in that they link certain ways of intuiting/feeling/thinking toward things to other ways of intuiting/ feeling/thinking. Theories also realign felt imagination at the parameters of the ways “things” are thought to be. Theories “function . . . as an intensifying fantasy” that may “invest all of an existing social field[,] including the latter’s most repressive forms.” Theories may “launch a counterinvestment.”11 This is not an act of accretion, but a strategic felt comprehension that has the power to change a paradigm, or reinvest a political movement with a new vision to act. This is the power of intense dreaming, of the felt intensification when boundaries shift and other views become available. Theoretical narratives mobilize boundaries of what can be felt, thought, and acted upon. I hold on then to the idea that theories are active felt-­ embodied narrative practices that inform mobile abstractions, traveling or migrating across certain kinds of seemingly reified knowledge domains, reorganizing boundaries as they go, claiming something—is something else. On that note, theory may also colonize. It is in the realm of public articulation where our singular and communal knowledges often become part of written knowledges that are positioned in relation with other Western narratives and discourses. In fact, most communities readily do this now. Thus, it is neither possible nor bene­ ficial to isolate any community-­produced “oral” meaning from the written production of those peoples, nor is it possible to view community-­produced narratives as isolated knowledge. There is a steady transformation in language among Indigenous scholars working now—peter cole for one. I like cole’s words, although to quote him extensively would be to decontextualize him, to reposition him in my academic narrative, ignoring the point that his Indigenous story/theory acts to subvert the kind of  Western academic knowledge practices that I write of and use. He writes: storytelling is a way of experiencing the world  rather than imposing decontextualized denotative ‘truth’  claims story is about historicizing culture  enculturing history  contextualizing like poetry and drama  storytelling is itself interpretation paddle paddle stroke paddle12 Thank you, peter cole. I perceive discourses spatially as potent mobile fields of felt meaning making where Native peoples are already fully engaged, whether or not any use the kind of language I work with here. Thus, I feel/think Indigenism as theory, the current intensely felt theory/ strategy of peoples who must deal with permanent settler states in their There Is a River in Me  |  37

own homelands (North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and so on). Indigenism is most certainly a project that creates relations between different Indigenous peoples and with other colonized peoples. Indigenist scholars seek to articulate their own positionalities in their own terms. Indigenism seeks relations with other friendly states and nongovernmental entities to reduce the ineluctable force of any dichotomous relationship to any colonizer’s nationalism. But, most important, Indigenism must be understood as a lateral and internal strategy to rebuild Indigenous social relations across hemispheres that are not merely reactive to any nation-­ state’s embrace. Indigenism is to acknowledge who the people are in their relations in this historical moment, to elude the embrace I highlighted. Indigenism is to define our selves, rather than be defined. That is an active doing, the imagining and revisioning of an Indigenism that is never, never static. We are constantly eluding frames, and bringing our own knowing with us, carefully parsing our experiences. It is paramount that we be awake to the potentia, the knowledge in any moment. In Joy Harjo’s poem “A Postcolonial Tale,” she writes: “Every day is a reenactment of the creation story. We emerge from dense unspeakable material, through the shimmering power of dreaming stuff / . . . Once we abandoned ourselves for television, the box that separates the dreamer from the dreaming. It was as if we were stolen, put into a bag carried on the back of a whiteman who pretends to own the earth and the sky . . . We fought until there was a hole in the bag . . . The imagining needs praise as does any living thing. Stories and songs are like humans who when they laugh are indestructible.”13 The television is a good metaphor for the way corporate dream machines project desire and meaning into our lives and transform our consciousness. You may fight to make a hole in the bag, but in the end you must claim your own stories and your own affective power in dreaming and (re)visioning the stories that change but are indestructible, such as laughter’s power to transform us to joy. I struggled for a word to speak of the complexity of relations we call into being in this revisioning I speak of and the word valence came to mind. I thought carefully before using the English word valence, because it is primarily a scientific word that indicates the “combined power of an element.” Yet the term works if  I explain how Indigenism comes into being because of the dense relations we envision, remember, create, and invest in Indigenism now. Beyond Indigenism’s symbolic positioning of our new global relations with other peoples for which land is a spiritual experience, valence denotes the vested position that Indigenism in its plural, Indigenous societ38  |  Dian Million

ies, takes against a world capitalism that seeks to commodify and own life itself.14 Regardless of any conflicts within any particular Indigenous political practice, Indigenism is a position that is active visioning of a present belief, valenced and mobilized as life exceeding life, not to be contained by or within capitalism’s voracious appetites. It is an Indigenous politic that imagines humans in relation with life’s potential rather than as masters. It is the imaginary that Indigenous peoples hold to when they attach to a future beyond a present that is increasingly ensconced within a medicalized thera­ peutic diagnosis of our colonial wounding. It is the felt home of our desires to bring life into being in a world increasingly occupied by a necropolitic.15 We are always part of someone else’s theory or our own, depending on how we will feel/vision it. In Canada and the United States a theory that has started to prevail is that we have an illness, trauma, and that we must heal. What our “wounds” actually are and how we heal, we must consider carefully. We must consider what this theory tells us about our selves and what we might need to tell others about this theory. In Northern Athabascan Survival: Women, Community and the Future, Phyllis Fast, who is Athabascan, points out that “discourses related to social pathology are culturally potentiated to provide terms that fit mainstream American ideas of  Native Americans.”16 Against bleak statistics that quantify Northern Athabascan suffering, Fast suggests that we look for a more nuanced and complex understanding. The Gwich’in that Fast lived among and spoke to in the early 1990s articulated their pain “to political and economic hegemony,” not necessarily “illnesses” such as alcoholism and “outcomes” like suicide. Fast suggests there is a dissonance between their community explanation and the common institutionalized medical categories of pathology that dominate the conversation on contemporary Athabascan health. The Gwich’ins spoke of values, vat’aii and of yinjih, of survival and strength. These are ethical cores of northern Athabascans that are practiced and perceived in everyday personal and communal actions across and against the medical languages that demarcate modern Alaskan Native experience. These values exist, not in an unchanging oral tradition necessarily, or in an unchanging world, but in change, in the moment by moment struggle to live Gwich’in meaning into another day. These Northern communities neither deny nor ignore epidemic diseases such as diabetes and alcoholism. Nor do they ignore the violence within. Because of the Internet, they make relations globally. They are similar to myriad other Indigenous communities now, positioned locally, nationally, and internationally in the great political agonisms of the present. As with There Is a River in Me  |  39

other communities rural and urban across North America, these Northern communities increasingly participate in speaking to, as well as acting on, issues of great intimacy put in public: suicide, domestic abuse, child abuse, sexual abuse, and incest. Their own advocacy now extends well beyond any one Indigenous culture or nation-­state boundary. It is not victimhood that they actually articulate. It is a struggle to live Indigenous lives on Gwich’in terms within the felt affective morally positioned languages of our times. The residential school discourse is at its heart about colonization as abuse, in so many forms it would be impossible to name them here. To understand how Indigenous and First Nations peoples came to speak of three generations of abuse in their own time, to change Canada’s official story, its discourse, is to acknowledge both historical formations and those languages that would make speech possible now. Those academic languages (abuse, victim) that created a space for the residential school survivors to speak are part of the intricate sexual and gendered construction of nation so basic to the violence done to Indigenous peoples, to life as relationship and being. However, it was these Indigenous people’s much larger and older belief in life, in being Shuswap, or in being Cree, that I bring to the fore here. Indigenous peoples reached to the life-­a ffirming stories of their enduring experience in these places, these places that are inhabited by our ghosts, our spirits, the spirits of the potentia, the life force itself. They are people transformed, and transforming, living what they mean by any healing. It is from this potential, the potential of our proposition for other ways of being and living, that we generate and attach ourselves to our intensely dreamed future, always becoming. Thus, sometimes when this stream overflows . . . right now to survive means something to me because further upstream someone may wade out again appear from the mouth of a log appear on the land again all clean from the water dancing through the soft evening light 40  |  Dian Million

gathering bones: our laughter will be as thick as the birds who fly from the trees at dawn Notes

1. Throughout the chapter are excerpts from my unpublished unnamed poem. This is a poem that could be named “A River Runs through Us.” Rivers generally formed the lifeblood of where I came from, and so I offer rivers as an apt suggestive metaphor for life force and my desire and will to life. The poem runs through this article to contrast and interrupt the linear academic style of the work I necessarily do here for this volume. 2. I do this notation feel/think, feel/link, and so on, to signify my understanding that the affective precedes any thought or meaning making. This is in power­ ful agreement with knowing, understood in many Indigenous communities as “coming from the heart,” i.e., their felt intuitive knowledge rather than any solely rationalized logic. Also, in this paragraph I use the term “residential school.” A residential school is the same kind of colonial educational institution that the Indian boarding schools established in the United States were and are. The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996. See John Sheridan Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879–­1986 (Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press, 1999). 3. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 64. 4. I do this work with a commitment to a certain kind of theorizing, an organic commitment to work from the ground up. I try to work with an attention to language—to listen for the way that people make meanings from the various meanings that are “always already” available and the way they reach to move beyond these meanings. I began to think of this as languaging, a word that I (re)visioned, changing language from a noun to verb, in order to accent the active process that we engage to reconceptualize. It is the process that Gloria Bird and Joy Harjo put in their cogent languaging as they moved to “reinvent the enemy’s language.” It can here stand here for a moment to posit the work to find Indigenous conceptualizations—that always very present effort to language our own languages and concepts in the attempt to articulate and rearticulate the now dense playing field of  Indigenous political and social action. For Gloria Bird and Joy Harjo’s statement on how they see language reinvention, see Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2007). 5. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique 6 (1987). There Is a River in Me  |  41

6. Christian, “The Race for Theory,” 52. 7. Christian, “The Race for Theory,” 52. 8. Part of this chapter appears in another form previously published as Dian Million, “Intense Dreaming: Theories, Narratives, and Our Search for Home,” American Indian Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2011). Also see Dian Million, “Felt Theory: An Indigenist Feminist Approach to Affect and History,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009). 9. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London and New York: Zed Books, 2002), 44. 10. I have often cited this quote from Timothy S. Murphy, “Quantum Ontology: A Virtual Mechanics of Becoming,” in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 214. However, Murphy is actually citing Gilles Deleuze in two separate instances. Thus, the original quote is from Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-­Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Daniel F. Bouchard, trans. Daniel F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 206. 11. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti- ­Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (New York: Viking, 1977), 30. 12. Peter Cole, Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing, Coming Home to the Village, Native and Northern Series (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2006), xiv. 13. Joy Harjo, The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: Poems (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), 18. 14. For an amazing account this capitalization of life in biotechnology industries and their integral positioning to neoliberal capital growth, see Melinda Cooper’s Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of  Washington Press, 2008). 15. For an account of necropolitics, see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003). 16. Phyllis Ann Fast, Northern Athabascan Survival: Women, Community, and the Future (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 2002).

42  |  Dian Million

T WO  | 

Teresia Teaiwa

The Ancestors We Get to Choose White Influences I Won’t Deny

The title of this chapter addresses concepts of both identity and intellectual genealogy in Pacific Studies, which is the field in which I work. As we describe it in our program publicity and literature at Te Whare Wānanga o Te Ūpoko o te Ika a Māui, Victoria University of Wellington, “Pacific Studies is an interdisciplinary programme of study that is international and cross-­cultural in scope.”1 Also known as Pacific Islands Studies at other institutions, this subfield of area studies can take as its broadest geopolitical boundary markers Timor Leste, West Papua, and the Philippines to the west; Aotearoa (New Zealand) to the south; Rapanui (Easter Island) to the east; and Hawai‘i to the north. However, the history of diasporic movements of  Pacific peoples beyond the Pacific, which intensified in the twentieth century and continues in the twenty-­fi rst, has meant that Pacific Studies has to account for ever expanding cultural geographies. Pacific Studies needs to be understood as a project that is distinct from Native studies, because the former is about an inherently plural space—the region—whereas the latter is often focused on a single nation or ethnicity.2 But as Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui argue, the existence of Pacific diasporas simultaneously requires and has been productive of an analytical approach that is attentive to what is both Native and Pacific about the new cultural and intellectual spaces in which diasporic Pacific people find themselves.3 This chapter may be read, therefore, as a reckoning with what is Native about Pacific Studies; it is also, inevitably, a subversion of it. It has been routinely acknowledged in both anthropological scholarship on Pacific cultures and biographical and theoretical writing by Pacific Islands scholars that genealogy is central to the formation of Pacific subjectivity.4 In response to works by Pacific Islands scholars, there have also

emerged some clear expressions of suspicion and anxiety around the potentially fascist or ethno-­nationalist turns in the use of genealogical (often conflated with genetic) discourse.5 Such anxieties, however, often fail to account for one of the foundational characteristics of kinship in the Pacific— the capacity (and, indeed, in some cases the preference) for assimilating Otherness through a variety of means that have genealogical implications: adoption, feeding, the exchange of land, titles, gifts, and names.6 So let me perform some moves to authenticate myself as a Native Indigenous person. In the culture of my father’s people, te I-­Banaba, from the central Pacific Islands of Kiribati, there is no such thing as being part Banaban. You either are or you aren’t Banaban. Mixed blood does not lessen one’s claim to being Banaban or one’s authority as a Banaban. As a result, intermarriage is not threatening to Banaban people. But Banabans have never been satisfied with intermarriage as a way of strengthening their gene pool. A key feature of our social organization is adoption.7 But adoption in our culture is not just about adults adopting children. Among Banabans, it is common for adults to be adopted as children, and for adults to be adopted as siblings. What seals the deal in an adoption is the allocation of land to the adopted person. In our knowledge system, land is equivalent to blood. So when land is given to a newly adopted member of a family, it is for all intents and purposes a blood transfusion. The adopted family member now has the blood of the family.8 My second authenticating move is to invoke the words of someone with whom I am not related by blood (or land), but whom I consider an elder—a recently deceased elder from the Cook Islands, a group of Polynesian islands east of New Zealand and west of French Polynesia. Papa Tom Davis was of mixed European and Rarotongan heritage. His distinguished international career is marked by his becoming the first Cook Islander to graduate from a New Zealand medical school; his being a yachting enthusiast; his employment as a scientist at Harvard, as nutritionist for nasa, and as the second prime minister of the Cook Islands; and as a key figure in the revitalization of the Cook Islands heritage of oceangoing canoe building and navigation. It was in this last area of interest that Papa Tom was most irreverent and iconoclastic: when selecting a design for one of the first oceangoing canoes that he would lead Cook Islanders to build in the twentieth century, he did not choose an authentic Cook Island design; instead he chose to replicate a Fijian traditional vessel called a drua. After having difficulties with sourcing natural materials for and maintaining wooden canoes, he was recorded saying, “If my ancestors had fiberglass they would 44  |  Teresia Teaiwa

have used it.”9 Papa Tom passed away in 2007, and he was mourned not only by his family and Cook Islanders but across the Pacific, and by Pacific peoples and others around the world. So in addition to invoking an elder, I have invoked someone who has joined the ancestors—a doubly authenticating move in many Indigenous worlds. But the elder and ancestor I have invoked was not someone who slavishly pursued Indigenous authenticity for its own sake. The two moves of authentication that I have used simultaneously function to destabilize certain notions of and about indigeneity. When education itself is often coded as a process of “whitening” for Indigenous communities, it sometimes seems that “we” should emphasize Indigenous influences over others in our lives.10 Without intending to marginalize my Indigenous intellectual ancestors, I direct my reflection here toward the implications of being influenced by white theorists, explicitly acknowledging that influence, and critically mobilizing that influence in my work as a teacher of undergraduate students in Pacific Studies. In order to appreciate how I came to take the particular approach that I do as a teacher, however, some background on my own academic trajectory may help. I grew up in the early post-­independence period in the Pacific Islands of Fiji, in a population where white people were a small minority whose social and political privileges were evident but not entirely enviable, perhaps because the Eurocentric effects of the formal education system that prevailed in the islands were ameliorated by a multicultural cadre of teachers, who had a sufficient degree of ambivalence about the ultimate costs of complete westernization. Fiji, I believe, gave me a combination of resilience and confidence as a person of color, so that when I arrived in the United States to undertake undergraduate studies, I was neither awed by nor resentful of banal assumptions of white supremacy. I should also add that I did not arrive in the United States with a sense of entitlement, and was keenly aware of the sacrifices that enabled me to bridge the world of my father in Fiji, and the one that my mother had come from in the United States. I earned a ba in history, with a minor in Spanish and political science, from a women’s Catholic liberal arts college in Washington, DC. A political theory professor, someone with whom I had studied only in my last semester as an undergraduate, nominated me for election to Phi Beta Kappa just before I graduated. Although I did not feel as if  I had been especially adept in her course, she seemed to like the way I engaged European political thought from Plato to Marx. I do not know if my professor realized it, but had it not been for Marx, I probably would not have become interThe Ancestors We Get to Choose  |  45

ested in political theory in the first place. And it was significant that I had been introduced to Marx, not through the pages of a university syllabus, but through friends I had made in the Socialist Worker Party when I had been on a study abroad program during my sophomore year. While I do not require my students in Pacific Studies to read Marx, my own reading of his theory has profoundly influenced the way I think and teach. I went on to complete an ma in history at the University of  Hawai‘i; my major field of study was Pacific history and my minor field of study was European intellectual history. A catalytic experience for me as part of the ma, however, was taking an elective course in the Hawaiian Studies Department—Haunani-­K ay Trask’s first ever decolonization seminar. Trask assigned readings by revolutionary writers from outside the Pacific, such as Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, and important activists and theorists of sovereignty and independence movements inside the Pacific, such as Donna Awatere from Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Susanna Ounei from Kanaky, New Caledonia. Among the compelling lineup of writers and activists of color that Trask required her students to read was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci; and as I will discuss presently, I have endeavored to continue her tradition. After Hawai‘i, my educational journey took me to the University of  California, Santa Cruz, where I enrolled in a PhD in History of Consciousness. Those who know the reputation of that interdisciplinary program will understand how its students might appear to have overdosed on theory— I certainly found myself reeling often from the potent cocktails of cultural studies, discourse analysis, women-­of-­color feminism, and postcolonial theory I encountered there. As a result of this eclectic educational background, and in spite of falling victim to occasional bouts of nationalism and reverse racism (usually in reaction to the heightened oppositional identity politics of the US academy in the 1990s), my experience of theory has mostly been one of valuing ideas, and in particular valuing the ability to identify connections and resonances and distinguish gaps and contradictions between models and proposals. I do not like theory when it is used as a weapon. I especially dislike theory when it is used like a silencer on a gun. I prefer to see and use theory as a frame, a magnifying glass, a key, a plow, a sail, an oar. Theory is like fiberglass as well—I have found, like Papa Tom, that it can get you where you want to go, faster. So I now teach Pacific Studies at Victoria University of  Wellington (also known as vuw or Victoria), in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Having outlined a bit of my own educational pedigree, the parts of the genealogy of Pacific 46  |  Teresia Teaiwa

Studies that I want to share here are profoundly patriarchal, masculine, and significantly white. I admit this but make no apologies for it because I am now sharing the genealogy outside of the specific pedagogical and curricular context in which I introduce students to Pacific Studies. Suffice it to say that on average our students are exposed to more writings and works by Native and Indigenous Pacific scholars, writers, artists, and activists than others. The thoughts I put forward in this chapter arise out of  Pacific Studies— a field of academic practices that turns sixty-­t hree years old in 2013. It is a comparatively young field in relation to the more established fields of science, mathematics, and classics in the Western academy. David Shorter described the 2007 and 2008 gatherings of a critical mass of scholars joined in critical reflection (Who are we? Where are we going?) as a point of maturation for a movement, which culminated in the formalization of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. In contrast, practitioners in the field of Pacific Studies have largely resisted engaging in such collective self-­reflexivity; while we have enthusiastically embraced opportunities to share our research specializations in academic conferences, there have been few attempts to thoroughly interrogate the project of Pacific Studies itself.11 In fact, what remains the most lucid intellectual stock-­take of the field, in my opinion, is an article from 1995 by a white male practitioner in the field, Terence Wesley-­Smith. In his landmark work, “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies,” Wesley-­ Smith charts the emergence of Pacific Studies in metropolitan universities (the University of Hawai‘i and the Australian National University) during the post–World War II period and describes three rationales for the establishment and development of these and subsequent programs. The first rationale for Pacific Studies is “pragmatic,” shaped by metropolitan-­colonial and neocolonial interests and ostensibly aimed at getting to know “one’s friends as well as one’s enemies.” The pragmatic rationale generated research on behalf of the state, or in the national interest.12 The second rationale for Pacific Studies that Wesley-­Smith identifies is “laboratory,” and is predicated on what were presumed to be the ideal conditions for conducting scientific and social scientific research: mostly small and relatively isolated island societies. The laboratory rationale was attractive to and conducive for discipline-­based studies.13 The third rationale is “empowerment.” Pacific Studies in this scenario can no longer primarily be about abstracted or objectified knowledge about the Pacific Islands or peoples; the academic field must instead contribute to advancing the best interests of the region. The Ancestors We Get to Choose  |  47

The empowerment rationale for Pacific Studies involves research by and for Pacific peoples, and as a result, the very terms for academic research are also called into question. In a Pacific Studies project shaped by the empowerment rationale, the methods, standards, form, and content are no longer taken as given by the academy. Simple competence—or even excellence— in existing academic standards may be a source of empowerment for some Pacific Studies students and scholars; for others, what is desired is nothing less than a transformation of the field.14 Surprisingly, Wesley-­Smith’s article has not been taken up very much by people who claim to be working in Pacific Studies. An issue of the journal Contemporary Pacific (a top-­tier refereed journal in Pacific studies), published to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i, contains few references to his article.15 Ironically, Wesley-­Smith was coeditor of the volume—he is a modest man! He is a white man. Wesley-­Smith is also a graduate of vuw. When students enter our program and take the first-­year introductory course “The Pacific Heritage,” I recount for them a genealogy of Pacific Studies at vuw. For me it is crucial that our students get a sense very early on that they become heirs to a specific academic tradition when they enroll. In the genealogical recitation that they are given, one of the early founding fathers is a man named J. C. Beaglehole. I tell my students how Beaglehole graduated from our university in 1924 before he went on to complete a PhD at the London School of Economics. After completing his PhD, Beaglehole returned to Victoria, where he taught until his retirement in 1966. He became world famous for editing, annotating, and publishing the journals of James Cook’s expeditions to the Pacific; it was a process that took him seventeen years to complete.16 These volumes have been the most reprinted and best-­selling New Zealand texts of all time—essential references for Pacific historians and iconic texts in Pacific Studies. While I acknowledge the ambivalence, if not antipathy, with which many Native Hawaiian scholars and activists regard Cook, the truth is that it is precisely because of the work that Beaglehole did to bring Cook’s journals to new generations of readers that we are able to critically engage the age of European exploration in our region.17 In 1970 when Beaglehole was awarded the British Order of Merit, an honor accorded to only 24 living recipients, the university recognized his achievements by naming its library’s rare and special collections after him. However, Beaglehole’s academic career had not been without struggle: as an avid believer in academic freedom, and as someone who had criticized attempts to persecute communists in the academy, he had faced 48  |  Teresia Teaiwa

several disheartening professional obstacles.18 Beaglehole was a hardworking man. He was a white man. Chronologically, the next most significant figure in our genealogy of Pacific Studies is another white man, J. W. Davidson. Davidson graduated from Victoria in 1938. He went on to a doctoral program at Cambridge, which he completed in 1942, and a few years later he was offered the first-­ever professorial chair in Pacific history at the newly established Australian National University. As chair in Pacific history, Davidson also became the first director of the Research School in Pacific Studies, and he gathered around him an energetic cohort of graduate students whom he promptly dispatched to go off to research and write up historical investigations of the Pacific. Much like their mentor, many of these students (mostly white) were on fire with a fervent post–World War II belief in rights to self-­determination. Davidson’s magnum opus was provocatively titled Samoa mo Samoa (Samoa for Samoans).19 He advocated centering the islands in historical research and writing about the Pacific; this went against the grain of imperialist and Euro-­centered work that Beaglehole and previous generations of historians had produced. On account of the generosity and sincerity that Davidson displayed in both his written work and his relationships with Samoans, he was invited to help author the constitution of the independent nation-­state of  Western Samoa.20 In fact, Davidson was such a widely trusted man across the Pacific that when Papua New Guinea—another nation of fiercely proud and astute people—was approaching its own independence, Davidson was invited to participate in its constitutional convention as well. Sadly, he died in a car crash while in Papua New Guinea for that purpose in 1973.21 Davidson was a man whom Pacific Islanders trusted. He was a white man. One of Davidson’s many Australian National University students was another graduate of Victoria, a man widely known as Papa Ron Crocombe. Crocombe graduated from Victoria with an ma in 1957, and early in the 1960s he went over to Canberra to study with Davidson. Crocombe’s PhD research was on land tenure in the Cook Islands, and the monograph he developed from that stands as the most authoritative work on the subject to this day.22 Surpassing Davidson in his dedication to “island-­centered” approaches to the Pacific, Crocombe became a zealous advocate for the publication of Pacific voices and analyses. When he became the first director of the Institute for Pacific Studies established at the University of the South Pacific in 1976, that was his mandate. He was almost rabid in his pursuit of Pacific authors to publish. He did not care if they were formally eduThe Ancestors We Get to Choose  |  49

cated or not—his mission was to record, disseminate, and validate Pacific knowledge and perspectives. Tributes on his sudden passing at the age of seventy-­nine in 2009 noted that under his watchful eye, the Institute of  Pacific Studies had published more than 1,700 Pacific Islanders.23 Crocombe believed in an islander-­centered Pacific Studies. Yet he was a white man. The first brown man to appear in the genealogy of Pacific Studies that I present to my first-­year students is the Samoan novelist and professor of English Albert Wendt, who graduated from Victoria with both his ba and ma in history in the 1960s. Wendt is profoundly influential on the field and on my own thought and teaching.24 And of course, the majority of students are able to identify with him to a certain extent because he is brown. (The average class size for this first-­year course is sixty-­five, of which about 60 percent are of Pacific Island heritage, about 10 percent are Maori, and about 5 percent are Asian, and at least 25 percent are white.) In spite of these demo­ graphics, I resist the urge to locate Wendt at the beginning of the genealogy of Pacific Studies. For me, it is important that my students are able to see through both this recitation and their own reading of  Wesley-­Smith’s article that the origins of the field that we inherit at university are unavoidably white and colonial. There is nothing wrong with admitting that. To deny it and try to locate the origins of Pacific Studies in some pure Indigenous intellectual activity that predates universities would be disingenuous. To deny the white origins of the field would also be to deny the extra­ ordinary political, intellectual, and academic activism of the white men and later the native Pacific Islander academics and intellectuals who have helped shape the field. For me, acknowledging the significance of all their work is critical to helping my students understand and deconstruct whiteness. By introducing my students to white men who advocated for self-­r ule and the independence of Pacific Islands states, and by introducing my students to white men such as Crocombe, who could be as ornery as he was helpful to the Pacific Islander students and academics who reached out to him, they start to understand that whiteness is not monolithic. It is not just the brown students who need to understand this either; the white students need models for both performing and deconstructing their own whiteness. More than anything, however, the reason that I present students with this genealogy in this order is so they can see themselves in relation to the students who have gone before them. What is most powerful about this genealogy is that it is a genealogy of thinkers who started out as students—just like our students. We are incredibly endowed at vuw with this rich intellectual history; more than any other university in New Zealand, it has been 50  |  Teresia Teaiwa

our vuw ancestors who have made some of the most significant impacts on the field of Pacific Studies, from Beaglehole to Davidson to Crocombe, Wendt, and Wesley-­Smith. In case the androcentrism of this genealogy causes the reader to worry, please be assured that it is balanced and disrupted by my stacking of strong women-­centered and Indigenous texts and conscientiously critical pedagogies throughout this course and the others that make up the Pacific Studies major at Victoria. Furthermore, and as testament to the students’ discernment and construction of a broader genealogy of thought for themselves, when given an opportunity to write an essay for their major assignment in “The Pacific Heritage,” describing any one of the thinkers or writers they have come across in the course as the students’ closest intellectual kin in Pacific Studies, the most popular choices in the last five years have been a Native Hawaiian woman (Haunani-­K ay Trask), a Samoan woman (Lonise Tanielu), and a man of Tongan descent (Epeli Hau‘ofa), none of whom studied at Victoria. The ethos of adoption is strong in our Pacific Studies students. What is interesting to me is that my students rarely question why a white man is in my genealogy of Pacific Studies, or why a white person’s work is assigned as a course text, as long as the white man or white woman is writing about the Pacific. Even if they might disagree with a white author, even if they might prefer to read the Indigenous writers I also assign, my students, brown and white, can see the logic of having white people’s work in our syllabus if the white people are working on the Pacific. But what happens when I ask them to read Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Antonio Gramsci, or John Berger? In “Framing the Pacific: Theorising Culture and Society,” we take our final-­year students through an extended exercise in framing and theorizing the work of artists and activists in the Pacific. Whenever I have taught the course, I assign excerpts from Rousseau, Hobbes, Gramsci, and occasionally Berger. They are not writing about the Pacific—Rousseau might mention the “savages” of America, Gramsci might refer to Asiatic peoples, but by and large, these theorists are writing in the realm of abstraction and generalization. And although Gramsci’s Italian heritage could locate him in a liminal space of whiteness, as far as students of Pacific heritage in New Zealand are concerned, at least initially, he and the other European theorists they are encountering are palagi (white).25 In “Framing the Pacific,” I ask the students if they recognize anything from what Gramsci describes in his chapter “The Intellectuals” in their The Ancestors We Get to Choose  |  51

own communities.26 Usually the students respond by saying, “You must be kidding—this thing was impossible to read!” But then I explain to them that in spite of a family background of poverty and struggle and being the fourth of seven children, Gramsci took every opportunity for education offered to him; that he loved writing theater reviews, he was arrested not long after becoming a member of the legislature, and he was imprisoned for ten years, during which he wrote The Prison Notebooks and had to do so in a code so that the prison guards would not easily understand. In response the students make all sorts of noises in sympathy and return to the next class flushed and invigorated from having had a thorough workout on Gramsci. “Gramsci had it hard when he was young—just like us!” “He was a white man, but man, he was cool!” The students come back being able to identify the church ministers in their communities as “traditional intellectuals”; they come back asking whether I would consider tufuga tatatau (tattoo artists) to be “traditional” or “organic” intellectuals; they reckon that hip-­hop artists are “organic” intellectuals, for sure. Gramsci has been integral to our teaching program for our final-year students. Gramsci helps us to see how other theories with white origins might be shaping or manipulating us into consent. Gramsci helps us to think about culture in very politicized ways. Gramsci opens the door for my students—not just to theory (as something to learn or apply) but to theorizing (as something to do for themselves). For me, his particular chapter on the intellectuals is a provocation to my students and me to think about what our endeavors at the university are about. Am I here to produce students who become traditional intellectuals (technicians, bureaucrats, agents of the status quo)? Am I here to produce organic intellectuals (individuals who can serve as the mouthpieces and public-­relations agents of change for the specific communities with whom they identify and by whom they are claimed)? Whom do my students think they will become? One thing is for sure: I need to equip them for either or both possibilities. I must give them the skills to be competent in the status quo, and I need to give them the tools to work for change—to do only one or the other would be criminal by my own moral and ethical code. No matter what, Gramsci has become one of those ancestors we in Pacific Studies get to choose. We get to adopt him. We get to make him ours. If we want. My students get to take him or leave him behind when they graduate. And if they choose to leave him behind, they can always come back to get him later. That is sovereignty. Engaging broadly with theory and theorists of all kinds is part of exer52  |  Teresia Teaiwa

cising intellectual agency and is a necessary foundation for achieving fuller self-­determination for Native and Indigenous and Pacific peoples in the academy. Sovereign intellectuals have nothing to lose by admitting that some white men, white women, and white people are part of our genealogies of thinking whether we like it or not. Some white men, white women, white people, are the ancestors we get to choose. Notes

1. “Study and Careers,” Va’aomanū Pasifika, Victoria University of  Wellington, accessed October 7, 2013, http://www.victoria.ac.nz/pasifika/study. 2. Teresia K. Teaiwa, “Lo(o)sing the Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of  Island Affairs 13, no. 2 (2001): 343–­57; and Teresia K. Teaiwa, “Specifying Pacific Studies: For or Before an Asia-­Pacific Studies Agenda,” in Remaking Area Studies: Teaching and Learning Across Asia and the Pacific, ed. Terence Wesley-­Smith and Jon Goss (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 110–­124. 3. Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of  Island Affairs 13, no. 2 (2001): 315–­342. 4. For anthropological scholarship, see, e.g., Raymond Firth, We, the Tikopia: A Sociological Study of Kinship in Primitive Polynesia (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936); Per Hage and Frank Harary, Island Networks: Communication, Kinship, and Classification of Structures in Oceania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Antony Hooper, Why Tikopia Has Four Clans (London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1981); and Margaret Mead, Kinship in the Admiralty Islands, with a New Introduction by Jeanne Guillemin (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). For biographical and theoretical writing by Pacific Islands scholars, see, e.g., Vilsoni Hereniko, “Representations of Cultural Identities,” in Tides of History: The Pacific Islands in the Twentieth Century, ed. K. Howe, R. Kiste, and B. Lal (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994), 406–­34; Ty P. Kawika Tengan, Tevita O. Ka‘ili, and Rochelle Fonoti, “Genealogies: Articulating Indigenous Anthropology in/of Oceania,” Pacific Studies 33, nos. 2–3 (2010): 139–­67; and Haunani-­K ay Trask, “From a Native Daughter,” in The American Indian and the Problem of History, ed. Calvin Martin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 171–­79. 5. Roger M. Keesing, “Reply to Trask,” The Contemporary Pacific 3, no. 1 (1991): 168–­171; Jocelyn Linnekin, “Text Bites and the R­Word: The Politics of Representing Scholarship,” The Contemporary Pacific 3, no. 1 (1991): 172–­177; and Doug Munro, “Who Owns Pacific History? Reflections on the Insider/ Outsider Dichotomy,” The Journal of Pacific History 29, n0.2 (1994): 232–­37. 6. J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery Volumes 1–­4 (Cambridge, UK: Hakluyt Society at the University The Ancestors We Get to Choose  |  53

Press, 1955–­74); Firth, We, the Tikopia and Branislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Dutton, 1961). 7. Raobeia Ken Sigrah and Stacy King, Te Rii ni Banaba (Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, the University of the South Pacific, 2001), 61. 8. Martin G. Silverman, “Banaban Adoption,” In Adoption in Eastern Oceania, ed. Vern Carroll (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1970). 9. See, e.g., Sean Mallon, Samoan Art and Artists: O Measina a Samoa (Nelson, New Zealand: Craig Potton, 2002), 10. 10. James T. Carroll, “The Smell of the White Man Is Killing Us: Education and Assimilation among Indigenous Peoples,” US Catholic Historian 27, no. 1 (2009): 21–­48; and Karen Lupe, “An Ocean with Many Shores: Indigenous Consciousness and the Thinking Heart,” in Penina Uliuli: Contemporary Challenges in Mental Health for Pacific Peoples, ed. Philip Culbertson, Margaret Nelson Agee, and Cabrini Ofa Makasiale (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 124. 11. Teaiwa, “Lo(o)sing the Edge”; and Teaiwa, “Specifying Pacific Studies.” 12. Terence Wesley-­Smith, “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies,” Pacific Studies 18, no. 2 (1995): 117–­21. 13. Wesley-­Smith, “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies,” 121–­2 4. 14. Wesley-­Smith, “Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies,” 124–­2 6. 15. Vilsoni Hereniko and Terence Wesley-­Smith, eds., “Back to the Future: Decolonizing Pacific Studies,” special issue, The Contemporary Pacific 15, no. 1 (2003). 16. J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Journals of Captain James Cook on His Voyages of Discovery, Volumes 1–­4. 17. See Pauline Nawahineokala‘i King, “Some Thoughts on Native Hawaiian Attitudes towards Captain Cook,” in Captain Cook: Explorations and Re­ assessments, ed. Glyndwr Williams (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2004), 94–­109. 18. Rachel Barrowman, Victoria University of Wellington 1899–­1999: A History (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 1999), 53–­53; Timothy Beaglehole, A Life of JC Beaglehole: New Zealand Scholar (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, 2006). 19. James Wightman Davidson, Samoa Mo Samoa: The Emergence of the Independent State of  Western Samoa (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). 20. Doug Munro, “J.W. Davidson and Western Samoa: University Politics and the Travails of a Constitutional Advisor,” The Journal of Pacific History 35, no. 2 (2000): 195–­211. 21. O. H. K. Spate, “And Now There Will Be a Void: A Tribute to J.W. Davidson,” Journal of Pacific Studies 20 (1996): 21–­22. 22. R. G. Crocombe, Land Tenure in the Cook Islands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971).

54  |  Teresia Teaiwa

23. See, for example, “Ron Crocombe, a Great Friend of  Pacific Peoples,” Cooks Library and Museum Society, February 27, 2010, accessed October 7, 2013, http://cookislandslibraryandmuseum.blogspot.co.nz/2010/02/ron-­crocombe -­g reat-­f riend-­of-­pacific.html. 24. The New Oceania: Albert Wendt, Writer, dir. Shirley Horrocks (Auckland: Point of View Productions, 2006), videodisc; and Teresia Teaiwa and Selina Tusitala Marsh, “Albert Wendt’s Critical and Creative Legacy in Oceania: An Introduction,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of  Island Affairs 22, no. 2 (2010): 233–­48. 25. Gaia Giuliani, “Whose Whiteness? Cultural Dis-­locations between Italy and Australia,” in Transmediterranean: Diaspora, Histories, Geopolitical Spaces, ed. Joseph Pugliese (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2010), 125–­38. 26. Antonio Gramsci, “The Intellectuals,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971, 1st edition), 3–­23.

The Ancestors We Get to Choose  |  55

T H R E E   | 

Glen Coulthard

From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh

To think about distant places, to colonize them, to populate or depopulate them: all of this occurs on, about, or because of  land. The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about. —Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

In this chapter I assess the critical utility of Marx’s primitive-­accumulation thesis for developing an understanding of the dynamics that continue to shape the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state in Canada. It must be noted, however, that this discussion constitutes only part of a much broader research project in which I map the contours of what has been a crucial shift in the operation of colonial power following the surge of  Indigenous protest that occurred in response to the federal government’s Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy (also known as the “White Paper 1969”) in 1969. As I have argued elsewhere, in the wake of this period of activism, the colonial architecture that frames Indigenous and state relations began to shift from a structure primarily reinforced by policies, techniques, and ideologies explicitly oriented around the exclusion and assimilation of Indigenous peoples to a structure that is now reproduced through a seemingly more conciliatory set of languages and practices that emphasize recognition and accommodation.1 Regardless of this modification, however, the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state has remained colonial to the foundation, and an appropriately modified version of Marx’s primitive-­accumulation thesis provides a useful frame to develop a critical understanding of what this entails. The argument presented in this chapter is broken into five sections and a

conclusion. In the first section, I provide a brief outline of Marx’s primitive-­ accumulation thesis and propose three modifications to it that are required to make it more relevant to an analysis of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state in Canada. In the remaining sections, I provide a case study in which I examine the process of primitive accumulation as experienced by the Dene peoples of the Northwest Territories, Canada. These sections are meant to illuminate in concrete terms the theoretical discussion provided in the first section. More specifically, in the second section, I examine the changing social, political, and economic context within and against which the Dene self-­determination movement emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. In the third section, I examine the cultural foundation undergirding the Dene Nation’s critique of capitalist imperialism as expressed at the public hearings of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry between 1975 and 1977. In the fourth and fifth sections, I show how a similar critique came to inform the demand for recognition in the Dene Declaration of 1975, as well as the three subsequent land-­claims proposals submitted by the Dene Nation to the federal government in 1976, 1977, and 1981. All four of these articulations of recognition were informed by a place-­based ethics that fundamentally challenged the assumed legitimacy of colonial sovereignty over, and capitalist social relations on, Dene territories. And finally I examine some of the effects that the negotiation of land claims has had on this place-­based ethics, and how these effects have in turn shaped the contemporary trajectory of  Indigenous politics in northern Canada toward neocolonial ends. Taken together, these sections will show how the process of primitive accumulation has been at least in part facilitated by the very mechanism of recognition that we hoped might shield the Dene land and communities from it: land claims. On Primitive Accumulation

What do I mean by colonial relationship? For my purposes here, a colonial relationship is best defined as one characterized by domination; that is, it is a relationship where power—in this case, interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power—has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their land and self-­determining authority. In this respect, Canada is no different from any other settler-­colonial power: in the Canadian context, colonial domination continues to be structurally oriented around the state’s commitment to maintain—through force, fraud, and, more reWards of the State  |  57

cently, so-­called negotiations—ongoing access to the land that contradictorily provides the material and spiritual sustenance of  Indigenous societies and the foundation of colonial state formation, settlement, and capitalist development. In thinking about colonialism as a form of structured dispossession, I have found it useful to return to a cluster of insights developed by Karl Marx in chapters 26 through 32 of Capital, Volume I.2 These chapters are crucial because it is here that Marx most thoroughly links the totalizing power of capital with that of colonialism by way of his theory of primitive accumulation. According to Marx’s thesis, the birth of capitalism emerged out of a host of colonial-­l ike state practices which sought to forcefully strip— through “conquest, enslavement, robbery, [and] murder”—noncapitalist producers, communities, and societies from their means of production and subsistence.3 For Marx, these formative acts of dispossession are what initially set the stage for capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist relations of  production by tearing Indigenous societies, peasants, and other small-­scale agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood—namely, the land. It was this gruesome process that established the two necessary preconditions underwriting the capital-­relation itself: it forcefully opened up what were once collectively held territories and resources to privatization (i.e., the enclosure of  “the commons”), which, over time, came to produce a “class” of workers compelled to enter the exploitative realm of the labor market for their survival (i.e., proletarianization). The historical process of primitive accumulation thus refers to the violent transformation of noncapitalist forms of life into capitalist ones. The critical purchase of Marx’s primitive-­accumulation thesis for ana­ lyzing the relationship between the logics of colonial rule and capitalist accumulation in the contemporary period has been the subject of much debate over the last decade. Drawing on these debates, I suggest that three problematic aspects of Marx’s thesis must be addressed in order to make it more relevant to an analysis of colonial domination and Indigenous resistance in contemporary Canada. The first issue involves what is now generally recognized as Marx’s excessively temporal framing of the phenomenon. Indeed, as early as 1899, the anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin made note of what seemed to be an “erroneous division” drawn in Marx “between the primary [or primitive] accumulation of capital and its present day formulation.”4 The critical point here, which many contemporary writers have subsequently picked up on, is that Marx tended to portray primitive accumulation as if it constituted “a process confined to a par58  |  Glen Coulthard

ticular (if indefinite) period—one already largely passed in England, but still under way [sic] in the colonies at the time Marx wrote.”5 For Marx, the era of violent dispossession may have inaugurated the process, but in the end, it is “the silent compulsion of economic relations” that ultimately “sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker.”6 The problem with this formulation, of course, is that history has clearly proven it not to be the case. As the recent work of David Harvey, Silvia Federici, and numerous others have highlighted, the escalating onslaught of violent, state-­orchestrated enclosures following neoliberalism’s rise to hegemony has unmistakably demonstrated the enduring role that unconcealed, violent dispossession plays in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in the present.7 The second issue that needs to be rectified concerns the normative developmentalism that problematically underscored Marx’s original formulation of the primitive-­accumulation thesis. I stress original here because Marx began to reformulate this teleological aspect of his thought in the last decade of his life, and this reformulation has important implications with respect to how we ought to conceptualize the struggles of non-­Western societies against colonial domination. For much of his career, however, Marx propagated within his writings a typically nineteenth-­century modernist view of history and historical progress. As a result, his most influential work tends to portray primitive accumulation as a historical phenomenon in the sense that it constituted a prior or transitional stage in the development of the capitalist mode of production, and he portrays primitive accumulation as a historically inevitable process that would ultimately have a progressive effect on those violently drawn into the capitalist circuit. This simultaneously destructive and progressive feature of primitive accumulation is clearly expressed in Marx’s commonly cited New York Tribune articles on India in the 1850s. There he suggests that, although vile and barbaric in practice, colonial dispossession would nonetheless have the “revolutionary” effect of bringing the “despotic,” “undignified,” and “stagnant” life of the Indians into the fold of capitalist modernity, and thus onto the true path of human emancipation: socialism.8 Clearly, any analysis or critique of contemporary setter colonialism must be stripped of this Eurocentric feature of Marx’s original historical metanarrative. 9 But this still raises the question of how to address this residual feature of Marx’s analysis. For our purposes here, this can most affectively be accomplished by contextually shifting our investigation from an emphasis on the capital relation to the colonial relation. As suggested in his critical Wards of the State  |  59

appraisal of E. G. Wakefield’s A View of the Art of Colonization (1849), Marx was primarily interested in colonialism because it exposed some “truth” about the nature of capitalism.10 His interest in the specific nature of colonial domination was largely incidental. This is evident in his position on primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation involved a dual process for Marx: the accumulation of capital through violent state dispossession that resulted in proletarianization. The weight given to these constituent elements, however, is by no means equal in Marx. As he explicitly states in chapter 33 of Capital, Volume 1, Marx has little interest in the condition of the “colonies” as such. Rather, what caught his attention was “the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by it: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the . . . expropriation of the worker.”11 When examined from this angle, colonial dispossession appears to constitute an appropriate object of critique and analysis only insofar as it unlocks the key to understanding the nature of capitalism: that capital is not a “thing,” but rather a “social relation” dependent on the perpetual separation of workers from the means of production.12 This was obviously Marx’s primary concern, and it has subsequently remained the dominant concern of the Marxist tradition as a whole.13 The contextual shift advocated here, by contrast, takes as its analytical frame the subject position of the colonized vis-­à-­v is the effects of colonial dispossession, rather than from the primary position of  “the waged male proletariat [in] the process of commodity production.”14 A number of critical insights into the colonial present emerge from the resolution of these first two issues. For example, by making the contextual shift in analysis from the capital relation to the colonial relation, the inherent injustice of colonial rule is established on its own terms and in its own right. By repositioning the colonial frame as our overarching lens of ana­ lysis, it becomes far more difficult to justify in antiquated developmental terms (from either the Right or the Left) the assimilation of noncapitalist, non-­Western, Indigenous modes of life based on the assumption that this assimilation will somehow magically redeem itself by bringing the fruits of capitalist modernity into the supposedly backward world of the colonized. In a certain respect, this was also the guiding insight that eventually led Marx to reformulate his theory after 1872. Subsequently, in the last decade of  his life, non-­Western and noncapitalist social formations were no longer condemned by Marx to necessarily pass through the destructive phase of capitalist development as an indispensable condition of freedom. During 60  |  Glen Coulthard

this period, Marx had come to view more clearly not only how features of noncapitalist and capitalist modes of production can “articulate” (albeit asymmetrically) in a given social formation but also the ways in which aspects of preexisting, noncapitalist forms of life can come to inform the construction of socialist alternatives to capitalist development. A similar insight informed Kropotkin’s early critique of Marx as well. The problem for Kropotkin was that in addition to Marx drawing an erroneous division between the history of state dispossession and what has proven to be its persistent role in the accumulation process, he seemed to justify the violent dispossession of place-­based, nonstate modes of  Indigenous economic, political, and social activity, only this time to be carried out under the auspices of the centralized authority of socialist states. By shifting our analytical frame to the colonial relation, we might occupy a better angle from which to both anticipate and interrogate practices of dispossession justified under otherwise egalitarian principles and espoused with so-­called progressive state political agendas in mind. Instead, what must be recognized by those inclined to advocate a blanket “return the commons” as a redistributive counterstrategy to the neoliberal state’s new round of enclosures is that, in liberal settler states such as Canada, the commons belong to somebody—the First Peoples of this land. And the commons also deeply inform and sustain Indigenous modes of thought and behavior that harbor profound insights into the maintenance of relationships within and between human beings and the natural world built on principles of balance, nonexploitation, and respectful coexistence. By ignoring or downplaying the centrality of dispossession, critical theory risks not only becoming complicit in the very structures and processes of domination that it ought to oppose but also overlooking what could prove to be invaluable glimpses into the ethical practices and preconditions required of a more humane and sustainable world order. Another insight facilitated by this contextual shift in orientation has to do with the role played by Indigenous labor in the historical process of colonial-­capital accumulation in Canada. It is now generally acknowledged among Canadian political economists that following the waves of colonial settlement that marked the transition between mercantile and industrial capitalism (roughly spanning the years 1860–1914, but with variation between geographical regions), Native labor became increasingly (although by no means entirely) superfluous to the political and economic development of the Canadian state.15 To oversimplify, increased European settlement combined with an imported, hyperexploited, non-­European workWards of the State  |  61

force, meant that, in the postfur trade period, Canadian state formation and colonial-­capitalist development required first and foremost land, and only secondarily the surplus value afforded by cheap, Indigenous labor.16 This is not to suggest, however, that the long-­term goal of indoctrinating the Indigenous population to the principles of private property, possessive individualism, and menial wage labor did not constitute an important feature of Canadian Indian Policy. It clearly did. As one minster of  Indian affairs wrote in 1884, Canada’s “policy of destroying the tribal or communist system is assailed in every possible way and every effort [has been] made to implant a spirit of individual responsibility instead.”17 When this historical consideration is situated alongside the contemporary facts that there has been, first, a steady increase in Native migration to urban centers over the last few decades (often for economic or employment reasons) and, second, that many First Nation communities are situated on or near lands coveted by the resource-­exploitation industry, it is reasonable to conclude that disciplining Indigenous life to the cold rationality of market principles will remain on the federal government’s agenda for some time.18 In this respect Marx’s thesis still stands. What I want to point out, rather, is that when related back to the primitive-­accumulation thesis, it appears that the history and experience of dispossession, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. In addition, dispossession also continues to inform the dominant modes of  Indigenous resistance and critique that this relationship has produced. Stated bluntly, the theory and practice of  Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land (a struggle not only for land in the material sense but also deeply informed by what the land as a complex system of reciprocal relations and obligations can teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and the natural world in nondominating and nonexploitative terms) and less around our emergent status as “rightless proletarians.”19 With these insights noted, I can know turn to the third and final issue that needs to be addressed with Marx’s primitive-­accumulation thesis. This one brings us back to my original claim that, in the Canadian context, colonial relations of power are no longer reproduced primarily through overtly coercive or imposed means, but rather through the asymmetrical exchange of mediated forms of state recognition and accommodation. This is obviously quite different from the story Marx tells, where the driving 62  |  Glen Coulthard

force behind dispossession and accumulation is still overwhelmingly that of violence: it is a relationship of brute “force,” of  “servitude,” whose methods, Marx claims, are “anything but idyllic.”20 The strategic deployment of violent sovereign power serves the primary reproductive function in the colonial-­accumulation process in Marx’s writings on colonialism. As Marx himself bluntly put it, these gruesome state practices are what thrust capitalism onto the world stage, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, in blood and dirt.”21 The question that needs to be asked here, however, is what if state violence no longer constitutes the norm underwriting the colonial process, as appears to be the case in ostensibly tolerant, multinational, and liberal settler polities such as Canada? Stated in Marx’s own terms, if neither “blood and fire” nor the “silent compulsion” of capitalist economic relations can adequately account for the reproduction of colonial hierarchies in liberal-­ democratic contexts, what can? I sketch a partial answer to these questions by providing a historical account of the process of primitive accumulation as experienced by the Dene peoples of northern Canada. Although the last century has witnessed numerous attempts by the state to coercively integrate our land and communities into the fold of the capitalist economy, it was not until the negotiation of land-­claims settlements in the 1970s and 1980s that this process began to significantly take hold. A Brief History of Denendeh

There are currently five Dene regions that fall within the political boundaries of the present nwt. The northernmost region is occupied by the Gwi’chin Dene, whose comprehensive land-­claim area, settled in 1992, borders the southernmost boundary of the Inuvialuit land-­claim area, settled eight years earlier.22 Immediately to the south of the Gwich’in are the territories of the Sahtu Dene (composed of the Hare, Mountain, and Bear Lake peoples), whose lands stretch west and north of Great Bear Lake, which in the Sahtu Dene language is also referred to as Sahtu. In conjunction with the Métis of the region, the Sahtu Dene settled their comprehensive land claim in 1993.23 Just south of the Sahtu claim area is the Dehcho region, occupied by Slavey-­speaking Dene. Although their land claim has yet to be settled, Dehcho territory extends south beyond the Mackenzie River to the borders between the nwt, Alberta, and British Columbia. Just north and to the west of the Dehcho region are the territories of the Tlicho Dene. Tlicho lands extend up from Great Slave Lake (or Tindee, as the Dene refer to it) to Wards of the State  |  63

the border between the nwt and Nunavut. The Tlicho are the most recent Dene group to settle their land-­claim dispute, which in 2003 became law and includes the first aboriginal self-­government agreement in the nwt.24 And finally, just south of  Tlicho territory is the Akaitcho region, occupied by the Weledeh (or Yellowknives) and Chipewyan Dene. This region is my home territory, and it extends south of Great Slave Lake to the borders between the nwt, Alberta, and Saskatchewan and east to Nunavut. Unlike the other regions noted, in 1999 our communities decided to pursue our land grievances (which have yet to be settled) via the specific claims process (through Treaty Land Entitlement, or tle) instead of the comprehensive claims route.25 Although vastly separated in terms of geography, all of the Dene nations occupying these regions speak related dialects of the Northern Athapaskan language family, and the nations historically shared many similarities in terms of spiritual beliefs, legal orders, forms of governance, and economic systems. The 1950s and 1960s witnessed several profound changes in the economic and political landscape of Denendeh, all of which would come to shape the character of Dene activism in the decades to follow. During this period, many Dene individuals found themselves having to escalate their involvement in the cash economy of the emerging settler society due to an increase in the in the cost of trade goods and a decrease in the price of furs following World War II.26 As a result, by the 1950s, many families had to supplement income derived from hunting, trapping, and fishing with a combination of paid labor, welfare, and family allowance.27 Assuming that the fur trade would never recover from the postwar recession, the federal government began to initiate policies aimed at forcefully establishing permanent Dene communities, based on the argument that this would better facilitate the integration of adult workers into the wage economy, and at the same time provide a context conducive to educating Native children in the skills required for attaining employment in an industrial capitalist society. Even though this was the case, by the late 1960s, the full effects of primitive accumulation had yet to take hold and a delicate balance was struck between a mode of life sustained by land-­based harvesting activities and income generated from state transfers and seasonal paid employment.28 The fragile equilibrium struck in the 1950s and 1960s between these two distinct ways of life—that of the industrial capitalist and the Indigenous hunter and harvester—was largely absent in the political sphere, however, where northern development was occurring in a far more asymmetrical manner.29 The clearest example of this came in 1967, when Canada an64  |  Glen Coulthard

nounced its plans to transfer the administrative center of the nwt from Ottawa to Yellowknife, without consulting the majority-­Native population. Prior to this, the sole political authority over issues concerning the nwt rested with the federal government in Ontario. After the transfer, the size and power of both the Government of the Northwest Territories (gnwt) and its non-­Native constituency increased dramatically. Between 1967 and 1979, for example, the gnwt grew from 75 to 2,845 employees, “approxi­ mately 400 more than the number of federal employees working in the region.”30 During the same period, the operating and capital budgets of the gnwt rose from $14,584,00 to $282,167,000 (Canadian dollars)—“almost a twenty-­fold increase.”31 Not surprisingly, the influx of administrative staff and families significantly affected the area’s general population, which jumped from roughly 29,000 to 35,000 between 1966 and 1971.32 As these numbers indicate, a significant percentage of this increase can be attributed to the newly formed northern bureaucracy. As the settler population continued to grow, many of the newcomers began to pressure the federal government to advance northern economic initiatives, most notably in the form of nonrenewable resource development. As one might expect, all of this generated feelings of discontent and alienation within and among our communities, as we soon found ourselves becoming a numerical minority in our homeland with little influence over issues pertinent to the well-­being of our land and way of life.33 As the Dene Nation explained in 1984: “Although we [remained] the majority population in Denendeh [after 1967], we were finding ourselves to have less say in the administration and laws of our land. Every year more mines were discovered and opened, roads were built, parks proposed, oil and gas wells drilled, without our consent or often our knowledge.”34 From the position of the minority non-­Native population, however, the devolution of powers from Ottawa to Yellowknife seemed to reflect an attempt to foster legitimate and responsible government above the 60th parallel north. This was the position advanced, for example, by the Advisory Commission on the Development of Government in the Northwest Territories, also known as the Carrothers Commission. In 1965 the federal government established the commission to investigate local preferences for political development in the nwt, including the possibility of splitting the district into two geographical units.35 Over the following year, the commission documented the testimony of 3,039 residents in fifty-­one communities across the region.36 In 1966 the commission published its finding, which suggested that Canada keep the nwt intact, but “locate the government Wards of the State  |  65

of the Territories within the Territories, to decentralize its operations as far as practicable, to transfer administrative functions from the central to the territorial government in order that the latter may be accountable on site for the administration of the public business, and to concentrate on economic development and opportunity for the residents of the north.”37 The following year, Canada responded to the recommendations by establishing Yellowknife as the territorial capital and by committing to more nonrenewable-­resource development in the area. Not coincidentally, as the federal government prepared to establish a territorial bureaucracy in Yellowknife, widespread excitement was mounting over the possibility of future petroleum discoveries off the northern shores of Canada and the United States.38 As it turned out, the excitement was well founded, and in 1968 a huge reservoir of oil and natural gas was discovered beneath Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Almost immediately, Canada started enthusiastically fielding plans from a consortium of corporations to construct a multibillion-­dollar pipeline that would transport the gas through the Mackenzie Valley to markets all over southern Canada and the United States.39 The Canadian federal government stated in 1969: “From the first realization of the magnitude of the Prudhoe Bay find, it [had] been considered likely that . . . gas from the field would . . . find its way to markets in the USA by a pipeline through Canada.”40 At the time, the estimated cost of the Mackenzie Valley pipeline would have established it as the largest private-­sector development project in the history of Canada, and quite possibly the world.41 Unfortunately for the Dene, Inuit, and Métis of the area, the proposed right-­of-­way for the pipeline, along with a massive infrastructure of roads, airstrips, camps, gravel pits, storage sites, stream crossings, and gas plants, would cut south across the entire western half of our homeland.42 All of this meant little to the federal and territorial governments, both of which at the time maintained their “tradition of ignoring native demands in the north.”43 Although the majority of Dene, Inuit, and Métis overwhelmingly rejected the idea of an imposed pipeline development from the outset, these communities were not initially provided with a means to formally voice their opposition. As Edgar Dosman put it, at the time “no channels existed for the articulation of [Native] concerns. They had no way of knowing what was going on, or what decisions had already been taken. Yet pipeline and resource decisions would change and probably destroy their traditions and way-­of-­l ife.”44 The federal government’s ability to completely ignore the voices of the 66  |  Glen Coulthard

Indigenous population in the north would soon suffer a major setback, however. In 1969, when sixteen Dene chiefs convened at Fort Smith under the sponsorship of the Department of  Indian Affairs and Northern Development, it was decided that the Dene needed a more independent and aggressive political body to represent their communities’ concerns. It was at this meeting that leadership established the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories (ib-­n wt). The Inuvialuit followed suit and established the Committee for Original Peoples’ Entitlement in 1970. In 1971 the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada was formed to address the concerns of all Inuit in Canada, including those within the nwt. And finally, in 1972, the Métis Association of the Northwest Territories was set up to represent the interests of the Métis and nonstatus Dene population. Although each organization differed in its specific concerns and visions regarding the scope of northern development, all three would nonetheless mount a push to defend the interests of  Indigenous peoples against the vision of economic and political expansion that state and industry had begun to aggressively impose the decade before.45 For the Dene, making such a push would emerge as one of the ib-­n wt’s first major orders of business. This culminated in 1973, when the Forth Smith chief Francois Paulette, along with fifteen other chiefs represented by the ib-­n wt, filed a “caveat” with the Northwest Territories Registrar of Land Titles, claiming a Dene interest in more than one million square kilometers of the nwt.46 The Crown responded by challenging the Dene right to file the caveat, but later that year, Justice William G. Morrow of the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories decided that the Dene had “a potentially legitimate case and at least had a right to be heard.”47 In his subsequent decision, Morrow ruled in favor of the Dene, claiming that the “Indigenous people” had a definite interest in the land covered by the caveat, and that “they have what is known as aboriginal rights.”48 More important, however, Morrow concluded that historical evidence suggested that it was unlikely that the Dene had knowingly extinguished their title to the lands covered by Treaties 8 and 11, which they had negotiated with the Crown in 1900 and 1921, respectively.49 Although the case was eventually appealed and subsequently thrown out on a technicality, the questions raised by Morrow regarding the continued existence of aboriginal title were never challenged at appeal. Two major developments arose in the aftermath of this push of  Native activism in the early 1970s. First, on August 8, 1973, the month before Morrow rendered his decision in Re: Paulette, and Registrar of Land Titles, the Wards of the State  |  67

federal government announced its new comprehensive land-­claims policy.50 This announcement (which emerged in the context of heightened Native concerns over the course of northern industrialization, widespread First Nations resistance to the federal government’s “White Paper 1969” on Indian policy, and the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1973 Calder v. British Columbia (Attorney General) decision) essentially reversed the state’s fifty-­t wo-­year policy of refusing to address Native land grievances where questions surrounding the existence of aboriginal title remained open. Because the Dene had essentially asserted in filing their caveat that they had never extinguished their political rights or legal title to their traditional territories, despite having signed Treaties 8 and 11, the Crown proceeded with our claim under its new policy, which was set up to deal with cases “based on the assertion of continuing Aboriginal title to lands and resources.”51 The thrust of the comprehensive claims policy, which was reaffirmed in 1981, is to “exchange the claims to undefined Aboriginal rights for a clearly defined package of rights and benefits set out in a settlement agreement.”52 The second development was the establishment of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, also known as the Berger Inquiry. Realizing that it could no longer simply disregard the rights of northern Indigenous peoples, the Crown agreed to sponsor a “commission of inquiry” to investigate the environmental and social impacts potentially posed by the construction of the Mackenzie Valley project. Under political pressure from the New Democratic Party, the Pierre Trudeau administration somewhat reluctantly selected Justice Thomas Berger—an outspoken environmentalist and Native rights advocate—to head the investigation. Beginning in the summer of 1975, the commission traveled across Canada and the north, recording the statements, opinions, and concerns of hundreds of expert witnesses and nearly a thousand individuals who would likely be affected by the proposed project, both Native and non-­Native. After listening to twenty-­one months of testimony, Berger released his two-­volume report, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, which recommended that no pipeline ever be built along the north slope of the Yukon between Prudhoe Bay and the Mackenzie Delta, and that a ten-­year moratorium be placed on the construction of the Mackenzie Valley project itself, which would ideally allow time for environmental and Native land-­claims issues to be resolved.53 Ten years later, in reflecting on the importance of the Berger Inquiry for highlighting the struggles of Indigenous peoples, Frances Abele wrote: “Probably no royal commission or public inquiry has sus68  |  Glen Coulthard

tained such a large and diverse audience, or provoked, years after its conclusion, such strong emotional responses.”54 “That Is Not Our Way”: Resisting Colonial Development

By the mid-­1970s, the Dene had developed a radical analysis of colonial development and effectively used both the ib-­n wt and the Berger Inquiry to voice their position. As Peter Usher notes, this analysis amounted to a fundamental “critique of capitalism and industrialization.”55 I want to return to and further develop a claim I made regarding the difference between the normative foundation underwriting Indigenous anticolonialism and anticapitalism and that which underwrites similar sentiments within the Western radical tradition, most notably that of  Marxism. When related back to the two pillars of Marx’s primitive-­accumulation thesis— dispossession and proletarianization—it would appear that, in Canada, the history and experience of the former has structured the political relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state to a greater extent than the latter. The primary experience of dispossession is what also tends to fuel the most common modes of  Indigenous resistance to and criticism of the colonial relationship itself: that is, Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism are best understood as struggles oriented around the question and meaning of land. In his groundbreaking 1972 text, God Is Red, the late Dakota philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. argues that one of the most significant differences that exist between Indigenous and Western metaphysics revolves around the central importance of land to Indigenous modes of being, thought, and ethics.56 When “ideology is divided according to American Indian and Western European [traditions],” writes Deloria, the “fundamental difference is one of great philosophical importance. American Indians hold their lands— places—as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind.”57 Whereas most Western societies tend to derive meaning from the world in historical and developmental terms, thereby placing time as the narrative of central importance.58 Deloria then goes on to conclude: “When one group is concerned with the philosophical problem of space and the other with the philosophical problem of time, then the statements of either group do not make much sense when transferred from one context to the other without the proper consideration of what is taking place.”59 In drawing our attention to the distinction between Indigenous place-­ based and Western time-­oriented understandings of the world, Deloria Wards of the State  |  69

does not simply intend to reiterate the rather obvious observation that most Indigenous societies hold a strong attachment to their homelands. Instead he is attempting to explicate the position that land occupies as an ontological framework for understanding relationships. Seen in this light, it is a profound misunderstanding to think of land or place as simply some material object of profound importance to Indigenous cultures (although it is this too); land ought to be understood as a field of  “relationships of things to each other.”60 Place is a way of knowing, experiencing, and relating with the world; and sometimes these ways of knowing can guide forms of resistance against other rationalizations of the world that threaten to erase our senses of place.61 This is precisely the understanding of land that grounded our critique of colonialism and capitalism in the 1970s and early 1980s. In the Wedeleh dialect of Dogrib (which is my community’s language), for example, land (or dè) is translated in relational terms as that which encompasses not only the land (understood here as material) but also people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on. Consequently, we are as much a part of the land as any other element. Furthermore, within this system of relations, human beings are not the only constituent believed to embody spirit or agency. Ethically, this meant that humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we have obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants, and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-­being of all over time.62 Consider, for example, the following story told by the late George Blondin, a respected Sahtu Dene elder. The tale recounts an experience his brother Edward had while hunting moose: Edward was hunting near a small river when he heard a raven croaking, far off to his left. Ravens can’t kill animals themselves, so they depend on hunters and wolves to kill food for them. Flying high in the sky, they spot animals too far away for hunters or wolves to see. They then fly to the hunter and attract his attention by croaking loudly, then fly back to where the animals are. Edward stopped and watched the raven carefully. It made two trips back and forth in the same direction. Edward made a sharp turn and walked to where the raven was flying. There were no moose tracks, but he kept following the raven. When he got to the riverbank and looked down, Edward saw two big moose feeding on the bank. He shot them, skinned them, and covered the meat with their hides. 70  |  Glen Coulthard

Before he left, Edward put some fat meat out on the snow for the raven. He knew that without the bird, he wouldn’t have killed any meat that day.63 Notice how Blondin’s narrative emphasizes the consciousness and individual agency of the raven and also depicts the relationship between the hunter and the bird as a mutually interdependent one. The cooperation displayed between Edward and the raven provides a clear example of the ethic of reciprocity and sharing underlying Denes’ understandings of their relationship with land. In the decades leading up to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, it became apparent to many people within our communities that the organizational imperatives of capital accumulation signified an affront to our normative understanding of what constituted proper relationships—relationships between people, relationships between humans and their environment, and relationships between individuals and institutions of authority. By the mid-­1970s, this place-­based ethics had been worn by decades of colonial displacement, but it was still functioning enough to frame both our critique of capitalist development and our ways of thinking about how we might establish political and economic relations both within our own communities and with Canada based on principles of reciprocity and mutual obligation. Not coincidentally, Peter Kulchyski highlights this spatial feature of  Indigenous struggle well in his excellent book Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut when he writes: “It is possible to argue that precisely what distinguishes anti-­colonial struggles from the classic Marxist accounts of the working class is that oppression for the colonized is registered in the spatial dimension—as dispossession—whereas for workers, oppression is measured as exploitation, as the theft of time.”64 I would simply add here that Indigenous ways of thinking about nonoppressive relations are often expressed with this spatial referent in mind as well. The significance of land in our critique of colonial development is clear from any cursory glance at the testimony made by Indigenous participants at the Berger Inquiry. One of the most profound statements of this sort was delivered by Philip Blake, a Dene from Fort McPherson. Notice the three interrelated meanings of land at play in his narrative: land as resource, central to our material survival; land as identity, as constitutive of who we are as a people; and land as relationship: If our Indian nation is being destroyed so that poor people of the world are might get a chance to share this worlds [sic] riches, then as Indian Wards of the State  |  71

people, I am sure that we would seriously consider giving up our resources. But do you really expect us to give up our life and our lands so that those few people who are the richest and most powerful in the world today can maintain their own position of privilege? That is not our way. I strongly believe that we do have something to offer your nation, however, something other than our minerals. I believe it is in the self-­ interest of your own nation to allow the Indian nation to survive and develop in our own way, on our own land. For thousands of years we have lived with the land, we have taken care of the land, and the land has taken care of us. We did not believe that our society has to grow and expand and conquer new areas in order to fulfill our destiny as Indian people. We have lived with the land, not tried to conquer of control it or rob it of its riches. We have not tried to get more and more riches and power, we have not tried to conquer new frontiers, or out do our parents or make sure that every year we are richer than the year before. We have been satisfied to see our wealth as ourselves and the land we live with. It is our greatest wish to be able to pass on this land to succeeding generations in the same condition that our fathers have given it to us. We did not try to improve the land and we did not try to destroy it. That is not our way. I believe your nation might wish to see us, not as a relic from the past, but as a way of life, a system of values by which you may survive in the future. This we are willing to share.65 When Blake suggested that as “Indian people” we reject the pathological drive for accumulation that fuels capitalist expansion, he was basing this statement on a conception of Dene identity that locates us as an inseparable part of an expansive system of interdependent relations covering the land and animals, past and future generations, and other peoples and communities. For many Natives at the time of the Berger Inquiry, this relational conception of identity was nonnegotiable; it constituted a fundamental feature of what it meant to be Dene. Furthermore, it also demanded that we conduct ourselves in accordance with certain ethico-­political norms, which stressed, among other things, the importance of sharing, egalitarianism, respecting the freedom and autonomy of both individuals and groups, and recognizing the obligations that one has not only to other people but to the natural world as a whole.66 It was this place-­based ethics that served 72  |  Glen Coulthard

as the foundation from which we critiqued the dual imperatives of colonial sovereignty and capitalist accumulation that came to dictate the course of northern development in the postwar period. The same foundation shaped the Dene Nation’s demand for recognition and self-­determination in the years to follow. The Dene Declaration: Understanding Indigenous Nationalism

On July 19, 1975, at the second annual Joint General Assembly of the Indian Brotherhood of the nwt and the Métis and Non-­status Association of the nwt, more than three hundred Indigenous delegates unanimously voted to adopt what quickly became known as the Dene Declaration—a political manifesto demanding the full “recognition” of the Dene as a “self-­ determining” nation “within the country of Canada.”67 In his Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred provides a theory of  Indigenous nationalism that is useful for developing an understanding of the politicized articulation of  Indigeneity called attention to in the Dene Declaration.68 According to Alfred, Indigenous expressions of nationhood are “best viewed as having both a relatively stable core which endures and peripheral elements that are easily adapted or manipulated to accommodate the demands of a particular political environment.”69 For Alfred, Indigenous political identities are neither based on clearly delineated essences nor are they merely “invented” to correspond with shifting political aspirations.70 Rather, Indigenous articulations of nationhood are best understood as informed by a complex of cultural practices and traditions that have survived the onslaught of colonialism and continue to structure the form and content of  Indigenous activism in the present.71 Contrary to many other forms of nationalism, however, Alfred is quick to point out that most Indigenous movements do not seek recognition and self-­determination “through the creation of a new state”; they do so “through the achievement of a cultural sovereignty and a political relationship based on group autonomy reflected in formal self-­government arrangements.”72 Dene nationalism during this period can be understood within a similar cultural frame—as a dynamic revival of Dene political concepts framed in a manner to meet the economic and political goals of contemporary Dene society. To this end, although our movement was firmly rooted in and motivated by political values and concepts informed by a relational conception of land, it also actively incorporated new social and political discourses to enrich these older traditions.73 A number of these discourses were drawn on to articulate our vision Wards of the State  |  73

of a postcolonial political relationship with Canada, including, among others, Marxist political economy, world systems analysis, theories of development and underdevelopment, and Third World anticolonialism.74 Although all of these conceptual tools helped shape, to varying degrees, our views on colonialism and self-­determination, here I want to highlight one that remains particularly salient to this day: namely, the Marxist concept “mode of production.”75 Essentially, a mode of production can be said to encompass two interrelated social processes: the resources, technologies, and labor that a people deploy to produce what they need to materially sustain themselves over time, and the forms of thought, behavior, and social relationships that both condition and are themselves conditioned by these productive forces.76 As the sum of these two interrelated processes, a mode of production can be interpreted, as Marx himself often did, as analogous to a way or “mode of life.”77 This latter phrase accurately reflects what constituted culture in the sense that the Dene deployed the term, and which our claims for cultural recognition sought to secure through the negotiation of a land claim. Simply stated, in the three proposals I examine, our demand for recognition sought to protect the “intricately interconnected social totality” of a distinct mode of life.78 This is a life on and with the land that stresses individual autonomy, collective responsibility, nonhierarchical authority, communal land tenure, and mutual aid,79 and which sustained us “economically, spiritually, socially and politically.”80 George Barnaby wrote in 1976: “The land claim is our fight to gain recognition as a different group of people—with our own way of seeing things, our own values, our own life style, our own laws. . . . [It] is a fight for self-­determination using our own system with which we have survived till now.”81 Understanding culture as the interconnected totality of a distinct mode of life encompassing the economic, political, spiritual, and social is crucial for comprehending the state’s response to the challenge posed by our land-­claim proposals. The state responded to this challenge by structurally circumscribing the terms and content of the recognition it was willing to make available to us through the negotiation of a land settlement. The reason the Crown agreed to get into the land-­claims business in the first place was to extinguish the broad and undefined rights and title claims of First Nations in exchange for a limited set of rights and benefits set out in the text of the agreement. In the 1970s Canada still required the explicit “cede, release and surrender” of aboriginal rights and title prior to the resolution of a settlement, which from the Crown’s perspective constituted the surest way to attain the political and economic “certainty” required to satisfy the 74  |  Glen Coulthard

state’s interest in opening up Indigenous territories to further economic investment and capitalist development.82 Although the state no longer requires the formal “extinguishment” of aboriginal rights as a precondition to reaching an agreement, the purpose of the process has remained the same: to facilitate the “incorporation” of  Indigenous peoples and territories into the capitalist mode of production and to ensure that alternative “socioeconomic visions” do not threaten the desired functioning of the market economy.83 With this objective firmly in place, both Canada and the nwt insisted on negotiating a land settlement based on the following two principles: first, that a Dene claim to self-­determination was invalid; and second, that any settlement reached must attain “finality” through the extinguishment of what remained of Dene political rights and title in exchange for the institutional recognition and protection of certain aspects of Dene “culture.” However, for the state, recognizing and accommodating “the cultural” through the negotiation of land claims would not involve the recognition of alternative Indigenous economies and forms of political authority, as the concepts of mode of production and mode of life suggest; instead, the state insisted that any institutionalized accommodation of  Indigenous cultural differences be reconcilable with one political formation—namely, colonial sovereignty—and one mode of production—namely, capitalism. Land Claims and the Domestication of Dene Nationhood To encourage “cultural diversity” requires not the separation of culture and politics, but their marriage and to insist on that separation is to destroy, or attempt to destroy culture. —Dene Nation, quoted in Gurston Dacks, A Choice of Futures: Politics in the Canadian

In his Study on Treaties, Agreements and Other Constructive Arrangements between States and Indigenous Populations (1999), the special rapporteur for the United Nations Sub-­commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities Miguel Alfonso Martinez examines the myriad of techniques and rationales adopted by colonial settler regimes to “domesticate” the “international” status of  Indigenous nations, thereby placing their claims squarely under the “exclusive competence” of the “internal jurisdiction” of non-Indigenous nation-­states.84 My analysis of the three land claims proposals submitted to the federal government by the Dene Nation between 1976 and 1981 shows that, rather than recognize our right to self-­ determination, both the gnwt and the government of Canada defended Wards of the State  |  75

within the land-­claims process a depoliticized discourse of Indigenous “cultural rights” that it used to rationalize the hegemony of non-Indigenous economic and political interests on Dene territory. In this way, from the state’s perspective, the land-­claims process constitutes a crucial vehicle for the domestication of  Indigenous claims to nationhood. On October 25, 1976, the ib-­n wt, under the leadership of Georges Erasmus, provided the federal government with a land-­claim proposal designed to accommodate the robust form of recognition expressed in the Dene Declaration. The proposal, titled “Agreement in Principle between the Dene Nation and Her Majesty the Queen, in Right of Canada,” called upon the federal government to negotiate with the Dene Nation in accordance with an expansive list of principles, including the recognition of a Dene right to self-­determination; the right to retain ownership of a significant portion of our traditional territories; the right to exercise political jurisdiction over the territories in question; the right to practice and preserve our languages, customs, traditions, and values; and the right to develop our own political and economic institutions. All of these rights, we claimed, would be exercised “within Confederation” through the establishment of a “Dene government” vested with political authority over land and subject matters currently within the jurisdiction of the federal and territorial governments.85 Essentially, the 1976 agreement outlined in broad terms the foundation for building a renewed relationship with the state that would secure a degree of Indigenous political and economic autonomy unprecedented in the history of land-­claim settlements in Canada.86 Although the specific form that this autonomy would take remained unspecified in the proposal, a number of statements made and research reports produced by the Dene during this period suggest that it would look radically different from the economic and political institutions of the dominant society. In terms of political development, for example, the ib-­n wt emphasized the need to construct modern political institutions on the traditional principle of popular sovereignty and consensus decision making, thus including as wide a spectrum of Dene as possible in the formation of government policy.87 This commitment to the construction of alternative governance forms cashed out politically in 1976, when the ib-­n wt announced that it would officially boycott participating in the territorial government, arguing that it was a “colonial institution” that did not represent the perspectives of the Dene peoples, and that this was reflected in the style and structure of government itself.88 The boycott lasted until 1979. George Barnaby, one of the two elected Dene officials to resign from territorial politics in 1976 (the 76  |  Glen Coulthard

other being  James Wah-­Shee), explained his motivation: “If we go through a whole Dene movement and we end up with native people just giving orders to their own people, [then we won’t be] better off than now, when white people order us around.”89 For Barnaby, a “true [Dene] government” would be the “people themselves deciding what they want” and then working together to achieve their desired goals.90 The principle of direct democracy was to apply to the economic sphere as well. For instance, the proposal states that a noncolonial economy in addition to promoting Dene self-­sufficiency, would do so in a manner consistent with our cultural values and “way of life.” To this end, the claim outlines an economic vision that would develop a mode of production based on a combination of  “continued renewable resource activities, such as hunting, fishing and trapping,” as well as “community-­scale activities” designed “to meet our needs in a more self-­reliant fashion.”91 In the following years a number of these “community-­scale activities” were discussed and proposed, including a combination of locally operated manufacturing enterprises, Native-­run cooperatives, and worker-­controlled enterprises.92 At a 1974 regional co-­coordinators workshop, the ib-­n wt noted two perspectives on development that it found compelling. The first was the example of  “communal enterprise” and “development” exemplified in the postindependence struggle of Tanzania.93 At one point, the ib-­n wt was even in a conversation with the Kahnawake Office of the Indians of Quebec Association about sending a delegation of Dene fieldworkers to learn from the Tanzanian experience.94 The second was drawn from the following observation made by George Manual and Michael Posluns in The Fourth World: “Real community development can never take place without economic development, but economic development without full local control is only another form of imperial conquest.”95 In the “Agreement in Principle,” these economic models were pitched as culturally relevant alternatives to the “externally initiated economy” imposed on the Dene by the state.96 “True Dene development,” the ib-­n wt argues, “[must] entail political control, an adequate resource base, [and would not] permit a few to gain at the expense of the whole community.”97 And finally, in keeping with our commitment to strengthening social relations premised on reciprocity, the leadership proposed to structure our relationship with the non-Indigenous population according to the principle of mutual self-­determination.98 Subsequently, the ib-­n wt agreed to uphold the political and existing property rights of all non-­Native northerners. However, with regard to private property, the Dene Nation would only respect fee-­simple title to lands acquired Wards of the State  |  77

before October 15, 1975; after this date, land would be held in accordance with the values and principles set forth in the proposal.99 The Dene Declaration together with the proposed “Agreement in Principle” evoked a range of responses. On the one hand, our communities were greeted with an enormous display of support by progressive political organizations from across the country, including the Canadian Labour Congress; the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union; Oxfam Canada; the United Steelworkers of America; and the New Democratic Party’s “Waffle” movement, which was, at the time, known by many pundits for its “strident socialism.”100 At the same time, however, there were many who were openly hostile to the transformative message underlying our claim. The then-­m inister of Indian affairs Judd Buchanan, for example, dismissed the Dene Declaration as “gobbledygook” that any “grade ten student could have written in fifteen minutes.”101 Even the respected Cree leader Harold Cardinal blasted the declaration as an “intrusion of  left-­w ing thinking that is perhaps much closer to the academic community in Toronto than it is to the Dene.”102 Much of the criticism leveled at the ib-­n wt during this period expressed a similar sentiment—namely, that Dene leadership had been manipulated by southern radicals and were therefore not acting in the interests of their own constituencies. As one Edmonton Report columnist wrote: “A bewildered Canada [is] gradually waking up to the fact that a radical socialist philosophy [has] taken hold of the native peoples in the Mackenzie Valley. How is it that these territorial natives whose politics up until now were generally considered non-­existent should suddenly emerge with such advanced left-­ wing inclinations?”103 The public expressed a similar point of view. One gentleman stated to the Berger Inquiry: “Most of [the] hollering . . . done by the Indian Brotherhood [has been directed] by whites, not the majority of  Indians. [The Dene] figured they made a good deal [with Treaty 11] until the Indian Brotherhood with white backing started stirring things up.”104 The gnwt added to the hysteria by suggesting that the Indian Brotherhood “be renamed the Radical Left.”105 At one point there were even rumors circulating across the north that some of our community members were being trained in tactics of  “guerilla warfare,”106 and that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had employed “undercover operatives to infiltrate the Brotherhood.”107 These racist, McCarthy-­like accusations held a great deal of currency to many non-­Natives during the 1970s and into the early 1980s.108 Aside from allegations of leftist extremism, most government officials 78  |  Glen Coulthard

rejected the Dene position based on the view that it violated the liberal value of equality underwriting universal representation within Canadian political institutions. Initially the most vocal proponent of this argument was the gnwt Legislative Assembly, which expressed its concerns in a position paper titled “Priorities for the North,” submitted to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development in May 1977.109 The paper explicitly denounced the Dene claim, arguing that it would amount to the establishment of an exclusionary, indeed “race-­based,” jurisdiction in northern Canada. In the words of the Legislative Assembly: “This is why the ‘native state’ concept is, and always will be, totally unacceptable to the people of the Northwest Territories”; this is because it “lacks the necessary element of universality of participation in political institutions by any Canadian who chooses to live in the [Northwest] Territories.”110 In response to the gnwt’s repeated charge of racial intolerance, the ib-­n wt submitted a second proposal to the federal government in July 1977.111 Like its predecessor, “The Metro Proposal” stressed the importance of recognition and self-­determination for the Dene Nation. However, appreciating that many people had “misinterpreted” our “Agreement in Principle” as discriminatory, the ib-­n wt sought to “make it clear” in the new claim that it was seeking self-­determination not only for the Dene but for all citizens of the north, and an “end to racial oppression” as such, whether it be the “oppression of Dene by non-­Dene, or oppression of non-­natives by Dene.”112 To accommodate this vision, “The Metro Proposal” recommended that the north adopt a decentralized federative structure based on the following principles: that the nwt be divided into three geographical territories, “one where the Dene are a majority, one where the Inuit are a majority, and finally one where the non-­native people are the majority”113; that these three territories uphold the political rights of all of their citizens through the establishment of government institutions based on each group’s respective traditions and in accordance with the desires and aspirations of the respective constituencies; that each territorial government divide powers and relate with the federal government in a manner similar to the current federal-­provincial relationship; and that a “Metro” or “United Nations” governance structure be “organized by the three new governments to deal with matters, issues, and programs of common concern.”114 Under this model, each newly established government would be responsible for sending “representatives” to negotiate “as equals” with those from the other governments “until an agreement was reached on any joint activity.”115 And Wards of the State  |  79

finally, in accordance with Dene custom, economic relations within our proposed territory would not be dictated by the reign of capital; rather, all economic principles and values set forth in the “Agreement in Principle” would to apply to the new proposal as well. It was at this point that the state began to counter our position with a depoliticized conception of aboriginal “cultural” rights divorced from any substantive notion of Indigenous sovereignty or alternative political economies. In “Priorities of the North,” for example, the gnwt argued that land claims ought to be used as a mechanism to secure the recognition and protection of aboriginal cultural interests, but only if the state agreed to separate the negotiation of political rights to self-­determination from the process.116 To this end, the assembly proposed that a Native bill of rights be written into the constitution of the nwt.117 This would serve two purposes: first, it would crystallize the rights of Native people with respect to their traditional “use and enjoyment” of the land; and second, it would function to “preserve native languages and cultures in some form of immutable legislation.”118 The federal government advanced a similar position in its 1977 opinion paper “Political Development in the Northwest Territories.”119 The paper was to serve as a “detailed terms of reference” to guide the newly appointed special representative for constitutional development in the Northwest Territories, Charles (Bud) Drury.120 Like the Legislative Assembly, the federal government stated that it would be willing to use land claims as a vehicle to “safeguard” aboriginal culture and enable aboriginal people and communities to pursue their “traditional” practices “to the extent that they may wish to do so.”121 Subsequently, Canada agreed to work closely with Native groups to develop programs within a number of areas, including education, housing, economic development, and “the protection and promotion” of “other cultural interests,” namely, “Indian and Inuit languages” and “rights to traditional activities such as hunting, fishing and trapping.”122 In securing these rights, however, the federal government insisted that it would not endorse a call for the establishment of political jurisdictions allocated “on grounds that differentiate between people on the basis of race.”123 Instead, Ottawa directed Drury to consider the “possible division of the Northwest Territories” on the basis of  “functional” issues, “including economic, socio-­cultural, and other relevant factors,” but excluding “political divisions and structures” configured along Indigenous/non-Indigenous lines.124 Thus, if the Dene wanted to participate in the constitutional development of the northern political apparatus, they would have to do so 80  |  Glen Coulthard

at a “local and subordinate” level within the common and presumably legitimate institutions of the nwt.125 In short, for both the gnwt and the government of Canada, cultural rights, not political rights, constituted the core issue to be resolved in the settlement of a Dene land claim. In terms of political economy, both levels of government sought to tease apart the recognition of Indigenous cultural practices from any socioeconomic scheme that might potentially disrupt the further accumulation of capital through the development of the North’s resource base. The gnwt, for example, simply asserted that the “long term economic development of the Northwest Territories will almost certainly depend on the further exploration and utilization of its natural resource[s].”126 Recognizing the cultural claims of First Nations would be permitted, but only insofar as these claims could be reconciled with this “predominantly private enterprise mode of organization.”127 In a similar vein, the federal government suggested that while land claims would provide “native groups” with financial compensation for any infringement of their property rights, Canada’s “national interest” dictated that the Crown “maintain its ownership and control of the potentially significant non-­renewable resources in the Northwest Territories.”128 And regarding the intensity of northern capitalist development, the Crown, like the Legislative Assembly, declared that business would continue unabated: “In view of the energy and other resource requirements that are now recognized as becoming increasingly urgent, the Government wishes to maintain some momentum in the exploration and development of northern non-­renewable resource[s].”129 Land claims, according to the Crown, would better enable the Dene to “play a part” in this process, but in no way would they provide the economic and political infrastructure necessary to block or effectively cultivate a nonexploitative alternative.130 Instead of participating in Drury’s investigation, the Dene Nation agreed to collaborate with the Métis Association of the nwt to construct a joint-­ settlement claim, which they provided the federal government in 1981. The proposal, titled “Public Government for the People of  the North,” called for a transfer of power to a “province-­l ike” jurisdiction named “Denendeh.”131 Although the Dene and Métis refrained from invoking the explicit language of self-­determination common to the previous two claims, the spirit of the document remains much the same. It demands, for instance, that sovereignty be distributed between Denendeh and the federal government in manner similar to the current distribution of provincial and federal powers, although in some areas, such as fisheries, family relations, communiWards of the State  |  81

cations, and labor relations, Denendeh would require powers currently claimed by the federal government.132 The rationale here is that that these areas are crucial for the protection and further development of the Dene “way of life.”133 The proposal also calls for a significant return of the Dene traditional territory, which the Dene would retain the right use, own, and manage collectively. Most remaining lands, with the exception of existing private property, would be allocated to the government of Denendeh and remain under its jurisdictional authority. Structurally speaking, Denendeh would be “province-­l ike” and consist of two levels of government: a public territorial level, called the National Assembly of Denendeh, and municipal-­t ype governments at the community or regional level.134 Denendeh would be unlike provinces in other ways, however. For instance, the Dene again recommended that a direct democracy or “consensus” approach to political decision making be instituted at both the local and territorial levels.135 This was pitched as a culturally appropriate alternative to the allegedly elitist and adversarial form of government imposed on northerners from the South. Also, to protect the political rights and freedoms of Dene citizens in perpetuity, the Dene and Métis proposed that a senate be established as a second chamber of the public National Assembly with guaranteed Dene representation.136 In order to protect the interests of everyone, however, the Dene and Métis proposed that a ten-­year residency period be implemented, after which full political rights of all Denendeh citizens would be respected. But regardless of any residency requirement, the government of Denendeh would be responsible for respecting the fundamental human rights and freedoms of all its citizens, particularly the rights outlined in sections 18, 19, 21, and 22 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which Canada is a signatory.137 In terms of economic development, Denendeh would also operate differently from the provinces in a number of key ways. For example, the document suggests that all land and resource development adhere to standards set forth in a “Charter of Founding Principles,” which would emphasize, among other things, maintaining a “harmonious relationship between the Dene and the physical environment.”138 Thus, the Dene and Métis stated that natural-­resource use would be determined “on the basis of a ‘conserver society’ ” with a “firm commitment to renewables.”139 Once again, building a modern economy committed to the traditional practice of  harvesting and manufacturing renewable resources would form a signifi­ cant aspect of economic development within the new territory. However, 82  |  Glen Coulthard

in circumstances where the exploration and development of Denendeh’s nonrenewable-­resource base might be permitted to continue, this activity would only be allowed if it promised to ensure the “well-­being of the people and resources of Denendeh” as a whole, “as opposed to the economic benefit of the developers.”140 And to ensure economic self-­sufficiency, the Dene and Métis proposed that 10 percent of all resource revenues derived in the territory be collected and paid into a “Dene heritage fund” managed by the Dene through the framework of the proposed senate.141 Remaining profits extracted through rents taken from nonrenewable-­resource outfits would be redirected back into programs aimed at bolstering the renewable-­ resource sector, cover the operating budgets of the Denendeh government at both the community and territorial levels, and used to repay the federal government for its assistance in the delivery of unemployment-­insurance benefits, family allowances, and so on.142 Also like its predecessors, the proposal suggests that all private-­property rights be respected for lands acquired prior to the implementation of the agreement, although after that, the government of Denendeh would grant property titles solely through long-­term leases and hold remaining lands collectively for the benefit of all Denendeh citizens.143 Reaction to the Denendeh proposal was varied. Some people were outraged at the proposed agreement, suggesting that it would provide too much protection for Dene rights and interests while ignoring those of the North’s non-­Native population.144 One of the studies prepared for the federal government’s Special Committee on Constitutional Development even suggested that the proposal’s recommended restrictions on private property could be interpreted as violating what many northerners had come to consider an “inalienable right” to own property.145 Others, however, viewed the proposal as a “unique opportunity to be a part of something exciting, a chance for all people of the north to join together and build a new style of government.”146 Conclusion

In the end, the federal government remained one of the principal detractors of the Denendeh proposal. As opposed to the position outlined in their own comprehensive claims policy, the Dene and Métis adamantly rejected the idea that Indigenous peoples must surrender or exchange their political rights and title as a prerequisite to reaching a settlement. Maintaining this position caused negotiations to drag on until 1988, when, finally, a new “agreement in principle” (aip) was reached between the Dene Nation, the Wards of the State  |  83

Métis Association, and the government of Canada. The new aip offered the claimants “ownership of over 181,000 square kilometres of land, with subsurface rights for approximately 10,000 kilometres of it, and a payment of $500 million over fifteen years as compensation for lost land use in the past.”147 To reach the aip stage, however, the Crown required two things. The first was that a recognition of Indigenous political rights be removed from the negotiation table. This essentially meant that the Dene Nation dropped its previous insistence, articulated in the Dene Declaration and the three claims I examined, that a substantive right to self-­government form a fundamental component of any land deal. Second, the aip required the Dene and Métis to agree to “cede, release and surrender” any residual aboriginal rights and title to the remaining lands of the nwt. Negotiators for the Dene and Métis thus conceded that, if reached, a comprehensive claim would inevitably involve an “exchange” of aboriginal “land rights” for a “clearly defined set of land-­related and land based-­r ights.”148 At this point, however, those involved in the negotiations refused to see this as an extinguishment of their “political rights,” which they would “continue negotiate through other forums.”149 On April 9, 1990, two years after community negotiators agreed to sign the new aip, Native representatives from across Denendeh convened at a special general assembly held in Fort Rae, where they initialed a final agreement that included an extinguishment clause but excluded a self-­ government component. In July of the same year, a motion was passed at another general assembly, this time held in Dettah, to “have aboriginal and treaty rights affirmed, not extinguished, in the comprehensive claim agreement.”150 In the end, the majority of delegates voted to affirm the motion and in doing so rejected the Dene and Métis final agreement. No doubt frustrated with the nonnegotiable nature of the Crown’s position, Gwich’in representatives opposed the majority decision and formally withdrew from the general assembly. Following their lead, the Sahtu withdrew from the claim several weeks later. The Crown officially stopped funding the Dene Nation’s claims secretariat after the withdrawal of the Gwich’in and Sahtu, and instead offered to negotiate with these groups independently. In 1992 the Gwich’in, and 1993 the Sahtu along with the Métis, extinguished their political rights and title by signing comprehensive agreements with Canada. These settlements signified the official end of an at times tenuous and fragile (but nonetheless unified) Dene national self-­determination movement.151 Northern Indigenous perspectives on economic development began to shift significantly during this period as well. This shift was exemplified most 84  |  Glen Coulthard

clearly with the backing of diamond megamining projects by the Tlicho and Yellowknives Dene First Nations in the late 1990s, and again in 2000, with the establishment of the Aboriginal Pipeline Group, which represents the interests of most Dene regions in the nwt (excluding the Dehcho) and has since negotiated an agreement to purchase a one-­third share in the newly proposed Mackenzie Gas Project. The Mackenzie Gas Project, like the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline before it, promises to be one of the largest and most costly pipeline projects in the history of Canada.152 What is perhaps most interesting about the newest incarnation of the Mackenzie pipeline project is that many of the young Dene activists who opposed it in the 1970s are now either active supporters or founding members of the Aboriginal Pipeline Group. The former Fort Good Hope chief Frank T’Seleie has explained his change in perspective like this: “You know, the world has changed a lot over the last 25 years. We’re now masters of our own house in many ways. Many of us have settled our land claims and we have the power to make sure this pipeline is done the right way. Sure, I feel uneasy in some ways about promoting this. This gas is going to go south, maybe not today or tomorrow. But it is going to go, and I don’t think we can afford to be left out.”153 A similar sentiment underwrites the following rationalization of the project given by the former Dene Nation president Stephen Kakfwi in 2001: “We have a stable political regime with aboriginal people occupying many important positions in government. The Inuvialuit, the Gwich’in and Sahtu Dene and Métis have settled claims. . . . Processes to settle claims and treaty land entitlements are underway in the South Slave and Dehcho regions. . . . We now have the moral and political authority to decide on a pipeline.”154 If primitive accumulation represents the process through which noncapitalist social relations are transformed or integrated into market ones, then it would appear that this process has gained considerable momentum in the North over the last few decades. Although primitive accumulation no longer appears to require the explicit dispossession of  Indigenous communities and their entire land and resource base, it does demand that both remain open for exploitation and capitalist development. A number of interrelated considerations have to be taken into account to figure out why this has emerged as the case, and I would like to conclude by providing a cursory sketch of just two of them. The first involves a significant transformation in the discourse of “sustainable development” over the last fifteen or so years. As Stuart Kirsch has argued, one of the most pressing challenges faced by Indigenous peoples has been the “speed with which capital now appropriates the terms of Wards of the State  |  85

its critique.”155 Any visit to the North will unequivocally demonstrate the degree to which state and industry has been able to co-­opt the discourse of sustainability to push their shared vision of economic development. As opposed to the discourse of sustainability underwriting the Dene claims, which sought to establish political and economic relations that would foster the reciprocal well-­being of people, communities, and the land over time, sustainability has now come to refer more to the economic sustainability of development projects. The longer the projected lifespan of a proposed project—that is, the longer period that a project proposes to exploit a community’s land, resources, and labor—the more sustainable it is said to be. The second consideration involves the unanticipated effect that the land-­claims process has had on Indigenous people and communities. Aside from the inevitable debt trap that land claims lock many First Nations into, which can in turn compel these communities to open up their settlement lands to exploitation as an economic solution, land claims also have the uncanny ability to subtly shape how Indigenous peoples think and act in relation to the land.156 As Paul Nadasdy suggests in his work with the Kluane First Nation in the Yukon, “to engage in the process of negotiating a land claim agreement, First Nations people must translate their complex reciprocal relationship with the land into the equally complex but very different language of  ‘property.’ ”157 One of the negative effects of this power-­ laden process of translation has been a reorientation of the meaning of self-­ determination for many (but not all) Indigenous people in the North; this has been a reorientation of Indigenous struggle from one that was once deeply informed by the land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligations (which in turn informed our critique of capitalism in the 1970s and early 1980s) to a struggle that is now largely for land, understood here as some material resource to be exploited in the capital-­accumulation process. Notes

1. Glen Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007). 2. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (New York: Penguin, 1990). 3. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 874. 4. Peter Kropotkin, Conquest of Bread and Other Writings (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 221. 5. Jim Glassman, “Primitive Accumulation, Accumulation by Dispossession, Accumulation by ‘Extra-­Economic’ Means,” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 5 (2005): 611. 6. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 899. The degree to which Marx is susceptible to 86  |  Glen Coulthard

this general line of criticism is itself the subject of debate. For instance, an interesting argument developed by Massimo De Angelis suggests that if we conceive of primitive accumulation as a set of strategies that seeks to permanently maintain a separation of workers from the means of production, then it would follow that this process must be ongoing insofar as this separation is constitutive of the capital relation as such. The specific character of primitive-­ accumulation strategies might change at any given historical juncture, but as a general process of ongoing separation it must remain in effect indefinitely. Massimo De Angelis, “Marx and Primitive Accumulation: The Continuous Character of Capital’s ‘Enclosures,’ ” The Commoner, no. 2 (September 2001). However, the question this position raises is why then use the historical marker primitive to refer to the process at all, instead of simply referencing the accumulation of capital proper? This question is explored in Paul Zarembka, “Primitive Accumulation in Marxism, Historical or Trans-­h istorical Separation from Means of Production?” The Commoner (March 2002), as a qualification to De Angelis’s earlier contribution to the same journal. 7. See Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso, 1997); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004); Todd Gordon, “Canada, Empire, and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas,” Socialist Studies 2, no. 1 (2006); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Michael Pearlman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Retort Collective, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (New York: Verso, 2005). Also see De Angelis, “Marx and Primitive Accumulation.” De Angelis’s article is one of many contributions in that issue of  The Commoner devoted to examining the continual relevance of Marx’s dispossession thesis in the contemporary period. 8. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The British Rule in India,” in Marx, Engels on Colonialism (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2001), 41–­42. This is also the underlying thrust of Marx and Engels’s famous assertion in The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all in­ struments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one world it creates the world after its own image.” Quoted in David McClelland, ed., Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 225. For a useful discussion of this aspect of  Marx’s argument, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1994); Crystal Barto­ lovich and Neil Lazarus, eds., Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies Wards of the State  |  87

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Arif Dirlik, The Post­colonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); and Epifanio San Juan Jr., Beyond Postcolonial Theory (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1999). 9. This rigidly unilinear understanding of historical development began to shift significantly in Marx’s work after the collapse of the European labor movement following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. It was at this point that Marx began to again turn his attention to the study of non-­Western societies. Marx scholars have tended to identify three areas of Marx’s late writings (1872–­83) that reflect this shift in perspective: (1) editorial changes introduced by Marx to the 1872–­75 French edition of Capital, Volume 1 that strip the primitive-­accumulation thesis of any prior suggestion of unilinearism; (2) a cluster of late writings on Russia that identify the Russian communal village as a potential launching point for socialist development; and (3) the extensive (but largely ignored) ethnological notebooks produced by Marx between 1879 and 1882. See in particular Kevin Anderson, “Marx’s Late Writings on Non-­ Western and Pre-­capitalist Societies and Gender,” Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 4 (2002); and Gareth Stedman Jones, “Radicalism and the Extra-­European World: The Case of Karl Marx,” in Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-­Century Political Thought, ed. Duncan Bell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Although each of these three strands in Marx’s late scholarship is instructive in its own right, his 1872–­75 French revisions to Capital are of particular interest for us here because of the specific focus paid to the primitive-­accumulation thesis. Marx referred to these revisions in a well-­k nown letter he wrote to the Russian radical N. K. Mikhailovsky in 1877, in which Marx states that the “chapter on primitive accumulation” should not be read as a “historico-­philosophical theory of the general course imposed on all peoples,” but rather as a historical examination of the “path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist economic order emerged from the womb of the feudal economic order.” Karl Marx, “A Letter to NK Mikailovsky,” transcribed and reprinted in The New International 1, no. 4 (November 1934): 1. Marx makes the virtually analogous point in his well-­k nown letter to the Russian activist Vera Zasulich. Karl Marx, “A Letter to Vera Zasulich,” in McClelland, Karl Marx. 10. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 932. 11. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 940; emphasis added. For a discussion of this feature of Marx’s project, see Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 101–­3. 12. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 932. 13. As David McNally succinctly puts it, at its “heart” primitive accumulation is ultimately about “the commodification of human labour power.” David McNally, Another World Is Possible: Globalization and Anti-­capitalism (Winni­ peg, Canada: Arbeiter Ring Press, 2006), 107. 14. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 12. 88  |  Glen Coulthard

15. Frances Abele and Daiva Stasiulis, “Canada as a ‘White Settler Colony’: What about Natives and Immigrants,” in The New Canadian Political Economy, ed. Wallace Clement and Glen Williams (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1989), 252–­53; also see David Bedford and Danielle Irving, The Tragedy of Progress: Marxism, Modernity and The Aboriginal Question (Halifax, Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 2001); and Terry Wotherspoon and Vic Satze­ wich, First Nations: Race, Class, and Gender Relations (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 2000). On the importance of  Native labor to Canadian political-­economic development, see John Lutz, Makuk: A New History of Aboriginal-­W hite Relations (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008). 16. Cole Harris, “How Did Colonialism Dispossess? Comments from an Edge of Empire,” Annals of  The Association of American Geographers 94, no. 1 (2004): 167. 17. Quoted in Donald Purich, Our Land: Native Rights in Canada (Toronto: Lori­ mer Publishing, 1986), 127. 18. Taiaiake Alfred articulates this point well in the context of Canada’s land-­ claims and self-­government policies: “The framework of current reformist or reconciling negotiations are about handing us the scraps of history: self-­ government and jurisdictional authorities for state-­created Indian governments within the larger colonial system and subjection of Onkwehonwe [Indigenous peoples] to the blunt force of capitalism by integrating them as wage slaves into the mainstream resource-­exploitation economy.” Taiaiake Alfred, Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2005), 37. 19. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 876. 20. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 874. 21. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 926. 22. Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Gwich’in Comprehensive Land Claims Agreement, 2 vols. (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1992). For background information on the Inuvialuit comprehensive claim, see Department of  Indian Affairs and Northern Development, nwt Plain Facts: On Land and Self-­Government; The Inuvialuit Final Agreement (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2007). 23. Department of  Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Sahtu Dene and Metis Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement, 2 vols. (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 1993). 24. For background information on the Tlicho Agreement, see Aboriginal and Territorial Relations, “Backgrounder: The Tlicho Agreement—Highlights.” Department of  Indian Affairs and Northern Development, December 2004, accessed August 13, 2013, http://www.aadnc-­aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100025022 /1100100025024. 25. Under federal policy, specific claims differ from comprehensive claims insofar Wards of the State  |  89

as the latter do not involve an aboriginal title claim but rather seek to implement the specific rights and provisions outlined in a historical treaty (which the Crown has failed to live up to), or those that flow from the state’s fiduciary obligation to protect the interests of aboriginal peoples in its management of band money, lands, or other assets. See Department of  Indian Affairs and Norther Development, Specific Claims: Justice at Last (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2007). 26. Michael Asch, “The Dene Economy,” in Dene Nation: The Colony Within, ed. Mel Watkins (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 56–­57; Michael Asch, “The Economics of Dene Self-­Determination,” in Challenging Anthropology, ed. D. Turner and A. Smith (Toronto: McGraw-­H ill, 1980), 345–­47; Martha Johnson and Robert A. Ruttan, Traditional Dene Environmental Knowledge (Hay River, Canada: The Dene Cultural Institute, 1993), 98–­99; and Peter Usher, “The North: One land, Two Ways of Life,” in Heartland and Hinterland: A Geography of Canada, ed. L. D. McCann (Scarborough, Canada: Prentice-­Hall, 1982). 27. Asch, “The Dene Economy,” 56–­57. 28. Asch, “The Dene Economy,” 56–­58. 29. Abel, Drum Songs, 244. 30. Mark Dickerson, Whose North? Political Change, Political Development, and Self-­Government in the Northwest Territories (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1992), 89–­90. 31. Dickerson, Whose North?, 90. 32. Statistics Canada, 2001 Census Analysis Series—A Profile of the Canadian Population: Where We Live (Ottawa: The Government of Canada, 2001), 1. 33. Dene Nation, Denendeh: A Dene Celebration (Yellowknife, Canada: The Dene Nation, 1984), 19. 34. Dene Nation, Denendeh, 19. 35. Dickerson, Whose North?, 83–­84. 36. Garth M. Evans, “The Carrothers Commission Revisited,” in Northern Transitions, vol. 2, Second National Workshop on People, Resources and the Environment North of 60º, ed. Robert Keith and Janet Wright (Ottawa: Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, 1978), 299. 37. Dickerson, Whose North?, 86. 38. Institute for Psycho-­Political Research and Education, “Political Development in the Northwest Territories,” in Keith and Wright, Northern Transitions, vol. 2, 318. 39. Gerald Sutton, “Aboriginal Rights,” in Watkins, Dene Nation, 149. 40. Quoted in Bruce Alden Cox, “Changing Perceptions of  Industrial Development in the North,” in Native Peoples, Native Lands, ed. Bruce Alden Cox (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991), 223. 41. Thomas Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, vol. 1 (Ottawa: Minster of Supply and Services Canada, 1977), ix. 42. Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, ix. 90  |  Glen Coulthard

43. Edgar Dosman, The National Interest: The Politics of Northern Development, 1968–­75 (Toronto: McClelland and Stuart, 1975), xiii. 4 4. Dosman, The National Interest, 25. 45. Peter Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut (Winnipeg, Canada: University of Manitoba Press, 2005), 61–­62. On the differing ideological perspectives of each organization vis-­à-­v is northern development, see Peter Usher, “Northern Development, Impact Assessment, and Social Change,” in Anthropology, Public Policy and Native Peoples in Canada, ed. Noel Dick and James Waldram (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 1993), 110–­11. 46. For a discussion of the caveat, see Abel, Drum Songs, 250. 47. Abel, Drum Songs, 250. 48. Quoted in Miggs Wynne Morris, Return to the Drum: Teaching among the Dene in Canada’s North (Edmonton, Canada: NeWest Press, 2000), 138. 49. On the history of  Treaties 8 and 11, see Rene Fumoleau, As Long as This Land Shall Last: A History of Treaty 8 and Treaty 11, 1870–­1939 (Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 2004). 50. Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Statement on Claims of  Indian and Inuit People: A Federal Native Claims Policy (Ottawa: Department of  Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1973). 51. Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Comprehensive Claims Policy and Status of Claims (Ottawa: Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2002), 1. 52. Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Comprehensive Claims Policy and Status of Claims, 1. 53. Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, xxvi–xxvii. 54. Frances Abele, “The Berger Inquiry and the Politics of  Transformation in the Mackenzie Valley,” PhD dissertation, York University, 1983, 1. 55. Usher, “Northern Development, Impact Assessment, and Social Change,” 111. 56. Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1992), especially chapter 4. 57. Deloria, God Is Red, 62; emphasis added. 58. Deloria, God Is Red, 62. 59. Deloria, God Is Red, 63. 60. Vine Deloria Jr., “Power and Place Equal Personality,” in Power and Place: Indian Education in America, ed. Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2001), 23. 61. Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (New York: Blackwell, 2004), 11. 62. See, for example, the discussion of land as relationship in Sally Anne Zoe, Madelaine Chocolat, and Allice Legat, “Tlicho Nde: The Importance of Knowing,” unpublished research paper prepared for the Dene Cultural Institute, Dogrib Treaty 11 Council, and bhp Diamonds Inc., 1995, 5. For similar accounts in other Indigenous contexts, see Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Language and Landscape among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University Wards of the State  |  91

of New Mexico Press, 1996); Paul Nadasdy, “The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human-­A nimal Sociality,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007); and Thomas F. Thornton, Being and Place Among the Tlingit (Seattle: University of  Washington Press, 2008). 63. George Blondin, When the World Was New: Stories of the Sahtu Dene (Yellow­ knife, Canada: Outcrop Publishers, 1990), 155–­56. 64. Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum, 88. 65. Philip Blake, “Statement to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry,” in Watkins, Dene Nation, 7–­8. 66. See, for example, Lesley Malloch, Dene Government: Past and Future (Yellow­ knife, Canada: The Western Constitutional Forum, 1984). Also see George Barnaby, George Kurszewski, and Gerry Cheezie, “The Political System and the Dene,” in Watkins, Dene Nation; and Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, 93–­100. 67. Dene Nation, “Dene Declaration,” in Watkins, Dene Nation, 3. 68. Taiaiake Alfred, Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors: Kahnawake and the Rise of  Native Nationalism (Don Mills, Canada: Oxford University Press, 1995). 69. Alfred, Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors, 14. 70. The year 1983 was important in the development of the thesis nationalism as invented tradition. See in particular Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983). 71. Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of  Tradition, 178. 72. Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of  Tradition, 14. 73. Abel, Drum Songs, 231. 74. Usher, “Northern Development, Impact Assessment, and Social Change,” 99. 75. On the application of the mode-­ of-­ production concept to Dene self-­ determination, I am indebted to the work of Peter Kulchyski and Michael Asch in particular. See Michael Asch, “Dene Self-­Determination and the Study of Hunter-­Gatherers in the Modern World”; Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum, 34–­42, 103–­4; and Eleanor Leacock and Richard Lee, eds., Politics and History in Band Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Also see Hugh Brody’s work in The Living Arctic: Hunters of the Canadian North (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1987); Maps and Dreams (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1988); and The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the Modern World (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2000), as well as Peter J. Usher’s writings on the subject, including “The Class System, Metropolitan Dominance, and Northern Development in Canada,” Antipode 8, no. 3 (1976); “Environment, Race and Nation Reconsidered: Reflections on Aboriginal Land Claims in Canada,” The Canadian Geographer 47, no. 4 (2003); “The North: One Land, Two Ways of Life,” in Heartland and Hinterland: A Geography of Canada, ed. L. D. McCann (Scarborough: Prentice-­Hall, 1982); and “Staple Production and Ideology in Northern

92  |  Glen Coulthard

Canada,” in Culture, Communications and Dependency, ed. W. H. Melody, L. Salter, and P. Heyer (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1982). 76. Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum, 38. 77. Consider Marx’s formulation (with Friedrich Engels) in The German Ideology: “[A] mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce [it].” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLelland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 161. 78. Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum, 38. 79. See Asch, “The Dene Economy.” 80. Joan Ryan, Doing Things the Right Way: Dene Traditional Justice in Lac La Martre, nwt (Calgary, Canada: University of Calgary Press, 1995), 1. 81. Barnaby, Kurszewski, and Cheezie, “The Political System and the Dene,” 120. 82. For a comprehensive elaboration on this point in the context of land claims in British Columbia, see Taiaiake Alfred, “Deconstructing the British Columbia Treaty Process,” Balayi: Culture, Law and Colonialism 3 (2001); and Andrew Woolford, Between Justice and Certainty: Treaty-­Making in British Columbia (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005). Also see Gabrielle Slowey, Navigating Neoliberalism: Self-­Determination and the Mikisew Cree First Nation (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008). 83. Joyce Green, “Decolonization and Recolonization,” in Changing Canada: Political Economy as Transformation, ed. Wallace Clement and Leah Vosko (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2003), 52. 84. Miguel Alfonso Martinez, Study on Treaties, Agreements and Other Constructive Arrangements between States and Indigenous Populations, final report for the Sub-­commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 51st Session, June 22, 1999, 30. 85. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “A Proposal to the Government and People of Canada,” in Watkins, Dene Nation, 185–­87. 86. June Helm, The People of Denendeh: An Ethnohistory of the Indians of Canada’s Northwest Territories (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s Press, 2000), 265. 87. On the importance of  “political form” to Indigenous politics in the North, see Kulchyski, Like the Sound of the Drum. More generally, see Taiaiake Alfred, “Sovereignty,” in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-­Determination, ed. Joanne Barker (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 2005); Richard J. F. Day, “Who Is the ‘We’ That Gives the Gift? Native American Political Theory and the Western Tradition,” Critical Horizons 2, no. 2 (2001); Rauna Kuokkanen, “The Politics of Form and

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Alternative Autonomies: Indigenous Women, Subsistence Economies, and the Gift Paradigm,” paper published by the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University, 2007; and Andrea Smith, “Native American Feminism, Sovereignty, and Social Change,” Feminist Studies 31, no. 1 (Spring 2005). 88. On the ib-­n wt boycott of the 8th Legislative Assembly of the nwt, see Abel, Drum Songs, 259; Barnaby, Kurszewski, and Cheezie, “The Political System and the Dene,” 120–­29; Gurston Dacks, A Choice of Futures: Politics in the Canadian North (Toronto: Methuen, 1981), 99–­100; and Dickerson, Whose North?, 102. 89. Quoted in Helm, The People of Denendeh, 267. 90. Helm, The People of Denendeh, 267. 91. ib-­n wt, “Agreement in Principle,” 184. 92. On the relevance of cooperative and workplace-democracy modes of economic development to Indigenous societies, see Guston Dacks, “Worker-­ Controlled Native Enterprises: A Vehicle for Community Development in Northern Canada,” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 3, no. 2 (1983); and Lou Ketilson and Ian MacPherson, Aboriginal Co-­operatives in Canada: Current Situation and Potential for Growth (Saskatoon, Canada: Centre for the Study of Co-­operatives, 2001). Also see Robert Ruttan and John T’Seleie, Renewable Resource Potentials For Alternative Development in the Mackenzie River Region, report prepared for the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories and the Métis Association of the Northwest Territories, 1976. 93. Annual Report, 1975 (Yellowknife, Canada: Indian Brotherhood of  the North­ west Territories, 1975), 24–­25. 94. The conversation occurred via mail between a representative for the Kahnawake Sub-­office and the then–vice president of the ib-­n wt Richard Nerysoo. The letter was included as part of an information package compiled in 1977 by the nwt Legislative Assembly to generate public concern over the “radical” nature of the Dene self-­determination movement. Also included in the package was a list of reading materials that the then­–ib-­n wt Community Development program director Georges Erasmus suggested might be useful in constructing a “development philosophy” for the Dene Nation. The list of readings included, among others, Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized. According to Erasmus, these “alternative” sources on development were to supplement research and perspectives drawn from the communities. “Many alternatives must be looked at,” wrote Erasmus in a memo addressed to Dene fieldworkers, “especially the example of our culture, the approach to development and distribution of material and ownership that our forefathers took. We may wish to keep some aspects of the old way in this industrial era.” Georges Erasmus became president of the ib-­n wt the following year (in 1976) and served in this capacity until 1983. Information package on file with author. 94  |  Glen Coulthard

95. Quoted in the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories’s Annual Report, 1975, 25. 96. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “A Proposal to the Government and People of Canada,” 184. 97. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “A Proposal to the Gov­ ernment and People of Canada,” 184. 98. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “A Proposal to the Government and People of Canada,” 184. 99. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “A Proposal to the Government and People of Canada,” 187. 100. Abel, Drum Songs, 254. 101. Quoted in Martin O’Malley, Past and Future Land: An Account of the Berger Inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Limited, 1976), 98. 102. Harold Cardinal, The Rebirth of Canada’s Indians (Edmonton, Canada: Hurtig, 1977), 15. 103. Quoted in Peter Puxley, A Model of Engagement: Reflections of the 25th Anniversary of the Berger Report (Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Network, 2002), 9. 104. Quoted in O’Malley, Past and Future Land, 98. 105. Quoted in Kenneth Coates and Judith Powell, The Modern North: People, Politics and the Rejection of Colonialism (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1989), 112. 106. This information was obtained by the ib-­n wt from a report made by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter Intelligence Program (cointelpro). See ib-­n wt, “The fbi War Game and the nwt,” The Native Press, November 12, 1976, 1, 8. 107. Dene Nation, Denendeh, 29. 108. Coates and Powell, The Modern North, 113. 109. Government of the Northwest Territories, “Priorities for the North: A Submission to the Honorable Warren Allmand, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development,” in Northern Transitions, vol. 2, Second National Workshop on People, Resources, and the Environment North of 60º, ed. Robert Keith and Janet Wright (Ottawa: Canadian Arctic Resource Committee, 1978). 110. Government of the Northwest Territories, “Priorities for the North,” 260, 262. The Legislative Assembly even went as far as to (irresponsibly) suggest that Thomas Berger’s recommendations would amount to the establishment of an “apartheid” regime in northern Canada: “These same people (i.e., the Dene and their supporters) think that much of the territories should be converted into racial states along native lines. Like Mr. Thomas Berger. If you’re for what he seems to believe, then you’ve got to support something that has always been abhorrent to Canadians and violates our history—separating people according to race. Frankly, support Mr. Berger and you have to support South Wards of the State  |  95

Africa and its policy of apartheid—the separate development for each of its founding races.” Quoted in Dene Nation: Apartheid?, pamphlet (Edmonton: Free South Africa Committee, University of Alberta, 1977). 111. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “Metro Proposal,” in Keith and Wright, Northern Transitions, vol. 2. 112. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “Metro Proposal,” 265. 113. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “Metro Proposal,” 266. 114. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “Metro Proposal,” 266. 115. Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, “Metro Proposal,” 266. 116. Government of the Northwest Territories, “Priorities for the North,” 262. 117. Government of the Northwest Territories, “Priorities for the North,” 259, 262. 118. Government of the Northwest Territories, “Priorities for the North,” 259, 260. 119. Office of the Prime Minister, “Political Development in the Northwest Territories,” in Keith and Wright, Northern Transitions, vol. 2. 120. Office of the Prime Minister, “Special Government Representative for Constitutional Development in the Northwest Territories,” in Keith and Wright, Northern Transitions, vol. 2, 275. 121. Office of the Prime Minister, “Political Development in the Northwest Territories,” 280. 122. Office of the Prime Minister, “Political Development in the Northwest Territories,” 279. 123. Somewhat tellingly, the federal government would immediately go on qualify this assertion by stating that it would not sanction racially determined “political structures” unless this meant “the establishment of reserves under the Indian Act.” Office of the Prime Minister, “Political Development in the Northwest Territories,” 280. 124. Office of the Prime Minister, “Special Government Representative for Constitutional Development in the Northwest Territories,” 275. 125. Peter Russell, “An Analysis of Prime Minister Trudeau’s Paper on Political Development in the Northwest Territories,” in Keith and Wright, Northern Transitions, vol. 2, 297. 126. Government of the Northwest Territories, “Priorities for the North,” 262. 127. Government of the Northwest Territories, “Priorities for the North,” 263. 128. Office of the Prime Minster, “Political Development in the Northwest Territories,” 278. 129. Office of the Prime Minster, “Political Development in the Northwest Territories,” 278. 130. Office of the Prime Minster, “Political Development in the Northwest Ter­ ritories,” 278. 131. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North (Yellowknife, Canada: Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, 1981), 3. 132. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 7. 96  |  Glen Coulthard

133. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 7. 134. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 13. 135. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 13, 21–­23. 136. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 17. 137. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 9–­10. 138. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 9. 139. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 11. 140. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 11. 1 41. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 11. 142. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 11. 1 43. Dene Nation and Metis Association of the Northwest Territories, Public Government for the People of the North, 11. 144. Dene Nation, Denendeh, 42. 1 45. Aboriginal Rights and Constitutional Development Secretariat, “Discussion Paper on the Denendeh Government Proposal,” working paper prepared for the Special Committee of the Legislative Assembly on Constitutional Development, September 1982, 30. 146. Dene Nation, Denendeh, 42. 1 47. Abel, Drum Songs, 256–­57. 148. Dene/Metis Claims Secretariat, The Dene/Metis Land Claim: Information Package (Yellowknife, Canada: Dene/Metis Negotiations Secretariat, 1986), 8. 149. Dene/Metis Claims Secretariat, The Dene/Metis Land Claim, 8. Following the change in leadership in 1983 from George Erasmus to Stephen Kakfwi, the Dene Nation made a strategic decision to pursue the recognition of political rights though the territorial government and land issues through the negotiation of the land claim. Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum, 87. 150. Marina Devine, “The Dene Nation: Coming Full Circle,” Arctic Circle (March/ April 1992), 15. 151. On the fragmentation of the Dene Nation and unified nationalist movement, see Devine, “The Dene Nation,” 12–­19; and Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum, 94–­97. 152. For a critical discussion of the newly proposed Mackenzie Gas Project see Petr Cizek, “Northern Pipe Dreams and Nightmares: Return of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline,” Canadian Dimension, May/June 2005; and Erin Freeland and Wards of the State  |  97

Jessica Simpson, “Petro-­capitalism and the Fight for Indigenous Culture in Denendeh,” New Socialist 62 (Fall 2007). 153. Quoted in Ed Struzik, “Things Change in 25 Years Says Anti-­pipeline Activist: Frank T’Seleie Is Now in Favour of a Pipeline along the Mackenzie,” Edmonton Journal, July 7, 2001. 154. Struzik, “Things Change in 25 Years Says Anti-­pipeline Activist.” 155. Stuart Kirsch, ”Indigenous Movements and the Risks of Counter Globalization,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (2007): 304. 156. Gordon, “Canada, Empire and Indigenous Peoples in the Americas.” 157. Paul Nadasdy, “ ‘Property’ and Aboriginal Land Claims in the Canadian Subarctic: Some Theoretical Considerations,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 1 (2002): 248.

98  |  Glen Coulthard

FOUR 

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Robert Nichols

Contract and Usurpation Enfranchisement and Racial Governance in Settler-­Colonial Contexts

The struggle to close the gap between the ideal of the social contract and the reality of the Racial Contract has been the unacknowledged political history of the past few hundred years. —Charles Mills, The Racial Contract To confront the hegemonic structure by denouncing the gap or contradiction between its official values and its actual practice—with greater or lesser success—is the most effective way of enforcing its universality. —Étienne Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality”

This chapter is one contribution to a larger project consisting of an attempt to interrogate the implication of political theory in settler colonialism. I aspire to make two contributions to the recent proliferation of  literature in political philosophy and the history of  political thought on questions of empire and imperialism. First, contrary to the overwhelming preoccupation in political theories of global empire that take the historical experience of, say, British imperialism in India or French imperialism in North Africa as paradigmatic, the focus of my attention is the historical specificity of  settler colonialism in the Anglo-­A merican world (e.g., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States) up to the present. It is disappointing— and revealing—to observe that most political philosophers and theorists in the Western academy have not taken the question of imperialism as an important object of study until quite recently, and those who have taken it up have failed to do so in ways that highlight their own implication in the colonial occupation of unceded Indigenous territories in the Americas or the Anglo-­Commonwealth, including the land upon which many of us

write.1 Second, I am not merely interested in the political theory of settler colonialism—that is, a political theory that takes as its domain of objects of investigation the specific practices and configurations of settlement as a tool of empire building. Rather, I am primarily interested here in political theory as settler colonialism—that is, I seek to highlight the ways in which the production of knowledge organized around the supposedly key concepts of political philosophy (such as sovereignty, contract, and consent) has served, and continues to serve, as an important justificatory apparatus in the actual practices of settler colonialism, and how those historical practices have affected the historical development of central features of what we recognize as political theory today. So when I suggest thinking through the question of political theory and/as settler colonialism, I have in mind a more comprehensive critique of constitutive features of contemporary political theory than a model that merely suggests adding more historical and cross-­cultural examples to the field of possible empirical data analyzable by an untroubled discipline of thought. Rather, I seek to ask what it would mean if political theory were to take as its point of departure a foregrounding of the historical experiences of  the settler-­colonial societies of Anglo-­A merica as at least partially constitutive of the discipline, including an analysis of why this central constituting role has remained relatively underexamined or effaced. Elsewhere I have taken up this question by examining the political function of certain traditions of European political thought in colonial contexts, but especially that of social contract theory.2 Social contract theory refers to a large and internally diverse tradition of argumentation in Western practical philosophy in which an original situation is imagined wherein individuals encounter each other in a presocial, prepolitical state of nature and contract together to form the basis of a collectivity. Some theorists in this tradition have suggested that such an original state of nature once existed in actual historical time, whereas others argue that it is merely a useful “device of representation” (in the language of  John Rawls) or heuristic device that is helpful for generating the basic guiding principles that all would agree to under conditions of ignorance as to their actual social locations. These thinkers also disagree over whether moral norms are best understood as conventionalist—as the product of actual negotiation between self-­interested agents—or derived from a set of objective, quasi-­ transcendental rules (and thus the contract merely helps to bring into relief what those rules are).3 Versions of this form of reasoning can be seen in works by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, and Im100  |  Robert Nichols

manuel Kant, as well as, in the twentieth century, Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Charles Mills (to provide only a few prominent examples). In referring to the function of social contract theory in relation to settler colonialism, I have chosen to speak of the settler contract. In using the term settler contract, I am deliberately playing off of previous work by philosophers and political theorists who have been concerned to show the historical function and development of social contract theory in relation to specific axes of oppression and domination. Two of the most important contributions to this literature are Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract and Mills’s The Racial Contract. In Pateman’s 1988 work, she rereads the canon of  Western social contract theory in an attempt to demonstrate that the presumptively neutral and ideal accounts of the origins of civil society as presented in the works of, for instance, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau were in fact always (implicitly or explicitly) sexual-­patriarchal narratives that legitimized the subordination of women.4 In 1995 Mills deliberately borrowed from Pateman in his project of unmasking the racial (or, more precisely, white-­supremacist) nature of the contract. There Mills defines the “racial contract” as that set of formal or informal agreements or meta-­agreements . . . between the members of one subset of  humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria c1, c2, c3[,] . . . as “white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-­r uled polities the whites either already inhabit or establish or in transactions as aligns with these polities, and the moral and juridical rules normally regulating the behaviour of whites in their dealings with one another either do not apply at all in dealings with nonwhites or apply only in a qualified form.5 Although they have not necessarily used the specific term of settler contract, for some time now various thinkers have attempted to contribute to an expansion on these themes by demonstrating the ways in which social contract theory has served as a primary justificatory device for the establishment of another axis of oppression and domination: an expropriation and usurpation contract whereby the constitution of the ideal civil society is premised upon the extermination of  Indigenous peoples or the displacement of them from their lands. In fact, the term settler contract originally deContract and Usurpation  |  101

rives from Pateman’s use of the phrase in a chapter of a recently published book, coauthored with Charles Mills.6 While I am obviously indebted to this work, there are certain modifications I would like to make to Pateman’s use of the phrase for my own purposes. First, while Pateman uses the term to refer to the notion that when founding new polities, settler colonizers implicitly or explicitly denied the existence of  Indigenous peoples, I propose a more modest and qualified use. It is my belief that although this may be the case in some specific instances, as an empirical claim it is overextended. It is not the case that all settlers—or even most settlers—denied the existence of previous societies. In fact, it is often the case that actual settlers on the ground recognized Indigenous title, in contrast to the theoretical pictures given of  Indigenous peoples in prevailing theories of the time.7 More narrowly then, the term settler contract references the strategic use of the fiction of a society as the product of a contract between its founding members only insofar as it is employed in these historical moments to displace the question of that society’s actual formation in acts of conquest, genocide, and land appropriation. The term’s reactivation is used not to deny the content of the claims of specific Indigenous peoples, but rather to shift the register of argumentation to a highly abstract and counterfactual level, relieving the burden of proof from colonial states. Settler contract then refers to the dual legitimating function of the philosophical and historical-­narrative device of the original contract as the origins of societal order: first, by presupposing no previous Indigenous societies, and, second, by legitimizing the violence required to turn this fiction into reality. The question I would like to pose now is: what is the relationship between the analysis of other axes of oppression and domination—particularly antiracist critique—to the settler contract? Specifically, I am interested to show that the political function of antiracist discourse changes when situated in a settler-­colonial context. This, in turn, will help to demonstrate the general point—that abstract or ideal theories must be analyzed in terms of their function at specific historical and political junctures, and not merely in terms of their internal structure of argumentation. I wish to interrogate the intuition that even though antiracist discourses may serve a critical and destabilizing function in one context, in another (specifically settler-­colonial) context, that same discourse may serve a totalizing and hegemonic function. This is particularly the case when the problem of racism is taken up (as it has been by key theorists of the racial contract) as a failure to properly universalize the category of the “human” (or of  “person-

102  |  Robert Nichols

hood”), which thereby introduces forms of domination through political and societal exclusion. This position is best represented by Mills’s analysis. In his work, most notably The Racial Contract, Mills sought to both deracialize the social contract tradition and, at the same time, employ its methods as a means of generating a critical antiracist theory. He sought to show that the reality of a political and social order that operates on the principle of white supremacy (which Mills submits has existed globally for some five hundred years) cannot be defended by the actual application of social contract theorizing to thinking about justice.8 Thus, Mills characterizes his work as part of the long struggle to “close the gap between the ideal of the social contract and the reality of the Racial Contract.”9 Understood in this way, antiracist critique may inadvertently reproduce the official state narrative of the settler colony, in which the (colonial) state is the best approximation of the ideal social contract and indigeneity is understood as derivation or deviation from this ideal, in need of additional normative justification (derived, for instance, from a claim to the recognition of cultural distinctiveness, or from claims to first or prior occupancy). In fact, it is often through the removal of so-­called race-­based barriers to integration and subsequent enclosure and incorporation of previously self-­governing Indigenous polities that settler colonialism has operated. A distinction is required then between a politics of antidiscrimination and a politics of antiusurpation. Insofar as a certain form of antiracist critique fundamentally obscures and propagates this logic, it is part of what I am calling the settler contract. In order to provide a historical context to this discussion and an exemplary case that will hopefully reveal not only the limitations of contractarian approaches to antiracism but also their strategic function within the settler contract, let me turn to a brief case study—that of the compulsory enfranchisement of Indigenous nations in Canada—before returning to further elaborate upon the theoretical argument. Compulsory Enfranchisement and the Gradual Civilization of the Michel Nation

Between 1876 and 1879, numerous Indigenous nations in the northwest plains of what is now Canada—particularly in the current provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan—entered into agreements with the British Crown in what became known as Treaty 6.10 One of the signatories to this agreement was the Michel First Nation, a community of people originally

Contract and Usurpation  |  103

of  Cree, Mohawk, and Métis ancestry who settled in northwestern Alberta. The treaty was meant to secure the principles that would guide a just relationship between the Indigenous nations and the British Crown in Canada in perpetuity. However, the treaty also had the effect of restricting communities such as the Michel Nation to geographically bounded spaces as determined by the Crown: the reserve system. Furthermore, in the thirty years following the signing, the Michel Nation was placed under considerable pressure to part with most of its remaining reserve lands—including an 8,200 acre section in one set of transactions—for which the members rarely received the promised compensation.11 The slow enclosure of the Michel Nation and subsequent theft of its land holdings is unfortunately not unique. It is the rule rather than the exception in the colonization of the northwest plains. In fact, the Michel Nation is no longer even recognized as a corporate entity—or Indian Band—by the Canadian government such that the nation may gain the legal standing to fight for the return of its lands. The nonrecognition of  Indigenous communities as legal and political entities is also not particular to this community, however. What is unique to the members’ situation is the way in which the erasure of the Michel Nation took place. In 1958 the entire nation was subject to “compulsory enfranchisement.”12 All the members of the band lost their Indian status and became Canadian citizens with formal legal equality as individuals before the law, but no membership in the corporate entity previously recognized as the Michel Band. In 1985 some of the individual descendants of the Michel Nation had their Indian status reinstated under the controversial Bill c-­31. However, the band itself was never again recognized and, in lieu of this, the nation expresses itself through the incorporated, not-­for-­profit Friends of Michel Society.13 The nation continues to struggle for recognition as a band and, because of this, for the return of its lands.14

In Canada the policy of enfranchising Indians was given its first legislative expression in The Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of  Indian Tribes in This Province, and to Amend the Laws Relating to Indians, which passed in 1857. This act provided the possibility of an enfranchisement of Indians as British subjects, but this enfranchisement was largely voluntary, selective, and differentially ordered along racist and sexist lines. As the 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (rcap) states, the Gradual Civilization Act was premised on the notion that 104  |  Robert Nichols

by eventually removing all legal distinctions between Indians and non-­ Indians through the process of enfranchisement, it would be possible in time to absorb Indian people into colonial society. Enfranchisement, which meant freedom from the protected status associated with being an Indian, was seen as a privilege. There was thus a penalty of six months’ imprisonment for any Indian falsely representing himself as enfranchised. Only Indian men could seek enfranchisement. They had to be over 21, able to read and write English or French, be reasonably well educated, free of debt, and of good moral character as determined by a commission of non-­I ndian examiners.15 Enfranchisement as a political technology of assimilation in settler colonialism, at least in this case, began as a strategy of differential selection and ordering of subjects through gendered and racist lenses. The aim was not a wholesale incorporation of any and all Indigenous peoples. Rather, it was a careful and selective process whereby only those best approximating the ideal British subject—male, well educated, propertied, and of good moral character—would be considered for incorporation into the body politic. As rcap states, enfranchisement was a “privilege.” Such strategies naturally produce, however, unintended consequences and unexpected problems, which then require modification of the general system of governance. In the first twenty years after the passing of the Gradual Civilization Act, only one Indian, Elias Hill, took advantage of the opportunity to voluntarily become a full subject of the British Crown in Canada.16 Hence, by the passing of the first Indian Act in 1876, the political technology of enfranchisement underwent significant modification. In fact, the Indian Act reflected a radical reorientation of the underlying ideological comprehension of enfranchisement as such, as represented by provisions of the Indian Act that permitted the involuntary enfranchisement of Indigenous peoples. This was initially still a selective process, indexed to the usual normative ranking of  Indigenous peoples along racist, sexist, and class-­based hierarchies. For instance, one of the first provisions for involuntary enfranchisement was section 86, which stated that any Indian who became a doctor, lawyer, or clergyman, or who obtained a university degree, could be stripped of his Indian status and band membership and incorporated into Canadian citizenship. Further involuntary enfranchisement could take place in the (now infamous) case that an Indian woman married a non-­I ndian.17 Reflecting another important development, section 93 of the Indian Act stipulated that an entire band could be enfranchised at once. Contract and Usurpation  |  105

In short, we can observe during this period a major conceptual reordering of the very nature of enfranchisement. It moved largely from an individual, voluntary act to a collective, ascriptive tool of wholesale assimilation. The shift in policy continued throughout the twentieth century. In 1920 the Gradual Civilization Act was further amended to permit the compulsory enfranchisement of any Indian or Indians (including entire bands) who were deemed fit by a board of examiners appointed by the superintendent general of  Indian affairs.18 It was under these provisions that the Michel Band was eventually enfranchised in toto. In these two moments of enfranchisement in the context of settler colonialism we can observe two different logics at work. In the first—represented best by the original 1857 act—enfranchisement operates as a norm-­ laden, hierarchically ordered screening process, with a function that is both corrective pedagogical (for the Indian tribes) and salutary protective (for white, “civilized” settler societies). As the title attests, the policy was meant to encourage Indigenous peoples to gradually bring themselves into alignment with the civilized nations while at the same time functioning as a protective screen to guard the civilized against encroachment by the savage and barbaric. In this way, enfranchisement served as a political technology not unlike immigration testing did (and does today by carefully selecting the “best” citizens, who are most conforming to the nation-­building exercise). By 1876, however, we can already begin to see a shift, one that came to full fruition in the amendments of the 1920s.19 Under the logic of the compulsory-­enfranchisement provisions, correcting the racial-­biological and moral character of the Indigenous peoples is less important than their wholesale incorporation into the settler-­colonial body politic. For instance, in the case of involuntary enfranchisement resulting from “marrying out,” it is not possible to determine that the children of the partnership would be “fit” for civilized society. In short, it appears that the corrective-­pedagogical aspect of the policy took a backseat to the more pressing question of  how to absorb indigeneity altogether and make it disappear within a few generations.20 And if the corrective-­pedagogical function required a careful typology and differentiation of citizenship calibrated along lines of race, class, gender, sexual, and moral character, the second logic required the total erasure of such differences, at least in law. In other words, in the first deployment of the political technology of enfranchisement, particularity functioned as a tool of marking out difference and ordering it; in the second moment, it was precisely the absence of a marking out of such particu106  |  Robert Nichols

larities that permitted enfranchisement to continue to function in service of the settler-­colonial state. Or, perhaps more accurately, settler-­colonial governance operated most effectively when a tension and dynamic oscillation could be maintained between the strategies of ordering-­taxonomizing particularity and difference-­blind universalizing. Let us call these then two modes of settler-­colonial governmentality. While recognizing that these two modes have always operated in tandem (even if shifts in emphasis can be noted in particular places and at particular times), it is the animating concern of this chapter that the second mode has been largely occluded from critical analysis, even by those, or perhaps especially by those, who seek to correct the injustices of the first. One place we might expect such a dearth of critical analysis is in the official state narratives of settler-­colonial societies themselves. The government of Canada has recently acknowledged that policies relating to the enfranchisement of  Indigenous peoples were based on racist premises. State documents understand and locate the racism of these policies, however, in terms of the differential and hierarchically ordered status—either de jure or de facto—of Indians relative to their non-­I ndian fellow compatriots when it came to citizenship rights. In other words, the Canadian government typically construes its past racism as a failure to completely and equally integrate Indigenous peoples into citizenship through the uneven distribution of rights that flowed from the policy of compulsory enfranchisement. The (supposed) problem was that although Indigenous peoples were enfranchised, they were often prevented from effectively exercising this franchise due to formal prohibitions against Indians voting, or because of provisos (such as property qualifications) that de facto excluded the vast majority of  Indigenous peoples from political participation. One policy document explains: Enfranchisement simply removed all distinctions between the legal rights and liabilities of  Indians and those of other British subjects. It did not in itself, grant an entitlement to vote. Enfranchisement did, however, require the abandonment of reserve rights and the right to live with one’s family and culture. Further, it was dependent upon proof of literacy, education, morality and solvency. Consequently, the requirements for enfranchisement constituted discriminatory conditions imposed on Indians, preventing them from qualifying for the right to vote. While acknowledging these shortcomings, however, the Canadian government is also quick to note that significant progress has been made to overContract and Usurpation  |  107

come this racist and discriminatory past. Credit is given to “the advent of human rights legislation following World War II” for initiating the legislative changes that finally corrected the discriminatory actions of the federal and provincial governments so that the laws would eventually “conform with human rights philosophy.”21 What is not countenanced in this state narrative of confessing and overcoming a racist past is, of course, that the colonial logic is not captured (or at least not exhausted) by racially differential and unequal citizenship. Rather, it is the incorporation of Indigenous peoples such as the Michel into the settler-­colonial state itself that is at stake here. Furthermore, in such cases a more seamless, nondifferentiated form of citizenship would not be inadequate for rectifying a colonial past; this would be a continuation of the second logic of settler-­colonial governmentality. If racialized taxonomies and their corresponding hierarchically ordered packages of economic and political rights were the only form that colonial governance took, then we would be right to suggest that a means of correcting this legacy would be a more universal and egalitarian application of citizenship. In fact, this is precisely what was suggested by the Canadian state in its infamous 1969 White Paper, in which the government proposed the abolishment of the Indian Act because such “race-­based” legislation was unjust, and “the legislative and constitutional bases of discrimination must be removed.”22 As the document explains at length: The Government believes that its policies must lead to the full, free and non­d iscriminatory participation of the Indian people in Canadian society. . . . The policies proposed recognize the simple reality that the separate legal status of  Indians and the policies which have flowed from it have kept the Indian people apart from and behind other Canadians. The Indian people have not been full citizens of the communities and provinces in which they live and have not enjoyed the equality and bene­ fits that such participation offers. The treatment resulting from their different status has been often worse, sometimes equal and occasionally better than that accorded to their fellow citizens. What matters is that it has been different.23 In short, the appeal to a nonhierarchically ordered, “difference-­blind” form of universal enfranchisement does more than fail to address the problems of colonial governance; it is an explicit tactic of settler colonialism. One place we might expect a more nuanced understanding of the political technology of universality as governmentality would be in the analysis 108  |  Robert Nichols

of universality and antiracism stemming from various traditions of critical political theory. However, because of the lack of attention to the specificity of settler colonialism as a unique set of  historical formations of governance and ideological production, we find very little comprehension of this dynamic. Such work tends to effectively echo the official narrative of settler-­ colonial states such as Canada. I will therefore now return to the discussion of  the application of social contract theory to antiracist critique as a means of demonstrating the limitations of this approach for apprehending the problematic presented by the Michel Nation case. Governmentality, Totality, and Hegemony in the Settler Contract

How does the case of compulsory, universal enfranchisement as a tactic of settler colonialism trouble the very conceptions of universality and citi­ zenship with which political philosophers have been working? How do prevailing understandings of racism as a gap between a universal or ideal social contract and the reality of racially ordered societies effectively reflect and reproduce key elements of the settler contract? What happens when we foreground colonization through ascriptive incorporation? What does this foregrounding do to the self-­understanding of idealist, contractual theories, even when they are specifically applied to the problem of racism? In order to explore these questions, let me return to the most prominent example of such work—that of Charles Mills. In The Racial Contract, after debunking the white-­supremacist mythology that supports and justifies the social contract tradition of sovereignty, as well as tracing a set of practical effects in specific policy areas (such as affirmative action), the philosopher Charles Mills raises an even more troubling prospect. He writes, “The Racial Contract continues, with a truly grisly irony, to manifest itself even in the condemnation of the consequences of the Racial Contract.” As an example of this, Mills points to the case in which the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany is “misleadingly designated as the Holocaust,” a case in which “the racial mass murder of Europeans is placed on a different moral plane than the racial mass murder of non-­ Europeans.”24 Mills’s point here is that the specific historical experience of  Nazi Germany, when generalized and made the standard for thinking about all institutionalized and state-­sponsored forms of racism, not only obscures the dynamics of racialized governance in other parts of the world at other times but also can be a form of racism (in this case, a privileging of European over non-­European life). In foregrounding the case of the Michel Nation, I hope to bring to light Contract and Usurpation  |  109

another irony, one distressingly similar to that observed by Mills. The prevailing way in which the problematization of race and racism has been taken up from within the dominant languages of Western political philosophy—including its condemnation by people such as Mills—continues to instantiate the colonial and imperial features of this tradition by effacing the historical connection between racism and colonialism. As a consequence, this construes the normatively favored solution to the problem of racism as a more expansive, universalist redescription of personhood or humanity, realized through a deeper integration of racialized subjects under the legal protection of (unproblematized) colonial sovereignty. A more general claim, which I can only gesture toward here tangentially, is that ideal, analytic, and contract philosophy fails to adequately diagnose the imbricated problematics of racism and colonialism, and thus also its remedy. Furthermore, this philosophy fails to disclose the historic and ongoing implication of such a mode of theorizing with the very problematic itself. In this way, ideal contract theory serves to reestablish itself as a key feature of racist colonialism in precisely the moment in which it critiques racist colonialism. In short, one of the ways in which the settler contract continues to function today is through the hegemonic reproduction of its universality through antiracist discourse. Analysis of the racial contract, insofar as it comprehends the problem of white-­supremacist rule to be one of failed universality, functions to performatively reproduce key features of the settler contract. Although Mills sees the actual historical instantiation of contract theory as implicated in white supremacy, he nevertheless argues that the form or model of reasoning it represents can be “modified and used for emancipatory purposes.”25 Mills argues that the language of an ideal contract that constitutes society “serves a useful heuristic purpose—it’s a way of dramatizing the original social contract idea of humans choosing the principles that would regulate a just society.”26 This is why Mills describes his work as a contribution to that long struggle to “close the gap between the ideal of the social contract and the reality of the Racial Contract.”27 The key thing to note here is that, because he begins from within the social contract tradition—in which an ideal, counterfactual contract between individual subjects is used as a device of representation for the generating of a normative theory of justice—Mills construes the racism of the actual contract between citizens as problematic because it relegates a certain category of people (nonwhites) in such a way that they “have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-­r uled polities.”28 In other words, the “subordinate 110  |  Robert Nichols

civil standing” problem cannot not withstand the application of a “universability test” inherent in the device of an ideal contract. Now, even if we were to accept Mills’s point as valid with respect to one aspect of racism and the racial contract (i.e., the subordinate civil standing of nonwhites in white-­r uled polities), we would still have to acknowledge not only analytic difference between this racial contract and its settler variant, but also the function of the former as part of settler-­colonial governmentality. As the example of the Michel Nation (to take only one case) makes abundantly clear, it is not (only) “subordinate standing” or “differential and hierarchically ordered citizenship” within white-­r uled polities that Indigenous peoples often struggle against, but also the very process by which they were dispossessed of their land by, and then incorporated into, a white-­r uled polity through nondifferentiated, universal enfranchisement. In short, remedy for Mills’s racial contract appears to be a less racially segregated, more universally incorporating polity, whereas remedy for the settler contract would render problematic the further incorporation of  Indigenous peoples into the settler-­colonial state per se (whatever their citizenship status therein). In order to properly grasp this aspect of the settler contract, we need to theorize claims to the underlying universality of peoples as forms of governmentality. Flowing from the Michel Nation example, I suggest that to speak of universals is not only to make an ideal claim but also to invite a certain relationship of governance over those to whom this is addressed. Here I find it helpful to invoke Michel Foucault, for he most effectively posited the idea that we might analyze claims to universal truths not only in terms of their truth content relative to a set of agreed upon tests for verification. Rather, he suggested that we might study such claims to the universal also as forms of governmentality.29 In fact, Foucault suggested that we might even take this as a basic “theoretical and methodological decision.”30 When we take up the study of settler colonialism from this starting point, we don’t accept the a priori existence of things such as the state, the public sphere, and a set of subjects requiring enfranchisement or emancipation (or not). Instead we look to the actual practices enacted (in this case, the enfranchisement) and their effects on producing the very thing that these subjects appear, retrospectively, to have been incorporated into (in this case, the setter-­colonial state). In other words, adopting a Foucauldian suspicion of such universals—“supposons que les universaux n’existent pas”31—permits us to escape the demand to read the Michel case as an instance of inclusion (or exclusion) of  Indigenous nations into the settler colony in favor of  readContract and Usurpation  |  111

ing the case as a practice that produces this colony and, at the same time, establishes its universality. Consideration of how this form of governmentality works through certain forms of antiracism requires that we supplement our analysis with two additional theoretical tools. First, we must also keep in mind that universality may also refer to the process by which a specific mode of life (with its configuration of economic, cultural, political, and philosophical elements) becomes universal, not in the sense of approximating an ideal, but by becoming totalizing of a field of possibilities. It is not enough to suggest that we think of universalizing claims as forms of governmentality; we must also specify what kind of governmentality they call forward, in context. As an example of universality as totality, here we need only to think of Marx’s characterization of bourgeois capitalism as a force that “batters down all walls,” “compels all nations,” and “creates a world after its own image.”32 By attending to the assimilative function of claims to universal inclusion, we also can better grasp the techniques of a range of alternatives, or the means by which they are foreclosed. By focusing on the historical experience of settler colonialism, for instance, we cannot avoid foregrounding the fact that there may be some forms of life or modes of governance that are universalizing in the sense that they literally colonize and absorb alternatives. They create the world after their own image. When introducing the device of an original contract in a state of nature into the context of ongoing occupation and settlement of  Indigenous lands, thinkers in this tradition often explicitly understood their arguments to serve a kind of performative colonial function. Indigenous lands were declared terra nullius and analogized to the beginnings of the world. (The Lockean precept that “in the beginning all the world was America” is but the clearest and most oft-­cited example of this.33)The nonexistence of previous peoples is the presupposition of thinking of colonies as “new world” polities. But this presupposition is also a project. For instance, by the early 1800s American Indian policy reflected the notion that displacement of  Indigenous peoples from their land was acceptable not because these peoples had committed any crime or violence against the United States, but because Indigenous sovereignty had never truly existed in the first place. The myth of an original, pure, and empty land was thus used as justification to advance policies that would turn the myth into fact (i.e., by exterminating Indigenous peoples and thus establishing a true terra nullius).34 This is the true gap between the ideal and the reality that social contract theory has struggled to close. Aspiring to approximate the ideal of the social 112  |  Robert Nichols

contract in the context of settler colonialism means aspiring to found a just society ex nihilo. The founding of the just society is achieved therefore by universalizing the colonial society only in the sense of eradicating all that stands as a permanent reminder of its nonuniversality (i.e., indigeneity)— what Patrick Wolfe calls settler colonialism’s “logic of elimination.”35 In order to grasp the totalizing impulse of the settler colony, we need to grasp this performative loop—the projection and subsequent production of an empty state of nature. To bring in a third term and push the argument one step further, I would suggest that analysis of racial governance in terms of the gap between the ideal of the social contract and the reality of a racially ordered society in the context of settler colonialism performs a function that is, in a classic sense, hegemonic. Insofar as this form of antiracist critique enables settler-­ colonial sovereignty to structure the terms of its own contestation, it is classically hegemonic, or, in a slightly different language, a form of what Étienne Balibar analyzes as “fictive or total university.” Balibar cautions that “to confront the hegemonic structure by denouncing the gap or contradiction between its official values and its actual practice—with greater or lesser success—is the most effective way of enforcing its universality.”36 In this case, the ideal of the social contract effectively demonstrates its universality only “because it leads dominated groups to struggle against discrimination or inequality in the very name of the superior values of the community: the legal and ethical values of the state itself (notably: justice).”37 With the introduction of this final point of reference (hegemony), and a linking of it back our previous signposts (regarding governmentality), a picture of the structure of the settler contract emerges more fully. In sum: Settler colonialism deploys universality as a totalizing form of governmentality through the hegemonic reproduction of its own contestation. In this case, the politics of antiracism seeks to bridge the gap between the ideal (as represented by the law of the settler-­colonial state itself) and the actual (i.e., discriminatory practices of differential and hierarchically ordered citizenship). Insofar as antiracist theory and praxis fail to grasp claims to the ideal universality of the settler-­colonial state as a form of governmentality (one that is totalizing of alternative horizons), it will fail to recognize that deeper integration (even fully undifferentiated citizenship rights) within this (colonial) state is itself what is being contested by anticolonialism. Such an antiracist critique will thus fail to see the call and need for not a more uniform citizenship (without racialized distinctions) but a pluralization of Contract and Usurpation  |  113

sovereignties. As such, it will function as an aspect of the settler contract itself—namely a hegemonic function. The key point here is that by focusing on the legislation of an ideal contract (on the model of a founding constitution) that can guide the adjudication of actually existing practices, social-­contract theories—even those working on critical antiracist projects—fundamentally miss one dimension of colonial domination. What a foregrounding of the historical experience of settler colonialism highlights is that, in addition to racial (and sexual) discrimination and exclusion, colonial domination has also operated, and continues to operate, through a logic of assimilation and usurpation. As James Tully reminds us, assimilation is one face of domination (the other being exclusion), whereby subjects are permitted and often encouraged to participate in democratic practices of deliberation yet are constrained to deliberate in a particular way, in a particular type of institution [in this case, the settler-­colonial state that originally occupied Indigenous lands], and over a particular range of issues so their agreements and disagreements serve to reinforce rather than challenge the status quo. Through participation in these assimilative practices, they gradually come to relinquish their dissonant customs and ways and acquire the consonant forms of subjectivity. Although they are governed through their freedom to some extent, they nevertheless deliberate within the rules rather than over the rules, as the principle of democracy requires.38 If assimilation can properly be said to be a tool of settler colonialism (and I think the case of the Michel Nation, among countless others, demonstrates that this is so), then the state of nonfreedom that assimilation introduces is properly understood to be one of usurpation. As Patchen Markell argues, prevailing theories of domination and freedom—whether liberal or republican—often fail to properly disambiguate forms of nonfreedom. Following his lead, we must distinguish between interference (in the sense envisioned by classical liberalism, as direct intervention in the exercise of action by another), domination (in the republican sense of arbitrary rule), and usurpation. As Markell reminds us, apart from situations in which a given relationship subjects “an agent to another’s whim” or “deprive[s] her of involvement in affairs that effect her,” we have another situation in which “the mechanisms that guard against arbitrariness and subject decisions to control can also displace involvement, leaving people subject to relatively predictable and perhaps even beneficial forms of power that nevertheless 114  |  Robert Nichols

‘stifle’ and ‘stultify.’ To complain of such displacement is to complain not of domination but of . . . usurpation.”39 In short, we may say that settler colonialism is not called into question (only) because it subjects some people to either undue interference or arbitrary rule. Settler colonialism may be an explicitly ordered, routinizing, and nondiscriminatory form of rule and nevertheless may also unduly displace the locus of political exercise by channeling or routing political practices and subjectivities through certain institutions, customs, and practices, in this case, those of a settler-­colonial state (i.e., through a policy of involuntary enfranchisement into a foreign polity). Whereas certain antiracist critiques may be effective at pointing out the injustice of interference and domination, they often fail to address this additional problem and, as I’ve been arguing, even occasionally contribute to it. To be clear, I raise this warning not as a critique of antiracist theory and practice, but rather as instigation for a more nuanced antiracism, one that might provide a set of arguments undergirding a coalitional decolonizing antiracism built on the recognition of the different historical experiences that imperialism has imposed on subjugated populations. Theorizing Native Studies and Theorizing the Settler Contract

Let me conclude with some reflections on how I see this intervention fitting into a volume on theorizing Native studies. If  I am correct in suggesting that the settler contract is best understood as introducing a relationship of usurpation through practices of universal assimilation, then I hope mini­ mally to have contributed to the richness of the theoretical vocabulary available to Native studies. However, we might aspire to more than this. The task here is to demonstrate the implication of our models of theorizing within settler colonialism, not merely to develop more-­sophisticated tools of analysis, which may be applied to Native studies as data. By placing the case of the compulsory enfranchisement of the Michel First Nation alongside prevailing theories of antiracist critique in the contractarian model, I hope to have demonstrated the utility of a contextualist approach to theorizing. The examples demonstrate that in order to assess a theoretical model of critical analysis (such as the one presented in The Racial Contract), we must attend to its strategic function within a specific political context. This is not something that can be elucidated by investigating the internal structure of argumentation itself; instead the practical effects of the model must also be interrogated. Furthermore, these practical effects are not reducible to authorial intent. Rather, they are the result of the interaction of concepts with the modes of governance they invoke, Contract and Usurpation  |  115

justify, and, at times, conceal. Hence, even the most ostensibly benign invocation of an ideal model of equal, universal respect and nonhierarchical relations of citizenship may (by design or effect) replicate the very forms of domination—or in this case, usurpation—they purport to undermine. With respect to how we might proceed to theorize Native studies, I think this leads us away from deductive models of investigation that begin from seemingly abstract and naive, but ideologically loaded, questions such as “what is indigeneity?” and “what is its particularity?”—that is, the drive to seek a political resolution through a reduction of indigeneity to a determinate content of social and cultural difference.40 Against this, the approach here counsels that attention be paid to the strategic function of these ideal models and naive questions, as well as their moments of activation and practical effects. In short, the approach calls for the apprehension of models of abstraction and interrogation as forms of governmentality. More substantively, the juxtaposition I posited also demonstrates that the systemic failure of a structure of governance to properly or authentically grasp the thing under description (in this case, indigeneity) may be an integral part of that very system. In recent years, very sophisticated work in Native studies has called into question the adequacy of representations of indigeneity located within the prevailing approaches of various academic disciplines, traditionally organized. Dale Turner, for instance, has pain­ stakingly shown how liberal political theorists, such as Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor, fundamentally distort and contain the radical potential of what he calls “Indigenous critical philosophies.”41 Similarly, the legal theorists Patrick Macklem and Robert Williams Jr., among others, have tirelessly worked to expose the racism embedded in the legal history of settler-­ colonial states such as Canada and the United States.42 The approach modeled here can add to this a critical eye on the hegemonic function of the systemic failures exposed by Turner, Williams, and Macklem (and Charles Mills, for that matter). What I have been attempting to disclose here is the way in which systems of governance may channel or structure the terms of their own contestation. And unless we grasp the hegemonic function of this usurpation of our political agency, we will fail to undermine the system, and our criticism will serve to reinforce its universality. To grasp this, we need to understand how settler colonialism both targets and requires indigeneity. Patrick Wolfe argues, On the one hand, settler society required the practical elimination of the natives in order to establish itself on their territory. On the sym116  |  Robert Nichols

bolic level, however, settler society subsequently sought to recuperate indigeneity in order to express its difference—and, accordingly, its independence—from the mother country. . . . In its positive aspect, therefore, settler colonialism does not simply replace native society tout court. Rather, the process of replacement maintains the refractory imprint of the native counter-­claim.43 While approaches that attempt to expose the internal contradictions of settler-­colonial theoretical models (Turner) or legal reasoning (Williams) are undoubtedly valuable tools, they may also be complemented and augmented by an approach that attends to how the contradictory, misleading, and distorted refractory imprint of indigeneity is not a failure of settler-­ colonial governmentality, but an integral feature of it. I have demonstrated only one small example of how this might work here by showing that some forms of antiracist critique reinforce the structure of colonial racism precisely through their critical practices. To grasp this in a fuller sense—that is, to uncover the hegemonic function of misrepresentation in the context of settler-­colonialism44—means moving beyond a politics of the narrowing gap between the real and the ideal to an insurgent politics that struggles to exercise and achieve freedom behind and below the hegemonic field itself. Notes

This chapter was originally prepared for the “Theorizing Native Studies” workshop held at Columbia University, October 16–­17, 2010. Particular thanks are owed to Glen Coulthard, Cressida Heyes, Elizabeth Povinelli, Aurélie Roy, Audra Simpson, Jakeet Singh, Andrea Smith, Chloë Taylor, and James Tully for their help and constructive criticism on previous drafts. 1. For example, none of the following works on empire and the history of political thought pays any significant attention to settler colonialism in the Americas (despite the fact that all of these thinkers live in North America): Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-­Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 2. See Robert Nichols, “Indigeneity and the Priority of the Settler Contract Today,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (2013); and Robert Nichols, “Realizing the Social Contract: The Case of  Indigenous Peoples and Colonialism,” Contemporary Political Theory 4, no. 1 (2005). Contract and Usurpation  |  117

3. The first of these is usually referred to as “contractarianism,” whereas the second is known as “contractualism.” For an edited collection on this distinction, see Stephen Darwall, ed., Contractarianism/Contractualism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003). 4. Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 5. Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 11. 6. Carole Pateman, “The Settler Contract,” in Contract and Domination, ed. Carole Pateman and Charles Mills (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007). 7. For instance, recent work by Vicki Hsueh documents in considerable detail how the degree to which settlers in colonial Maryland, Carolina, and Pennsylvania recognized prior Indigenous sovereignty varied considerably across time and space. See Vicki Hsueh, Hybrid Constitutions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 8. Mills, The Racial Contract, 20. 9. Mills, The Racial Contract, 132. 10. Although the main signings took place during this time period, there were numerous other agreements made—often called “adhesion signings”—into the first half of the twentieth century. 11. For more, see the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services, 1996) (hereafter rcap), vol. 2, part II.4; Elizabeth Macpherson, The Sun Traveller: The Story of the Callihoos in Alberta (Edmonton, Canada: Ingénieuse Productions, 1998); Bennett McCardle, The Michel Band: A Short History (Edmonton: Indian Association of Alberta, 1981); and Tyler and Wright Research Consultants Limited, The Alienation of  Indian Reserve Lands During the Administration of Sir Wilfred Laurier, 1896–­ 1911: Michel Reserve #132 (Regina: Federation of Saskatchewan Indians, 1978). I am particularly indebted to Jodi Stonehouse for materials and conversation about the Michel for this portion of the chapter. 12. Part of the Michel Nation had already been subjected to compulsory enfranchisement in 1920. 13. More information on this society can be found on the Michel Nation’s website, http://www.michelfirstnation.net/index.html (accessed October 4, 2011). 14. See “Enfranchised Band Demands Redress,” Windspeaker 14, no. 9 (January 1997): 32. “In 1985 the Friends of the Michel Society asked the Indian Claims Commission to determine if descendants of the Michel Band should be recognized as a band within the meaning of the Indian Act and the Specific Claims Policy. The Friends of the Michel Society is a group formed to represent descendants and former members of the Michel Band of Alberta. This claim contends that the enfranchisement of many original Band members in 1928 and again in 1958 was invalid, and that Canada breached its statutory and fiduciary duties in relation to various surrenders of reserve land obtained from the Band in the early 1900s. The Federal Government stated that the Band 118  |  Robert Nichols

was not entitled to be recognized as a Band under the Indian Act and that the Society therefore had no right to bring a specific claim. In May 1997, the negotiating parties agreed that the Commission would consider only the issue of whether Canada had a statutory obligation to reconstitute the Michel Band. The Commission found that Canada had an obligation to reconstitute the Michel Band, and the Society had no standing to bring the claim forward under the Specific Claims Policy.” 15. rcap, Volume 1: Looking Forward, Looking Back, Part II.9.5, 271. 16. rcap, Volume 1: Looking Forward, Looking Back, Part II.9.5, 271. 17. This was initially instituted as part of an 1869 amendment to the Gradual Civilization Act and ensured that the children of such a marriage would also be enfranchised, regardless of parental wishes. 18. See 1920 amendment to the Indian Act (“An Act Respecting Indians”), R.S.C., 1951, c. I-­5. In addition to banning hereditary rule by band leaders, the act allowed for the involuntary enfranchisement (and loss of treaty rights) of any status Indian considered fit for enfranchisement by the Department of  Indian Affairs. It was repealed two years later but reintroduced in a modified form in 1933. This was also upheld by a 1951 amendment, which also formalized the compulsory enfranchisement of any Indian woman “who is married to a person who is not an Indian.” For a discussion of this, see rcap, Volume 1, Part II.9.5–­7. 19. This process had already begun as early as the 1858 Pennefather Commission in colonial Canada. This commission recommended, for instance, discontinuing the policy of enclosing Indigenous peoples on communally held reserves and replacing it with a policy of direct allotment of land to individual Indians. See rcap, Volume 1, Part II.9.4. 20. This shift may even be due to a shift in demographics—as long as Indigenous peoples constituted a large enough population that their wholesale incorporation into the settler-­colonial polity would have been too destabilizing, enfranchisement remained relatively selective and mostly voluntary. Once this balance changed, the tools of enfranchisement were modified to follow suit. 21. Wendy Moss and Elaine Gardner-­O’Toole, Aboriginal People: History of Discriminatory Laws, bp-­175e, Law and Government Division, Government of Canada, November 1987, revised November 1991. 22. Quoted in Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society, 2nd ed. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 119. 23. Government of Canada, Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy (The White Paper) (Ottawa: Queen’s printer cat. no. r32–­2 469, 1969); emphasis added. 24. Mills, The Racial Contract, 104. 25. Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, “Introduction,” in Contract and Domination, 1–­9, 4. 26. Charles Mills, “Contract and Social Change,” in Contract and Domination, 10–­34, 16. Contract and Usurpation  |  119

27. Mills, The Racial Contract, 132. 28. Mills, The Racial Contract, 6. 29. This is to be contrasted to those approaches—implicit in Mills and explicit in others—that see universality only as a structure of claims making, and one that is necessarily emancipatory. For instance, Thomas McCarthy’s recent interventions on racism and empire from the standpoint of neo-­K antian critical theory places hope for a postimperial and postracialized modernity upon the fact that in so-­called modern, Western societies (as explicitly distinguished from “traditional cultural spheres”) “modes of reflective discourse have been institutionalized and the requisite cultural and motivational conditions for them have been met.” This “heightened critical reflexivity” of modern societies is traced precisely to “our” capacity to articulate moral claims in universal terms: “Precisely the claimed universality of that discourse [of modernization] leaves it semantically and pragmatically open to dissent and criticism from subordinated and excluded others. For this reason, modernity need not— indeed cannot—be left behind for some putative postmodernity; but it can be continually transformed from within.” Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 155, 222. 30. Michel Foucault, “Leçon du 10 janvier 1979,” in Naissance de la biopolitique (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 3–­2 8. 31. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique, 5. 32. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, 1967), 84. 33. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), c.V, section 49, 29. 34. I have discussed this at more length in Nichols, “Realizing the Social Contract.” 35. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 388. 36. Étienne Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality,” in Politics and the Other Scene (New York: Verso, 2002), 162. 37. Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality,” 161. 38. James Tully, “Exclusion and Assimilation: Two Forms of Domination in Relation to Freedom,” in Political Exclusion and Domination: Nomos xlvi, ed. Melissa Williams and Stephen Macado (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 213–­1 4. 39. Patchen Markell, “The Insufficiency of  Non-­domination,” Political Theory 36, no. 1 (February 2008): 12; emphasis added. 40. See, for example, Elizabeth Povinelli, “The Governance of the Prior,” Interventions 13, no. 1 (2011). 41. Dale Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 2006). 42. See, for instance, Patrick Macklem, Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 2001); Robert Williams 120  |  Robert Nichols

Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Robert Williams Jr., Like a Loaded Weapon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); and Robert Williams Jr., Linking Arms Together (New York: Routledge, 1999). 43. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 389. 4 4. This is something that Glen Coulthard has specifically done with respect to the Canadian state, for instance. See his “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007).

Contract and Usurpation  |  121

FIVE  | 

Christopher Bracken

“In This Separation” The Noncorrespondence of  Joseph Johnson

Oh, this pleasing pain! —Jonathan Edwards, The Life of David Brainerd Oh! I am nothing. —Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, May 2, 1774

“I speak, or write not only for Myself,” Joseph Johnson confides in a May 1774 letter to his father-­in-­law, Samson Occom, “but also for the Indians.”1 In his letters and diaries, Johnson typically identifies himself as “an Indian” and refers to “the Indians” as his “Brethren.”2 On this occasion, however, he allows himself a moment of disidentification. The parallelism of his syntax, “not only . . . but also,” locates him on one side of a boundary and “the Indians” on the other. What explains his declaration of separation? Johnson was born around 1750 to Elizabeth Garrett and Joseph Johnson, a Mohegan scout killed in the Seven Years’ War. In December 1758 Johnson enrolled at Moor’s Indian Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut; in 1766 the school’s founder, Eleazar Wheelock, sent Johnson to the Mohawk Valley to keep a school for Oneida students in northern New York.3 Johnson left in 1768, after an episode of “frolick,” and taught briefly in Providence, Rhode Island, before joining the crew of a whaling ship.4 He returned to Mohegan in October 1771, farmed for a year, and then taught again in Farmington, Connecticut.5 From the fall of 1773 until his death, sometime between June 1776 and May 1777, he devoted himself to planning and negotiating the voluntary removal of Christian Indians from seven New England towns to the Oneida territory.6 These are “the Indians” Johnson refers to: Pequots from North Stoning-

ton and Groton, Narragansetts from Charlestown, Montauks from Long Island, and Niantics from the town of  Niantic, as well as residents of Farmington and Mohegan.7 “The Indians” practiced English methods of farming and earned cash by wage labor and craftwork. They favored English modes of architecture, technology, and education. The village, or “Praying Town,” was their mode of political organization. In the early 1770s, they joined the separatist movement inspired by the Great Awakening three decades before. A number of factors influenced their decision to withdraw before the tide of English settlement: a decline in population, a reduction in land holdings, and dwindling political autonomy and economic opportunity.8 But these were not the only reasons. The Separates, as Occom informed the Trustees of Moor’s Indian Charity School in November 1773, were going to “unite together and seek for a New Settlement among the Western Indians” in order “to Introduce the Religion of Jesus Christ ^by their example^—among the benighted Indians in the Wilderness, and also Introduce Agriculture amongst them.”9 In signing up for removal, Johnson and Occom were signing on to a “modernization program.”10 They proposed to cultivate a field in “the wilderness.” They conceived of it as a field of culture. Since at least the fifteenth century, culture has signified both the cultivation of the soul and the cultivation of the soil. The Separates aspired to cultivate a subjectivity capable of acquiring agricultural property and of adding cultural properties to itself. The work of cultivation, moreover, was to be performed in “the heart.” The Separates were removing to the wilderness to cultivate the field of “the affections,” the field known today as affect studies. When they spoke of a “wilderness,” then, they were positing the theory of a region beyond theory, of a concept still uncontaminated by conceptualization. To “introduce” theory into a wilderness therefore divides culture from nature, an inside from an outside, enlightened Indians from “benighted Indians.” But so too does the resistance to theory. The intervention of theory assumes that somewhere there is no theory, just as the backlash against theory assumes that somewhere there can be no theory. The originary violence of cultivating a field in a wilderness divided Johnson from the community he was trying to build. He separated himself from his fellow Separates, complaining that although he acted for “the Indians,” “the Indians” did not act for him. He gave them his “help,” he writes, but received no help from them: “The Mohawk affair has brought me very low, as I have had no help worth mentioning, since I undertook for the Indians. I am almost ready to say that I will undertake no more for such unthankfull, “In This Separation”  |  123

ungratefull, and unmanly Indians. But tho I thus speak, pity, love, and zeal doth glow in this heart of mine, and I will still according to My Ability, help my poor Indian Brethren in these parts. But O that Indians were men.”11 If “Indians” are not “men,” what are they? And what is he? Johnson separates himself from the coming community, but his separation is valid only on one side of the page. Although he continues to regret that “the Indians” are not paying his wages, which he likens to “Slaving” in an era of slavery, on the other side of the same page he gathers with them under a common name. “I think it very hard,” he repeats, “that Indians for whom I have been Slaving from time to time has not as yet considered of me. I am almost discouraged sometimes. I am but young, and I am but poor. I am an Indian. If I was the Son of some Rich English man perhaps I shoud be able better to travel the Country up and down at my own Charges. O that Indians were men.”12 His repetition of the phrase “O that Indians were men” confirms that the repeatability of the signifier, its capacity to act in different contexts at once, “not only” annuls its singularity “but also” divides its identity.13 To aspire to a name is to be exposed to the possibility of its failure. Even as he seeks justice for his “Brethren,” Johnson weighs the injustice of any project to assemble a community of the elect, whether it is a community of theorists cultivating a conceptual field in a wilderness of nontheorists or a community of  Indian saints planning a town “among the benighted Indians,” beyond the limits of “culture.” His declaration of separation anticipates Jacques Derrida’s more recent claim that “the gathering into itself of the One is never without violence.” The violence of the One, Derrida adds, is inevitably a jealous violence. The One simultaneously guards against the other and keeps some of the other: “L’un se garde de l’autre.” It constitutes itself as unique, indeed as the Unique, by guarding itself against external difference, “the benighted Indians,” and yet it keeps the other within itself in order to conserve the internal difference that “makes it One”: “I am an Indian.”14 Johnson plays one violence against the other. He invites his “Brethren” to join the common, “men,” without ceasing to be unique, “Indians.” By dividing the coming community from itself, he guards against the violence that would divide it from the other. The violence of self-­d ivision forestalls the violence of the One. The community assembles itself by an originary act of self-­separation. Perhaps it is no accident, then, that Johnson’s Indians failed to be men in two ways on two sides of the same page. On the recto, the noun men signifies a gender. He laments that Indians are not men because they lack the 124  |  Christopher Bracken

supposedly masculine virtues of gratitude and liberality. Elsewhere he adds courage to his list.15 On the verso, men signifies a universal. Indians are not men because they are shut out of the category of  “man” in general, which he personifies in the highly particular form of the “Rich English man.” Johnson gains entry into discourse by exploiting the divisibility of the signifier from itself, “its essential drifting.”16 He divides himself from the Indians even as he identifies himself as an Indian, and he divides Indians from men even as he fantasizes about identifying with an exemplary settler subject who claims land, capital, and the universal as his own, and whose settlements are driving the Separates to build a new town for themselves “among the Western Indians.” While his sense of separation “almost” discourages him, Johnson’s “pity” nevertheless inspires him to act for those who do not act for him. But what moves him to pity? And why does he pity those who do not pity him? This is a question Jean-­Jacques Rousseau poses in the “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” composed about two decades before Johnson’s letter to Occom. Rousseau suggests that pity folds opposites together. It is “natural” to the human “heart,” and yet it belongs among the “social affections.”17 Pity is individual, and yet it is collective. It is an emotion, but it depends on cognition. What I feel for others depends on how well I understand them: “How do we let ourselves be moved to pity? By transporting ourselves outside ourselves; by identifying with the suffering being. We suffer only to the extent that we judge it to suffer; we suffer not in ourselves but in it. Think how much acquired knowledge this transport presupposes! . . . How could I suffer when I see another suffer if  I do not even know that he suffers, if I do not know what he and I have in common?”18 Johnson, in contrast, pities his “poor Brethren” even though he is keenly aware of everything that he does not have in common with them. How can he have pity without a sense of being in common? According to Rousseau, pity finds its condition of possibility in identification: we pity “by identifying” with someone who “suffers.” Identification, moreover, is a transportation system: it “transports” us “outside ourselves” and projects us into the other’s experience. If we are able to leave ourselves, however, it is because “we” are already divided from ourselves. Pity finds its condition of possibility in the violence of self-­d ivision. Identification finds its condition in nonidentity. It transports me toward the other while keeping me from the other, and it guards me from the other in order to let me keep the other: Je me garde de l’autre. Johnson’s theory is that identity is never identical with itself. Rather, “In This Separation”  |  125

it is “always” in transport between destinations. “Indian identities,” Scott Lyons confirms, “are always historically produced: constituted in writing and laws, on tribal rolls and employment forms, through social relationships and perceptions of phenotype, and of course in the inner recesses of one’s sense of self.”19 What Lyons neglects to mention is that the concept of identity is itself “historically produced.” Johnson, moreover, is writing at the scene of identity’s emergence. Paul Ricoeur notes that it was John Locke who invented the notion of identity, and the sequence it forms with the notions of self and consciousness, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1690.20 Locke argues that identity is an attribute of anything that is “the same with itself.”21 Personhood is a sense of being the same self in different contexts, for example, on two sides of the same page. The word person, for Locke, signifies “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and that can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and . . . essential to it.”22 Identity is the persistent self-­ consciousness of self-­sameness, the fold where consciousness turns back on itself and perceives that it is the same as itself. Ricoeur observes that Locke’s invention marks the victory of sameness over difference.23 Johnson does not sign on to the emerging concept of identity. He prefers to mobilize the resources of self-­d ivision. Although he compares himself with others, he does not affirm an unambiguous sense being in common with them. Nor does he make any claim to being the same as himself. He does not always seem to be conscious of being “the same thinking thing” on both sides of the page. As if to affirm identity’s nonidentity with itself, he approaches the act of writing as a ritual of self-­d ivision. To understand his ritual does not, however, require the “intervention” of theory. For it is already a theoretical project. Indeed Johnson’s letters and diaries suggest that the debate over theory, over who does it and who doesn’t, who has it and who hasn’t, who belongs to the field and who is shut out, is as old as the decision of  Indigenous authors to write in English. In the “Essay on the Origin of Languages,” Rousseau confirms that self-­ reflection proceeds from reflection on others. It is “what is foreign to us,” he explains, that “leads us to examine what touches us.” There was a time though when people were incapable of transport. Rousseau conceives of it as an era of “first men.” The first men did not encounter others. Hence they had no experience, and therefore no concept, of difference, “variety.” The first men did not compare ideas. And so they did not reflect. Without 126  |  Christopher Bracken

reflection, they lacked self-­consciousness: “Never having seen anything other than what was around them, they did not know even it; they did not know themselves.”24 Who are these first men? Rousseau calls them “barbarians.” But they bear an uncanny resemblance to Locke’s “persons” because they are acutely conscious of being the same as themselves in all times and places. They seem to personify a resistance to reading built into Locke’s idea of personhood: a resistance to the experience of otherness. It is only fitting, then, that Rousseau is not always identical to himself. In the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of  Inequality among Men, he revises his argument and separates pity from understanding, arguing instead that pity acts “prior to all reflection.”25 Pity, according to this other Rousseau, is nature’s way of teaching us to read. “It is a pleasure to see” (on voit avec plaisir), he remarks, that even Bernard de Mandeville admits that human beings are “compassionate” by nature.26 Mandeville’s satire of charity schools, published in 1723, outraged readers for the remainder of the eighteenth century. When the infamous Mandeville addresses the theme of compassion, however, he temporarily suspends his “cold and subtle style” and renders a scene that would move any reader to pity, not just the reader “of good morals,” but a “housebreaker or even a murderer.”27 Rousseau describes it, rather inaccurately, as “the pathetic picture of a man locked up, who outside sees a ferocious Beast [Mandeville says it is a sow] tearing a Child from his Mother’s breast, breaking his weak limbs with its murderous fangs, and tearing the Child’s throbbing entrails with its claws [in fact, pigs have hooves]. What a dreadful agitation must not this witness to an event in which he takes no personal interest whatsoever experience? What anguish must he not suffer at this sight, for not being able to give any help to the fainted Mother or the dying Child?”28 Pity is the kind of reading that pains the reader. Mandeville goes so far as to suggest there are texts that pain the reader in ways no text can express: “To see and hear all this, what Tortures would it give the Soul beyond all expression!” The reader of a torture text effectively trades places with the suffering being. To witness pain from a distance, Mandeville explains, “moves us but little.” We pity “the suffering being” only when we are close enough to discern the signs of suffering on the sufferer’s face.29 Rousseau says “it is a pleasure” to suffer a reading of such a “pathetic picture.” What is the source of his pleasure? The witness feels only anguish. Does the pleasure lie in imagining a reader appropriately responding to another’s pain? Or is it a pleasure to learn that a reader as uncharitable as Mandeville believes that pity is “natural to the human heart”? Or does “In This Separation”  |  127

Rousseau take pleasure in identifying with the anguished witness? Is it pleasurable to suffer in another’s place? Does pleasure arise from anguish itself? Is reading a pleasing pain? Two centuries later, in an oft-­cited essay, Sigmund Freud confirms there is pleasure not only in watching others suffer in person but in reading about their suffering in books. It is “surprising,” he says, “how often” people seeking treatment for hysterias and obsessions fantasize about a child being beaten. Johnson confides to his diary in March 1772, for example: “Who knows his Masters will and does it not, Shall be beaten with many Stripes.”30 In an era when spanking was inseparable from education, Freud notes that beating fantasies appear “very early” in life and are further re­inforced when young readers witness “other children being beaten” at school. As they advance to the higher grades, where corporal punishment is “no longer” practiced, “the influence” of seeing other children being beaten is “replaced and more than replaced,” he stresses, “by the effects of reading.” And it is “almost always the same books,” he adds, “whose contents” give “a new stimulus to the beating fantasies.” The canon of masochistic literature attaches an especially high value to sentimental novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which ends with Simon Legree beating “poor Tom” to death. In the community of masochistic readers, the suffering of an oppressed and racialized literary type affords particular pleasure.31 What Rousseau finds pleasantly unbearable about Mandeville’s “pathetic picture,” what most pleasingly tortures Rousseau, is the curious fact that the anguished witness cannot help the “suffering being.” Nor can we, Rousseau’s readers, help either of them in their distress. Our inaction mirrors theirs. Mandeville says that pity is a counterfeit of charity. Rousseau suggests instead that pity is a counterfeit of agency. We sympathetic readers would prefer not to read at all. We would rather transport ourselves into the text and relieve the fainted mother and her dying child. But our pity moves us only by locking us in place. So we remain passive despite ourselves, watching the witness who watches a mother watch as a mother pig devours a child sacrificed by Mandeville’s “strong and lively imagination” to test the limits of human compassion. We sympathetic readers suffer “tortures” because we suffer events to happen. We suffer “not only” the other’s agony, then, “but also” our own passivity. What Rousseau says of sympathetic reading in the 1750s Hans-­Georg Gadamer says of reading generally in 1960. According to Rousseau, pity transports us outside ourselves and puts us in the other’s standpoint. According to Gadamer, historical understanding “transposes” us out of the 128  |  Christopher Bracken

horizon of the present and projects us into the horizon of the past.32 A horizon is a standpoint that limits interpretation. We cannot see around it, nor are we fully aware of its limits.33 Usually our prejudices “touch us” so closely that we do not even notice them. The encounter with the other suddenly puts them at risk. Sometimes a text composed in an earlier era pulls us up short by saying something we had not anticipated—and perhaps did not want it to.34 Gadamer says that we cannot understand the historically different text unless we fuse the present and the past in a higher universality, though without subordinating one to the other.35 But what if we cannot identify with the other standpoint? What if we encounter otherness without becoming other to ourselves? What if the pitying reader takes no pity on the text? When Occom and Johnson enter the university classroom today, they tend to provoke a clash rather than a fusion of horizons. In his foreword to Joanna Brooks’s edition of Occom’s Collected Writings, Robert Warrior observes that the students he teaches genuinely “appreciate” the “anti­ racist” conclusion of Occom’s 1768 autobiography, but are “typically put off by his diffidence, disappointed in both his Christian piety and his concomitant lack of a traditional Mohegan spirituality, and befuddled by his eighteenth-­century rhetorical conventions.”36 When I teach Occom and Johnson, I repeatedly find that undergraduate readers are surprised and sometimes downright mad to learn that two of the first Native American authors to write and publish in English were evangelical Christians, as if it were unusual to be an evangelical in eighteenth-­century New England or as if it were wrong today. These readers-­in-­training suffer the prejudice of seeing the author’s prejudices but not their own. They are locked in their standpoint, just as Mandeville’s witness is, literally, “locked up” in his. As Andrea Smith explains in her study of contemporary evangelical activism, “Christian Indians are generally seen as dupes for white supremacy, complicit in their own oppression.” Consequently the contributions of “religious movements” to social and political change tend to go unexamined.37 Craig Womack, for example, dismisses Alice Callhan’s Wynema, “the first novel authored by a Native woman,” as “a document of Christian supremacism and assimilation.”38 Today’s readers are ready to look critically, even courageously, at most historical forms of prejudice, but are slow to question the still-­active prejudice against the historically different text. Not all readers, though. In American Lazarus Joanna Brooks reanimates the Enlightenment project of sympathetic reading in the hope of redeeming Occom and Johnson for contemporary readers. Neither Mandeville nor “In This Separation”  |  129

Rousseau conceives of the witness breaching the textual frame and intervening in the other’s horizon. Brooks insists on every reader’s capacity to act. Above all she invites her readers to come to the assistance of the historically different text. The readerly rescue unfolds in two stages. The first is resurrection. Literary scholars, like Brooks herself, have painstakingly recovered—“resurrected,” she says—a canon of neglected works from the archives and “restored” them “to literary publication, study, and instruction.”39 The second step is regeneration. In life, Occom and Johnson were the targets of racial prejudice.40 In death, they are targets of aesthetic prejudice. Many readers of their work interpret “differences in content, shape, and texture” as “markers of ‘inadequacy’ ” rather than “elements of signification.”41 Brooks therefore exhorts us to put our prejudices at risk: “We must also be willing to believe in and search out [the meaningfulness of resurrected texts], even if that search entails a reformulation of our assumptions about literature, history, race, and religion.”42 She convenes a congregation of regenerate readers or, to regenerate the language of eighteenth-­century New England Calvinism, a new church of visible reader-­saints. The congregation of sympathetic readers shares a common faith—“we believe”—in the “meaningfulness” of the historically different text. But does the sympathetic reader, in her zeal to redeem the text from obscurity and revive the author’s damaged reputation, lift a prejudice from the present and transport it into the past? The risk is particularly acute when the text says things that contemporary readers might find surprising, embarrassing, or just plain offensive. Today what the suffering being needs to be saved from is the notion that he or she suffers at all. Brooks insists the Native American or African American author of the eighteenth century was, and is, a fundamentally capable being, a subject of potentialities. Capable authors are not “passive vessels,” she says, but resourceful survivors.43 The highest praise the regenerating reader can give them is to glean their texts for signs of  “creative agency.”44 Brooks defines agency as the capacity to produce something “new”: new identities, new communities, new literatures; new social histories, new theories and practices; new religious traditions; and new pantribal affiliations.45 The capable author even regenerates regeneration itself, creating “new rituals of regeneration.”46 The labor of reregeneration, moreover, is reciprocal: “These literatures,” once resurrected, “invite us to consider the regenerative possibilities of our own work as literary scholars and teachers.” The sympathetic reader is born again in the interpretation of the capable text. “Who are we but revivalists,” Brooks asks, “breathing life into old texts as we read them”?47 130  |  Christopher Bracken

Before asking “who are we?” though, we might first ask “who’s we?” Is it necessary to assemble a reformed community of hermeneutic saints in order to read Occom or Johnson? Do we need a “we” to read at all? The para­ doxical fact is that the theory of sympathetic reading rests on a conceptual distinction that Johnson repeatedly contests: the distinction between identity and difference. When we constitute ourselves as the One, therefore, we substitute our contemporary theoretical project for his. Our desire for the new, for the unique, exposes his theoretical work to the violence of the Unique. We identify not with him but with the congregation of readers that gathers around him. Our readerly violence is already at work in the assumption that the interpretation of indigenous literature can and should orient itself toward one historical standpoint rather than any other—namely, “our own.” Brooks’s “we” appears to consist mostly of the latter-­day inheritors of the new Indian history. Two decades ago, Richard White explained in The Middle Ground that the old history used to deal primarily with settler policy toward Indian peoples, while the “new” history “places Indian peoples at the center of the scene and seeks to understand the reasons for their actions.”48 In 1977 one of the early advocates of the new history, Robin Fisher, lamented that historians of “Indian-­European relations” during the colonial period rely “largely on written, and therefore European sources, which impose limits on [their] understanding of the Indian side of the story.”49 After the resurrection of Occom and Johnson, among others, it is no longer possible to assume that “written sources” are “therefore” European. If “we,” the community of regenerate readers, presume to understand “the reasons for their actions,” then we will have to respond to Occom’s and Johnson’s texts with sentiments finer than frustration, disappointment, and befuddlement. Misunderstanding, however, is not an accident that befalls the historically different text from the outside. Occom penned his autobiography in 1768, after returning from his tour of England, because he knew that other “gentlemen” were already circulating “grossly mistaken” accounts of his life. He wrote for himself because others were already writing for him. Ironically, a text that provokes misunderstanding in the present was written to dispel misrepresentation in the past. Misrepresentation is Occom’s horizon: “Having Seen and heard Several Representations, in England and Scotland, ^made wrote^ by ^Some^ Several gentlemen in America, Concerning me, and finding many miss representations and gross Mistakes in their Account,—I thought it my Duty to give a Short Plain and Honest Ac“In This Separation”  |  131

count of myself, that those who may See my Account hereafter ^see it^, may know the ^Truth^ Concerning me.”50 William S. Simmons cites Occom’s text verbatim as an authoritative source for Mohegan history in the colonial era, as if it opened a transparent window on past events.51 But does it? Occom literally strikes out “miss representations” from his discourse, but he finds it difficult to replace them with “Truth.” The word appears in his manuscript as a correction, perhaps an afterthought, just above the place where it appears in Brooks’s critical edition. Apparently, Occom neglected to include it in his first draft, as if some law of syntax resisted his effort to establish himself as the referent of his own autobiography. So he went back and inserted it precisely where there is no room for it, using a caret to wedge it into place. Brooks uses two carets to translate his handwritten correction into her printed transcription. Occom’s “Truth” is a late addition. Its proper place is one where it does not properly belong. He writes to correct others’ “Mistakes” but fails to put his truth directly onto the page. Instead, he approaches the truth via a detour that divides him from his own intentions. Misrepresentation can be written over, he suggests, but it cannot be written out. “The successes of history,” Michel Foucault remarks, “belong to those who are capable of seizing [a system of  “rules”], to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them.”52 Occom seizes control of a discursive system in order to turn it back on those who have turned it against him. He is a genealogist in Foucault’s sense. Like Johnson, Occom writes his own truth in rewriting somebody else’s. He emerges into discourse by dividing himself from himself. Johnson too suffers discourse. He lets it rule him in order to redirect its rules to his own ends. He rules over it in being ruled by it. He articulates his nonfit, his separation from himself and from his writing, in a ritual of self-­v iolence that takes the form of exaggerated self-­reproach. Writing to Eleazar Wheelock in December 1774, Johnson flatly declares that he is “an undeserving Object” and he thanks his “Patron” and former teacher for extending love and friendship “to such a Despicable Lump of polluted Clay, as is inclosed in this tawnny Skin of mine.”53 He watches the other watch him and the experience of seeing himself being seen, of reading himself  being read, reduces him to a thing, a lump. This kind of declaration pulls the sympathetic reader up short. Here, surely, is something that “we” cannot identify with. The subject of action refers to himself as an object to be acted upon. He refers to himself, contrary to our deepest hermeneutic desire, as 132  |  Christopher Bracken

a “passive vessel.” One historian explains that although his early education instilled him with shame, Johnson recovered “both” his “self-­esteem” and his “pride in his Indianness” by 1772.54 If so, then why, as late as 1774, does he call himself a lump? And why, more alarming still, does he suggest that a “tawnny” body is a polluted one? One of the great challenges “for a truly historical hermeneutics,” Gadamer observes, is to distinguish “legitimate prejudices” from the “countless” others that it is the critic’s task to debunk.55 Surely the imperative to read the historically different text for signs of agency counts as a legitimate prejudice. Who would deny the resourcefulness, ingenuity, and wit of writers like Occom and Johnson? But does the agency imperative revive an element of the Puritan horizon or add one to it? Brooks’s praise of the active, capable being and her legitimate anxiety about reducing authors to “passive vessels” have a historical precedent in the fifth book of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics. “The more perfection a thing has,” Spinoza affirms, “the more active and the less passive it is.” “Conversely,” he continues, “the more active it is, the more perfect it is.”56 In acting, a thing completes itself. In suffering itself to be acted on, it incompletes itself. But Spinoza’s vindication of the capable being clashes sharply, almost comically, with John Calvin’s doctrine of justification, outlined in the first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion. “All men, without exception,” Calvin thunders, “are puffed up with insane confidence in their own powers, unless the Lord proves their vanity. When all this stupid opinion of their own power has been laid aside, they must needs know they stand and are upheld by God’s hand alone.”57 Viewed from Calvin’s standpoint, Spinoza’s equation of activity with perfection smacks of excessive pride; viewed from Spinoza’s standpoint, Calvin’s insistence on human incapacity negates not just the human essence but God’s, because conatus, Spinoza maintains, is a mode of divine activity. The sympathetic reader tends to identify the past with the present. She confuses horizons instead of fusing them. When Brooks insists on the agency of the capable being, her standpoint is closer to Spinoza’s horizon than Calvin’s. When she defines reading as regeneration though, she is regenerating a fundamental principle of Calvinist thought. She is regenerating the piety of regeneration.58 The new literary piety rests on a theory of agency that, by Calvin’s standards, shows an “insane” overconfidence in human powers. Calvin insists that humans cannot regenerate themselves. Being born again requires absolute submission to God’s will. God’s grace is irresistible, but it is unmerited. He chooses his elect according to “In This Separation”  |  133

his pleasure.59 In fact, he has already decided. Justification proceeds not from works, which “are nothing but corruption and filth,” but from faith, which is the saints’ conviction that the promise of salvation is to be fulfilled for them.60 George Whitefield’s evangelistic tour sparked a revival of the regeneration doctrine in southern New England in the fall of 1740.61 The revivalists, derisively called New Lights, held that being converted was a matter of the heart, not the head. Those who had already received the “new light” needed to be persuaded that new converts “stood in the same light” before admitting them “into their fellowship.”62 As a measure of assurance, converts testified to experiencing divine impulses, visions, and special calls from God. The stronger the evidence of enthusiasm, such as “jerking,” “fainting,” and “crying out,” the more plausible the claim to be reborn.63 Radical New Lights broke with churches that tolerated unconverted members. They were the Separates. The Congregationalist establishment in Connecticut persecuted them. In response, some opted for removal, seeking religious and political freedom on the settler frontier.64 Johnson counts himself one of the “true Seperates,” noting that he was “[re]born,” and received a “New light,” at the age of twenty-­one.65 Occom reports that when he was born, “the Indians at Mohegan” were still following traditional “Ways, Customs & Religion” and had “no Connections with the English” apart from an occasional trade in “small Trifles.” When he was about sixteen, the people underwent a sudden change. “We heard a Strange Rumor among the English,” he recalls, “that there were Extraordinary Minsters Preaching from place to place and that there was a Strange Concern among the White People.” Impressed by the new movement, residents of Mohegan began attending “meetings and Churches.”66 Apparently, something about the New Light evangelism appealed to a people who had resisted adopting “English ways” for decades. Occom does not say what it was. The fact that the Mohegan maintained their political and cultural autonomy for so long suggests that they were not forced to convert. They chose to. Johnson’s diaries indicate that the Great Awakening, with its emphasis on rebirth, provided a symbolic form for the passage from tradition to modernization. Jonathan Edwards studied the conversion experience in A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God, a widely read account of the revival that swept Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1734 and 1735 while he was pastor there. He claims a true conversion befalls only those who sense that God is watching them and admit that they are exceedingly wicked and guilty in 134  |  Christopher Bracken

God’s eyes. Conversion is an experience of being read. God is the reader; the saints are the texts. The saints rewrite themselves, and God assesses the revisions. In the prelude to rebirth, the saints feel intensely different from others. They believe that they are the worst of all people. They think that God would be right to damn them, and they acknowledge that they cannot save themselves from their own “exceeding sinfulness and vileness.”67 Edwards cites the case of Abigail Hutchinson. She suffered an undiagnosed illness that prevented her from eating, but even as she slowly and painfully starved to death, she looked on her God as a just and loving torturer: “She used sometimes to say to her sister, under her extreme sufferings, ‘It is good to be so!’ ” “She was willing to be in pain,” Edwards recalls, “if that was the will of God.”68 Hutchinson occupies the position of Rousseau’s “suffering being.” We sympathetic readers watch her suffer through Edwards’s eyes. We even “transport ourselves outside of ourselves” and suffer in her place. We suffer because we cannot help her. And yet she does not ask for our help. She addresses her suffering not to us but to the divine reader who takes it as a sign of her submission to his will: a first, necessary step toward her regeneration. She divides herself from the reader who pities her by addressing her sufferings to the reader who redeems her. Hutchinson did not choose to suffer. Johnson inflicts suffering on himself, not the physical pain of illness or injury but the psychological pain of self-­reproach. He is already lacerating himself in the letters he addressed to Wheelock from the Mohawk Valley in 1766 and 1767. Johnson’s self-­ violence, like Hutchinson’s, divides him from the sympathetic reader. And perhaps it is no accident that he performs this violence on the hinge where writing conventionally divides itself from its author. Johnson abases himself in signing his name. He separates himself from himself while separating himself from his own discourse. “That God may grant you an ample reward in the upper world,” he writes to Wheelock on December 1, 1766, “for all your Labours of Love towards the poor Indians, and me in perticu­ lar is the hearty wish of, Revd Sir, your most Obedient though unworthy Servent Poor good for nothing Indian Joseph Johnson.”69 He signs his letter twice, affirming that he is at once a “Servent” and an “Indian.” The first is “obedient” though “unworthy”; the second is “good for nothing.” The first has a license to sign what he writes; the second does not. One is the subject of discourse; the other is its object. What makes the signature a suitable device for self-­d ivision? When Johnson signs, he cuts himself off from his text. But the text nevertheless remains his. It stays close to him at a distance. His signature separates him “In This Separation”  |  135

from his text by grafting him to it. The signature can do both because it has always already let go of him. It is his ghost or legacy: it survives him. It puts him to death while keeping him alive. In a letter dated November 10, 1767, Johnson asks Wheelock for permission to sign “as an Indian,” as if in signing he were breaking a prohibition: “Suffer me as an Indian and a good for nothing one, to Subscribe myself your dutifull Pupil, or one that will Endeavor to be dutifull.”70 All reading entails a measure of sufferance. Wheelock, for example, bears or tolerates the text Johnson sends him, just as Johnson bears or tolerates Wheelock’s reading of it. The signature simultaneously releases a discourse to the reader and deprives the author of the authority to defend it.71 Johnson, however, invites his reader to suffer an author who suffers his own self-­d ivision. He again signs as if he were two: a “good for nothing Indian” and a “dutifull Pupil.” The Indian cannot sign on his own account: the reader either cannot bear it or will not tolerate it. Johnson therefore asks Wheelock to let the pupil underwrite, or “sub-­scribe,” the Indian’s signature, as if to certify or notarize it. The pupil signs on the Indian’s behalf. The pupil’s endorsement authorizes the Indian to address himself to an insufferable and unsympathetic reader. But the pupil’s status is itself undecidable. Johnson says that he is a “dutifull Pupil” or  “one that will endeavor to be dutifull.” Either he is capable of dutifully standing behind his signature or he is still learning to. Either he is a reliable author or he is becoming one. Either way, he cannot guarantee what he signs. Authorship remains a project for him. We, his readers, can only suffer it. The pattern recurs in a letter to Wheelock dated April 20, 1768. “So I remain your Ignorant Pupil,” Johnson concludes, “and good for nothing Black Indian.”72 The pupil again signs for the Indian, while the Indian suffers the pupil’s subscription. The author divides himself in reproaching himself. Indeed self-­reproach is his means of self-­d ivision. But why does he do it? Why does he repeatedly sign off on self-­v iolence? Contemporary theory offers a variety of explanations for the violence of self-­d ivision, and the sympathetic reader might have some sympathy for them. But these explanations belong more to the reader’s horizon than to Johnson’s. They draw on assumptions that his discourse at once resists and exceeds. To survey them, moreover, requires an approach to reading that in the introduction to this volume Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith call “theoretical promiscuity.” The approach is justified by the fact that Johnson was himself a promiscuous reader, even if today’s readers have largely forgotten his sources. The first explanation is shame. According to Jean-­Paul Sartre, I feel shame 136  |  Christopher Bracken

when I sense that “I am as the Other sees me.” Shame is the sense of  being read by someone who cannot be read in turn. Transporting myself outside myself, I regard myself as an object.73 Johnson often expresses a sense that someone is reading him as he writes. In June 1772, after getting drunk at a meeting, he confesses in his diary that he feels so “vile” that he shames (“dishonors”) the reader who is shaming him: “I view my self to be grosely guilty of dishonouring a holy god and have brought much disgrace upon the holy religion. . . . I abhor and loathe myself, for the vileness that is in me.”74 What makes Johnson say he loathes himself? According to Sartre’s formula, he is judging himself from the Other’s place: he believes he is as the divine reader sees him. In fact, though, he is following another, older convention. The New Lights found a paradigm of conversion in the diary of David Brainerd, a dissident who was expelled from Yale during the Great Awakening and later worked as a missionary for the Scottish Society for the Propagation of  Christian Knowledge. He died at Edwards’s home in 1747. Edwards published an abridged and annotated edition of Brainerd’s diary in 1749. It is still in print today. Johnson often echoes Brainerd’s usage. Sometimes Johnson copies Brainerd almost verbatim. Brainerd, like Johnson, often rages at himself. “I see so much of my own extreme vileness,” he muses in August 1742, “that I feel ashamed and guilty before God and man: I look, to myself, like the vilest fellow in the land.”75 His self-­deprecation is part of the New Light ritual of self-­regeneration. He turns on himself in the hope of prompting that “great” and “abiding change,” which, as Edwards says, will make him “a new man, a new creature.”76 The second explanation is melancholy. Edwards himself suggests it when he numbers “melancholy” among the “imperfections” of Brainerd’s character.77 Was Johnson, Brainerd’s imitator, melancholic too? In the Freudian tradition, melancholy occurs when a loved one, for example, the father, is “introjected” into the ego and reproached for some perceived offense, for example, for abandoning the child. The melancholic who outwardly criticizes himself is in fact punishing somebody else: “If one listens patiently to a melancholic’s many and various self-­accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at all applicable to the [melancholic] himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else whom the [melancholic] loves or has loved or should love.”78 In Johnson’s early letters, the “dutifull Pupil” suggests that he is more worthy to sign than the “good for nothing Indian.” Is this a symptom of  “an ego divided, fallen apart into two pieces, one of which rages against the second”?79 Is the son reproaching the father “In This Separation”  |  137

for abandoning him? Recall that Johnson’s father died in the Seven Years’ War and Wheelock took the father’s place when Johnson was about eight years old. The third explanation is masochism. Freud says it comes in three forms. The “erotogenic” masochist makes pain a condition of sexual pleasure. The “feminine” masochist fantasizes about being castrated, copulated with, or giving birth, and seeks to be gagged, bound, beaten, or whipped like a “naughty child.” The moral masochist expiates an unconscious sense of guilt through self-­torture.80 The masochist’s need for punishment expresses an internal tension between the ego and the superego or conscience. The superego is formed by the introjection of the child’s parents, who are the first objects of the child’s love. The parents represent the demands of the outer world to the ego, including the ethical code. They lose their influence as the child develops and are replaced by other authority figures, such as heroes, teachers, and, significantly for Johnson, God. Every extension of morality sharpens the sadism of conscience. In extreme cases, the sadistic conscience vanishes into masochism altogether, enticing the subject to sin and expiating sin through self-­chastisement.81 According to Theodor Reik, masochism is characterized by a “demonstrative intention.” “However genuine the penance, however voluntary the suffering,” he wryly observes, “it can’t do without a public.”82 Every maso­ chist requires an audience; every performance implies a reader. In his diary Johnson admits to an especially acute sense of being observed on November 10, 1771, after reading from Richard Baxter’s The Saint’s Everlasting Rest, a seventeenth-­century Puritan treatise. (Brian Fawcett published an abridged edition in 1758 and sent several copies to Wheelock in 1767.83) Baxter’s vision of the last judgment combines scopophilia, pleasure in watching others, with sadism, pleasure in watching others suffer. “Let it make the devils tremble, and the wicked tremble,” he exults, “but it shall make us leap for joy to see our neighbours that lived in the same towns, came to the same congregation, dwelt in the same houses, and were esteemed more honorable in the world than ourselves, now by the Searcher of  hearts eternally separated.”84 Johnson tortures himself with the thought of  being tortured. So he resolves to watch what he gives the Searcher of hearts to read: “The Discourse Seem to come home to my heart, and Seem to be Such a liveing Truth that it Seem to me to be the most necessary thing for me to be busy about the bussiness of the Eternal world of Spirits to which I am adayly hastening . . . and to live as in the Sight of God.”85 This is one 138  |  Christopher Bracken

of many passages in which he expresses a sense of being read by a reader whose intentions he cannot read. He writes while reading himself from the place where the absolute reader reads him. He is the author of the text and yet he experiences himself as a text. Freud finds masochism puzzling because it contradicts the widely held assumption that “instinctual life” is governed by the pleasure principle. If mental activity primarily aims to avoid unpleasure and obtain pleasure, how do we explain why we sometimes seek out pain when we could just as easily avoid it? This is the “economic problem” of masochism.86 Reik’s solution is the “flight forward.” He proposes that the masochistic performance removes an obstacle to satisfaction.87 Every punishment is repaid with a pleasure; every debit is balanced by a credit. But economics was yesterday’s problem. Today’s problem is that masochism contradicts the agency principle. Lynda Hart points out that since it denotes submission to domination, the word masochism has become synonymous with “internalized oppression.”88 And yet she detects a forbidden value in powerlessness. Sado­masochism breaks down the conceptual boundaries that conventionally separate the normal from the perverse, reality from fantasy, activity from passivity—and identity from difference.89 The masochist tries in particular to “lose” the consciousness of being self-­identical at different times and in different places, as required by Locke’s theory of personhood. Hart notes that while mainstream feminists, for example, attach a high value to “finding oneself,” masochists speak in terms of  “losing oneself ”; while feminists typically affirm their identities, “sadomasochists frequently refer to the experience of becoming ‘nothing.’ ”90 The effort to “become nothing” forms the core of the sadomasochistic ritual. She describes it as the surrender of the autonomous ego.91 Johnson speaks of himself in precisely these terms in a letter addressed to Wheelock on May 2, 1774. “O!” he exclaims, “that I might see more and more of my own wretchedness, and insufficiency, that Jesus Christ might become more precious to my Soul. Oh! I am nothing.”92 Viewed from Hart’s horizon, Johnson appears to be playing the masochist’s role in a sadomasochistic relationship with God. Masochism, however, is not his ritual. It is its historical inheritor. To explain this claim, though, requires more promiscuous reading. Edwards argues in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections that the neo-­Calvinist ritual of regeneration is supposed to produce a “change of nature” in the human subject, transforming the merely “natural man” into a properly “spiritual” creature. The “springs” that propel this change are “In This Separation”  |  139

the affections: what scholars today, shunning the -­ion, simply call affect. The affections are located in “the heart.” The imagination, however, can counterfeit them.93 Edward likens the imagination to a writing tablet. Sensory impressions inscribe themselves on it like “letters and words written in a book.”94 Significantly, an especially lively impression can pass itself off as the thing itself. “The same sort of power that can put ink upon paper,” Edwards warns, “can put on leaf-­gold.”95 Consequently, in the ritual of regeneration, the “spiritual man” seeks assurance that the impression “inked” on the heart is not a forgery. It is necessary to distinguish those lively exercises of the heart that mark an authentic change from those lively impressions of the imagination that counterfeit the change.96 Assurance lies in the divine author’s signature. “When God sets his seal on a man’s heart by his Spirit,” Edwards maintains, “there is some holy stamp, some image impressed and left upon the heart by the spirit, as by the seal upon the wax.”97 According to Edwards, God has twelve ways of signing the heart. Hence there are twelve ways to tell a true affection from a false impression. The sixth is “evangelical humiliation.”98 For Edwards, it is the signature affection. Today’s reader probably recoils from it. Who would seriously encourage you to humiliate yourself? What Edwards means by humiliation though is humility. Evangelical humiliation is a practice for curbing excessive pride. It puts limits on narcissism. True saints show their humility by walking humbly, remaining patient under affliction, and showing meekness toward others. When they speak, they express an “abasing” sense of utter insufficiency, despicableness, and odiousness, and they worry that words cannot adequately represent their “meanness, filthiness, impotence, etc.”99 When Johnson abases himself— that is, when he says he is vile and unworthy or when he loathes and abhors himself—he is putting the “stamp or seal” of assurance on his conversion. If he sounds like a masochist today, it is because the discourse about maso­ chism has seized control of the language of eighteenth-­century Calvinism and redirected it to new purposes. In a 1991 essay, for example, Joan Cocks remarks that lesbian sadomaso­ chism marks “a paradoxical return” to the conventions of Augustinian piety.100 Similarly, Gilles Deleuze affirms, without a trace of irony, that “the masochistic experiment” aims at the “regeneration and rebirth” of the masochist. Masochism is to Deleuze what evangelical humiliation is to Edwards: “the projection of a new man.”101 The masochistic ritual recasts the evangelical ritual, just as Deleuze shares his keywords with a Calvinist philosopher from Puritan New England. Masochism is a secular theology. 140  |  Christopher Bracken

One of the great theoretical questions of Johnson’s time was whether human agency includes the potential for passivity. Edwards took it up in Freedom of the Will, published in 1754, a few years before Johnson entered Moor’s Indian Charity School. In the first part, Edwards strings together a series of premises that continue to frame the debate about agency two and a half centuries later. He defines the will as the capacity to choose. It is a cause that produces effects on itself. Whatever excites it is a “motive.” A motive is always something good, for we do not willingly choose what is bad. Whatever is good is pleasing. Or rather, it excludes “what is disagreeable or displeasing.”102 In short, agency is governed by the pleasure principle. Without pleasure, Edwards adds, there can be no freedom, just as without freedom, there can be no agency. Freedom is the power to do what is pleasing, and “to be free is the property of an agent.”103 No wonder we find it so difficult today to associate agency with passivity or sufferance. According to a philosophical tradition that Edwards traces back to “Mr. Locke,” unpleasure is the signature of unfreedom. To suffer is to endure servitude. To suffer is to submit to the other. Edwards addresses his argument to his philosophical opponents, the Arminians, who define agency as the capacity for self-­determination.104 Every agent, they insist, is the author of his or her actions. Thus being the author of an act means “being the immediate agent, or the being that is acting or in exercise in that act.”105 Authors do not depend on another’s will. They sign for themselves. They do not suffer the other to sign for them. They act without being acted on because a truly free choice does not follow from a “preceding” choice. To be the effect of another cause is a sign of passivity. Edwards rebuts Arminianism by arguing that there is no action that is not the effect of a prior action, no choice that is not the result of choices that others have made. Freedom includes the potential for unfreedom. Every action bears a trace of  “passion.” Action and passion are not “opposite existences,” then, “but only opposite relations,” not beings, but ways of  being.106 Nor are they necessarily incompatible. The same subject may “at the same time” and “in different respects” be “active with relation to one thing” and “passive with relation to another.”107 Edwards’s (and Johnson’s) theory of active passivity finds a counterpart today in Scott Lyon’s theory of the “x-­mark.” Lyons explains that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, making an x-­mark, for example on a treaty, was a way for indigenous people to sign off on a decision that somebody else had already made for them. “An x-­mark,” he concludes, is “In This Separation”  |  141

“a sign of consent” performed “in a context of coercion.” It indicates both “agency and a lack of agency.” It is the kind of  “decision” you make “when something has already been decided for you,” just as the sadomasochistic ritual, according to Hart, is a “free choice” that you are not free to reject.108 Consciously or not, Lyons is reviving a theoretical possibility that Edwards proposed, and Johnson put into practice, in the later eighteenth century, when the concept of agency was still being invented—and when it still could have been invented differently. Johnson does not present himself as an author to his reader. He describes himself as a surface of inscription and reinscription. He can undertake no writing, he writes, without suffering to be written on, especially in the diaries that record his conversion. On November 14, 1771, he asks his God to make him “a new Creature,” and, on November 17 he prays “for a New heart, a heart of flesh, capable of feeling, an Understanding Heart.”109 He prays for a heart similar to the page he is writing on; he prays to be able to rewrite the page that he himself is. Accordingly, on December 28 he asks God for a heart of text: “Lord Jesus Condescend to work thy work within me, and renew my mind and put thy Law in my mind and write it upon my heart.”110 His prayer combines the changeable heart of Ezekiel 36:26 (“I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh”) with the writeable heart of Proverbs 7:3 (“Bind [my commandments] upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart”). By dividing himself in two, he is at once the author who makes an inscription and the surface that receives it. His agency therefore includes the potential for passivity. Johnson records his conversion on the morning of December 20, 1772. He writes that he has seen the Lamb of God writing. Thus there are two authors of the conversion scene, Johnson and Christ, just as there are two texts, the diary that Johnson is writing and the “heart” that Christ “impresses.” Johnson becomes a new man by suffering a division of authority. “This morn,” he writes, “I Saw in my first wakings, in my drowsiness, as it were the likeness of a lamb that had been Slain, Standin at the foot of my Couch, and these words Seem to be set home upon my heart. He was Oppressed—and he was Afflicted, yet he oppend not his Mouth.”111 His conversion receives two signatures of assurance. First Christ signs, leaving an “impression” on Johnson’s “heart,” and then Johnson countersigns Christ’s impression. He both is and is not the author of his conversion; his agency both is and is not his own: “What think you, who ever, here after may peruse these Lines—I am Joseph Johnson who do you think was the Subject of my Meditation . . . or what impression think you, was left upon 142  |  Christopher Bracken

my heart?”112 If  “Joseph Johnson” was not always already subject to self-­ division, if his signature was not inherently divisible from itself, then his readers would have no reason, and no ability, to doubt that he is the subject of  his own meditation. He chooses separation over identification. But it is a forced choice. “Joseph Johnson” only signs what the other writes. Notes

1. Joseph Johnson to Samson Occom, May 25, 1774, in Joseph Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren: The Writings of Joseph Johnson, 1751–­1776, ed. Laura J. Murray (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 232. 2. See, for example, Joseph Johnson, “To the Indians Concerning Oneida Lands” and “Joseph Johnson’s Speech to the Oneidas” in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 204, 208–­10. 3. Edwin S. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England (New York: Harper, 1957), 45–­47; C. C. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 1740–­ 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 10–­12; and Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–­1783 (Albuquerque: University of  New Mexico Press, 1988), 218–­20. 4. Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, December 28, 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 75–­76; Samuel Kirkland to Eleazar Wheelock, December 29, 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 78. 5. Bernd Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind: Indian Missionary-­Writers in Antebellum America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 103; Laura J. Murray, “The Diaries,” in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 88–­89. 6. Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 127–­30; Laura J. Murray, “The Brotherton Idea,” in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 168–­74; Peyer, The Tutor’d Mind, 105; Harold W. Van Lonkhuyzen, “A Reappraisal of the Praying Indians: Acculturation, Conversion, and Identity at Natick, Massachusetts, 1646–­1730,” in New England Encounters: Indians and Euroamericans, ca. 1600–­1850, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 212–­13. 7. Joanna Brooks, “ ‘This Indian World’: An Introduction to the Writings of Samson Occom,” in Samson Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan: Leadership and Literature in Eighteenth-­Century Native America, ed. Joanna Brooks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 24. 8. Murray, “The Brotherton Idea,” in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 170. 9. Samson Occom to the Officers of the English Trust for Moor’s Indian Charity School, November 10, 1773, in Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, 108. 10. Scott Lyons, X-­Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 128. “In This Separation”  |  143

11. Johnson to Occom, May 25, 1774, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 232. 12. Johnson to Occom, May 25, 1774, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 232–­33. 13. Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 329. 14. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 76–­78. 15. In October 1773 Johnson was one of nine residents of Farmington, Connecticut, who signed an open letter addressed to “All our Indian Brethren,” urging them to “remember the Affair.” “Let us take Courage friends,” they write, “and step forward like men. . . . Send a Man out of each Tribe, that they may go with us, and seek a Country for our Brethren.” Being a man, in this case, means having the “Courage” to join the exodus into “the Wilderness.” “Farmington Indians to All Our Indian Brethren,” October 13, 1773, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 198. 16. Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” 317. 17. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages in Which Something Is Said about Melody and Musical Imitation,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 267. 18. Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages in Which Something Is Said about Melody and Musical Imitation,” 267–­68. 19. Lyons, X-­Marks, 37. 20. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 102. 21. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), book 2, chapter 27. 22. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 335. 23. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 104. 24. Rousseau, “Essay on the Origin of Languages in Which Something Is Said about Melody and Musical Imitation,” 268. 25. Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of  Inequality among Men, in Gourevitch, ed., The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, 152. 26. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of  Inequality among Men, 152. 27. Bernard de Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. Phillip Harth (London: Penguin Books, 1970), 265. 28. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of  Inequality among Men, 152. 29. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, 265–­66. 30. Joseph Johnson, diary, March 6, 1772, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 139. 144  |  Christopher Bracken

31. Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, trans. James Strachey and others (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 179–­80; emphasis added. 32. Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translation revised by Joel Weins­ heimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2002), 267, 305. 33. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 302. 34. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 268. 35. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 305–­6. 36. Robert Warrior, “Foreword,” in Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, v. 37. Andrea Smith, Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of  Unlikely Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), xi, xix. 38. Craig S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minnea­ polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 107. 39. Joanna Brooks, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-­American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 6. 40. Brooks, American Lazarus, 52. 41. Brooks, American Lazarus, 12. 42. Brooks, American Lazarus, 11. 43. Brooks, American Lazarus, 72, 3. 4 4. Brooks, American Lazarus, 13, 17, 65. 45. Brooks, American Lazarus, 9, 15, 24, 62. 46. Brooks, American Lazarus, 48. 47. Brooks, American Lazarus, 18. 48. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–­1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xi. 49. Robin Fisher, Contact and Conflict: Indian-­European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–­1890 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1977), xiii. 50. Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, 52. 51. William S. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1620–­1984 (Hanover, NH: University Press of  New England, 1986), 32. 52. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-­ Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Daniel F. Bouchard and trans. Daniel F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 151. 53. Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, December 4, 1774, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 246–­47. 54. Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 252. 55. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 277. 56. Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics and Selected Letters, ed. Seymour Feldman and trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1982), 223. “In This Separation”  |  145

57. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids, MI: H. H. Meeter Center for Calvin Studies/William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1975), 35. 58. Perry Miller exhaustively explains that in Puritan New England, Augustinian piety hinged on the experience of being born again. It was a drama in three acts. The first act was justification: the Puritans assumed that humans have no power, no agency, to free themselves from sin because they are by nature enslaved to it. The second act was vocation: it was God who by his grace called the elect to a new life. The third act was regeneration: the elect responded to God’s call with a change of heart and consequently became new creatures. See Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1939), 26–­27. 59. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 37, 49. 60. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 31, 34. 61. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England, 26–­30; Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 18. 62. Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 45. 63. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England, 77; Goen, Revivalism and Separatism in New England, 17–­18, 33. 64. Gaustad, The Great Awakening in New England, 107, 202–­3. 65. Joseph Johnson to All Enquiring Friends (1772 or 1773), in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 178. 66. Occom, The Collected Writings of Samson Occom, Mohegan, 52–­53. 67. Jonathan Edwards, “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 4, The Great Awakening, ed. C. C. Goen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 164–­89. 68. Edwards, “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God,” 197–­98. 69. Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, December 1, 1766, in Johnson To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 60–­61. 70. Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, November 10, 1767, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 63, 65. 71. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 28. 72. Joseph Johnson to Eleazar Wheelock, April 20, 1768, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 69. 73. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 302, 384. 74. Joseph Johnson to David Jewett, ? June 20, 1772, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 149–­50. 75. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 7, The Life of David Brainerd, ed. Norman Pettit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 176. 76. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 7, The Life of David Brainerd, 502. 77. Edwards, The Works of  Jonathan Edwards, vol. 7, The Life of David Brainerd, 91. 146  |  Christopher Bracken

78. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, 248. 79. Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, 109. Edwards styles the New Light Calvinists as artists of melancholy. See his commentary in Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 7, The Life of David Brainerd, 91–­93; and on the revival at Northampton, see Edwards, “A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God,” 206–­7. 80. Sigmund Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, 161–­62. 81. Freud, “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” 167–­69. If conscience speaks in the language of introjected authority figures, then it is tempting to infer that when Johnson reproaches himself in his letters to Wheelock, Johnson is repeating the words that his teacher once addressed to him. He calls himself a “good for nothing Black Indian” because Wheelock called him one. The super­ego speaks in the father figure’s voice. 82. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1941), 78. 83. Laura Murray, editor’s note, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 104. 84. Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (London: Old Royalty Publishing, 1928), 21. 85. Joseph Johnson, diary for November 10, 1771, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 104. 86. Freud, “Economic Problem,” 159. 87. Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, 123. 88. Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 87, 105. 89. Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh, 105. 90. Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh, 60. 91. Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh, 149–­50. 92. Johnson to Wheelock, December 4, 1774, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 228. 93. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 100. 94. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 210–­11. 95. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 216–­17. 96. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 217. 97. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, A Treatise Concerning Re­ ligious Affections, 232. “In This Separation”  |  147

98. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 311. 99. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 2, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 312, 328–­29, and 334. 100. Joan Cocks, “Augustine, Nietzsche, and Contemporary Body Politics,” differences 3.1 (1991): 155; Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh, 46. 101. Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 66, 94. 102. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, Freedom of the Will, ed. Paul Ramsey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 143. 103. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, Freedom of the Will, 163. 104. Calvin’s doctrine of election poses an obvious ethical dilemma. If God has already decided whether I am saved or damned, why should I be good? Why not “frolick” instead? Arminians in Holland and Laudians in England answered that the effectiveness of grace depends on the human will. God offers salvation; the individual is free either to neglect this gift or to invest it in good works (Miller, The New England Mind, 367–­69). A related solution, proposed by Puritan divines in the seventeenth century, was the covenant of grace. The divines affirmed that God, freely limiting his absolute power, extends the means of salvation to anyone who consents to be converted and redeemed (375–­78). Both Arminianism and covenant theology affirm that humans are capable of helping themselves, but both nevertheless advocate submission to God’s will (395). 105. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, Freedom of the Will, 342. 106. It is no accident that Perry Miller reads Edwards as a kind of Calvinist existentialist. Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949). 107. Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, Freedom of the Will, 347. 108. Lyons, X-­Marks, 1–­3; Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh, 66. 109. Joseph Johnson, diary, November 14 and 17, 1771, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 105, 107. 110. Johnson, diary, December 28, 1771, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 125. 111. Johnson, diary, December 20, 1772, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 161. 112. Johnson, diary, December 20, 1772, in Johnson, To Do Good to My Indian Brethren, 161.

148  |  Christopher Bracken

SIX  | 

Mark Rifkin

Making Peoples into Populations The Racial Limits of  Tribal Sovereignty

Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of  “bio-­power.” . . . If the development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo-­and bio-­politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them. —Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1

What defines a population as such? This question could mean something like how particular populations are coded within existing discourses. Alternately, challenging the idea that populations are given entities, it could be asking how groups of people are constituted as a population or populations—how the contours of a population are determined, by whom, and through what institutional and ideological mechanisms. From the former perspective, one could explore how Indigenous populations are represented within the administrative rhetorics of the settler state or, from the latter perspective, the ways the U.S. government produces “Indians” as a racial population in ways that facilitate the promulgation of regulations that encompass all Indigenous people. Both of these approaches could employ Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics to address how techniques of governance are (re)cast as necessarily following from innate

bodily qualities (such as Indian “blood”), how such strategies are presented as simply supplementing or reflecting biological impulses and imperatives. Moreover, Foucault suggests that biopolitics “effects distributions around the norm,” and “the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory,” “a technology of power centered on life.”1 The positions various groups of people occupy within the political and economic configuration(s) that sustain the norm, then, are validated as merely expressive of their collective bodily dispositions, qualities that make them—as populations—less able to participate in the promise of augmented life represented by the norm. However, the question with which I began has another dimension that largely is left unaddressed within a biopolitical framework, namely the issue of geopolitics. If a population is not given but produced in order to locate particular groups of people within a system of control that operates through distributions around a biologically imagined norm, what kinds of social organization and collective self-­representation does the idea of the population supplant? Moreover, if biopolitics comes to be exercised through an already existing institutional matrix of the state that seeks to manage political and economic relations, as suggested in the epigraph, how is the reach of the state defined and justified? How is the space over which normalizing techniques of governance operate determined, or what institutional and ideological processes are at play in outlining the juridical contours of  “the social body”? The concept of population, as articulated by Foucault, presumes the geopolitics of the nation-­state, its existence as a clearly bordered entity with centralized authority over subjects understood as within its exclusive jurisdiction. While scholarship in queer studies has sought to extend the scope of Foucauldian biopolitics as a critical imaginary, to explore its usefulness in addressing forms of imperialism old and new, this work has not thought much about the struggle among competing systems, the relation between the interpellation of groups of people as populations subject to imperial rule, and their existing ways of conceptualizing collectivity, governance, and territoriality.2 What were they before they were a population—a biopolitically (and potentially racially) imagined unit under the purview of the state? What happens to prior modes of identification and sociospatiality in that (continuing) process of population making? What geopolitical work does the idea of the population perform in rendering obvious the dimensions of state rule, or, put another way, what role might population play in translating prior geopolitical formations and 150  |  Mark Rifkin

contemporary jurisdictional tensions into biopolitical terms, such that they no longer appear as issues of jurisdiction or as challenges to the authority of the state to define what constitutes viable modes of political process, structure, and representation? These questions seem particularly pressing in considering the kinds of sovereignty exercised by settler states. The settler state is premised on intimate belonging to the space it claims as its own, requiring that the friction between state mappings and already existing Indigenous formations be disavowed.3 The fusion of the politics of state nationality to Indigenous place involves the careful management of Native governance so that it does not conflict with the terms of settler occupation, and in the case of the United States, as Vine Deloria and Clifford M. Lytle argue, the recognition of forms of Native “self-­government” remains contingent on what “the federal government deems acceptable and legitimate exercises of political power,” a framework that is not what “Indian people themselves have demanded or appreciated.”4 The categories of  “Indian” and “tribe,” then, can be understood as generated within U.S. political discourses and institutions, as (mis)translations of  Indigenous polities. Representing Indians as a racial population enables the U.S. government to insert them into the matrix of federal jurisdiction, defining them not as polities whose existence precedes that of the settler state itself but instead as a collection of persons whose shared identity and status is measured through U.S.-­produced terms and norms.5 Deloria and Lytle indicate that the distance between “self-­government” and “self-­determination” can be measured in terms of federal efforts to regulate what will count as a legitimate kind of political claim, and the biopolitical production of populations can be understood as a tactic, or technique of rule, within that larger and ongoing geopolitical project. Coding Indigenous polities as an “Indian” population, aggregated into “tribes,” displaces not just specific Indigenous modes of governance and land tenure but the authority of  Indigenous peoples to decide for themselves how they should be governed. Indigenous intellectuals and activists have used the topos of peoplehood, along with self-­determination, as a way of challenging states’ claims to exclusive sovereignty within their borders, drawing on those terms’ meanings within existing international law and un covenants to insist that indigeneity cannot be reduced to the terms of settler governance.6 The concept of peoplehood can provide a way of leveraging the unexamined geopolitical assumptions at play in existing ways of analyzing biopolitics, while also helping highlight the role that biopolitical forms of power play within the Making Peoples into Populations  |  151

geopolitical project of legitimizing and exercising settler-­state authority over Indigenous space and polities. In particular, a focus on kinship can aid in illustrating and developing that double-­sided critical movement, since it functions as an ideological switch point between biopolitics and geopolitics. Kinship provides an idiom through which to cast the operation of the state apparatus as merely an extension or recognition of instinctive familial bonds of affection and care.7 As a term and concept, kinship emerges out of a Euramerican anthropological tradition that seeks to remake Indigenous social formations as an older/other version of the social sphere of family, measuring the former within the normative frame of the latter.8 In this vein, Indigenous peoples can be narrated as a population defined by reproductively transmitted Indianness. The discourse of kinship can cast Indigenous principles of geopolitical organization—the contours and character of peoplehood—as, instead, characteristics that attach to a (racially imagined) population, such that tribes as collections of  Indians are offered diminished, circumscribed forms of collective recognition (self-­government as tribes) rather than fully acknowledged as peoples (self-­determination). As I will show through discussion of two U.S. Supreme Court decisions—United States v. Rogers (1846) and Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978)—this process of creating an Indian population not only subjects Native peoples to a biopolitical regime but reaffirms the obviousness of the territoriality and jurisdiction of the settler state. Alternative Indigenous conceptions of collectivity are portrayed either as merely expressions of racial Indianness or as indicating a specific kind of legally recognized yet circumscribed cultural difference—as tribes—that attaches to Indians as an anomalous population within the nation-­state. An attention to questions of kinship helps in tracking the threshold between geopolitics and biopolitics and the ways issues of jurisdiction and sovereignty are interpellated as innate characteristics of a racialized population. More specifically, such an approach traces how the assertion of the obviousness of U.S. jurisdiction leads to the bio­ logization of peoplehood, even in the absence of an explicit discourse of racial difference in situations where the United States seems to acknowledge the distinctness and political autonomy (self-­government) of  Indian tribes. Race, Space, and Sexuality

Before turning to the legal dynamics of U.S. population making, and the complex role of kinship in that process, I want to address more fully the ways that Foucault’s conception of biopolitics has been extended to questions of empire and to consider how a focus on peoplehood can raise 152  |  Mark Rifkin

questions about the representation of spatiality and sovereignty in those accounts. In particular, Ann Laura Stoler’s Race and the Education of Desire and Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages provide useful examples of how scholars have rethought the dynamics of Foucault’s analysis as laid out in The History of Sexuality. Both offer crucial qualifications and elabo­ rations that can be immensely useful to Native studies in understanding the process by which Indigenous social formations are inserted into the ideologies and institutions of the settler state. They explore how modes of racialization depend on discourses of sexuality, generating a kind of  interpretive framework that attends to the central importance of representations of  family, desire, and homemaking within imperial imaginaries. However, in demonstrating how populations are produced as such within biopolitical projects, these works tend to lose track of countervailing geopolitical formations to those of the imperial power. In emphasizing the pervasiveness of  biopower—its extension into all areas of life—these accounts tend to treat space as a kind of inert backdrop across which imperial authority extends, bracketing tensions or frictions between imperial governance and the already existing sociospatialities of those over whom such governance is extended. In Foucault’s account, biopolitics supplants an older model of rule organized around the unilateral power of the sovereign to kill, and this royalist vision of absolute authority enacted in limited circumstances gives way to a more pervasive notion of power as circulating through the social body, imagining the subjects of a given government as a kind of organic entity out of which the state develops and, thus, making the state into the protector and facilitator of popular well-­being in ways that suggest the necessary penetration of governance into all areas of life (including health, sanitation, reproduction, education, and child care). Without challenging the importance of discourses of sexuality to this transformation in European social life, Ann Laura Stoler suggests that Foucault’s field of vision is far too limited because he implicitly accepts the fiction produced within colonial policy of a “home” country whose residents are de facto the people of which the government is the expression. The separation between home and colony, she argues, does not in fact precede the colonial encounter but instead postdates it—a retrospective projection constituted through interwoven discourses of sexuality and race: “In this age of empire, the question of who would be a ‘subject’ and who a ‘citizen’ converged on the sexual politics of race.”9 For Stoler, Foucauldian biopolitics serves as a means of understanding how colonial governance produces and maintains the crucial boundary Making Peoples into Populations  |  153

around citizenship that allows for the continued validation of the state as representative in the face of its subjection of other people and places to potentially unlimited regulations and interventions. Also, racial and sexual differentiation provides an alibi for such domination by portraying subject populations as a potential threat to the welfare/life of the national people and thus in need of extensive and intrusive management. Stoler explores the ways that the attempt to regulate domestic relations in the colonies served as a central part of state strategies to construct and police a distinct Europeanness that remained quite murky in practice. She argues, “The self-­a ffirmation of white, middle-­class colonials thus embodied a set of fundamental tensions between a culture of whiteness that cordoned itself off from the native world and a set of domestic arrangements and class distinctions among Europeans that produced cultural hybridities and sympathies that repeatedly transgressed these distinctions.”10 The legally sanctioned “culture of whiteness” relied on discourses of sexuality to link together potentially discrepant social activities, such that family and household formation can be taken to signify something coherent and innate about those partaking in particular practices. In this way, racialized conceptions of domesticity provide the basis for distinguishing the nation from the colonies, serving as the basis for determining who belongs to the national people. The making of middle-­class sensibilities, then, which for Foucault operate as the horizon of normalization within the European nation-­state, actually occurs within the colonies, and discourses of kinship and residency operate as core tools through which state policy engages in the production of noncitizen populations, whose supposed innate difference justifies their status as alien subjects of state jurisdiction.11 One of the most compelling and helpful aspects of Stoler’s reformulation of Foucault is her emphasis on how the institutionalized production of racialized populations generates geopolitical distinctions (home versus colony, citizen versus subject), but in a register that appears not to be about space and sovereignty at all. Such categorizations appear as if they were derived from the natural facts of health, reproduction, and racially differentiated embodiment. While she does not develop this point, Stoler’s argument gestures toward the ways the interpellation of persons and places into the terms of imperial governance performed by the concept of the population displaces discussion of the translation and supplants already existing governmental structures and modes of land tenure among the colonized. For example, Stoler refers at several points to “cultural hybridities” that threaten the racial and sexual logic of whiteness: what happens if one 154  |  Mark Rifkin

figures these hybridities not simply as ambiguities internal to the colonial system but as evidence of a struggle between a European social system and a prior one? How might such hybridities be interpreted as traces of  forms of sociospatiality that certainly are affected by imperial presence and policy but are not reducible to them? How might those principles and practices often characterized as kinship be understood as modes of collectivity and place making, as part of a non-­European geopolitical imaginary whose contours remain at odds with those of imperial policy? Within Native studies, such an analysis can allow for investigation of how the racialized category of  “Indians” administratively was constructed through discourses of sexuality (kinship, courtship, marriage, homemaking, child rearing), and this methodology further enables examination of how that process translated Native peoples as a population in ways that bracket or disavow questions about the supersession of  Indigenous modes of collectivity and sovereignty (such as decision making, land tenure, resource distribution) by the logics and mappings of settler-­state policy. From this perspective, the critical juxtaposition of population with peoplehood offers a way of tracking the process of interpellation, of marking the discursive and institutional threshold for translating Native geopolitical formations into the terms of settler governance.12 If used from a critical position that is attentive to Indigenous peoplehood, a biopolitical analytic can help highlight the role that discourses of sexuality play in transposing and displacing Native sovereignty and self-­determination, attending to how such discourses recast these issues as ones of population management within the orbit of state jurisdiction. In Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar points to the continued complex twining of sexuality and race within imperial projects in the contemporary moment, illustrating the ways biopolitical tactics deployed in and by the United States depend on shifting processes of normalization, which regu­ late access to privileged forms of political subjectivity. The thrust of her argument is that the extension of rights and positive recognition to certain homosexual subjects within the United States is indissolubly enmeshed in the interpellation of so-­called terrorists and Muslims and Arabs more broadly as queer populations whose detainment and death makes possible the safety of the nation—the construction of the terrorist as “a body almost too perverse to be read as queer.”13 The provisional acceptance of sexual minorities remains “contingent upon ever-­narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normativity, and bodily integrity,” which when endorsed by such minorities is described Making Peoples into Populations  |  155

by Puar as “homonationalism.”14 This apparent embrace of particular kinds of sexual deviance is accompanied by “the ascendancy of whiteness,” which though not “strictly bound to heterosexuality[,] . . . is bound to heteronormativity,” creating “differences between queer subjects who are being folded (back) into life and the racialized queernesses that emerge through the naming of populations.”15 From this perspective, in ways similar to Stoler’s account, racialized population making is dependent on the perception of particular social practices as violating heteronormative principles; such subjects “refuse to properly assimilate,” which Puar places in “contrast to the upright homosexuals engaged in sanctioned kinship norms.”16 Noting that “the ascendancy of whiteness and the ascendancy of heteronorms are biopolitical comrades,” Puar suggests that queer abjection attaches less to particular forms of homoerotic desire (since gays and lesbians can become good homonational subjects) than to violations of a national liberal ideal— one ordered around proper family making, intimacy, household formation, and consumerism.17 Yet such population making relies less on existing categories of identity than “assemblages.” This “mapping of race through aggregates and dis­ aggregates” “establishes the individual as imbricated in manifold populations (not community—the designation to a dehumanizing population instead of the communalism of community is significant).”18 The terrorist is not part of a community, a collectivity with a sense of itself as such. Instead of describing persons as mutually participating in something, this mode of racialization entails the construction of a kind of acommunal aggregation of traits that ostensibly indexes persons’ failure to meet the heteronormative standards of  “life.”19 Not having a determinate collectivity that could make political claims, terrorists exist in the U.S. policy imaginary as deterritorialized bodies whose very lack of national location makes them both inherently threatening and an exception to the normal rules of law and international warfare. In this sense, race marks the gap between the formal legal limits of U.S. sovereignty and the exercise of imperial power, providing a rationale for the extension of state authority over nonstatist actors operating anywhere. Biopolitical discourses manage the disparity between the legalities of nation-­state boundaries and terrorist mobilities. As Puar suggests, the formulations and formations of the “war on terror” exude “the anxiety of managing rhizomic, cell-­d riven, nonnational, transnational terrorist networks that have no self-­evident beginning or finite end,” with “the terrorist serv[ing] as the monstrous excess of the nation-­state.”20 Puar further suggests that the United States seeks to validate the war on terror by 156  |  Mark Rifkin

casting its policies as conducive to greater gender and sexual freedom either in the United States or in regimes modeled on the United States. She argues that this “sexual exceptionalism” facilitates the construction of a “state of exception” for “terrorist” populations, in which the protection of the life and freedom of privileged subjects legitimizes state action to kill those envisioned as threatening such freedom.21 Heteronormative ideologies provide the basis for differentiating between normal and queerly racialized populations, presenting the latter as possessing inherent characteristics that make them the appropriate target for state authority acting in “excess” of—or in the necessary “exception” to—domestic and international law. The state’s biopolitical narration of the terrorist as a deterritorialized actor constituted by an assemblage of traits casts the population to which she or he belongs as unmoored from any particular (sense of) place—as having no spatial identity, claims, or mappings of its own. Such modes of queer racialization can be understood as a tactic through which the United States seeks to foreclose discussion of the limits of its own jurisdiction, the sociospatiality of the terrorists (in terms of inhabitance, alliance, or aspiration), and the sovereignty of other nation-­states whose borders are seen as meaningless in the supposed war on terror. However, rather than engaging with the erasure (or perhaps deferral) of geopolitics performed by universalizing heteronormative discourses that define worthwhile life and lives, Puar accepts the idea of the diffuse assemblage as a model for political praxis. She suggests that “the paradigm of queer diaspora retools the notion of diaspora to account for connectivity beyond or different from sharing a common ancestral homeland,” “allowing for queer narratives of kinship, belonging, and home.”22 In response to the administrative deterritorializations of state power that characterize the war on terror, she advocates a move away from “the defense of the integrity of identity” and toward “a queer praxis of assemblage [that] allows for a scrambling of sides that is illegible to state practices of surveillance, control, banishment, and extermination,” turning the imperial logic of assemblage back on itself so as to proliferate forms of association and organization that cannot be easily located within state mappings.23 If the modes of racialization deployed against terrorists cast them as lacking a determinate community and spatiality, does the acceptance of this model provide much of an alternative? Doesn’t doing so reaffirm the state-­managed paradigm of heteronormative whiteness and population making as the only basis by which to define what constitutes a legitimate collectivity for articulating a politics for exercising sovereignty and self-­determination? Making Peoples into Populations  |  157

Drawing on Puar’s analysis, one can interpret the history of U.S. Indian policy as a process of coding Native peoples as terrorist populations, as queer deviations whose failure to adhere to normative structures of  homemaking and land tenure threaten the safety and welfare of the (white) nation.24 Further, a heteronormative framework can be seen as having regulated the conditions for political intelligibility, in terms of shaping what would be seen as a viable form of governance and sociality as well as providing the basis for racializing Native peoples as Indians (their deviations from bourgeois homemaking marking them as nonwhite).25 However, even in critiquing the ways U.S. power is exerted through the state of exception, Puar tends to naturalize the geopolitics of U.S. nation-­statehood by failing to acknowledge that the kinds of sexual exceptionalism she addresses not only legitimize the extension of jurisdiction but also interpellate the political mappings of nonstatist actors (including Native nations) as merely a perverse absence of normative nationality. Puar overlooks how political geographies and processes of governance not modeled on U.S. liberalism are treated as merely the unnatural impulses/tendencies of a racial population.26 Puar and Stoler illustrate the importance of discourses of sexuality to imperial projects, showing how these discourses help make possible racializing forms of rule that contradistinguish citizens from popu­lations that are subject to virtually unlimited state regulation and intervention. Both scholars, though, lose track of the geopolitical formations that biopolitical techniques work to efface or to translate into more manageable terms. Such an oversight ends up eliding other extant modes of collectivity, place making, and sovereignty, including those of  Indigenous peoples. Kinship and Geographies of Jurisdiction

Biopolitical analyses can be immensely useful for Native studies, drawing attention to the ways that deviations from an emergent or established heteronorm can serve as the basis for the settler state’s construction of a racialized population, which then is targeted for particular kinds of regulation. However, while these accounts intimate that biopolitical discourses perform geopolitical work, such scholarship does not explore the forms of spatial self-­representation, mapping, and sovereignty that are displaced through imperial population making. Given that the state’s assertion of its own territorial self-­evidence is critical to the exertion of settler authority over Indigenous peoples-­cum-­populations, addressing how biopolitics works to render national space self-­evident is crucial in incorporating this 158  |  Mark Rifkin

Foucauldian concept into Native studies. The case of United States v. Rogers helps reveal how the exertion of U.S. jurisdiction is legitimized by reference to a racializing heteronorm, and the case shows how Native kinship functions as a threshold at which peoplehood is interpellated as population within the legal discourses of the settler state. The representation of Indianness as an inherited (set of) characteristic(s) serves as a necessary supplement to the naturalization of U.S. legal geography. The decision uses the concept of Indian to transpose Native sociopolitical processes into a discourse about kinds of bodies in which legal boundaries and jurisdiction are addressed in terms of racial reproduction rather than extant Native forms of (political) self-­identification. In this way, the decision makes tribal self-­governance logically and legally contingent on determining who possesses Indian blood. The decision centers on the extent of U.S. jurisdiction over acts occurring in Indian Territory, specifically within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation. William S. Rogers had been tried in a U.S. Circuit Court for the murder of Jacob Nicholson, and the indictment had described both as “white men and not Indians.” In his plea, Rogers contended that while he and Nicholson had been “native-­born free white male citizen[s] of the United States,” the fact that both had become citizens of the Cherokee Nation through marriage to Cherokee women meant that U.S. courts had no authority over them.27 The basis for this legal claim was the provisions of the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act passed in 1834, which had limited the exertion of federal power to crimes in which non-­I ndians were involved.28 Given that they were “incorporated with the said tribe of  Indians as one of them,” Rogers and Nicholson, Rogers asserted, each was “a Cherokee Indian,” and thus the killing could not be adjudicated in U.S. courts. The prosecution argued that “the proviso of the act of Congress . . . was never intended to embrace white persons,” and since the justices were divided on certain central legal issues, the Circuit Court sent the case to the Supreme Court, asking among other questions, “Could the accused . . . so change and put off  his character, rights, and obligations as a citizen of the United States, as to become in his social, civil, and political relations and conditions a Cherokee Indian?”29 While the lower court focused mostly on whether and under what circumstances a U.S. citizen could renounce that status, the Supreme Court majority opinion by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney largely ignored this line of inquiry, instead taking up the prosecution’s suggestion that to be simultaneously “white” and a “Cherokee Indian” was a legal impossibility.30 On this basis, the court declared that Making Peoples into Populations  |  159

neither Rogers nor Nicholson was Indian within the terms of the 1834 act, and, thus, Rogers could be tried in a U.S. court.31 Other scholars have focused on the implications of the decision’s apparent choice of race over politics as a way of defining Cherokee identity,32 but instead of suggesting that Taney’s narration of Native peoples as a racial population displaces or brackets acknowledgment of the Cherokees as a polity, I want to suggest that his racialization crucially supplements the geopolitics of U.S. sovereignty by marking the limits of such political recognition. Put another way, race does not so much take the place of what might be termed politics, but rather it serves as a crucial way of defining and circumscribing tribe when the United States recognizes limited Native self-­ governance. The insertion of racial Indianness here works to cast whatever might be characterized as Cherokee politics as necessarily subordinate to U.S. jurisdiction because Cherokees, as part of a racial population, are all subjects within the sphere of U.S. rule. After rehearsing the basics of the case and the claims in Rogers’s plea, the opinion immediately turns to the geopolitical status of Cherokee lands: “The country in which the crime is charged to have been committed is a part of the territory of the United States. . . . It is true that it is occupied by the tribe of Cherokee Indians. But it has been assigned to them by the United States, as a place of domicile for the tribe, and they hold and occupy it with the assent of the United States, and under their authority.”33 If the meaning of  “Indian” in the 1834 statute is the central issue of the plea, and ultimately of the decision itself, why begin with the discussion of the scope of U.S. space? The process of determining who is Indian appears to require presenting the relation between the Cherokees and their “place of domicile” as inherently mediated by official U.S. will (“assign,” “assent”). The term domicile suggests (contingent) habitation rather than the immutable fusion of land and authority that attaches to the U.S. government. The decision further asserts that “native tribes . . . have never been acknowledged or treated as independent nations.” Yet while insisting on the fact that such “tribes” have been and are “subject to [the] dominion and control” of Euro-­derived regimes, Taney demurs a bit, observing that “it would be useless at this day to inquire whether the principle thus adopted is just or not”: the United States has “maintained the doctrines upon this subject which had been previously established by other nations.”34 The pause here intimates that something about the “principle” of failing to treat “tribes” as “independent nations” may be un-­“ just,” that the invocation of precedent (simply doing what others have done) seeks to hold at bay a challenge to the legitimacy of U.S. 160  |  Mark Rifkin

mappings of the nation’s own “dominion and control.”35 Later in the same paragraph, Taney insists, “we think it too firmly and clearly established to admit of dispute that the Indian tribes residing within the territorial limits of the United States are subject to their authority,” but if so, why does the decision actively have to decry the effort to “inquire” into the basis for such “authority”?36 If the territoriality of the United States is a self-­evident and self-­sufficient explanation for the exertion of jurisdiction over tribes, what question could be raised about the justice of that geopolitical fact? The presumptive coherence of U.S. legal geography seems to depend on deferring this issue, declaiming the uselessness of investigating it. The hyperbolic, and somewhat hysterical, reiteration of the obviousness of the contours of  U.S. territory testifies to a sense of the logical and normative tenuousness of that very claim in light of prior Native occupancy. The decision seeks to cover this gap through introducing the figure of race. After observing that the United States has merely “maintained the doctrines” that preceded the existence of the nation as such Taney notes: “Yet from the very moment the general government came into existence to this time, it has exercised its power over this unfortunate race in the spirit of humanity and justice, and has endeavored by every means in its power to enlighten their minds and increase their comforts, and to save them if possible from the consequences of their own vices.”37 To be Indian is to be a member of a particular race, rather than to belong to a political entity, an “independent nation”—a status that would put in crisis the territory—authority complex of U.S. jurisdiction (disputing the contours of U.S. “dominion and control”). While the opinion does rehearse the rhetoric of the civilization program (enlightening minds and saving Natives from their vices), this moment is the only one of this kind, and the decision lacks the usual images of Native brutality, wildness, wandering, and inhabitance of a wilderness.38 One could read this moment as the one where race displaces politics, substituting a distinct and inferior Indian corporeality for an engagement with Native people as peoples, as autonomous and self-­determining. Such an interpretation, however, overlooks the ways that characterizing being Indian as belonging to a race serves less as a way of erasing the existence of tribes as polities than differentiating “tribes” from “independent nations.” Racializing Native peoples as Indians, or reciprocally understanding “Indian” as a racial designation, defines them primarily as a population, presenting them in biopolitical terms. Taney says of Rogers that “whatever obligations the prisoner may have taken upon himself by becoming a Cherokee by adoption, his responsibility to the laws Making Peoples into Populations  |  161

of the United States remains unchanged and undiminished. He was still a white man, of the white race, and therefore not within the exception in the act of Congress” for Indian-­on-­I ndian crime.39 “Indian” and “white” are incommensurable; being one a person cannot become the other. Yet the opinion does not deny that Rogers, or Nicholson for that matter, could “becom[e] a Cherokee” and acquire distinct “obligations” in doing so. That “adoption,” though, cannot alter or erase race, which is given at birth and immutable. While Cherokee here is not (necessarily) a racial identity, it must be subordinated to the facticity of being white (or Indian) inasmuch as that status marks an underlying and incontestable “responsibility to the laws of the United States.” Here we reach a bit of an aporia. The term tribe includes yet exceeds the category of  “Indian” because the latter designates belonging to a race, and Indianness anchors tribal identity in U.S. law, evi­ dently confirming the overriding importance of U.S. “assent” to tribal actions despite the absence of any explanation for why this would be the case. Distinguishing Indian from tribe and racializing the former displaces two threatening propositions. If to be Indian simply is to be recognized as a member of a tribe by the tribe, the terms and contours of  Native peoplehood do not have reference to U.S. law and are not subject to it, de facto making tribes “independent nations.”40 Reciprocally, if tribes are solely collections of  Indians rather than political entities, then there is no basis for the treaty system, leaving the United States with no way of justifying its acquisitions of Native-­occupied lands except brute force. The importance of casting the extension of U.S. authority over Native territory as both obvious and consensual is illustrated in the decision by the reference to the Treaty of New Echota (1836), which legitimized the removal of the Cherokees from their traditional lands.41 While the document was signed by people unauthorized by the Cherokee national government after it had been rejected twice in formal council, that Taney feels the need to argue that the 1834 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act is not at odds with the treaty indicates the treaty’s significance for him as a marker of the legitimacy of U.S. policy, due to its ability to indicate Cherokee agreement to federal law and its application to them.42 Asserting that the term Indian must refer to race, then, does not so much erase Native polities as constrain them. U.S. national space is constructed through, in Stoler’s terms, a “racial grammar,” but in this case, rather than offering a means of separating home from colony, this ideological system works to secure the self-­evidence of the nation’s “territorial limits” by making the dynamics of tribal governance distinct from while still contingent on a supposedly underlying Indianness. 162  |  Mark Rifkin

To what, though, does race refer in the decision? Although viciously circular incoherence is one of the most prominent generic features of Supreme Court decisions focused on Indian law and policy, Taney’s attempt to define Indian deserves some kind of prize (making it well worth quoting in full): And we think it very clear, that a white man who at a mature age is adopted in an Indian tribe does not thereby become an Indian, and was not intended to be embraced in the exception above mentioned. He may by such adoption become entitled to certain privileges in the tribe, and make himself amenable to their laws and usages. Yet he is not an Indian; and the exception is confined to those who by the usages and customs of the Indians are regarded as belonging to their race. It does not speak of members of a tribe, but of the race generally,—of the family of  Indians; and it intended to leave them both, as regarded their own tribe, and other tribes also, to be governed by Indian usages and customs.43 It’s hard to know where to begin in addressing the baffling involutions of this passage. Setting aside the odd qualification indicated by the phrase “at a mature age,” 44 the opinion here states unequivocally that “a white man . . . is not an Indian” and that the impossibility of one ever being the other has to do with “belonging” to a “race.” Indian refers “to those who by the usages and customs of the Indians are regarded as belonging to their race,” therefore race itself appears to be predicated less on inherited bodily traits than specific “usages and customs,” dynamics of Native sociality. Why, then, couldn’t someone categorized as white at birth become Indian if the latter race is dependent on tribal principles and practices? As noted earlier, both Rogers and Nicholson seem to have been “regarded” as “Cherokee Indians” by the Cherokees themselves. The decision, however, distinguishes between the privileges, and even laws, of a tribe and the “usages and customs” of  “the race generally.” This latter phrase presents race as inclusive of membership in tribes but as exceeding that kind of belonging, as providing a more “general” and encompassing rubric. If the explicit or implicit aim is to substitute race for politics, the stuttering invocation of  “usages and customs” significantly undermines that effort by indexing social formations that disjoint the discursive soldering of  “Indian” to a bodily type. Instead, the opinion casts race as the generic standard against which to assess the particular features of a given tribe’s laws, for the purposes of evaluating their relation to—and viability within—U.S. policy. The 1834 law, the opinion declares, does not mean to interpose U.S. Making Peoples into Populations  |  163

authority among members of a tribe, so long as that matrix conforms to “Indian usages and customs.” The term Indian delimits the threshold of U.S. intervention, suggesting the existence of a field of purely internal tribal matters, but one whose dimensions and processes are not defined simply by reference to the tribe’s own self-­chosen laws and usages. While portrayed as transparently indicative of a set group of persons (the ostensibly self-­ evident their that provides the syntactic hinge rendering Indians and race equivalent), Indianness actually works topologically, enfolding Native people(s) within the sphere of U.S. authority by positing a basis for identification neither putatively defined by the United States (their own “customs”) nor in competition with it (“intended to leave them” alone in their general character). Race functions as a limit on what will constitute Native politics from the perspective of the settler state, enfolding tribal governance within the geopolitics of overarching U.S. jurisdiction while speaking as if  Native people—Indians—are simply being left to govern themselves. Still unaddressed, though, is the reason race should be taken as primary, as logically prior to tribe, especially when it depends on “usages and customs” rather than immutable traits. Or put another way, what can explain the apparent attribution of immutability to Indianness (such that whites can never become one)? The key to this question can be found in Taney’s seemingly passing allusion to kinship. In attempting to explain the meaning of the phrase “race generally,” he calls forth the notion of  “the family of Indians.” This formulation condenses an array of interdependent assumptions, alluding to the privatizing model of nuclear homemaking, which already had achieved dominance in the United States as the normative ideal for residency, reproduction, and property holding by the 1840s.45 Foucault argues, “At the juncture of the ‘body’ and the ‘population,’ sex became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life”— “a bio-­politics of the population.”46 This framework solders to each other eroticism, household formation, child care, and a specific gendered division of labor in the privileged figure of conjugal couplehood. In addition, politics by definition is separated from the personal sphere of love and sexuality; legitimate governance works to preserve the sanctity of that space from intrusion, deformation, and perversion. While the decision’s yoking of  family and Indians does not directly conjure the image of sentimental domesticity for reasons I will address, this heteronormative ensemble serves as the ideological prism through which to approach Native socialities and to interpellate them within U.S. jurisdictional logics. If family names something distinct from the institutions of governance and yet internal to their 164  |  Mark Rifkin

sphere of operation, as that which animates them (the thing they should promote and protect), categorizing Indians in this way positions the term as indicating something foundational, which is neither an effect of political discourses and decisions nor challengeable in and by them. Moreover, if the contours of  Indian identity are not a product of U.S. law, such identity’s status as the general condition for the existence of tribes also means that they ultimately cannot be considered as having (geo)political dynamics at odds with federal policy, since they are the epiphenomenal expression of a nongovernmental set of relations. In other words, the trope of family does the discursive work of gesturing toward a content for Indian that can fill the otherwise empty distinction between tribe and independent nation at the center of the opinion’s logical and legal acrobatics. Foucault asserts that in modern regimes of power, “the question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population.”47 However, the biologization of Native peoples—as a race of  Indians—through appeal to a discourse of kinship itself aims to bracket anxieties about U.S. sovereignty and the difficulty of legitimizing the juridical claim to exert control over Native lands. Making tribal laws contingent on racial Indianness depoliticizes Native forms of collectivity by casting them as indicative of inborn tendencies rather than of sovereignty. The opinion’s chiastic linkage of family to race emphasizes the latter’s dependence on a particular vision of reproduction while presenting Native sociality, especially in its difference from Eura­ merican norms, as a set of inherited dispositions. The idea of race as an ensemble of characteristics transmitted in the blood was well established by this period, and the conceptualization of Indianness in this way reaffirms the heteronormative logic discussed earlier, in that personal identity is imagined in relation to, in Foucault’s terms, “the deployment of sexuality” through which “each individual has to pass in order to have access to his own intelligibility (seeing that it is both the hidden aspect and the generative principle of meaning).”48 Put another way, the notion of race as a quality that inheres at birth in individual bodies, at play in the decision’s declaration that a person “of the white race” cannot become Indian, depends on an ideology of family centered on conjugal, reproductive couplehood as the self-­evident building block of social life. Conversely, deviations from the model of sentimental domesticity, itself taken as a natural expression of how best to maximize human life, can be treated as symptomatic of an underlying, ingrained set of propensities, testifying to a population’s racial identity. Stoler captures this dialectic in Making Peoples into Populations  |  165

her discussion of how whiteness is forged in European colonies: “Cultural competencies and sexual practices signaled the lines of descent that secured racial identities and partitioned individuals among them.” She later notes, “The most basic universalistic notions of ‘human nature’ and ‘individual liberty’ elaborated by Locke and Mill rested on combined notions of breeding and the learning of ‘naturalized’ habits that set off those who exhibited such a ‘nature’ and could exercise such liberty from the racially inferior—and in their cases—South Asian colonized world.”49 Only those expressing certain “cultural competencies,” or “middle-­class sensibilities” centered on the appropriate forms of sexual expression and homemaking, could count as fully white.50 There are two symmetrical corollaries of this association of particular behaviors and practices with racially differentiated “lines of descent”: sociopolitical dynamics that do not fit a liberal conception of  human nature can be understood as symptomatic of nonwhite racial identities; and the socialities of those deemed nonwhite can be interpreted as unnatural, as failing to fulfill the prepolitical requirements of liberty, of being recognized as full political subjects—individual or collective.51 Discourses of race, then, extend beyond bodies to social formations, especially those that do not conform to heteronormative mappings of affection, eroticism, residency, and property holding, so Taney’s decision can refer to Indian “usages and customs” without speaking about something other than biological inheritance, since discourses of sexuality forge naturalized connections between reproduction and other facets of life defined as inherently nonpolitical. Taney’s equation of “the race generally” with “the family of Indians” implicitly subsumes Native modes of collectivity under the rubric of race, treating formulations and processes of peoplehood as mostly expressive of Indian descent and, thereby, a priori disqualifying them as geopolitical principles and claims on the basis of which one could dispute U.S. “dominion and control.” In the decision, tribes have laws and function as political entities in the sense of entering into agreements with the United States and regulating their own internal matters, but the echo between tribal “laws and usages” and Indian “usages and customs” indicates that tribe as a concept and status within U.S. jurisdictional logics can never break free from the orbit of racial Indianness, from the family connection to it. Any principle or act of governance at odds with U.S. interests and imperatives can be dismissed as either merely an expression of customs that symptomize racial breeding (and thus are not truly governance) or an extension

166  |  Mark Rifkin

beyond the limited exception made by the United States for such Indian eccentricities. This kind of management can be seen in Taney’s repeated depiction of  Rogers and Nicholson as having been incorporated among the Cherokees through “adoption.” Portraying their relation to the tribe in this way alludes to the history of captivity in which non-­Natives became part of Native peoples through inclusion in their kinship systems.52 This way of making family was marked as generically Indian in official and popular print discourse, both distinguished from Euramerican practices and seen as applying across tribal differences, and in its deviation from bourgeois norms, it could be, and was, taken as pointing toward racial identity, as expressive of the ingrained absence of an understanding of the natural benefits of true home and family. Reciprocally, the decision’s portrayal of Rogers and Nicholson suggests that the extension of Cherokee tribal membership to them involves a misunderstanding of the difference between law and custom, a particularly Indian inability to appreciate the necessary distinction between governance and family that leads to overstepping the proper bounds of the former. Put another way, the trope of adoption implies that the tribe exceeded the sphere of law, but in a way that uniquely testifies to Rogers’s and Nicholson’s underlying Indianness. However, these two men actually were not adopted; they were naturalized through marriage to Cherokee women. Laws regulating the political status of white men in the Cherokee Nation began to be passed in the 1820s as part of the larger bureaucratization and constitutionalization of Cherokee governance in the preremoval period.53 This inclusion of white husbands in the tribe was less custom than the result of a formal legislative process largely modeled on that of the United States. That institutional apparatus was created by the Cherokees in order to have a centralized government that would be recognized by the United States, so as to refuse ongoing insistence that they cede more of their lands. Once that statist structure was in place, legislators began to transform the conditions of membership in the nation, from matrilineally transmitted clan belonging to a more heteronormative and slavery-­friendly model: whites were admitted to citizenship if legally married to Cherokees; the children of non-­ Native women were granted citizenship; people of African descent were denied it, regardless of whether the mother was part of a Cherokee clan; and inheritance flowed through the patriarchally oriented nuclear family unit.54 Thus, the trajectory of Rogers and Nicholson “becoming Cherokee” needs to be situated within a reformulation of Cherokee kinship, at least

Making Peoples into Populations  |  167

in its legalization by the incipient constitutional government, which itself was part of the broader effort to coalesce and legitimize Cherokee sovereignty by bringing it in line with principles of U.S. governance. In other words, rather than indicating the ongoing efficacy of customs of family formation that bespeak Cherokee tribal identity’s suffusion by underlying, inbred Indian tendencies, the presence of Rogers and Nicholson testifies to a profound shift in Cherokee self-­representation. In suggesting the role that institutionalizing a privatizing, nuclear conception of kinship plays in efforts to validate Native governance as governance for the United States, the Cherokee example actually highlights the importance of ideologies of family to the struggle over what will be acknowledged as a political system, instead of family marking that which is before, outside, or beyond the sphere of politics. Euramerican discourses of kinship provide the grid of intelligibility for the decision’s deployment of the figure of race. They naturalize the centrality of  heteroreproductive inheritance to personal identity (imagined as given at birth), the agovernmental character of home and family, the inherent value of sentimental nuclear domesticity, and the attribution of alternative modes of sociality to unnatural inclinations. Within this frame, Native “customs and usages” at odds with dominant U.S. norms and jurisdictional imperatives can be understood as separate from issues of sovereignty due to the fact that they emanate from Indian breeding, making them expressive of proclivities that are not political in character. As such, they must be regulated by the legal system rather than potentially constituting an autonomous system of governance not reducible to that of the settler state. Therefore, while tribes persist as polities of a sort, with laws of their own pertaining to internal matters, they ultimately are limited by their general Indianness, and any dispute with the United States over the contours and scope of their authority can be resolved through the invocation of  Indianness—of their biopolitical status as a population—as the necessary limit to tribal authority. The question of the justice of U.S. narrations of national geopolitics, of the potential for Native peoples to be “independent nations,” can be displaced by the citation of the (reproductive) self-­evidence of  Indianness. Race serves here less as a way of proclaiming Native inferiority (although it also does so) than providing a topos through which to mark Indians’ interiority to the settler state while still recognizing the existence of tribes as political entities—of a diminished, domestic kind.

168  |  Mark Rifkin

Preserving Indian Distinctness

Tracking the ways the production of Indians as a population stands in for, and thus defers, a substantive engagement with their status as peoples becomes even more pressing with respect to modes of U.S. recognition that do not explicitly mention race and that appear to affirm tribal self-­ governance. In United States v. Rogers, the employment of racial difference is central to the decision’s logic. The decision minimally circulates the stereotypes often attached to Native peoples and thus offers a good example of the structural function of race as trope or topos within federal Indian policy (transposing geopolitical struggle into a biopolitical register) separate from specific racist aspersions (e.g., of wandering, wildness, inhabiting a wilderness). By contrast, Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez does not rely on an evident rhetoric of  Indian racial identity, and it seems to work from the assumption that Native peoples should be treated as such—as independent political entities whose organizing structures should not be super­ intended and regulated by the United States. Within an interpretive frame that equates racialization with racist denigration or that dichotomizes race and politics, this case may appear as the opposite of United States v. Rogers. However, if one attends to the ways that the decision narrates federal jurisdiction, its dual emphasis on Congress’s plenary power and tribes’ cultural difference (especially as formulated through reference to kinship) comes to the fore. Rather than being at odds, these lines of discussion crucially supplement each other, presenting limited tribal autonomy as a gift granted by the U.S. government to Indians due to their anomalous cultural formations, and this beneficent gesture brackets Native geopolitics in an affirmative mode that often characterizes contemporary modes of settler power. The case itself concerned Santa Clara Pueblo’s membership code. Passed in 1939, under a constitution adopted through the provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), it specified that the children of member fathers and nonmember mothers would be part of the community but that the children of member mothers and nonmember fathers would not. The original plaintiff, Audrey Martinez (the respondent in the Supreme Court case on appeal), was a recognized member of the Pueblo who had married a Navajo man and whose children, who had grown up and continued to reside on the reservation, had no claims to tribal citizenship or landholding under the 1939 act, and she sued to have it declared null and void under the provisions of the Indian Civil Rights Act (icra). That federal statute, passed in 1968, made most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights applicaMaking Peoples into Populations  |  169

ble to Native peoples, requiring that tribal governments extend these protections to their citizens.55 Among them is the Fifth Amendment’s equal-­ protection clause, and Martinez sued under this provision, alleging that the Santa Clara Pueblo code violated her rights on the basis of gender. The case began in the federal district court, in which the justices found that while the court did have jurisdiction, the ability of the Pueblo to define its own membership was “basic to the tribe’s survival as a cultural and economic entity.”56 The court of appeals also found that it had jurisdiction to hear the case, but it reversed the lower court’s decision, finding that a main intent of the icra was to protect American Indians (also U.S. citizens from 1924 onward) from the arbitrary exercise of tribal authority. Given that the distinction made by the Pueblo was based on sex, the justices held that this determination of membership required greater judicial scrutiny and that the tribal interests served by the requirement did not outweigh its discriminatory impact. The Pueblo appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, but rather than ruling on the merits of Martinez’s claim, the Court found that federal courts did not have jurisdiction to hear the case in the absence of  the Pueblo’s agreement to have the matter tried. The opinion argued that the icra included a provision for federal-­court oversight only with respect to habeas corpus petitions, extending more broadly to criminal prosecution, but not for what might be termed civil matters. In the absence of clear congressional intent to extend federal jurisdiction, the Pueblo’s sovereign immunity from suit still holds, so even though the icra applies to all acts by tribal governments, possible violations of a noncriminal nature cannot be remedied through the federal-­court system.57 The decision seems to offer a portrait of tribal autonomy that fully recognizes the existence of  Native peoples as polities in ways that are not dependent on the positing of an underlying (racial) Indianness, but the line of thought privileging sovereignty seems at odds with the opinion’s running reiteration of Congress’s plenary power over Indian affairs.58 The majority opinion, authored by Thurgood Marshall, emphasizes the ways Native governments are separate from those of the United States, quoting from earlier cases that describe them as “distinct, independent political communities, retaining their original natural rights,” and as a “separate people, with the power of regulating their internal social relations.”59 After indicating the ways Indigenous peoplehood precedes the U.S. Constitution, the decision finds that the icra had a double purpose. While “strengthening the position of individual tribal members vis-­à-­v is the tribe,” the law “also manifest[s] a congressional purpose to protect tribal sovereignty from un170  |  Mark Rifkin

due interference,” so the courts should be loathe to “interfere with a tribe’s ability to maintain itself as a culturally and politically distinct entity.”60 Yet Marshall, in equal measure, highlights Congress’s plenary authority in Indian policy. Dating from United States v. Kagama (1886), this doctrine holds that Congress essentially can do whatever it will with respect to Native peoples without any of the restraints present in other aspects of U.S. law. Not only does Marshall rehearse the narrative of this unfettered absolutism, it often is invoked in the same sentence as the declaration of tribal independence from U.S. rule. In addition to quoting from United States v. Kagama early in the Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez decision, he observes of tribes’ sovereign immunity that “this aspect of tribal sovereignty, like all others, is subject to the plenary control of Congress,” and in outlining why such immunity cannot be presumed to have been abrogated, he indicates the need for “a proper respect both for tribal sovereignty itself and for the plenary authority of Congress.”61 The two appear consistently yoked to each other in ways that suggest the projection of tribal authority from congressional will, but in a displaced way. Describing Native sovereignty as “the powers of local self-­government,” the decision immediately adds, “however, Congress has plenary authority to limit, modify, or eliminate the powers of local self-­government which the tribes otherwise possess,” noting that the icra is in part “an exercise of that authority.”62 While Native sovereignty is characterized as distinct from and anteceding U.S. control, it structurally appears as a potentially temporary pause in the exercise of unrestricted and unrestrictable congressional power.63 There appears to be a direct proportion between the Court’s insistence on the distinctness of Native sovereignty and the complete and utter subordination of that sovereignty to congressional whim and fiat. Rather than being antagonistic, the Court’s portraits of  Native politics and U.S. jurisdiction are interwoven and interdependent, suggesting that the term sovereignty means something radically different when applied to Native peoples. However, that translation from geopolitics to another discursive register in the use of the same term is disavowed. Marshall emphasizes the importance of “a tribe’s ability to maintain itself as a culturally and politically distinct entity,” but what sort of differentiation is being made through the term distinct? While in one sense it can refer to the separateness of a tribe as its own polity not incorporated within the United States, a meaning toward which the decision sometimes gestures (“separate sovereigns pre-­existing the Constitution”), distinct also can indicate an entity of a different sort than the United States, and that slippage, across Making Peoples into Populations  |  171

which tribal sovereignty is stretched, is signaled by Marshall’s description of tribes as occupying an “anomalous” position within U.S. governance.64 They are cast as an exception to the usual dynamics of federal law, in the sense of occupying a position that crosses the threshold between law and some other kind of entity. This placing of  Native peoples within a legal limbo resonates with the assertion in earlier decisions that same session that certain political powers are at odds with the status of  Indian tribes, a formulation first offered in Oliphant v. Suquamish (1978). That case concerned the Suquamish tribe’s effort to prosecute a non-­I ndian, Mark David Oliphant, under their law and order code, and the Court found that “by submitting to the overriding sovereignty of the United States, Indian tribes therefore necessarily give up their power to try non-­I ndian citizens of the United States.”65 Such “overriding sovereignty” follows from the notion, quoting United States v. Rogers, that “Indian reservations are ‘a part of the territory of the United States,’ ” producing an inherent dependence on U.S. governance.66 This claim itself inheres in generating a status for Native peoples that can bracket the challenge they continue to pose to the United States’s geopolitical narration of its own territoriality. If tribes are distinct and yet, returning to Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, not “possessed of the full attributes of sovereignty,” and thus not in United States v. Rogers’s terms “independent nations,” what sort of entity are they?67 Or, put another way, how does the Court manage the logical and legitimacy crisis of U.S. jurisdiction by presenting the displacement of prior Native sovereignty as an engagement with the special qualities of tribes? Status is cast as being derived from the characteristics of tribes themselves rather than symptomizing the geopolitical aporias produced by settler imperialism. In justifying the existence of a tribal sovereignty irreducible to the will of Congress, United States v. Wheeler, also decided in the 1978 session, observes that tribes “have a significant interest in maintaining orderly relations among their members and in preserving tribal customs and traditions,” and in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, Marshall notes that “the often vast gulf between tribal traditions and those with which federal courts are more intimately familiar.”68 More than acknowledging the potential discrepancy between Indigenous peoples’ modes of governance and those of the United States, the trope of tradition provides a content for tribe that appears to explain why it occupies an exceptional status within the law. The priorness of  Native peoples requires the United States to recognize in the law what is not of the law, a kind of entity not fundamentally legal or govern172  |  Mark Rifkin

mental in character, but the production of that categorical distinction also seeks to preserve the (territorial) realm of law from mediation by the presence of tribal entities. Tradition marks tribes as a kind of collectivity that can exercise some political/legal functions but is not ultimately political/ legal in nature, as partaking of attributes of sovereignty but not occupying it in the ways that the United States does while doing so contingently at the discretion of the United States.69 Given that the traditions of various tribes may differ, what do tribes share such that they all can occupy the same status? In addressing the icra’s effort “to protect tribal sovereignty,” the Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez opinion observes that the law “provides that States may not assume civil or criminal jurisdiction over ‘Indian country’ without prior consent of the tribe,” and later, Marshall reminds that the Court “repeatedly” has found that “Congress’ authority over Indian matters is extraordinarily broad.”70 While the decision uses the term Indian in colloquial and somewhat commonsensical ways, the very obvious ordinariness of the concept allows it do a great deal of uninterrogated discursive work. Indianness binds the tribes to each other, providing cohesion for this category in ways that allow tribe to indicate something other than either a fully sovereign polity or the disjunctive incoherence of settler jurisdiction. As in United States v. Rogers, the figure of the Indian in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez covers over the conceptual chasm generated by the difficulty of fitting Native peoples into the United States’s own narrative of its territorial identity and jurisdictional authority, but unlike in United States v. Rogers, here it appears in the service of affirming a tribe’s authority to define itself, the ability of the Pueblo to set its own membership criteria (or at least not to be sued in federal court for doing so in a way that substantively violates federal law). In light of the decision’s recognition of Pueblo traditions within a legal frame that declares its choice of politics over race, is there an object of scholarly or political critique? In the absence of the expression of racist sentiment or the diminution of tribal authority, is Indianization even an issue? Is there reason to balk at the politics of sovereignty inthe case? If one wanted to argue for politics over race, Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez could be celebrated as a rejoinder to Oliphant v. Suquamish’s constriction of sovereignty, but the former is constituted out of the elements of  the latter, just in a different key. Oliphant v. Suquamish notably distinguishes between Indians and non-­I ndians rather than between Indians and whites, and if one holds off on reading the former as merely euphemizing the latter, as a code for conventionally conceived racial categories, the Indianness that Making Peoples into Populations  |  173

surrounds and makes intelligible the acknowledgment of tribal sovereignty in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez takes on a different cast. The decision’s insertion of tradition in the breach between the representation of U.S. sovereignty and of Native sovereignty positions it as the kinder, gentler conceptual companion to congressional plenary power, presenting such power as a necessary corollary of the uniqueness of tribes rather than the preeminent sign of the imperial illegitimacy of settler rule.71 Scholarly discussion of Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez has tended to cluster around four positions: the decision honors patriarchal tradition over protecting women’s rights; it respects tradition, or at least tribal autonomy, in ways that bolster Native sovereignty against settler imposition; it reaffirms as tradition a set of patriarchal practices largely instituted by U.S. policy or in direct response to government mandates; and it accepts a dichotomy between universal rights and relative cultural distinctiveness that denies the complexity of Santa Clara Pueblo’s history—the existence of multiple, changing traditions and a layered and shifting field of self-­governance.72 These approaches, though, do not examine the ways that in the decision the rhetorical and ideological condition of possibility for recognizing Native sovereignty is Congress’s “authority to limit, modify, or eliminate [tribes’] powers of local self-­government.”73 Tribe designates a kind of entity completely at the mercy of Congress, which can decide at what point some (set of) practice(s) denominated tradition can enter into the field of politics—as sovereignty— from the nonpolitical sphere of social life in which it otherwise resides. The threshold the Court repeatedly posits, in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez and elsewhere, for that congressional act of will is the line between matters internal to the tribe and external to it. That distinction transposes anxiety about the topology of U.S. jurisdiction into the process of determining the boundaries of tribal authority—or the line at which tribal cultural customs can become transmuted into (a simulation of) sovereignty. However, while sounding like a geopolitical differential, the Court’s distinction between internal and external and, thus, its definition of tribal identity turns on Indianness. More than indicating a racial category whose contours are already clearly established, Indian here functions as, in Puar’s terms, a biopolitical assemblage. She addresses the ways that contemporary modes of racialization work through the construction of a “data body” out of statistical aggregations of traits: “These ‘surveillant assemblages’ . . . create the sameness of population,” generating an “informational profile [that] works to accuse in advance of subject formation.”74 Although staged as something other than racial, following the rejection of that rhetoric in 174  |  Mark Rifkin

Morton v. Mancari (1974), later cases such as Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez create a tribal profile (an aggregation of elements for what a tribe is) that is justified as an expression of an apolitical Indianness that itself provides the apparent referent for adjudicating inside and outside, internal versus external matters.75 As Dan Gunter argues, the U.S. government employs a “technology of tribalism” in which Native peoples “in order to obtain tribal status . . . must demonstrate instead that they have a European sense of tribal identity.”76 While he is addressing the formal process a group must go through to gain status as a “federally recognized tribe,” his observation is broadly applicable to the tribalization of peoplehood, which translates the geopolitics of indigeneity into the biopolitics of shared Indianness. The guidelines instituted by the Bureau of  Indian Affairs for such recognition, adopted in 1978, testify to the circular, self-­identical, and seemingly original quality of being Indian that appears to precede and undergird identity as a tribe: “tribal existence” depends on, among other things, “longstanding relationships with State governments based on the identification of a group as Indian”; “identification as an Indian entity by anthropologists, historians, or other scholars”; and “repeated identification and dealings as an Indian entity with recognized Indian tribes.”77 One knows a tribe as such because it fits the characteristics of an “Indian entity,” but more than referring to a specific (stereotypical) ensemble of elements, Indian here marks and enacts a dynamic of interpellation and iteration. While particular qualities can be added or subtracted, they all signify as if they pointed back to a subjectivity-­identity matrix that provides a decisive and self-­evident means for adjudicating who is and who is not Indian—the line between internal and external. In Puar’s terms, “What is at stake here is the repetition and relay of . . . ubiquitous images, not their symbolic or representational meaning.”78 The name given to this assemblage that makes it not race is tradition, but as I’ve argued, tradition is inapplicable to so-­called non-­I ndians, defining inside and outside in other than territorial terms and casting that distinction as a unique, special, peculiar tribal deviation from governance and law proper. The issue of tribal membership can occupy this not-­quite-­political space of  anomaly due to its linkage to kinship, which provides a key intermediary concept between race and sovereignty. Although not directly conveying a notion of racial inheritance, and in many ways rejecting such a logic of identification by tying belonging to patrilineal descent rather than blood quantum, Santa Clara Pueblo’s membership requirements do link tribal identity to reproduction in ways that allow them to be read as a variation Making Peoples into Populations  |  175

within dominant, liberal notions of family. The fact that the Pueblo’s code departs from the standard of nuclear couplehood does not disqualify it from being recognized by the United States but instead helps testify to Indian cultural distinctiveness. The idea that Indian identity is acquired at birth is not challenged by the Pueblo’s rules: the Pueblo draw on the kind of biologization at play in discourses of race without the Court having to mandate racial blood as the gradient of belonging (still implicit, though, in the accepted and a priori distinction between Indian and non-­I ndian). Lucy A. Curry observes, “In the arena of ‘intra-­tribal’ matters, including membership, marriage, and family matters, tribal activities go unobstructed, whether or not the Indian involved is a member.”79 This comment suggests how federal law and the courts construe the tribal through reference to an Indianness that exceeds the specific dimensions of any given tribal polity. In United States v. Rogers being “members of a tribe” is separate from, yet logically and legally subordinate to, being part of  “the race generally.” As in that decision’s rendering equivalent of racial identity with “the family of  Indians,” the term Indian in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez continues to signify within a heteronormative nexus formed by the association of reproduction, marriage, household formation, and privacy. These are components of, in Foucault’s terms, an “artificial unity”—or, in Puar’s terms, an assemblage—that provides the context for tribal internality—for drawing the line between inside and outside and thus defining the kind of population to which tribes belong.80 The choice by Santa Clara Pueblo to limit membership to the children of Santa Clara Pueblo fathers may function for the Pueblo as an act of self-­ determination in the shaping of their own governance, potentially breaking from a dominant Euramerican model based on bilateral inheritance and the (apparent) separation of lineage from political status.81 However, from the perspective of the U.S. settler state, this arrangement still enables citizenship in the Pueblo to be conceptualized as an extension of lineage and domesticity, in ways that trying to include non-­Indians or to extend jurisdiction over them could not.82 Unlike in United States v. Rogers, Indianness is not directly coupled to a transmission of racial blood, but the version of tradition for which Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez makes allowance also remains within the bounds of such identification. While this ideological framework acknowledges a version of  Native difference, it is interpellated as a deviation from Euramerican family rather than an alternative model of governance at odds with (rather than encompassed within) U.S. sovereignty. Puar argues that “certain Orientalist queernesses (failed heteronormativity, as signaled 176  |  Mark Rifkin

by polygamy, pathological homosociality) are a priori ascribed to terrorist bodies,” and a certain queerness attaches to Indian traditions in U.S. legal discourses, in the sense that they are narrated as a kind of sanctioned perversion of  liberal homemaking localized within a specific population. Puar further describes the construction of  “the (queer) terrorist” as “the never-­ ending displacement of the excesses of perverse sexualities to the outside, a mythical and politically and historically overstated externality [that is] fundamental to the imaginative geographies at stake.”83 Similarly, recoding the excesses of tradition as properly belonging to the private sphere of sexuality (family, parentage, inheritance), given limited political efficacy as tribal sovereignty by Congress, constructs an ostensibly obvious internality (for the tribe and the nation-­state) that is crucial to the jurisdictional geography of the United States. If terrorists are “the monstrous excess of the nation-­ state,” Native peoples lie at the settler state’s aporetic center.84 Yet rather than endorsing deterritorialization, as in Puar’s account, my analysis seeks to mark the ways that Indianness serves as the biopolitical trace of an ongoing displacement of  Indigenous peoplehood. The possibility of Native sovereignty not entirely superintended, regulated, bounded, and ordered around the plenary will of Congress appears impossible in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, despite the decision’s apparent endorsement of tribal autonomy. While none of the three decisions from the 1978 session that I’ve discussed address racial identity per se, all of them rely on Indianness. One could argue that “Indian” is inherently a racial category and that its use enacts modes of racialization regardless of whether race is explicitly invoked as such. This claim often works as a way of calling on the Court to refuse to employ racist stereotypes of Native peoples or to focus on tribes as (semi)sovereign polities rather than as members of a racial group.85 However, my analysis is askew with respect to both these lines of critique. Both seem to miss the stakes of the settler state’s racialization—or, more to the point, biopolitical interpellation—of  Native peoples as a population. If the call to choose politics over race with respect to United States v. Rogers misses how the decision actually does recognize tribes as polities, but in ways subordinated to U.S. geopolitics, such a call seems even more problematic for Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, which already seems to have divorced race from politics and chosen the latter as its frame. This dichotomy displaces the ways that Indianness functions less as a code for racial inferiority than as an ideological placeholder for the ultimately non(geo)political character of tribes that supposedly explains their political status. Making Peoples into Populations  |  177

Failing to attend to the dialectical role biopolitics plays within the broader geopolitics of settlement can result in different but equally limiting modes of analysis. Within the forms of critique common to queer studies, the challenge to Indianization does not necessarily yield an appreciation for place-­based collectivity, foregrounding the kinds of racialization performed by discourses of sexuality and their role in bolstering state sovereignty and national identity without investigating how they displace and foreclose alternative mappings. Within Native studies, the tendency either is to argue that race is being substituted for politics or to understand the circumscription of  Indigenous self-­determination as due to a racist imaginary. The first overlooks how the population-­making dynamics of racialization provide a limit for what will constitute sovereignty when tribes are treated as polities, and the second leads to critique of discourses of  Indian savagery and innate inferiority. Such antiracism, though, does not address how Indianness functions as a biopolitical tactic within an encompassing assertion of the jurisdictional coherence of the settler state. The stakes of  Indianization are less in the creation of a population understood as inherently subordinate to whites than in the substitution of population for peoplehood, the continual renarration of crises in U.S. jurisdiction as if they were the result of tendencies among a group defined in terms of family. The trope or topos of  Indianness allows principles and practices at odds with settler “dominion and control” to be cast as a function of kinship, itself taken as something other than what properly belongs to the sphere of politics. In both United States v. Rogers and Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, the Court recognizes tribes as polities, because to do otherwise would undermine the political functions of the treaty system and recast Indian policy as merely coercion. At the point at which such recognition would foreground the tenuousness of U.S. legal geography, though, tribes’ status as polities is qualified by presenting them as an epiphenomenal extension of a fundamentally shared (set of) qualities understood in reproductive terms— shared, underlying Indianness. A critical approach focused on biopolitics can trace the dynamics and effects of such Indianization, and the relative biologization of tribal entities, but it also threatens to redouble the bio­ political maneuver whereby struggles over boundaries and jurisdiction fade into the background. Similarly, conflating the legitimation of settler occupancy with racism can overlook the ways that the official engagement with tribes as political entities is limited less by invidious assumptions of  Indian incapacity than the displacement of Native geopolitics (or, perhaps more precisely, of the legal and logical incoherence of settler geopolitics). Ad178  |  Mark Rifkin

dressing how Indianness is imagined and circulated in U.S. policy through figurations of family—in a heteronormative matrix in which whatever is classified as kinship cannot belong to the domain of politics—provides a more capacious way of charting imperial modes of population making, drawing on the insights of queer studies while staying focused on the occlusion, preservation, and regeneration of peoplehood. Notes

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 144. 2. In particular, I am thinking of the work of Ann Laura Stoler and Jasbir K. Puar. 3. See Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-­Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Scott Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism,” glq , nos. 16.1–­2 (2010): 105–­31; Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and Mark Rifkin, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4. Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: University of  Texas Press, 1984), 18–­19. 5. See Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 6. See James S. Anaya, Indigenous Peoples in International Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Maivân Clech Lâm, At the Edge of the State: Indigenous Peoples and Self-­Determination (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2000); Ronald Niezen, The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Haunani-­ Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’I (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). 7. Scholars have addressed the ways that family ties, particularly marriage and reproduction, can be used to naturalize nation-­statehood and to exert (variegated kinds of) authority over particular spaces and subjects. For examples, see M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Elizabeth Freeman,The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Rosemary Hennessey, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2000); Jacqueline SteMaking Peoples into Populations  |  179

vens, Reproducing the State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Alys Eve Weinbaum, Wayward Reproduction: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 8. See Janet Carsten, After Kinship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Jane Fishburne Collier and Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987); Susan McKinnon, “The Economies in Kinship and the Paternity of Culture: Origin Stories in Kinship Theory,” in Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, The History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); David M. Schneider, A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984); and Thomas R. Trautmann, Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). For discussion of the ways kinship can serve as a more capacious idiom for Native self-­identification, especially against restrictive U.S. legal standards, see Daniel Heath Justice, “ ‘Go Away, Water!’ Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative,” in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, ed. Janice Acoose et al. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008). 9. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 133. 10. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 112. 11. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 99. 12. In her use of these terms, Stoler replicates the elision I’m addressing. She suggests, “As populations were being enumerated, classified, and fixed, ‘peoples’ were being regrouped and reconfigured according to somatic, cultural, and psychological criteria that would make such administrative interventions necessary and credible.” She presents peoplehood as a differently configured kind of biopolitical categorization through which “a racial grammar tying certain physical attributes to specific hidden dispositions played a crucial role” (Race and the Education of Desire, 39–­40). While using population and people to mark different kinds of positionings within an imperial biopolitics, Stoler’s account leaves no term to describe forms of collective self-­understanding and political organization not already colonized or not reducible to the logics of imperial governance. 13. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 169. 14. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, xii. Puar is building on Lisa Duggan’s notion of “homonormativity,” the endorsement of the principles of neoliberalism by certain gays and lesbians as the price of admission into forms of straight privilege. See Lisa Duggan, “The New Homonormativity: The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism.” In Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural 180  |  Mark Rifkin

Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 15. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 31, 35. 16. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 20. 17. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 148. 18. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 162. 19. Puar observes, “Perversity is still withheld for the body of the queer Muslim terrorist, insistently deferred to the outside. This outside is rapidly . . . congealing into a population,” one mapped through “statistical racisms that see some populations [those that conform to the homonormative ideal of  health, welfare, and democracy] as worthy of life and others as decaying, as destined for death” (Terrorist Assemblages, 113, 200). 20. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 52, 99. 21. On the “state of exception,” see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. David Heller-­Roazan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). On the use of strategies of exception in Indian policy, see Byrd, The Transit of Empire; Philip P. Frickey, “(Native) American Exceptionalism in Federal Public Law,” Harvard Law Review 119 (2005); and Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of  The ‘Peculiar’ Status of  Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 73 (2009). 22. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 171. This apparent embrace of deterritorialization eerily resembles her earlier critique of what she characterizes as “queer secularity,” the idea that queerness entails a “freedom from norms” especially with respect to home, family, and religion (13–­25). 23. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 215, 221. 24. For a different reading of this relation in terms of Puar’s work, see Scott Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism,” glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, nos. 1–­2 (2010). 25. See Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? 26. On the ways that Native nations’ policies are critiqued as illiberal, see Angela Riley, “(Tribal) Sovereignty and Illiberalism,” California Law Review 95 (2007). 27. United States v. Rogers, 1846 U.S. Lexis 413, 1–­3. 28. For the text of the law, see Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed. (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 2000), 63–­68. 29. Rogers, 1846 U.S. Lexis 413, 5, 7–­8. 30. For discussion of the discrepancy between the circuit court’s questions and the Supreme Court decision, see David E. Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice (Austin: University of  Texas Press, 1997), 40–­43. 31. The fact that by this point Rogers was dead should have prevented the case from going forward, a point never raised in the Supreme Court hearing. See Bethany R. Berger, “ ‘Power over This Unfortunate Race’: Race, Politics, and Indian Law in United States v. Rogers,” William and Mary Law Review 45 Making Peoples into Populations  |  181

(2004): 1963, 1998–­2003; Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court, 40. 32. See Berger, “ ‘Power over This Unfortunate Race’ ”; Eric Cheyfitz, “The (Post) Colonial Construction of Indian Country: U.S. American Indian Literatures and Federal Indian Law,” in The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United States since 1945, ed. Eric Cheyfitz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 20–­23; and Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court, 38–­51. These accounts tend to posit a break between a period in which the United States recognized Native peoples as geopolitical entities and when it ceased to do so. While disagreeing with aspects of her interpretation, I should note that Bethany R. Berger offers an incredibly detailed account of the events leading up to and surrounding the case, presenting an immensely archivally rich portrait of that history. For a very astute discussion of the ways the pro-­sovereignty argument to choose politics over race as a way of framing U.S. policy toward Native peoples can undermine laws that use blood quantum as a means of distinguishing Native people for specific legal privileges and protections with respect to land, such as Native Hawaiians, see Rose Cuison Villazor, “Blood Quantum Land Laws and the Race Versus Political Identity Dilemma,” California Law Review 96 (2008). 33. Rogers, 1846 U.S. Lexis 413, 13. 34. Rogers, 1846 U.S. Lexis 413, 13, 13–­1 4. 35. Taney’s framing here echoes similar kinds of statements in the foundational cases of Johnson v. McIntosh (1823) and Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831). For discussion of that pattern, see B. Berger, “ ‘Power over This Unfortunate Race.’ ” 36. Rogers, 1846 U.S. Lexis 413, 14. 37. Rogers, 1846 U.S. Lexis 413, 14. 38. On the commitment in U.S. public policy to civilizing the Indians in the first half of the nineteenth century, see Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–­1812 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967); Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Cultural Change, 1700–­ 1835 (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 1998); Timothy Sweet, American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); and Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 39. Rogers, 1846 U.S. Lexis 413, 17–­18. 40. See Berger, “ ‘Power over This Unfortunate Race,’ ” 2034–­35; Cheyfitz, “The (Post)Colonial Construction of  Indian Country,” 22. 41. See William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Prince­ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Papers of Chief John Ross, vol. 1, 1807–­1839 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 332–­85; Rifkin, Manifesting America, 37–­74; Thurman Wilkins,

182  |  Mark Rifkin

Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 264–­90. 42. Rogers, 1846 U.S. Lexis 413, 16–­17. On the importance of simulating consent within antebellum U.S. imperialism, see Rifkin, Manifesting America. One can think of treaty-­mediated consent and the kinds of racialization I discuss here as parallel, sometimes intersecting, modes of imperial interpellation, suggesting questions about the interpretation of U.S. Indian policy as shifting between race and politics in easily periodizable ways. 43. Rogers, 1846 U.S. Lexis 413, 15–­16. 4 4. See Cheyfitz, “The (Post)Colonial Construction of  Indian Country,” 22–­23. 45. See Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-­Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600–­1900 (New York: Verso, 1988); Cott, Public Vows; Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-­Century America (Chapel Hill: University of  North Carolina Press, 1985); Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-­Century American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 46. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 147, 139. 47. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 137. 48. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 155. 49. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 45, 131. 50. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 99. 51. On this dynamic with respect to representations of blackness in the United States, see Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4 (1997); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Marlon B. Ross, “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm,” in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 52. On the captivity narrative as a cultural phenomenon, see Michelle Burnham, Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–­1861 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997); Christophe Castig­ lia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-­Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Gary L. Ebersole, Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of  Indian Captivity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995); June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier

Making Peoples into Populations  |  183

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Pauline Turner Strong, Captive Selves, Captivating Others: The Politics and Poetics of Colonial American Captivity Narratives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999). For discussion of the ways that tradition continues to influence understandings of tribal membership, see Audra Simpson, “From White into Red: Captivity Narratives as Alchemies of Race and Citizenship.” American Quarterly 60.2 (2008): 251–­58. 53. Rogers and Nicholson married their wives in the Cherokee Nation prior to removal (and were in fact brothers-­in-­law), so the laws of the Cherokee Nation before reunification with Cherokee “Old Settlers” in what would become Indian Territory would have been determinative of the men’s status. See Berger, “ ‘Power over This Unfortunate Race’ ,” 1982–­84. 54. See Cherokee Nation, Laws of the Cherokee Nation Adopted by the Council at Various Periods, Printed for the Benefit of the Nation (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1973), 10, 37–­38, 53, 57, 120–­21. See also Berger, “ ‘Power over This Unfortunate Race’ ”; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic; Perdue, Cherokee Women; and Rifkin, Manifesting America, 37–­74. 55. For the text of the ICRA, see Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 250–­53. On the case, see Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 98–­145; Bethany R. Berger, “Indian Policy and the Imagined Indian Woman,” Kansas Journal of Law and Public Policy 14 (2004); Lucy A. Curry, “A Closer Look at Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez: Membership by Sex, by Race, and by Tribal Tradition,” Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal 16 (2001); and Shefali Milczarek-­ Desai, “(Re)Locating Other/Third World Women: An Alternative Approach to Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez’s Construction of Gender, Culture and Identity,” ucla Women’s Law Journal 13 (2005). 56. Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 (1978) at 54. 57. The Pueblo changed their membership criteria in 2012 to allow for the enrollment of children from both Santa Clara mothers and fathers. See “Report: Santa Clara Pueblo Votes to Change Membership Rule,” http://www .indianz.com/News/2012/005521.asp. 58. For a reading of the decision as testifying to Native sovereignty in exercising control over tribal membership, see Riley, “(Tribal) Sovereignty and Illiberalism.” 59. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 at 55. 60. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 at 62–63, 72. 61. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 at 58, 60. 62. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 at 56. 63. A decision earlier in that same session, United States v. Wheeler, underlines this dynamic even more forcefully. Finding that the prosecution of an Indian at the tribal level for a lesser offense emanating from a single action does not preclude federal prosecution under the double-­jeopardy clause, a conclusion based on the idea that tribes’ sovereignty does not derive from the federal gov184  |  Mark Rifkin

ernment, the majority opinion declares that Native peoples retain “attributes of sovereignty” “only at the sufferance of Congress,” later adding that the “problem [posed by the case] would, of course, be solved if Congress, in the exercise of its plenary power over the tribes, chose to deprive them of criminal jurisdiction altogether.” (United States v. Wheeler, 435 U.S. 313 [1978], 323, 331. 64. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 at 72, 56, 71. The term appears as part of a quote from Kagama. On the work of such figures of peculiarity in U.S. Indian law, see Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben.” 65. Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978), 210. Here we see another reference to Native collective choice, such as in the reference to the treaty system in Rogers. While I am not focusing on this aspect of the Indian law decisions in the 1978 session, they do repeat claims about tribes choosing to come under U.S. jurisdiction, which forms a parallel (if sometimes logically incompatible) strategy in Indian policy to the biopolitics of  Indianization that I am addressing here. 66. Oliphant 435 U.S. 191 at 209, 199. 67. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 at 55. 68. Wheeler, 435 U.S. 313 at 331; Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 at 72. 69. For discussion of Native peoples as extraconstitutional polities, such that the exertion of U.S. plenary authority over them is logically incoherent, see Frickey, “(Native) American Exceptionalism in Federal Public Law”; Riley, “(Tribal) Sovereignty and Illiberalism”; David E. Wilkins and K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Uneven Ground: American Indian Sovereignty and Federal Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001). 70. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 at 63–­64, 72. 71. Because tradition and culture can provide a crucial supplement for efforts to cast tribes as a different, lesser, or not-­quite-­fully-­governmental entity, and thus justify U.S. superintendence, I am wary of appeals to culture as a means of bolstering assertions of  Native sovereignty and self-­determination. For such a strategy, see Wallace Coffey and Rebecca Tsosie, “Rethinking the Tribal Sovereignty Doctrine: Cultural Sovereignty and the Collective Future of  Indian Nations,” Stanford Law and Policy Review 12 (2001). For discussion of the perils of this approach in an international framework, see Karen Engle, The Elusive Promise of Indigenous Development: Rights, Culture, Strategy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 72. See Barker, Native Acts, 98–­145; Curry, “A Closer Look at Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez”; Milczarek-­Desa, “(Re)Locating Other/Third World Women”; and Riley, “(Tribal) Sovereignty and Illiberalism.” 73. Martinez, 436 U.S. 49 at 56. 74. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 155, 198. 75. Indianization occurs even in Morton v. Mancari, which explicitly articulates Native identity as political rather than racial. Finding that preference for “Indians” in Bureau of  Indian Affairs (bia) hiring under the Indian Reorganization Act violates neither the Equal Employment Opportunity Act (1972) nor Making Peoples into Populations  |  185

the due-­process clause of the Fifth Amendment, the decision indicates, “The preference as applied, is granted to Indians not as a discrete racial group, but, rather as members of quasi-­sovereign tribal entities . . . governed by the bia in a unique fashion,” which itself derives from “Congress’ unique obligation toward the Indians.” Morton v. Mancari, 417 U.S. 535 (1974) at 554–­55. Disowning a racial lens, the opinion implicitly derives the uniqueness of  “tribal entities” from their shared possession of  Indianness. 76. Dan Gunter, “The Technology of Tribalism: The Lemhi Indians, Federal Recognition, and the Creation of  Tribal Identity,” Idaho Law Review 35 (1998): 108. 77. Prucha, Documents of United States Indian Policy, 290. On the process of federal recognition, see also Barker, Native Acts; Les W. Field with the Muwe­ kema Ohlone Tribe, “Unacknowledged Tribes, Dangerous Knowledge: The Muwekema Ohlone and How Indian Identities Are ‘Known.’ ” Wicazo Sa Review 18, no. 2 (2003); Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Kirsty Gover, “Genealogy as Continuity: Explaining the Growing Tribal Preference for Descent Rules in Membership Governance in the United States,” American Indian Law Review 33 (2008–­9); Anne Merline McCulloch and David E. Wilkins, “ ‘Constructing’ Nations within States: The Quest for Federal Recognition by the Catawba and Lumbee Tribes.” American Indian Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1995); Mark Edwin Miller, Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); and Allogan Slagle, “Unfinished Justice: Completing the Restoration and Acknowledgement of California Indian Tribes,” The American Indian Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1989). 78. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 201. 79. Curry, “A Closer Look at Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez,” 200. “Powers of Indian Tribes,” an opinion by the solicitor general of the Interior Department in the wake of the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, which sets out the framework for Native self-­governance largely still operative to this day, actually cites the practice of matrimonial management as exemplary of the nature of  Native jurisdiction. “The powers of an Indian tribe in the administration of justice derive from the substantive powers of self-­government which are legally recognized to fall within the domain of tribal sovereignty. If an Indian tribe has power to regulate the marriage relationships of its members, it necessarily has power to adjudicate, through tribunals established by itself controversies involving such relationships. So, too, with other fields of local government.” Opinions of the Solicitor of the Department of the Interior Relating to Indian Affairs 1917–­1974, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), 471. 80. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 154. 81. See Cott, Public Vows; Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University 186  |  Mark Rifkin

Press, 2006); Winona Stevenson, “ ‘Ethnic’ Assimilates ‘Indigenous’: A Study in Intellectual Neocolonialism,” Wicazo Sa Review 13, no. 1 (1998); and Weinbaum, Wayward Reproduction. 82. My argument, then, is not about whether the United States should allow for tribes to have diverse, and possibly illiberal, membership requirements but about the ways such requirements remain contingent on a racializing imaginary that provides the condition of intelligibility and legitimacy for them from the perspective of U.S. law—whether or not blood quantum is the basis for belonging. 83. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 76. 84. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 99. 85. For a pronounced version of this argument, see Robert Williams Jr., Like a Loaded Weapon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

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SEVEN  | 

Scott Lauria Morgensen

Indigenous Transnationalism and the AIDS Pandemic Challenging Settler Colonialism within Global Health Governance

Indigenous aids organizers defend Indigenous peoples from colonial violences by creatively and critically engaging health governance in the settler state and in international arenas. Within such work, lgbtq  (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) and allied Indigenous activists provide important leadership, by critiquing the coloniality of heteropatriarchy and by defending gender and sexual diversity as aspects of Indigenous tradition and decolonization. In the process, Indigenous organizers explain the human suffering of hiv/aids as having been conditioned and extended by the power of settler colonialism, which they challenge in arenas of health policy and law. Their organizing directs global and health studies to ask how settler colonialism not only affects Indigenous nations and settler states but also is naturalized within global health governance. By global health I invoke the intertwining of law, epidemiology, and humanitarianism into an apparatus of biopower that produces and manages sexual, gendered, racial, and national populations along global scales. Indigenous aids organizing critically engages this mode of biopower by exposing what Mark Rifkin calls the “geopolitics” intrinsic to settler colonialism: a requirement that Indigenous peoples be dispossessed of lands that settler law then renarrates to perpetuate settler occupation and rule.1 What we have come to understand about settler geopolitics can be tied to the seemingly mobile and placeless world of global health management, which pursues in border-­crossing ways what I explain elsewhere as the biopolitics of settler colonialism.2 Indigenous aids organizers begin to diagnose this form of settler-­colonial and global power when they creatively engage state and international health projects in which Indigenous peoples are managed or from which they have been erased.

My analysis locates Indigenous aids organizing within broader indigenist and decolonial approaches to Indigenous health, which I shorthand as the pursuit of health sovereignty. In this usage, sovereignty invokes activist assertions of the epistemologies of  Indigenous governance, as these appear to contest the terms through which Indigenous peoples become collectively subjected to colonial rule. Indigenous aids activists pursue health sovereignty when promoting the decolonization of consciousness and of social life as a basis for Indigenous people asserting cultural, economic, and political control over the conditions and methods of health.3 In the process their work denaturalizes settler colonialism as a condition of the settler state and global health governance. My argument is inspired by activists’ creative negotiations of global governance, which demonstrate the incapacity of that governance to contain Indigenous self-­determination. Notably, efforts by Indigenous lgbtq people within hiv/aids activism to challenge colonial heteropatriarchy defend the autonomy of their peoples—here, over the conditions and methods of health—while challenging the colonial structuration of the settler state and global health. Settler Colonialism and Global Health

Global health scholars take interest in colonization’s continuation within the structural inequalities of a putatively decolonized world. But they remark less often that settler colonialism is not even nominally decolonized within contemporary settler states. Furthermore, while settler colonialism may appear to be contained within settler states, its actions are inherently transnational: settler states and societies define and lead the economics and laws that articulate a globalized world with ongoing, naturalized colonization. Theories of global health, and of globalization more broadly, must shift their accounts of colonialism to respond to Indigenous people who challenge settler colonialism in global arenas, including in Indigenous peoples’ relationship to health. Within health studies, critical scholarship on the colonial conditions of health creates a context for more specifically addressing settler colonialism. Cindy Patton argues that “even a brief exploration of international health policy reveals the sobering disorder of the colonial legacy.”4 Scholars frequently identify colonialism as a precipitant of national health crises in nominally decolonized states of the global South, as in Paul Farmer’s account of Haiti’s colonial history in aids and Accusation.5 Scholars also identify a key method of colonization in colonial medicine, which produced border-­crossing webs of health management as contexts for colonial Indigenous Transnationalism and AIDS  |  189

political authority—and, as Warwick Anderson argues, set the stage for global health institutions and discourses.6 Mahmood Mamdani specifically targets the coloniality of global health management, noting that the “international community” led by the un and its Security Council “departs markedly from the older language of law,” when he describes “as ‘human’ the populations to be protected and as ‘humanitarian’ the crises these suffer from, the intervention that promises to rescue them, and the agencies that seek to carry out intervention. Whereas the language of sovereignty is profoundly political, that of humanitarian intervention is profoundly apolitical, and sometimes even antipolitical.”7 Farmer, Peter Drobac, and Zoe Agoos agree with Mamdani by arguing that global health interventions that pursue “protection” both define those they help as “wards” and prevent health from being addressed in terms of the rights of citizens. But, of course, any invocation of citizenship forces us to ask how ongoing forms of colonialism still condition who can or cannot claim what kinds.8 Global health governance is a key arena of the continued and naturalized activity of colonial biopower. Patton explains that colonialism conditions global health through the circulation of two “thought-­styles” that structure World Health Organization efforts to manage public health, including the hiv/aids pandemic. The first style she traces to the discipline of tropical medicine, which historically studied the effects of disease on the traveling European body. For Patton, tropical thought styles defined a normatively European human body as endangered by movement through geographies of disease that are inhabited by tropical bodies. In this narrative, disease is localized, while the subject of disease travels. Patton contrasts this to the epidemiological thought style that can be extrapolated from the rationalizing scientific methods of public health. Here disease agents travel along vectors to create nodes of illness, whose chains of relationship must be diagnosed by epidemiologists. In an epidemiological frame, the subject of disease may be local, but diseases are mobile, as must be research and researchers. For Patton, both of these narratives sustain a colonial legacy: in the racial and civilizational reading of tropical zones of inexorable disease; and in the seemingly deracialized story of a world united by disease, by the positionless mobility of epidemiological researchers, and by their universal claims to knowledge. Through their different spatializations, Patton argues, “these two major scientific thought-­styles . . . were competing ways of claiming the mantle of neutrality that invoking science affords.”9 In her analysis, colonial discourses and institutional practices are sustained when populations marked by disease become the focus of global health governance. 190  |  Scott Lauria Morgensen

In addressing contrasts of Africa and Asia to Europe or the West within global health, Patton does not specify the locations of indigeneity. Indigenous peoples appear within the settler-­colonial articulation of global health as populations destined for elimination by the arrival of colonial modernity. Tropical thought otherwise might seem helpful to explain colonial accounts of  Indigenous peoples as essentially localized. But while colonial medicine narrated Asia and Africa as hardier in relation to disease than the European body, Indigenous Americans and Pacific Islanders were narrated as excessively vulnerable to disease and as inevitably disappearing with the expansion of colonial modernity. In this way, global health narratives rest easily within the settler-­colonial “logic of elimination,” in Patrick Wolfe’s terms, if they portray diseases among Indigenous peoples as nonhuman and bereft of agency, and thus perform and naturalize the settler-­colonial discourses and institutional practices that predict and enact Indigenous genocide.10 Narratives of  Indigenous peoples’ isolation—geographic, temporal, cultural, and biological—have coded with narratives of elimination to frame their encounter with hiv/aids. A failure of global health programs to stem the epidemic in Africa or Asia can be explained by tropicalizing those regions as sites of permanently entrenched disease. But the same programs’ failure to address hiv/aids among Indigenous peoples can appear to be an effect of those peoples’ naturalized marginality (“too isolated to be served”), which joins with their supposed vulnerability to change by “contact” to suggest an inevitable march to extinction that even modern health interventions cannot stop. Such narratives were invoked in Canada in 2009 amid public-­health responses to the h1n1 epidemic, after federal agencies delivered the vaccine and face masks accompanied by unmandated body bags to northern Indigenous communities. Outraged community-­health workers deplored this as a sign that the very agencies charged with protecting Indigenous communities had given up and were being readied for the community members’ deaths. An epidemiological assumption that public-­ health measures will not prevent epidemics in northern Indigenous communities rationalizes the biopolitical logic of settler colonialism, which presumes or seeks Indigenous elimination. Moreover, amid such narratives, settler health programs empower global health agencies to set protocols and procedures for managing Indigenous people, whom states govern as part of their own “populations.” State and international governance thus become mediums for settler-­colonial and global power over Indigenous peoples’ relationships to disease and health. I draw these implications for theorizing health and global power in NaIndigenous Transnationalism and AIDS  |  191

tive studies from the inspiration of a specific case: critical engagements of Indigenous aids organizers with the power of settler state and global health institutions. While both state and global health systems require Indigenous participation, Indigenous health activists engage their power more complexly than if we were to interpret their participation as a form of co-­optation. Kevin Bruyneel contends that the coloniality of settler sovereignty is defined, constrained, and disturbed by self-­determined Indigenous demands for collective relationship to the settler state or international law. Their acts create a “third space” where Native sovereignty exists interdependently with settler rule without presenting as an assimilation within or as removed from settler rule’s power.11 Taiaiake Alfred counters the dependent assignment of sovereignty to Indigenous peoples in their relationship to settler rule by asserting instead what he and Jeff Corntassel call the “resurgence” of Indigenous modes of governance.12 Alfred’s suspicion of sovereignty as a location dependent on colonial law is both affirmed and complicated by Indigenous feminist activist critiques, which engage the sovereignty of  Indigenous people precisely by critiquing the heteropatriarchal nation-­state form as a colonial construct and by inviting the renewal of traditional Indigenous governance while supported by alliance-­based identities and movements along national and transnational scales.13 In such modes, activists reimagine sovereignty not as inherent in a state—as in the Western sovereignty critiqued by Alfred, and traced by Giorgio Agamben to the root of biopower—but instead as a capacity of  Indigenous peoples across differences and interrelationships to understand and practice life autonomously from colonial rule. If this may arise for activists in perpetual relationship to the power of settler law, as the third space that Bruyneel theorized, it also may appear when activists imagine Indigenous decolonization in mobile practices that cross, crease, and potentially disrupt the capacity of settler law to define or contain them. Thus, differently from Alfred’s questioning of the term but with similar effects, Indigenous aids activists join Indigenous feminists in challenging settler sovereignty in their pursuit of decolonization. As I argue elsewhere, such effects are intensified when Indigenous aids activists challenge colonization by identifying heteropatriarchy within Indigenous nations as a colonial legacy. The addressing of the hiv/aids epidemic formed a key initial context for Indigenous lgbtq  activism and the defense of traditional gender and sexual diversity in North America. Tackling gender and sexual diversity in Indigenous aids organizing highlighted how Indigenous people experience colonial rule through the defi192  |  Scott Lauria Morgensen

nition, restriction, and regulation of their sexuality, gender, and health, and this effort framed acceptance of that diversity as a decolonial act of traditional healing. Similar arguments shaped Indigenous aids activisms across the Americas and Pacific and inflected global alliances where Indigenous lgbtq  people played a leadership role. Challenging colonial heteropatriarchy helped aids organizers target settler colonialism in state and global health governance, even as it made the dissolution of colonial heteropatriarchy a key goal of protecting the health of all Indigenous people and of reaffirming traditional health governance. In such ways, both Indigenous aids organizing and movements supporting Indigenous gender and sexual diversity (such as, in North America, Two-­Spirit organizing) defended Indigenous peoples from within transnational alliances that confronted the border-­crossing power of settler colonialism. In light of these histories, I use the term health sovereignty to refer to a broad array of conditions that would disrupt settler-­colonial control over life and renew Indigenous peoples’ traditional relationships to land, governance, and their capacity to sustain life. Asserting Indigenous control over the conditions and methods of health potentially disrupts the entire institutional apparatus of settler colonization. But in the context of fighting aids, as well as the genocidal legacies of epidemic disease for Indigenous people, calls for health sovereignty specifically challenge the biopolitics of settler colonialism that presumes that Indigenous peoples are destined to die. When Two-­Spirit Indigenous lgbtq  people organizing against aids argue for their inclusion within Indigenous nations, they defy how the hetero­patriarchal biopolitics of settler colonialism erases gender and sexual diversity as part of seeking to eliminate traditional Indigenous governance. Both a specific and general subjection of  Indigenous peoples to genocidal erasure are put in question when Indigenous aids organizers counter Western sovereignty with Indigenous governance and alliance politics. Transnational Indigenous AIDS Organizing

Indigenous health activists confronted hiv/aids from within longstanding efforts to foster decolonial and indigenist approaches to health. The epidemic appeared just as Native lgbtq  people were recovering knowledge about the gender and sexual diversity that was acknowledged as part of the traditional cultures and governance of their nations.14 In this context, they argued that homophobia and transphobia are colonial constructs that constitute social determinants of health—increasing hiv risk while decreasing access to health care, social support, and the conditions of good health. Indigenous Transnationalism and AIDS  |  193

As such, and as part of renewing modes of traditional healing, activists recalled and promoted knowledges honoring gender and sexual diversity within many Indigenous traditions. In North America efforts to link varied traditions led to proposing Two-­Spirit identity in 1990 as a term that could describe, in English, both the varied traditional terms for gender and sexual diversity in Indigenous nations and the contemporary lives of Native American lgbtq  people. In the era of aids, Two-­Spirit identity also served as an indigenist mode of traditional healing, in that it identified the harm caused to Indigenous nations when colonial heteropatriarchy disrupted traditional modes of kinship and governance. Indigenous lgbtq  and Two-­ Spirit activists thus defended not a separable “sexual minority” but the nations in which they claimed membership: an impetus that also influenced their participation in Indigenous aids organizing, which sought to protect health by strengthening Indigenous peoples’ collective responses to disease and to colonial health management. While elsewhere I examine the central role of Indigenous lgbtq  and Two-­Spirit people in Native aids organizing in North America, I extend from that history now to discuss its articulation with global Indigenous aids organizing. While many Indigenous aids organizers first defended tradition and asserted sovereignty within the national frames of diverse nations, the mobility of state and global governance and of hiv/aids also placed Indigenous aids organizers in transnational relationships where they asserted ties beyond state borders or the limits of international law. Recognizing that the pandemic affected Indigenous peoples worldwide in similar ways, Indigenous aids organizers critiqued global health governance while reimagining Indigenous sovereignty along global scales. Indigenous aids organizers thus modeled a decolonizing politics of gender, sexuality, and health with a potential to trouble the biopolitics of settler colonialism precisely within its globalization amid pandemic. North American histories of Native aids organizing already map the activist routes of  Indigenous transnationalism. Norms of health governance in settler states linked Native nations across geographic and cultural differences. The National Native American aids Prevention Center (nnaapc) formed in the United States after a network of Native aids activists accessed federal funds to address unmet needs among Native people across the country who were affected by hiv/aids. The organization thereby became responsible for funding Native health services that federal agencies did not need to run but could influence. Nevertheless, it also enabled Native activists to undertake local organizing that otherwise 194  |  Scott Lauria Morgensen

might not have happened, while calling Native people together to produce new methods for addressing the epidemic and negotiating the power of the settler state. The work of nnaapc indicates that state efforts to control Native peoples also created opportunities for them to collaborate in new ways, within and beyond state projects. For instance, nnaapc was empowered by its mandate to coordinate Indigenous health initiatives for Native North Americans and Kanaka Maoli in Hawaii. The organization’s origin on the continent also centered the cultures and histories of Native Americans when they entered dialogue with Kanaka Maoli aids organizers. In Hawaii respect for traditional Hawaiian gender and sexual diversity has been central to the contributions of Kanaka Maoli lgbtq  people working for Hawaiian sovereignty. Leaders in Kanaka Maoli aids organizing include self-­identified mahu activists who present within a traditional role while defending their people.15 Their distinction became a point of discussion after nnaapc circulated its first curriculum educating Native health workers in the United States in hiv/aids outreach to Native gay and bisexual men. The curriculum, “Addressing Two-­Spirits” (2002) foregrounded Two-­Spirit identity to describe Native gay and bisexual men and their ties to cultural traditions. Yet the curriculum’s distribution among Kanaka Maoli organizers also raised the question of commonalities or distinctions between the terms mahu and Two-­Spirit. The North American pantribalism of Two-­Spirit identity met its geographic specificity if Kanaka Maoli partners had to argue the distinctions of Hawaiian culture. Yet their engagement with this term and curriculum also demonstrated an intention to pursue alliance when discussing traditional gender and sexual diversity in spaces facilitated by nnaapc. Spaces facilitated by the state thus also sparked transnational Indigenous debate or potential alliance. While revealing their potential limits, such exchanges also affirmed enduring commitments to decolonization that exceeded any such space and remained to inspire border-­crossing activism. Indigenous aids organizers beyond North America centrally pursued the recollection of histories of gender and sexual diversity. Mahu activists actively formed ties with Samoan aids activists in Samoa and Hawaii who identified and worked in fa’afafine social networks. Samoan activists participated in forming the Pacific Sexual Diversity Network with Indigenous aids organizers from Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, Cook Islands, and Papua New Guinea, many of whom practiced and defended traditional nonheteronormative roles. Initially funded by unaids, the Pacific Sexual Diversity Network aligned with the Australian Federation of aids Organizations as a Indigenous Transnationalism and AIDS  |  195

regional network coordinating local aids programs organized by Pacific Islanders and emphasizing men who have sex with men and transgender women. Concurrently, as examined by the Maori scholar and hiv/aids researcher Clive Aspin, aids organizers who were aligned with Maori lgbtq  politics promoted the term takatapui in Aotearoa (New Zealand) to name the traditional recognition of same-­sex and transgender partnerships in Maori societies. Aspin argues that this work models to Maori and to Indigenous peoples worldwide that promoting “health and well-­being” in Indigenous communities, especially in the age of aids, depends on decolonizing gender and sexuality.16 Among many more examples, these suggest that resonances among Indigenous Pacific and North American aids activists articulated the sustained power of state and global health governance to draw lgbtq  and allied Indigenous people to fight aids and the social conditions facilitating it. A global shift in Indigenous aids organizing followed local and regional efforts to send representatives to pursue Indigenous agendas at international health conferences, and notably the biennial International aids Conference. This conference of the International aids Society has, since 1985, offered a venue where medical researchers join aids service organizations, governments, and pharmaceutical corporations to define knowledge and coordinate responses to aids. The authority of this conference was heightened after its early targeting by aids activists, as traced by Patton, when act up’s “stings” at the 1993 Berlin International aids Conference demanded accountability and received increased accessibility for local and international activists to engage the conference.17 These were the contexts where Indigenous aids activists first met at the International aids Conference. Barbara Cameron, the cofounder in 1975 of the first organization for Native American lesbians and gay men, San Francisco’s Gay American Indians, attended the 1993 meetings as nnaapc’s official representative. She reflected afterward on her unplanned encounters during this trip with Indigenous people, including Native American expatriates living in Berlin who helped delegates form a sense of  Indigenous community outside the conference, even as Indigenous delegates from around the world held daily meetings at the conference to support their participation.18 Rodney Junga-­Williams, a Narunga-­K aurna and Adelaide Plains activist in Indigenous Australian aids organizing, wrote of his travel to Berlin as “the first Aboriginal gay man living with hiv to speak” at the International aids Conference: “Like other nungas [Indigenous Australians] I went looking and found other Indigenous people from the U.S.A., Canada and New 196  |  Scott Lauria Morgensen

Zealand and we stuck together throughout the event. As a group of people we weren’t that many but we were very vocal.”19 He is referring to Indigenous delegates’ efforts to write a statement for the closing session, which called on international agencies to challenge colonial legacies that make Indigenous peoples vulnerable to aids and to recognize the autonomy and self-­determination of Indigenous nations. From their earliest shared engagements with global health institutions, Indigenous aids activists acted to hold those institutions accountable to transnational assertions of sovereignty by Indigenous peoples over the local, global, and national conditions of health. Political theorists increasingly bracket within transnational activism the rise of ngos as players in the power relations of states and international agencies. Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a distinctive method of such activism in which political actors who cannot achieve change in states call on ngos or international agencies at global policy arenas to advocate for their issue and thereby broker decisions with states.20 Feminist critics also have interpreted this activism as a mode of global governmentality, once it integrates nongovernmental organizing into international law as a normative site for managing subjects and rights. Inderpal Grewal explains that feminists in transnational activism challenge formal exclusion from national or international law only to find that women privileged by nation, class, and race in global arenas gain authority to speak on behalf of others while being recruited to manage an ngo-­ization of social movement.21 Transnational activism thus produces a governmental site to legitimate the international laws that states define to regulate change, while citizens in dominant states manage hegemonic power relations in the name of advocacy. Yet feminist scholars attentive to the pervasion of these power relations also note that the structures they produce remain adaptable on the margins by the very targets they mean to control. As Anna Tsing explains in Friction, when local actors in Indonesia encounter global power not just through global economies or governmental agencies but also in transnational activism such as environmentalism or feminism, engaging them with discrepant local stakes exposes global power to critique while inciting unpredictable actions that may trouble its effects.22 One effect could be to engage the circuits of global power by asserting sovereignty from their global and borderless authority as a basis for relationship with their power. While engagements with global power may co-­opt radical intentions, zones of friction merit study of their potential to produce unexpected relationships and effects. Indigenous Transnationalism and AIDS  |  197

I am interested in how Indigenous aids activist involvement in global politics disturbs the naturalization of settler colonialism within global governance while facilitating the imagining of transnational Indigenous alliances that may exceed global systems and model the alternatives of Indigenous governance. For Indigenous peoples responding to the aids epidemic, the biopolitics of settler colonialism predicts these peoples’ elimination and ensures their regulation. Settler colonialism’s globalization then naturalizes their definition and management by so-­called independent states without regard for indigenous sovereignty. When these power relations coalesce in global health governance, the “participation” of  Indigenous people is not in question: this will occur regardless of whether they choose to engage. In this context, I am interested in how Indigenous aids activists rooted in defense of their nations and experienced in transnational alliances addressed global health with discrepant stakes. As activists who are accountable before and after their participation to projects that exceed global power and that intend to destroy its colonial form, they exhibit a critical edge with frictive possibilities for decolonization, precisely amid the pressures of pandemic and its institutional management. Global actions by Indigenous aids activists have arisen largely as interventions into the International aids Conference that hold the organization and its stakeholders accountable to Indigenous demands for health sovereignty. In response to alliances formed at the Berlin International aids Conference and afterward, Indigenous aids activists from Canada and Mexico mobilized Indigenous participants at the conference within existing activist ties crossing the Americas and Pacific. Their first event was held prior to the 1996 International aids Conference in Vancouver, in the form of the International Indigenous People’s Summit. The British Columbia Native aids organization Healing Our Spirit hosted this off-­site preconference to link Indigenous delegates from around the world with Indigenous activists in British Columbia and others traveling from across Canada and the United States. Because the summit model was external to the International aids Conference, it readily connected local and regional Indigenous people with regional Indigenous aids organizations and Indigenous delegates from around the world in an autonomous space—a model repeated at later summits. The 2008 Mexico City summit was led by Zapoteca muxhe organizer Amaranta Gómez and Indigenous activists from across Mexico and Latin America, while the 2006 Toronto summit was hosted by the Toronto Native aids organization 2–­Spirits and by the Ontario Aboriginal hiv/aids Strategy. Summit events thus arose in relation to the 198  |  Scott Lauria Morgensen

International aids Conference and the global circuits of people and capital, and government it creates, while forming spaces for collaboration— not at the conference but nearby—where hosts and visitors linked multiple struggles in growing networks. Such work shaped how organizers at the 2006 Toronto summit drafted their network’s first statement of shared values in a form that would draw the attention of the International aids Conference, states, and global institutions. Composed as an international policy document, “The Toronto Charter: Indigenous People’s Action Plan on hiv/aids 2006” asserted sovereignty over health for all Indigenous peoples.23 Activists from North America and the Pacific spent two years composing the charter, which demanded that states and global institutions answer Indigenous demands to control the conditions and methods of health. My interpretation of the charter is inspired by Robert Warrior’s analysis of the 1881 Osage Constitution, which he says presents a creative Indigenous adaptation of U.S. constitutional law that responded to a changing colonial situation by setting indigenist terms for negotiating sovereign relationships.24 In the narrative form of public policy, the charter demands that settler states and international agencies become accountable to the authority of  Indigenous peoples to define and manage health from within modes of  Indigenous governance. In the two years prior to the 2006 International aids Conference, summit organizers traveled to prepare the text “at a session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and in numerous cities in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States,” and submitted drafts to Indigenous aids organizations worldwide for feedback.25 The final text was printed as a poster and announced at the Toronto conference as a form of media activism and an intervention into policies governing Indigenous people and hiv/aids. The charter opens with a call to the states, international bodies, and ngos that control “the provision of hiv/aids services for Indigenous Peoples around the world” to recognize the “devastating effect” of aids on Indigenous peoples. Marginalization within settler states produces a “range of socio-­cultural factors that place Indigenous Peoples at increased risk of hiv/aids,” such that “in some countries, Indigenous Peoples have disproportionately higher rates of hiv infection than non-­I ndigenous people.” The charter resituates this reality by asserting Indigenous peoples’ “inherent rights . . . to control all aspects of their lives, including their health” and “to determine their own health priorities.” This assertion of a sovereign relationship to settler societies also centers Indigenous control over Indigenous Transnationalism and AIDS  |  199

the conditions and methods of health. When the charter calls on settler states to fulfill obligations to Indigenous peoples whose lands they occupy, it marks colonial rule as a force that Indigenous demands can shift. The text asserts that “governments are responsible for ensuring” that Indigenous people will experience “a state of health that is at least equal to that of other people,” and sets the terms of health care in such qualities as “access to their own languages” and addressing the “physical, social, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions” of health while communicating “information about the prevention and treatment of hiv/aids that is relative to the reality in which Indigenous Peoples live.” These statements admit that, all demands for autonomy aside, Indigenous peoples experience settler colonialism as the source of the conditions of poor health that now require intervention. Thus, to the extent that Indigenous communities are so marginalized from good health and Indigenous governance that only state health institutions can offer care, the very agencies that created the conditions of illness will continue to manage health for Indigenous peoples. Yet the charter insists that such changes will not be a prerogative of settler states, but will respond to an authority asserted by Indigenous people to define the conditions and methods of their health despite ongoing colonial occupation, including Indigenous control over the production of knowledge. The charter asserts that “governments must be committed to consulting with Indigenous Peoples in order to ensure that health programmes meet the needs of  Indigenous Peoples,” and that “it is essential that hiv/aids data on indigenous peoples be collected in a manner that is [determined] by Indigenous Peoples themselves.” Governments then will “ensure the central participation of  Indigenous Peoples in all programmes related to the prevention of hiv and programmes for the care and support of Indigenous Peoples living with hiv/aids ” and will provide “resources to Indigenous Peoples to design, develop and implement hiv/aids programmes . . . so that Indigenous communities can respond.” This last statement acknowledges that organizations such as nnaapc are not common, and their ability to support Native projects that precede and exceed state funding remains one model that Indigenous aids activists can accept for its record of being open to critical adaptation. Finally, all these calls to transform the practices of settler states are framed by a demand that international agencies “monitor and take action against any States whose persistent policies and activities fail to acknowledge and support the integration of this charter into State policies relating to hiv/aids ,” while ensuring that the “participation of  Indigenous Peoples in United Nations forums is strengthened so their views are fairly 200  |  Scott Lauria Morgensen

represented.” These statements put settler states on notice in international arenas that they are sites of colonial rule of  Indigenous peoples, and they also show how the un Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues joins other sites that Indigenous activists already engage to make their interventions on international platforms while holding national and international law accountable for addressing settler colonialism. “The Toronto Charter” is a critical intervention within the still-­hegemonic colonial terms that organize state and global governance of  health and, as a result, Indigenous peoples. The charter’s language does not model Indigenous governance, but it does tactically open possibilities for discourse that may facilitate the more radical and decolonial ends that Indigenous aids activists envision and seek. While the charter never directly names gender or sexuality, an implication that sovereignty connects to the assertion of  Indigenous knowledge reflects efforts by activists to link the defense of gender and sexual diversity to the protection of  Indigenous communities from aids. Although the charter only alludes to such work, its announcement at the 2006 Toronto International aids Conference performed it. Indigenous delegates invited delegates and Toronto-­a rea residents to a press event where they joined local Indigenous aids activists, including many Two-­Spirit Indigenous lgbtq  people, to hear the charter read before global and Indigenous media at the conference-­designated Indigenous peoples’ pavilion. Organizers announced the charter as a first statement by an international alliance of  Indigenous aids activists; they read key portions and called for a response from the society and governments before distributing the poster to attendees. This event pursued media activism by calling on global corporate and independent media at the conference to cover the novelty of an Indigenous aids protest, and the historic event was to be recorded by Indigenous media representatives and activists’ own organizations. While the press event called attention to Indigenous aids activist interventions at the conference, the event was not in fact designed as a presentation to the International aids Conference’s stakeholders, none of whom attended. In this sense, the significance of this event is less that it should have received a formal response from global health managers than that it succeeded in performatively imagining health sovereignty by demonstrating that Indigenous aids activists do constitute a global alliance that can demand Indigenous control over the conditions of health. Yet in the background of this event, on the wall of the indigenous peoples’ pavilion, a complementary message was displayed: a flag given to the Indigenous Transnationalism and AIDS  |  201

Toronto organization 2–­Spirits by the San Francisco organization Bay Area American Indian Two-­Spirits, which succeeded Gay American Indians more than a decade earlier. The flag’s symbolism, which inscribes the term “2–­Spirits” across its face and includes a medicine wheel and other images, asserts an Indigenous difference overlaid on, yet unabsorbed by, the queer “diversity” represented by the rainbow flag. But the flag’s appearance at this event also is a reminder that “The Toronto Charter” never mentioned Two-­Spirit or any other Indigenist claim on gender or sexuality. The charter specifically addressed as its audience non-Indigenous arbiters of colonial power; the purpose was not to educate them in Indigenous tradition but to demand that they make way for Indigenous people to decide how their cultures will be engaged. At the International aids Conference, the charter’s announcement linked Indigenous aids activists who live as Two-­ Spirit, mahu, muxhe, fa’afafine, and takatapui, as well as people identified as lgbtq. Without collapsing the differences among these identities, activists crossed many stakes to lead a new movement for the health of their own and all Indigenous communities. This is the work of a transnational Indigenous politics of gender and sexuality, and it arose when aids redefined kinship and solidarity to link Indigenous people across differences in pursuit of the decolonization of health. Conclusion

The critique of colonial heteropatriarchy within Indigenous aids organizing supports the critique of settler rule within states and global forums and challenges the biopolitics of settler colonialism. When Indigenous activists traverse state and global health systems, they highlight the potential co-­optation of Indigenous peoples, but their pursuit of health sovereignty also invites those systems’ disruption. Rather than presuming that activists who engage health systems assimilate their governmentality, I ask how asserting Indigenous survival and self-­determination in the face of genocide and pandemic exposes those systems’ structuring by settler colonialism to new critique. As Taiaiake Alfred and Glen Coulthard convincingly argue, co-­optation will follow the alignment of Indigenous “sovereignty” with “recognition” under the legal apparatuses of settler states.26 Activists at the Toronto International aids Conference convened at an “Indigenous pavilion” designated by the conference’s policy of incorporating, and thereby containing, critical constituencies. But the intervention that activists brought to that space already exceeded any recognition that their acts received from global institutions. As in Joanne Barker’s critique of recogni202  |  Scott Lauria Morgensen

tion as an end point of sovereignty activism, “The Toronto Charter” does not hinge on states or global institutions recognizing Indigenous sovereignty, although the norms of public policy may interpret it that way.27 The letter of the charter announces that Indigenous peoples know and practice a capacity to define and control culture, health, and governance, regardless of whether or how the settler state or global institutions attempt to recognize these aspects of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous aids activists then demand responsible engagement from institutions that currently exert power over Indigenous people by holding these institutions accountable to sustained claims of  Indigenous control over the conditions and methods of health. Here Indigenous self-­determination rests first not in its recognition but in its assertion; and if settler states or global institutions were to respond as requested, they would not practice recognition—an act internal to their sovereign capacity—but accountability to a power that exceeds their bounds and control. The knowledge that Indigenous governance never disappeared and cannot be removed already inflected aids-­activist promotions of  Indigenous epistemologies as bases for good health—partly due to their ties to the antiheteropatriarchal and decolonial work of  Indigenous lgbtq  people. When deployed against state and global health management, Indigenous epistemologies of gender, sexuality, and health interrupt the normative logics of subjectification and population control within colonial biopolitics. While this effect may be read throughout the history of  Indigenous health activism, the unique foregrounding within Indigenous aids activism regarding gender and sexual diversity already marked settler state and global power as colonial due to their heteropatriarchal formation. Countering narratives of  Indigenous peoples as anterior to modernity or as eliminated by disease and conquest, Indigenous aids organizers dared to assert autonomy from biopolitical control by decolonizing gender and sexuality and declaring sovereignty over the conditions and methods of health. When I defer readings of Indigenous aids organizing as recolonizing and ask instead what radical effects might follow their denaturalizing of settler colonialism, I agree with Alfred that sovereignty as defined by settler law will fail to perform Indigenous governance. But I submit that when aids activists challenge settler colonialism within the global health systems that settler states help create and sustain, possibilities open within Native studies and Indigenous activism for plying the fractures that they have exposed. For Indigenous aids activists, the stakes for such engagements are high. During life-­and-­death efforts to defend Indigenous survival Indigenous Transnationalism and AIDS  |  203

from pandemic disease, aids activists on a daily basis negotiate the front lines of the biopolitics of settler colonialism and global health. Notably, their work exposes how the deployment of colonial heteropatriarchy also subjects Indigenous peoples to death, if colonial heteropatriarchy’s naturalization eliminates all memory of the gender roles and kin ties that informed traditional Indigenous community and governance. In turn, if the heteropatriarchy that indigenous nations confront is a colonial invention and imposition, then challenges to that heteropatriarchy will recall and reestablish traditional governance on other-­t han-­heteropatriarchal terms. Two-­Spirit and Indigenous lgbtq  activists have pursued this work, including at times defending their peoples’ health within Indigenous aids activism. This activism may inspire Native studies to ask not only how to renew Indigenous governance but also how to destabilize settler sovereignty by critiquing any location where its power is naturalized. One such site would be the naturalization of heteropatriarchy as a necessary foundation of  Indigenous or settler law. Another would be to expose global governance as settler governance—so that critiquing the terms of international law would present a point of advancement for decolonial struggle. Indigenous aids organizers mark and challenge the global scope of settler colonialism, even as they disrupt its heteropatriarchal relegation of  Indigenous peoples to a queered state for biopolitical elimination. As such, Indigenous aids organizers’ work bears theoretical significance for global studies, health studies, and gender and sexuality studies, each of which has barely begun to examine settler colonialism in the world or as a condition of each field’s work. But the implications of Indigenous aids organizers’ work in Native studies are also profound. This organizing invites the critique of colonial heteropatriarchy—here in defense of the women, intravenous drug users, sex workers, transgender people, and gay and bisexual men who are queered by their vulnerability to hiv/aids—as a key site for marking and troubling settler colonialism. Furthermore, the work centers transnationalism as a significant frame through which Indigenous peoples defend their nations by meeting across differences to challenge settler colonialism’s border-­crossing power. Indigenous aids activists’ assertions of control over the conditions and methods of health resituates sovereignty from its colonial-­modern definition to defend the ways that Indigenous peoples assert collective relationships to land and life. These activists’ work defies the biopolitics of settler colonialism that predicts Indigenous elimination while asserting health sovereignty to support the resurgence of  Indigenous nations. 204  |  Scott Lauria Morgensen

Notes

1. Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of  the ‘Peculiar’ Status of  Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 73 (2009). 2. See Scott Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011). 3. See, for example, Bronwyn Carson, Terry Dunbar, Richard D. Chenhall, and Ross Bailie, eds., Social Determinants of  Indigenous Health (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2007); and Ethan Nebelkopf and Mary Phillips, eds., Healing and Mental Health for Native Americans Speaking in Red (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004). 4. Cindy Patton, Globalizing aids (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 28. 5. Paul Farmer, aids and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 6. Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 7. Mahmoud Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2010), 274. 8. Paul Farmer, Peter Drobac, and Zoe Agoos, “Colonial Roots of Global Health: Lessons Learned for Modern Humanitarian Health,” in Harvard College Global Health Review, September 19, 2009, accessed June 22, 2011, hcghr.word press.com/2009/09/19/colonial-­roots-­of-­g lobal-­health/. 9. Patton, Globalizing aids, 50. 10. Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism and the Question of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008). 11. Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-­Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 12. Taiaiake Alfred, “Sovereignty,” in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-­Determination, ed. Joanne Barker (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 2005). On Alfred’s account of “resurgence,” see Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel, “Being Indigenous: Resurgences against Contemporary Colonialism,” Government and Opposition 40, no. 4 (2005). 13. Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Andrea Smith, Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 14. Many activists whose work this essay discusses reclaimed traditional terms for gender or sexual diversity in their Indigenous languages, such as mahu (Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian), fa’afafine (Samoan), takatapui (Maori), and muxhe (Oaxacan). For further discussion of these and related categories, Indigenous Transnationalism and AIDS  |  205

see Qwo-­Li Driskill, “Doubleweaving Two-­Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies,” glq 16, no 1–­2 (2010); Qwo-­Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Introduction,” in Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature, ed. Qwo-­Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Morgensen (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). 15. Ty P. Kawika Tengan, “Ke Kulana He Mahu: Remembering a Sense of Place,” The Contemporary Pacific: A Journal of  Island Affairs 15, no. 1 (2003); Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe, Ke Kulana He Mahu (the Rank of the Transgender): Remembering a Sense of Place (United States: Zang Pictures, 2001). 16. Clive Aspin, “Exploring Takatapui Identity within the Maori Community and the Well-­Being of  Indigenous Peoples,” in Critical Interventions in Queer Indigenous Studies, ed. Qwo-­Li Driskill, Chris Finley, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Scott Morgensen (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011). 17. Patton, Globalizing aids. 18. Barbara Cameron, “Frybread in Berlin,” In The Wind: American Indian Alaska Native Community aids Network Newsletter 4, no. 4 (1993). 19. Rodney Junga-­W illiams, “Rodney’s Journey: An Interview with the Aboriginal and Islander Health Worker Journal,” Aboriginal and Islander Health Worker Journal 30 (2006). 20. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 21. Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). See also incite!, Women of Color Against Violence, ed., The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-­profit Industrial Complex (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007). 22. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 23. International Indigenous People’s Satellite, “The Toronto Charter: Indigenous People’s Action Plan on hiv/aids 2006,” prepared for the International Indigenous People’s Satellite of the xvi International aids Conference, Toronto, 2006. 24. Robert Allen Warrior, The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 51, 53. 25. National Native American aids Prevention Center, “Landmark Charter Calls for Full Participation of  Indigenous Peoples in hiv Programs,” Seasons: Newsletter of the National Native American aids Prevention Center (Summer 2006). 26. Taiaiake Alfred, Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Glen S. Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007). 27. Joanne Barker, “Recognition,” American Studies 46, nos. 3–4 (2005).

206  |  Scott Lauria Morgensen

E I G H T   |   Andrea Smith

Native Studies at the Horizon of Death Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-­Reflexivity

Indigenous studies scholars such as Elizabeth Cook-­Lynn, Sandy Grande, Linda Tuhiwi Smith, and others have called for the development of a Native and Indigenous studies that is distinguished by its methodologies and theoretical frameworks. Their scholarly contributions call into question the assumption that Native studies should be equated with its object of study—Native peoples. Rather, their work suggests that Native studies could potentially have diverse objects of study approached through distinct methodologies and theoretical formations that are necessarily interdisciplinary in nature. Robert Warrior has called such intellectual projects “intellectual sovereignty” in that they center Native studies as an intellectual project with its own integrity that can be informed by traditional disciplines, but the field is not simply a multicultural add-­on to these projects. Thus, the question is not about how we approach the study of  Native communities through the lens of religious studies, anthropology, history, or other disciplines. Rather, the question is, how does Native studies impact how we might shape and understand various disciplinary formations? Similarly, the emergence of a critical ethnic studies seeks to go beyond intellectual projects based on liberal multiculturalism, which relies on a politics of identity representation domesticated by nation-­state and capitalist imperatives. As ethnic studies has generally developed along identity lines (Asian American studies, Native studies, and so on), it has provided critical foundations for looking at intersections of racism, colonialism, immigration, and slavery within the U.S. context. However, the identity-­ based approach is also at a crossroads, necessitating the development of a critical ethnic studies that is poised to interrogate the strictures in which Native studies and ethnic studies finds itself. Ethnic studies scholarship of-

ten becomes mired in identity politics, what Elizabeth Povinelli describes as “social difference without social significance.”1 Increasingly, more scholars seek to build a critical ethnic studies that does not necessarily dismiss identity but that structures intellectual inquiry around intersecting logics of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy. This expanded scope is critical in providing a space for all scholars to be part of an engagement with critical ethnic studies, because these logics structure all of society, not just those who are “racialized.” This work is not properly rendered postidentity, which, as Hiram Perez notes, ultimately becomes a disavowed whiteness.2 But the reshaping of ethnic studies does allow Indigenous studies to engage in a coalitional intellectual project that does not erase the need for an autonomous Native studies; instead the project provides the space for Indigenous studies to expand its impact through diverse academic formations. As Alexander Weheliye describes, the project of critical ethnic studies “departs from current hegemonic formations without ceding the field altogether to closet positivists, identitarian gatekeepers, conservative poststructuralists, and other such strange creatures.”3 Ethnographic Entrapment and Native Studies

There are many challenges to developing such projects within the academic industrial complex. One problem for Native studies is its position within the academy, which is one of ethnographic entrapment. Denise da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race informs my analysis of ethnographic entrapment; in that text she holds that the Western subject is itself funda­ mentally constituted through race. She argues through her exhaustive account of Enlightenment theory that the post-­Enlightenment version of the subject as a sole self-­determined actor exists by situating itself over and against “affectable” who are subject to natural conditions as well as to the self-­determined power of the Western subject. In essence, the Western subject knows itself because of (1) its apparent ability to exercise power over others; and (2) the inability of others to exercise power over it. The “others” meanwhile, are affected by the power of the Western subject (and hence are affectable), but they cannot effect power themselves. The anxiety with which the Western subject struggles is that the Western subject is in fact not self-­determining. After all, nobody is actually able to exercise power without being affected by others. Consequently, the manner in which the Western subject addresses this anxiety is to separate itself from conditions of affectability by separating from affectable others. This separation is fundamentally a racial one—both spatially and temporally. That 208  |  Andrea Smith

is, the Western subject is spatially located in the West in relationship to the affectable Third World others. It is also temporally located in modernity in relationship to “primitive” others who are never able to enter modernity. The Western subject is a universal subject who determines itself without being determined by others; the racialized subject is particular but aspires to be universal and self-­determining.4 Silva’s analysis thus critiques the presumption that the problem facing Native peoples is that they have been “dehumanized.” But, according to Silva, the fundamental issue that does not get addressed is that “the human” is already a racial project. It is a project that aspires to universality, a project that can only exist over and against the particularity of  “the other.” Consequently, two problems result. First, those who are put in the position of affectable others presume that liberation will ensue if they can become self-­determining subjects—in other words, if they can become fully human. However, the humanity to which we aspire still depends on the continued oppression of other affectable others. Thus, a liberation struggle that does not question the terms by which humanity is constituted becomes a liberation struggle that depends on the oppression of others. Second, the assumption that affectable others have about liberation is that they will be granted humanity if they can prove their worthiness. If people understood us better, they would see we are human just like they are, and they would grant us the status of humanity. As a result, antiracist activist and scholarly projects often become trapped in ethnographic multi­ culturalism, what Silva describes as a “neoliberal multicultural” representation that “includes never-­before-­heard languages that speak of never-­ before-­heard things that actualize a never-­before-­k nown consciousness.”5 This project rests on an inherent contradiction, because this strategy, designed to demonstrate our worthiness of being universal subjects, actually rests on the logic that Native peoples are equivalent to nature itself, things to be discovered or to have an essential truth or essence. In other words, the very quest of full subjecthood that is implicit in the ethnographic project to tell our “truth” is already premised on a logic that requires us to be objects of discovery, unable to escape the status of affectable other. Consequently, Native studies is in a position of ethnographic entrapment because Native peoples become almost unintelligible within the academy outside of this discursive regime. To use Silva’s phrase, ethnographic entrapment inevitably positions Native peoples at the “horizon of death.”6 María Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo’s work further explores the racialized limits of authentic subjectivity in her book The Revolutionary Imagination Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  209

in Latin America and the Age of Development. She examines the controversy surrounding Rigoberto Menchu’s autobiography, noting that critiques of the work center on controversies over whether or not it is “true.”7 Saldaña-­ Portillo questions the terms of this debate. In particular, she critiques how Menchu is imagined only as a container of truth that must be revealed to the Western subject—who in turn is deemed responsible for adjudicating truth. She asks, why don’t we read Shakespeare with this sole question in mind: “Is what he is saying true?” The difference of course is that the Western subject is capable of self-­determined analyses, of strategy, of rhetoric. Saldaña notes that when we read Native literature outside the rubric of truth, it is almost illegible. We cannot even comprehend reading the work without making that the first question. We do not consider that maybe she is engaged in a rhetorical strategy that determines what she wants to say, what not to say, and to whom. We also do not question whether Menchu actually owes us the truth. Saldaña-­Portillo’s work builds on the analyses of Cook-­Lynn, who critiques the genre of the Native biography and “life story.” She discusses this obsession as being a fundamentally anti-­intellectual project. The life stories of Native peoples are important, but their theorizing and analyses are not. Cook-­Lynn similarly complains, “It is as though the American Indian has no intellectual voice with which to enter into America’s important dialogues. The American Indian is not asked what he thinks we should do about Bosnia or Iraq. He is not asked to participate in Charlie Rose’s interview program about books or politics or history. It is as though the American Indian does not exist except in faux history or corrupt myth.”8 Saldaña-­Portillo adds to this critique by suggesting that the real problem with the life story may not be the genre itself but the fact that, particularly for Native peoples, these stories can only be read for their truth. Is this person’s depiction true? Are they authentic? Yet we don’t read Michel Foucault asking if he is authentically French. Western writers are granted rhetorical agency, analysis, and theory—the ability to tell truths that are not contained in their bodies. Ethnographic entrapment then has the impact of forcing Native studies scholars into the position of what Rey Chow terms “self-­confessing subjects.”9 She notes that ethnic studies scholars (and by extension Native studies scholars) often feel that they must live up to the ethnographic niche to which they have been assigned. She notes that ethnic subjects are forced to display their ethnicity constantly as a form of confession that will set them free. Furthermore, the ethnic subject must confess the truth of 210  |  Andrea Smith

one’s self while disavowing that he or she is actually engaged in a representational practice. If we tell the truth about our communities and ourselves, we will be free. As Foucault argues, power is often manifested through normalization in the modern state. Through prisons, medicine, and other technologies of the body, the body becomes the site of regulation such that power relations no longer seem to be that—rather it becomes self-­evident that in order to be a healthy person, there are rules that any allegedly normal person would want to follow. Those who challenge social norms become not so much outlaws as sick or deviant. This deviance is managed through a technology of the soul, whereby the soul seeks liberation from its inability to be normal by confessing its truth. Ironically, the confessing self seeks liberation in a set of power relations that entrap the confessing self into thinking its inability to tell its truth is the source of its oppression. This normalization happens at the level of the social body as well. The bourgeoisie are normal and healthy—all others are classified in relationship to their deviance from their norm. This classification is then racialized. Ann Stoler argues in Race and the Education of Desire that racism, far from being a reaction to crisis in which racial “others” are scapegoated for social ills, is a permanent part of the social fabric: “Racism is not an effect but a tactic in the internal fission of society into binary opposition, a means of creating ‘biologized’ internal enemies, against whom society must defend itself.”10 She notes that it is the constant purification and elimination of racialized enemies within the state that ensures the growth of the national body: “Racism does not merely arise in moments of crisis, in sporadic cleansings. It is internal to the biopolitical state, woven into the web of the social body, threaded through its fabric.”11 Thus, she remarks that genocide becomes rational in the modern state because the modern state is entitled to destroy those who represent permanent threats to its well-­being. Genocide then does not become an ethical contradiction for democracy. The modern state is fundamentally stratified in terms of those who get to be subjects, who achieve the norm, and those who are objects, who desire to become normal subjects. As Chow states: “All are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”12 Ironically, however, we fall into the Foucauldian trap of thinking that our liberation will be effected, not through structural change but through confessing our truths, demonstrating the worth of our cultures, proving to those in power that we are worthy of humanity. As Chow says, we believe if we properly perform our ethnicity, we will be granted humanity. We do not question the racial logic of the ideological state apparatus that is the Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  211

academic industrial complex; we struggle instead to ensure that our truths are represented in the academy. The response to the anthropological gaze that says “let’s study Indians to see how cool, interesting, and spiritual they are” is not a questioning of the ethnographic gaze itself, but is simply a reappropriation of it: “Let’s prove how cool, interesting, and spiritual we are so that people in the university will like us.” Glen Coulthard suggests an alternative approach to the politics of intellectual recognition. Rather than seek recognition from colonial powers, perhaps we can start to seek recognition among ourselves and among all colonized peoples. As he puts it, [The] key problem with the politics of recognition when applied to the colonial context . . . [is that it] rests on the problematic assumption that the flourishing of  Indigenous Peoples as distinct and self-­determining agents is somehow dependent on their being granted recognition and institutional accommodation from the surrounding settler-­state and society. . . . Not only will the terms of recognition tend to remain the property of those in power to grant to their inferiors in ways that they deem appropriate, but also under these conditions, the Indigenous population will often come to see their limited and structurally constrained terms of recognition granted to them as their own. In effect, the colonized come to identify with “white liberty and white justice.”13 What Chow’s and Coulthard’s analyses suggest is that this desire for recognition prevents internal critiques because the basis of the desire is simply not to be excluded from settler colonialism and capitalism. The idea that the social order is bad because it excludes me also implies that the social order is good if it includes me.14 But the quest of  Native and ethnic studies for legitimacy in the academy begs the question, how can we expect either of  them to really be legitimate in a settler-­colonial and white-­supremacist society? If we begin to see that our intellectual task then also requires a political commitment to dismantling settler colonialism and white supremacy, rather than to engage in what Dylan Rodriguez terms “genocide management,” we may rethink our representational practices.15 An alternative representational strategy is suggested in Audra Simpson’s article “Ethnographic Refusal.” Simpson frames her project as such: In this paper I will argue that the techniques of representation and ana­ lysis that avail themselves to us when the processes sketched out above have been accounted for make for a form of representation that may 212  |  Andrea Smith

move away from “difference” and attendant containment as a unit of analysis. . . . Rather, it is my proposition that to think about “sovereignty”—a construct which is always a bestowal and as such is deeply imperfect but critical for these moments in Indigenous/Settler-­State relations—is to think very seriously about needs and, basically, involves a calculus ethnographically of what you need to know and what I refuse to write in.16 Her work can be misread as a work on simple ethnographic ethics. Do not all ethnographers have to make decisions about what they will publish and what they will not? But Simpson’s ethnographic refusal is more a systemic critique of the positioning of Native studies within the academy, its position of ethnographic entrapment. To fully understand this, Simpson’s article needs to be read in tandem with her dissertation on Mohawk nationalism. What is significant in her dissertation is the conscious refusal to reveal excessive ethnographic detail about the Mohawk communities in which Simpson situates her work. This absence coincides with Justine Smith’s analysis of  Indigenous texts as aporetic texts.17 That is, what is significant about Indigenous texts (understood in the broader sense of the term) is as much in what is not in the texts as in their positive textual content. The aporetic nature of Simpson’s text serves several functions. First, it serves to decenter whiteness and the white gaze from her project. She further decenters whiteness in her approach by not signaling her methodological shift. Perhaps counterintuitively, Eduardo Glissant argues that the project of decolonization includes insisting on the right not to be known: For the attempt to approach a reality so often hidden from view cannot be organized in terms of a series of clarifications. We demand the right to obscurity. Through which our anxiety to have a full existence becomes part of the universal drama of cultural transformation: the creativity of marginalized peoples who today confront the ideal of transparent universality, imposed by the West, with secretive and multiple manifestations of  Diversity. Such a process is spectacular everywhere in the world where murders, shameless acts of genocide, tactics of terror, try to crush the precious resistance of various peoples. It is imperceptible when we are dealing with communities condemned as such to painless oblivion.18 Within the context of Indigenous disappearance, it would seem that the goal of  Native studies would be to make Native peoples appear, and hence make them more knowable. However, as Antonio Viego suggests, the manNative Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  213

ner in which Native peoples become known is itself another practice of genocide because “it helps render the ethnic-­racialized subject as a thoroughly calculable and exhaustible—that is, dead—subject.”19 In other words, this mode sets up the racial subject as one who is to be fully known and understood by the self-­reflexive subject, who remains indeterminate and hence self-­determining. Essentially, the presupposition is that, if only others knew us better, we (whoever that is) would be free. In fact, the quest for the knowable racialized subject is part of colonial and racial discourse itself. As Viego argues, our goal may not be to “understand” the Native but to challenge the grid of intelligibility under which the Native is known: “Given what I have been arguing thus far regarding how racism depends on a certain representational capture of the ethnic-­racialized subject— rendered as transparent to the signifier, potentially whole and unified—in order to manage this subject more masterfully in discourse, then this insistence on the incalculable and indeterminate should be very welcome in our antiracist analyses.”20 The difficulty, however, for works that engage in ethnographic refusal is that they can become indecipherable with the white-­supremacist logics of the academy, as Saldaña-­Portillo’s analysis demonstrates. If there are no ethnographic details given, then the Native scholar must not be a scholar— it is not possible to credit the Native scholar with representational agency. Native studies becomes ethnographically trapped because Native peoples are seen as the containers of truth that must be unveiled. They cannot be the ones who analyze or determine truths. When one refuses one’s place in the multicultural classificatory scheme, one becomes illegible within the discourse of the settler state and its attendant academic industrial complex. This kind of work is often read as bad scholarship or even nonscholarship. So Simpson’s call for refusal becomes a refusal of colonial intelligibility. What happens to our work when our goal is not to attain academic recognition and to demonstrate the truth of our Native selves but to engage in strategic and cunning acts of academic resistance? There have been a plethora of works on decolonizing the academy. But what is often not addressed in these works is the fact that if the academy was decolonized, it would not exist because it is structurally a colonialist, capitalist, and white-­supremacist institution. Not surprisingly then, the means by which the academy engages so-­called insurgent Indigenous knowledge is through domestication and pacification. Decolonial knowledge production therefore requires us to rethink our relationship to the academy. Our relationship with the academy need not be based on one of complete avoidance, as if a position 214  |  Andrea Smith

completely outside settler colonialism is even possible. Rather, the project of decolonization would suggest a strategic engagement in which spaces, such as they exist within the academy, are appropriated to develop a Native studies that is located in diverse and multiple spaces inside and outside the university. Because of the attendant dangers in actually engaging in decolonization, such intellectual acts require a movement behind them perhaps based on mutual recognition of our desire for liberation rather than academic legitimacy (even as gaining some form of legitimacy at some points may be a strategy within the context of a larger struggle). The Self-­C onfessing Subject

Rey Chow notes that within this position of ethnographic entrapment, the only rhetorical position offered to the Native is that of the “protesting ethnic.”21 The posture to be assumed under the politics of recognition is the posture of complaint. If we complain eloquently, the system will give us something. Meanwhile, the other posture that is created within this economy is the self-­reflexive settler, the white subject. I became acquainted with this posture in my experience with a plethora of antiracist organizing projects over the years. I frequently found myself participating in various workshops in which participants were asked to reflect on their gender, race, sexual, or class (and so on) privilege. These workshops had a bit of a self-­help orientation to them: “I am so and so, and I have X privilege.” It was never quite clear what the point of these confessions were. It was not as if other participants did not know the confessor in question had her or his proclaimed privilege. It did not appear that these individual confessions actually led to any political projects to dismantle the structures of domination that enabled privilege. Rather, the confessions became the political project themselves. The benefits of these confessions seemed to be ephemeral. Because the instant the confession took place, those who do not have that privilege in daily life would have a temporary position of power as the hearer of the confession who could grant absolution and forgiveness. The speaker of the confession could then be granted temporary forgiveness for her or his abuses of power and relief from white, male, or heterosexual (and so on) guilt. Because of the perceived benefits of this ritual, there was generally little critique of the fact that in the end, it primarily served to reinstantiate the structures of domination it was supposed to resist. One of the reasons there was little critique of this practice is that it bestowed cultural capital to those who seemed to be the “most oppressed.” Those who had little privilege did not have to confess and were in the poNative Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  215

sition to be the judge of those who did have privilege. Consequently, people aspired to be oppressed. Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop new heretofore-­unknown forms of oppression from which they suffered: “I may be white, but my best friend was a person of color, which caused me to be oppressed when we played together.” Consequently, the goal became not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible. These rituals often substituted confession for political movement building. And despite the cultural capital that was, at least temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed to be the most oppressed, these rituals ultimately reinstantiated the white-­majority subject as the subject capable of self-­reflexivity and the colonized or racialized subject as the occasion for self-­reflexivity. This self-­reflexive subject is also frequently on display in Native and ethnic studies conferences in which the privileged subject explains how much she or he learned about personal complicity in settler colonialism or white supremacy after exposure to Native peoples. A typical instance of this involves non-­Native peoples who make presentations based on what they “learned” while doing solidarity work with Native peoples in their field research and so on. Complete with videos and slide shows, the presenters express the privilege with which they struggled. We learn how they tried to address the power imbalances they experienced with the people with whom they studied or worked. We learn how they struggled to gain these people’s trust. Invariably, the narrative begins with the presenters initially facing the distrust of the Natives because of their settler or white privilege. But through perseverance and good intentions, the researchers overcome this distrust and earn the friendship of their ethnographic objects. In these stories of course, to evoke Gayatri Spivak, the subaltern does not speak.22 We do not hear what their theoretical analysis of their relationship is. We do not hear about how they were organizing on their own before they were saved (or studied) by these presenters. Native peoples are not positioned as those who can engage in self-­ reflection; they can only judge the worth of the confession. Consequently, the presenters of these narratives often present very nervously. Did they speak to all their privileges? Did they properly confess? Or will someone in the audience notice a mistake and question whether they have in fact become a fully developed antiracist subject? In that case, the subject would have to then engage in further acts of self-­reflection that require new confessions in the future. If, however, this person self-­reflects effectively, s/he may be bestowed the title “ally” and build a career of her/his self-­reflection 216  |  Andrea Smith

to the point where we have what some activists refer to as an ally industrial complex that dominates anti-­oppression activism. These rituals around self-­reflexivity in the academy and in activist circles are not without merit. They are informed by key insights into how the logics of domination that structure the world also constitute who we are as subjects. Political projects of transformation necessarily involve a fundamental reconstitution of us as well. However, for this process to work, individual transformation must occur concurrently with social and political transformation. That is, the undoing of privilege occurs not by individuals confessing their privileges or trying to think themselves into a new subject position but through the creation of collective structures that dismantle the systems that enable these privileges. The activist genealogies that produced this response to racism and settler colonialism were not initially focused on racism as a problem of individual prejudice. Rather, the purpose was for individuals to recognize how they were shaped by structural forms of oppression. However, the response to structural racism became an individual one—individual confession at the expense of collective action. Thus the question becomes, how would one collectivize individual transformation? Many organizing projects attempt to do precisely this, such Sisters in Action for Power, Sista II Sista, Incite! Women of Color against Violence, and Communities against Rape and Abuse, among many others. Rather than simply focus on one’s individual privilege, these organizations address privilege on an organizational level. For instance, they might assess if everyone who is invited to speak is a college graduate, or if certain people are always in the limelight. Based on this assessment, the organizations develop structures to address how privilege is exercised collectively. For instance, any time a person with a college degree is invited to speak, he or she brings a cospeaker who does not have that education level. Or that person might develop mentoring and skills-­sharing programs within the group. To quote one of my activist mentors, Judy Vaughn, “You don’t think your way into a different way of acting; you act your way into a different way of thinking.” Essentially, the current social structure conditions us to exercise what privileges we may have. If we want to undermine those privileges, we must change the structures within which we live so that we become different people in the process. The logics of privilege rest on an individualized self that relies on the raw material of other beings to constitute itself. Although the confessing of privilege is understood to be an antiracist practice, it is ultimately a project premised on white supremacy. Consequently, organizing and intellectual projects that are questioning these politics of privilege are Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  217

shifting the question from what privileges a particular subject has to what is the nature of the subject that claims to have privilege in the first place. The Settler or White Subject and Self-­R eflexivity

Borrowing from the work of Scott Morgensen and Hiram Perez, the confession of privilege, while claiming to be antiracist and anticolonial, is actually a strategy that helps constitute the settler or white subject. In Morgensen’s analysis, the settler subject constitutes itself through incorporation (or what Silva would term “engulfment).23 Through this logic of settlement, settlers become the rightful inheritors of all that was Indigenous—land, resources, Indigenous spirituality, and culture. Thus, Indigeneity is not necessarily framed as antagonistic to the settler subject; the Native is instead supposed to disappear into the project of settlement. The settler becomes the new-­and-­improved version of the Native, thus legitimizing and naturalizing the settler’s claims to this land. Within the context of settler colonialism, Native peoples are the affectable others who become incorporated into settler subjectivity in order to establish settler claims to self-­determination. Native peoples, by contrast, do not require self-­determination because they are nothing more than the raw materials—the affectable others—of the settler project. Hiram Perez similarly analyzes how the white subject positions itself intellectually as a cosmopolitan subject capable of abstract theorizing through the use of the “raw material” provided by fixed, brown bodies. The white subject is capable of being anti-­identity or postidentity but understands his or her postidentity only in relationship to brown subjects who are hopelessly fixed within identity. Brown people provide the raw material that enables the intellectual production of the white subject.24 Thus, self-­reflexivity enables the constitution of the white or settler subject. Antiracist and colonial struggles have created a colonial dis-­ease that the settler or white subject may not in fact be self-­determining. As a result, the white or settler subject reasserts his or her power through self-­ reflection. In doing so, the subject’s subjectivity is reaffirmed against the foil of the “oppressed” people who still remain the affectable others providing the occasion for this self-­reflection. Often times, the white or settler subject of self-­reflexivity positions herself or himself in relationship to those settler subjects who appear to fail in their responsibilities toward self-­reflection. For instance, a plethora of work has been published that critiques New Age appropriation of  Native spirituality. These critiques have addressed the manner in which aspects of Native 218  |  Andrea Smith

“culture” are severed from their context and commodified as objects that can assist in the healing or personal development of non-­Natives. While these analyses are very valuable, it can also be easy for those in the academy to ridicule New Agers while not considering the way in which academic engagement with Native peoples often replicates these same New Age logics. Micaela di Leonardo makes the connections between these operations by exploring how the treatment of  Native peoples within the academy does not sharply differ in its logics from the New Age movement. She critiques the tendency for social scientists to study “exotics” as a means for those in the dominant culture to learn more about themselves. Either Native communities have “ancient wisdom” to bestow upon others or they represent the “savage” who proves the superiority of the dominant society: “Primitives are ourselves, or our worst or best selves, or our former selves, undressed: human nature in the buff.”25 She critiques many feminist ethnographies for portraying cultures disconnected from the global political economy. She notes, for instance, that Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman tells the story of an Indigenous woman, Esperanza, in Mexico with almost no reference to Mexican history or political economy.26 Instead, the ethnography becomes the occasion for Behar to authorize her own identity as an oppressed woman of color. Esperanza’s story becomes the occasion to tell Behar’s story: “Esperanza challenged me continually to articulate the connections between who she is as a visibly invisible Indian street peddler and who I am as an academic woman with a certain measure of power and privilege. . . . Esperanza and I were in many ways exaggerated, distorted mirrors of each other.”27 Ironically, however, even di Leonardo’s critique replicates some of these same logics in that her analysis appears to dismiss the possibility that Indigenous peoples may have any intellectual contributions to make. It is noteworthy that in her critique of the exoticizing practices of anthropologists in their relations with Native peoples, she fails to intellectually engage Native academics (with one lone exception) who have been making similar critiques about anthropology for years. For example, in her discussion of Franz Boas and his students, she does not mention the Dakota anthropologist Ella Deloria. The one Native scholar she does cite, Vine Deloria Jr., she dismisses completely because he does not cite specific anthropologists in his analysis—even though such a task was completely beyond the scope of his project. She dismisses the efforts of any scholars to uncover contributions Native peoples might make to discussions of political economy as simply arguing that Native peoples “are better off.”28 From her perspective, Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  219

the only thing of importance to say about Native peoples is that “they simply have less power and fewer resources than their interlocutors. . . . [They] are engaged on the losing ends of the varying institutions of international political economy.”29 Hence, in the end, while critiquing the primitivist stereotypes that undergird even many feminist anthropological works, she essentially holds on to the same stereotypes, implicitly claiming that Native peoples are somehow outside of history and are therefore incapable of contributing to understandings of global historical processes. Simpson’s article “On Ethnographic Refusal” thus questions whether or not to call for greater “accuracy” in anthropology’s depiction of  Native peoples. Instead, she suggests that the project may be to refuse anthropological intelligibility in the first place.30 Of course, this chapter does not escape the logics of self-­reflexivity either. Rhetorically, it simply sets me up as yet another judge of the inadequacies of the academic-­activist confessions of others. Thus, what is important in this discussion is not so much how particular individual scholars engage Native studies. If Native peoples are represented problematically even by peoples who espouse antiracist or antisettler politics, it is not an indication that the work of those peoples is particularly flawed or that their scholarship has less value. Similarly, those privileged “confessing” subjects in antiracism workshops do so with a commitment to fighting settler colonialism or white supremacy, and their solidarity work is critically needed. Furthermore, as women-­of-­color scholars and activists have noted, there is no sharp divide between those who are oppressed and those who are oppressors. Individuals may variously find themselves in the position of being the confessor or the judge of the confession depending on the context; this is because these positions are not ontologically fixed to particular bodies but are contingent, discursive positions. The point of this analysis is to illustrate the larger dynamics by which Native studies is even intelligible in the academy in particular and in society at large in the first place. Native studies is in a position of ethnographic entrapment because Native peoples become almost unintelligible within the academy outside of this discursive regime. In our desire to prove our worthiness to be deemed human, we constantly put ourselves in the position of ethnographic objects who have no value other than to enable self-­determining settler subjects to constitute themselves. In addition, because we do not more fundamentally question the colonialist and white-­supremacist constructions of  humanity to which we aspire, we find that our engagements in antisettler and anti­ racist struggles ultimately reinstantiate the logics we seek to deconstruct. 220  |  Andrea Smith

In other words, we fail to imagine a liberatory politic that does not ultimately rest on the oppression of others. From the Self—Determination to R adical Relationality

As Silva’s work suggests, the settler and white-­supremacist logics of confession and self-­reflexivity rest on an epistemological understanding of the self as being constituted over and against other selves. Furthermore, the trap facing racial and colonial affectable others is that they also seek liberation by positioning themselves against others whom they perceived to be affectable. For example, many racial-­justice groups have either supported or been complicit with sexism or homophobia. The project of self-­reflexivity is another instantiation of the self-­determining subject seeking to transcend the affectability created by conditions of white supremacy and colonialism. Affectable others aspire for self-­determination by becoming the judges of those deemed capable of self-­reflexivity. This mode sets up the racial subject as one who is to be fully known and understood by the self-­reflexive subject, who remains indeterminate and hence self-­determining. In fact, however, the quest for the infinitely knowable racialized subject is fundamentally constituitive of white supremacy. Thus, as Alexander Weheliye suggests, the goal is not to secure the well-­being of the oppressed class to which we belong by making ourselves more fully known, but to create new forms of humanity by practicing “a politics of being that . . . introduces invention into existence. . . . This is a battle to supplant the current instantiation of the human as synonymous with the objective existence of white, western Man and his various damned counterparts[,] . . . offering in its stead new styles of human subjectivity and community.”31 Thus, Silva’s analysis implies that “liberation” would require different selves that understand who they are in radical relationality with all other peoples and things. The goal then becomes not the mastery of antiracist and anticolonialist lingo but a different self-­understanding that sees one’s being as fundamentally constituted through other beings. An example of the political enactment of this critique of the Western subject could be glimpsed during the 2008 World Social Forum that I attended. The Indigenous peoples made a collective statement calling into question the issue of the nation-­state. In addition to challenging capitalism, they called on participants to imagine new forms of governance not based on a nation-­state model. They contended that the nation-­state has not worked in the last five hundred years, so they suspected that it was not going to start working now. Instead, they called for new forms of collectivities that were based on Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  221

principles of interrelatedness, mutuality, and global responsibility. These new collectivities (nations, if you will, for lack of a better word) would not be based on insular or exclusivist claims to a land base; indeed the collectivities would reject the contention that land is a commodity that any one group of people should be able to buy, control, or own. These collectivities would instead be based on responsibility for and relationship with land. The Indigenous peoples’ statement echoed that of Patricia Monture-­ Angus, who argued: Although Aboriginal Peoples maintain a close relationship with the land[,] . . . it is not about control of the land. . . . Earth is mother and she nurtures us all. . . . It is the human race that is dependent on the earth and not vice versa. . . . Sovereignty, when defined as my right to be responsible[,] . . . requires a relationship with territory (and not a relationship based on control of that territory). . . . What must be understood then is that the Aboriginal request to have our sovereignty respected is really a request to be responsible. I do not know of anywhere else in history where a group of people have had to fight so hard just to be responsible.32 But the Indigenous Peoples’ statement suggested that these collectivities could not be formed without a radical change in what we perceived ourselves to be. That is, if we understand ourselves to be transparent, self-­ determining subjects, defining ourselves in opposition to who we are not, then the nations that will emerge from this sense of self will be exclusivist and insular. However, if we understand ourselves as being fundamentally constituted through our relations with other beings and the land, then the nations that emerge will also be inclusive and interconnected with each other. Interestingly, the spokespeople at the World Social Forum specifically stated that their goal was not to tell non-Indigenous peoples to “go home.” The spokespeople articulated an expansive notion of Indigeneity by stating that all are welcome to their lands if they live in good ways with the land. Of course, these kinds of statements can be troubling in the New Age context in North America where they might be heard as “everyone can be Indigenous by doing a pipe ceremony, sweat lodge, and so on.” Essentially, this expansive understanding of  Indigeneity could be understood to erase the specificity of  Indigenous peoples and their struggles today. But in this context I would argue that while this call might be more open and affirming than the typical calls to confess settler privilege, it is also a more difficult demand. This demand is something more akin to Weheliye’s 222  |  Andrea Smith

call—a complete transformation of subjectivity and humanity. Indigeneity in this call does not become an easily calculable category that the privileged subject can become through a simple process of appropriation and commodification. Rather, to borrow from the work of  Justine Smith, Indigeneity becomes the performance of transformation itself.33 This call then was less about critiquing settler privilege and more about gesturing toward a political project that requires global and collective participation to move beyond the conditions of settler colonialism. Beyond Recognition

If we question the self as a self-­determining subject who uses others as the occasion to constitute herself or himself through self-­reflection, then we might develop alternatives to confession and self-­reflexivity as a means to dismantle white supremacy and settler colonialism. Queer and Indigenous futurities provide some possible directions because they question the assumption that the goal of oppressed groups is to become recognized or to be bestowed humanity within the current social order. Rather, this work suggests that our project may be to disrupt the order itself. For instance, the queer theorist Lee Edelman contends that futurity acts as a guarantor of the current oppressive social order that articulates the child as the anchor for reproductive futurity: “For politics, however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar is it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. That Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmic beneficiary of every political intervention.”34 He maintains that “queerness takes the side of those not fighting for the children[,] . . . the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.”35 Of course there has been much critique, particularly queer-­of-­color critique, of Edelman’s call for “no future” as vacating any possibilities for social or political transformation as well as being premised on a disavowed whiteness whose futurity is not under threat.36 However, it may be possible to view his call as being less about a call against futurity and more about a call to end the social order. That is, the problem we face in struggling for social transformation is that we do so within the terms set by the current system. Consequently, our calls for a better future are necessarily limited to the terms predetermined by the present. Hence a call for “no future” may be described more accurately as a call to the end of our very grid of intelligibility that Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  223

does not allow us to conceptualize “another world” because to do so would simply be another rearticulation of the current world. Thus it follows that under this analysis, one would regard all political programs with suspicion: “Political programs are programmed to reify difference and thus to secure in the form of the future, the order of the same.”37 Kara Keeling’s work, while sharing much of this analysis, provides another approach toward the symbolic order. A call for a “no future” or a complete end to political programs tends to situate the “outside” of the social order as its opposite. That is, when we try to imagine ourselves outside the current system, we often imagine it to be the complete opposite of the current system. For instance, many Native activist and intellectual projects call for decolonization. While decolonization is an important project for denaturalizing and thus dismantling the structures and logics of settler colonialism, it is sometimes interpreted to mean that Native peoples must reject everything that is not Indigenous in order to be properly authentic. As Kiri Sailiata notes, this understanding of decolonization imagines itself as an extractive process whereby people must remove anything from their lives that is tainted by colonialism. Similarly, Scott Lyons’s X-­Marks contends that a politics of decolonization has the danger of lapsing into a politics of purity in which any engagement with the current legal and economic system is dismissed as co-­opted: “If you happen to live away from your homeland, speak English, practice Christianity, or know more songs by the Dave Matthews Band than by the ancestors, you effectively ‘cease to exist’ as one of the People.”38 While Lyons does not dismiss the importance of decolonization, he argues that such politics do not begin from an imagined precolonial past but under current living conditions. Rather than articulate contemporary Native identity as an impure version of traditional identity, Lyons argues that such a framework locks Native identity in the past and cedes the modern to whiteness. Decolonization entails not going backward to a precolonial past but a commitment to building a future for Indigenous peoples based on principles of justice and liberation. Keeling suggests that the “outside” should not be seen as the opposite of the current system, but instead imagined as being in noncorrespondence to the current order. Thus, since it is not the opposite of our current grid of intelligibility, we may be able to see glimpses of the outside—ghosts that gesture toward a beyond—within the current systems. And, as a result, we do not have to reject everything within the current system in our quest for liberation. Some theoretical concepts within Native studies can help elucidate her arguments. The work of Vine Deloria Jr. has provided much 224  |  Andrea Smith

of the theoretical grounding for Native studies. His argument is that decolonization required a fundamental epistemological shift that questioned the very logic systems of Western thought.39 In God Is Red, he articulated what he viewed as some of the distinctions between Western and Indigenous thought systems, such as the distinction between spatial versus temporal orientations, circular versus linear time, and practice-­versus belief-­ centered traditions.40 However, as Lyons notes, these concepts started to become taken very literally such that Native scholars started insisting that Native people “think in circles.”41 However, I think Deloria’s analysis could be better understood not as a literal reading of  Indigenous epistemologies but as a gesture toward a “beyond the colonial order.” Because of colonization, one must articulate these frameworks within colonial terms. Yet colonialism cannot contain them either. What Keeling suggests then is that these gestures toward the beyond are critically important, but we should not mistake the gestures for the beyond itself. Based on this analysis, our project becomes less of one based on self-­ improvement or even collective self-­i mprovement and more about the creation of new worlds and futurities for which we currently have no language. In addition, the “new” worlds may exist within this world. For instance, at the 2005 World Liberation Theology Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Indigenous peoples from Bolivia stated they know another world is possible because they see that world whenever they do their ceremonies. Native ceremonies can be a place where the present, past, and future become copresent, thereby allowing us to engage in what the Native Hawaiian scholar Manu Meyer calls a radical remembering of the future, a beyond where we currently live. Thus, as Alexander Weheliye notes, global oppression is not complete. In fact, perhaps one way that global oppression perpetuates itself is through its appearance of universality, which can prevent us from seeing those spaces in which liberatory praxis does exist. Alternatives to Confession for Dismantling Settler Colonialism and White Supremacy

There is no simple anti-oppression formula that we can follow; we are in a constant state of trial and error and radical experimentation. In that spirit I offer some possibilities that might speak to new ways of undoing privilege, not in the sense of offering the “correct” process for moving forward, but in the spirit of adding to our collective imagining of a beyond. These projects of decolonization can be contrasted with that of the projects of antiracist or anticolonialist self-­reflexivity in that they are not based on the goal of Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  225

“knowing” more about our privilege, but on creating that which we cannot now know. As I have discussed elsewhere, many of these models are based on “taking power by making power” models particularly prevalent in Latin America.42 These models, which are deeply informed by Indigenous peoples’ movements, have informed the landless movement, the factory movements, and other peoples’ struggles. Many of these models are also being used by a variety of social justice organizations throughout the United States and elsewhere. The principle undergirding these models is to challenge capital and state power by actually creating the world we want to live in now. These groups develop alternative governance systems based on principles of horizontality, mutuality, and interrelatedness rather than hierarchy, domination, and control. In beginning to create this new world, subjects are transformed. These “autonomous zones” can be differentiated from the projects of many groups in the United States that create separatist communities based on egalitarian ideals in that people in these “making power” movements do not just create autonomous zones; they proliferate them. These movements developed in reaction to the revolutionary-­ vanguard model of organizing in Latin America that became criticized as “machismo-­leninismo” models. These models were so hierarchical that in the effort to combat systems of oppression, they inadvertently re-­created the same systems they were trying to replace. In addition, this model of organizing was inherently exclusivist because not everyone can take up guns and go the mountains to become revolutionaries. Peoples who have the primary responsibility as caregivers for their families, for instance, could particularly be excluded from such revolutionary movements. As a result movements began to develop organizing models that are based on integrating the organizing into one’s everyday life so that all people can participate. For instance, a group might organize through communal cooking, but during the cooking process, which everyone needs to do anyway in order to eat, they might educate themselves on the nature of agribusiness. At the 2005 World Social Forum in Brazil, activists from Chiapas reported that this movement began to realize that one cannot combat militarism with more militarism because the state always has more guns. However, if movements began to build their own autonomous zones and proliferated them until they reached a mass scale, eventually there would be nothing the state’s military could do. If mass-­based peoples’ movements begin to live life using alternative governance structures and stop relying on the state, then what can the state do? Of course, during the process, there 226  |  Andrea Smith

may be skirmishes with the state, but conflict is not the primary work of these movements. And as we see these movements literally take over entire countries in Latin America, it is clear that it is possible to do revolutionary work on a mass scale in a manner based on radical participation rather than representational democracy or through a revolutionary-­vanguard model. Many leftists will argue that nation-­states are necessary to check the power of multinational corporations or will argue that nation-­states are no longer important units of analysis.43 These “making power” groups, by contrast, recognize the importance of creating alternative forms of governance outside of a nation-­state model based on principles of horizontalism. In addition, these groups are taking on multinational corporations directly. An example would be the factory movement in Argentina, where workers have appropriated factories and seized the means of production themselves. They have also developed cooperative relationships with other appropriated factories. In addition, in many factories all of the work is collectivized. For instance, a participant from a group I work with who recently had a child and was breastfeeding went to visit a factory. She tried to sign up for one of the collectively organized tasks of the factory and was told that breastfeeding was her task. The factory recognized breastfeeding as work on par with all the other work going on in the factory. This kind of politics then challenges the notions of safe space often prevalent in many activist circles in the United States. The concept of safe space flows naturally from the logics of privilege. That is, once we have confessed our gender, race, settler, and class privileges, we can then create a safe space where others will not be negatively impacted by these privileges. Of course, because we have not dismantled heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism, or capitalism, these confessed privileges never actually disappear in safe spaces. Consequently, when a person is found guilty of his or her privilege in these spaces, that person is accused of making the space unsafe. This rhetorical strategy presumes that only certain privileged subjects can make the space unsafe, as if everyone isn’t implicated in heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and capitalism. Our focus is shifted from the larger systems that make the entire world unsafe to interpersonal conduct. In addition, the accusation of unsafe is also levied against people of color who express anger about racism, only to find themselves accused of making the space unsafe because of their raised voices. The problem with safe space is the presumption that a safe space is even possible. By contrast, instead of thinking of safe spaces as a refuge from colonialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, Ruthie Gilmore suggests that safe Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  227

space is not an escape from the real but a place to practice the real we want to bring into being. “Making power” models follow this suggestion in that they do not purport to be free of oppression, only that they are trying to create the world they would like to live in now. To give one smaller example, when Incite! Women of Color against Violence organized, we questioned the assumption that women-­of-­color space is a safe space. In fact, participants began to articulate that women-­of-­color space may in fact be a very dangerous space. We realized that we could not assume alliances with each other; we would actually have to create these alliances. One strategy that was helpful was rather than presume that we were acting “nonoppressively,” we built a structure that would presume that we were complicit in the structures of white supremacy, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and so on. We then structured this presumption into our organizing by creating spaces where we would educate ourselves on issues in which our politics and praxis were particularly problematic. The issues we have covered include: disability, antiblack racism, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-­A rab racism, and transphobia, along with many others. However, in this space, while we did not ignore our individual complicity in oppression, we developed action plans for how we would collectively try to transform our politics and praxis. Thus, this space did not create the dynamic of the confessor and the hearer of the confession. Instead, we presumed that we are all implicated in these structures of oppression and that we would need to work together to undo them. Consequently, in my experience, this kind of space facilitated our ability to integrate personal and social transformation because no one had to anxiously worry about whether they were going to be targeted as a bad person with undue privilege who would need to publicly confess. The space became one that was based on principles of loving rather than punitive accountability. Ethnographic Entrapment and Native Activism

The colonial desire to “know” Native peoples structures not only Native studies but Native activism as well. Within the context of political struggle, for instance, it is inevitably the job of the Native activist or advocate to explain the “truth” of Native culture to those purportedly in the position to address Native peoples’ claims. At the United Nations World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa, to give one example, whenever Indigenous peoples’ request for a hearing with state governments was granted, the Indigenous caucus was repeatedly told that the spokespeople should be sure to wear regalia at the event. 228  |  Andrea Smith

Because it is the task for Indigenous peoples to be known, their aspirations can be simply apprehended. Native peoples simply need sovereignty and self-­determination. These demands of self-­determination require no complex analysis or articulation. They are simply “known” things that Indigenous people should have. Consequently, Native peoples across the political spectrum—anarchists, capitalists, Marxists, U.S. patriots, libertarians, apolitical individuals—will all use the same term, sovereignty, to describe their political aspiration for Native peoples. Laura Harjo argues: “Sovereignty! Sovereignty! Sovereignty!—it’s the battle cry for social justice in Indian Country, but have you ever repeated a word over and over, to the point that it starts to look strange to you, and all meaning is liquidated . . . ? The discourse surrounding the term sovereignty transforms it into a strange and meaningless word.”44 Consequently, Harjo notes, it is important to begin to delineate the political, economic, social, and cultural content of this political goal. She proffers a “radical sovereignty,” which is “an ideal of decolonized sovereignty, or radical sovereignty, outside of the state, outside of normative systems of governance.”45 But perhaps more importantly, she also suggests a methodology for how Native communities can collectively begin to imagine and analyze what the principles of sovereignty might be in particular contexts. Numerous other scholars and activists have also begun to interrogate what sovereignty might be. Leanne Simpson calls for a sovereignty that is antiheteropatriarchal. Cedric Sunray critiques Native nations who engage in antiblack racism under the rubric of self-­determination.46 Glen Coulthard (this volume) and Klee Benally critique sovereignty projects that remain invested in capitalism.47 This work is critically important because otherwise, political debates and disagreements become occluded both within and outside Native communities. If one claims that her or his political position is simply upholding sovereignty, then any others who disagree are dismissed for being antisovereignty and, by extension, improperly authentic. For example, when an article on Native activists who occupied a border-­patrol office in Arizona in order to oppose sb 1070 (the law that codified racial profiling for suspected undocumented peoples) was published in the Indian press, many letter writers complained that these activists obviously couldn’t be Native and must actually be Mexican. While the problem of articulating Native as mutually exclusive with Mexican is beyond the scope of this chapter, this rhetorical strategy speaks to how a political difference became rearticulated as one of authenticity. That is, there was little if any political debate over whether or not a politics of  Indigenous sovereignty should respect the Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  229

U.S.-­Mexico border, whether sovereignty should be defined in terms of political borders, or whether U.S. sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignty are mutually incompatible. Rather, this debate was foreclosed because these and other political differences were positioned outside the proper bounds of what Native sovereignty is supposed to entail. Potential allies in Native struggles have difficulty when two different seemingly authentic Native informants give them completely different positions on what is purported to be the prosovereignty perspective on an issue. Because Native peoples are supposed to be singular in their infinitely knowable aspirations, and hence devoid of political complexity and contradiction, the assumptions behind their political positions require no further engagement. One is simply supposed to follow the prosovereignty position articulated by whoever appears to be the most authentic Native person. Those who reject this political positioning often adopt a dismissal of sovereignty projects, but based on the same presuppositions. Native peoples again are simply knowable. Their political projects are simple. If we do not like the particular articulation of that project that we hear, we should dismiss Indigenous claims all together. This tendency is obvious in the more reactionary critiques of Native movements and communities, such as Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard’s Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, in which Native peoples are presumed to have a singular knowable political aspiration and identity that the authors then condemn.48 But even more nuanced and more constructive engagements with Native activism and scholarship often do not engage the political contestation within Native communities.49 If we see a political position we do not like, we condemn it as representative of Native peoples as a whole, or reject it as not authentically Native enough. The diversity and complexity of thought and analysis within Native communities requires no engagement because Native peoples are not producers of thought and analysis; rather, they are ethnographically entrapped as mascots of social and political movements. Ethnographic entrapment, while sometimes more obviously pronounced, is not exclusive to Native communities. Rather, the assumption that liberation happens when one’s group is more known places peoples seeking liberation in the position of articulating both who they are and their struggles in easily containable and understandable sound bites that foreclose the possibilities of collective imagining, analysis, and thought that are necessary to build another world. If we really knew everything about our struggles and even ourselves, we would have already ended global oppression. Thus, to quote John Holloway: “Revolutionary change is more desperately 230  |  Andrea Smith

urgent than ever, but we do not know any more what revolution means. . . . Our not-­k nowing is . . . the not-­k nowing of those who understand that not-­ knowing is part of the revolutionary process. We have lost all certainty, but the openness of uncertainty is central to revolution. ‘Asking we walk,’ say the Zapatistas. We ask not only because we do not know the way (we do not), but also because asking the way is part of the revolutionary process itself.”50 Conclusion

Native studies (as well as other studies rooted in a desire for liberation) finds itself in a position of ethnographic entrapment within the academy because it operates outside the academic dictate to make Native peoples more knowable. The presupposition is that Native peoples are oppressed because they are not sufficiently known or understood. In fact, however, this desire to know the Native is itself part of the settler-­colonial project to apprehend, contain, and domesticate the potential power of  Indigenous peoples to subvert the settler state. As Mark Rifkin has argued, colonial logics attempt to transform Native peoples who are producers of intellectual theory and political insight into populations to be known and, hence, managed. Native struggles then simply become a project of  Native peoples making their demands known so that their claims can be recognized by the settler state. Once these demands are known, they can they be more easily managed, co-­opted, and disciplined. Thus, the project of decolonization requires a practice of ethnographic refusal—the refusal to be known and the refusal to be infinitely knowable. The politics of decolonization requires the proliferation of theories, knowledge, ideas, and analyses that speak to a “beyond settler colonialism” and are hence unknowable. Similarly, when we think not only beyond privilege but beyond the sense of self that claims privilege, we open ourselves to new possibilities that we cannot imagine now for the future. Notes

Some of the material in this article has appeared in Andrea Smith, “Unsettling the Privilege of Self-­R eflexivity,” in Geographies of Privilege, eds France Winddance Twine and Bradley Gardener. (New York: Routledge, 2013). 1. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 16. 2. Hiram Perez, “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too,” Social Text 23, nos. 3–­4 (2005). Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  231

3. Alexander G. Weheliye, Phonographies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 4. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 5. Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 169. 6. Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 27. 7. María Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 8. Elizabeth Cook-­Lynn, “American Indian Intellectualism and the New Indian Story,” in Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing About American Indians, ed. Devon Mihesuah (Lincoln: University of  Nebraska Press, 1998), 112. 9. Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 10. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of  Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 59. 11. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 59. 12. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 13. Glen S. Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Colonial Contexts,” in Contemporary Political Theory 6, no. 4 (2007): 437–­60. 14. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 15. Dylan Rodriguez, “Response,” presented at the Theorizing Native Studies Panel, American Studies Association Conference, Albuquerque, NM, October 16, 2008. 16. Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures 9, no. (2007). 17. Justine Smith, “Indigenous Performance and Aporetic Texts,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 59, no. 1–­2 (2005). 18. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 2. 19. Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 20. Viego, Dead Subjects. 21. Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 22. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-­ colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). 23. Scott Morgensen, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 24. Perez, “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too,” 185–­86. 25. Micaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, and American Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 147.

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26. Di Leonardo, Exotics at Home, 310. 27. Ruth Behar, Translated Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 302. 28. Di Leonardo, Exotics at Home, 243. 29. Di Leonardo, Exotics at Home, 35. 30. Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal.” 31. Alexander G. Weheliye, “My Volk to Come: Peoplehood in Recent Diaspora Discourse and Afro-­German Popular Music,” in Black Europe and the African Diaspora, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Tricia Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small (Champaign: University of  Illinois Press, 2009), 174. 32. Patricia Monture-­A ngus, Journeying Forward (Halifax, Canada: Fernwood Publishing, 1999), 36. 33. Smith, “Indigenous Performance and Aporetic Texts.” 34. Lee Edelman, No Future (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2–­3. 35. Edelman, No Future, 3. 36. Jose Esteban Munoz, “Cruising the Toilet: Leroi Jones/Amiri Barake, Radical Black Traditions, and Queer Futurity,” glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2–­3 (2007). 37. Edelman, No Future, 151. 38. Scott Lyons, X-­Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 139. 39. Vine Deloria Jr., “A Native American Perspective on Liberation,” Occasional Bulletin of Missionary Research 1 (July 1977): 17. 40. Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1992). 41. Lyons, X-­Marks. 42. Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005). 43. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 4 4. Laura Harjo, “Muscogee (Creek) Nation: Blueprint for a Seven Generation Plan,” PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 2012, 18. 45. Harjo, “Muscogee (Creek) Nation,” 27. 46. Cedric Sunray, “Racist Tendencies Common in Too Many Tribes,” May 23, 2012, Indianz.com, accessed August 1, 2013, http://www.indianz.com/News /2012/005634.asp. 47. Klee Benally, “Democracy Unwelcome on Navajo and Hopi Nations?,” Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights News, October 3, 2009, http://bsnorrell .blogspot.com/2009/10/klee-­benally-­democracy-­u nwelcome-­on.html. 48. Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2008). 49. One example is Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance: Challenging Colonial States,” Social Justice 35, no. 3 (2009). This article

Native Studies at the Horizon of Death  |  233

makes important contributions to the politics of Native nationalism. However, in its critique of nationalism, it pays little attention to the diverse articulations within Native studies and activism that would speak to many of the authors’ concerns. 50. John Holloway, Change the World without Taking Power (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 215.

234  |  Andrea Smith

N I N E  | Mishuana R. Goeman

Disrupting a Settler-­Colonial Grammar of Place The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie

We are shadows, silence, stones, never that simulation of  light in the distance. Trickster stones and postindian stories are my shadows, the natural traces of liberation and survivance in the ruins of representation. —Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners No social revolution can succeed without being at the same time a consciously spatial revolution. —Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies

As Indigenous people, we have always explored and developed through visual and literary aesthetics our complex philosophical understandings of the world around us, and our relationships to other beings. While interconnection between multiple Indigenous and other cultures is largely understood within Native studies, there is all too often a tendency to look at Native cultures as separately closed systems of neatly defined cultural territories. Since time immemorial, however, Native philosophical ideas have been shaped by connections to our surroundings, other individuals within our Nations, our immediate neighbors, or with those regarded on a nation-­to-­nation basis. With the onslaught of varying settler-­colonial concepts of land, however, these connections and interpretations are largely erased, contained, buried, displaced, denied, or overlooked, though they are in plain view and enacted in Native people’s daily lives. How we have come to see land and water are closely linked to how we see ourselves and others and how we engage the world. Government pressure to define ourselves by state definitions of purity in order for recognition and access to resources leads not only to externally imposed colonial

logics but also to an internal closing of physical and cultural borders as nations and people make themselves readable to the state. The criteria for federal recognition include aspects of time and space and particularly focus on key words such as continuous, historical, distinct, and established, which reoccur over and over in the legal document outlining federal guidelines.1 It is important to make clear the connection between place and settler logics of governmentality: “ ‘Tribe’ as a mode of governance mandated by the U.S. government is persistently conflated in bar [the Bureau of  Indian Affairs’s Branch of Acknowledgment and Research] analyses with ‘tribe’ as a descriptive term for Indian communities and with ‘tribe’ used to designate Indian communities as places of physical residence. . . . bar’s function depends on its authority to categorize, classify, legitimate, and exclude as an arm of the policy-­making machinery of U.S. Indian policy.”2 The classification of  “Indian” has everything to do with spatial occupation of land and bodies. Much of what constitutes being an Indian in popular culture, which filters itself into colonial logics and management on the ground, stems from historical images of savages, later made “reel” in Hollywood, and currently continues to dominate in visual culture, from Edward Curtis’s photos to current depictions of dark-­skinned Indians riding horses on reservations—specifically isolated reservations in the Southwest or Great Plains.3 The visual and historical register of  Indigenous relations and their ongoing colonial residue is what Gerald Vizenor terms “the ruins of representation.”4 The nostalgic past is represented with images and words of stagnant purity and authenticity, constraining people in places and in bodies that are marked and unmarked in ways that make them legible or illegible as Indigenous peoples. There are highly organized and spatialized ways that many Native nations operate, contradict, overlap, deny, acquiesce, and refuse—sometimes at the same moment in space and time—a settler-­colonial grammar of place, such as that found in the federal-­recognition criteria and in the cultural images that pervade the settler imaginary. Geographers often refer to the term grammar of place in specific relation to place names, but theorists such as Michel De Certeau have pushed forward this concept to include the sets of power relations that happen within the mapping process that gives authority to some grammars while denying, erasing, or overlaying others. I aim to push forward the concept of a settler-­colonial grammar of place in order to expose the specific spatial logics at work within settler colonialism and the certain conditions it sets up for Native communities and peoples. Foundational to normative modes of settler colonialism are repetitive prac236  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

tices of everyday life that give settler place meaning and structure. Yet space is fluid, and it is only in the constant retelling and reformulating of colonial narratives that space becomes place as it is given structure and meaning. Grammar, or that which provides a system of rules, indexes, and thus forms certain patterns, structures, and meanings, is not without lapses, critiques, and disavowals. In the context of blackness as constitutive of an “American grammar,” Hortense Spillers clarifies the significance of the body in constituting an assumed grammar, particularly of race.5 This essay intervenes in what I am naming a settler grammar, and highlights the important alliances, both social and political, among Native nations, confederacies, and clans that make impossible a sense of complete U.S. or Canadian conquest. All of the above formations operate on an interscalar arrangement, framing and often reframing the interactions among individuals and groups. Spatial theory enables us to talk about the relationship of the visual and narrated construction of a grammar of settler space. I look toward Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s (Dine, Seminole, Muscogee) artistic endeavors, specifically her collection of panels that present as pages in a book, diary, or photo album, entitled Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant (Living on Occupied Land). The set of panels antagonizes the premise of the settler state and breaks the confines of settler colonialism. By focusing on a politic of scales—that is, the social construction of space and, in this case, the particular reach of colonialism’s dependency on the redefinition of all Native spaces from the body of the individual to large landmasses in order to maintain settler power—I call for an intervention in the domination of the settler state as the primary mode of scholarship and focus of social movements. What it means for Native people “living on occupied land” is not only physical occupation of land that has occurred but also our material, symbolic, and lived spaces from the body to the home and to the nation. While many have discussed the “ruins of representation” and the forceful role they play in the everyday life of Native people, there is a lack of attention to the constitutive construction of body and space.6 Representations of  Indian bodies are stagnant, as is the nature of space in a majority of colonial discourses. Documenting and simultaneously uprooting the discursive construction of  Native bodies and settler places upends the state-­ determined fixity of geopolitical space that we now sit within, a space that remains unfinished and unconquered. Theorists from the fields of cultural geography, Native studies, and visual studies can carve out a space in which the disruption of the visual and narrated territories of the nation-­state—a space that excludes or imagines Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  237

in caricature current Native presence—occurs. It is these caricatures that allow an appropriation and ordering of  Native people and lands. It is necessary to extend our theoretical toolbox and move beyond statist-­defined national spaces, which further entrench complex systems of power and close off and subsume Native-­created spaces of interaction on a variety of scales. Edward Soja’s words calling for a spatial revolution cited in the epigraph ring especially true in a settler state—critically thinking about the constructions of space is crucial to the project of dismantling on-­going colonialism and indigenizing our bodies, land, and waters.7 Yes, the recovery and maintenance of the land itself is necessary for our survival, but so too is a careful attention to our formations of the social, which determines everyday experiences in place. An examination of embodied spatiality in a settler state is necessary if we are to avoid replication of colonial systems of power at work in the nation-­state. The visual and political artwork of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s photographic memoir provides an excellent platform to speak to the different intersecting scales from which the logic of settler colonialism operates. This analysis is deeply indebted to Soja, who conceived of these scales as “locales nested at many different scales” which are “a vital part of being-­in-­the-­ world.”8 In Tsinhnahjinnie’s Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant (Living on Occupied Land), these “nested locales” are displayed in the fifteen intertextual panels composing her memoir. The nested locales represented in the panels are structured as narrative, photography, and bookmaking, among the primary material forms. In an analysis of John Berger’s play with time and space in The Look of Things, Soja stipulates that “we can no longer depend on a story-­line unfolding sequentially, an ever-­accumulating history marching straight forward in plot and denouement, for too much is happening against the grain of time, too much is continually traversing the story-­line laterally.”9 In the life of an “aboriginal savant,” we must not only pay attention to the “infinite number” of story lines of colonialism by “extending our point of view outward” but also account for the collision of colonial story lines with the stories of survivance to upset the foreclosing of new possibilities. Accounting for the collapse of a progressive time-­a nd-­ space continuum intervenes in settler logics. The organization of this chapter’s sections around scales familiar to those in Native American studies (such as reservations, colloquially and intimately referred to as the rez, the urban, the border town, and the nation) is in no way meant to reify them; it is rather meant to engage the material reality produced by these imagined structures that together uphold the logics of settler colonialism. We also 238  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

must recognize those moments of colonial entanglement in order to move toward social justice, as Tsinhnahjinnie does in her work. None of the elements that compose Tsinhnahjinnie’s visual memoir are in themselves tribally specific or even solely Native, nor are they a purity of Dine, Muscogee, or Seminole (her tribal affiliations themselves speak to constant mobility and incomplete annihilation, regardless of a dominant historical and cultural narrative that makes up a settler grammar). Her tribal affiliations do not call up singularly specific places or pure specific bodies but do contain echoes of this positionality. Tsinhnahjinnie does not aim for a “pure” body; she turns her focus to dominant forms of textual and visual representations of  “Indians” in buckskins, trapped in the “simplicity,” “ignorance,” and “poverty” of the premodern—representations that have long been used by settlers to capture and entrap Native people in space and time. Tsinhnahjinnie presents images and texts that have supported notions of the “the Indian” or “Aboriginal,” including images reminiscent of  Curtis’s photographs, as well as academic literature, anthropological images, tourist postcards, official documents, and individual photo albums. These are the forms that have constituted a colonial grammar and the forms that are manipulated by Tsinhnahjinnie to make legible the power relations within them. She unsettles perceived truths or supposedly realist images that dominate photography and multimedia sources by imbricating photos under or over the narratives, thus providing story lines that enter and operate on multiple scales. It is within the text that she plays with her personal memory and embeds Native bodies in time and place. Whereas Indians can exist in space, as in the space of the Wild West in the 1800s, it is much harder to place Indians. To do so means you have to acknowledge their presence and thus rights or the fact that they are still here and have a voice that articulates their own relationships in the world. A settler-­colonial grammar would prefer to have Indians in a ubiquitous space, controlled by problematic imagining. For instance, she mimics the form of a prologue to a book to open up the art piece. The text itself overlays a typical display of a 1950s cowboy and Indian toy circulated through various economies and is meant to be read simultaneously as an art piece and a text. This punctuates the author’s claim that “the act of existing has been nothing short of wild west show.” While the textual dominates panel 1, in its visual formation as a book, the background provokes meaning on multiple scales. To a viewer of the museum exhibition, the series is placed on the wall in a recognizable format. It is important to remember that the viewer, in a sense, is inside the pages Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  239

of the book and is thus included in the scale of the series. Rather than an exploration of self (of memoir), the memoir explores modes of dominance in the circulations of  Wild West texts and the consequence of such imaginings on Native subjectivities. This first panel sets up the rest of the pages to come and influences our readings. The book blurb plays on the fascination and exoticism that many attend a Wild West show to see or may all too often pick up Native literature to find. The blurb claims that it is “thought provoking”—you can “journey to the center of an aboriginal mind without the fear of being confronted by the aboriginal herself.”10 Of course, much Native literature and film can escape the bodied presence and politics of justice. Widely popular authors, such as Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko, may be included in syllabi, book clubs, and other larger reading audiences, but often the knowledge gained exists as a peephole into an exotic culture rather than a critique of settler colonialism or a consideration of the conditions that colonialism sets up. These discourses, however, have constructed the way that Native bodies experience the every­day. The spatial policies and disciplined ordering of the Native subject by the nation-­state through governmental techniques of containment, reservations, urban erasure, federal Indian law, and a multitude of other policies that seek to “eliminate” the Native all function to make the acquisition of space achievable.11 This spatial restructuring of bodies coincides with the spatial construction of the nation-­state. Tsinhnahjinnie, however, reconfigures the space of the memoir to confront the disciplining head on: “As the self-­described aboriginal savant, I have photographed and written about my observance of myself, family, community and those other people.” In the pages of this memoir, settlers are the ones who occupy, are exotic, and made curios. They are the unnamed, but implied and known: “those other people” who have become part of the memoir. Her visually disorienting photographs accompany disorienting texts, reconfigure settler space, and focus on the experience of “living on Occupied land.” Much of  Tsinhnahjinnie’s memoir is tongue and cheek, sarcastic, and a focused critique of dominant discourses of representation and white possession that determine our sight or what we see; and by placing the body so, she reconfigures a grammar of place. The viewer will encounter the unexpected in this Aboriginal memoir, which will not reaffirm notions of Indians bodies or settler place, and more importantly will not reaffirm the settler power. The memoir’s objective, which is to display a personal experience, is disrupted and instead depicts a lived experience on multiple scales with 240  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

various intersecting story lines. Tsinhnahjinnie’s use of memoir is an accounting of the imaginary construction that all is too real for Aboriginal savants, and it is of an imaginative quality that is constantly opening up possibilities to revolutionize our embodied spatialities. Even though her “life has been a wild west show,” the possibilities are not already constructed, as Tsinhnahjinnie remains unpredictable and undetermined in the pages of her memoir and provides a space for how she sees herself as she reflects on the places she has been throughout her life. The panels reflect the spaces into which the artist was born and in which she performs and constitutes her existence. Judith Butler’s assertion that it is in the performance and performativity of gender that social norms are created and power is manifested informs my reading of the memoir and examination of the repetitive and often-­gendered performances of  Indian identity.12 It is in the ubiquitous performativity of certain gestures, acts, and bodily movements of  Indian identity, not only in the United States but also on a global scale, that the settler construction of the Indian arrives on the world stage. By calling attention to the various nested locales of performativity, as a theory of subjectivity, I refigure the binded (pun intended) everyday life of Aboriginal savants and occupied land. The photos link the personal experience to the consistent representation of  Indians, an identity formed through the repetitive images of  Native people in photographs and texts. In her memoir, the panels are composed of multiple familiar genres to reflect this: postcards, newspaper clippings, family photos, portraits, anthropology texts, literary texts, coloring books, government posters, and journals. These are the forms of writing that impact Native peoples, and these are subsequently the forms used to displace the conceptual maps of settler colonialism. Place is also not restrictive in the memoir, just as it isn’t in the everyday reality of Native peoples throughout the Americas. These images move through the space of time, creating temporalities that rub up against each other. Yes, the progression of the exhibit mirrors her progression in terms of age, but the panels’ intertextualities open up the “pauses” she chooses to take. The tearing at the edges tells us that these pages are torn from a larger memoir, which “contain[s] endless pages of Native intelligence, Native resistance, Native pride, countless pages.” Some of the panels contain page numbers, and some do not. Some reflect the year, such as in the high school yearbook with the number 75, and yet others reflect her age. Linear time is disordered in these moments, creating a messy narrative that moves in and through space and pauses in various places. In this way, knowing the Aboriginal savant is always partial and incomplete, and Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  241

power relations are unstable as Tsinhnahjinnie “troubles” the category of “Indian” at multiple scales. It is in these unpredictable pauses that Native people inhabit the everydayness and perform subversive acts of dismantling settler space. Tsinhnahjinnie’s work reflects places that are familiar to many in the Native audience: the Bay Area, Gallup, the Rez, boarding school, high school, and the family backyard.13 These are sources, or as the preeminent cultural geographer Yi-­Fu Tuan states, “places we live in and call home at all scales from house and neighborhood to nation and the earth itself.”14 Tuan argues that in order to achieve full subjectivity, it is important to understand the connection between place and space in forming subjectivity. The places depicted in Tsinhnahjinnie’s work are recognizable in a Native grammar of place—that is, the familiarity of the places she discusses to a Native audience are structured through our experiences with settler colonialism. The way we come to understand the meaning of places depicted in Tsinhnahjinnie’s work is from understanding the movement of Native bodies in time and space. Tuan defined the meaning of place through a contingent examination of space. I propose that this construction is useful in terms of place making in a colonial context. Tuan postulates that space is open in movement, while places are the pauses along the way with other subsets of pauses made through experiences.15 In this pause, value and belonging emerge, whereas in space the abstraction of science prevails. It is the space of settler grammars when the racial management and purity of Native peoples are quantifiable. Whether through force or coercion, the settler state attempts to abstract Native peoples from their home places as they became managed on reservations. As Kevin Bruyneel poignantly states in The Third Space of Sovereignty, regarding continually shifting and often ambivalent policies toward Indigenous people: “American colonial impositions continually seek to reaffirm a sense of national belonging for the settler-­society so as to, among other things, forestall discussion of the political implications of the fact that Indigenous people assert a deeper temporal and spatial sense of belonging.”16 Tsinhnahjinnie’s pages of the memoir pause in moments that reflect the deeper senses of landscape, social networks, memory, desire, and introspection of a savant living on occupied land. The memoir is partial and never a complete story of the Aboriginal savant, but through the culmination of pauses along the way, belonging and a history of displacement emerge not only to show the pattern of settler-­colonial restructuring of  Native lands and bodies but also to show those moments when the pattern fails. 242  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

However, even places that are recognizably Native in moments are not fixed and are often contested in Tsinhnahjinnie’s work. Tsinhnahjinnie’s work illuminates the abstraction of  Native place and Native bodies into the territory of the nation-­state of the settler imaginary, a change that has occurred through the process of colonialism and neocolonialism. She is constantly unsettling colonial visual and narrative geographies and expressing a history of disciplining Native bodies. Visual art, through its presentation of the familiar in new frames, upsets a grammar of place often internalized by Native people by presenting places as overlapping in their politics of scale. The Reservation, the Urban, and Occupied Nations

In the “People of the Wandering Flocks” panel, Tsinhnahjinnie evokes a dominant grammar of tradition in place: the sepia-­toned wide-­angled picture depicts a Navajo grandmother preparing to tend her flock of sheep in a pueblo (see figure 9.1).17 The photo itself is reminiscent of Curtis’s photos: its beauty is composed of a play with light, accented by dark shadows, and Native subjects. It is familiar to the viewer. Curtis, a photographer hired by J. P. Morgan to capture disappearing Indians, was crucial to the vanishing-­ Indian motif, and his photography still lingers in the spatial imaginary of most Americans.18 Curtis’s photos and subsequent renderings of the reservation become the “authentic” grammar of Native space that is contrasted with the proper space of the nation. Michelle Raheja elicits the connection between tourism and temporalities that are manifested in these images: “From their creation, reservations have been often-­perverse tourism sites where non-­Indians would travel to experience a glimpse into a purportedly ‘vanished’ culture. Reservations became living dioramas where tourists could punitively step outside of time and space to see ‘real’ Indians (or what passed for the ‘real’ in the settler nation’s national mythology).”19 Tsinhnahjinnie disrupts this colonially defined Indian place and the stagnancy of tradition in the colonial narrative by labeling the panel “People of the Wandering Flocks”; she presents in vast detail her return to the reservation during the summers and her return at the specific moment of her grandmother’s death. Temporality and the spatializing of Native bodies are shifted in the memoir—this pause in Tsinhnahjinnie’s memory is pregnant with con­tinued returning and fluidity. The movement between generations, or time, and locales are all presented in the narrative. While the narrative specifically gives direction to the location (“we would drive north to Chinle on to Many Farms Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  243

Figure 9.1  Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Tuskegee/Diné), “People of the Wandering Flocks (#6),” from the series Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant, 1994. Unique digital print on aged book stock. 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the artist.

head west 15 miles and drive up to Margaret’s hogan and not far would be grandmas [sic] hogan”), it does not contain these bodies on the Rez, nor in the past. Her grandmother “was traditional in her living and traditional in her beliefs,” but her 105 years of settler onslaught “encompassed an array of experiences.” Tsinhnahjinnie ends by not only expanding the temporality of her grandmother but also expanding the distances she traveled— chanting the following line four times in the four directions: “From the memories of my grandmother I am made strong.” It is in the unlimited 244  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

pauses in time and space that Native experience extends beyond the jurisdictional lines defined through U.S. law and opens up Native experiences to an interconnected world. Representing visual registers that acknowledge movement through time and space, such as the one Tsinhnahjinnie presents us, avoids reaffirming notions of vanishing Indians or stagnant traditions and provides a sense of place made strong through intergenerational memory. The panel operates on a variety of scales, from the intersecting stories of her grandmother’s life of movement, survival, and strength to Tsinhnahjinnie’s life, shored up by these memories. Part of what makes the intergenerational memory strong is Tsinhnahjinnie thinking about the “outside influences, governmental policies, missionaries” and how her grandma survived and maintained her sense of traditions. Tsinhnahjinnie’s challenge to the viewer that her grandmother will “never be American enough, because you have to be a foreigner to be a true American,” dismantles state place making by unsettling statist assumptions of belonging—from the very definitions of a true American— in a settler-­colonial grammar of place that requires a subjugated victim, isolation, and purity of the Native.20 Tsinhnahjinnie’s grandmother is anything but, and stands as a testimonial to a temporal and spatial belonging that provides strength to endure over a hundred years of shifting settler-­ state policies that continue to legitimize the state’s own sovereignty and colonial rule. Belonging comes through in the pauses between memories and panels, and her grandma’s place is given meaning not just through its traditionalism or imagining of purity but through intergenerational embodied experiences. Tsinhnahjinnie also provides what is too often set up as the opposite of the “pure, Native space of the reservation”—the urban, relocation center. The visual register of the urban setting is a charged place for Native people—there is an acknowledgment of a vast majority of Native people residing off reservation and a recognition of the numerous official policies and economic tyranny that has led to many seeking opportunities in various cities across the United States.21 Yet, in the structures set up through a settler grammar, so-­called real Natives reside on the reservation. This received image causes a pause when the viewer is presented with the living Native body. Tsinhnahjinnie depicts a Native living body against the Bay Area monument of the Golden Gate Bridge—both of these prominent objects in the panel are easily identifiable (see figure 9.2). The significance of the Bay Area as a relocation center, however, is a piece of extratextual information that can inform the reader’s or viewer’s Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  245

Figure 9.2  Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Tuskegee/Diné), “In the Air Heading to MSP (#8),” from the series Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant, 1994. Unique digital print on aged book stock. 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the artist.

interpretation according to his or her understanding of the grammar of place. The monument of the Golden Gate Bridge marks the image as the Bay Area, while the presence of the Indian woman in full regalia marks her identity as Native. Yet interpretation of these two signposts may differ, as might the struggle to read the photo. To certain audiences—aware of the history of the Muwekma Ohlone’s struggle in the Bay Area and Yerba Buena Island, federal termination policies, and Oakland’s identity as one of the largest relocation spots—the shadow of the Indian woman in the 246  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

distance is not jarring. It is actually a historical representation of colonial spatial restructuring unacknowledged in dominant discourses, even though it was an instrumental counterpart to termination, which led to the further absorption of Native lands into the settler state.22 The urban Bay Area is not coded in the U.S. imagination as Indian, furthering the historical alienation of Natives in place. For instance, the traditional dressed body of the Native (though not traditional for this specific locale as she is in plains clothing), conflicts with the urban, which is often interpreted as civilized place. Tsinhnahjinnie reworks the settler-­colonial grammar of place through the visual and in presenting an embodied space. I will push the disruption of this settler-­colonial grammar of place further, by dismantling the binary of urban and rez as one that has resulted from a conceived and perceived spatiality, historicality, and sociality. Following Butler’s notion of performativity, the urban Indian has problematically become readable as an identity to contemporary Native communities, even as communities struggle to reconcile this with the colonial structures that impinge on self-­determination. To disrupt a settler grammar of place, however, we must remember the history and ongoing settlement of the original tribal peoples of the Bay Area. Constructing national myths and making absent the presence of Native people of specific tribal affiliations with particular affiliations and histories to specific places is part of the discursive edifice of settler space. Places are constructed through reiterative practices: they are social productions that provide the context of our actions. Thus, the images and texts, or space of representation, are not deterministic, as we see in the visual and textual refusal to erase Native peoples from the Bay Area. Yet while the history of relocation is recalled through the signpost of the body, the original inhabitation is not made present. Why do bodies belong in one place, the rez, and not the other? What bodies belong where and when? What does it mean when these bodies are undisciplined and unreadable?23 The Native woman in figure 9.2 (panel 3) looks at the lights of the city to the west, perhaps from the vantage point of a gravesite found in the eastern part of the island. The visual tells us a partial story, but it is in the accompanying words that the image of colonial conditions is presented as only being able to tell a partial story. Movies, films, and recognition policies exploit the dreams of Native people: Be careful of your dreams there’s some white guy ready to package and sell them. Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  247

White guy, shit. Watch out for your economic developed brothers and sisters, who have self-­determined that they can express your native experience better than you. Commodification of the “Native experience” is highlighted in this moment, taking on special resonance in the Bay Area, which is home to the Muwekma Ohlone. The Ohlone are currently a nonfederally recognized nation due to the negligence of the Sacramento superintendent Col. Lafayette A. Dorrington, and are seeking a means to “self-­determination” after being terminated in 1927.24 Yet many California Indians struggle with the fact that being recognized means playing Indian according to the Office of Federal Acknowledgement—a colonial operation of control that sets up a settler grammar of place that defines California Indians as landless and limits their recourse to recognition of their existence as a people or nation. Tsinhnahjinnie reminds the spectator: Our word isn’t revolution. Our word is sovereignty. Sovereignty for all red nations. If sovereignty is “our word” rather than revolution, then I am advocating that we think about what that means in its spatiality beyond replicated colonial borders, ordering, and received grammars. Border Towns and Child’s Play

The work of cultural geographers enables Native studies to examine the way that narrative and the visual impact lived realities and do not merely reflect them. In the Gallup panel, Tsinhnahjinnie turns to the violence of creating a settler grammar of place, and to do so she goes to the incredibly violent space of border towns. As in many memoirs that track a personal journey, Tsinhnahjinnie recalls how she wanted to be a photojournalist, and so she began to photograph Gallup, New Mexico: “Gallup was a place to expose and exploit, I began taking photographs and the pain came in waves.” Later, after dropping the project, she found a book that was similar in scope to her original intention. The picture she chose for the panel is from Bordertowns, compiled by Marc Gaede and Marnie Gaede, a photographer and his editor. The book, of which Tsinhnahjinnie is highly 248  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

critical, depicts the deaths of  Indian people in Gallup.25 The Indians are unnamed, violently splayed as a testament to a natural demise and rise of settler spaces. Tsinhnahjinnie asserts that the place of Gallup is real and imagined: “The self-­described Indian capital of the world. It is a strange place where one can be wild and free, until you wake up.” The wake-­up call is depicted in the photo she chooses—a policeman forcing an intoxicated Indian man into a paddy wagon. This was the tamest image (I assume in the interest of not wanting to replicate the violence) in this “photo journal” that uses crime-­scene and accident photos to depict the bodies of  Indians brutally murdered and victims of car wrecks—Indians who are blamed for their own demise by constructing a visual grammar of pathology depicting Indian bodies in the space of Gallup and the temporality of death. The photos in Bordertowns are presented without a written text. The on-­t he-­scene photos are vividly real and document the very minutia of violent death. The production of Bordertowns produces visual and narrative spatial imaginaries that commit further acts of violence in the visual and circulated space of a coffee-­table book. The visual violence in this book, while being extremely obscene and dehumanizing, stems from a long line of such depictions and reaffirms the spatial imaginary of the alcoholic, diseased, and dying population of American Indians who supposedly cannot cope with a changing time and space. Instead of interrogating the violence that is set up in occupied territory, settler discourses tend to pathologize and commodify Native people; even their bodies in death are commodified, disrespected, and naturalized in these images presented in the form of a coffee-­table book. The commodification of Native bodies and land far precedes Marc Gaede’s articulation in this book, however. The material effect of this imagining is the obfuscation of violence against Native people, especially in interracial areas. The lived reality of Native populations is that the average age of a Native male is thirty-­nine years; he is much more likely to die of a violent crime than his white male counterpart, and on average American Indians experience per capita twice the amount of violent crime than the rest of the population.26 Yet this can only be understood through the fact that this crime is 71 percent more likely to be committed by someone from another race.27 In fact, all too often we still see the vanishing, dying, drunk image, albeit toned down, in much of popular culture. The settler grammar of place in this visual encounter is familiar in the depiction of the border town. The excess presence of the Native body is dealt with violently, materially, historically, and in its criminalized sociality. The layered lived reality of  TsinhnahjinDisrupting a Grammar of Place  |  249

nie’s intertextual subjectivity brings her to a different place than the photographer who exploits the violence of Gallup. A place like Gallup, where transient tourists flock to buy Indian art and souvenirs that document their journey to the frontier, does more than reaffirm Gallup in the spatial imaginary; the place also reaffirms and settles the perceived and conceived space of the nation. The frontier affirms the more “civilized” places in the center of the settler state. Tsinhnahjinnie unsettles settler axioms created through this voyeurism and raises critical points about these visual narratives and their relationship to embodied spaces. She does this also recognizing her own vulnerability to received notions of space. Tsinhnahjinnie, however, proposes a new space of inquiry and tells us of a different project “to docu­ ment white voyeurism and alcoholism” as a violent practice and a part of constituting a settler grammar. Depicting violence against Native bodies is naturalized as a part of making state territories.28 The violence, such as that in Gallup, comes to be naturalized as an unfortunate by-­product of progress, often a synonym for colonization. Tsinhnahjinnie poignantly asks of the Gallup pictures, “What if a native child sat down with this book, the damage to the spirit would be immense.” She asks this knowing full well the intensity of the visual on Native children’s conception of self. Native children are constantly subjected to these images, as we also see in the “Chief Hot Foot” panel culled from a child’s coloring book. Presented is the generic, cartoon Indian, whose body you can inhabit quite literally by placing your fingers through cutout holes to form “Indian” legs. Interestingly, there is also a place on the coloring page to insert the place names of the city and state. Indians may exist every­ where, but they are effectively made part of the past in these neoliberal politics through the child’s play and structures of colonialism. Tsinhnahjinnie connects these seemingly harmless images to that of state practices of  land theft: “Take a person, turn them into a cartoon they become unreal and if you happen to hurt or steal from these unreal people, nothing wrong has been done.” The visual and settler narrative is affirmed in images such as the generic Chief Hot Foot, and Tsinhnahjinnie’s tool to displace the settler spatial imaginary is to embolden the letters, requesting, “Native children[,] defuse this image.” Rather than hide it from site/sight in liberal politics, she advocates for uncovering a “hidden agenda” in the dramatic play. The images of Gallup and the seemingly benign coloring book are not disconnected, nor can they be boiled down to racial ignorance. This is instead about making Native land part of the state by either violent killing or violent erasure of present Native bodies. 250  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

Living on Occupied Land and Nation-­States

Settler colonialism relies on producing closed, categorized, and defined spaces—or a grammar of settler space—to practice “scattered forms of dominance-­in-­hegemony,” Matthew Sparke usefully defines “scattered forms of dominance-­in-­hegemony” as “operative at and across the personal and national scales just as much as (and often at the same time as) at the global scales of transnationalism and the world system.”29 Natives crossing and traversing in their own land experience these “scattered forms of dominance-­in-­hegemony” as the logics of settler colonialism order land and bodies in a particular schema that upholds its spatial dominance. No matter how imagined and ridiculous this schema may seem, scattered forms of dominance in spatialities are part of everydayness. Tsinhnahjinnie’s snapshot of a trip she took to Mexico elicits the charged nature of traversing borders to visit a different location, border, and people. In the Tijuana panel the border between Mexico and the United States becomes a site of interrogation into spatial imaginaries and our very real embodied presence in them. Tsinhnahjinnie reflects on a border-­crossing trip to Tijuana with a friend—that infamous place of lawlessness and no-­man’s land where tourists flock to get away from the so-­called civilized and ordered space of the United States.30 She uses a personal snapshot, complete with a burro and sombrero, to capture this event in a foreign space. Mexico is the new frontier or border of civilized space; Tsinhnahjinnie opens with a reflection on her trip: “The only border art we did, we ate, bought a plaster Virgin De Guadalupe, ate again, went to the mercado [market] and bought a bottle of centario [Tequilia].” Her narrative does not end with the visual or this narrative, however, as she begins to unpack the layering of her individual history and the history of U.S. nation building throughout the installation. She recognizes the seemingly arbitrary nature of the border, constructions of power relations, and the ideologies that naturalize Mexico as the foreign and lawless vacation spot: “Just so happens I was born on the Northern side of the border, I remember reading somewhere, the Seminoles were requesting to be relocated to Mexico rather than Oklahoma.” In this photo-­ journal moment, Tsinhnahjinnie identifies the convergence of history and ideology in this embodied place: “The United States government thought that would be a negative mark on nationalistic pride in that, they would be perceived as unable to handle the welfare of their Indians.” Claiming space and the acts of claiming and placing people converge in the construction of Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  251

settler space. There are many possible outcomes in settler-­colonial grammars. In the memoir, Tsinhnahjinnie reminds the reader of the speaking subjects “who have an Oklahoma accent when they might just as well have a south of the border accent.” Possibilities of the past and present converge in these intersecting story lines, upsetting a set temporal and spatial settler grammar. Yet while border crossing privileges certain narrated bodies in some instances, there are moments when the material reality of the border orders the everyday life of Native people “living on occupied land.” Contemporary Native artists, such as Tsinhnahjinnie, interarticulate and rearticulate the intersectionalities that inform our everyday existence and offer up new spatial imaginaries that depict these new world systems. Tsinhnahjinnie ends her Tijuana panel by commanding the viewer: “The border to the south, tell me again how it differs from the Berlin wall.” After all, North American dominance begins with the repressive relationship between the Native individual and the state; U.S. dominance abroad is dependent on the resources at “home,” which is itself dependent on the domination of Native people. Presenting “scattered” textual and visual forms of dominance on a global, national, community, and individual scale, Tsinhnahjinnie disrupts forms of possession at various scales and colonial-­settler spatial practices by demonstrating interlocking and overlapping systems of power in which we are all implicated. Settler power is instrumental in maintaining global power, but this is done at the very scale of regulating bodies. Figure 9.3, the “Don’t Leave The Rez Without It!” panel, depicts the power of the symbolic; restriction of  Indian activities occurs through the colonial tool of government-­issued Bureau of Indian Affairs cards that act like passports into the social relam. Figure 9.3 plays with the forms of dominance, particularly in recognition of who is and isn’t Indian, that the cards depicted in the figure take. While all the other cards belong to an “Indian Activist” of the past, Tsinhnahjinnie’s card stands out as an “Indian Artist” and a contemporary example. The play between artist and activist is punctuated by the fact that the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 stipulates that art labeled Indian must be produced by those possessing certified Indian membership. The dilemma produced by the messiness of recognition—at both the scale of federal or state recognition of a tribal nation and the recognition of individuals as Indian—serves to highlight the spatial and temporal contradictions at play in settler colonialism. The visual narrative of tribal enrollment cards that juxtapose the United States of America and the Indian activist—under the poster declaring, “Don’t 252  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

Figure 9.3  Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Tuskegee/Diné), “Don’t Leave the Rez Without It! (#7),” from the series Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant, 1994. Unique digital print on aged book stock. 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the artist.

leave the Rez Without It! NEVER!”—reflects an understanding of the relationship between geopolitics and the making of settler nations. The narrative can refer to the card, but its indirect reference could also open the possibility of the “it” being an awareness of attempts to control identity in the effort to control activism. Bodies are in place and placed through colonial logics that endeavor to limit the very activism that Tsinhnahjinnie is promoting in her art. Gwendolyn Wright and Paul Rabinow comment on Foucault and the panopticon: “The degree of a mechanism,” in this case the passport or Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  253

id card, “is reduced to its ideal form, a coordination of abstract schematization and very concrete applications.”31 These forms of identification restrict Native movement through space and attempt to restrict belonging to tribal nations in accordance to the practices of the state. The passport is concrete and abstract simultaneously. As Audra Simpson’s work makes clear, the border is a place of deep power struggle and enunciation—a moment that crosses time and various conceptions of territories and ultimately affects subjecthood: “This explicit right to pass, then, implicitly leaves the legal regimes of Canada and the United States with the power to define who those Indian nations are and how that right to pass shall be rendered and respected. As well, and very critically, the regimes of the United States and Canada were bequeathed the power to choose whom they would recognize as members of these communities.”32 While Simpson examines the revenue rule and failed consent from a legal and anthropological standpoint and on an international scale, here I am presenting a visual narrative that grasps with the power of the state as asserted over individuals. In doing so, the scales are overlapping and deeply connected. The fact that Tsinhnahjinnie carries a “United States of America/Government Approved and Certified/Indian Artist” card—that she imagined—raises questions about a Native adoption of a settler grammar of place. Do we need a card documenting an approval by the United States in order to resist that very same entity’s control over our land and bodies? This is particularly pointed in the panel, as many great cultural heroes—who are widely diverse through time and geographic place but are held together in their resistance to U.S. occupation of their land—are included as Indian activists with their own Tsinhnahjinnie-­produced U.S. government cards. Native Bodies on the Move

I have discussed place thus far in terms of the reservation, the urban, the erased Native nation in the urban, and the border town, but what of the mobile Native body that moves between these places? How do these bodies register in a settler grammar? How might a recuperation of the mobile Native subject disrupt the logics of this grammar itself? How does the body become necessary to understanding a politics of scale that imagines possibilities outside the logics of U.S. colonialism? One of the more clever disruptions of a grammar of settler place occurs in the picture of an older Geronimo (figure 9.4). Geronimo is outlined by common words we associate with the place now named Florida. For those 254  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

Figure 9.4  Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Tuskegee/Diné), “Geronimo (#11),” from the series Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant, 1994. Unique digital print on aged book stock. 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the artist.

who do not know the history of Geronimo—and perhaps even for those of us who do—Everglades, Disney, gators, beaches, palm trees, Geritol, and Seminoles are not words that evoke the place in which we imagine him. In the constructed spatial imaginary, Geronimo is often situated in the Southwest or at traveling shows, affirmed by the mass circulation of photographs, postcards, and, currently, mass-­produced images on T-­shirts. Left out of the visual registrar are Geronimo’s experiences in the landscapes of Florida. His imprisonment by the U.S. government was a pivotal turning point in his personal life, and also in U.S. history. Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  255

His image in a way is the hinge in how settler histories and space are conceived. It was in his lived experience as a captive in Florida that shifted his role from the lauded warrior against the violently encroaching U.S. and Mexican governments to the conquered object in a Wild West show. By changing the language of place, both visually and textually, Tsinhnahjinnie provokes a questioning of our received notions of Geronimo as the homogenized Indian warrior open to commodification. The homogenized and masculine Indian is a statist category set up to erase the specificity of tribal place and lived bodies—in fact it erases Geronimo’s very resistance to the settlement of his homelands and the consequent subjugation of his people by the United States and Mexico. Geronimo becomes captured by photographs and the colonial texts; his defeat is played out over gene­ rations. For instance, Geronimo becomes Indian, not Apache, through reiterative practices as his image circulates in vague conquered space, not in the Apache home landscapes he fought so hard to maintain. The Aboriginal savant transforms the image of Geronimo to make us question not only where Geronimo should be located but also notions of immobile attachments to locations. Temporally, Geronimo must become a fixture of a past struggle and a conquered present in a settler imaginary of place. This calls into question the production of place as well—what narratives have proliferated where the history of Geronimo’s imprisonment in Florida has been erased? Why do we recognize our disorientation between the visual and the written, even while we understand that the list is formed from words associated with Florida? What do Disney and Seminoles have to do with each other? Why is Geronimo a pause in Tsinhnahjinnie’s memoir? The received grammar of place crumbles in the dissonance between place, which we understand as Florida, and temporality, which we understand through the figure of Geronimo—he is literally a body out of place. In this dissonance, Native spaces are opened up, and this reforms our thinking of not only Geronimo but also the national myths narrating the space of the nation. Conceived and perceived notions of place and bodies in those spaces are revealed, and in doing so the discourses and interpretations that converge to produce settled truisms are rethought on a conscious and subconscious level. At each moment in Tsinhnahjinnie’s memoir the body in place matters and elicits specific meanings that contradict a grammar of place that is heteronormative, masculine, and riddled with settler hierarchies. The nation-­state in this sense, or the United States, is about rearranging geo-

256  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

cultural ideas of place. Tsinhnahjinnie breaks from the binary of conceived and perceived space through the visual insertion of Native bodies in unexpected contexts; she constructs a space-­time in the memoir that is based on lived or practiced spaces, rather than those in a settler spatial imaginary. By examining a politics of scale in conjunction with lived bodies, we might push the theory in more productive ways by moving beyond the body as a signifier of race or gender and examining the meanings of bodies in certain places.33 The liberal state relies on categories of race and gender to set up a settler grammar of place that maintains state power over space, bodies, and time. Many of the pauses in Tsinhnahjinnie’s memoir are seemingly timeless and do not belong to a particular geography; they instead occur at the scale of  the body. Tsinhnahjinnie’s nude, for instance, recalls a long line of great American Indian female nudes (see figure 9.5, which is panel 4). This is a visually provocative image, immediately drawing the viewer’s gaze to the partial body, in which a young Aboriginal woman is “one with the land.” Native women’s bodies were surfaces, inscribed with alignment to messy nature, open to conquest.34 A racial grammar of categorization worked to solidify Europeans’ place in the world as they met up with multiple different worlds. Native people in this schema were closely aligned to nature and thus did not receive the same treatment or so-­called property rights to land. This pause that lingers on the Native body recalls the coding of early Europeans who dehumanized Native people by creating a grammar of place that named and claimed the New World through the bodily inscription of Native women.35 The early “flotsam and jetsam of a navigational error” created the context of  Tsinhnahjinnie’s “existence,” as she states in the prologue. The movement and error indicated in the narration of space in this panel, however, helps us to conceive of these early moments of categorizing Native bodies, a pause in time, as not predetermined. Rather than fixed interstices, the memoir’s panels are pauses within a particular location; the pauses that compose the memoir are not objective positions—purely controlled spaces and hegemonies—but rather modalities of space and the body, such as memory, senses, language, imagination, and perception, that transgress the spatial orders of the border, nation-­ state, reservation, and city. By walking through the panels, pausing at fixed moments in one woman’s life, the viewer must engage with knowledge production. Tsinhnahjinnie plays on the inscription of  Native women’s bodies by providing an alternative and modern narrative of  “intertribal lust.” This

Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  257

Figure 9.5  Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Tuskegee/Diné), “Lust 101 (#10),” from the series Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant, 1994. Unique digital print on aged book stock. 14 x 11 in. Courtesy of the artist.

“repatriating of the erotic” plays with the image of the Native’s close alignment with the land and the fact that both body and land must be tamed and ordered according to a settler-­colonial grammar of place.36 Embodied space, especially in this visual terrain, is perhaps the most critical site to watch the production and reproduction of power in relation to Native peoples and the land. The untamed nature of the photo resists settler-­colonial mappings, and it pushes the dialogue forward through its queering and reconfiguring of intimate events: 258  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

Intertribal Lust Vermilion Romance Just another Two spirited Indian love call By employing common descriptors found in colonial narratives, Tsinhnahjinnie transgresses the grammar of place to create an everyday reality that unsettles notions of bourgeois intimacy and romantic notions captured by Pocahontas and her progeny. The text refutes the colonial intimate construction of the vermilion romance, that is, of a romance that has a red hue, which is usually a romantic convening of an “Indian squaw” and white pioneer-­explorer-­settler, in “intertribal lust.” The use of the version of the word “vermilion” in the short poem refers directly to the land and red rocks made of pigment made from mercury sulfide, thus the artist cleverly binds settlers’ romance of land and Native bodies. The discourses of “vermilion romances” abound in the history of U.S. literature, from the earliest late nineteenth-­century dime novels, such as Maleaska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, whose success relied on the heterocoupling of the Native woman and white settler, to the burgeoning film industry of the mid-­t wentieth century, which further affirmed the visual registrar of  these relations to present New Age movements. The continual fascination of  Indian sexuality in vermilion romance and the current—often but not always New Age—fascination with “two spirited love calls” throughout various temporalities is part of the settler grammar used to regulate sexuality and Native relationships that are instrumental to the structures of colonialism. Mark Rifkin’s book When Did Indians Become Straight? researches the link between romance plots and the theft of Native land. He argues that “the potential for Native Americans to circulate radical counternarratives of home and family was greatly curtailed by the institutionalizing of the romance plot organizing federal Indian policy.”37 Yet it is Native bodies that are made absent in settler-­spatial imaginaries. The visual terrain set forth in this panel demands that we interrogate our locations in relation to the woman’s body and the power it contains. While the naked body planted in wild, untamed grass draws our attention, the refusal of the woman with closed eyes to even look at us also speaks to power. If, as Barbara Hooper and others suggest, “the whole of (social) space proceeds from the body,” then Tsinhnahjinnie is doing more than freeing Native women’s bodies; she is also rearranging social space.38 She frees up the romantic relationship from its heteronormative and raced place that has Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  259

profoundly impacted the lived realities of Native people whose intimate acts have been consistently regulated by the state.39 As noted by Hooper, the body is more than a bioproduct of culture: “It is a concrete physical space of flesh and bone, of chemistries and electricities; it is a highly mediated space, a space transformed by cultural interpretations and representations; it is a lived space, a volatile space of conscious and unconscious desires and motivations—a body/self, a subject, an identity; it is in sum, a social space, a complexity involving workings of power and knowledge and the workings of bodies[’] lived unpredictabilities.”40 The image of the body is important to pause on in this moment, but I suggest that we also look at the temporal and spatial structures of meaning that this reiterated image portrays. This body is unpredictable and transgresses a settler-­colonial grammar of place; it is marked as Native and queer from the subtitles, and thus not visually bounded by a settler grammar. The desire implicated in this frame is not to be used in the economies of civilized, heteronormative, or white settler colonialism—or to become a subject, a mere body of difference in the framework of colonialism. The image instead is in a continuous becoming, and thus resists the transfer of land via conquest of the Native woman’s body, a body rooted and growing in the soil.41 This body is transfigured and refuses to be an ethnographic subject who is raced, sexualized, or displaced as part of a nationalistic discourse and settler agenda. Conclusion

In a letter addressed to her diary, Tsinhnahjinnie speaks to the politics of feeling lucky: lucky to be tribally enrolled, demonstrated by her enrollment numbers across her forehead; lucky to have the ear of President Clinton for the “first time”; and so lucky she says, “All my problems done gone away.” The sarcasm here is punctuated by the fact that she “feel[s] like wearing a Washington Redskins Hat,” emphasizing that regardless of the politics of meeting with a U.S. president, Native people continue to be constructed as the unreal and as politically vacated from the land. Spillers, in contemplating an “American grammar,” addresses the structure that allowed for such violence in slavery: “For three centuries of human life, [people] were not curious about this ‘cargo’ that bled, packed like so many live sardines among the immovable objects. Such inveterate obscene blindness might be denied, point blank, as a possibility for anyone, except that we know it happened.”42 Settler-­colonial grammar assembles an absence of violence in ongoing Native-­white relations, yet as in slavery, we know what happened, and what continues to happen. 260  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

The breaking down of the visual boundaries in this piece (re)maps the spatiality and temporality of settler place. In her corporeal inhabiting of various places in her photographic memoir, Tsinhnahjinnie extends her analysis beyond dominant representations that order space and erase and categorize Native bodies. Within her accounts she lives with moments of spatiality (the page taken from Minnesota or the Bay Area, for instance), historicality (the pages that document boarding schools, Wild West shows, men’s participation in the military, and narratives of discovery), and sociality (each photo holds a personal memory and evokes a particular relationship). Soja asserts that historicality, sociality, and spatiality “are summary terms for the social production of space, time, and being in the world.”43 The pauses that compose Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant (Living on Occupied Land) play with temporality, image, and spaces by asserting an alternative to settler colonialism’s ontological grammar without ignoring the material reality of what it means to live on “occupied land.” The imagining of space and creation of very real productive relationships is tangible and yet flexible enough to reimagine new ways of existing. Tsinhnahjinnie demands through her visual memoir that we put the contexts of space and time within the epistemologies and lived experience of the Aboriginal savant. For instance, let us not celebrate three hours of a politician’s time, as she comments in one of her panels: “The meeting was three hours long. Three hours to discuss Native issues. Three hours out of 200 years.” Her work provides a moment to pause in our struggle for Native nation building and considers other imaginative geographies that do not close down possibilities; they instead rather ask tough questions and demand an awareness of the ways that we are limiting possibilities. It is necessary—and at times it takes a savant, particularly an Aboriginal one—to begin to dismantle the many forms of settler-­state dominance and start demanding that the settler state “just give the land back.” Notes

1. The following criteria must be meet under the federal recognition guidelines: “(1) A statement of facts establishing that the petitioner has been identified as an American Indian entity on a substantially continuous basis since 1900; (2) a statement of facts and an analysis of such facts establishing that a predominant portion of the membership of the petitioner (a) comprises a community distinct from those communities surrounding that community and (b) has existed as a community from historical times to the present; (3) a statement of facts and analysis of such facts establishing that the petitioner has maintained political influence or authority over its members as an autonomous Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  261

entity from historical times until the time of the documented petition; (4) a copy of the then present governing document of the petitioner that includes the membership criteria; and (5) a list of all then current members of the petitioner, a copy of each available former membership list and a statement of the methods used in preparing the lists. Membership would have to consist of established descendancy from an Indian group that existed historically, or from historical Indian groups that combined and functioned as a single autonomous entity,” see S. 504 and H.R. 1175. 2. Les W. Field with the Muwekema Ohlone Tribe, “Unacknowledged Tribes, Dangerous Knowledge: The Mukwekma Ohlone and How Indian Identities Are ‘Known,’ ” Wicazo Sa Review 18, no. 2 (2003): 85. As of 2003 the Branch of Acknowledgment became the Office of Federal Acknowledgment. 3. See Jacqueline Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indian: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); and Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). 4. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 63. 5. See Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987). 6. Foundational literature includes Robert Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); and Vizenor’s play with representation in Manifest Manners. Vizenor warns against creating structures that bind in simple form what it means to be Native in the present and to avoid becoming “terminal creeds.” For an excellent collection of essays on representation, see Gretchen Bataille, ed., Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001). Finally, for a discussion of multiple forms of representation in popular culture, see Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). 7. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 92. 8. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 149. 9. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 23. 10. As Audra Simpson pointed out, this is a direct reference to Claude Lévi-­ Strauss, and his well-­k nown fascination for Native people, the trickster figure, and the myth making that are part of performative gestures. In fact, the idea of a Native or primitive mind flows throughout popular culture, and that idea has made it difficult to address very real contemporary problems. See Owens, Mixedblood Messages. 11. On containment, see Phil Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Kansas City: University of Kansas Press, 2004); on urban erasure, see Donald Fixico’s Termination and Relocation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 262  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

1990); on acquisition of space, see Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006). 12. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990). 13. For a complete view of this exhibit, see the page for Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant on Tsinhnahjinnie’s website, http://www.hulleah.com /Images/Memoirs/Memoirs.htm (accessed September 15, 2010). 14. Yi Fu Tuan, “Place, Art, and Self,” Princeton Public Lectures Series, http: //www.princeton.edu/WebMedia/lectures/, (accessed October 8, 2003). 15. Yi Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspectives of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 198. 16. Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-­Indigenous Relationships (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 9. 17. See an earlier piece on this topic, Mishuana Goeman, “From Place to Territories and Back Again: Centering Storied Land in the Discussion of  Indigenous Nation-­Building,” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 1, no. 1 (2008). 18. For more information, see Barbara A. Davis, Edward S. Curtis: The Life and Times of a Shadow Catcher (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1985); Christopher M. Lyman, The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions: Photographs of  Indians by Edward S. Curtis (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982); and Anne Makepeace, Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians (Anne Makepeace Productions, Inc. 2000). For artists’ thoughts on Curtis and his influences, see Lucy Lippard, ed., Partial Recall (New York: New Press, 1993). 19. Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 43. 20. Frank B. Wilderson III speaks to an ontological grammar of race relations in U.S. cinema, noting that they adhere to a structure of suffering. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 21. Relocation and termination marked an era of economic assimilation in Federal government and American Indian relations. Specific policy was put in place to move American Indians off the reservation and into certain cities as wage laborers. Termination of specified tribal lands was then seen as inevitable. See Donald Fixico, Termination and Relocation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990). 22. For further information on relocation and termination as part of colonial spatial restructuring, see my previous work, Mishuana Goeman, “Notes Towards a Native Feminism’s Spatial Practice,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009). 23. For an excellent exploration of a geographic area’s struggle with these sets of questions, see Renya Ramirez, Native Hubs: Culture, Community, and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  263

See especially her use of the hub as a method of negotiating colonial containment and erasure by examining the fluidity of Native communities and their ability to make sets of relations. 24. See the official Muwekma Ohlone site, http://www.muwekma.org/ (accessed September 20, 2010). 25. Marc Gaede and Marnie Walker Gaede, Bordertowns: Photographs by Marc Gaede (La Cañada, CA: Chaco Press: 1988). 26. According to the American Indians and Crime, 1992–­2000 report published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and compiled by Steven W. Perry in 2004, the correlation between violence and geography is clear: “During the 24-year period, 1976–­1999, about 75% of all murders of American Indians occurred in 10 States in which 61% of the American Indian population resided in 2000.” Important to note is that the data compiled by Perry is limited by the reporting data acknowledged as being difficult to obtain. These stunning numbers may even be higher. 27. Spero Manson, Janette Beals, Suzell Klein, Calvin Croy, and the ai-­superpfp Team, “Social Epidemiology of  Trauma among Two American Indian Reservation Populations,” American Journal of Public Health 95, no. 5 (2005): 856. 28. Critics across disciplines have confronted these national narratives as the foundation of U.S. nation building. See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-­Century America (Toronto: Atheneum, 1992) for an example of frontiers and regeneration; see Roy Harvey Pearce’s detailed analysis of the function of the concept of civilization in Savagism and Civilization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967); and see Reginald Horsman’s account of the uses of Manifest Destiny doctrine to support violence in Race and Manifest Destiny (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) is useful for an overview of race and empire building. Another foundational text is Richard Drinnon’s Facing West: The Metaphysics of  Indian Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). These seminal works provide ample evidence of the uses of  Indian and violence as necessary to the building of the United States as a First World superpower. 29. Matthew Sparke, “Political Geography: Political Geographies of Globalization III—Resistance,” Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 3 (2008): 780. 30. See Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–­1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). 31. Gwendolyn Wright and Paul Rabinow, “Spatialization of Power: A Discussion of the Work of Michel Foucault,” Skyline, (March): 16. 32. Audra Simpson, “Subjects of Sovereignty: Indigeneity, the Revenue Rule, and Juridics of Failed Consent,” Law and Contemporary Problems 71 (Summer 2008): 191. 264  |  Mishuana R. Goeman

33. The body is significant in a discussion of the “politics of scale,” which according to Neil Smith encompasses “body, home, community, urban, region, nation, [and the] global.” See Neil Smith, “Homeless/Global: Scaling Places,” in Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird (London: Routledge, 1993). 34. See Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005) for an examination of a pattern of sexual violence inherent and necessary to conquest. Theodoor Galle’s 1587 statue The Discovery of America, among many other early artistic renderings, pictured the Native woman who represented the Americas as naked, lying in wait quite literally to spawn a new form of man. 35. For literature on the representations of  Native women, see Janice Acoose, Iskwewak Kah’ki Yaw Ni Wahkomakanak: Neither Indian Princess nor Easy Squaws (Ontario: Women’s Press, 1995); Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986); Bataille, Native American Representations; Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multi-­cultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Vicki Ruiz and Ellen C. Dubois (New York: Routledge, 1990); and Nancy Mithlo, “Our Indian Princess”: Subverting the Stereotype (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2009). 36. Deborah A. Miranda, “Dildos, Hummingbirds, and Driving Her Crazy: Searching for American Indian Women’s Love Poetry and Erotics,” Frontiers—A Journal of  Women’s Studies 23 (2002): 146. 37. For a full analysis of the relationship between sexuality and federal Indian policy, see Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 154. 38. Barbara Hooper, “Bodies, Cities, Texts: The Case of Citizen Rodney King” in Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 114. 39. For an outstanding analysis of compulsory heterosexuality and the imposing of  Western gender norms through state policies, see Mark Rifkin, “Romancing Kinship: A Queer Reading of Indian Education and Zitkala-­Ša’s American Indian Stories,” glq: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12, no. 1 (2006). 40. Hooper, “Bodies, Cities, Texts,” 115. 41. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 42. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 70. 43. Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 71.

Disrupting a Grammar of Place  |  265

T E N  | Vera B. Palmer

The Devil in the Details Controverting an American Indian Conversion Narrative

Tusca ror a R edem ption (A requiem for my Skarure mother, Alberta N. Wright Bauer) Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. —Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Dear Mama, softly and tenderly you spoke of grace divine for Red sinners; salvation flowing in the blood of  The Lamb, The Pure Lamb, White as snow. Your crown for chris’sake was your wide Skarure Mother-­heart, scooping up that Jesus-­child and suckling him— such a frightened foundling on the shores of Turtle’s back. He grew strong and loud. Then like Flint, the impatient Twin demanding his birth, he tore his way through and away from your cradling flesh.

He claimed mastery of our manna. He commandeered kindness.

Even so, you cursed no Christian Soldiers— gluttons, hungry for souls,

hawkers of hope that blooms only in death— nor their unsparing rod for a youthful tongue stealing-­away home on warm breath to our Language, nor their scorn for Skarure skin too dark for their love; pagan-­brown, unfaded by the purging Lamb. Sneer at hymns! Protect flanks from Christ-­cannibals! These terms of my survival were not your way. How do you forgive when they bend sweet grace into tragic flaw? Why bless their rancid charity with thanks? Where did your playful spirit hide while God’s Army stomped our Council fires, fouling and thieving our past, our future, our children, our Land? Oh Mama, let’s pray in the old Way! Show your granddaughter the steps. Together we’ll have an all-­n ight Sing. We’ll invite our Kin who died fleeing the creed meant to bleach our hearts. We’ll welcome survivors of  The Cleansing. We’ll find those who were stolen, broken, and those who got lost. We’ll Stomp our Grounds and raise the fires! By morning and mourning dear Mama, Condolence will dawn and we’ll be cleansed by the Blood of Our Own.1 If  I start out in Auriesville, New York—today’s name of Kateri Tekakwitha’s birthplace along the Mohawk River near what is known as Albany—then hop into my car for a drive to the northern Mohawk community of Kahnawake, it would be a trip of about 180 miles as the crow flies. When Tekakwitha, the young, hale, smallpox survivor, made this same overland journey as a refugee orphan from her war-­torn home of seventeenth-­century Iroquoia to take sanctuary among the New France Jesuits, she traced a path within familiar Haudenosaunee landscapes. But similar to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the “cartographer’s mad project” to render the map and the The Devil in the Details  |  267

territory coextensive, the Jesuits’ written record and the many, later, serial redactions of  Tekakwitha’s life and its meaning conspire to reduce, reroute, and reroot her.2 They figure her remove as profoundly self-­exiling. Tekakwitha (who was born circa 1656 and died in 1680) is the seventeenth-­ century Iroquoian convert to Christianity whose life and conversion are recorded in the Jesuit Relations. Her father was Mohawk, and her mother was an Algonquin convert to Christianity who had been adopted by the Mohawks. From the moment of  Tekakwitha’s death in 1680, there has been a continual campaign of advocacy for her sainthood, beginning with the priests responsible for her Christian tutelage and catechism at the mission in New France—the same clerics who first fashioned the story of her transformation from Indian heathen to New World Christian convert. The Catholic Church venerated Tekakwitha in 1943 and beatified her in 1980. In October 2012 she was canonized by the Vatican, which conferred her with liturgical status as the first American Indian female saint. The Jesuit Relations texts provide the primary documentation for the subsequent and multiple hagiographic accounts of Tekakwitha that are available today. The texts all narrate stories that effectively supplant Tekakwitha’s identity from her homeland and transplant her into political and spiritual terrain that is largely alien to her Indigenous heritage. These narratives constitute a literary reduction, abduction, and captivity, and they serve as an example of what Andrea Smith calls “ethnographic entrapment.”3 There is a colonial hand in this project. Ultimately, it is a mind-­ and heart-­splitting agenda that conspires to estrange the Native convert— Tekakwitha, in this case—from the spiritual and political roots of his or her own world. The rationale for this transplant comes from a colonial consciousness that deems earth-­honoring spiritual practices as degrading, pagan, and unholy, characterizations that effectively alienate Natives from their own defining status as autochthonous beings with relationships to particular lands, practices, and affective connections to the natural world that are embedded within tribal experience, knowledge, and fabulation. To consider the nature of  Tekakwitha’s literary deracination, we should foreground some political and metaphorical features attending her appropriation into the strictures of a Christian conversion story. Despite the condition of Haudenosaunee lands and communities in the 1600s, ravaged by war, sickness, and alcohol, the Tree of Peace endured, and it endures now as the organizing principle and symbol of the Iroquoian world. The Tree of Peace remains today as in Tekakwitha’s time—storied into the land and physically embedded in the form of the Confederacy’s Council 268  |  Vera B. Palmer

Fire, centrally set at Onondaga in today’s New York State. The Kaianerekowa, known as the Great Law of Peace, is an oral constitution binding the tribes of the Iroquois (Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, Cayuga, Seneca, and later the Tuscarora) into a union of purpose and reciprocal relationships. It carries a message and paradigm of human comfort that serves as a guide for moral and political conduct as well as the grounding of its social order. The second article of the Great Law of Peace states, “Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south, and one to the west, and the name of these roots is the Great White Roots of Peace. If any . . . shall show a desire to obey the laws of the Great Peace . . . they may trace the roots to their source . . . and they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.” This article of the Great Law inverts the familiar Christian semiotic that reads white as purity and cleanliness and places it directly into the soil of the earth as an abiding foundation. Rootedness in the land provides the ontological condition of identity and a pedagogy of comportment. Tekakwitha was a child of the Mohawks’ Eastern Door geography of the Iroquois Confederacy—structural imagery that embeds the form of the Longhouse itself into confederacy land. Practically and figuratively, the Longhouse was and is a spiritual and political home to the tribes of the Haudenosaunee, the “People of the Longhouse.” Following Longhouse ways, when a young woman joins with an outsider as consort, the male newcomer’s arrival is marked in her domicile by “extending the rafters.” He is incorporated into the body of the woman’s family, home, and community; the Longhouse is made physically longer. The story of a people expands to receive and adapt to the complexities and nuances of augmentation. The new and larger story is not biased toward the ways of the newcomer. This protocol has political and social implications, as well as matrilineal signals of domicile and authority. It denotes whose homeland and paradigm prevail. So how might we bring together these ideas with a culturally coherent story of Tekakwitha’s affinity for certain Christian tenets? In normative terms of  Haudenosaunee matrimonial politics, when Tekakwitha becomes a symbolic “bride of Christ,” she brings him into the body of Haudeno­ saunee place and politic. Emically understood, Tekakwitha’s novel alliance makes him a beneficiary of Haudenosaunee hospitality, diplomacy, and accommodation. So the very subject of the eucharistic host—the symbolic, or transmogrified body of Christ—is thus cast as the received guest of  Iroquoian territory and heartland. In this context it are the clan mothers who select and approve the male leaders. The Devil in the Details  |  269

Tekakwitha’s youthful escape from the war trauma of her Mohawk Valley home, and her acceptance of selected precepts of Christianity, may be understood on her part as adding rafters to the Longhouse, instead of initiating a permanent self-­exile from her geopious constituency. Despite the chaotic wartime circumstances of  Tekakwitha’s young life, a woman’s willful and permanent desertion of homeland would be an unfamiliar cultural model. An exception in the case of an abduction and subsequent adoption by a thieving tribe has its example in the case of  Tekakwitha’s own Algonquin mother, who had been captured by Mohawks and adopted into the community. Conversion construed as a rafter-­extending event is a culturally congruent model for Tekakwitha’s story. Whether extending the rafters operates in the case of  Tekakwitha’s conversion as a figure of expansion and acceptance, or whether it becomes a marker of social entropy, is a matter of tribal determination and destiny. A strong cultural predisposition toward dialectical oratory and consensus suggests of an Iroquoian convert an enhanced motivation and ability to adjudicate new, unfamiliar religions or social norms in light of  Native forms and values whose content would be more familiar. The Iroquoian convert would likely have a developed skill in discerning fruitful connections between received Iroquoian knowledge embedded in cultural and linguistic detail and the imported forms and structures of Christianity—particularly forms that might do similar cultural work. The convert’s response might well retain critical aspects of the antecedent tribal paradigm and merely expand to incorporate aspects of the proximal new (Christian) virtues that resonated with already existing Iroquoian knowledge or values. It would be less likely that all previous Iroquoian semiotic conditioning would be displaced or suddenly abandoned for a novel and incompletely understood system. New catechisms might be perceived in terms of their function to an Iroquoian life, not a European one. Similarly, the Iroquoian Longhouse concept of Kane˛hsy鲕ti? (the house extends out) is an embedded part of the formal conclusion of Condolence observance. Simply stated, the term extending the rafters best explains here the meaning: making room for newly adopted families in the longhouse or lodge.4 The vision embedded in the term is proleptic, and it also affirms continuity of the preexisting community. Even in this the reference is gynocentric, in that “the usual longhouse began with a single apartment for a Clan Mother’s family[,] . . . and as her daughters grew and married . . . the first daughter’s apartment was added at one end and the next daughter’s apartment was added to the other end. A Clan Mother with many daughters ended up in the middle apartment of 270  |  Vera B. Palmer

a very long house.”5 The metaphor of adaptation and extension of community is one driven by woman-­gendered agency and social authority. The historian Allan Greer makes reference to the gendered pattern of conduct typically recorded in “colonial hagiographies,” the stories of  Christian devotees in the New World, whereby “holy men were admired for what they said and did, holy women for what they were. Among the saints of New France, this basic sexual division of labor persisted, with the males pursuing more active roles, and making their voices heard in the historical record, while the females were celebrated more as virginal ‘treasures.’ ”6 But Tekakwitha’s extreme acts of piety, coupled with her unorthodox plan to break away from the limits of the Kahnawake mission to start a separate sacred society of Native women at Kahnawake, demonstrate qualities of independence and leadership that put severe strain on the conventions of sacred Christian biographies, as well as a strain on the tolerance of her Jesuit mentors. Yet again, in an Iroquoian rubric these acts would not be remarkable according to the narrative of the Great Law. In the Peace­ maker’s journey into the land of the Iroquois with his helper and disciple, Hiawatha, to spread the news of the Great Law of Peace, the first person to listen and grasp the concepts that the two prophets were trying to impart was Djikonsã´së? (Anglicized as Jigonsase), a woman whose name became known as “The Mother of All Nations,” or Ye-­go-­wa-­neh (Great Woman).7 From this distinction—a woman being among the first to recognize the overarching value of peace through the principles of Condolence and to be won over by this message—came the tradition that designated women in possession of and empowered to confer the titles of the chiefs.8 By the same token, the process of conversion itself can be seen here as a crucial and preexisting Iroquoian structural conveyance, rather than a novel import of Christian missions. The Peacemaker himself was a Huron prophet arriving among the Iroquois from a tribe outside of Haudenosaunee lands, a tribe that had been in frequent conflict with Iroquoian tribes. Jigonsase, Hiawatha, and later, Tadodaho were Iroquoian neophytes to his message of peace through the process of Condolence. The ensuing acceptance and instantiation of the Peacemaker’s teachings in the Iroquois Confederacy bear witness to the transformative and long-­lasting influence this outside prophet had upon Haudenosaunee life. It also illustrates a thoroughly Indigenous model of conversion operating long before the arrival of Christian missionaries. The move by tribes to incorporate new ideas and etic structures of belief was not an exclusive innovation from Christian Europe. In this context, Jigonsase is designated the female receiver and early apostle of  The Devil in the Details  |  271

transformative knowledge. Already acknowledged as a collective mother figure, an originary ontological presence, she is also entrusted and imbued with the knowledge and sage tenets of the Great Law. She holds a structural and epistemic status. Another aspect of deracination that marks the Jesuit version of  Tekakwitha’s changed life involves the creation-­story genre itself. The Bible’s deity creates earth and all living creatures ex nihilo from a place of celestial omnipotence. Some narratives of Christian theology tell of a favored but hubristic archangel who is cast out from heaven and and earth becomes the domain for his evil influence. In the book of Genesis, when Eve and Adam succumb to temptation and disobedience in the Garden of Eden, original sin enters the story, rendering the earth of God’s creation a place marked by corruption. Sin is introduced by the serpent—a symbolic embodiment of that corruption from the “lower” animal world of earth’s realm. Sin, evil, and the physical earth become interpretively elided with human degeneracy. The newly inherited feature of sinful human nature from the moment of  birth is characterized as a fall from divine grace, forever tainting all progeny of Eve and Adam. By contrast, in Haudenosaunee metonymic systems, the fall of Sky Woman from an upper world mythically signals the beginning of earth’s creativity. It represents life’s incipient unfolding. Sky Woman’s fall may be figured somewhat like the fall from the heavens of the Gnostics’ Sophia—a syzygetic moment. Sky Woman’s descent even produces the image of a form of salvation occurring in concert with nature, as broad-­w inged birds carry her safely to the surface of  Turtle’s back. Muskrat’s labor in diving for soil to bring to the surface is a nascent act of ensemble and community, not of Lockean property. Turtle’s back soon grows to become the surface of earth itself. In this version of creation imagery, the earth accrues breadth and fecundity from woman’s presence, from its own life sources, sui generis— and from the bottom up. So it is evident that the notion of a woman’s figurative fall from the heavens as catalyst for life’s genesis sweepingly contradicts the directional and moral symbols in the Bible’s generative story. Unlike the biblical Eve, Sky Woman’s fall introduces life and collaboration within nature, not sin, evil, and more falling. There were plenty of examples for the Jesuits to draw from in the surrounding atmosphere of social and spiritual decay of  Iroquoia to analogize the tortures of hell. And indeed the pedagogy of unworthiness would later become an article in the cant of Indian education. But if one takes into account, for example, that the closest Iroquoian word for sin translates to 272  |  Vera B. Palmer

“mistaking one thing for another,” it becomes evident that the concept and doctrinal consequences of original sin, to be absorbed intact, would need to wage a real epistemic struggle in the minds of early Iroquoian converts. Indeed, it is within the linguistic, narrative, and performative registers of interpretation that the most fruitful understandings of these conversions can develop. The Iroquoian linguistic scholar Kevin Conneley states that the very concept of  “doing wrong” is in Iroquoian languages very complex and involves discussion rather than facile judgment. The concept does not engage precise understandings of good and evil. Rather, wrongdoing or sin implies “that which brings about confusion.” A generic version might be, “I misunderstood the matter.” This reading of sin or wrongdoing would thus be held as conduct that engenders confusion and causes abandonment of the Iroquoian principle of the “Good Mind,”9 a condition in which the rage, bitterness, and retribution experienced from profound loss are eased through communal enactments of comfort and reintegration. Thus Condolence brings about the Good Mind. Its remedy emerges in collective response and ritual action; the nostrum for the conditions of this confusion, this sin, was already available in Iroquoian social and spiritual structures. We might say that for an Iroquoian Christian convert like Tekakwitha, the idea of remedy for sin would suggest a strong cognitive reference to the Iroquoian principles of Condolence.

It is clear from the extant oral repertoire of Haudenosaunee life that fundamentally and culturally Iroquoia still embraces and endorses the natural world as matrix, mater, and matter—as model and as nourishing material substance within which tribal experience inheres, endures, and obtains. Attending this Iroquoian view is a thick assumption of human coextension with entities of the natural world and with the earth itself, both ontologically and affectively. This perspective shapes cultural meaning and endows metaphors with a bias toward material, corporeal references. So, in Tekakwitha’s case, considering her departure from cherished homelands, the temporal dissolution of Iroquoian social structures and cultural lifeways, and the deaths of her many family members, the aggregate of  Tekakwitha’s traumatic losses finds credible analogs in the somatic experience of a severed limb. Here Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s work in perceptions that reveal themselves through the human body as well as in the mind proves useful to The Devil in the Details  |  273

reckon the effects of mutilation and amputation. This phenomenon understood in physiological terms is no less affectively experienced and no less devastating when applied to the situation of Aboriginal losses of land and cultural structures. In his text The Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-­ Ponty discusses the familiar syndrome of phantom pain following amputation; the experience of pain in a limb that no longer appears as part of the physical body. While contemporary work in neuroscience provides a new paradigm through which to consider the embodied features of phantom pain, Merleau-­Ponty’s examples are useful here to assess the depth effect on Natives traumatically separated from their homelands. This is a severance that culturally speaking is tantamount to losing part of the physical self, but with an interesting inversion. In the case of clinical amputation, the loss is visible to an outside observer, while the pain to the aggrieved is often felt in the absent limb. In the case of Natives’ rupture from sacred homelands, the human body may appear to be intact, but the subjective, nostalgic pain is experienced out of sight, inwardly, as if a vital body part has been hacked away. Merleau-­Ponty’s ideas lay out the symbolic dilemma here: [The phantom limb] is the representation of an actual absence. . . . Proust can recognize the death of his grandmother, yet without losing her as long as he can keep her on the horizon of his life. [Similarly, the] phantom arm is not a representation of the arm, but the ambivalent presence of an arm. The refusal of mutilation in the case of the phantom limb . . . [is] not a deliberate decision and does not take place at the level of positing consciousness . . . after considering various possibilities. . . . This phenomenon, distorted equally by physiological and psychological explanations, is . . . understood in the perspective of being-­in-­the-­world. What it is in us which refuses mutilation and disablement is an I committed to a certain physical and inter-­human world, who continues to tend towards his world despite handicaps and amputations and who, to this extent, does not recognize [the amputation] de jure.10 Merleau-­Ponty’s analog here illustrates this category of loss as not merely contemplated loss, but loss that affects one’s very being and way of being in the physical world. An ineluctable tropism toward wholeness persists in the amputee’s consciousness and therefore in practice, even after rupture. Displaced Natives from homelands, like the human body itself, reject disunity with a deep sense of this extended self that identifies with place and is constituted from land-­based knowledge, local phenomena, aesthetic form, enduring place names and stories, commissaries, apothecaries, sa274  |  Vera B. Palmer

cred fastnesses, and using contemporary lexicon, in traditional ecological knowledge. In the face of deep losses and separations in all these categories, the desire to keep integral relationship to homelands on the horizon of life endures, often ferociously, and this urge occurs no less for lost homelands than for a lost limb. For Indigenous people, the “commitment of the I” to which Merleau-­Ponty refers emphatically includes a particular physical, geographical world imbued with sacred and familial significance, in the same ways it includes a human community of relationships. Further, Merleau-­Ponty’s “commitment of the I” to its normative wholeness bears a tribal analogy to the sovereignty of the Indigenous nation, the collective body politic, with its traditional homelands. To assume that early Native converts’ preoccupation was mainly to understand Christianity’s system of values glosses over what had to be an overwhelming context of loss for seventeenth-­century Iroquoians. Tekakwitha’s personal and cultural world of the 1660s was wracked by massive loss and trauma. The concomitant tragedies of epidemic sickness, hunger, wartime carnage, and alcohol-­related debauchery had become commonplace. Tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy warred with exogenous tribes, such as the Algonquin and Huron. The League of the Iroquois fought alternately with the Dutch, the French, and the British to maintain a once-­ formidable military and political position in areas now known as New York State, Ontario, and Quebec. Plied with alcohol for trade, treaty, and fraud in land transactions, many Iroquoian individuals and communities were becoming socially and spiritually ravaged. In a letter to the reverend father provincial of France, Father Thierry Beschefer reports on an Iroquoia of the 1680s in upheaval: Drunkenness prevails there to such an extent, and so continuously, that it often makes their villages veritable images of hell . . . one sees only madmen, who destroy the cabins and everything in them; who strike all whom they meet; and who often fall upon one another, biting and tearing each other with their teeth—attacking chiefly their faces, whereon many bear marks of these quarrels. . . . At such times no captain or elder can repress these lawless acts; they themselves are compelled to flee from the violence of these madmen, to avoid being ill-­treated by them.11 This was clearly a time when the practiced ideals of the Great Law and the principles of Condolence seemed all but lost. Such demonstrations of cannibalistic rage surely represented to Christian clerics a biblical, even apocalyptic, manifestation of the devil, a sign of the beast. For the steadfast The Devil in the Details  |  275

in tribulation among the Iroquois, these acts of cannibalism would signal a state of mind, clouded not only by alcohol but by the anguish of loss and death—conditions that trigger the epic remedy of their Peacemaker.

As with most of her compatriots, Tekakwitha’s losses were direct, personal, and cultural. Her home community near today’s Albany, New York, was moved, and moved again. Smallpox claimed the life of her mother, her father, and her brother. A response of one Native group of the time (Huron or Iroquoian) speaks to the depth of losses, of which smallpox was one agent: “This disease, said many, has not been engendered here; it comes from without; never have we seen demons so cruel. The other maladies lasted two or three moons; this has been persecuting us more than a year. Ours [native sicknesses] are content with [killing] one or two in a family; this [disease], in many [families], has left no more than that number—and, in many, none at all. The loss from the old ones [old illnesses] was repaired in a few years; . . . this [smallpox] would require ages to repeople us.”12 The people of the Longhouse were faced with the prospect of a devoured future as well as discontinuity with their past. The very historical moment within which they found themselves appeared to be a reenactment of the moribund figure of cannibalism itself; a rabid present was consuming all hope for the Haudenosaunee. Tekakwitha too was swept into this scourge. Smallpox claimed the lives of nearly all her family members. From the age of four, the disease left Tekakwitha’s young face deeply pocked and her physical strength and eyesight permanently damaged. Tekakwitha in Mohawk means “she who bumps along as she goes,” referring to her halting gait affected by poor vision. Her personal tragedies were compounded by the suffering that affected her entire cultural community—all creating conditions of extreme trauma.13 Given the disintegration surrounding her, Tekakwitha’s ultimate hegira to the northern mission of Caughnewaga (Kahnawake) can be seen as flight toward sanctuary from the horrors at home. It surely provided a welcome reprieve from local chaos and was not necessarily a repudiation of her full Iroquoian identity and homelands. Exploring Tekakwitha’s life and narrative within the discourse of historical and personal trauma creates an intersection of both the historical record of Iroquoian experience and the principles of Iroquoian creation narratives and the Condolence rites so central to Iroquoian perspectives. 276  |  Vera B. Palmer

These factors must be taken seriously in any interpretation of Native response to Christianity. Syncretic interpretations and discussions of conversion usually fall short in noting these cultural particulars. The discourse of syncretism often moves swiftly and often reductively toward a hydraulic, synthetic resolution; this gesture clouds understanding of the concerns of Native people. Andrea Smith identifies a useful flexibility for a Native who comes from a primarily traditional background—a flexibility that confounds and resists the totalizing language of syncretism: “This flexibility can lessen the need . . . to ‘reinterpret’ Christian concepts [found to be] oppressive; [Natives who become Christians] simply may ignore what they find inadequate or offensive in Christianity and look elsewhere, usually to Native traditions, for what they need.”14 I would further argue that the impulse toward spiritual expression in a proselytizing context is determined less by insurgent religions than by Indigenous spiritual values that may or may not be satisfied by the novel European religious paradigm. The Iroquois belief in an afterlife was nonpunitive and consisted of  images that replicated an idyllic version of this life, in which people live peaceably together while hunting, playing, and renewing antecedent family relationships. The seventeenth-­century Jesuits report, “[Native people] believe that the appointed place for souls, to which after death they are to retire, is in the direction of the setting sun, and there they are to enjoy feasting, hunting, and dancing; for these pleasures are held in the highest repute among them.”15 Here Haudenosaunee images of a happy afterlife replicate earthly joys. They do not propose an escape from earthly experience. Delving further within the specific historical setting of seventeenth-­century Iroquoia, the need for salvation might just as well represent a welcome respite from war’s ravages and instability, and not an abstract, celestial escape from sin and renunciation of earthly forms and relationships. The tribes of the Haudenosaunee had already experienced a Christian vision of hell in the temporal forms of disease and destruction in their midst. Nonetheless the Jesuits noted with exasperation many Natives’ rejection of the notion of eternal punishment based on their practical logic that “there could be no [eternal] fire where there was no wood.”16 While the receptivity of Native converts to Christianity was perhaps based on logistical need, in a pragmatic sense that need had been set in motion by the ruptures of psyche and society that, ironically, Christianity itself had helped to create. In seeking a metaphor to capture the contradictory impulse that administers both injury and rescue, the pathology of Münchhausen syndrome by proxy comes to mind. Metaphors aside, the The Devil in the Details  |  277

deeper question remains of  how successfully a new, Christian remedy could alone compete with the ongoing Indigenous system of particular epistemic requirements molded by native Iroquoian cosmology with its own theory of human nature. In her work on early cultural encounters around the Great Lakes between Indigenous women and men from settler groups, Susan Sleeper-­Smith applies the theoretical approach offered by Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of  “symbolic capital.” What helps to describe the power of patterned behavior in kinship-­based societies, she claims, is that certain repetitive cultural or ritual behaviors produce symbolic capital within the society, based on acts of obligation, personal loyalty, or adherence to a certain code of honor. According to Bourdieu’s notion, when confronted with new situations, Indigenous people adjust their behaviors in order to retain symbolic capital—to retain that which is valued in their social order as respect, honor, authority, or prestige.17 The currency and production of this symbolic capital is unique in each specific Indigenous society. The hegemonic language of colonial power relations contrives to erase or neutralize the specifics the draw distinctions between Indigenous traditions. This flattening process obscures the discrete cultural processes through which Natives have met change and created continuity. Also, syncretism’s preoccupation rests with the strategies of dominant power, with the product of the subsuming encounter or with the new condition resulting from contrasting paradigms—in this case, “the convert.” This discourse often fails to reveal knowledge about the Indigenous perspectival forces, internally and externally situated, that vie for survival and continuity during and after the fact of colonial intrusion. A rich inquiry into the creative processes brought to bear in the dilemma facing Indigenous experience under these negating pressures is usually neglected. In the competitive tension of Hegelian sublation, Indigenous epistemologies are represented as subsumed, lost, or vestigial—in short, “vanished” elements. The historical losses are quite real and stunning in scope. However the structural and cultural processes to cope with the losses do not necessarily disappear as well. They need to be reckoned. In her reading of Antigone, the feminist theorist Judith Butler explores the process and implications of a “violent forgetting of primary kinship relations in the inauguration of symbolic masculine authority.”18 She notes that in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the figure of Antigone represents a transfiguration of the power of the mother, the law of household, and kinship. Hegel posits this example as representative of the process of Aufhebung—the process that determines how familial, local, and affective 278  |  Vera B. Palmer

relationships must ultimately give way to the authority of the state—symbolically for Antigone, to the will of the father, Creon. Butler attempts to unpack the content of Antigone’s dilemma of assimilation that on one hand separates the idea of performative acts in the name of one principle (her personal, kinship act of burying her outlawed brother, Polynices, in defiance of  her father) and on the other hand, the use of the idiom of the state which by its syntax and linguistic norms subsume the private realm. Her “speech act” defends her deed of the burial, yet the speech act is a rhetorical sign of the very hierarchical authority that she defies. In Hegel’s Phenomenology, he suggests that Antigone’s argument of kinship obligation must, of necessity, defer to the assimilative force of the state. In his account, this sublation affirms that familial bonds—maternal kinship bonds in particular—find their full and ideal existence in providing sons for war to defend the state and its boundaries. Butler summarizes, “Thus citizenship demands a partial repudiation of the kinship relations that bring the male citizen into being, and yet [ironically] kinship remains that which alone can produce male citizens.” In the purposed family model of Hegel’s account, we perceive a pattern that recalls the “culture of death” of pre-­Condolence times when wisdom is put in service of cunning and twists the kinship unit to cannibalistically consume its own in order to sustain its identity and fulfill the social mandate of its own creation. This evokes the archetypal figure of the negative senex, a wizened elder turned cannibal and destroyer. Butler argues that ultimately Antigone is pressed into the service of the state’s demands, all the while she resists any authority that would erase her human-­k inship obligation. Butler’s feminist interpretation reveals a model repudiating any demands of assimilation that would seek to deny basic kinship relations. She proposes what may be a critical dilemma of assimilation, one that may inform a reading of  Tekakwitha’s asceticism and her performative text as a would-­be convert at the Jesuit mission of Kahnawake. Butler states, “The drama of reciprocal recognition begins when one consciousness finds that it is lost, lost in the Other, that it has come outside itself, that it finds itself as the Other or, indeed, in the Other.”19 In this dilemma of assimilation that Butler’s analysis proposes, we reprise certain virtues and principles of Condolence deemed necessary for a society to sustain itself after the rupture of loss, loss of one’s land, one’s kin, or even the threat of losing one’s self. Grace, as either a social or religious virtue, can be thought of as unearned or unmerited favor. Its production hinges on permission and gift rather than entitlement. The meaning of grace bears an originary quality, in that the production of grace is often The Devil in the Details  |  279

assigned to the realm of Providence. Grace is thus not linked to the dynamics of quid pro quo; its production is detached from the economy of exchange values and equivalencies. It is arguable, even likely, that important elements that participate in the production of grace exist outside the realm of the concept of redemption. We “redeem” coupons. We use them to receive a bonus in the form of a discount, or a premium from a source that in turn wishes to encourage our patronage in commerce or some other enterprise. In Christian theological terms, Christ through his death is said to redeem sinners. Through the gift of Christ to mankind, God provides the permit of entrance to heaven or to everlasting life to unworthy sinners. According to Christian doctrine, there is no rational accounting for the gift of God’s son, because, in the doctrine of original sin, no human being on face value alone is worthy of forgiveness or exception from the fate of eternal damnation. Alexander Irwin states it this way: “The divine (self-­) sacrifice defies the utilitarian principle that commands the circularity of ordinary sacrificial procedures. The god has, by definition, no utilitarian motivations; his gift or sacrifice cannot be compensated by any meaningful return.”20 Aside from the sacrifice of Christ’s death, there is no method or inherent right of humans to acquire permission to enjoy the state of eternal joy, which is said to come through release of original sin’s burden and error. In secular terms, or at least in a sense that is generally spiritual rather than specifically Christian or theological, the virtue of grace interrupts the rather precise and inevitable calculus of retribution for injury. Grace disrupts and intervenes to assuage grief and assist successful mourning of loss by providing the occasion and context for permission, invitation, narrative, time suspension, and reintegration. Grace theoretically offers an undeserved or unearned alternative to crime and its punishment—to loss and its erosion. Grace operates as a gift. Grace bears evidence of excess, of abundance. It is beneficence without a reason, a gift whose justification is unaccounted for in any metric. Grace stands as an exception to the rule, an exception so radical that its presence can reorder the entire social and spiritual system. This is the relief for the mourning of loss offered through the Condolence tradition. Before his transformation by the message of the Peacemaker, Hiawatha endured the bitter loss of his wife and five daughters, who were all murdered. In his anger and despair, he had given in to figurative and literal cannibalism—paroxysms of self-­consuming rage. Many nights alone in his solitary reverie he imagined the things he would do if he met with someone who was in the state of anguish he found himself: “This is what I would 280  |  Vera B. Palmer

do: I would wipe away the tears from the person, and I would also clear their hearing and clear their throats, and take all the darkness away from them. This is what I would do to comfort and sympathize with that person, if it was somebody else. But nobody comes to sympathize with me.”21 Hiawatha had fashioned and arranged strings of quahog shells into wampum, shells that he found at a nearby lake (today’s Lake Tully in New York State). He designated a string of wampum for each aspect of comfort and restoration that he felt was lacking for him. These very tenets are itemized and formalized in the rite of Condolence. Soon after Hiawatha’s soliloquy, the Peacemaker, unbidden, responded, saying that he has heard Hiawatha’s words and that he came to sympathize with him: “I overheard you talking [to yourself]. I come to sympathize with you. So we will work together. I will now work with you and I will sympathize with you with these strings of wampum. I will lift all the burden of grief from your mind, and make this day bright.”22 Certain passages of the ceremony spoken by the comforter relate to wiping away the tears. These passages articulate an observation of the mourner: “You are too prone in grief, your back alone is visible.” This corporeal reference depicts the griever who has turned his or her back on the social order, making that person a candidate for the culture of death. The comforter voice offers a gift: “I shall stoop low too in order to utter words to caress and appease you.”23 Everything in the narrative hinges on this crucial gesture of compassion that not only reinscribes the value of community but also exhibits a grace; it upholds and codifies a generosity invented of intention, sympathy, and a Good Mind. The matrilineal culture of the Iroquois figures society as a woman, and under the condition of loss, it is seen as a bereaved wife. Loss itself is treated as an illness, with fifteen elements that mark the symptoms of grief and malaise for which Condolence is indicated. The three main focuses of these fifteen elements are the eyes, the ears, and the throat. These three corporeal sites foreground the theme of relationship or communication, which need to be mended throughout the life of the individual or the community in order to regenerate after great loss. The sites respectively correspond to the metaphoric illness of unabated darkness, meaning that one is unable to see matters clearly; the illness of silence or isolation that allows morbid thoughts of self-­negation and cuts one off from communing with others; and the muteness of choking grief, which isolates a person (or community) and turns that anguish to internal despair or violence and bitterness projected outward. Condolence’s structural process separates the community into two The Devil in the Details  |  281

parts; one moiety consists of those who have suffered the loss, and one consists of those who comfort—the mourners and the condolers. Though both sides are considered to be mourners, the symbolic separation of the community into two antiphonal facets represents the fracture that the loss has engendered. The mourner side figures as a patient, specifically, a female patient who is ill. Since both sides participate as mourners, the process of restoration benefits the comforter or condoler as well. Among the opening gestures of the rite is one titled “At Wood’s Edge,” in which the mourners come out to welcome those who have come to comfort them. The edge of the woods here also signifies a boundary of respect. The comforters call out in prescribed song cycles for the mourners to come forth, but the comforters must not rush into the mourners’ space. The comforters are obliged to wait for the mourners to come out, and grant permission to enter. Even in this, one can see the gender dynamic of a gynocentric structure at work. The process operates almost as a courting ritual; the love song is sung to beckon a movement of the woman toward the song, toward the lover, and toward (re)union—all the while honoring the principle of permission above that of impetuous desire. Recalling the story of an unregenerated Hiawatha, sick with loss and trapped in his own self-­devouring state, we note that his relief does not appear until he voices his wishes for the comfort he desires. This is the juncture when the Peacemaker, D—h, enters the scene, offering the precise healing words of compassion and consolation that Hiawatha had longed for in his solitary contemplation. The principle here is that even the good news of comfort is obliged to operate within a rubric of respect for the intention of the one in need—the permission flowing from personal intention and invitation is the master lock admitting comfort into the picture, and making it meaningful. The interactive moments of Condolence do not operate in a hydraulic of spiritual overawe followed by self-­surrender. The seemingly tedious process of tender respect speaks quiet volumes about the role of patience and the skills of listening also upheld within Condolence protocols. The distinction mitigating the tiresome aspects of such attentiveness is that all is done for the sake of the beloved. The term Condolence, commonly used for the ritual of central importance in Iroqouian spiritual and political identity, derives its meaning in translation from the Latinate condolere (to feel pain with). Cognates in English of the word condolence can thus be easily conflated with Christian notions of compassion, perhaps by way of identification with the Passion of Christ. This is misleading for the present discussion, however. In Iroquoian languages a common form of the word used to refer to this important cere­ 282  |  Vera B. Palmer

mony is Kaye˛?n鲕ta ϑ. The word contains two roots: one implies sharing and permission, “to permit,” and the other relates to nourishment. Hence the combination, “facttwo, onefood” both describes and prescribes, as in, “it is the two of thems’ meal,” or, “one maintains or feeds another.”24 The Iroquoian word for the Condolence Ceremony in this cluster of concepts contains many implications of how we might deal with the rite’s influence on Iroquoian thought, and in turn how the textures of this ancient meaning bring nuance to how Tekakwitha’s conversion might actually be more fully understood. Again, the conjugation of these meanings presents a concept fully consonant with the narrative of D—h, the Peacemaker, and Hiawatha. The translation contains the story’s crucial elements of permission and restoration by nourishing the need of someone who has been famished and ravaged by loss. The simplicity of the literal root, “facttwo, onefood” absorbed in the context of a ritual structure, also reinforces the value of community, that is, “two entities sharing what there is one of.” The emphasis is not so much on the economic concern of dividing the food; rather the emphasis is on the concord that brings the two together. Nourishment is the bonding component. A common alternative term for the Condolence rite is the Requickening, which in translation perhaps implies a bit more of the narrative ceremonial content of regeneration. But in all cases, to separate the meaning of the ceremonial process from the narrative structure it reflects relinquishes important guides for interpreting an Iroquoian perspective that is faced with pressures to convert from the primacy of tribal self-­identity to a novel Christianity.

The stories of Tekakwitha’s conversion written by her Christian tutors testify to her Christian doxology. But they are convincing only under the assumption of a deep cognitive shift, transforming a geography made sacred of landscape and home to instead seeing earth as an ambiguous and untrustworthy habitat of potential evil—a relationship and affinity that must be amputated from the affections, from the soul. Further, Tekakwitha’s conversion narrative presumes a spatial and directional shift of her reverence and fidelity—effectively displaced from a palpable and sacred earthly home to a promised, distant, and imagined heavenly home. My own mother and grandmother, born and raised in the Iroquois community at Six Nations Grand River Reserve, were subjected to heavy-­handed treatment without metaphors by nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century missionaries at the The Devil in the Details  |  283

Mohawk School and Mission (dubbed by survivors “the Mushhole” for its monotone diet of gruel). My mother and grandmother have reported to me the pressure in the early years of the mission that was put upon proselyte families to change their Indian names to Western names. This standard process of induction at government Indian boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School that employed missionary teachers was already common practice at most mission schools. For those families at Six Nations that didn’t have English family names, such as my own Tuscarora (Wright) surname, proselytes were often encouraged to change their Indian names away from words that allegedly signified “lowly things on the ground, that drew attention downward to an earthly kingdom which belonged to the devil,” to either English surnames or names of “things and ideas that inspired one to look up, toward heaven,” as with extant Iroquoian family names preceded by Mountain (Mt. Pleasant), Cloud, Hill, Sky, and so on.25 Similarly, Christian Tuscarora sources report that individuals who aligned with clan identities according to the clan system of Haudenosaunee (e.g., Turtle, Beaver, Bear, Wolf, and Eel) were frequently exhorted by Christian mentors to abandon any symbolic identity with earthly (and earthy) beings of supposedly heathen significance. The evangelical and doctrinal tropism away from the sinful earth and toward the supernal realm for inspiration and identification is consistent with a broad range of missionary endeavors and was especially strong in Indigenous communities where so-­called pagan ways and references were thought to hinder a sanctified Christian life. Upon his arrival at Carlisle as an Oglala Lakota student, Luther Standing Bear recounts how he was required to choose a new, Christian name for himself from a random list of names written on a blackboard. He says that he chose the name Luther by pointing at it “like an enemy.”26 Within his resolve to assert his Oglala identity, and in his deliberate gesture to prophylactically set up a boundary for the newly assigned Christian name, is an act that anticipates an Indigenous, Foucauldian understanding of how the power to name operates in a colonial context. Foucault comments on praxis in “The Subject and Power”: I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and which implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists 284  |  Vera B. Palmer

of using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, and find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.27 Given his youth, Standing Bear couldn’t have consciously foreseen his gesture in terms of a historical critique of colonial power. But his bold, youthful response to this naming event nonetheless eloquently performs and demonstrates what Foucault intends: an empirical way to illuminate power relations that conjugate practice with theory. Returning to the topic of  Tekakwitha’s story that culminates in her declared sainthood in 2012, it seems that deracination from both name identity and identity with place joins veneration and beatification as a precondition of canonization. And like the economic metaphor of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, this deracination operates across time and in concert with colonial desires, reducing and trading Tekakwitha’s tribal identity with homeland and political allegiances, in exchange for abstracted spiritual hegemony and heavenly reward. The deracination portends erasure of the particular markers of tribal provenance and assigns an exceptional meaning of  Indigenous identity upon the individual person. This minimizes and circumscribes the relevance and the interpretive significance of collective, tribal roots. Without this inversion of values, Tekakwitha is indeed an inconvenient saint—perhaps unsuitable for sainthood altogether. The Catholic Church’s iconic story of Tekakwitha, deserting fealty to geography for exceptional status and heavenly realms, completely ignores the barbed issue of autochthony. It leaves the idea of Native homelands—cast as a biblical wasteland and a howling wilderness—ever more open to the colonial architecture of John Winthrop’s utopian “city upon a hill,” a New World realization of St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei contra paganos (The City of God against the Pagans). Her exceptional role as the Jesuits’ Christian Indian convert and transformative figure to inspire European funding for continued mission support in the New World elevates her status above other unconverted “heathens.” This exceptionalism violates Iroquois community values of consensus and mutual respect, and leadership without vaunt. There is another way to think about Tekakwitha’s exceptional position from within the purview of prescribed tribal narrative and roles, instead of through terms of alienating and exalted superiority over her own tribal community and kin. When she The Devil in the Details  |  285

arrived at Kahnawake in 1678, the Jesuits became Tekakwitha’s mentors in the tenets of Christian doctrine. During the brief two years of  her residence there before her death in 1680, she engaged in acts of worship, extreme piety, self-­mortification, and self-­denial. Her performative devotion was quite naturally interpreted and reported by the Jesuits according to their cognitive models of Christian sanctity and humble self-­abasement. For example, as one act of piety, she prepared for herself a bed of thistles to sleep on. While this behavior recalls a number of medieval saints and anchorites, interpreted from within Tekakwitha’s Iroquoian life, it also strongly evokes the Iroquoian creation narrative, in which the mother of the originary Sky Woman in childhood survives after her brother’s fatal illness. The Sky World is a mirror world that exists above earth’s celestial dome and predates the creation of this world. However, it is a place that knows no sorrow or death. This is an interesting inflection of elements found in both the Edenic ideal and the Christian imagery of heaven. In the Haudenosaunee narrative, a boy and girl child have each been identified as gifted or uncanny children—in Mohawk, they are Deh ninõ´-­ta ton, which translates as “down-­fended,” or one who is defended by thistle and down. In the mythic story, such a cultural marking is apparently not a gender-­specific distinction, since it is shared by the sister and the brother. In the Iroquoian ethnographer J. N. B. Hewitt’s record, such children in ancient Mohawk tradition are to be kept in seclusion from birth to puberty, in preparation for their roles of service to or healing of the community. Thistles and white down are used to mark the children’s fastness and also to serve as warning if an intruder disturbs the children’s seclusion. Drawn from an Iroquoian creation narrative, the myth of the earth grasper, “the name down-­fended . . . signifies that one has mystic power and cannot fail in anything, because indeed one is a wizard. . . . [Thus, these] two [children] shall possess goodness of mind . . . and [these] two shall not have any stain of evil.”28 Rather than a Christian version of ascetic self-­abasement, the Iroquoian interpretive register here would be self-­defense and spiritual self-­identification through the use of thistle and down. The story also implies that “down-­fending” is a sign and gesture of protection from outside intruders who would disrupt the preparation of the special child’s mission or role in the community. So the mark indicating a special role in society and self-­protection for the accomplishment of that obligation would be culturally consistent with Tekakwitha’s extreme asceticism at Kahnawake. At the very least, culturally specific knowledge obstructs facile interpretations of her performative expression as mere mimicry of medieval Christian piety.29 Tekakwitha’s sense of her own survival, given the wrenching losses of 286  |  Vera B. Palmer

family that she endured through disease and war, might also have endowed her with the sense of having a chosen role in the spiritual renewal of  her Iroquoian world by virtue of having been spared. An Iroquoian narrative lens would suggest that Tekakwitha’s motivation in her decision to seek sanctuary may indicate another layer of meaning. Her move north was perhaps more than flight from the terror and chaos of her homeland in Lower Iroquoia (present-­day New York State). It could be a manifestation of her sense of having survived the smallpox scourge as a sign of being “down-­fended,” and having been thus spared, would be her obligation to find a safe place to explore the efflorescence of her special social marking. Her purpose would be to survey the dimensions of a culturally spiritual mission within the safety provided in the Jesuit mission at Kahnawake. At the Jesuit mission she found a refuge in which to explore and perform and to transform the meaning of her losses and those of her community into something of value for her and her people. Condolence tradition figures society itself as a woman whose health and well-­being depend on the Good Mind—a mind unburdened by the destructive effects of unmourned loss and bitterness, a disposition set upon honoring kinship bonds, despite temporal loss. Death and the culture of death are cast as the enemies of society—a condition marked by loss but where grieving is repressed, postponed, or absent. Condolence seeks to disentangle states of loss and unresolved grief through formal expressions of gratitude, generosity, and reciprocity. The unrequited mourning of losses is said to bring about a dangerous insanity figured as cannibalism in the narrative of the Peacemaker. This mourning is a state where life consumes itself, a condition of self-­negation and revenge in response to the pain and trauma of loss. The narrative of the Peacemaker again provides the allegorical structure. During the Peacemaker’s journey to bring the Great Law of Peace to the warring Iroquois tribes, he encounters resistance and rejection from leaders of the Onondaga Nation. Foremost among his detractors is the powerful leader and seer Tadodaho. Tadodaho is intellectually brilliant. His hideous figure is crowned with the sign of cunning: snakes coil through his hair—a vexed image that Christian Jesuit missionaries may well have found to be a useful (though inaccurate) mnemonic for Satan. Through enraged despair over his own losses, an embittered Tadodaho has turned to a life of revenge, murder, and cannibalism. He has a sinister talent for combining his traditional knowledge of medicines and keen intuition about human nature to bring about others’ undoings or deaths. For this The Devil in the Details  |  287

he is known and feared among his own people as a cannibal—a person in the state of arrested mourning whose devouring nature increases his and society’s losses. Eventually Tadodaho is persuaded to accept the message of peace conveyed through Condolence. The Peacemaker and Hiawatha his companion charge the previously misguided Tadodaho with the prime responsibility of power, as keeper of the central fire of the emergent Iroquois Confederacy. In stark contrast to missionary dogma, his transformation from sinful confusion to an honorific position exacts no punishment, neither from him nor by way of sacrifice of a divine proxy. Further, the epic role of the Tadodaho narrative is permanently codified in the continuing political offices and spiritual structure of the Iroquois Confederacy to the present day. The perpetual story of his conversion is reinscribed each time a Tadodaho dies and another is condoled or installed. Tadodaho is a dramatic convert figure who moves from cannibal to holder of the confederacy’s spiritual office: keeper of the central fire. He is not rejected or cast out but incorporated and given an important position in the continuing life of the community. The wisdom of Condolence thus recognizes mourning as a cultural site, not of evil but of deep, anguished longing brought on by loss. It recognizes humans’ destructive nature when afflicted with loss and it allows their wounds to be mitigated by the power of compassion and restoration. A passage from the Great Law of Peace, which is an integral component of Condolence oratory tradition, illustrates the standard of qualities expected of  Iroquoian leadership who replace those who have gone before: The chiefs . . . shall be mentors of the people for all time. The thickness of their skin shall be seven spans nine, which is to say that they shall be proof against anger, offensive action, and criticism. Their hearts shall be full of peace and good will, and their minds filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people. . . . With endless patience, they shall carry out their duty. Their firmness shall be tempered with a tenderness for their people. Neither anger nor fury shall find lodging in their minds and all their words and actions shall be marked by calm deliberation.30 It is interesting to note how heavily this passage relies on corporeal meta­ phors of strength and endurance. The body is an important locus of cultural and spiritual definition. Also apparent are the paradoxical pairings that imply a balance between gendered characteristics: a thick skin to deflect attack and criticism coupled with hearts of good will—firmness combined with tenderness. The work of clear intellect is to be permeated by a 288  |  Vera B. Palmer

yearning for the good of the people—a blending of mental and affective action. In light of the fact that Iroquoian chiefs were selected by the elder women leaders or clan mothers in this matriarchal society, this passage highlights the values of patience, sacrifice, and endurance in tandem with agency across genders—positions of agency and responsibility that would be familiar to Tekakwitha and her other companions in ecstatic spiritual expression at Kahnawake. Beyond strictly political or strategic savvy, leadership means having a conscious, empathic virtuosity. Such are the endowments formalized in the rite of Condolence. Dominick LaCapra makes important distinctions between loss and absence that come to bear in the configuration and cultural work of transformative cultural narratives. He holds that losses are specific and involve particular events, and these losses accrue to real people and cultures of affected groups. Whether individual or collective, the losses are historical and personal. They entail real calamities, consequences, real perpetrators, and victims. On the other hand, the language of absence is reductive, abstract, and ethereal, yet absolute. It appears disembodied and evacuated of subjects. Perhaps most important for the present discussion, he notes that the language “downgrades the significance of particular historical losses.” In distinguishing the difference between loss and absence, LaCapra states that “losses may entail absence, but the converse may not be the case. . . . In terms of absence, one may recognize that one cannot lose what one never had.”31 LaCapra’s work on absence and loss is especially helpful here to identify and distinguish between possible modes of reception of Christianity by Native converts, and what mission Jesuits may have expected to follow from the conduct they witnessed in their Iroquoian neophytes. LaCapra explains: The conversion of absence into loss gives rise to both Christian and Oedipal stories (the Fall and the primal crime)—stories that are very similar in structure and import (for example in attempting to explain the origin of guilt). When understood as lost, divinity becomes hidden or dead, lost because of some sin or fault that could be compensated for in order for redemption or salvation to occur, allowing a return to unity with the godhead. Paradise lost could be regained, at least at the end of time . . . the critique of ultimate or absolute foundations is best understood as related to an affirmation or recognition of absence, not a postulation of loss.32 The Devil in the Details  |  289

Following this model, the missionary work of salvation among early Native Iroquoians would have required evading a cultural reckoning of traumatic losses—transferring the convert’s devastated response to the losses of loved ones through war and disease, and losses of homelands and lifeways, to a generalized discourse of absence—such as a distant state of future grace purification. Eliding loss with absence, while seemingly natural and even necessary, LaCapra warns, allows for an avoidance of problems of an immediate or historical nature.33 Condolence operates within the breach between absence and loss. Its procedures work with an interplay of the two by giving voice and place to that which is lost, rather than ignoring, occluding, or displacing it. The remedy of Condolence is through applying the mythically enacted vision of comity and sound mind in situations of loss, to restore the community. So another real task for the Jesuit mentors of Tekakwitha and her companions would have been to appropriate the narrative of palpable losses and to convert that story into an aspirational narrative of an absent ideal. The effectiveness or satisfaction in such a story line seems to fall short of healing properties for an Iroquoian like Tekakwitha. The conversion account of an Indigenous saint cannot take place without the utter transformation of deeply held cultural narratives. That a cognitive shift and identity rupture this deep occurred in Tekakwitha’s experience is at least questionable. From a Native, and specifically an Iroquoian, perspective, the great problem in working exclusively with the hagiographic narrative record of Tekakwitha’s life is accounting for the radical vacuum where an account of grief and mourning should be. The omission of any reference to the affective component of Tekakwitha’s response to her own losses of loved ones and beloved community elements eviscerates that which made her Iroquoian in the first place and brands the conversion narrative from the outset as a largely alien artifact. Much of this is a structural problem posed by the reductive nature of the hagiographic form. Hagiography has a singular goal. In its eager trajectory to transform the subject from pagan to convert to saint, so the sanctified figure can become a vehicle to produce more converts and edify the faithful, the genre discards or ignores internal narratives of trauma and loss. The occlusion of  Indigenous narrative voice is a familiar colonial gesture that in this case conspires to expunge the vitality of Condolence. In the Indigenous experience of  Tekakwitha’s Christian conversion, the grief of loss does not register in the triumphal outcome of salvation, so the traumatically lost elements are reckoned as negligible. The utilitarian model of the greatest good obtains here. When Richard 290  |  Vera B. Palmer

Kieckhefer states that in hagiography the narrative of the saint’s life passes through an “assimilation to type,” he invokes a word highly charged with specific historical import in Native memory and experience: assimilation.34 As with the terms hybridity and syncretism, the story embedded in the concept of assimilation foregrounds the product of change rather than the conditions and effects of loss that get edited out of the process. From Native perspectives these forfeitures are integral to the story. Accounts of losses are seen paradoxically, as an inherent part of human wholeness. There is no profligate waste of either human experience or the epistemic gains that accrue from that experience. Even if  Tekakwitha did betray to the French some crucial political and military information that enabled later English victories, as some of  Tekakwitha’s Iroquoian detractors suggest, calling her “a leaky pot,” such charges can only be seen as contingent and temporal in light of the cultural betrayal implied by viewing her religious conversion as trivializing the memory of lost loved ones, and lost homelands.35 The hagiographic narrative is silent on the matter, except to vaunt her superiority to others of her relations. Are we to assume that Tekakwitha’s conversion experience ignores, dismisses, or even celebrates these losses? The cultural work that Iroquoian traditions of mourning fulfill through the Condolence process is to employ formalized oratorical mechanisms of thick description to acknowledge the value of what and who has been lost and reinvest honorary status for the beloved back into the community and to the individuals affected. These cultural devices serve Indigenous objectives—and more recent psychoanalytic projects as well—to accomplish the work of successful mourning, which allows the mourner to acknowledge what is lost without betraying what is lost. Condolence provides a living and palpable repair for the phantom pain of cultural rupture. In Condolence terms, the mourner’s eyes once again become clear to see what is around him or her, the ears can hear again, and the mourner can speak with clarity, not with revenge or self-­negation. Those who grieve are able to live once again according the Good Mind.

The Jesuit Relations contains the only written record of Tekakwitha’s life. But this record does not spring from a tribal oral tradition, nor is its narrative of  Tekakwitha deeply informed by the traditions of her own heritage. In the Jesuits’ story she becomes captive to, and frozen within, a hermeneutical stasis determined largely by the literary form of hagiography. We The Devil in the Details  |  291

are presented with a strong notion of  her physical being—her ailments and frailty, her blindness, her ascetic acts of self-­mortification—without a sense of her voice, her Haudenosaunee voice. Her few recorded utterances are selected for and refracted by an ambitious agenda of  Christian evangelism. As in Jacques Lacan’s paradoxical dilemma of  being both informed by language and entrapped and limited by the symbolic system of language, the Jesuit Relations gives merely an etic account of the interior experience of Tekakwitha’s drastic times, transformations, and translations—an account saturated with doctrinal precepts formed outside of  her world. The work of the Lacanian theorist Mladen Dolar further suggests that such an example of ventriloquism belies an excess of speech and meaning that are not represented, a Lacanian object petit a that links subjectivity to the voice itself.36 In this space resonates the power of oral tribal narratives, allegories, and linguistic materials informing Tekakwitha’s tribal life that function to unpack and bring to light the influences and possibilities in such a conversion. More broadly, interrogating this conversion narrative asserts a grounding feature of  Indigenous knowledge, experience, and identity: that humans can only hold an emic position vis-­à-­v is the natural world. Both spiritual life and material existence celebrate and bear witness to humans’ inescapable location within nature’s realm. The Catholic Church has named Saint Kateri Tekakwitha the “Lily of the Mohawks.” She has already predictably become the saint of “the environment.” Driving on New York State Route 5 today, one comes upon Tekakwitha’s national shrine in Auriesville. Along that road on a summer’s day, I passed profusions of daylilies growing untended. They are not the tidy, white blossoms of church lilies, but a deep russet color, marooned by the sun. They wave in the breeze. These blooms’ connection to the earth is tenuous; a thin stem easily severed would deprive the lily of its vital life source. As the exceptional Lily of the Mohawks in these hagiographies, Tekakwitha too has been marooned—alienated and isolated, and in the name of Christ. The roots and life of the Haudenosaunee are in Haudenosaunee lands and hands, entwined with the symbolic great white pine, the Tree of  Peace. The organic nexus of the confederacy is a network of the White Roots of Peace moving out from this tree. Even through turbulent and often disheartening centuries of colonial intrusion, the roots grow in the rich, dark earth. Below the topsoil, they quietly transgress all artificial boundaries of nation-­state and surveyed property lines; they have no fidelity to land titles. What is essential and enduring is connected to and coextensive with this 292  |  Vera B. Palmer

land and with these roots embedded in the loam. They absorb a grounded nutrition of social, spiritual, and diplomatic proportions. The tree stands firm and its roots, like Iroquoian people—the Ongweoweh—have traveled far and wide over time. But our movements can always be mapped back to homelands. Tekakwitha is still an unexiled daughter of the Eastern Door of the Iroquois Confederacy. And while local lilies come and go with the seasons, for me and for many Haudenosaunee—tribal Christian or tribal Longhouse—she stands with and for that singular, living Tree of Peace.

In this exploration that straddles time, experience, and belief, what role should be given to Western theoretical models and practice? The ambitious praxis of  liberating a dynamic Indigenous presence and voice trapped within the sacralized canonical space of an Indian conversion narrative is an act of sovereignty and decolonization. By decolonize in this case I do not necessarily mean de-­Christianize. But I do mean to render transparent the rhetorical and conceptual devices operating in the name of religious dogma that conspire to terminally alienate Natives from ontological, spiritual, and political identity with our own homelands and tribal nations. This exposé can be creatively achieved through a careful intertextual project that uses theoretical hardware to boldly navigate between tribal oral traditions, narratives of received church dogma, and systems of translation and linguistic play.

My Tuscarora mother often spoke about the thrilling danger of the old-­time Iroquoian fireball game that she used to play back home on the reserve. The kerosene-­soaked balls of rags set alight and tossed through the crisp night air from one player to the next is a game that recalls the shooting stars and meteors attending Sky Woman’s descent onto Turtle’s back. Those ancient fireballs fell from the same celestial opening that she did—prefiguring and lighting her way down to a young earth. Our fireball game gives occasion to commemorate and perform the conditions in our creation story. Many of our games do in fact turn upon matters of life and death. I take the use of theoretical models in our work as Native scholars just as seriously, and at once as playfully, as one takes those fireballs. They can excite creative renewal; they can illuminate for a moment the dark detail of colonial apparatus—because the devil is in the details. Yet if dropped and static, the The Devil in the Details  |  293

fireballs can scorch the earth no less than General Sherman’s army. Held too long or too closely they may consume the spirit, even as they ignite the ego. Theories’ tools are fireballs that can herald our sovereignty, but it’s a risky sport, and not for the faint of heart.

I say, “Let the games begin!” Notes

1. Poem by Vera B. Bauer Palmer, copyright 2013. A requiem for my Skarure mother, Alberta N. Wright Bauer. 2. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2. 3. Andrea Smith, “The Protesting Native: Theorizing Native Studies within the Academic Industrial Complex,” paper presented at the naisa conference, Athens, GA, April 10–12, 2008. 4. Marianne Mithun, “Introduction,” in Extending the Rafters: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Iroquoian Studies (Albany, NY: suny Press, 1984). 5. Paul A. W. Wallace, The White Roots of Peace (Port Washington, NY: Ira Friedman, Inc, 1968), 30–­31. 6. Allan Greer, “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France,” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2000). 7. According to older interpretations of Condolence, the peacemaker’s name is only to be spoken during an actual Condolence ceremony, when a chief is being installed, or in times of great need. The Cayuga chief Jacob Ezra Thomas gives three euphemisms of his name to be used at other times. These alternatives (Tandãhë•s•an, Hõnek-­o:wanen_, and Honon_shon_ne:don•) translate respectively as “he has no father,” “he has a great mind,” and “he constructed the house.” Beaver, Mohawk Reporter, 182.   The implication that the founder of the confederacy and the Great Law, including Condolence, is a person who “has no father” further underscores in a linguistically embedded way the primacy to the Iroquois of maternal lines of identity in matters of spirituality and politics. It also uniquely clashes with Christ the prophet figure of the Gospels, whose father is said to be divine, and whose mother, Mary, is merely human, though of elevated status. 8. Beaver, Mohawk Reporter, 190. 9. Interview with Kevin Conneley, March 13, 2001, Ithaca, New York. Conneley is in the Onondaga Nation and has a PhD in linguistics. 10. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 93–­94; my emphasis. 11. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 62 (New York: Pageant Books, 1959), 225. 294  |  Vera B. Palmer

12. John J. Heagerty, Four Centuries of Medical History in Canada, vol. 1 (Bristol, UK: John Wright and Sons, 1928), 58; and Thwaits, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, vol. 39, 131; my emphasis. 13. Michael Goodich suggests that the context of fourteenth-­century Europe, a fear-­r idden period of war, pestilence, and famine, presents an example in which contiguous social conditions profoundly affect human emotions, expand belief in the transcendent, and precipitate a preoccupation with the fear of death. He notes that these conditions emphasize the importance put on miracles and encourage religious and spiritual excesses. Michael Goodich, Violence and Miracle in the Fourteenth Century: Private Grief and Public Salvation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 14. Andrea Smith, “Walking in Balance,” in Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods, ed. Jace Weaver (Maryknoll, NY: Orbus, 1998), 182. 15. Thwaits, Jesuit Relation and Allied Documents, vol. 1, 287. 16. Thwaits, Jesuit Relation and Allied Documents, vol. 1, 289. 17. Susan Sleeper-­Smith, “Introduction,” in Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). I would apply Bourdieu’s notions concerning Indigenous social practices, especially of the “habitus of behavior,” only with great caution here, in that his formulations assume that kin-­based societies are shaped mostly by the power of habit and influenced by repetitive behavioral patterns. The caution lies in noting how near this view stands to the Hegelian description of  Indigenous Americans as unthinking creatures of habit, “unhistorical,” immersed in nature, without consciousness of freedom or relevance to Geist. 18. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 4. 19. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 13–­1 4. 20. Alexander Irwin, Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 6–­7. 21. Jose Barreiro and Carol Cornelius, eds., Knowledge of the Elders: The Iroquois Condolence Cane Tradition (Ithaca, NY: The Northeast Indian Quarterly, Cornell University, 1991), 9. 22. Barreiro and Cornelius, Knowledge of the Elders, 9. 23. John Bierhorst, ed., “The Ritual of Condolence: An Iroquois Ceremonial,” in Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984). 24. Blair A. Rudes, Tuscarora-­English English-­Tuscarora Dictionary (Toronto: University of  Toronto Press, 1999). 25. I reference the Tuscarora family name of Mt. Pleasant following reports of elder Tuscarora relations—both Christian and Longhouse relatives—who cited it as an example in their early memories of an acceptable family name by early mission standards of scrutiny. I make no genealogical claim here about the origin of that or any other family name on the Six Nations Reserve. The Devil in the Details  |  295

26. Luther Standing Bear, My Indian Boyhood (New York: Bison, 2006). 27. Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208; my emphasis. 28. Hewitt, 470. 29. By the seventeenth century, owing largely to material in many European explorers’ accounts, the intellectual traditions of Native people of the Americas had been characterized as nonexistent, or limited to parroting and repetition. Given these tropes, and coupled with the objectives of  Tekakwitha’s hagiographers to see her canonized, interpretations of Native converts’ piety as merely imitating European forms of faith are predictable, though inadequate. These assumptions about the limitations of Native intellect remained relatively unchallenged, and they became formalized later as an article of historical and geographical fact in G. W. F. Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1831), in which Hegel articulates the inferiority of America’s Native peoples. Note the following passage: “As we know, the Jesuits and other Catholic clergy established a state in Paraguay, as well as monasteries in Mexico and California. Since they wished to accustom the Indians to European culture and morals, they mingled with them, and prescribed their duties to them for the day as though they were under age. Lazy though they were, the Indians bowed to the authority of the fathers. These prescriptions—and at midnight a bell had to remind them of their matrimonial duties—have quite properly led to further needs, which are the mainsprings of human activity in general.” G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 1988), 85–­86. 30. Taiaiake Gerald Alfred, Peace, Power, and Righteousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41. 31. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2013), 48–­50. 32. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 51. 33. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 53. 34. Richard Kieckhefer, “Imitators of Christ: Sainthood in the Christian Tradition,” in Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions, ed. Richard Kieckhefer and George Bond, 32, cited in Greer, “Colonial Saints,” 324. 35. K. I. Koppedrayer, “The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin: Early Jesuit Biographies of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha,” Ethnohistory 40, no. 2 (1993): 277. The term leaky pot is currently used by some Mohawk traditionalists skeptical of  Tekakwitha’s historical position. The term also reflects the ironic nature of  Indian humor, in that the translation of  Tekakwitha’s birthplace in the Mohawk Valley of today’s New York State is known as “the place of the clean pot.” 36. Mladen Dolar, The Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006).

296  |  Vera B. Palmer

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Contributors

Christopher Bracken is an associate professor of English and Film

studies at the University of Alberta.

Glen Coulthard is an assistant professor in the First Nations Studies Program and the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia. Mishuana R. Goeman is an associate professor of gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dian Million is an associate professor of American Indian studies

at the University of  Washington.

Scott Lauria Morgensen is an associate professor of gender studies

at Queen’s University.

Robert Nichols is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alberta. Vera B. Palmer is a senior lecturer of Native American studies at Dartmouth College. Mark Rifkin is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Audra Simpson is an assistant professor of anthropology at Columbia

University.

Andrea Smith is an associate professor of media and cultural studies

at the University of California, Riverside.

Teresia Teaiwa is a senior lecturer of Pacific studies at Victoria

University of Wellington.

Index

Abele, Frances, 68–69 Aboriginal Pipeline Group, 85–86 accommodation, in Indigenous studies, 56 act up organization, 196 “Addressing Two-­Spirits,” 195 adoption: in Banaban culture, 44; Native kinship structure and, 160–68 Advisory Commission on the Development of Government in the Northwest Territories, 65–69 affect studies: Separates movement and, 123–43; theorization and role of, 31, 41n2 Agamben, Giorgio, 192 agency: in Christian Indian writing, 130–32, 142–43; Indigenous studies and role of, 31–41 Agoos, Zoe, 190 “Agreement in Principle between the Dene Nation and Her Majesty the Queen, in Right of Canada,” 76–83 aids and Accusation (Farmer), 189–90 aids pandemic, indigenous transnationalism and, 188–204 Akaicho region, Weledeh and Chipewyan Dene peoples in, 63–69 Alexie, Sherman, 240 American Indian Movement, Marxism and, 17–18 American Lazarus (Brooks), 129–30 Anderson, Warwick, 190 anthropological gaze, ethnographic entrapment and, 211–12

anthropological research, Native studies and, 4–5, 23n11 anticolonialism, governmentality and, 113–15 Antigone, 278–79 anti-­i mmigrationism, ethnic studies and, 27n32 antiracist discourse: in Occom’s writing, 129–32; settler contract and, 102–3 aporetic texts, ethnographic entrapment and, 213 Arminianism, 141, 148n104 Aspin, Clive, 196 assimilation: domination and, 114–15; enfranchisement as tool for, 105–9; Native conversions and dilemma of, 279–80, 290–94 Athabascan culture, values and agency in, 39–40 Augustinian piety, sadomasochism and, 140–41, 146n58 Australian Federation of aids Organizations, 195–96 Australian National University, Research School in Pacific Studies, 47, 49 autonomous zones, creation of, 226–28 autonomy: in Dene Declaration land claims proposals, 76–83; in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez case, 169–79 Awatere, Donna, 46 Balibar, Étienne, 99, 113–15 Banaban culture, genealogy in, 44

Barker, Joanne, 202–3 Barnaby, George, 76–77 Baudrillard, Jean, 267–68 Bauer, Alberta N. Wright, 266–67 Baxter, Richard, 138 Bealglehole, J. C., 48–49, 51 Behar, Ruth, 219 Benally, Klee, 229 Benedict, Ruth, 23n11 Berger, Bethany R., 182n32 Berger, John, 51, 238 Berger, Thomas (Justice), 68, 95n110 Berger Inquiry. See Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry Berlin International aids Conference, 196–98 Beschefer, Thierry (Father), 275 Bhabha, Homi, 14 Bill C-­31, reinstatement of First Nation status under, 104 biopolitics: Foucault’s concept of, 149–52; global health governance and, 190, 192–204; kinship and geographies of jurisdiction and, 158–68; Native studies and, 20–21; race, space, and sexuality and, 152–58; settlement geopolitics and, 178–79; transnational Indigenous alliances and, 198–204 Bird, Gloria, 41n4 Blackhawk, Ned, 5, 24n14 Blake, Philip, 70–73 Blondin, George, 70–73 Blood on the Border (Dunbar-­Ortiz), 17 Boas, Franz 23n11, 219 body imagery: grammar of place and, 256–60; mobility of Native populations and, 254–60; settler-­colonial grammar of place and, 235–39; violence against Native bodies, 249–50 border towns: cultural geography of, 248–50; land occupation and, 251–54 Bordertowns (Gaede), 248–50 Bourdieu, Pierre, 278, 295n17 Bracken, Christopher, 21, 122–43 Brainerd, David, 137 Brooks, Joanna, 129–30, 132 Bruyneel, Kevin, 14–15, 192, 242 Buchanan, Judd, 78 324  | Index

Bureau of Indian Affairs: Branch of Acknowledgment and Research, 236; identity card issued by, 252–54; tribal sovereignty and, 175 Butler, Judith, 241, 247, 278–79 Byrd, Jodi, 15–16 Calder v. British Columbia Attorney General decision, 68 Callhan, Alice, 129 Calvinism, writing of Christian Indians and, 130–31, 133–34, 148n104 Cameron, Barbara, 196 Canada: Dene nation case study, 57; history of indigenous land claims in, 74–75; primitive-­accumulation thesis and, 56–86; public health response to h1n1 epidemic in, 191; settler-­colonial enfranchisement and racial governance in, 99–117 Canadian Labour Congress, 78 Canadian residential schools, 41n2; sur­ vivors’ testimony concerning, 31–41 canoe building, in Cook Island cultures, 44–45 Capital, Volume I (Marx), 58–63, 88n9 capitalist imperialism: Dene Nation critique of, 57; history of indigenous land claims and, 74–75; Indigenous alternatives to, 221–22; primitive-­accumulation thesis and, 58–63 Cardinal, Harold, 78 Carpio, Myla Vicenti, 11–12 Carrothers Commission. See Advisory Commission on the Development of Government in the Northwest Territories Catholic Church: Christian Indian conversions and, 268; Tekakwitha’s conversion and sainthood and, 268, 286–94 “Charter of Founding Principles,” Dene Declaration and, 82–83 Cherokee nation case study: kinship and geographies of jurisdiction in, 159–68; “Old Settlers” and, 184n53 “Chief Hot Foot” panel (Tsinhnahjinnie), 250 Chow, Rey, 13, 20–21, 210–12, 215–18

Chrisman, Laura, 13–16 Christian, Barbara, 6, 34 Christian Indians: conversion narratives of, 266–94; as first Native American writers, 129–32; in Johnson’s writing, 122–43 Christianity, Native studies and tradition of, 4–5, 21–22 Churchill, Ward, 17–18 citizenship: governmentality, totality, and hegemony in, 109–15; in Michel First Nation case study, compulsory nature of, 104–9; tribal civil rights and, 169–70 Cocks, Joan, 140–41 Cole, Peter, 37 Collected Writings (Occom), 129 collectivities, Indigenous concepts of, 221–22 Collier, John, 24n14 Colonial Discourse and Post-­colonial Theory (Williams and Chrisman), 13–16 colonial imperative, Native studies and, 5–6 colonization: Dene resistance to, 69–73; global health governance and, 189–204; Native Christian conversions and role of, 268–94; Native studies and role of, 10–12; naturalized violence and, 250, 265n34; primitive-­accumulation thesis and, 56–63; race, space, and sexuality and, 152–58; settler-­colonial grammar of place and, 236–61; survivors’ narrative in context of, 34–41 Committee for Original Peoples’ Entitlement, 67 commodification of theory, survivors’ narratives and, 34 Communist Manifesto, The (Marx and Engels), 87n8 Communities against Rape and Abuse, 217 community activism, Native studies theory and, 7–8 community-­scale activities, Dene Declaration land claims proposals and inclusion of, 77–83 Condolence, in Haudenosaunee tradition, 271–72, 278–83, 287–94, 294n7

Congregationalists, Separates movement and, 134–43 Congressional plenary authority, tribal sovereignty vs., 169–79 Connelley, Kevin, 273 Constitution of the United States, Indigenous peoplehood and, 170–79 Contemporary Pacific journal, 48 conversion narratives: cultural hybridity in, 268–72; by Johnson, 122–43; in Native studies, 266–94 Cook-­Lynn, Elizabeth, 5–12, 207, 210; on postcolonial theory, 13 Corntassel, Jeff, 192 Coulthard, Glen, 10, 19, 56–86, 202–3, 212, 229 covenant theology, 148n104 creation-­story in Christianity, cultural hybridity with Native cultures and, 272–94 critical race theory, Native studies and, 19–20 Crocombe, Papa Ron, 49–51 “cultural ecology” framework, Native studies and, 5 cultural geography: border towns and, 248–50; settler-­colonial grammar of space and, 248–50 cultural hybridities: Native conversions and, 270–94; New Age appropriation of Native spirituality, 219–21; race, space, and sexuality and, 154–58 cultural rights: Congressional power vs., 169–79, 185n71; Dene Declaration and concepts of, 80–83; indigenous nationalism and concepts of, 74–75 cultural traditions, in Native studies, 21–22 “culture of whiteness,” race, space, and sexuality and, 154–58, 165–66 Curry, Lucy A., 176, 186n79 Curtis, Edward, 236, 243 Custer Died for Your Sins (Deloria), 5, 25n15 Dacks, Gurston, 75 Davidson, J. W., 49, 51 Davis, Papa Tom, 44–45 Dead Subjects (Viego), 21 De Angelis, Massimo, 86n6 Index  |  325

De Certeau, Michel, 236–37 decolonization politics: authenticity and, 224–25; ethnographic entrapment and, 214–15; global health governance and, 189–204; Native studies and role of, 10–12 Dehcho region, Dene peoples in, 63 Deh ninõ´-­ta ton (Mohawk gifted children), 286–94 Deleuze, Gilles, 140–41 Deloria, Ella, 23n11, 219–21 Deloria, Philip, 5–6, 23n11; postcolonial theory and, 15 Deloria, Vine Jr., 3–4, 69–70, 150, 219–21, 224–25 Dene Declaration of 1975, 57; “agreement in principle” and, 83–86; indigenous nationalism and, 73–75; land-­claims proposals in, 76 “Dene heritage fund,” Dene Declaration proposals concerning, 83 Denendeh jurisdiction, Dene Declaration proposal for, 81–83 Dene peoples: case study of, 57; history of, 63–69; land and place relationships in, 69–73; land claims and domestication of nationhood in, 75–83; resistance to colonial development by, 69–73 Derrida, Jacques, Separates movement and philosophy of, 124 diamond megamining projects, in Northwest Territories, 84–86 di Leonardo, Micaela, 219–20 Dine people, 237–39 direct democracy, Dene Declaration land claims proposals and, 76–83 discourse: colonial hegemony and erasure of Indigenous tradition through, 278–94; narrativity and, 33–41 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men (Rousseau), 127 Discovery of America, The (Galle), 265n34 disease vulnerability, settler colonialism and, 191–204 dispossession, politics of, 56–86; colonization and, 57–63; Dene people’s colonial resistance and, 70–73; primitive 326  | Index

accumulation thesis and, 59–63; settler contract and acceptability of, 112–15 Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry (Widdowson and Howard), 230 Djikonsã´së? (Jigonsase) (“Mother of All Nations”), 271–94 Dogrib (Wedeleh dialect), 70–73 Dolar, Mladen, 292–94 domestication of indigenous nationalism, Dene land claims and, 75–83 domination, colonization and, 57–63 “Don’t Leave The Rez Without It!” panel (Tsinhnahjinnie), 252–54 Dorrington, Lafayette A., 248 Dosman, Edgar, 66 double-­jeopardy clause, tribal sovereignty and, 172, 184n63 Drobac, Peter, 190 drua (Fijian traditional vessel), 44–45 Drury, Charles (Bud), 80–83 Duggan, Lisa, 180n14 Dunbar-­Ortiz, Roxanne, 17 Eastern Door geography (in Iroquois Confederacy), 269 economic development: Dene Declaration land claims proposals and inclusion of, 77–83, 94n94; history of Dene peoples and changes in, 64–69; shift in nwt indigenous perspectives on, 84–86 Edelman, Lee, 223–24 Edmonton Report newspaper, 78 Edwards, Jonathan, 122, 134–35, 137, 139–42 elders, in Pacific Studies, 44–53 empowerment rationale, in Pacific Studies, 47–53 enfranchisement: Canadian settler-­ colonial governance and, 99–117; governmentality, totality, and hegemony in, 109–15; Michel Nation case study, 103–9, 115–17, 118n14; Native studies theorization and, 115–17; as tool of assimilation, 105–9 Enlightenment theory, ethnographic entrapment and, 208–15 epidemiological framework, global public health policy and, 190–204 Erasmus, Georges, 94n94

Erdrich, Louise, 240 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, An (Locke), 126 “Essay on the Origin of Languages” (Rousseau), 125–27 essentialism, in Native studies, 2–5, 22n2 ethnic studies: anti-­i mmigrationism and, 27n32; Native studies as, 12–13 ethnographic entrapment theory: Christian Indian conversions and, 268; Native activism and, 228–31; Native studies and, 207–31; recognition and, 223–25; self-­determination and radical relationality and, 221–23 Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God, A (Edwards), 134–35 family: kinship structure vs., 160–68; tribal concepts of, 175–79 family names, Christian and Native versions of, 295n25 Fanon, Frantz, 46 Farmer, Paul, 189–90 Fast, Phyllis, 39–40 Fawcett, Brian, 138 federal recognition, Native studies and, 235–36 Federici, Silvia, 59 feminist theory: masochism and, 139–41; Native studies and, 15–17; transnational aids activism and, 197 Fifth Amendment, tribal civil rights and, 169–70 Fiji: Indigenous cultures in, 44–46; in post-­i ndependence period, 45–46 First Convocation of American Indian Scholars, 8–9 Fish, Stanley, 3 Fisher, Robin, 131–32 Forbes, Jack, 12 Foucault, Michel: biopolitics of, 149–52; governmentality theory of, 111–12, 254; on history, 132; normalization in modern state and, 211; on power relations, 284–85; sexuality, space, and race in work of, 153–58, 164–65 Fourth World, The (Manual and Posluns), 77 Freedom of the Will (Edwards), 142

Freud, Sigmund: on masochism, 138–39, 147n81; on suffering, 128, 137 Friction (Tsing), 197 Friends of Michel Society, 104, 118n14 fur trade, history of Dene peoples and postwar demise of, 64–69 Gadamer, Hans-­Georg, 128–29, 133 Gaede, Marc, 248–50 Gaede, Marnie, 248–50 Galle, Theodoor 265n34 Gay American Indians: aids activism and, 196, 202 gender: global health systems and, 192–204; Native conversion narratives and, 270–94; in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez case, 170–79 genealogy, centrality in Pacific Studies of, 43–44 genocidal logic: Native studies and role of, 10–12, 213–15; normalization of state and, 211 geopolitics: biopolitics and, 150–52; race, space, and sexuality and, 154–58; tribal sovereignty and, 174–79, 182n32 Geronimo, images of, 254–56 Gilmore, Ruthie, 227–28 Glissant, Eduardo, 213 global health policy: Native studies and, 20; settler colonialism and, 188–204 God is Red (Deloria), 3–4, 225 Goeman, Mishuana R., 21, 235–61 Gómez, Amaranta, 198 Goodich, Michael, 295n13 “Good Mind” Iroquoian principle of, 272–73, 287–94 governance: biopolitics and, 149–52; global health governance and settler colonialism, 188–204; Native studies theorization and, 116–17; settler contract and, 109–15; settler logics of place and, 235–61; “taking power by making power” models, 226–28; tribal sovereignty and issues of, 170–79 Government of the Northwest Territories (gnwt): reactions to Dene Declaration proposals by, 78–83; size and power of, impact on Dene peoples of, 65–69 Index  |  327

gradual civilization, in Michel Nation case study, 103–9 Gradual Civilization Act (Canada), 104–9, 119nn17–18 grammar of place: border towns and, 248–51; mobility of Native populations and, 254–60; settler-­colonial concepts of, 236–61; urban populations and, 243–48 Gramsci, Antonio, 46, 51–52 Grande, Sandy, 207 Great Awakening, Christian Indians and, 123, 134, 137 Great Law of Peace (Kaianerekowa), 268–72, 287–94 Greer, Allan, 271 Grewal, Inderpal, 197 Gunter, Dan, 175 Gwich’in Dene culture: Dene Declaration and, 84–86; history of, 63–69; values and agency in, 39–40 “habitus of behavior,” 295n17 Haiti, colonial history and health policy in, 189–90 Hare Dene peoples, 63 Harjo, Joy, 38, 41n4, 229 Hart, Lynda, 139, 142 Harvey, David, 59 Haudenosaunee culture, Christian Indian conversions and, 268–94 Hau’ofa, Epeli, 51 Hawaii: indigenous aids activism in, 195–204; Pacific Islands studies in, 47–48 Healing Our Spirit organization, 198 health sovereignty, aids global health governance and, 188–204 Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors (Alfred), 73 Hegel, G. F. W., 278–79, 296n29 hegemony: “scattered forms of dominance” model of, 251; settler contract and role of, 113–15 heteropatriarchy, aids global health governance and politics of, 188–204 Hewitt, J. N. B., 23n11 Hiawatha, Haudenosaunee culture and transformation of, 271–72, 280–83 328  | Index

Hill, Elias, 105–9 history: in Christian Indian writing, 132–33; residential school survivor narratives in context of, 35–40 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 153–58 Hobbes, Thomas, 51, 100–101 Holloway, John, 230–31 Holocaust, social contract theory and, 109 homonationalism, Puar’s concept of, 155–58 homonormativity, 180n14 homosexuality, global health systems and, 192–204 Hooper, Barbara, 259–60 “horizon of death,” ethnographic entrapment theory and, 209–15 Howard, Albert, 230 humanitarian aid programs, health sovereignty issues and, 190–204 human rights legislation, impact on compulsory enfranchisement of, 108–9 Hurston, Zora Neale, 23n11 Hutchinson, Abigail, 135 identity. See also indigeneity: assemblages vs., 156–58; authenticity and, 224–25; in Dene culture, land linked to, 71–73; ethnic studies theory and, 207–8; Johnson’s concept of, 125–43; kinship and geographies of jurisdiction and, 160–68, 175–79; Locke’s theory of, 126, 139; in Pacific Studies, 43–53; Separates movement and role of, 125–43 imperialism: Canadian settler colonial enfranchisement and racial governance and, 99–117; simulation of consent in, 183n42 Incite!, 217 Indian Act of 1876 (Canada), involuntary enfranchisement under, 105–9 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, 252–54 Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories (ib-­n wt): formation of, 67–69; indigenous nationalism and, 73–75; land-­claims proposals of, 76–83, 94n94; resistance to colonial development and, 69–73 Indian Civil Rights Act (icr a), 169–71

Indian distinctiveness. See indigeneity Indian Reorganization Act (1934), 169–79 Indians of Quebec Association, 77 Indian Trade and Intercourse Act, 162–68 Indigeneity: Christian conversion by Natives and erasure of, 268–94; global health policy and locations of, 191–204; nonrecognition of indigenous communities and, 104–9; preservation of, 169–79; settler contract and, 102–17; settler self-­reflexivity and, 218–21; terrorism linked to, 155–58; transnational aids activism and, 188–204 Indigenism, Million’s theory of, 37–40 Indigenous aids activism, global health governance and, 188–204 Indigenous Australians, aids activism of, 196–97 Indigenous critical philosophies, Native Studies theorization and, 116–17 Indigenous nationalism: Dene Declaration and, 73–75; land claims and domestication of, 75–83 Institute for Pacific Studies, 49–50 Institutes of Christian Religion (Calvin), 133–34 intellectual tradition: colonial framing of Native traditions, 296n29; genealogy of, in Pacific Studies, 43–53; “intellectual sovereignty,” Warrior’s concept of, 9–10; isolationism of, in Native studies, 12; political theory and recognition of, 212–15 International aids Conferences, Indigenous aids activism and, 196–204 International aids Society, 196 International Indigenous People’s Summit, 198 “In the Air Heading to msp (#8)” (Tsinhnahjinni), 245–48 Inuit peoples, impact of petroleum development on, 66–69 Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, 67 Inuvialuit peoples: land-­claim area, Dene Nation and, 63; petroleum development and, 67 ironic humor, in Native cultures, 296n35 Iroquois Confederacy: Native conversion

narratives and culture of, 268–94; wars fought by, 275 Irwin, Alexander, 280 “island-­centered” research, in Pacific Studies, 49–50 Jesuit missionaries, Native conversions and, 267–70, 285–94 Jesuit Relations, 267–68, 291–94 Johnson, Joseph, 21, 122–43; “All our Indian Brethren” open letter and, 144n15; conversion described by, 142–43; on Great Awakening, 134; Rousseau’s philosophy and writing of, 123–28; self-­ punishment by, 135–39 Jones, William, 23n11 Junga-­W illiams, Rodney, 196–97 jurisdiction: kinship and geographies of, 158–68; tribal sovereignty and issues of, 172 Kahnawake community, Native conversion narratives and, 266, 270–94 Kanaka Maoli aids organization, 195–204 Kant, Immanuel, 100–101 Keck, Margaret, 197 Keeling, Kara, 224–25 Kieckhefer, Richard, 290–91 kinship: Congressional power vs., 169–79; foundational characteristics of, in Pacific cultures, 44; geographies of jurisdiction and, 158–68; geopolitics and, 152; tribal membership and, 170–79, 262n1 Klopotek, Brian, 13 Kluane First Nation, 86 Knapp, Steven, 8–9 Kropotkin, Peter, 58–63 Kulchyski, Peter, 70 Kymlicka, Will, 116–17 laboratory rationale, in Pacific Studies, 47–53 Lacan, Jacques, 292–94 LaCapra, Dominick, 289–90 land allocation: in Banaban culture, 44; settler-­colonial grammar of place and, 237–61 Index  |  329

land-­claim cases: Canadian government interpretation of, 89n25; Dene Nation case study, 57; domestication of Dene nationhood and, 75–83; governmentality vs. universality concepts and, 112–15; history of, in Denendeh cultures, 63–69, 89n18; Michel First Nation case study, 103–9, 119 n19; Native studies and, 27n35; resistance to colonial development and, 69–73 language: colonial hegemony and erasure of Indigenous tradition through, 278–94; theorization and role of, 41n4 LaRocque, Emma, 14 Latin American revolutionary movements: Indigenous aids activists, 198–99; Marxism and, 17–18; “taking power by making power” models, 226–28 liberation: ethnographic entrapment and, 209–15; self-­determination and radical relationality and, 221–23 life story genre, ethnographic entrapment and, 210 Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut (Kulchyski), 70 literary studies, Native scholarship and, 6–8, 25n23 Locke, John: on identity, 126, 139; political philosophy of, 100–101, 112, 166 “logic of elimination,” global health narratives and, 191; settler contract and, 113–15 Longhouse imagery, in Haudenosaunee culture, 269–72 Look of Things, The (Soja), 238 Lowery, Melinda Maynor, 13 luck, Tsinhnahjinnie on politics of, 260–61 “Lust 101 (#10)” (Tsinhnahjinnie), 256–60 Lyons, Scott, 4, 15, 18, 126, 141–42, 224–25 Lytle, Clifford M., 150 Mackenzie Gas Project, 85–86 Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, 57, 68–69; Dene nationalism and, 78; resistance to colonial development and, 69–73 Macklem, Patrick, 116–17 mahu activism, aids organization in Hawai’i and, 195–96 330  | Index

Malcolm X, 46 Maleaska, the Indian Wife of the White Hunter, 259–60 Mamdani, Mahmood, 190 Mandeville, Bernard, 127–30 Manual, George, 77 Maori lgbtq  politics, transnational Indigenous aids activism and, 195–96 Markell, Patchen, 114–15 Marshall, Thurgood, 170–72 Martinez, Audrey, 169–79 Martinez, Miguel Alfonso, 75 Marxism: governmentality vs. universality and, 112–15; indigenous nationalism and, 74–75; indigenous studies and, 56–86; mode of production concept in, 74–75, 93n77; Native studies and, 17–18; Pacific Studies and, 45–46; primitive-­ accumulation thesis of, 56–63, 86n6, 88n9 Marxism and Native Americans (Churchill), 17–18 masochism, Christian Indians and theories of, 136–41 mass-­based peoples’ movements, alternative governance structures and, 226–28 matrilineal culture, Native conversions and role of, 269–72, 281–83 McCarthy, Thomas, 120n29 McClintock Anne, 14 Menchu, Rigoberto, 210 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 273–75 Métis, impact of petroleum development on, 66–69 Métis and Non-­Status Association of the Northwest Territories, indigenous nationalism and, 73–75 Métis Association of the Northwest Territories, 67; “agreement in principle” and, 83–86; Dene Declaration and, 81–83 “The Metro Proposal,” Dene Declaration and, 79–83 Mexico: Indigenous aids activists from, 198–99; Native identity and, 229–30 Meyer, Manu, 225 Michaels, Walter Benn, 8–9 Michel First Nation case study: compulsory enfranchisement and gradual

civilization in, 103–9; racism and colonialism in, 110–15 Middle Ground, The (White), 131–32 Miles, Tiya, 13 militarism, activist movements and, 226–28 Mill, John Stuart, 166 Miller, Perry, 146n58 Million, Dian, 19, 31–41 Mills, Charles, 20, 99, 101–3, 109–15; Native studies theorization and, 116–17 mixed marriages, kinship and geographies of jurisdiction and, 159–68 mode of production, Marxist concept of, indigenous nationalism and, 74–75, 93n77 modernity, postracial theory and, 120n29 Mohawk peoples: Christian Indians and culture of, 268; nationalism of, 213 Mohawk School and Mission, 284 Monture-­A ngus, Patricia, 222 Moor’s Indian Charity School, 122, 141 Morgan, J. P., 243 Morgensen, Scott Lauria, 20, 188–204, 218–21 Morrow, William G. (Justice), 67 Morton v. Mancari, 175, 185n75 Mountain Dene peoples, 63 multiculturalism: ethnic studies theory and, 207–8; ethnographic entrapment and, 209–15 multinational corporations, alternatives to, 227–28 Muscogee people, 237–39 Muwekma Ohlone people, 246–48 Nadasdy, Paul, 86 narrative, in social research, 31–41 National Assembly of Denendeh, Dene Declaration proposal for, 82–83 National Native American aids Prevention Center (nnaapc), 194–204 nation-­state governance model: alternatives to, 227–28; Indigenous alternatives to, 221–22; land occupation and, 251–54 Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, 47 Native biography, ethnographic entrapment theory and, 210

“Native experience,” commodification of, 246–48 Native studies. See also indigeneity: biopolitics and, 149–52; as ethnic studies, 12–13; ethnographic entrapment theory and, 207–31; feminist theory and, 15–17; kinship and geographies of jurisdiction in, 158–68; Marxism and, 17–18; multiple Indigenous cultures and, 235–36; Native intellectual traditions in, 296n29; orally based knowledges in research of, 33–41; origins of, 8–9; Pacific Studies and, 51–53; postcolonial theory and, 13–16; queer theory and, 15–17; role of agency in, 31–41; role of theory in, 1–22; settler contract and theorization of, 115–17; theoretical practices in, 8–9; theoretical promiscuity and, 9–12; theory ownership and, 6–8; truth claims and essentialism in, 2–5, 22n2 Native Youth Sexual Health Network, 7–8 Navajo identity, in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez case, 169–70 Nerysoo, Richard, 94n94 New Age movement: interracial coupling and, 259–60; Native spirituality appropriated by, 218–21 New Democratic Party (Canada), 68, 78 New Lights movement, 134, 137 New York Tribune, Marx’s articles in, 59, 87n8 ngos, transnational aids activism and, 197–204 Nicaraguan Revolution, American Indian Movement and, 17–18 Nichols, Robert, 19–20, 99–117 Nicholson, Jacob, 159–68 nonrenewable resource development: Dene Declaration proposals concerning, 82–83; impact on Dene peoples of, 65–69 normalization, ethnographic entrapment theory and role of, 211 Northern Athabascan Survival: Women, Community and the Future (Fast), 39–40 Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, 68 Nozick, Robert, 101 Index  |  331

Occom, Samson, 21, 122, 129–32, 134 occupied land, grammar of settler space and, 251–54 Office of Federal Acknowledgement, 248 Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, 78 Oliphant, Mark David, 172 Oliphant v. Suquamish, 172–74, 185n65 “On Ethnographic Refusal” (Simpson), 212–13, 220 Ontario Aboriginal hiv/aids Strategy, 198–99 Osage Constitution of 1881, 199 other, ethnographic entrapment and role of, 209–15 Ounei, Susanna, 46 Oxfam Canada, 78 Pacific Sexual Diversity Network, 195–96 Pacific Studies: academic practices in, 47–53; geopolitical boundaries of, 43; identity and intellectual genealogy in, 43–53 Palmer, Vera B., 21–22, 266–94 Papua New Guinea, constitution of, 49 Paris Commune, 88n9 Parker, Arthur, 23n11 passivity, agency and theory of, 141–42 Pateman, Carole, 20, 101–2 Patton, Cindy, 189–91, 196 Paulette, Francois, 67 Pennefather Commission, 119n19 peoplehood: indigenous sovereignty and concepts of, 151–52; race, space, and sexuality and, 152–58, 180n12 “People of the Wandering Flocks” (Tsinhnahjinnie), 243–48 Perez, Hiram, 208, 218–21 petroleum development, impact on Dene peoples of, 66–69 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 278–79 Phenomenology of Perception, The (Merleau-­Ponty), 274–75 Photographic Memoirs of an Aboriginal Savant (Living on Occupied Land) (Tsinhnahjinnie), 237–61 pity, Rousseau’s discussion of, 124–27 place-­based ethics: biopolitics and, 332  | Index

149–52; colonial resistance and, 70–73; land claims and, 57; settler logics of governmentality and, 235–61; sovereignty and, 152–58 “Political Development in the Northwest Territories,” Dene Declaration and, 80–83 political rights, separation of cultural rights from, 80–83 political theory: Canadian settler colonial enfranchisement and racial governance and, 99–117; ethnographic entrapment and, 228–31; intellectual recognition and, 212–15; postcolonialism and, 14–16; transnational activism and, 197–204 populations: peoplehood concepts and, 155–58, 180n12; preservation of Indian distinctness in, 169–79; racialized definitions of, 149–52 Posluns, Michael, 77 “A Postcolonial Tale” (Harjo), 38 postcolonial theory, Native studies and, 13–16 postidentity, ethnic studies theory and, 208 postmodern theory, principles of, 2–5 post-­positivist realism, Native studies and, 2 poststructural theory, Native studies and, 2–5 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 13, 20–21, 208 power relations: biopolitics and, 20, 149–52; coalition building and, 11; Congressional power vs. cultural rights, 169–79, 185n71; Dene nationhood and land claims and, 75–83; empowerment rationale in Pacific Studies, 47–53; ethnographic entrapment and, 208–31; Foucault on, 284–85; global health policy and, 188–204; governance and, 114–17; indigeneity and, 169–79; jurisdiction geographies and, 158–68; land occupation and, 251–54; maso­ chism and, 139–42; narratives as source of, 32–38; politics of dispossession and, 56; primitive accumulation thesis and, 57–68; race, space, and sexuality in, 152–58; resistance to development

and, 68–73; settler-­colonial grammar of space and, 236–42; “taking power by making power” models, 226–28 pragmatism, in Pacific Studies, 47–53 primitive-­accumulation thesis: history of Dene peoples and, 63–69; Indigenous studies and, 56–63; Marx’s development of, 88n9; principles of, 86n6; resistance to colonial development and, 69–73; transformation of noncapitalist social relations and, 85–86 “Priorities for the North” (gnwt), reactions to Dene Declaration proposals and, 79–83 protesting ethnic, ethnographic entrapment and, 215–18 Prudhoe Bay pipeline, impact on Dene peoples of, 66–69 Puar, Jasbir K., 153–58, 174–77, 181n19 “Public Government for the People of the North,” Dene Declaration and, 81–83 Pueblo membership, in Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez case, 169–70, 184n57 Pulitano, Elvira, 2 queer theory: aids global health governance and, 192–204; biopolitics and, 150–52, 155–58, 181n19; futurity and, 223–25; Native studies and, 15–17; tribal sovereignty and elements of, 176–79 Rabinow, Paul, 253–54 race and racism: Canadian settler-­colonial governance and, 99–117; compulsory enfranchisement and, 105–9; ethnographic entrapment and, 208–15; geographies of jurisdiction and, 159–68; governmentality, totality, and hegemony and, 109–15; kinship and geographies of jurisdiction and, 161–68; Mills’s racial contract and, 101; normalization paradigm and, 211; in reactions to Dene Declaration proposals, 78–83; spatiality and sovereignty and, 152–58; tribal sovereignty and limits of, 149–79, 187n82 Race and the Education of Desire (Stoler), 153–58, 211 “The Race for Theory” (Christian), 34

Racial Contract, The (Mills), 101–3, 109–15 radical relationality, self-­determination and, 221–23 Raheja, Michelle, 243 Ramirez, Renya, 11–12 Rawls, John, 100–101 reciprocity ethic, Dene relationship to land and, 70–73 recognition: ethnographic entrapment and, 223–25; in Indigenous studies, 56; Native studies and role of, 10–12 Reik, Theodor, 138 relativism, theoretical truth and, 2–5 reparations policies, inhibition of research and, 27n37 Re: Paulette, and Registrar of Land Titles, 67–68 representation, in Native studies, 20–21 reservations, settler grammar of space and, 243–48, 263n21 resource-­e xploitation industries, primitive accumulation thesis and, 62–63 Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies (Wesley-­ Smith), 47 Revolutionary Imagination in Latin America and the Age of Development, The (Saldaña-­Portillo), 209–15 Ricoeur, Paul, 126 Rifkin, Mark, 20, 149–79, 188, 259 rivers, in survivor narratives, 41n1 Robers, William S., 159–68 Robertson, Kimberly, 11–12 Rodriguez, Dylan, 212 Rojas, Paula, 18 Rose, Charlie, 210 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 51, 100–101, 135; Separates movement and philosophy of, 125–28, 130 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (rcap), 104–9 sacred homelands, Native ruption from, 273–94 safe space concepts, activist politics and, 227–28 Sahtu Dene people: Dene Declaration and, 84–86; language and territories of, 63 Said, Edward, 56 Index  |  333

Sailata, Kiri, 224–25 Saint’s Everlasting Rest, The (Baxter), 138 Saldaña-­Portillo, Josefina, 17–18, 209–15 “salvage ethnography” theoretical truth and, 5 Samoa mo Samoa (Samoa for Samoans) (Davidson), 49 Samoan aids activism, 195–96 Santa Clara Pueblo people, membership code of, 169–70 Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, 152, 169–79 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 136–37 sb 1070 anti-­i mmigration law, 229 self-­confessing subject: alternatives to, 225–28; ethnographic entrapment and, 210–11, 215–18; self-­determination and radical relationality and, 221–23; settler self-­reflexivity and, 218–21 self-­determination: agency and, 141; biopolitics and, 150–52; capitalist development invalidation of, 75; Dene land claims and domestication of, 75–83, 89n18, 94n94; Dene Nation case study in, 57; ethnographic entrapment and, 208–15, 229–31; indigenous nationalism and, 74–75; in Pacific Studies, 49; radical relationality and, 221–23; tribal membership and, 176–79; tribal sovereignty and, 171–79; tribal termination and, 247–48 self-­d ivision, Johnson’s concept of identity and, 125–43 self-­government, biopolitics and, 149–52 self-­loathing, in Christian Indian’s writing, 134–36 self-­reflexivity: alternatives to, 223–25; ethnographic entrapment theory and, 207–8; protesting ethnic concept and, 215–18; settler colonialism and, 218–21 Seminole people, 237–39 Separates movement: formation of, 134–43; history of, 123–25 settler colonialism: biopolitics and, 150–52; body imagery and, 256–60; compulsory enfranchisement and, 103–9; geographic variations in, 118n7; global health governance and, 188–204; grammar of place in, 235–61; nation-­ 334  | Index

state governance model, 251–54; Native studies theorization and, 115–17; racial contracts and, 109–15; self-­reflexivity and, 218–21; social contract theory and, 99–103; strategies for dismantling of, 225–28 settler contract: governmentality, totality, and hegemony in, 109–15; philosophical origins of, 100–102 Seven Years’ War, 122 sexual exceptionalism, biopolitics and, 157–58 sexuality: global health systems and, 192–204; racialized connotations of, 259–60; sovereignty and, 152–58; tribal membership and, 176–79 Sexual Contract, The (Pateman), 101 shame, in Christian Indian’s writing, 136–37 Shorter, David, 47 Sikkink, Kathryn, 197 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 240 Silva, Denise de, 7, 208–9, 221–23 Simmons, William S., 132 Simpson, Audra, 1–22, 136, 212–14, 220, 254 Simpson, Leanne, 229 sin, Iroquoian concepts of, 272–73 Sista II Sista, 217 Sisters in Action for Power, 217 Six Nations Grand River Reserve, 283–84 Sky Woman (Haudenosaunee figure), 272–94 Slavey-­speaking Dene peoples, 63 Sleeper-­Smith, Susan, 278 smallpox, impact on tribal communities of, 276 Smith, Adam, 285 Smith, Andrea, 1–22, 129, 136, 207–31, 268, 277 Smith, Justine, 213, 223 Smith, Linda, 35–36 social contract theory: antiracist discourse and, 109–15; Canadian settler colonialism and, 100–117 socialism, Marx on, 59–63 Socialist Worker Party, 45–46 social theory, narratives in, 37–40

Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 137 Soja, Edward, 235, 238 sovereignty: biopolitics and, 149–52; ethnographic entrapment and, 229–31; health sovereignty, 189; racial limits of tribal sovereignty, 149–79; sexuality, spatiality, and racism and, 152–58; supremacist ideology of, 109 Sparke, Matthew, 251 spatial theory, settler-­colonial grammar of place and, 237 Spillers, Hortense, 237 Spinoza, Baruch, 133 spirituality, in Native studies, 21–22 spiritual practices in Native cultures, Christian conversion by Natives and, 268–94 Spivak, Gayatri, 216 Standing Bear, Luther, 284–85 Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 56 Stevenson, Winona, 12–13 Steward, Julian, 5, 24n14 Stoler, Ann Laura, 153–58, 165–68, 180n12, 211 story. See narrative Study on Treaties, Agreements, and Other Constructive Arrangements between States and Indigenous Populations (Martinez), 75 subalternity, protesting ethnic concept and, 216–18 “Subjects of Empire” (Coulthard), 10 subordinate civil standing problem, in settler-­colonial governments, 110–15 suffering: Freud’s discussion of, 128; Rousseau’s discussion of, 125–28 Sunray, Cedric, 229 survivors’ narratives, discourse concerning, 33–41 sustainability discourse, capitalist co-­optation of, 86 syncretism, Native conversion narratives and, 278–94 Taala Hooghan Infoshop, 7–8 Tadodaho (Iroquois figure), 271, 287–94

Taiaiaka Alfred, Gerald, 73, 89n18, 192, 202–3 takatapui (Maori same-­sex and transgender partnerships), 196 “taking power by making power” models, 226–28 Taney, Rober B. (Chief Justice), 159–68 Tanielu, Lonise, 51 Tanzania, economic development in postindependence era, 77 Taylor, Charles, 116–17 Teaiwa, Teresia, 43–53 “technology of tribalism,” tribal sovereignty and, 175–79 Tekakwitha, Kateri, 22; conversion narrative of, 267–94; sainthood campaign for, 268, 285 terrorism, biopolitics and, 154–58, 176–77 Terrorist Assemblages (Puar), 153–58 testimony, affective force of, 31–41 Teuton, Sean, 2 Te Whare Wānanga o Te Ūpoko o te Ika a Māui (Victoria University of Wellington), Pacific Studies at, 43 theoretical promiscuity, Native studies and, 9–12 theory and theorizing: agency and, 31–41; Native studies and role of, 1–22; pedagogy and, 43–53; truth of, 2–5 Theory’s Empire, 1–2 third space concept, postcolonial theory and, 14 Third Space of Sovereignty, The (Bruyneel), 242 Thomas, Jacob Ezra, 294n7 Tlicho Dene peoples, 63; diamond mega­ mining projects backed by, 85–86 “The Toronto Charter: Indigenous People’s Action Plan on hiv/aids 2006,” 199–204 Toward a Global Idea of Race, 208 traditional cultures, conscious adoption of, 29n64 traditional healing practices: global health systems and, 193–204; transnational Indigenous aids activism and, 193–204 Transit of Empire (Byrd), 15–16 Translated Woman (Behar), 219 Index  |  335

transnational organizations: Indigenous aids activism and, 193–204 Trask, Haunani-­K ay, 46, 51 Treaiwa, Teresia, 19 Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Edwards), 139–40 Treaty 6, compulsory enfranchisement and gradual civilization under, 103–9 Treaty of Land Entitlement, history of Dene land claims and, 64–69 Treaty of New Echota, 162–68 Tree of Peace in Haudenosaunee culture, 268–69 tribal sovereignty: global health systems and, 192–204; kinship and geographies of jurisdiction and, 160–68; membership definitions and, 170–79, 262n1; racism and limits of, 149–79; settler logics of governance and, 236–61 tribal termination, urban Native communities, 246–48, 263n21 trickster figure, in Native cultures, 262n10 tropicalization framework, global public health policy and, 190–204 Trudeau, Pierre, 68 truth, ethnographic entrapment theory and role of, 210–15 T’Seleie, Frank, 85–86 Tsing, Anna, 197 Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah, 21; settler-­ colonial grammar of place and art of, 237–61 Tuan, Yi-­Fu, 242 tufuga tatatau (tattoo artists), 52 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 6, 207 Tully, James, 114–15 Turner, Dale, 116–17 Tuscarora Redemption (Bauer), 266–67 Two-­Spirit Indigenous aids organizations, 193–204 unaids, transnational Indigenous aids activism and, 195–96 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 128 unitary identity, in Native studies, 21 United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, 82

336  | Index

United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, 5 United Nations Security Council, global health politics and, 190 United Nations World Conference against Racism, 228 United States Supreme Court, tribal sovereignty and, 170–79 United States v. Kagama, 171 United States v. Rogers, 152, 159–69, 172–73, 176–79 United States v. Wheeler, 172, 184n63 United Steelworkers of America, 78 universality, governmentality and role of, 110–15, 120n29 University of Hawai’i, Center for Pacific Islands Studies at, 47–48 University of the South Pacific, 49–50 un Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, 199–204 urban Native communities: primitive accumulation thesis and, 62–63; research biases concerning, 11–12; settle-­colonial grammar of place and, 243–48, 263n21 Usher, Peter, 69–73 usurpation, in settler contracts, 114–15 valence, Indigenism and, 38–40 Vaughn, Judy, 217–18 “vermilion romances,” in U.S. literature, 259–60 victimhood, Canadian residential school survivors’ narratives outside language of, 38–41 Victoria University of Wellington, Pacific Studies at, 43, 46–47 Viego, Antonio, 21, 213–14 View of the Art of Colonization, A (Wakefield), 60 violence: colonialism and sexual violence, 265n34; grammar of space and, 248–50, 264n26 visual culture: Native images in, 236; Tsinhnahjinnie’s photographic memoir and, 238–61 Vizenor, Gerald, 235, 236, 262n6

“Waffle” movement, 78 Wah-­Shee, James, 77 Wakefield, E. G., 60 Warrior, Robert, 2, 129; Indigenous aids activism and, 199; intellectual sovereignty concept of, 9–10, 207 Weaver, Jace, 2 Weheliye, Alexander, 208, 221–23, 225 Wendt, Albert, 50 Wesley-­Smith, Terence, 47–48, 50–51 Western philosophy: Canadian settler-­ colonial governance and, 100–117; ethnographic entrapment and, 208–15; Native studies and tradition of, 3–5, 7 Western Samoa, constitution of, 49 Wheelock, Eleazar, Johnson’s correspondence with, 132–33, 136, 138–39, 147n81 When Did Indians Become Straight? (Rifkin), 259 White, Richard, 131–32 Whitefield, George, 134 White Paper 1969 (Canada), 56, 68, 108–9

white subject, self-­reflexivity and, 218–21 white supremacy, strategies for dismantling of, 225–28 Widdowson, Frances, 230 Williams, Patrick, 13–16 Williams, Robert Jr., 116–17 Wolfe, Patrick, 113, 116–17, 191 Womack, Craig, 2, 6–7, 129 Women of Color against Violence, 217, 228 women’s studies, Pacific Studies and, 51–53 World Health Organization (who), global health governance and, 190 World Liberation Theology Forum, 225 World Social Forum, 221–22, 226–27 Wright, Gwendolyn, 253–54 Wynema (Callhan), 129 X-­Marks (Lyons), 15, 141–42, 224–25 Yellowknives Dene First Nations, diamond megamining projects backed by, 85–86

Index  |  337