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Overview
Contributors. Christopher Bracken, Glen Coulthard, Mishuana Goeman, Dian Million, Scott Morgensen, Robert Nichols, Vera Palmer, Mark Rifkin, Audra Simpson, Andrea Smith, Teresia Teaiwa
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822376613 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/07/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Andrea Smith is Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Native Americans and the Christian Right, published by Duke University Press, and Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide.
Audra Simpson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She is the author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States, also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
Theorizing Native Studies
By Audra Simpson, Andrea Smith
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7661-3
CHAPTER 1
There Is a River in Me
Theory from Life
Dian Million
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 ...
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."
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 affective 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-filled 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."
In this chapter, I reiterate a position about the worth of our lives, our Indigenous lives as the stuff of theory. 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 happening 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 theorize. Are we using the master's tools? Sometimes, we do, but dangerously; 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." 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." 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?" 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.
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. 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. Thus, ironically it is to history where all have gone to reconstitute what is known now. History in my analyses 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." 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." 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 beneficial 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 paddle
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 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.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction / Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith 1
1. There Is a River in Me: Theory from Life / Dian Million 31
2. The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won't Deny / Teresia Teaiwa 43
3. From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh / Glen Coulthard 56
4. Contract and Usurpation: Enfranchisement and Racial Governance in Settler-Colonial Contexts / Robert Nichols 99
5. "In This Separation": The Noncorrespondence of Joseph Johnson / Christopher Bracken 122
6. Making Peoples into Populations: The Racial Limits of Tribal Sovereignty / Mark Rifkin 149
7. Indigenous Transnationalism and the AIDS Pandemic: Challenging Settler Colonialism within Global Health Governance / Scott Lauria Morgensen 188
8. Native Studies at the Horizon of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic Entrapment and Settler Self-Reflexivity / Andrea Smith 207
9. Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place: The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie / Mishuana R. Goeman 235
10. The Devil in the Details: Controverting an American Indian Conversion Narrative / Vera B. Palmer 266
Bibliography 297
Contributors 321
Index 323
What People are Saying About This
"Theorizing Native Studies is a superb collection, an astutely conceived and targeted intervention in Native studies. The introduction is a gem and the essays cohere remarkably well around the core issue it raises: how to move beyond the unproductive opposition between European theory and Native practice, and to do so in ways that reflect and reproduce the particularities of Native epistemologies."
"With Theorizing Native Studies, Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith release Native studies from the old conventional dichotomies that organize prevailing conceptions of knowledge, such as theory/practice and subject/object. This collection gives us a taste of the disruptive force of a theory that begins and stays with the demand from the dismantling of State-Capital and everything that stems from it. A necessary weapon for a critical arsenal that faces the challenge of remaining relevant within and against the neoliberal university."