Marriage and Empire in 19th Century Native American Women's Literature
My impetus to interrogate marriage is based on an assertion made by motley Native American scholars, an iteration of which appears in Paula Gunn Allen’s 1986 monograph The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Allen asserts that gender and sexuality lay at the heart of “the physical and cultural genocide of American Indian tribes” during the ongoing process of U.S. settler imperialism (3). Marriage, as a gendered and sexed institution central to both Native and settler-colonial life, constitutes a robust site to study this interconnection between empire and gender and sexuality (Piatote, 96). My reading of the four authors in light of this claim regarding interconnectedness, which has come to be central to Native Feminist studies, is two-fold (Goeman and Denetdale, 10-11). I parse out the way in which marriage emerges as a site where Liliuʻokalani, Winnemucca, Ward, and Johnson detect this intimacy; simultaneously, I attend to the way in which marriage acts as a site where these Native American women writers make a critique of empire through the medium of gender and sexuality.
The concerns of my exhibit are informed by a robust contemporary inquiry by scholars within Native American and Indigenous studies regarding gender and sexuality’s centrality in U.S. settler colonial violence against Indigenous peoples. Corroborating Patrick Wolfe’s claim that settler colonialism is a “structure not an event,” these NAIS scholars– including Sarah Deer, Mishuana Goeman, Leanne Betasamsake Simpson, and Dian Million– illustrate the abiding role patriarchy has played in the oppression of Indigenous people, especially women, across centuries (388). This “interconnectedness” emerges, for example, in the intimacy Deer detects between “surviving colonization and surviving rape” (xiv). By focusing on writers from the nineteenth century, my exhibit aims to join this scholarly conversation by demonstrating this intimate operation during a particular period of time. As such, my approach regarding periodicity departs from literary studies’ dominant epistemic position that processes are best studied through Western historical units such as decades and centuries. Therefore, my decision to study Liliuʻokalani, Winnemucca, Ward, and Johnson, is based less on their literary production occurring during the nineteenth century and more on the constellation being a productive one in parsing out the intimacy of patriarchy and empire.
To illuminate the conversation between my exhibit of Native American women writers and the contemporary field of NAIS, let me delve simultaneously into my their works and my primary texts. Mishia Goeman, in her study of Native Americans’ refutation of colonial cartographies, detects in Indigenous literary works a binary between the safety of home and the riskiness of the colonial frontier (10). Writing when the colonial frontier has been formalized into the nation state, Leanne Betasamsake Simpson feels the operation of the same binary inside and outside Indigenous territory (5). Among our writers, Sarah Winnemucca foregrounds this dichotomy by positing the domestic sphere as an entity that makes especially visible the violence of settler colonialism. Nancy Ward corroborates this point about visibility by using the constricted domestic space of marriage to make a critique of settler colonialism that she refrains from making with regards to the greater space of Cherokee territory. Alongside the space of the home, there is the issue of discourse around marriage. Both, Liliuʻokalani and Johnson use marriage as a site to rebut a discourse central to settler colonialism: the denigration of Indigenous forms of kinship (Million, 7). Altogether, marriage emerges in these four Native American women writers’ works as a robust engine to deliver a devastating critique of empire.