Blood quantum as method?
I posit ambivalence here as a productive critique of representation. Many scholars have been concerned with the issue of representation, especially in “minoritarian literature.” As Kandice Chuh writes, “[minority literatures] are all too often read as transparent depiction of ‘how ‘they’ really are’” (11). In other words, minoritarian literature, that which exists to critique dominant paradigms, might be absorbed by liberal multiculturalist rationale all too easily. In fact, Laura Hyun Yi Kang writes that representation may encourage a “wishful trajectory” in which identification with a subordinated subject may linearly and automatically lead to representation which in turn “secures greater justice” (333). As I’ve discussed in my previous section, the history of blood quantum and land allotment policy might also the trace the settler colonial desire to “know” a Native person’s truth, to determine their nativity by measuring and drawing meaning from their blood. As Chuh writes, “the motivation and rationale for our epistemological choices are always somehow self-interested.” Both Chuh and Kang are writing in Asian/American Studies, but I find their critiques productive to think alongside NAIS scholars, such as Pexa. In conversation with Elizabeth Povinelli, Pexa argues that “liberal tolerance and recognition politics are premised on a coercive logic that difference…should not be too radical…or run counter to colonialist, capitalistic interests” (17). In other words, “liberal tolerance” is that which arbitrarily limits Indigeneity to a range from the “not-repugnant to “not-us” (17). Such a “model of permissible indigeneity” echoes the mandates of the Dawest Act, in which the land allotment policy was used to recognize the property-owning, heteronormative Native man as being “close enough to the unnamed universal white subject of law to count as a U.S. citizen” (17, 20). Thus, Pexa theorizes what he calls the “unheroic decolonizer” as a method of discussing that which “teases in reply, and in teasing breathes some life back into their families and communities” (16). To “breathe some life back” relates importantly back to my opening comments on the claustrophobic binary of “race or sovereignty?” Indeed, Pexa writes:
Against the neoliberal mandate of representation, Pexa shifts attention to “the story that emerges among and between voices…the nuanced internal politics among the assimilation-era Dakhota themselves. Such a story stands to move against views of Indigenous peoples as homogenous entities; more important, it shows that intratribal relationships…perform tribal sovereignty in ways that are often illegible within the presumptive sovereignty of the settler colonial state?” (31). To think with Pexa’s work, what might one make then of the “Native person” as a literary object, both heterogenous and resistant to the authority of knowledge? In other words, how might the literary animate relationships between self and community, past and present? It is my hope that the literary shifts conversations away from holding the Native person against an impossible rubric: are you for assimilation or resistance? In my next section, I explore texts that stubbornly refuse the Western rubric of legibility and sentimentality, as well as rethink sovereignty and decolonization by introducing a literariness to these terms.“Thinking about Indigenous life during the assimilation era in terms of either liberatory resistance or disabling ambivalence is problematic because both views require a monolithic model of reception rather than allowing or accounting for a continuum of diverse hearings and mishearings. But it also relies problematically on a narrative of subversion as the reinscription of norms, a narrative that Saba Mahmood has identified with liberal progressive politics” (16).