Early Indigenous Literatures Main Menu The Child Who Would be Sovereign: Settler Colonial Frustrations and the Figure of the Child in Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's American Indian Stories By: Kai Chase Illicit Relations: The Challenges and Possibilities of Black and Indigenous Relations soumya rachel shailendra Legibility and Ambivalence in 19th Century Indigenous Women's Writing An exhibit on E. Pauline Johnson and Sarah Winnemucca by Emma Cohen Lyric Histories: An Investigation of Early Black (and) Native America through Poetic Vignettes by Kira Tucker Marriage and Empire in 19th Century Native American Women's Literature by Angad Singh Not-not blood quantum: the Dawes Act and ambivalent Indigeneity by Yasmin Yoon Reading Indigenous Authorial Presence in 18th- and 19th-century Paratexts Title Page for Isabel Griffith-Gorgati's Exhibit Resistance on and off the Page: A Collaborative Conversation between Black and Indigenous Literary Contributors Featuring James Printer, Katherine Garret, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant (17th-18th Century Early Print Culture Participants)- By Lauren Johnson Spiritual Armies, Resurrected Bones, and “Boundless” Continents: How Indigenous Activists in Early New England Reconfigured Puritan Millennialist Narratives Featuring texts of Samson Occom, William Apess, and the Wampanoag Bible. By Surya Milner Sovereignty or Removal: The Conflicting Indigenous Policies of 1835 in the Continental United States Julia Gilman What Does Water Do For Indigenous Peoples of the Great Lakes Region? Featuring Heid E. Erdrich, Simon Pokagon, Black Hawk, and Simon Kofe by Sarah Nisenson (Re)introducing Black Hawk and The Life (1833) BHR 1-Intro

Conclusion

41696
For Indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes region, the centrality of water extends beyond its provisionary status and grounds Potawatomi, Sauk, and Ojibwe place-making. The flow of the river ecologically manifests temporal copresence and simultaneity, allowing these Indigenous authors a way to articulate the ongoing violence of settler colonialism upon their lands in the form of dispossession. 

Contained and confined by the settlers’ appetites for Indigenous objects and exhibits, Simon Pokagon negotiates legibility through transformative processes of birch bark booklet production and frames his biting critiques of settlers and fairgoers in watery language. For Black Hawk, there is little distinction between landed places and watery ones which reformulates dispossession in terms of the interrelationality between his people and the water that constitutes them and their homelands. Heid Erdrich centers temporal and geographic copresence in the Mississippi River to refute the myth of settler colonialism that relegates Indigenous peoples to archival statuses, imagines them as caricatures, and attempts to erase them from the endless forward momentum of settler colonial nation building. Simon Kofe, in his introduction to Tuvalu’s presence in the metaverse, situates his peoples’ homeland on the brink of an inevitable physical disappearance and explains the need to map it virtually to preserve and protect future generations’ sovereignty and place-making potential. 

In the wake of climate change, a process intimately fused with settler colonialism and imperialism, Indigenous peoples reassert their connection to place in the hopes to preserve these spaces in spite of their expected demise and transformation. The violence of settler colonialism not only dispossesses Indigenous peoples of their homelands, but it also creates ruptures in the knowledge of how to care for these spaces. These authors insist on the situatedness of their peoples; they highlight the loss of familiarity, intimate connectivity, and relational care between places and its inhabitants when Indigenous peoples are dispossessed. New technologies make possible new ways of articulating and preserving these relationships, and as Indigenous peoples have been forced to do since first contact with settlers, renegotiating these relationships with and to watery places is not just a method of endurance, but one of resistance, survival, and a means to flourish. 
 

This page has paths:

  1. What Does Water Do For Indigenous Peoples of the Great Lakes Region? sarah nisenson