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Early Indigenous Literatures

Legibility and Ambivalence in 19th Century Indigenous Women's Writing

Primary Texts

This exhibit is structured to allow for multiple routes between its texts, each producing its own set of connections and contradictions. Jump from text to text through the hyperlinks within each pathway, or return to this page between pathways to explore each text in whatever order seems most compelling to you.

Exhibition Overview

Midway through E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake’s short story “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” a settler character expresses her desire to know more about the protagonist, Christie. “Your father is delightful, I am sure,” she says to Christie, “but then he is only an ordinary Englishman, not half as interesting as a foreigner, or—or, perhaps I should say, a native” (Johnson 168). This assertion of interest is but one particularly bald example of an impulse that is on display from the first pages of the story: an insistence on the part of settler characters that Christie’s body, interiority, and Indigeneity be made legible. These characters’ claims to knowledge are often disrupted by misrecognition, but, over the course of the story as a whole, the question of whether even readers gain access to any stable knowledge of Christie remains an open one. Through subtle shifts in perspective, as well as adherence to and complication of the sentimental genre, Johnson simultaneously reveals and undermines this settler desire for legibility, ultimately rendering both her protagonist and her own position indeterminate. In doing so, Johnson’s text prompts us to follow scholars like Christopher Pexa who choose to step to one side of an assimilation-resistance binary, encouraging greater attention to the possibilities for productive instability even within moments that might appear to conform to settler frameworks.

In an effort to ask how Indigenous women in North America during the nineteenth century managed attempts on the part of settlers to access their bodies and interiority, this exhibit brings together a range of texts that perform similar strategies of indeterminacy in distinct material forms. In addition to Johnson’s story, as well as an advertisement for Johnson’s performance tour, it will explore Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes, a nineteenth-century book that vacillates between ethnographic and autobiographical modes both at the level of content and materiality. By charting the connections between these diverse texts throughout the exhibit, I suggest that nineteenth-century Indigenous women writers deployed a shared set of tools—generic play, spectacular performance, and authorial instability—in order to navigate a settler desire for access and visibility. Johnson’s story is a particularly rich example of how, at the end of the nineteenth century, strategies that were elsewhere played out at the level of material and embodied performance were able to be translated into fictional forms, adding more familiarly “literary” methods into an already robust repertoire of techniques.

There are, of course, vital differences between these texts. Paiute and Mohawk contexts offer distinct frameworks Winnemucca and Johnson’s work, respectively. And although both figures lived and worked in a North American context, strategies of settler colonialism in the United States shaped Winnemucca’s text in ways that are necessarily distinct from those deployed in Canada, where Johnson lived and worked. At the same time, bringing these figures into conversation allows us to see a set of compatible, if not coterminous, responses to a settler desire to access Indigenous women’s embodiment and interiority.

Legibility, Authenticity, and Recognition

Before diving in to the primary texts, it is useful to elaborate on this impulse towards legibility that I understand each of these women to be navigating. Although the specific genres that each text inhabits offer different frameworks for access and understanding, they all interact with a broader tendency on the part of North American settlers to make Indigenous peoples knowable. To return to the quote from “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” that opened this exhibit, this moment of stumbling scrutiny is revealing on multiple registers: it displays halting uncertainty about the status of Indigenous people as local Others versus members of foreign nations, but it also suggests a differential distribution of the drive towards knowledge. While an “ordinary Englishman” is familiar, not requiring further inquiry, a “foreigner” or “native” requires a process of narration to be made known and understood by the settlers surrounding them. Although presented as benign curiosity, this insistence upon understanding can be a strategy of dominance. In her discussions of anthropology’s role in constructing and managing conceptions of Indigeneity, Audra Simpson argues that “knowing and representing people within those places [the colonial contact zone] required more than military might; it required the methods and modalities of knowing” (Simpson, 95). To Simpson, making peoples and spaces knowable, particularly through strategies like translation and ethnography, is an essential component of making them available to be managed and controlled.

In addition to direct calls for explanation, like the one seen in “A Red Girl’s Reasoning,” we can also see this move to incorporate Indigenous peoples into networks of settler knowledge in moments that conjure and adjudicate Indigenous authenticity. Described by Patricia Monture as a “form of containment,” debates over authenticity, and expectations that individuals will adhere to familiar tropes of supposedly authentic “Indianness,” shadow each of the figures highlighted in this exhibit (Monture, 157). As Joanne Barker has demonstrated, the construction of a fantasy of stable authenticity, by allowing for seemingly transparent legibility, allows for smoothed-out consumption that distracts from pressing political aims. Writing succinctly that “real Indigeneity is ever presently made over as irrelevant as are Indigenous legal claims and rights to governance, territories, and cultures…but long live the regalia-as-artifact that anybody can wear,” Barker underscores that supposedly “authentic,” appropriable costumes are allowed to persist amidst the absenting of actual Indigenous people and their claims (Barker, 3).

This dynamic, in which visibility, when it is routed through archetypes of authenticity, serves to obscure political aims, also recalls Simpson’s discussion of recognition. Describing recognition as the “performance postconquest of ‘seeing people as they ought to be seen;’ as they see themselves,” Simpson sees this move as an ultimately impossible gesture towards multicultural inclusion that in fact extends settlement (Simpson, 20). Asserting that a “fixation on cultural difference and its purity occludes Indigenous sovereignty,” she argues that “recognition is the gentler form…or the least corporeally violent way of managing Indians and their difference” (Simpson, 20). We might, then, see a settler pressure for legible authenticity as a move towards cultural recognition, a recognition that could lead to incorporation, appropriation, and control at the expense of actually confronting Indigenous sovereignty.

Refusal, Withholding, and Ambivalence

For Simpson, one antidote to the drive for recognition is refusal, “a political and ethical stance that stands in stark contrast to the desire to have one’s distinctiveness as a culture, as a people, recognized” (Simpson, 11). While the figures featured in this exhibition certainly complicate straightforward bids for authenticity and cultural recognition, their texts often exist in a more entangled relationship to recognition than a phrase like “stark contrast” would suggest. To get a bit closer to the quality of the relationship between these texts and settler recognition, it is helpful to turn to Christopher Pexa’s work, who revises Simpson’s notion of refusal in the course of analyzing the work of allotment and assimilation-era Dakhóta intellectuals. Rather than engaging in flat-out refusal, Pexa argues that these intellectuals use translational practices that are “less explicit than refusal” (Pexa, 12). Proliferation, for instance, is a mode in which authors offer an overwhelming profusion of intertexts that can’t easily be grasped and consumed, and withholding is “a representational means of both satisfying settler desire for Indigenous transparency (and availability for co-optation and control) while preserving certain key opacities” (Pexa, 12). Although each of the figures included in my exhibit lived outside of the Dakhóta context addressed by Pexa, their texts similarly reveal the enabling potential of ambivalence, using translation and multiplicity in order to “remain part of their own social frameworks while negotiating the possibilities and violences of what up to that point had been settler framings, ideologies, and social forms” (Pexa 3).

Gendered Contexts

It is also important to recognize the ways in which this insistence on visibility, as well as Winnemucca and Johnson’s strategies for navigating it, are modulated by gender. When discussing Winnemucca and Johnson I will go into greater depth on how the “Indian Princess” trope functions as a gendered regime of visibility, but there is also a sizable body of scholarship that sees these texts as significant for their gendered responses to settler frameworks. Margery Fee and Dory Nason, for instance, situate both Johnson and Winnemucca in a larger context of Indigenous feminism, arguing that these authors “are representative of countless Indigenous women in North America who were forced to leave their territories due to land dispossession, loss of Status, compulsory education in boarding schools, or simply in order to survive” yet continued to spend dedicate themselves to “advocating for the rights and just treatment of Indigenous women and peoples” (Fee and Nason, 27-8). As Monture puts it more succinctly, “Indigenous women have been naming and standing against the irony of colonialism and its impact on our lives for a very long time” (Monture, 155). More specifically, Barker has argued that both Winnemucca and Johnson ought to be placed in a lineage of Indigenous women, such as Liliuokalani and Zitkala-Ša, who dis-identified with suffrage-based feminism in order to make nation-based claims for sovereignty (Barker, 16).

Helpful as it may be to understand these authors to be working within a larger context of Indigenous feminism, Maile Arvin, Angie Morrill, and Eve Tuck urge us to push beyond identarian frameworks such as “Native feminism(s)” in favor of Native feminist theories that articulate the imbrication of heteropatriarchy, heteropaternalism, and settler colonialism. It is my hope that this lens will operate implicitly throughout my readings of the texts in this exhibit, but, by way of example, it is worth looking briefly at how this approach might alter the way we encounter Johnson’s work. Monture, in pushing back against Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag’s move to align Johnson with European feminism and New Women, argues that “Haudenosaunee women have always led independent lives, at least prior to the coming of Europeans who brought laws and ways that subordinated women” (Monture, 155). Monture’s argument prompts us to think about the ways that simply identifying Johnson as an Indigenous feminist may cause us to overlook broader structures—read as embedded within her Mohawk context, Johnson’s independence no longer seems spectacular only because of its divergence from European gender roles, but more specifically because it manages to exceed the heteropatriarchal tools of settler colonialism, such as the Canadian Indian Act. As Leanne Simpson argues in her discussion of the Canadian Indian Act, “by the mid-nineteenth century, the colonizers positioned all the sexual autonomy (and the autonomy in general) of Indigenous women to be illicit;” Johnson’s mobility and independence is notable in large part because “Indigenous body sovereignty and sexuality sovereignty threaten colonial power” (Simpson, 107). Working alongside Simpson, Arvin, Morrill, and Tuck, I want to suggest that the texts in this exhibit are significant not simply as texts by Indigenous women, but also for the ways in which they portray the active construction of both Indigeneity and femininity through and against settler colonial logics.