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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

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"Pre-Occupied" Technological Production “Pre-Occupied” exists in a few iterations, including the printed poem that acts as the voice-over in the multimedia video with the same title. Importantly though, Erdrich explains the necessity of the visuals to convey the message contained within the poetry. In an email to Bernardin, she explains that “[she] couldn’t get to the heart of what [she] was doing unless people could see the [Superman] film” (43). While the poem exists as a published piece of writing on its own, the poemeo is the iteration that conveys the fuller meaning of the work.
Layering sound, photographs, animations, historical maps, and other forms, the temporal simultaneity Erdrich insists upon is further explicated and complicated. Opening with triumphant music typical of superhero media, the titular “Pre-Occupied” graces the screen against a blue backdrop populated with white flecks, evocative of stars in a vast galaxy. Erdrich immediately primes her viewer for a superhero film, one in which there is a distinct good/evil binary where good ultimately triumphs. But Erdrich’s mobilization of Superman immediately troubles this expectation. Channette Romero explains how Erdrich’s inclusion of this particular animation “recontextualize[es] the Superman short [Electric Earthquake] within an Indigenous perspective… [and] calls attention to and resists the ways in which mainstream animation historically has been used to legitimize and help continue cultural and material imperialism” (Bernardin 43). With the inclusion and recursion of this animation, Erdrich demands her viewers consider who constitutes a hero in a space of overlapping occupations. She situates the willfully ignorant, feigned impotent Superman (“Possibly but just what/ do you expect us to do about it?” in answer to the Indigenous Mad Scientist claiming “Manhattan/ rightfully belongs to my people”) as the villain in response to the heroic persistence of Indigeneity in spite of colonial occupation (3:06- 3:10).
On a formal level, the incessant layering of media forms and fast-paced movement of the poemeo speaks to the distractions and pre-occupations that are a central facet of Erdrich’s work. Using digital technology allows Erdrich to “read rhizomically ‘across time’” so that the “reflection of stars/ whence all life commenced” can be situated next to Max Fleischer’s 1942 Superman cartoon, and both of these speak to and with the Occupy Movement, “Alcatraz and Wounded Knee” (Berliner 83; Erdrich 2:22, 3:19). Reading rhizomically is simply a different term for what Erdrich calls “digressions.”
Labeling some moments as digressions that must be excused, Erdrich forces the question about what constitutes distraction in this media and in the world. In an age of oversaturation, with boundless information available and oftentimes unavoidable, Erdrich conveys the dangers of distraction while also positioning their utility. Moving from a planetary scope to one highly localized in the Twin Cities, moving between precontact America to the contemporary moment, Erdrich compiles digressions and distractions. Her viewers must categorize this collage on their own terms, deciding what remains digression and what constitutes its integral components. Erdrich compiles historical allusions, popular culture references, cartoon animations, poetry, Indigenous art, and much more to “yield a broader recognition of how national mythologies and histories of gendered colonialism thrive today” (Bernardin 47). And while Bernardin positions these formally diverse, temporally and geographic disparate allusions as that which allows audiences to understand the persistent violence of settler colonialism, Erdrich’s collage also gives audiences license to make these connections across time and space for themselves, relying on the associations viewers bring to her poemeo to assign meaning and re-assign signification according to Indigenous ideas of temporal simultaneity and place-making.