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1. 1 2022-12-05T10:22:32-08:00 sarah nisenson 7cb5d2c1682fbd145e76716f3924f03bf25c616a Dispossession as "scattered" sarah nisenson 3 plain 2022-12-06T07:05:50-08:00 sarah nisenson 7cb5d2c1682fbd145e76716f3924f03bf25c616a

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• 1 media/mississippi river.jpeg media/wild rice.jpeg 2022-12-01T11:40:24-08:00 "The Red Man's Greeting" Watery Place-Making 12 image_header 2022-12-07T06:31:08-08:00 Just as the watery language of “The Red Man’s Greeting” asserts recurrence and transformation along a temporal axis, these terms exemplify water as place-making. In an effort to reposition the status of watery formations as locations unto themselves, Yazzie and Baldy assert “a worldview [that] is ‘water view’ a view from the river not a view of the river” (2). This firmly repositions water as the space from which one considers the world, as a site of inhabitance, rather than a distant object or entity to be studied. 
  
  
  Specifically, “rivers, lakes, and wetlands were crucial to Potawatomi food systems and medicines, while also providing their primary mode of transportation via canoes” (Pochedley). Potawatomi peoples not only understand the ecological boundaries of waterways, but they also know these spaces for their medicinal attributes and transportation potential. Water is a crucial actor in the Potawatomi peoples' story of how they came to inhabit the Great Lakes region. They “knew that they had arrived home in the Great Lakes region once they reached the place where food grows on water” in reference to mnomen, “a critical spiritual relative and food source of the Neshnabé” which translates in English to wild rice (Pochedley). Mnomen ontologically signifies the Great Lakes region as the homeland for the Neshnabé peoples and their descendants and it typifies a level of knowledge about this region as a place that provides sustenance. Finally, mnomen is a “critical spiritual relative” that cannot be detangled from place, and as a spiritual relative, there is an imperative of care and consideration.
  
  Despite the scattering effect of dispossession that settler colonialism engenders, for the Potawatomi peoples, being displaced from the river does not erase the place-making significance that rivers embody.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Focusing on the lack of water and rivers that populate desert spaces, it becomes legible why homesickness is the primary force of death. As Andrea Carson explains “for Dakhota, Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, and other Native people living in Bdote, our relationship to water is not something held in a river alone but something kept inside our bodies.” This embodied relationship to water signifies the potential for resistance and persistence in Indigenous peoples removed from their homelands and separated from rivers in that the river is not a static entity entirely bound by its place. With the intimate, embodied relationship between Potawatomi peoples and the river, the scattering effect of colonialism reflects disruption and disorganization, which Pokagon articulates as a fatal kind of homesickness.