Early Indigenous LiteraturesMain MenuThe Child Who Would be Sovereign: Settler Colonial Frustrations and the Figure of the Child in Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's American Indian StoriesBy: Kai ChaseIllicit Relations: The Challenges and Possibilities of Black and Indigenous Relationssoumya rachel shailendraLegibility and Ambivalence in 19th Century Indigenous Women's WritingAn exhibit on E. Pauline Johnson and Sarah Winnemucca by Emma CohenLyric Histories: An Investigation of Early Black (and) Native America through Poetic Vignettesby Kira TuckerMarriage and Empire in 19th Century Native American Women's Literatureby Angad SinghNot-not blood quantum: the Dawes Act and ambivalent Indigeneityby Yasmin YoonReading Indigenous Authorial Presence in 18th- and 19th-century ParatextsTitle Page for Isabel Griffith-Gorgati's ExhibitResistance on and off the Page: A Collaborative Conversation between Black and Indigenous Literary ContributorsFeaturing James Printer, Katherine Garret, Phillis Wheatley, and John Marrant (17th-18th Century Early Print Culture Participants)- By Lauren JohnsonSpiritual Armies, Resurrected Bones, and “Boundless” Continents: How Indigenous Activists in Early New England Reconfigured Puritan Millennialist NarrativesFeaturing texts of Samson Occom, William Apess, and the Wampanoag Bible. By Surya MilnerSovereignty or Removal: The Conflicting Indigenous Policies of 1835 in the Continental United StatesJulia GilmanWhat 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-IntroYasmin Yoonf7f231e474bf43796f973cd0ee560919050f7427Lydia Abedeen321b94302eca10e499769fd0179e64cd33bc4cd5Kira Tuckeracf97d948460e98cd439646cc2db7ae17c5ebd9dsarah nisenson7cb5d2c1682fbd145e76716f3924f03bf25c616aKai Chased7cab5968a3a916efd1a14a48cc4832d5d5514aeSoumya Shailendra86c246fcc4aea83787381bffd2b839885bef5096Bennett Herson-Roeserc8289125445a56c819045a0091daf0402b3e0875Surya Milner077f837f3d662fd5ef9055f8258e5c47bb11f714Julia Gilmanb860a8277eea484f91a1a9e0423cab4b52bae522Lauren Johnson98dac03e7c9c1ad41e1c0a8583704e55802f98baAngad Singhd2b8d1d68ec374981c9e99b7cb400803bc678231Emma Cohen146e757b9fc3b3b416edecbf79592e8d743d4ba1Charlotte Goddu2d4c020870148128c7824ece179e04cffe180d95Isabel Griffith-Gorgati985a05928a67a856791fffac3dbba8acc85f6f37
12022-12-05T10:22:32-08:00sarah nisenson7cb5d2c1682fbd145e76716f3924f03bf25c616aDispossession as "scattered"sarah nisenson3plain2022-12-06T07:05:50-08:00sarah nisenson7cb5d2c1682fbd145e76716f3924f03bf25c616a
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1media/mississippi river.jpegmedia/wild rice.jpeg2022-12-01T11:40:24-08:00"The Red Man's Greeting" Watery Place-Making12image_header2022-12-07T06:31:08-08:00Just 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.