Early Indigenous Literatures

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In 1897, Simon Pokagon wrote that it “afforded [him] much pleasure in life to know that the rivers, lakes and nearly all the waterways of America retain the names our fathers gave [them]” (Berliner 83). While naming conventions are one way Pokagon asserts Indigenous situatedness to place as something that survives settler colonialism, the language in “The Red Man’s Greeting” emphasizes the temporal continuity between precontact America and settler colonialism in the same geographic space. Using what I refer to as watery terminology, Pokagon likens settler colonialism to water-based weather systems such as cyclones and storms in contrast to his use of “sea” which refers to Indigenous existence and persistence in place. By using watery terminology as the basis for comparison, Pokagon invokes Pexa’s first claim about what “critical relationality” offers, specifically its function as “temporality for linking to the past and moving toward the future” (22). 

Applying a similar water view to the word scattered, which connotes a disorganization of pieces no longer connected to the whole, water particles do not become less watery when they are separated from a larger body. Despite their disjointedness, they retain their inherent watery qualities, awaiting the moment that reconstitution into a whole becomes possible, similarly to the way Brooks imagines the spiral as something that “allows for recurrence and return but also for transformation” (309). Pokagon explicitly invokes this idea of recurrence and return: “We only stand with folded arms and watch and wait to see the future deal with us no better than the past…and so we stand as upon the sea-shore, chained hand and foot, while the incoming tide of the great ocean of civilization rises slowly but surely to overwhelm us” (13). Although Pokagon cannot imagine the future proceeding differently from the past in terms of the violence of settler colonialism, he alludes to the persistence of his peoples’ resistance as he imagines them “chained hand and foot” to the seashore, a place of recurrence, inherently imbued with change, and a force of resistance. His peoples’ survivance is not in question, but rather the nature of this survivance is.

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