The Child Who Would be Sovereign: Settler Colonial Frustrations and the Figure of the Child in Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's American Indian Stories
Content Warning
This exhibit deals with ongoing histories of genocide, in which the white-settler state of the US actively seeks to commit violence upon Native peoples--especially Indigenous women, children, and two-spirit peoples. Please take breaks as needed. With this in mind, the exhibit also refuses to situate these narratives as solely trajectories of violence--that which seeks to contain Native polities also repeatedly fails in the face of Native sovereignties, resistances, and imaginaries.How to Navigate
You may choose to view the exhibit in any order, with the caveat that certain contextual information may be integral to understanding other pages. With this in mind, viewers are encouraged to review and/or return to pages whenever questions arise by clicking the title page at the top of each path. For instance, while reading about Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's biographical information, one may want to return to the page on residential schools. Or, one might need to return to the explanation of ICWA in order to make sense of reproduction in a narrative. Whichever path one chooses, I set up some key terms below as well as an overview of my sources to orient viewers to how this exhibit is entering the larger NAIS conversation.Some Key Terms
Before we begin this exhibit, it is essential to find common ground on a few key terms both within Native American Indigenous Studies (NAIS) and within the context of the following presentation.Indigeneity: In discussing Indigeneity in this exhibit, we come across two competing formations. One, produced largely through settler colonial desires of incorporation, is Indigeneity as race and the other, as a political belonging to particular tribes/nations/communities. The latter emphasizes Indigenous peoples' processes of belonging that rest on aspects such as landedness and governance power (See Mark Rifkin's "Around 1978"). Still, as Kim Tallbear tells readers in Native American DNA, the racialization of Indigeneity also plays into Native peoples' lived experiences as racialized within the liberal multicultural understandings of the United States settler colonial government. Jodi Byrd in "Loving Unbecoming also underlines that definitions of Indigeneity are also alway unstable/subject to discourses of discovery, enlightenment, and sovereignty.
Sovereignty: Generally, this is the right of Indigenous peoples to governance power and political independence. This might look, for instance, like a nation's ability to delineate membership requirements or the power to seek justice through community-regulated means. However, sovereignty also has complicated roots with European conceptions of the right to hold power over others. In her book Mark my Words: Native Women Mapping our Nations, Mishuana Goeman differentiates between the two by stating that white, patriarchal sovereignty of the state differs from Indigenous sovereignties because the latter has hundreds of differently sovereign people. In Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill's piece "Decolonizing Feminism," they mark the distinction as the difference between the settler Nation-state's use of coercion/domination and Native sovereignty as about interrelation/responsibility.
Survivance: Gerald Vizenor's concept of the "active sense of presence and continuance of native stories" (Vizenor qtd. in Betasamoosake Simpson 196). Rather than focusing on mere reaction to colonialism or survivability in name, survivance renounces flattened discourse of dominance, tragedy, and victimhood (Betasamoosake Simpson 196). I use survivance at times across the exhibit to extend beyond "survival" into the realm of continued amalgamation of so-called "traditional" and "modern" methods, whereby such binary logics are destabilized.
Child(ren): Beyond literal children, I refer to the child here as descendant/kin who is designated as daughter/son/etc in the relational structure. I refer also to the figure of the child as in the rhetorical deployment of imagined children/childhood as a site of contestation. In Queer theory, the child is often marked as a political site in which the existing social order is reproduced. This is most clearly discussed in Lee Edelman's book No Future, in which he argues that the child--as one who is a stand in for innocence--represents possibility while queerness is marked as the antithetical of that possibility. Queerness is imagined as a "death drive" in a society which is narcissistic and grotesque. In light of this, Edelman argues for the embrace of refusal future-orientations through the figure of the child. However, Tuck et al. undermine this trajectory by discussing how the settler colonial project relies on erasing Indigenous future by imagining Indigenous peoples as always-already in midst of disappearing. Because of this, Indigenous children can be posited as already queer, since the image of the Native child alongside actual Native children is subject to projects of genocide.
Futurity and Reproduction: In theorizing around the future, I follow Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway's work Making Kin Not Population, in which they understand the anti-Black settler colonial state to produce a "institutionalized kinlessness" in which the assault on kinship of certain bodies (here Black and Native) is a process of maintaining white social order (Clarke and Haraway 61). With this in mind, reproduction and futurity get tied together under the politics of "which kinships, supports, structure and beings get to have a future" rather than how literal bodies reproduce; it is about "how life supports are replenished, cared for, and created" (Clarke and Haraway 110-111). Clarke and Haraway challenge us to rethink reproductive justice as a matter of "redistributing relations, possibilities, and futures" (111).
Setting the NAIS Scholarly Stage
The scholarly conversation this exhibit is most concerned with is that of Indigenous feminisms and queer theories. To understand how ethnic and queer studies both fail to address settler colonialism, I turn to Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill’s “Decolonizing Feminism.” In this work, Arvin et al. argue for rejections of seemingly “natural,” identifiable groups as well as the language of inclusion and equality ala civil rights rhetoric. In doing so, they turn to Native feminist theories, which they define as “theories that make substantial advances in understandings of connections between settler colonialism and both heteropatriarchy and heteropaternalism” (Arvin et al. 11). Their theorizing around heteropatriarchy (a system in which cis-heterosexual patriarchy is perceived as natural) and heteropaternalism (a system in which heteropatriarchy and nuclear-domesticity is seen as natural) are particularly elucidating when thinking through the ways in which settler colonialism has and continues to use control over kinship as means to create citizens, disappear Indigenous peoples, and reproduce the nation-state. In discussing heteropatriarchy and paternalism, I also utilize Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done to elucidate how heteropatriarchy seeks to align Indigenous men with white men in subjugating Indigenous women to ultimately undermine Native nations and steal land. Simpson’s concept of multidimensionality—the idea that Indigenous cosmologies include different planes of reality in which past/future and spirit/body refuse colonial bifurcation—is also helpful in understanding the literary and historical narratives from Bonnin’s time until now.In paying attention to particularly Nakota Yankton politics, histories, and art, I follow the call of Joanne Barker in her introduction to Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, in which she outlines her term “polity of the Indigenous”—the attention to ethics and responsibilities to specific land-based epistemologies, governance, laws, and relationships (7). This is particularly important, according to Barker as well as Queer Indigenous studies scholar Scott Lauria Morgensen, in the context of queer and feminist theories where the history of whitewashing and overgeneralizing in these fields rests on the presumed erasure and mythologization of Indigenous nations and peoples. With this in mind, I turn to Morgensen’s Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization to elucidate the critical differences in coming to Queer studies through Indigenous studies rather than through its white, settler lineages. This orientation complicates a sense of futurity (or lack of) which relies only biological reproduction, as well as focuses on Indigenous methodologies of belonging, sexuality, and gender.
To further investigate the contradictions around biology in Indigenous queer and feminist studies, I turn to both Jodi A. Byrd’s “Loving Unbecoming” as well as Mark Rifkin’s “After 1978: Family, Culture, and Race,” both of which are in the aforementioned Critically Sovereign. I choose these pieces because they both speak on US neoliberal biopolitics and how bodies and rights are governed through settler state desires to expand access and incorporate Indigenous (and other BIPOC) peoples into the nation-state. Byrd’s conception of erotic sovereignty seeks to present a possible resistance to such cooption by pushing against the fetishization of Indigenous difference while Rifkin critics the paternalistic histories of the US settler state.
Especially important in the discussion of ICWA is Rifkin’s critique of how even the benefits of ICWA rely on a biological Indianness which de-specifies, moves from place-based to lineage-based belonging, and depoliticizes nationhood through racialization. In her work Written by the Body, Lisa Tatonetti further reflects on the issues of recognition by considering how the body is site contestation and change where sovereignties play out. This is particularly true, Tatonetti and Arvin et al. argue, for Indigenous women and Two-Spirit peoples because of the unique ways in which settler colonialism comes to being through the ossification and punishment of the colonial gender binary. Yet that which seeks to subject and subdue Indigenous Women and Two-Spirit peoples also provides the greatest basis for sites of resistance and sovereignty. Tatonetti demonstrates this through the concept of erotics of responsibility in which Two-spirit and gender nonconforming peoples (such as Indigenous women who embody Indigenous masculinities, see “Warrior Women,” for instance) are empowered in their tribal accountabilities and specific roles to reproduce sustenance practices, healing, generational knowledge, and overall communal wellbeing.
Exhibit Overview
*Note* Throughout the exhibit I use both Gertrude Simmons Bonnin and Zitkala-Ša interchangeably as equally viable referents*In Gertrude Simmons Bonnin's American Indian Stories, the figure of the child is a site through which the political basis of Yankton Dakota identity is mapped and reproduced. Bonnin's narratives offer the child as a site of political struggle around belonging and survivance while also exposing the danger of defining belonging through strictly biological terms. This exhibit focuses on three stories within Bonnin's collection: "The School Days of an Indian Girl," "The Trial Path," and "A Warrior's Daughter," with an eye toward the ways children articulate the contestations over Native sovereignty. Through processes such as residential schools, blood quantum, and litigation around the family, settler colonialism attempts to conscript, regulate, and undermine Indigenous reproduction by presenting a whitened future predicated on Indigenous subsummation. Attempts at assimilation--playing out through the child--are never as complete as the settler state would like us to believe.
Where Bonnin's tales are central to understanding the ways Native peoples refuse settler projections of erasure and white futurity, I rely on paratextual information to situate the specific ways the settler state seeks to conscribe Native children into processes of assimilation. With this in mind, I rely on Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norriss’ introduction to the Penguin edition of American Indian Stories, in which they situate how Bonnin's work was received at the time, including how it was marketed toward (white) children.
Rather than these attempts at assimilation and erasure being reconciled to Bonnin's time, they take on new forms in contemporary battles over Native children. To explore how this occurs, the exhibit will end by bringing attention to the Dawes Acts of 1887, the processes of residential schools, and the Indigenous Child Welfare Act (or ICWA) of 1978. Bringing these legal contexts into the conversation situates the contemporary stakes of Indigenous sovereignty while also helping to map the violent familial and cultural dispossessions from residential school to now. ICWA documentation also projects our conversation into the contemporary moment, where Indigenous peoples are once again fighting to defend these slim legal protections.
The last integral contribution to this Exhibit is the Yankton Dakota artist Oscar Howe, whose pieces "Children at Play" and "Fleeing a Massacre" open up further conversation around how childhood and futurity shift within the political contexts of Indigenous nations as well as the relationship of futurity to the leadership of Indigenous Women and two-spirit peoples. By bringing our attention to these 1970s pieces, I hope again to draw salient resonances between seemingly disparate periods such that we might more deeply consider how the project of settler colonialism follows its own trajectories of dispossession as well as how Dakota Yankton creatives have frustrated those lineages.