Early Indigenous Literatures

Seashore

Pokagon explicitly invokes this idea of recurrence and return here. 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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