Early Indigenous Literatures

Spatial Afterlives of Dispossession

The consistent settler colonial script exhibited by the Life’s interlocuters in the previous section does not end on the page. Such rhetoric expands from discourse into tangible, physical actions with the same goal of Indigenous elimination and erasure. In turn, these real world acts create a vicious feedback loop in which “Indigenous disappearance” seems more convincing: initial violence is disavowed or romanticized and the “lasting” of the Natives is proclaimed in the settler colonial script, which provides the justification for the physical transformation of land into commodified units cognizable to settler ways of knowing the environment, which in turn “purifies” the landscape of Indigenous epistemologies and relationships to the land, which in the final instance appears to fulfill the first claim of “vanished Indians.” Thus, in an always unstable position, the logic of settler colonialism is both cause and effect to Indigenous elimination. This section examines how settlers have overwritten not just the text of the Life but the land and land-relationships it describes, through the Chippiannock Cemetary. Nevertheless, emphasizing Indigenous “survivance,”  part 2 of this section concludes by considering a preliminary project of Indigenous (re)mapping and (re)claiming the land.[1]


 
[1] For melancholy and parallels with the genre of elegy, see Arnold Krupat, “That the People Might Live:” Loss and Renewal in Native American Elegy ; for survivance and continuance, see Gerald Vizenor, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Lincoln, Neb., 2008), esp. chap. 1.
             Additionally, see the Black Hawk State Historic site. This exhibit does not go into depth on this site here because it does not appear to be a preservation effort led by Indigenous people (instead, it is managed by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency under the Illinois Department of Natural Resources). This difference is clear when looking at the educational materials available on the site's website. Despite site's goals to "recogniz[e] the importance of Native American presence in Rock Island," much of its historical narrative is riddled with settler colonial logics which "Other" and misconstrue Black Hawk and Sauk lifeways. Nevertheless, that this land has been set away for the theoretical purpose of this goal--even if it is yet to be realized--deserves a brief mention here.

 

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