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 the different ways settlers have overwritten not just the text of the Life but the land and land-relationships it describes. At the end, this section considers two preliminary projects of Indigenous (re)mapping and (re)claiming the land.

 

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