Why Indigenous Literatures Matter 1771121769, 9781771121767

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PREFACE / Notes for the Long Rebellion
Introduction Stories That Wound, Stories That Heal
Chapter 1 How Do We Learn to Be Human?
Chapter 2 How Do We Behave as Good Relatives?
Chapter 3 How Do We Become Good Ancestors?
Chapter 4 How Do We Learn to Live Together?
Chapter 5 Reading the Rupture 1s
Conclusion Keeping a Fire
APPENDIX / A Year of # HonouringIndigenous Writers
BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY / Citational Relations
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Citation preview

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Why

INDIGENOUS

LITERATURES Matter

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Indigenous Studies Series The Indigenous Studies Series builds on the successes of the past and is inspired by recent critical conversations about Indigenous epistemological frameworks. Recognizing the need to encourage burgeoning scholarship, the series welcomes manuscripts drawing upon Indigenous intellectual traditions and philosophies, particularly in discussions situated within the Humanities. Series Editor Dr. Deanna Reder (Cree-Metis) Associate Professor, First Nations Studies and English, Simon Fraser University Advisory Board Dr. Jo-ann Archibald (Stó:lō) Professor Emeritus, Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia Dr. Kristina Bidwell (NunatuKavut) Associate Dean of Aboriginal Affairs, College of Arts and Science, Professor of English, University of Saskatchewan Dr. Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation) Professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies/English and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture, University of British Columbia Dr. Eldon Yellowhorn (Piikani) Associate Professor, First Nations Studies, Simon Fraser University

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Why

INDIGENOUS

LITERATURES Matter

D A N I E L H E AT H J U S T I C E

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This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Justice, Daniel Heath, 1975–, author Why Indigenous literatures matter / Daniel Heath Justice. (Indigenous studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978–1–77112–176–7 (softcover).—ISBN 978–1–77112–178–1 (EPUB).— ISBN 978–1–77112–177–4 (PDF) 1. American literature—Indian authors—History and criticism. 2. Canadian literature—Native authors—History and criticism. 3. Indians in literature. 4. Native peoples in literature. 5. American literature—History and criticism. 6. Canadian literature—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series: Indigenous studies series PS153.I52J878 2018 810.9’897 C2017-905582-8 C2017-905583-6

Cover and text design by Lime Design Inc. Front cover image by Joseph Erb, www.josepherb.com. © 2018 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca This book is printed on FSC® certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains postconsumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy. Printed in Canada Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca, or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.

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This book is gratefully dedicated to my mother, Deanna Kathline Justice, who taught me to read and encouraged my dreams, even when they took me far from home.

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These are stories worth following home. Our bodies, like compasses, still know the way. —Debor a h Mir a nda (Esselen), Ba d Indi a ns

gidigaa bizhiw is a strategist and a warrior. the strategist sits with the pain. or maybe she sits beside the pain. maybe the warrior, the one that carries the burden of peace also carries the burden of love—of embracing connection in the face of utter disconnection. maybe there is no limit on love. —Le a nne Simpson (Michi Sa agiig Nishna a beg), “c aged”

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PREFACE

xiii

/ Notes for the Long Rebellion xvii



Introduction



Chapter 1

How Do We Learn to Be Human? 33



Chapter 2

How Do We Behave as Good Relatives? 71



Chapter 3

How Do We Become Good Ancestors? 113



Chapter 4

How Do We Learn to Live Together? 157



Chapter 5

Reading the Ruptures 183

Conclusion

APPENDIX

Stories That Wound, Stories That Heal 1

Keeping a Fire 205

/ A Year of #HonouringIndigenousWriters 213

BIBL IOGR APHIC ESSAY

/ Citational Relations 241

COP YRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS INDE X

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Acknowledgements

Those who have shown me intellectual and personal generosity in the course of writing this book are far too many in number to list here, and I apologize to anyone I may miss in these thanks. Among the most immediate are these: to Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith, former student and an impressive multi-genre writer in her own right, who first sparked the idea for this project when she asked me to write on the topic for her blog; to the stalwart Lisa Quinn, who was unfailingly encouraging even when I’d pushed well past any reasonable expectation of patience with the manuscript’s lateness; and to Siobhan McMenemy, former University of Toronto Press colleague and now Wilfrid Laurier University Press editor extraordinaire, whose good guidance helped smooth out the rough edges of the project and encouraged me to be clearer, bolder, and more expansive in my revisions; to Deanna Reder, Margery Fee, Sophie McCall, and June Scudeler, who never ceased to believe in the project or me, even when I was often doubtful about the merit of one or the other; and to David Gaertner, whose early enthusiasm for the first chapters gave me the kick-start I needed to keep with it.

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Special thanks to Mark Rifkin and my two anonymous reviewers, all of whom gave such excellent and generous suggestions for revision; I’m hopeful the final version of the work meets with your approval. And mahalo to ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui for the incredibly helpful response to my reading of Queen Lili‘uokalani’s writing. Thanks, as well, to all the writers and publishers who provided permission to reprint work in this volume. Wado to Joseph Erb for the evocative cover art that so powerfully speaks to the book’s concerns (incidentally, it’s the first Cherokee art that’s ever graced one of my book covers), and to Lara Minja and the team at Wilfrid Laurier University Press for creating a book design I wanted to honour with equally fine content; to my research assistant, Sol Diana, who helped get the messy appendix into tiptop shape; to my students and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, who continue to inform, inspire, and expand my world and its possibilities; to my fellow members of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association for their vital work in support of Indigenous writing and literary criticism, especially to the much-missed co-founders, Renate Eigenbrod and Jo-Ann Episkenew. I want to extend my deepest gratitude to the many friends, acquaintances, and strangers who supported the year of #HonouringIndigenousWriters with their comments, recommendations, and critiques; it was definitely made possible through an engaged community of care. And to my friend and colleague Sarah Hunt, who, early on, recommended the social media platform Hootsuite, which enabled me to preprogram a few weeks’ worth of tweets so I wouldn’t miss any days—I’m not sure I could have sustained it otherwise! Love and big thanks to Michelle St. John, who, in addition to being an exquisite actor, director, producer, writer, and all-around great person, is also a kindred spirit in the love of Indigenous literature; to Shelagh Rogers, for keeping the fire so fiercely for Indigenous writers; to James Cox, Domino Perez, and Ewan Cox, for being

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kin beyond blood; to Nancy Fromm, Dell Nutter, and the other small-town librarians in Cripple Creek and Victor who opened so many doors for this little mountain bookworm, and to all the librarians out there doing the same for so many of us, in spite of the rising tide of anti-intellectual spite and incuriosity; and to my parents, Kathy and Jim Justice, for always supporting me with so much enthusiasm and love. And of course, I owe a huge personal and professional note of appreciation to all the incredible Indigenous writers who do so much, often with far too little recognition or support, to make the world better and more beautiful with your words. Biggest thanks of all, as always, go to my husband, Kent Dunn, for supporting me in every possible way, while also gently teasing me about the book cover and ISBN that existed before the book did, and whose belief in me made it possible to realize this and so many other dreams. My work and my life are better for your generosity. Thank you, all. a

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Preface

Notes for the Long Rebellion

. . . our stories are unending connections to past, present, and future. And, even if worse comes to worst and our people forget where we left our stories, the birds will remember and bring them back to us. —Le A nne How e (Choctaw Nation), “The Story of A mer ic a: A Tr iba logr a ph y ”

This is a book about stories and some of the ways they matter. It’s about the many kinds of stories Indigenous peoples tell, and the stories others tell about us. It’s about how these diverse stories can strengthen, wound, or utterly erase our humanity and connections, and how our stories are expressed or repressed, shared or isolated, recognized or dismissed. It’s about the ways we understand that vexed and vexing idea of literature, and how assumptions about what is or is not “literary” are used to privilege some voices and ignore others. It’s also about how, in spite of various challenges

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and catastrophes, Indigenous writers, scholars, storytellers, and knowledge keepers have, since our earliest ancestors emerged as distinct peoples, worked to articulate lived truths and imaginative possibilities through spoken, written, and inscribed forms and project them into a meaningful future. More specifically, this is a book about Indigenous peoples’ diverse literatures and why they are (or should be) important to Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers alike, although perhaps for different reasons. The arguments here begin with that fundamental premise: that Indigenous literatures matter. The why and the how of that claim will be tested against a range of literary works produced in territories now claimed by Canada and the United States, with occasional relevant forays among the writings of other Indigenous peoples elsewhere in the world. And these will, in turn, be placed into the larger historical, political, and social context of colonialism in North America and elsewhere. Context is vital to understanding these matters, especially given how colonial government policies have combined with widespread popular stereotypes and everyday enacted practice to degrade and attempt to entirely eliminate Indigenous peoples and our cultural, artistic, and intellectual productions. Colonialism is as much about the symbolic diminishment of Indigenous peoples as the displacement of our physical presence. If there are no more people there can be no more stories; without our stories, we’re reduced as peoples and as individuals. Marie Annharte Baker (Anishinaabe) says it most powerfully in reflecting on one of her own motivations for writing: I have my mother to thank for her spirit of resistance. I remember my mother and others talking about running away from residential school. I have talked to others about inheriting the anger and rage of our mothers. Her generation was silenced. I cannot help but consider a need to document and bear witness to the treatment of First Nations women which comes from what I

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see as the blood price paid for any of our cultural productions to have survived the onslaught of 500 years of domination and attempts to wipe out our spirituality, our land base and oral literature/language.

Our literatures are just one more vital way that we have countered those forces of erasure and given shape to our own ways of being in the world. Our mindful stories, in all their forms and functions— and whether vocalized, embodied, or inscribed—honour the sacrifices of those who came before us and who made it possible for us to continue the struggle today as specific peoples in relation with the world. They help us bridge the gap of human imagination between one another, between other human communities, and between us and other-than-human beings. Fundamentally, they affirm Indigenous presence—and our present. That our nations do indeed have a vibrant present gives us hope that we’ll have a future, too. Yet while Indigenous writers have confronted that oppressive context and created a richly expansive literary tradition that engages with colonialism, these traditions are in no way determined by colonialism. Indigenous texts are by and large responsive, not reactive. They are at least as concerned with developing or articulating relationships with, among, and between Indigenous readers as they are with communicating our humanity to colonial society, if not more so. Indeed, I’d go so far as to argue that relationship is the driving impetus behind the vast majority of texts by Indigenous writers— relationship to the land, to human community, to self, to the otherthan-human world, to the ancestors and our descendants, to our histories and our futures, as well as to colonizers and their literal and ideological heirs—and that these literary works offer us insight and sometimes helpful pathways for maintaining, rebuilding, or even simply establishing these meaningful connections. This book is avowedly political, in that it affirms the fundamental rights of Indigenous peoples to the responsible exercise and

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expression of our political, intellectual, geographic, and artistic self-determination. It’s part survey of the field of Indigenous literary studies, part cultural and family history, and part literary polemic, and asserts the vital significance of our literatures to healthy decolonization efforts and just expressions of community resurgence. Politics without art moves quickly toward efficient dehumanization and intellectual myopia; art without politics descends swiftly into selfreferential irrelevance. I look to the formidable Menominee poet Chrystos for guidance here: “I assert that poetry without politics is narcissistic & not useful to us. I also believe that everything is political—there is no neutral, safe place we can hide out in waiting for the brutality to go away.” To argue for and produce Indigenous writing as such is necessarily to engage in political struggle and to challenge centuries of representational oppression. This book is just one of many volleys in that long rebellion. A more accurate title for this volume would perhaps be A Few Reasons Why I Believe Indigenous Literatures Matter Based on My Own Subject Position and Idiosyncratic History and Relationships. This project doesn’t try for comprehensiveness, nor distanced objectivity, although my perspective is, I hope, supported and informed by extensive personal experience as well as professional practice. It comes from the entirety of a professional career learning, studying, teaching, and writing in the field of Indigenous literary studies in Canada and the US, as well as a lifetime of trying to understand the stories that have shaped and influenced me, my family, and my various communities of affiliation and kinship. Other writers and scholars have different ideas about these matters, some complementary, some not; this book is only one of many equally relevant ways of approaching these works. I hope the book helps to expand and complicate these conversations, and that it might inspire readers to take up deeper study in the field, as we are always in need of smart, courageous, and committed thinkers to push our understandings further in challenging and compassionate ways. I very

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well might come to different conclusions about these works in the future based on new experiences and further research, but for now, this book with have to work with these particular concerns and considerations. Many of the arguments in this book won’t be particularly controversial to most readers, but others are more provocative. I take full responsibility for both. Ultimately, this book is intended to prompt meaningful discussion and even some debate, but with the larger goal of expanding the circle of welcome and making our ongoing relationships stronger, more honest, and more just. Challenge is not the same thing as rejection or dismissal; we can and must have the hard conversations if we have any hope of a better future. We can have sharp, even contentious arguments, but still return to the conversation and to our relationships when we’re done; in other words, we can hold each other to account as we hold each other up— they needn’t be mutually exclusive practices. We are sorely in need of more accountable kindness in our critical work as well as in our relationships, and it’s my fervent hope that this book holds that principle firmly at its centre. But kindness shouldn’t be mistaken for docility. It’s not a kind act to allow problematic or even destructive ideas to pass unchallenged, but we can do so with generosity and empathy, even in the fiercest argument. Sometimes the hardest struggles are with those we love and respect the most. And even when we do struggle, even when we debate and challenge and tussle, we can still love them. It’s not and shouldn’t be the approach all Indigenous writers take, and it hasn’t always been mine, but this is where I hope my contribution might now be most meaningful. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the writers, students, teachers, family members, friends, elders, community members, and mentors who have shared their knowledge over the years, who taught, argued, challenged, and struggled with and alongside me through so many conversations, in person, on the page, and on the

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screen. Whatever strengths are present in this book are here as a result of their generosity; I take full responsibility for any errors, omissions, or misunderstandings. a

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Introduction

Stories That Wound, Stories That Heal

I have never forgotten a speech that was made by one of the heads of the Department [of Indian Affairs and Northern Development] when he arrived at the settlement. The Inuit had expected to hear something fantastic since he had come such a long way especially to talk to them. The speech went something like this: “I am very glad to be here and enjoyed my visit to your homes. I am very pleased to see that they are so clean.” One old woman came over to me and asked if he was really the head of the Department, and if so, why he did not have the intelligence to tell us something that we do not know, instead of telling us what our houses looked like. We lived in them every day and we knew what they were like. How could I tell my elder that he did not think the Inuit have intelligence? —Mini Aodl a Fr eem a n (Inuit), Life A mong the Qa lluna at

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T

here are many stories about Indigenous peoples alive in the world today. Some of these stories are our own. They give shape, substance, and purpose to our existence and help us understand how to uphold our responsibilities to one another and the rest of creation, especially in places and times so deeply affected by colonial fragmentation. Sometimes they’re in our Indigenous mother tongues; sometimes they’re in English, or Spanish, or French, or other colonial languages. But they’re still our good stories—not always happy, not always gentle, but good ones nonetheless, because they tell the truths of our presence in the world today, in days past, and in days to come. Other stories are not so good. These are imposed upon us from outside. They belong to the colonizing populations that claim and dominate our homelands—populations from which many of us are also descended and with which we must navigate our complex relations as well. These stories are sometimes told with good intent. More often they’re not. Sometimes they’re incomplete rather than wrong, partial rather than pernicious. But sometimes the stories are noxious, bad medicine, and even when told with the best of motivations, they can’t help but poison both the speaker and the listener. Many of the stories about Indigenous peoples are toxic, and to my mind the most corrosive of all is the story of Indigenous deficiency. We’ve all heard this story, in one form or another. According to this story, Indigenous peoples are in a state of constant lack: in morals, laws, culture, restraint, language, ambition, hygiene, desire, love. This story presumes that we’re all broken by addiction, or dangerously promiscuous according to pleasure-hating, Puritanical concepts of bodily propriety. It insists that we have a lack of responsibility, lack of self-control, lack of dignity; it claims that we

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can’t take care of our children or families or selves because of constitutional absences in our character, or biology, or intellect. And it goes even further. Rather than see lower life expectancy, employment, and education rates, and higher rates of homelessness, substance abuse, and suicide as being rooted in generations of sustained and intentional colonial assaults on all aspects of our lives and identities, we’re blamed for our supposed lack of basic human decency. Depressed? In despair? Can’t be due to centuries of sustained oppressive social structures and racism—must be our supposed lack of mental fitness. Come from a supportive and generally stable family without many of the overt effects of wounding? Don’t assume that it has anything to do with your family’s good luck or the strength of your traditions or your particular capacity to overcome major obstacles—no, it must be due to successful assimilation and a gradual diminishment of “pure” Indigenous influence. In this poisonous story, every stumble is seen as evidence of innate deficiency, while any success is read as proof of Indigenous diminishment. In a particularly cruel twist, even our strengths are presented as evidence of our inadequacy. There are all kinds of ways this story seeps into our bones and eats away at our spirits, undermining our potential, eroding our capacity to hold one another up and build affirming relationships through and across difference. It hurts all of us, Indigenous and settler alike, but it’s particularly damaging for Indigenous peoples, for whom this unyielding stereotype of deficiency becomes the solid object against which we’re so often slammed, the supposed truth claim against which all our experiences are measured—and inevitably found wanting. This isn’t to say that there aren’t profound and challenging social and political problems. Indigenous peoples are vastly overrepresented in all negative social indicators in Canada, the US, and other settler states, and grossly underrepresented in the positive ones. But acknowledging these problems and their impacts is not

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the same thing as insisting that they are a result of who we are. We can’t acknowledge these problems without also directly acknowledging the colonial violence in which they’re imbedded. Again, contexts matter, and it’s these contexts that anti-Indigenous commentators so often refuse to engage or even acknowledge. There’s a huge difference between the experience of deprivation as a result of social, economic, and political oppression and having an essential defect in one’s humanity that leads inevitably to second-class status—and, not coincidentally, absolves the settler population of any accountability for the conditions they’ve created. Having a clear and unromantic perspective about the many challenges that face Indigenous peoples is not the same thing as seeing those challenges as an innate expression of our very nature. The story of Indigenous deficiency seems to me an externalization of settler colonial guilt and shame, and is all the more powerful because of the broader society’s refusal to take real responsibility for the story’s devastating effects. The story wasn’t of our making, but we’re part of it now. Perhaps the most wounding way in which this story of Indigenous deficiency works is in how it displaces our other stories, the stories of complexity, hope, and possibility. If the simplistic deficiency accounts are all we see, all we hear, and all that’s expected of us, it’s hard to find room for the more nourishing stories of significance. So how do we find the strength and the trust to tell different kinds of stories? Stories that are truthful about who we are, stories that connect us to the world, one another, and even ourselves? On this point, my colleague David Gaertner reminded me of a line in Blue Marrow, by Cree poet Louise Halfe, where she refers to stories as “wîhkês,” or “med-sins” in English, agents of both harm and healing. Stories can be bad, bitter medicine and inspire people to bad actions; they can be used to separate us, fragment us into pieces, leave us bleeding and alone. Disconnection is cause and consequence of much of this world’s suffering. We are disconnected from one

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another, from the plants and animals and elements upon which our survival depends, from ourselves and our histories and our legacies. When we don’t recognize or respect our interdependencies, we don’t have the full context that’s necessary for healthy or effective action. Yet stories can be good medicine, too. They can drive out the poison, heal the spirit as well as the body, remind us of the greatness of where we came from as well as the greatness of who we’re meant to be, so that we’re not determined by the colonial narrative of deficiency. We’re far more than that—though sometimes we need to be reminded, for Indigenous people internalize the bad stories, too. I’ve long been inspired by something my friend Alice Te Punga Somerville, a Māori literature scholar in Aotearoa, used to tell her allMāori literature class at the start of the term: “Remember that you are the descendants of gods.” Often when I tell this story I get a bit choked up, for it’s a beautiful summation of a kind of certainty in presence that’s sorely needed and far too rare. As I understand it, Alice’s statement wasn’t primarily meant to build her students’ self-esteem, although it no doubt did that; rather, it was a clear reminder that they were an essential part of something great, something dignified and strong, and worthy of reverence and respect. It was a fundamental expectation that they would hold themselves and one another to the highest possible standards. And they did. Today’s Indigenous people in North America are the descendants of those who survived the colonizing apocalypse that started in 1492 and continues today. We are more than just “of descent” from those initial survivors, however—we’re survivors, too, every one of us. According to the settler stories of Indigenous deficiency, our peoples were supposed to vanish into the sunset long ago; our families’ stubborn refusal to disappear has vexed and perplexed colonial apologists for centuries, for, in spite of all their hopes and ambitions, policies and practices, laws and customs, and assaults and editorials, our peoples are still here, as are our relations, as are our stories. In fact, our stories have been integral to that survival—more than

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that, they’ve been part of our cultural, political, and familial resurgence and our continuing efforts to maintain our rights and responsibilities in these contested lands. They are good medicine. They remind us about who we are and where we’re going, on our own and in relation to those with whom we share this world. They remind us about the relationships that make a good life possible. In short, they matter.

Most often a story starts with words, and words carry meaning far beyond themselves. When it comes to stories about Indigenous peoples, words—especially those in non-Indigenous languages—bear a particularly burdensome representational weight, usually encrusted with hard, jagged layers of colonialist misunderstandings. So we have to start at the beginning, with terminology, and clear away some of those dead layers to find more fertile ground before we’re able to continue with the rest of the story. We begin with Indigenous. The capital “I” is important here, as it affirms a distinctive political status of peoplehood, rather than describing an exploitable commodity, like an “indigenous plant” or a “native mammal.” The proper noun affirms the status of a subject with agency, not an object with a particular quality. Here, Indigenous peoples are those who belong to a place—in most cases relevant to this study, in what is now Canada and the US, or more widely referred to, especially in the eastern part of the continent, as Turtle Island—and it affirms the spiritual, political, territorial, linguistic, and cultural distinctions of those peoples whose connections to this hemisphere predate the arrival of intentional colonizing settlers and conscripted and enslaved populations from Europe, Africa, the Pacific, and other regions. It’s therefore no surprise that reactionary

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commentators and conservative publications like The Globe and Mail and the National Post here in Canada actively refuse to use the proper noun form, insisting on “native,” “aboriginal,” and “indigenous,” in large part to diminish claims of political and historical distinctiveness, which are anathema to colonial apologists. The proper noun affirms significance; reducing it to an adjective is an intentional act of political diminishment. In 2017, the Canadian Press and the Toronto Star joined the CBC, TVO, and Maclean’s in updating their stylebooks to indicate that Indigenous and Aboriginal would thereafter be capitalized, indicating a growing momentum toward the proper-noun version becoming the standard across Canada. (In the US, where American Indian and Native American tend to be the common terms, this is less of an issue, although this is perhaps because Indigenous territorial claims and physical visibility are much less prominent in and thus less threatening to the national consciousness.) Indigenous is a broadly inclusive and internationally recognized term, admittedly vague and non-specific, but here clearly encompassing those kinship-based tribal-nation peoples in the lands claimed by Canada (including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit, broadly considered under the generic category of “Aboriginal peoples”), the American Indian, Alaska Native, and Hawaiian/Kānaka Maoli peoples in those territories occupied by the US, and indio in Spanish colonial regions now known as Mexico. For the purposes of this book, “Indigenous” or even “the People,” when used as proper nouns, refer specifically to the First Peoples of North America, the Aboriginal, American Indian, Native, Inuit, Métis, and otherwise identified peoples who remain in relation to the land, the ancestors, and the kinship networks, lifeways, and languages that originated in this hemisphere and continue in often besieged but always resilient forms. The specifics of identity are complex and contested in nearly every community, especially as a result of diminishing resources and the intrusions of settler ethnicity logics

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alongside municipal, state, provincial, and federal agencies in these matters, but Indigenous peoples continue to affirm the responsibilities, relationships, and rights that have connected us to our lands and one another since well before the arrival of Europeans and other peoples to our homelands. Yet even this broad term is controversial, with omissions and displacements: are Chicanos and Chicanas also Indigenous peoples? What about mestizos in Mexico? Do they differ all that much from Métis, Seminoles, or other post-Invasion peoples who constituted themselves as distinct cultures on their own terms and in their own ways, or in response to the catastrophic geographic, biological, and political impacts of colonization? After more than five hundred years of cultural and genealogical exchange, many of our communities have changed significantly, so why are some identified as Indigenous and others not, and who decides? Who gets to claim Indigenous status and identity, under what conditions—and who determines the rules? These are important and very challenging questions, and not all are addressed here, but many Indigenous writers take up these complicated issues with great sensitivity and insight, as we will see in the subsequent chapters. One related note: whenever possible I refer to the specific name by which communities and writers most frequently identify themselves. Thus, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm is identified herein as “Anishinaabe” and Drew Hayden Taylor as “Ojibway,” even though both of these terms, along with “Chippewa,” refer to the same broad cultural family, and the same writer may use any one or all three, depending on context. For example, Akiwenzie-Damm’s Anishinaabe community is known formally as the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, while also being part of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, and all these and others are correct in their own contexts. My approach is broadly inclusive, as it makes no sense to me to draw the circle smaller based on arbitrary colonial standards of unachievable “authenticity” that have always functioned to dimin-

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ish Indigenous rights and access to the land. Accepting those standards too often reinforces the racist claims of colonialist entitlement, and would seem to be profoundly self-defeating—the exact opposite of sustainable Indigenous sovereignty and healthy selfdetermination. Yet it’s vital to remember that not all claims to Indigenous identity and community affiliation are legitimate; there’s a long, sad, and sordid history of settlers “playing Indian” to gain land, money, or fame, or for some personal purpose, often with profoundly negative material impacts on communities. These discussions can be very difficult and often very painful, especially for those of us with identity insecurities of our own as a result of being raised outside of our communities, having lightskinned privilege, being monolingual English speakers, etc., and I’ve tried to be as mindful as possible in my choice of authors to balance a spirit of inclusivity with the recognition of healthy, ethical, and necessary boundaries. No doubt some readers will disagree with my decision to draw broadly on the work of writers from a wide range of Indigenous identity positions, or on my decision to leave certain voices out of the analysis due to their ever-shifting or problematic identity claims, but that, too, is part of the ongoing conversation. Ultimately, on these matters in particular, Indigenous peoples’ concerns have been central to my considerations here, not those of a settler population that too often conflates colonial stereotypes with authenticity. While Indigenous is certainly a complicated term, far more challenging for many non-Indigenous readers is “settler.” This term is central to a larger analysis of “settler colonialism,” which is distinguished from the more traditional ideas of colonialism (wherein invaders claim resources but return home) by emphasizing the settler population’s creation of a new social order that depends in part on the ongoing oppression and displacement of Indigenous peoples. As the late Patrick Wolfe famously affirms, “settler colonies were (are) premised on the elimination of [N]ative societies. . . . The

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colonizers come to stay—invasion is a structure not an event.” Elsewhere he writes that, “so far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are. . . . Territory is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element”—in other, chilling words, “settler colonialism destroys to replace.” Historically, many colonizers returned to their “mother country” after extracting whatever wealth they could, but some became settlers who stayed behind to lay claim to the land, its resources, and even its history, a process that was further exacerbated by generations of descendants. And they rationalized their asserted right to those things through the myth of terra nullius—or “no one’s land,” a territory supposedly empty of human habitation and prior claims—dehumanizing the peoples who were there first, and who, in most cases, still remained to contest and offer physical testimony of the falsehood of that myth. Settler colonialism, as Wolfe notes, isn’t an anomaly of time and space—it’s an ongoing process of violent self-justification through the erasure of Indigenous peoples as anything but an empty symbol. While once a term of proud self-identification in expansionist Canada, the US, and other settler-states (or even today, as seen in the conflict in Israel and Palestine), “settler” has in recent years become more negative given its associations with shameful atrocities that many would prefer to remain unspoken and buried with the bygone past—and which, in fact, they assume is entirely a matter of past actions rather than ongoing behaviour of recent and current generations. As a result, some current cultural commentators object to the use of “settler” to describe non-Indigenous populations, seeing it as more of an insult than an accurate description of historical and contemporary relations with Indigenous peoples and lands. White-identified critics see it as prejudicially reductive and dismissive, while critics of colour raise important questions about the conflation of willing immigration with forcible transport through the trans-Atlantic slave trade or the flight of refugees from brutal conditions in their home countries. In both cases, there is an

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assumption at play about who “settlers” really are or were—bad people of European descent—and in both cases, there is a clear desire to distance oneself and one’s community from the violent histories and continuing practices of settler colonialism. But this seems to me an untenable evasion, at least in part. The simple fact is that, regardless of reason, and whether willing resource raiders or unwilling victims of other peoples’ ambitions, and whether intentionally or inadvertently, these groups very often displaced Indigenous peoples and, in many cases, laid claim to the land and took its resources for their own. Sometimes they did it with enthusiasm, sometimes they were forced to do it, sometimes they were reluctant but went along anyway, and sometimes they didn’t realize that their actions were uprooting others or that they had benefited from early dispossessions. There are many occasions where settlers intermarried with or became incorporated into Indigenous communities, but this rarely prevented land loss or cultural destabilization. In many cases, in fact, the intermarried settlers— generally men—had more efficient access to the land and its resources after gaining the community’s trust, thus speeding the processes of colonization. No matter what the reasons were or are, the results have generally the same for the People: displacement and alienation from land and relations. This doesn’t mean that some settlers didn’t find ways of building community with those they displaced, nor does it mean that they didn’t also face terrible experiences and labour under oppressive conditions from the colonial power structure; it doesn’t mean that profound and lasting alliances of kinship, love, and fierce friendship didn’t emerge. Nor does it mean that all settlers were equally greedy or cruel, or that they had equal rights and respect under colonial law or in their relations with Indigenous communities. But it does mean that through force, coercion, trickery, or other non-consensual means, Indigenous peoples lost lives, lands, and livelihoods as a result of non-Indigenous appropriations of lands and territories. This

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is distinct from Indigenous processes of kin-making and resource sharing. We must honestly and clearly name that history before we can untangle the complications that different newcomer populations have brought into that relationship, or before we can look for the alliances and connections between marginalized communities. That said, I’m compelled by the challenge of political theorist Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene). He has expressed concerns about the ways that “settler” has come to be claimed as an identity category by left-leaning activists and scholars—generally, but not exclusively, white Eurowesterners—outside of a robust engagement of colonialism and its violences. Indeed, in this context the term can once again displace Indigenous presence, as it becomes all about the speaker’s settler status rather than giving attention to the relationships and displacements in which that settlement takes place. Coulthard recommends that scholars return instead to the older language of “colonizer,” which, he argues, returns us to a discussion of colonialism that attends specifically to structures of power, and doesn’t sweep all newcomers into the same status, an understanding that there are many ways of being in relation to this land, and that not all newcomers are colonial agents. It’s an important analysis, and I’ve pulled back a bit from insisting that all references to non-Indigenous peoples are as settlers. This, too, is an ongoing and changing conversation. Either way, we must name our violent history to understand its continuing effects. Though an enfranchised citizen of an Indigenous nation in the United States, I’m also a Ph.D.-holding US citizen who came to Canada as part of its settler colonial immigration policy, so I, too, am very much implicated in these processes. When I first visited the latter country for my job interview at the University of Toronto in 2002, the very first person with whom I had an extended conversation was a security guard at Pearson International Airport in Toronto while I waited for the shuttle bus to my downtown hotel. The man and I started chatting. It was late, and there were few

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travellers that night, so, as I was clearly a stranger to those parts, he asked me why I was there. He told me a bit of his own story as a Pakistani immigrant to Canada, and I explained that I’d come to interview for a job in Aboriginal literature at the University of Toronto. He wasn’t sure what Aboriginal literature was, so, coming from a US context, I explained it was American Indian literature, and that I was doing work on the literature of my own nation. His follow-up question was unexpected—“So are you a Red Indian or a Brown Indian?”—and I hesitantly replied, “Red Indian, I guess.” The next comment was the real surprise: “So, you don’t pay taxes then.” This wasn’t posed as a question as much as a firm statement. I was at a loss for a moment, as this ugly stereotype wasn’t something I expected to hear in Canada, where I naively assumed that progressive ideals had eliminated much of the prejudice against Indigenous peoples I’d grown used to experiencing in the US. And his manner wasn’t dismissive or belligerent—it was a very matter-of-fact comment, as though “Red Indians” not paying taxes and being a drain on the system was as much an unarguable truth as the presence of the sun in the sky or the law of gravity. I finally managed to respond that, indeed, I paid taxes, as did most “Indians,” both state and federal. He seemed genuinely perplexed by my response, and we chatted a bit more, but then my bus arrived, and I headed off to my hotel, a little less certain about Canadian benevolence than I’d been when I stepped off the plane. And I’ve never forgotten that conversation or the man’s genuine kindness to a stranger, nor the sharp stab of stereotype that inadvertently marred our brief exchange. Eventually I was offered and accepted the job, and a few years later, as a Cherokee immigrant to Canada—and after much consideration and some ambivalence—I took Canadian citizenship myself, even making an oath of loyalty to “Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second, and all her heirs and successors.” (I had a different queen in mind when I heard I had to take such an oath, intending to reaffirm my commitment to Dolly Parton at the required moment,

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but alas, the citizenship authorities were quite specific about the queen in question.) Throughout the years since, I’ve seen again and again how nation-state policies about Indigeneity affect the understandings and attitudes of immigrants to this country, both the privileged and the dispossessed. I’ve heard my students—multigenerational and new Canadians alike—repeat these and other tired stereotypes for many years now, and they’ve recounted their own conversations with friends and families about the ways they’ve come to understand Indigenous peoples. There have always been moving examples of empathy and a recognition of shared oppression, but at least as common are the ugly stories about Indigenous deficiency and degradation. And these are only some of the stories about our complicated and entangled colonial context. For these reasons, I still most often prefer the term “settler,” followed by “colonizer” and other related terms, to signify those peoples and populations not identified as Indigenous, primarily but not exclusively of European heritage, and often representing and furthering the policies, practices, and perspectives of the larger settler state. It’s not a value judgment about the individual people— indeed, many non-Indigenous colleagues in the field whose work has deeply informed and enriched my own claim the term themselves, not in self-hate but in politicized acknowledgement of the privileged histories they’ve inherited and the responsibilities in their work. And though a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, I, too, am a descendant of settler colonial people on both sides of my family: Scottish, English, German Jewish, and a motley collection of other Europeans who travelled westward across the Atlantic to make new homes in someone else’s homeland. My mom’s family claims Chickasaw heritage from Paul’s Valley, Oklahoma, but the available documentary evidence indicates that those kin were likely white settlers laying claim to Chickasaw lands, as Chickasaw officials successfully fought their claims for over a decade. And then add Black chattel slavery along at least one branch of my Cherokee kin: Jennie

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Shields Riley, one of my fourth great-grandmothers, came with her family to Indian Territory from Creek Path, Alabama, as an “Old Settler” emigrant in 1829, along with eight enslaved African Americans whose names were not recorded. This latter point is where I grapple the most with the unspecific use of “settler,” for it obscures the ways in which physical and symbolic violence against Black bodies, minds, and spirits is also deeply enmeshed with anti-Indigeneity within settler colonial race logics. There is a long and ugly history of anti-Black violence in Indian Country that is sadly replicated in Indigenous Studies, through erasure and exclusions if not outright dismissal, and we can’t honestly contend with the legacies of settler colonialism if we don’t also firmly address anti-Blackness in our scholarship, our fiction, our politics, our families, and our lives. That history isn’t over by any means—it’s fully alive and well today, as the ongoing struggles of the Five Tribes Freedmen make clear. The Freedmen are descendants of Black people (including many Black Indians) enslaved by members of the “Five Civilized Tribes”—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—who were freed by federal decree after the US Civil War. Freedmen were, in principle, entitled to tribal citizenship and broad rights, and many were elected to serve on their respective nations’ councils, but over the ensuing years the Five Tribes leadership constantly fought to erode and deny those rights. The most cruel culmination of this campaign was the 2007 disenfranchisement of Cherokee Freedmen descendants from the body politic of the Cherokee Nation through an ill-conceived and deeply troubling constitutional amendment. In August 2017, after a ten-year court battle, a US District Court supported the Freedmen’s arguments for reenfranchisement, and the Cherokee Nation did not appeal. For now, at least, the matter has been resolved in the Freedmen’s favour, although some non-Freedmen citizens and politicians continue to seek their ouster from the Nation.

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Indigeneity doesn’t free me from being implicated in the violent histories of colonialism, even in my broader family. Like all relations, these, too, are complicated, and they demand degrees of accountability and obligation. These entanglements make easy dismissals unsustainable and ethically dubious. But I don’t see the use of the term “settler” as an easy out in any of these contexts; if anything, it centres these complexities and the discomfort that comes with them. I’m keenly aware of the bitter irony of “Old Settler” as a term for those Cherokees who went west before Removal, especially after the preceding discussion; the Old Settlers fled from growing white hostility in the east by moving into land already inhabited (especially by the Osages), in many cases, as with my Riley ancestors, forcing enslaved people to go with them. The resulting conflicts were bloody and left lasting trauma for those who lost lands and freedom in the process. In all these cases, “settler” is a challenging word. If it has unpleasant inflections, it’s because settler colonialism is unpleasant. It doesn’t get any less so when we use less provocative language; if anything, erasing those complexities just becomes another form of violence. “Literature” is the final term to foreground here. It’s so common that we often forget how it, too, is deeply embedded in a vexed history of racism, classism, and arbitrary power. The word comes from the classical Latin litterātūra, for the use of letters in communication— the practice of alphabetic writing, as well as the physical objects and cultural archive that result from that practice. Of course, today we don’t think of literature as mere writing. “Literature” presumes a particularly elevated kind of expression, one that’s invested with significant personal and social capital. “Writing” isn’t the same thing as “literature”; in most cases, you need the first to have the second, but you can have writing without it being literature. We most often assume that literature is good, even great writing. Literature is thus both uplifted and uplifting; the reader of literature attains a higher rung on the social ladder than the mere absorber of printed words.

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“Indigenous literature.” Two powerful words in a powerful relationship—but not a neutral one, as Bay of Quinte Mohawk writer Beth Brant observes: “I sometimes think that one of the reasons our work is not reviewed or incorporated into literature courses (besides the obvious racism) is that we go against what has been considered ‘literature.’ Our work is considered ‘too political’ and we do not stay in our place— the place that white North America deems acceptable.” For some readers, these two words together are an oxymoron, an absurd presumption, political correctness run amok. For others, they’re a revelation, a confirmation, an affirmation. Separately, these are words we generally assume we understand, though those assumptions are often very complicated: what do we mean by “Indigenous” or “literature,” after all? The meanings aren’t self-evident, but too often we behave as though they are, and too often misunderstanding is the result. It’s amazing how deeply we internalize these biases. When I was teaching a first-year “Introduction to Narrative” course at the University of Toronto, I would include among the required canonical whitestream texts by Chaucer, Pope, Coleridge, and Freud a few unexpected works: one term, it was the political autobiography of Hawai‘i’s Queen Lili‘uokalani and her testimony about the US-led overthrow of the monarchy, paired with Shakespeare’s colonial island fantasy, The Tempest; another year we read Patrick Dennis’s high camp novel, Auntie Mame, and Gregory Scofield’s poetic biography of his mother and auntie, I Knew Two Métis Women. And, as my own mentor and friend Dr. Domino Perez did when I was in her class as a graduate student at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, I’d insist that students buy a pulp romance novel and read it in a public place. This last activity always provoked anxiety, especially for the ostensibly straight men in the class. Students had to actually purchase or check the book out of a library themselves—they couldn’t borrow it from a friend or have someone else access it for them. And they had to sit and at least pretend to read it around strangers. Often

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students did the experiment on the subway. The results were invariably the same: many students told stories about being given scornful looks and hearing dismissive, even insulting comments—but sometimes they spoke about conspiratorial smiles and encouraging if surreptitious affirmations of support they received from obvious romance fans. I’d ask students to identify how they felt when reading the novel in public, and many would always say the same things. Embarrassment. Discomfort. Shame. It was generally the first time they’d thought about the deeply rooted presumptions they brought to reading, and about what “kinds” of people read certain works. We’d unpack the ugly stereotypes: socially dysfunctional guys with bad hygiene read science fiction; intense and vaguely paranoid white men wearing black or camouflage read political thrillers; flaccid old white men with nostalgic dreams of prairie freedom read westerns; sad, lonely, and unattractive women devoid of love read romances. Even those students who admitted to having read and enjoyed romance novels in the past talked about these stereotypes, although generally with a more critical perspective given their own experience with the genre and its social stigma. The more we interrogated these assumptions, the more we all came to realize how heavily sexism and classism influenced their attitudes toward romance novels. I don’t imagine that many lifelong romance readers came out of those classes, but I know that some closet romance lovers felt empowered by the experience and discussion, as did fans of other stigmatized genres who’d kept their interest under wraps for fear of censure. This is just one example of one kind of writing. But what happens when an entire community is pathologized as having a lower degree of cultural achievement and is thus excluded from consideration of having any literature of merit at all? Given the privileged status the category of “literature” holds in our broader culture, there is a profound level of shame and self-doubt associated with not

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having a body of writing considered as such; not to have literature is, in some ways and to some eyes, to be less than fully human, certainly to be less “civilized.” And of all cultures, Indigenous peoples are most often treated as deficient in this regard, the “savage” side of the “savage/civilized” binary created by imperialist cultures to justify their domination of supposedly “backward” peoples. A case in point: a couple of years into my position at the University of Toronto, I had the opportunity to meet and communicate with a visitor from Australia. She was a white settler scholar, a fiercely courageous university teacher at one of the country’s regional institutions who was committed to bringing Indigenous literatures from Australia into the classroom and the realm of respected study among her peers. It was an uphill battle, as she encountered constant racism from her colleagues, who couldn’t understand why she’d spend her time on these supposedly sub-par texts—and, by implication, people. Fortunately, she was tenured, and she used that protected privilege to embolden her work. Her visit to Canada was in part a fact-finding mission to learn how Indigenous literatures and scholars in the field had found a relatively secure place in literary studies in this country. Yet I didn’t realize just how challenging her situation was until she told me about a conversation she’d had with her faculty dean—a white man with significant power in her institution—who declared to her with no apparent irony and a great deal of certitude that Aboriginal people in Australia would never have a real literature until there was an Aboriginal Shakespeare. I’ve recently been back in contact with my Australian colleague, who gave me permission to share this anecdote; she and her compatriots continue the struggle to open up space in their university for Indigenous students, writers, and scholars to be acknowledged as equals in an institution built on their own lands. It remains a difficult slog, but she’s still at it. Her story has stuck with me all this time as a particularly egregious but not uncommon example of

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attitudes toward the literary achievements of Indigenous peoples. “Literature,” according to her dean, was a mark of basic human value and civilization. And it’s not enough to simply have writing or stories or textual traditions—to be treated as literature, they have to be recognizable as literature to others, especially to those with a vested interest in not recognizing them as such. It’s a terrible double-bind, and a dispiriting realization, as the more evidence we bring to bear to affirm our literariness, the more we risk becoming tangled in narrower and narrower definitions until we find ourselves mimicking the exclusivist arguments of the colonizing culture that has so long insisted on our literary invisibility in the first place. “Literature” as a category generally refers to written alphabetic texts; when not exclusively written, it becomes “oral literature,” “oral tradition,” “oral history,” etc., and the distinction is meaningful, as a social evolutionary bias presumes that the oral is a less developed version of the written. And for all the excellent scholarship that has been produced over the last century on oral traditions and their complex, multi-layered, sophisticated, and richly textured qualities—every bit the equal of any written tradition, if not even more remarkable due to the years of training and memory skill required for their continuity—we still live in a world that demeans the oral as a primitive, cruder, less evolved body of knowledge. All literatures matter—it’s why the term “literature” is so loaded, as it carries cultural capital, and all such capital is embedded in relationships of power. Literature as a category is about what’s important to a culture, the stories that are privileged and honoured, the narratives that people—often those in power, but also those resisting that power—believe to be central to their understanding of the world and their place in relation to it. For many critics, literature is about written alphabetic texts with particular aesthetic qualities, a form of art that exists independent of social usefulness or value beyond particularly elevated notions of beauty—the idea of “art for art’s sake.” Once a revolutionary, artistic call to arms amidst

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the suffocating, moralizing late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of Oscar Wilde and his Decadent contemporaries, today that philosophy seems to be encountered more often as an ostensibly high-minded stance for those privileged enough to be disaffected and politically disengaged. I much prefer the definition of art provided by the Cherokee-Appalachian poet Marilou Awiakta—“art for life’s sake”—whereby, rather than the wholly individualist expression of an artist’s singular, often self-absorbed vision, art is explicitly, generously engaged with a larger network of relations, influences, and experiences, always with some measure of commitment to articulating Indigenous presence in the world. Whatever our definition, literature, considered broadly as my kinsman Jace Weaver does, as “the total written output of a people,” is an expansive, dynamic, adaptive thing; that’s part of its beautiful, terrible power. It serves the powerful and the powerless alike; the rebellious texts of one generation become the stories against which the next generation struggles to be heard, even while providing inspiration and guidance for those who follow. And it’s more than singular—rightly, I should always be using the plural “literatures,” as these texts and traditions are far too diverse and multifaceted to neatly fit the presumptions behind the idea of the monolithic category of “literature.” This book is focused on works written in English. This is due to my own rather traditional English Studies training as a literary historian and critic in the field, and my admittedly narrow linguistic range as a largely monolingual English speaker (a smattering of French and even less Cherokee notwithstanding). Yet it bears explicit acknowledgement that these texts, for all their imaginative scope, beauty, and function in the world, are only one small part of a much broader expressive archive in many languages and forms. Indigenous peoples have always communicated ideas, stories, dreams, visions, and concepts with one another and with the other-than-human world, in whatever media have been most

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convenient and meaningful at the time. Alphabetic literacy, while never neutral in its power, is at its best an extension of these practices, not a replacement. As Penny van Toorn argues in reference to Aboriginal writing in Australia, a context not entirely dissimilar to that of Canada or the US in this regard: Traditionally based Indigenous practices of alphabetic literacy that emerged over 200 years ago in the late 18th century continued in the 19th and 20th centuries, and are still manifest in the authorial practices of Aboriginal writers today. The persistence of these practices suggests that they are not part of an insignificant, transitory adjustment process on a path that leads to “literacy proper.” Instead, they are evidence that reading and writing have been reinvented, and that under certain conditions Aboriginal communities have been able to develop and adapt their own new and distinct cultures of literacy in a manner that perpetuates traditional, orally grounded social structures and values.

van Toorn is quick, however, to point out that “there is no denying that in many parts of Australia important traditional Indigenous life-ways have not survived the introduction of literacy,” and ties that destruction to the ideological apparatus that accompanies literacy—namely, missionization and the “civilizing” work of white settlers, who actively dismantled and suppressed the pre-existing and more sustaining Indigenous cultural and linguistic contexts. When Indigenous peoples have been able to put these technologies to use in ways that affirm the sovereignty of Indigenous purpose, not subjection to white supremacy, they tend to uphold traditional practices, not erode them. To this end, then, our literatures include a wide array of other kinds of texts, such as cane baskets, wampum belts, birchbark scrolls, gourd masks, sand paintings, rock art, carved and painted cedar poles, stones and whale bones, culturally modified trees, and so on. While serving many cultural and

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ceremonial purposes, these items also communicate stories and ideas, and while the conflation may be controversial to some, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to think of our literary traditions as being broadly inclusive of all the ways we embody our stories in the world. In expanding our definitions, and mindful of van Toorn’s cautionary note, we must also be careful and understand that these other sorts of texts aren’t only diverse literary forms, but that they perform other kinds of vital functions in their respective cultures, many of them ceremonial, ritual, and spiritual. And there are internal interpretive methods that are specific to Indigenous languages, oratorical practices, and cultural protocols that don’t necessarily fit well with Eurowestern literary criticism; indeed, they’re often fundamentally different in mode and purpose. These diverse textualities and interpretive traditions generally require particular kinds of extensive specialized training that are most often limited to specific community members, with specific linguistic and cultural knowledge, who are charged with community responsibilities. Outsiders who approach them as simply a different form of writing are likely to misread them or, worse, misuse them, with often quite negative results. For example, we can read wampum belts as political documents, which in some ways they certainly are, but they’re far more than that, as they also physically embody and articulate the deep relationships of rights and responsibilities between peoples, and there are complex protocols and rituals that accompany and enliven their social function. Language matters here, too, as the erosion of fluency in Indigenous mother tongues has also impacted the deeper understandings of wampum within their specific cultural milieus. We therefore risk profound misinterpretation and even trivialization if we remove those belts from their most meaningful contexts and simply read them in English as documents the same way we’d read a desacralized parliamentary bill that’s completely alienated from the physical, spiritual, and symbolic lives of the peoples it

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ostensibly concerns. The similarities matter, but so, too, do the profound differences between them. The words of Lee Maracle (Stó:lō) on this point are important to consider here: “Although our knowledge was scattered, it was not destroyed. . . . To study this knowledge in a systemic way we must first gather, synthesize, and transfer this knowledge. Both of these processes are vital to our survival. This systemization of knowledge is required before writers can write from within their culture.” She goes on to call all of us doing work in the field to account, to be mindful about the limits of our experience and knowledge, especially those of us without deeper cultural grounding in the languages and traditions from which so many of these works emerge: Today we have many scholars studying Indigenous writing, many of them Europeans or with a European education, armed with colonial definitions and post-colonial theories. These scholars are not expected to pay attention to the study of the original culture from which the authors they study arise. Certainly, they are not expected to concern themselves with original oratorical principles of study. In contrast, an Indigenous graduate of literature automatically becomes an expert in Salish, Ojibway, Oji-Cree, Iroquoian, and Cherokee writing, without having to know much about the nations and the national story or oratorical traditions of those nations. Few Indigenous writers are in a position to comb through the oratory, story, drama, and poetry in their original forms in order to glean the principles of Indigenous story creation.

While the works I discuss here speak certain truths of their own, they’re not the totality of Indigenous oratorical, literary, or artistic expression or experience, and there are limits in the kinds of insight they can provide—just as there are limits to any insight I

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can give to the works discussed herein. They’re just one part of a much larger, much more diverse and dynamic expressive and critical archive, yet another important reason for folks to read widely and with broad interest. It’s also good to remember that not all things are meant for all people. There are boundaries to some forms of knowledge; to insist that all things should be available without limit to everyone is to exercise a particularly corrosive kind of universalizing colonialist privilege; claiming entitlement to all peoples’ knowledge is, after all, just one of the many expropriating features of settler colonial violence. Fortunately, even while respecting necessary boundaries on certain knowledge, there is still an ample and growing archive available for all of us to read, experience, share, and understand together, and it will be to those works and contexts that I direct my attention in these pages. One more caveat: every time we privilege the literary, we run the risk of doing violence to the specific relational contexts of the oral. Reading can be a very isolated and isolating experience; sharing stories orally is done in the context of living, dynamic peoplehood— one reason why it’s so significant to Indigenous communities, where so much knowledge is transmitted between living people, not mediated by objects like books. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson offers a vital caution on this point, which I quote at length: The relationship between those present becomes dynamic, with the storyteller adjusting their “performance” based on the reactions and presence of the audience. The lines between storyteller and audience become blurred as individuals make non-verbal (and sometimes verbal) contributions to the collective event. The “performance,” whether a song, a dance or a spoken word story, becomes then an individual and collective experience, with the goal of lifting the burden of colonialism by visioning new realities.

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While this is now also accomplished by Indigenous artists through the written word, spoken word, theatre, performance art, visual art, music and rap, film and video, it is most powerful in terms of transformation in its original cultural context because that context places dynamic relationships at the core. When mediated through print or recording devices, these relationships become either reduced (technology that limits interactivity) or unilateral (as in print, film, or video, when the creator cannot respond to the reaction of the audience). Then the process, to me, loses some of its transformative power because it is no longer emergent.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that Simpson is a spoken-word performer and musician, as well as a writer; many Indigenous writers take up more dynamic, audience-focused forms in addition to more conventional literary practices. While acknowledging its shortcomings, Simpson is clearly not dismissing the power of writing as only a “Western” imposition, as I’ve heard from some community members and even some writers. We must acknowledge the inevitable limits of the literary, while also acknowledging the diverse ways that story, community, and belonging continue in both oral and inscribed forms. To honour our literary traditions is not to say that only those traditions have value, nor is it to adopt the hierarchy of value presumed by settler societies and structures. But Indigenous literatures do something good and important in the world, and that’s my focus here.

This book takes up these stories of presence and how they enliven our lives and imaginations and consider the complications of historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in these lands. The structure of the book is intended to be invitational, to welcome dialogue

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and even debate, rather than insisting on a singular way of understanding the works or the issues under consideration. Four critical questions form the core chapters of this book, questions that continue to shape much of my approach to Indigenous Studies generally and to Indigenous literature more specifically. While the historical and political work of the broader discipline is vitally important to give context and content to the work of literary scholars, I fundamentally believe that the study of Indigenous writing offers us something different, a complementary but distinctive way of thinking about Indigenous belonging, identities, and relationships. Though born and raised in Colorado, connected by heritage, kinship, friendship, and ceremony to Oklahoma, and formally trained in Indigenous literary studies and history in Nebraska, I have been in Canada since 2002, where I’ve learned from and shared intellectual and interpersonal nourishment with Musqueam, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Cree, Inuit, Mi’kmaq, Métis, Lakota, Kwagiulth, Tahltan, and Dene people, among many others. In my Indigenous Lit and Indigenous Studies courses, in conference rooms, community centres, and around the kitchen tables of family and friends in Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, New Hampshire, Michigan, Georgia, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, Australia, England, and elsewhere, our discussions have often come back to the challenges, possibilities, and complexities of kinship and belonging, as much in our relationships to one another as to the world we share. The questions that structure the core of this book have emerged from these conversations and considerations, and offer what I think to be particularly productive and provocative ways of approaching this diverse body of work. I’m suspicious of claims of universal values between all Indigenous peoples around the world, as such broad assertions too often gloss over real and meaningful distinctions between communities, regardless of whatever else they may share. These claims are all too easily weaponized in colonialist authenticity

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debates against Indigenous individuals and groups. Yet these four questions do seem to me a good way of getting to some of the more widely held ideas about relationship, kinship, respect, and responsibility that Indigenous peoples articulate, separately and together. Examining them as questions makes room for the specificities of our diverse experiences. It also, I hope, keeps us humble, since considering these as processes leaves room for learning, growing, changing, and remembering. They’re not fixed in time or place, but help us maintain better relations to both. The book’s four guiding questions are: 1.

How do we learn to be human? What are the experiences, customs, traditions, and ceremonies that define our humanity? How do we realize the full potential of our physical and imaginative human embodiment with healthy bodies, hearts, and minds?

2.

How do we behave as good relatives? What are our relational rights and responsibilities to one another and to the otherthan-human world? How do our literatures help us realize these relations in meaningful ways?

3.

How do we become good ancestors? How do we create the kind of world and relationships that will nurture those who come after, and give them cause to thank us rather than curse or grieve our destructive selfishness? And what does literature do to help guide this work?

4.

How do we learn to live together? What are the social and intellectual structures, conventions, and considerations that reduce or manage conflicts and encourage harmonious relations across our varied categories of difference? How do our stories offer helpful models for those efforts?

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The concept of the “good” noted above deserves a bit of attention here. “Good,” in these questions, isn’t a prescriptive measurement presuming a singular state of moral rightness, but is rather a concept intended to be expansive. Yet I do believe that considering the status of our moral relations is important, and I hope that the associated discussions and readings may offer multiple approaches to the “good” through consideration of those ideas, behaviours, and relationships that are healthy and affirming of human and otherthan-human dignity, while challenging those that are toxic, violent, and demeaning. There are no specific answers to any of these questions; or rather, there are many answers, depending on contexts of culture, community, land, and history. They’re broad questions, but significant ones, which ask us to attentively consider our relationships to one another and to the world. Each question engages our uniqueness as individuals and as peoples while embedding that uniqueness in a larger context of consideration. And in the context of each of these questions, through poetry, prose, image, performance, song, and story, Indigenous writers offer insight, challenge, and possibility to our understandings of how we live in the world—and how we might do it better. For those familiar with Indigenous literatures, my choice of texts and writers may seem a bit unusual or unconventional. I’m more interested in the ideas communicated than in aesthetic techniques, but both are important in balance. Simply put: I like these works, and I wanted to write about works of art that interest, compel, challenge, and inspire me. Most of my discussion is on fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, not because these are the only genres that matter but because they’re the ones I’ve studied and taught the most. I don’t focus too much on whether or not these are canonical or critically lauded works; I’ve tried to give the bulk of my attention to texts that are underrepresented or less widely recognized, or to those that deserve a broader international readership. Indigenous

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children’s and young-adult literature are notably under-represented, but this is a result of my own knowledge gaps rather than any reflection on these important works; I’ve included quite a few such writers and works in the Appendix. In light of the disproportionate attention given to straight male Indigenous voices in the public sphere, especially in Canada, I’ve also prioritized the work of Indigenous women and queer/two-spirit writers of multiple genders. When I do attend to the corpus of more famous writers, I generally engage their more obscure or underappreciated works. This is both a result of my own idiosyncratic literary interests and a deliberate choice. We’re in the remarkably fortunate position of living in a time when there’s simply too much good work being produced by Indigenous writers in Canada and the US for us to keep up, not to mention the growing body of excellent scholarship about that archive. Too often, critics and readers act as though we only have a handful of Indigenous writers whose work is worthy of consideration or support—what I’ve elsewhere called the “noble nine,” more as a critique of the critics than of the fine work of the writers themselves. As a result, these few stories, voices, and perspectives take up what little space exists in public discourse, thereby displacing or entirely obscuring the many other writers not market-friendly or fortunate enough to be at the centre of consideration. It’s detrimental to the entire field of Indigenous literary studies, it’s demoralizing for emerging and established but underappreciated writers who struggle to make a living and have their work published, and ultimately it’s bad for all of us, as it simply reinforces the idea that Indigenous imaginations are limited in scope, range, and diversity. Yet I should also note that the absence of a writer here shouldn’t be read as evidence of their lack of significance in the field or beyond it. That may sometimes be the case, as there are certainly some writers whose work I don’t find particularly engaging, interesting, or aesthetically or politically compelling, but it’s not a uniform rule. Quite

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simply, it’s just not possible in a book of this length and focus to include every writer, critic, or work that I believe to be meaningful or worthy of consideration. I therefore had to concentrate on the ones that seemed best to address the book’s thematic concerns and to be the most provocative and generative of discussion and debate for this specific purpose. A different approach would necessitate different choices. But I’m confident that there’s something here to interest most readers, and hope that some of these works will spark a long-burning interest for future reading, study, and appreciation. This book draws on a diverse array of voices coming from many communities, perspectives, traditions, territories, and eras. I hope it inspires readers to seek out some of these writers and their works, and experience their imaginative possibilities for themselves. This is particularly the case because of the overlapping relevance of the structural questions to one another: after all, we can’t understand what it is to be human without also considering our interrelationships with those around us, or how to get along with one another across and through our differences.

This book is part of a much bigger conversation, one in which I’ve been blessed to be able to participate formally for most of my life, and there are many people of many backgrounds and affiliations who have worked for many years to articulate why Indigenous literatures matter, often under very trying circumstances, often at great cost to themselves and their careers, often with little recognition or even outright rejection, but always—always—with the hope that the future would be better, that our lineal and social descendants would have a worthy inheritance awaiting them, that the People and the stories would go on. To those writers, scholars, readers, teach-

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ers, and students, past, present, and future, who make these conversations possible, and who work for a better, more just, and more generous world through the transformative power of story, my heartfelt thanks. And that includes the readers of this book, too. Wado nigada. a

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Chapter 1

How Do We Learn to Be Human?

Raven shaped us; we are built for transformation. Our stories prepare us for it. Find freedom in the context you inherit— every context is different: discover consequences and change from within, that is the challenge. Still, there is horror at having change foisted upon you from outside. —Lee M a r acle (Stó:lō), “Goodby e, Snauq”

A

lthough we are born into human bodies, it’s our teachings—and our stories—that make us human. Whatever our particular gifts or limitations, no matter how our specific biology influences our decisions and behaviours, our humanity is far greater than the simple consequence of being born into the species Homo sapiens. The exchange of DNA is as much an accident of history as it is an act of will, and culture and kinship travel different (though often parallel) currents. Our biology is only a very small part of our humanity; the rest is a process of becoming.

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We tend to like our metaphors, analogies, weathered old chestnuts, quick-and-easy examples, especially for this most elemental of questions. In the old “nature vs. nurture” debate, we might think of nature being the clay and nurture the act of sculpting. The medium of clay determines much of what can be achieved, but it’s the care or negligence of the sculptor that has the greater influence. Of course, this presumes that the clay itself has no further role to play than to simply be, and it also ignores the ways that moisture, light, temperature, and other environmental conditions can affect both the process and the final result, so in the end this hackneyed metaphor, like most, falls short. Metaphors alone can’t encompass what it is to be human, nor can lived experience. For that, we need stories. We learn to be human from everything around us, as the worlds we inhabit help to define both the limits and the possibilities of our humanity. And because the specificities of each of our experiential worlds is different—as Lee Maracle writes above, the contexts we inherit—there can never be a single way of being or becoming human, though no doubt some ways have a great deal in common with one another. That’s the role of experience, of teaching, and of story—to help us find ways of meaningful being in whatever worlds we inhabit, whatever contexts we’ve inherited. This is what I take Thomas King’s oft-quoted words to mean: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” Our lives are incarnations of the stories we tell, the stories told about us, and the stories we inherit. They are both the process and the consequence of the transformations into the fullness of our humanity. Indeed, without those stories, without the teachings about the who, how, and why of us, something is profoundly, almost existentially amiss. We don’t need to speak them to live them; even those not given voice are inextricably embraided in our sense of self. We know ourselves only through stories. The unstoried life is a terrible thing to comprehend, a soul-deep desolation.

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Yet not all the stories that shape us are our own. Most, inevitably, are not, and these are the legacies we inherit, the formative context of our being. That’s part of the beauty and frightening power of story: sometimes the shaping stories are an empowering blessing, sometimes they’re a disfiguring curse, sometimes they offer a bit of both shadow and light. But they’re always part of who we know ourselves to be. Although the US-based Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich is rightly famous as a prolific and award-winning novelist, it’s her small nonfiction travelogue about writing and reading, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, that I like best, in part because it so beautifully articulates the profound human longing for stories that crosses space and time. In the book, Erdrich travels through northern Minnesota to the Great Lakes region of southern Ontario on a kind of memory quest, mapping Ojibwe writing through the land, language, and history of her people. She notes that her own career is both a personal calling and a natural extension of cultural values, gesturing even to one possible origin of the word “Ojibwe” itself: “The meaning that I like best of course is Ojibwe from the verb Ozhibii’ige, which is ‘to write.’ Ojibwe people were great writers from way back and synthesized the oral and written tradition by keeping mnemonic scrolls of inscribed birchbark. The first paper, the first books.” Throughout the journey, Erdrich punctuates each chapter with the refrain “Books. Why?” and offers different answers each time. At the book’s end, after she has returned home to Minnesota, she reflects on a question she’s pondered since childhood: if stranded alone on a desert island with just one book, which book would you want it to be? It’s an anxiety-producing question for any book lover, let alone a writer and bookstore owner, but her answer is simple, and brilliant: a dictionary, the source of endless story possibilities. And then she offers the following thoughts, almost a departing blessing:

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Books. Why? So I can talk to other humans without having to meet them. Fear of boredom. So that I will never be alone.

The aloneness of reading isn’t loneliness. With books and other stories, whether experienced in solitude or lived community, we abide in human presence beyond the flesh and blood of personal experience. It’s a remarkable alchemy, this storied transformation of self to other, and back again. When we’re in the presence of stories, we’re never truly alone. But that’s not to say that all stories are welcome companions. We must take care with the company we keep, for some of these stories do far more harm than good. And the stories of how we become and remain human are some of the most dangerous of all.

The struggle to understand and articulate our humanity is at the heart of most literatures, customs, laws, faiths, nationalisms, identities— even our basic sense of self. All peoples have developed complicated understandings of that existential question and the ways it has fascinated, frustrated, and frightened all human cultures throughout our varied histories. Some of these understandings are expansive and generous, considering the category of human to be a broad and multidimensional one that includes kinship with a whole range of beings that share something we might call “humanity,” while others—perhaps most—are more narrow in their definition, limiting “human” to specific classes of beings, with powers and privileges distributed accordingly. It’s what Nigerian storyteller Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Igbo) so brilliantly warns about in her 2009 TED

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Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” wherein she identifies Eurowestern literature as a particularly insidious purveyor of corrosive singular stories about all kinds of peoples, especially those of lands colonized by Europeans—in this case, the “authentically African” story that presumes that there’s only one narrative that represents thousands of cultures and millions of people over one of the largest land masses on Earth. And she makes the point that the expression of the single story is inherently an expression of power: Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

Single stories are shallow, but easily mobilized to support inequality, bigotry, and self-interest. Complexity challenges manipulation—it’s why the most cynical politicians and talking heads go out of their way to evade complexity and opt for the sound bite, or, when that fails, excessive volume. Yet even in more exclusive contexts that insist upon singularity over multiplicity, the privileged category of the moment is always in flux—it’s inevitable, as the complications of the world and its myriad relations evade these simplistic categories, and stories find their way free to disturb the status quo and to liberate people to express all the rich, bewildering diversity of their lived experiences. In thinking about how we learn to be human, we also have to keep firmly in mind that Indigenous traditions generally don’t limit the category of person solely to the human. As humans, we’re simply

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one of many peoples, and depending on the tradition, there are also animal people, bird people, rock people, fish people, and so on, alongside human people. Multiplicity is inherent in kinship; good relations require acknowledgement and, importantly, mindful accommodation of difference. All these peoples have their languages; all have customs, habits, strengths, weaknesses, and personalities. For all we know—and certainly Indigenous traditions teach us that it’s the case—these other peoples have their own story traditions, too. And many of the mainstream settler culture’s assumptions about which qualities are entirely unique to humans—language, a moral sense, rationality, tool use, etc.—have little purchase in cultures where untold generations of close observation and abiding relationship have given ample evidence otherwise. The mainstream is also increasingly out of step with Eurowestern science, especially ethology, the study of animal behaviour, which continues to demonstrate just how little we understand about the complex subjectivities of our other-than-human neighbours, especially when it’s a self-referential comparison with our own limited sensory comprehension of the world: crows and badgers and bonobos use tools; whales and prairie dogs have grammatically rich vocabularies; dogs can assess the fairness of situations; elephants grieve their dead; octopuses problem-solve and create underwater gardens arranged in ways practical and even pleasing to octopus aesthetics. The list is as varied as the species. And why do we even ask why animals aren’t more like humans? We wouldn’t measure so well against migratory birds in assessing travel based on the Earth’s geomagnetic field, after all. In fact, we’d utterly fail that test on our own merit and without the benefit of technological assistance, and might well be considered quite stupid and barely sentient if bird sense was the standard against which we were measured. The only thing that really seems to be unique about humans as a species is our capacity for wilful, self-deluding destruction. We’re really good at killing, maiming, and spoiling things, and doing it

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with pleasure. And we always have been—Indigenous traditions are well stocked with warnings against human destructiveness and lessons for more respectful co-existence with our other-than-human relatives. In Cherokee tradition, for example, it is humanity’s mindless cruelty that leads to the presence of disease and suffering in the world; as a result of widespread slaughter of our beast-kin, the chiefs of the various Animal and Bird peoples cursed us with every imaginable disease and debilitating ailment. It’s only due to the generosity of the Plant peoples that we’ve managed to survive to this point, as they each provided a cure to one of the Animal-inflicted maladies. And although some cultures and many individuals have worked to act more responsibly in our relationships with these other-thanhuman peoples, as a species we’ve repaid their generosity with widescale extinction, deforestation, climate catastrophe, and poisoning of the earth, air, and waters. The deeper you go into definitions of the human, the less clear and more arbitrary everything becomes. We find ourselves to be more like other animals, and our dependence on the other-thanhuman world becomes even more evident. This isn’t a bad thing; indeed, it should make us humble and thoughtful. But it doesn’t, not really, at least not on the planetary scale. While many traditional peoples continue to practise lives of accountability and honour with the world, a great resource-consuming mass of humanity is busy ravaging those delicate threads of interdependence. The horrors of factory farming are worse than ever, and as we become more distanced from the actual animal lives and deaths associated with our meat consumption, the suffering of untold numbers of fellow creatures becomes increasingly abstract; neonicotinoid use is devastating bee and other insect populations, but rather than reflect on the unfolding catastrophe, pesticide industries are lobbying for even more environmental deregulation. These are only two of a litany of examples, and the list is long and ugly. The world increasingly becomes a commodity to be purchased, consumed, and flushed away

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(but to where?) to poison the lands and oceans and skies that we all depend upon for survival. In such a perspective, there are still plenty of folks out there who will insist on not just our distinctiveness but also our unchallenged superiority. While not entirely a result of colonialism, this attitude is deeply entrenched in settler colonial cultures that are themselves embedded in culturally specific understandings of what it is to be human. In the Eurowest, the dominant stories of humanity are rooted in the Abrahamic traditions, notably those of the militant, hierarchical versions of Christianity that have justified centuries of expansion, invasion, expropriation, and exploitation; while there have always been other Christian traditions, these by and large have had a negligible impact on colonialist policy and practice. In the dominant Abrahamic stories, there is a fiercely maintained boundary between human and nonhuman, and even in the former category, there is a clear hierarchy: men are more human than women, European colonizers are more human than Indigenous and other colonized peoples, the rich and titled are more human than the poor and oppressed, Christian capitalists are more human than animist traditionalists, and so on. While the Enlightenment wrested much of the West’s interpretive authority away from Christianity, its fundamental structure didn’t change; European philosophical and scientific traditions remain heavily invested in an ethos of human exclusivity. Not surprisingly, artistic and ceremonial representations of their solitary deity (or, for Christian Trinitarians, a three-in-one god) fully reinforce the social hierarchies, most often showing some version of a white patriarch in white robes surveying and/ or judging the world of his unassisted creation. He could be an old man (Jehovah) or a young man (Jesus), and he might be surrounded by his celestial host or the writhing souls of the damned, but either way he generally stands alone atop the cosmic order with an air of unassailable authority. And when the creeds of this

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socio-religious tradition insist that “man was made in his own image,” it’s no great leap to see how an exclusivist god of the heavens is used as a divine model and mandate for narrower hierarchical definitions of humanity on earth. Yet for all the bluster and self-justifying rhetoric of the social hierarchs, the insistence on these firm boundaries is far from a sign of confidence. If anything, it’s clear evidence of a fundamental insecurity, a concern that their singular vision doesn’t quite hold up to close scrutiny, that the diversity of humanity is far too complex and dynamic to be contained in their limited definitions. And as new information and contrary evidence is brought to bear on the question, it’s either dismissed, attacked, co-opted, or gradually incorporated into the dominant order, destabilizing the power structure’s claims to monolithic authority while reinforcing its seeming inevitability. Only rarely does new knowledge break down that existing structure. Yet the destabilization is significant, as it opens and empowers spaces of dissent that make possible the larger, more important transformations.

In those Indigenous cultural understandings that have withstood such colonial intrusions, the status of “human” is intimately embedded in kinship relations. It’s why some version of the question “Who’s your family?” or “Who are your people?” continues to be so important in Indigenous conversations: such questions don’t just connect you to a lineage, however that may be understood—they place you in a meaningful context with your diverse relatives and the associated relationships of obligation, where you have people who claim you and who have, hopefully, trained you well in the ways of being a good human being. In other words, kinship isn’t just a thing, it’s an

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active network of connections, a process of continual acknowledgement and enactment. To be human is to practise humanness. It’s why even those of us not brought up on the land or in community publicly affirm our affiliations: to say that I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation is, in some way, to acknowledge not just my genealogical and kinship connections to a particular polity in a particular place (distinguished from those of the Eastern Band of Cherokees or the United Keetoowah Band), but to acknowledge that I belong to them, to whatever degree they decide to claim me, which in turn is to take up as best I can the responsibilities that come from that acknowledgement. And even that’s not the end of the story. I might belong as a Cherokee in certain recognizable ways, but those aren’t static either, and other Cherokees will let me know to what degree I’m legible to them as a Cherokee person, absent other linguistic, religious, and land-based relationships. Layer upon layer, complication after complication. And it all comes down, in one way or another, to kinship. One of the richest novels about Indigenous kinship is Waterlily, by the Yankton Sioux ethnologist Ella Cara Deloria. Written in the first half of the twentieth century and unpublished during her lifetime, it was drawn from her widely lived and professional experience, as well as extensive interviews with traditional Dakota community members, and offers a powerful account of Dakota lives and lifeways from their full experience on the edge of American settler colonialism. Its terminology and language are somewhat dated, and the stiff formal register can be a bit off-putting for those more inclined toward today’s emotive prose. At times, the novel’s gender dynamics are uncomfortably resonant with the broader patriarchal norms of Deloria’s time, and perhaps demonstrate more than a passing influence of Judeo-Christian intrusions, especially given her family’s deep Episcopalian faith and her own precarious position as a strong-minded woman committed to respectfully representing women’s experiences in a profession that privileged men overwhelm-

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ingly, both in scholarly focus and in career advancement. Yet for all these challenges, Waterlily remains a finely crafted novelistic study of the ways that kinship shapes self and identity, and of how the contexts of our relationships determine who we understand ourselves to be and what our duties are as a result. Told through the birth, childhood, and maturing adulthood of the title character, Waterlily articulates in fiction what Deloria eloquently described elsewhere: [T]he ultimate aim of Dakota life, stripped of all accessories, was quite simple: One must obey kinship rules; one must be a good relative. No Dakota who has participated in that life will dispute that. In the last analysis every other consideration was secondary—property, personal ambition, glory, good times, life itself. Without that aim and the constant struggle to attain it, the people would no longer be Dakotas in truth. They would no longer even be human. To be a good Dakota, then, was to be humanized, civilized. And to be civilized was to keep the rules imposed by kinship for achieving civility, good manners, and a sense of responsibility toward every individual dealt with.

To be human is to be a good relative, and in so doing to be respectable and dignified. This is a very different mode of “civilization” than that imposed by Eurowestern missionaries, militaries, teachers, and policy-makers. As Deloria’s statement and novel make clear, kinship makes peoples of us through responsibilities to one another; settler nationalism, focusing ever more on individualism in opposition to community, makes us lonely and isolated subjects of an ultimately unaccountable state authority. Penelope Myrtle Kelsey (Seneca) argues that “all aspects of the complex plot of Waterlily are driven by kinship obligations and what both female and male characters must do to fulfill them. Kinship acts as a standard for civilization by which Deloria measures the Dakota. It is a measure that is defined by

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the Dakota themselves.” And that measure isn’t just about Dakotaspecific identity, but the proper behaviour of a good human being. For readers steeped in the individualist ethos of contemporary capitalist consumer culture, Waterlily’s world is a bewildering place. Take, for instance, her adjustment period as a new bride. Consenting to an offer of wife-purchase from the respected hunter Sacred Horse, in part to honour the wishes of her recently deceased grandmother, Waterlily finds herself outside her own kinship circle and embedded in a new one. The complexities are many, but not foreign: For a Dakota bride, the major problem was not that of adjusting to her new status of wife, which was private and personal, but adjusting to her husband’s family and relatives, which was a social matter. . . . She must make this adjustment smoothly and correctly, or her kinship training at home would be in question. Dakota kinship rules, especially where relatives of marriage were concerned, were very exact and exacting. Her first step was to learn by subtle observation who was what to her, and then she must proceed to conduct herself properly in each case, as prescribed by kinship law. But this was not too complicated, after all. Anyone with ordinary intelligence, who had been brought up within the framework of the system, understood all its intricacies. Nevertheless, a relentless watchfulness was needed, especially at first.

Waterlily’s gradual understandings of her place within this new kinship network—and the profound mutuality of responsibilities that come from such an understanding—serve as the novel’s central concern and help place the reader within that growing awareness. Her growth is our growth, and what might to many non-Dakota readers seem initially to be little more than a prison of obligations and expectations becomes gradually revealed to be a durable but flexible system that accommodates individual talents and personalities while upholding the well-being of the wider

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community of relatives. Birth, death, love, loss, longing, laughter— we encounter all the stuff of lived experience as she travels with her new family on their annual cycle through Dakota territory. We’re embedded in a fictionalized but carefully rendered Dakota world of careful observation, or social duty, of gentleness and profound care; we’re also in a world of conflict, of resentments and failed obligations, and of the many customary and ritual methods, large and small, for rebuilding frayed social bonds in a very intimate sphere. At one point late in the novel, in the aftermath of a snowstorm, strangers come to the Dakota camp: an older couple, two young women, and three small children. They are a rude, disagreeable bunch, likely outcasts without even the basic social graces; the warriors suspect that the children are the result of incest between the man and his daughters. Waterlily’s camp nevertheless offers generous hospitality to the strangers “out of human decency” and “for their own reputations as hosts,” taking seriously the admonition to “treat as a man any stranger in your tipi who bears the physical semblance of a man,” but fully mindful that “what sort the man might be was not the determining factor for extending such courtesies.” Yet it’s not the shifty-eyed man, his disengaged wife, or his boorish grown daughters that trouble Waterlily the most: it’s the young children, who recoil from kindness, stick their tongues out at the dignified Dakota women, and show themselves to be “unbelievably wild, untutored children.” Waterlily observes: No one had ever said to them, “No, don’t do that . . . see, nobody does so!” and thereby shamed them into good behavior toward those about them. There were no others about them from whom they might learn by imitation. And so they were growing up without civility—and the results were terrifying to see. Camp-circle people were civilized; they knew how to treat one another. They had rules. These children were wild because they lacked any standards of social behavior.

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“Civilization” here isn’t the punitive system of English language use and literacy, Christian conversion, white supremacy, and capitalist acquisition so brutally imposed on the Dakota peoples of Deloria’s time—the shadow of which lingers just on the edges of Waterlily’s changing world—nor is it the white prejudices that held Dakotas to be “savage” and “primitive” because they didn’t beat their children into docile submission or force women into malleable household servitude and men into wage labour. Instead, civilization is measured by the practice of thoughtful relations, good behaviour, and generosity of spirit, all of which made for stronger communities and more responsible individuals within the social network: It came over Waterlily as she observed the unfortunate children, so unkempt and so hostile, how very much people needed human companions. It was the only way to learn how to be human. People were at once a check and a spur to one another. Everyone needed others for comparison, for a standard for himself. This measuring and evaluating of self was only possible in camp-circle life, where everyone was obliged to be constantly aware of those about him, to address himself to them in the approved ways. Thus only did people learn to be responsible for and to each other and themselves.

Even some of the less pleasant aspects of social life become transformed within this system of care: Waterlily used to think that critics and gossips were a public nuisance. But now, seeing these wild people with nobody to criticize them, she decided that perhaps they were an actual necessity, that maybe they could not be spared. If it were not for the critics, people could never know whether they were being at their best or their worst. Here were people unquestionably at their worst— and they did not know it. . . . It was a tragic thing, to stay alone like this, in a benighted state.

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For Waterlily, to be isolated from social accountability is to be something less than human. But even in their frightening disconnection from good human behaviour, they are still people in need, and the strangers are treated with courtesy and sent off with food. Their own lack of generosity is a stark contrast to the Dakota camp and its gossipy but largely healthy social system; it’s Waterlily’s camp that sets the standard for practising what it is to be human, a standard embedded in an ethos of hospitality. And that generosity isn’t predicated on whether or not the strangers are deserving or even in need, but simply because it’s the right thing—the human thing—to do. It’s no accident that Deloria set her novel in the nineteenth century, just on the edge of the massive socio-political disruptions of Eurowestern invasion and the catastrophic effects of racist government policies on Dakota communities and kinship networks that still reverberate today. Waterlily is an imaginative, culturally informed if somewhat limited window onto a time before the worst of these impositions and traumas, a partial reminder of what might have been, and, perhaps, what could be again. As Waterlily repeatedly observes, these practices are learned—they’re not inborn, nor do they ride the currents of blood or sit upon the rungs of the DNA ladder, but are instead a complex and deliberate but entirely learnable process of cross-generational education and social exchange between people. Importantly, as María Eugenia Cotera reminds us, Deloria “immerses the reader in Waterlily’s world, not as an outsider or an ‘objective’ observer, but as a participant in the camp circle, figured in the novel as a rational, ordered social universe: a place with a past, a present, and most importantly, a future.” And this process takes place between specific humans on specific lands to which they belong, and in relationship with the specific ancestors and the other-than-human world with which they so intimately abide. Yet what about those who, through no fault of their own, exist outside of those intimate familial contexts, or who have lost their

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families to circumstance or violence, or for whom—as is still the case for many queer and two-spirit Indigenous people—the birth family is a threat and a danger rather than the comfort and connection of “chosen” family? How do they learn to be human after centuries of settler colonial assaults on the health and well-being of the very Indigenous kinship structures and social values that have determined our distinctive humanity? Many of us today, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, were born into a social context of some degree of familial fragmentation and mobility, where family are those people visited across vast distances on holidays and special occasions rather than a network of affiliations and obligations that require constant care and commitment. And far too many are born into families ravaged by various traumas. How, then, do we learn to be human when Waterlily’s “camp-circle life” isn’t a viable option for so many of us anymore— or may not actually have been the space of full dignity and connection for all that many people, even in her own time? Indigenous writers have long taken up these challenging questions, and rarely are there easy answers. Settler colonialism isn’t something one just gets over; it’s woven into all aspects of our experience, and those strangling threads are too often invisible and all the more wounding as a result. What Indigenous texts do is make visible what’s so often unseen, and suggest a much more complicated perspective on what is too often grossly simplified in popular culture and mainstream media. And in considering the frayed edges of kinship that so many of us have worked to reweave in our own lives and those of so many of our communities, Indigenous writers have offered powerful, provocative, and often quite deliberately “unsettling” visions that chronicle the challenges of rebuilding what settler colonialism has mangled. The Last of the Ofos, a novella by Cherokee-Quapaw/Chickasaw writer and scholar Geary Hobson, is a compelling example, one I’ve written about before but which is eminently deserving of further

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study, especially in this discussion. We start with the title, a cheeky reference to James Fenimore Cooper’s influential 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans and its settler colonial fantasy of Indians disappearing, in resignation or in rebellion, but disappearing nonetheless, before the ostensibly unstoppable superiority of white frontier patriarchy. At first glance, we might think that this story follows a similar line: the protagonist, Thomas Darko, is the last of his Louisiana-based Ofo people. We accompany his reminiscences from his earliest days in bayou country until he returns to his childhood home as an adult, and fully acknowledges that he’s the last speaker of Ofo and the last of his always-small, immediate family left alive. His final years, the only part of the novella not in first-person narration, are tellingly appended in the form of a 1997 death announcement in an anthropological journal. Yet it’s what happens between the pages that fully distinguishes The Last of the Ofos from The Last of the Mohicans, and offers insight into the interventions of Indigenous writing into the still-dominant stereotypes about Indigenous humanity. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series (The Last of the Mohicans was one of its five volumes) extol the “pioneering spirit” of westward expansion, a celebration of the bloody heroism of white settler men fighting all the fearsome forces of Nature—including savage animals and savage Indians—as they bring Eurowestern civilization to the benighted wilderness. Humanity is defined in absolute contrast to the wild places and creatures of the continent, and although there’s inevitable ambivalence throughout, especially in the frontiersman character of Natty Bumppo, who straddles these worlds, it’s ultimately an epic about settler colonial erasure of Indigenous presence. The Canadian equivalent of this well-established frontier story is John Richardson’s 1832 novel Wacousta, a phantasmagoric invocation of settler violence set during Pontiac’s siege of Fort Detroit, and an equally troubling exploration of white supremacy and Indigenous diminishment.

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Hobson’s quiet novella offers a far different perspective. Thomas Darko reflects on his life, which spans nearly the entire twentieth century and includes brief stints as a bootlegger and jailbird, a Marine, a Hollywood extra, and a language keeper at the Smithsonian Institution, but only as part of a much larger story: namely, the struggle and rise of American Indian populations from the low ebb of the first half of the century to a position of comparative strength at its end. Yet the larger context of Indigenous resurgence is tempered by the many indignities Thomas faces throughout his life as a poor Indian man, as well as the loss of every other Ofo speaker in the world. While serving time in Angola Prison, Thomas learns that most of his family has been killed in a freak accident in which a train car broke loose and smashed into the family truck. He drifts into a fog of depression, one that’s intimately tied to his understanding of his humanity as an Ofo man being intimately interwoven with his family and the language they share: I realized, too, about this time, that I had pretty well even stopped talking to people, unless I was talked to by them first, and always in English, and all the time I was thinking Ofo things in Ofo and aware that now I might never git to speak the language again since everybody but me was gone. But more hurtful than that was the flash that I had that I would never get to hear it spoke out-loud by anybody other than myownself. Then it was that I felt like I was a lone cypress in a cleared-off bayou bottom.

While he has Tunica and Biloxi cousins, those that shared his specific understanding of Ofo kinship, as expressed through shared language and experience, are gone. The metaphor of clearcutting is an apt one. It’s a terrible blow, and, as he grows older, becomes a heavy responsibility as well. We can and must celebrate the victories of our nations’ survival, but even in our successes we have to acknowledge the losses.

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Most Indigenous languages in North America are threatened; many are critically endangered; some exist only through the memory of their fullness in the pages of academic treatises and dust-gathering linguistic accounts. Yet are they dead, or merely sleeping? Indigenous language revitalization efforts increasingly focus on the language of sleep rather than death; after all, if these languages belong to this land and have been spoken here since time immemorial, and if our knowledge comes from the land, then as long as our relationships to the land persist, there are possibilities for reawakening what has gone dormant. And if the land speaks, too, then there’s something even more profound at work here, possibilities for continuity unavailable in a world where humanity is the only form of personhood. It would be easy to read Thomas’s experience as a recasting of the vanishing Native stereotype, but it would also be a misreading. Whereas Cooper’s Indians fade into nothingness before the unstoppable onslaught of white “civilization,” Hobson’s Indians challenge both the idea of Indigenous erasure and the presumption of settler colonial inevitability. Although he disappears into grief and depression after learning about his family’s fate, Thomas doesn’t remain there. Unlike Cooper’s Chingachgook, who embraces his symbolic displacement by aiding in Natty Bumppo’s wilderness acculturation, Thomas Darko doesn’t surrender. He acknowledges the pain of his newfound poverty—not in material goods, but in family: “I was a poor man, but not jist cause I had no property. No, I was poor cause I no longer had a family. This is real poorness. It can’t never git no worse than that.” And he continues to speak his language, but only when away from other human ears: “I would talk to myself in Ofo, and it would seem to me like I could hear answers come back to me in the limbs and leaves of the cypresses and live oaks.” This is a reversal of sorts from the desolation of the “cleared-off bayou bottom.” Thomas continues to live his life, lonely but not isolated, and eventually, after a brief descent into alcoholism and a short stint as an extra

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in Hollywood westerns, he returns to his bayou home to “do some doctoring with plants and what-all” for his Tunica relatives. Yet the surest sign of a shift from the narrative of Indigenous erasure is the next step on his journey, when he travels to Washington, DC, is employed by the Smithsonian Institution, and briefly helps staff linguists and anthropologists develop a dictionary of Mosopelea, the Ofo language. His Washington visit doesn’t last long, but not from a lack of interest or commitment on Thomas’s part. He works hard to share what he knows, in spite of his constant battles with the condescending and ravenous Dr. Smight, as well as his alienation from assimilated urban Indians who insist that one needs a US-issued card to be a “real” Indian, a notion fundamentally at odds with his own grounded experience. Rather, his time at the Smithsonian ends when he and a group of white staff are taken to the nearby Pamunkey Reservation in Virginia. There he witnesses the brutal strapping of Indian pupils by Mr. Gant, the white teacher, when two Pamunkey boys are caught speaking their own language—and no one intervenes on the children’s behalf. It’s a breaking point: “Somehow or other, it dawned on me that I jist didn’t see the value in what we was doing—especially in what I was doing. A shikepoke like Smight can git paid to learn Indian languages and things, and Indian kids git whipped for talking it.” Thomas leaves after a short and frank conversation with Dr. Payne, a gentle old man who had known Thomas’s older relatives, and who, along with the younger Dr. Bledsoe, was one of the two scholars who treated him with genuine kindness. It’s a tender moment between two very different men from very different worlds who connect in a moment of profound mutual respect: He listened politely, then he say, “Sometimes scientists and scholars kill the very things they love, don’t they, Thomas?” I stop, then look right at him and forgit about talking to him about hunting and what-all.

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“Yes, sir. That is really right.” “Thomas, I could go on at length about the old adage of the often necessary action of breaking eggs in order to make omelets, but I don’t expect any of it will matter. Am I right?” “Yes, sir. I just think I be tired of seeing too many people be the eggs you talk about.” “I agree with you, Thomas.” He stopped and taken a drank of water from a glass by his bed. “Sometimes I have been very discouraged by the Mr. Gants in the world and—I apologize for speaking disparagingly about colleagues—the Dr. Smights. But then we must remember the Dr. Bledsoes. And, most of all, Thomas, I remember that there are people like you.” He looked straight at me and took my hand in his. “You are a good man, Thomas. Your grandpapa and parents would be proud of you. You are a great Ofo.”

Along with this acknowledgement of Thomas’s Ofo humanity, Dr. Payne gives him two final gifts: an Ofo switch-cane flute, snuck out of the Smithsonian holdings—and Dr. Smight’s acquisitive grasp—by young Dr. Bledsoe, and a farewell benediction: “‘Remember, Thomas,’ he say as I am leaving. ‘You are an entire nation. No nation anywhere could have a better representative.’” Encapsulated in these last words is the telling difference between The Last of the Ofos and The Last of the Mohicans, and the exchange of the words and the flute make possible the novella’s heart-wrenching conclusion. Thomas’s “lastness” isn’t an absence— it’s a profound and powerful presence. To acknowledge the losses is not to be defined solely by them. Thomas isn’t the deficient, bedraggled last gasp of a once-great people, but the dignified bearer of a living legacy, a nation of one carrying the memory of all those who came before, and one who continues to help his extended Tunica relatives long after he returns home to Ofo country. He grieves his losses, but still serves his people, both the living and the dead.

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The last scene in Thomas’s narrative voice takes place at night, after he’s recorded some of his travels on tape for the Tunica chief to share with the rest of the community. He takes up the switch-cane flute he was given by Dr. Payne. The flute has returned at last to where it belongs, the bayou country and Ofo Town, to carry the living breath of its Ofo creators and to bring their music back into the world. He plays for a little while, then switches to a soft song in the Mosopelea language, which he sings into the night: I had a great-big lump in my throat, and soon my low-talking become kind of loud, and then I wudn’t so much singing as yelling. My face and eyes was wet, but I keep on singing till my voice become raspy, like an old lady’s with a real-bad cold. I was beginning to git tired and also kind of chilly, but I sung on, and the lump got smaller and smaller and then it was gone. When I finally stopped, it seem to me like I could still hear me in all the trees around and out over the water. I turned and walked back to the bank, and I knowed pretty good that things was alright for the time being. But, if they wudn’t, then I figgered I could come back out here tomorrow night and sing again.

The novella ends with the dispassionate notice of Thomas’s death in 1997. The anonymous writer cites Dr. Smight bemoaning the uncompleted Ofo dictionary, and recounts the rumour that “from the time he returned to Louisiana after his stay in Washington up until his death, Mr. Darko was never known to have uttered a single Ofo word publicly”—a romanticized notion that’s fully contradicted by the scene of Thomas singing into the bayou night. The Ofo language, like the Ofo people, carries on, night after night, but not under the surveillance of settler scholars and their ilk. It carries on in Thomas’s service to his relatives, in his songs in voice and on the flute; to return to Maracle’s opening words, it’s Thomas’s continuing service to the full “context he inherited.” In spite of all his losses,

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he doesn’t surrender; he doesn’t fade or vanish. Throughout it all, Thomas honourably remains true to the lessons of Ofo humanity, and as a nation of one, he embodies multitudes. Even then, we might be inclined to think, “Yes, but he still dies at the end—and with it, the Ofo language is no longer spoken.” And it’s true: there’s no getting around or denying the impact of colonization and the losses we’ve experienced. Even in our affirmations of survival and endurance we must acknowledge what we’ve lost, because the losses are real and profound. Some losses can’t be compensated; some wounds can’t be healed, at least not in this lifetime. But it bears repeating that if we focus entirely on the losses, we lose sight of what our families and our communities—and even, to invoke Thomas, “ourownselves”—have managed to maintain. It presumes that we’re only in a position of trying to hold on to a finite set of resources, and doesn’t take into account our capacity to grow anew and to create new practices, relationships, and cultural forms. Like all humans, Indigenous peoples are creative and visionary. The losses of the past don’t inevitably determine the possibilities of the present and future. Given how the dominant deficiency narratives about Indigenous peoples are firmly rooted in the idea of absence, it’s not too far a leap from acknowledging our losses to figuring our humanity only in terms of loss. We’re more than absence. A certain moment in the novella reminds us of this important truth. Before Thomas leaves Washington, DC, he goes to a highpowered gathering of well-to-do American Indians held in the city. It turns out to be a very troubling confrontation between Thomas and “Princess Moneybags,” a light-skinned, condescending Mohawk from New York who insists that to be Indian one must have US identification and who praises the catastrophic Termination policy, whereby many smaller tribes lost federal recognition and thus protection of their lands, going quickly from selfsufficiency to impoverishment. Thomas is bemused and defiant, and is joined in his outrage by a young Pueblo man named Simon—

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perhaps a fictional appearance by Hobson’s very real contemporary, the Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz? The old Ofo and young Pueblo stand out in this well-heeled, assimilated, and avaricious crowd, and eventually leave to continue their conversation. It’s the early 1960s, just on the cusp of the civil-rights movement and Red Power activism. Simon’s prophetic words echo through the book and well past its conclusion: “I was in Texas and Arkansas and Louisiana and Alabama, Georgia, Florida—all places where there’s not supposed to be any, or at least a very few, Indian people. But, you know, I find Indians all around—Indians are everywhere.” In a settler colonial world that insists upon Indigenous absence, this isn’t just a statement of personal observation: it’s an affirmation and an invocation alike. Indeed, Indians and other peoples are everywhere, as are Indigenous stories. And Indigenous writers have done much to articulate the stories of that which continues, that which remains, as Métis writer and critic Warren Cariou so eloquently reminds us: So much of the literature by Canada’s Aboriginal writers is written against forgetting, against the obliterating narratives of conquest and progress and profit that have made the nation possible. These writers give us stories of dispossession, of the loss of land and language and identity, but they also, crucially, give us narratives of persistence and survival and even celebration. They remind us of what has been lost, but they also remind us that not everything is lost. After a fire, something always remains: something that must be accounted for and honoured if we are to have any idea where we are and where we are going.

This, too, is why the contemporary is so significant to Indigenous writing, of any era: in a world that so often wants to see us only as historical artifacts, writing about the now is a powerful refusal to disappear into the symbolic frontier of the settler colonial

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imaginary. Thomas King is perhaps most eloquent on this point in The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative, when he writes: What Native writers discovered, I believe, was that the North American past, the one that had been created in novels and histories, the one that had been heard on radio and seen on theatre screens and on television, the one that had been part of every school curriculum for the last two hundred years, that past was unusable, for it had not only trapped people in a time warp, it also insisted that our past was all we had. No present. No future. And to believe in such a past is to be dead. Faced with such a proposition and knowing from empirical evidence that we were very much alive, physically and culturally, Native writers began using the Native present to resurrect a Native past and to imagine a Native future. To create, in words, as it were, a Native universe.

And while there are certainly some writers for whom the more distant past still leaves some glimmerings of possibility for imagining otherwise, King’s observation is a sound one. To write of our lives today is to affirm, firmly and undeniably, that Indigenous peoples are still very much part of the world now. We, too, are human beings, not merely symbols or relics of a bygone age. Yet the world of now, as opposed to the worlds of Waterlily and The Last of the Ofos, is one marked by very mixed assumptions of just what it is to be human, especially for Indigenous peoples. Certainly many of the old dehumanizing stereotypes and biases are rampant—the stories of Indigenous deficiency—but so, too, are more insidious ones. “Ethnicity” is a particularly problematic concept for Indigenous peoples. Unlike Waterlily’s kinship camp or Thomas Darko’s Ofo Town, where one’s identity was embedded in one’s

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practice of good relationship, contemporary identity in Canada and the US (and elsewhere) is figured in one’s ethnic heritage and “blood” rather than in one’s obligations to kin and place. Thus we have people who proudly identify as Irish Canadian or Italian American who’ve never been to either country, don’t speak the languages, practise little of the cultures of the homeland or the diaspora (aside from enjoying a few ethnic foods or desacralized holidays), and know little of their family’s or extended community’s history beyond some vague notion of inherited ethnicity. To be clear, I’m not saying that these identities are invalid or illegitimate—they’re clearly deeply cherished, and millions find even these attenuated ties meaningful. What’s important to this discussion is the ways in which this particular idea of inherited identity has become seemingly naturalized in Canada and the US, when in reality it’s a very modern product of settler colonial nationalism and mobile, market-driven demographics. The more people move around and become distanced from legacies and histories of place, the more their identities become commodified and separated from specific obligations to kin and community, the more they privilege the nation state and its consumable symbols for notions of belonging—and the more they dismiss and disregard kinship- and land-based identities. The contemporary nation state, in fact, depends upon people understanding themselves in this way to ensure that they privilege their obligations to country and commerce above those to kin and relation to territory. And after centuries of sustained, relentless assaults on our communities and kinship practices, Indigenous peoples, too, have come to be enmeshed in these particular ideas about belonging. It bears repeating that kinship was specifically targeted by colonial authorities in their efforts to destroy Indigenous communities; indeed, kinship was the primary target. This is nowhere more horrifically evident than in the Indian residential school system in Canada. As communities and family homes tended to be sites of

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consistent and successful resistance to assimilative practices of Canadian education and missionization, reserve-based schools were found to be ineffectual, and off-reserve, long-term residential schools took their place. This, combined with the legalized restriction of movement off reserve, made it increasingly difficult for families to maintain links with children. The settler colonial authorities knew exactly what they were doing, as shown by this excerpt from a 1889 letter from Assistant Indian Commissioner Amédée Emmanuel Forget to the Indian agent at Blackfoot Crossing, Alberta: I have the honour to inform you that the visits of Indians to Industrial Schools, for the ostensible purpose of seeing their children, have grown to be so frequent that they have come to be regarded by the Department [of Indian Affairs] as a very serious evil, to be discouraged, because they tend to unsettle the minds of the children, confirm and foster idle and wandering habits in the parents, and cause an unjustifiable expenditure of supplies both on the reserves and the school.

The language says it all: Indigenous families “unsettle the minds” of children. Indeed. Yet with every generation subjected to the symbolic and physical violence of assimilationist policies, with every family bond weakened or broken, with every person forced away from community, homeland, and history, the intrusions of white-supremacist, settler colonial notions of “race” and “ethnicity” gradually replaced the collectively based network of social relationships. And in the twentieth century, with so many Indigenous peoples living in urban areas far from their homelands—as a result of economic displacement, as well as legalized dispossession, such as the Termination and Relocation policies of the post-WWII era in the US—

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Indigenous identity became inextricably entangled with dominant presumptions about what makes us human. This is a complicated and depressing history, but what does it all have to do with literature? Simply put, these issues—and their associated stories—are all about our sense of belonging and what defines our humanity. Indigenous writers have always struggled to articulate different understandings of who and what we are in relation to our histories and current experiences. If our humanity is defined in large part by the stories we tell, then the storytellers have a vital role to play in bringing us back to healthier relationships with ourselves and with one another. They remind us of who we are and where we come from, and Indigenous texts offer possible visions for who we might once again be. I’ve already given attention to fiction writers and essayists in this chapter. Now it’s time for the poets. Poetry is a particularly compelling literary form for confronting the ruptures of history and the fragmenting effects of settler colonialism. Poetry distills the rage, pain, and defiance of Indigenous peoples, who remain under ideological and physical assault by settler populations that so often insist that our continued existence is an affront and an impossibility. Yet given its intimate subject matter, its sensual rhythms, and its bittersweet distillations of love and longing, poetry is also an ideal form for naming the fierce beauty of contemporary Indigenous personhood. Certainly this dual purpose isn’t unique to Indigenous poets; poetry is the language of love and war alike, often both at the same time. It resembles cultural traditions of oratory and song more evidently than does prose, and so often poetry is most powerfully experienced in person, embodied, and in shared, vocalized, breathfilled performance with other humans present. If we’re asking how we learn to be human, pushing against the limits of colonial definitions and opening up space once again for our older understandings and articulations, Indigenous poetry takes us to that question and

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its possible answers in a more visceral way than other forms, a powerful distillation that lingers long after the initial experience. And this has long been the case. For generations, the Mohawk writer and performer E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (1861–1913) was anthologized and variously praised and dismissed as a sentimental late-Victorian writer of wilderness elegies that looked backward to a bygone age of Canada’s noble past and its fading Indian peoples. Yet throughout her lifetime and even today, her writing has been overshadowed by her performances, especially her practice of reciting poetry in proper, upper-class English evening attire, and then changing clothes halfway through into hyper-romanticized “Indian” beads and buckskin (and sometimes reversing that order). This has fascinated white observers and commentators for over a century, from journalists and scholars to playwrights, novelists, and other artists. Their questions are telling. What was she doing in these performances? Was she Mohawk or white? Was she just “playing Indian” for the white folks? Was she celebrating assimilation? Demonstrating subversive resistance as a Mohawk woman of light skin trying to make a living in a white-supremacist society? Was she selling out, settling scores, torn between two worlds? Whatever her (likely complicated) reasons for these performances, they’re far less interesting to me than her poetry, which is very much concerned with the question of Indigenous humanity. Consider the time in which it was written and published: Indian residential schools and all the paternalistic horrors of Canadian settler colonialism were in full throttle; American Indians in the US were under relentless assault from what Theodore Roosevelt would praise as “the mighty pulverizing engine” of land allotment and other policies intended to “break up the tribal mass”; Kānaka Maoli in Hawai‘i were experiencing the overthrow of their traditional monarchy and illegal annexation of their homelands by US corporate and missionary interests with the support of the US Navy; gold fever in the Klondike was accompanied by catastrophe for the

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Indigenous peoples of the region. This appalling list goes on and on. Indigenous populations in the lands claimed by Canada and the US dropped from millions in the eighteenth century to just a few hundred thousand by the first decades of the twentieth due to imported diseases, massive population displacements, destruction of traditional foods and medicines, rampant violence, and outright extermination. We can’t emphasize enough just how pervasive the miasma of white settler colonial supremacy was in Johnson’s time. “Indians” were simply not humans to most Canadians and Americans; and, if they were, their status was of a decidedly lower order, an infantile stage in human progression, of which white settlers and their descendants stood as exemplars of the maturity of human accomplishment and civilization. It might therefore come as a surprise to read these scathing lines from “The Cattle Thief” in Johnson’s first book of poetry, The White Wampum, published at the very end of the nineteenth century and told in a Cree woman’s voice after her father has been murdered for stealing white men’s livestock and his body threatened with mutilation: You have killed him, but you shall not dare to touch him now he’s dead. You have cursed, and called him a Cattle Thief, though you robbed him first of bread— Robbed him and robbed my people—look there, at that shrunken face, Starved with a hollow hunger, we owe to you and your race. What have you left to us of land, what have you left of game, What have you brought but evil, and curses since you came? How have you paid us for our game? how paid us for our land? By a book, to save our souls from the sins you brought in your other hand. Go back with your new religion, we never have understood Your robbing of an Indian’s body, and mocking his soul with food.

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Go back with your new religion, and find—if find you can— The honest man you have ever made from out of a starving man. You say your cattle are not ours, your meat is not our meat; When you pay for the land you live in, we’ll pay for the meat we eat.

Or the final lines from “A Cry from an Indian Wife,” wherein the speaker says farewell to her “Forest Brave” as he prepares for war against Canadian soldiers “marching West to quell / Our fallen tribe that rises to rebel”: “Go forth, and win the glories of the war. / Go forth, nor bend to greed of white men’s hands, / By right, by birth we Indians own these lands, / Though starved, crushed, plundered, lies our nation low . . . / Perhaps the white man’s God has willed it so.” The book is named The White Wampum in reference to what is often considered the peace colour of wampum, with the darker purple beads being representative of conflict or discord. Yet so many of Johnson’s poems in the collection are fierce condemnations of Canada’s inhumanity, spoken in the voices of defiant Indigenous women taking steady and unflinching aim at the blind self-justifications of the patriarchal Canadian state and its citizenry. Throughout these works, Johnson’s argument for Indigenous humanity is often implied through its oppressing opposites: settler colonial Canada is hypocritical, debasing, brutal, dishonest, and ungrateful; it offers false gifts and temporary promises, all with the ultimate purpose of taking the land and erasing Indigenous presence. This isn’t the Pauline Johnson many Canadian readers grew up with; this isn’t the Johnson that Canada regards as its own. Her nature poems invoke the almost iconic vision of Canada’s wild northern hinterlands and have been the subject of generations of commentaries and reprints. Take “Autumn’s Orchestra,” which imagines the speaker’s journey through a mixed-wood forest as a nature symphony that reminds her of a lover across the ocean; or “At Crow’s Nest Pass,” where the elements battle one another for supremacy in the high mountains, far from the concerns of humanity far below.

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Some of her patriotic odes to Canada could be repeated at Canada Day celebrations without much difficulty; others, such as the lamentably stereotypical rendering of the docile Japanese subject in “The Man in the Chrysanthemum Land,” are less easily incorporated into today’s stereotype of a progressive, enlightened Canada. As is so often the case, Johnson was complicated in her own time and certainly remains so in ours, and it’s in her complications that her most significant contributions are realized. In her essay “The Good Red Road: Journeys of Homecoming in Native Women’s Writing,” Beth Brant acknowledges the popularity of Johnson’s much-anthologized nature poem, “The Song My Paddle Sings.” She adds that, “in reading Johnson, a non-Native might come away with the impression that she only wrote idyllic sonnets to the glory of nature, the ‘noble savage,’ or ‘vanishing redman’ themes that were popular at the turn of the [twentieth] century,” just before insisting on the revolutionary politics of “The Cattle Thief.” As Brant argues: Pauline Johnson was a Nationalist. Canada may attempt to claim her as theirs, but Johnson belonged to only one Nation, the Mohawk Nation. She wrote at great length in her poems, stories and articles about this kind of Nationalism. She had a great love of Canada, the Canada of oceans, mountains, pine trees, lakes, animals and birds, not the Canada of politicians and racism that attempted to regulate her people’s lives.

Particularly important here is Brant’s observation that “the key to understanding Native women’s poetry and prose is that we love, unashamedly, our own. Pauline Johnson wrote down that love.” And that love is as much for the People as for the land, because the two are bound inextricably together. Care and regard for one translates into care and regard for the other. In a similar vein, Dory Nason (Anishinaabe) has written on the power of “the boundless love that Indigenous women have for their

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families, their lands, their nations, and themselves as Indigenous people,” particularly but not exclusively in reference to the Idle No More political movement. Put simply, “Indigenous women’s love is powerful. It is a love that can inspire a whole world to sing and dance and be in ceremony for the people. This has always been so.” Yet that power has been targeted by the forces of misogyny and patriarchy; the backlash against Indigenous decolonization and resurgence has specifically targeted the power of writers and activists like E. Pauline Johnson, as much through ideological violence as verbal, physical, and sexual assault. Johnson’s literary descendants have come of age in a world ravaged by the loveless hunger of settler colonialism, a patriarchal world where resurgent kinship values and meaningful relationships war with the fragmenting presumptions of ethnic identifications. And it’s a struggle still, but not a hopeless one. Residential school violence over generations has had a profound impact on all Indigenous communities in Canada, but those communities and their members are resilient, and, to return to Cariou’s words, “not everything is lost.” Continuing geographic displacements have frayed the land-based relationships of many Indigenous peoples in Canada and the US, but our peoples are adaptive, and not all bonds have been broken; many of the old traditions and old ways have endured or have been rekindled, the binding ties rewoven. The growing Indigenous populations in major cities across the continent and the growth of urban communities have separated many individuals from their home reserves and reservations, while making possible the creation of other affiliations and opportunities for cultural expression. New technologies, although dangerous and alienating when used to selfish ends, can also make possible a wide range of alliances and exchanges across time and space. And in all of these ways, Indigenous writers have sought to rebuild, reassert, reclaim, and reestablish connections and relationships that return us to ourselves, our lands, and our communities.

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Those connections aren’t just storied, nor are they simply symbolic; they’re also emotional, physical, and embodied. Poetry and other expressive forms bring these various registers of meaning together, in voice and on the page and screen, articulating and at times creating community through invocations of connection. One of the most powerful ways this is happening is through the erotic, the literature of love. What can be a more revolutionary act of affirming our humanity than to show and share love, especially when so many of the dominant perceptions about Indigenous sexuality assume innate and loveless pathology? When we only associate Indigenous bodies in popular culture with pain and suffering, or see sex as something shameful and love as something only “good” people deserve— with goodness being framed within a monotheistic, missionary value system of violence, oppression, and obedience to arbitrary authority—then we are stripped of one of our greatest sources of strength. Sexuality is our inheritance; it’s a vital expression of our humanity, of our capacity to love ourselves and one another, of our abilities to see pleasure outside of pain, of understanding ourselves as being worthy of desire no matter our body shapes or genders or identities. And it’s part of how we learn to be human, both in bodily and social understandings, as the Anishinaabe poet, essayist, and publisher Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm writes in her introduction to the revolutionary first collection of Indigenous erotica, Without Reservation: So what is Indigenous erotica? It’s about the loving, sexual, “dirty,” outrageous, ribald intimacies of humanity and sexuality that we all crave. It shows us as we are: people who love each other, who fall in love and out of love, who have lovers, who make love, have sex, break hearts, get our own hearts broken, who have beautiful bodies. It’s about all of the crazy, poignant, obscene, absurd things we do just to taste, touch, enjoy, and enter another.

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Just like all other humans, we’re complicated. We yearn for touch, for pleasure, for love. We long for connection, both intimate and imaginative. Gregory Scofield’s poetic meditation Love Medicine and One Song is an evocative work for precisely this reason. The love explored in this book is neither the cheap, saccharine Hallmark-card kind of love, nor the melodramatic, self-absorbed, commodified passion of the movies and television. It’s the language of longing and loss, hunger and redemption, departure, return, and remembrance. Not all loves last, not all shared passions endure, but in the giving and receiving, love transforms us, and bodies remember that we are meant for more than our pain—we are made for pleasure, too. The book begins with a short account about the Cree tradition of love medicine and its dangers, especially when used in a selfish way, as with a woman who used such medicine on a young man. She eventually abandoned him for another lover, but he was still bound to her and pined away, finally dying from love sickness. Love, like anything good, can be destructive in the wrong hands and with the wrong purpose. In the poems that follow, the speaker is caught up in powerful, painful relationships, and experiences all the aching hunger of love but follows a different path than the man abandoned in the opening account. Rather than fading from love sickness, the speaker opens himself to the world and is thereby transfigured through ceremonies of love-through-others rather than the narcissistic practice of love-as-self. Love of and in the world offers something far more powerful than narrow, self-focused passion, and as readers we follow his journey from singular passion to these greater sensual relationships. This is nowhere more powerfully rendered than in “He Is,” to my mind one of the most erotic poems in the book. The speaker’s lover embodies a sensory world of elemental experience, and the moments of ecstasy meld with all things wild and wondrous:

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. . . he is slug slipping between my teeth and down, beating moth wings, a flutter inside my mouth [ . . . ] he is spring bear ample and lean his berry tongue quick, sweet from the feasting.

The animals are both predators and prey—earthworm, caterpillar, slug, moth, snail, spider, watersnake, swamp frog, mouse, grouse, weasel, turtle, mountain lion, spring bear. Some, like the slug, the snake, and even the weasel, are often considered unsavoury creatures in Eurowestern traditions, while holding honoured status in Indigenous relations. Here they express their own full natures, and nothing is out of place: the speaker may become bones cracking in the jaws of a hungry mountain lion, but in this act of consumption he nourishes and is transformed, returning to self to be embraced now by the sweet-tongued spring bear. Again and again, human experience is rendered through communion with the wild world, both beautiful and wounding: the heady, earthy scent of muskeg bogs at moments of enrapture, trees and hearts that break apart from the cold, chattering geese, skin-shedding snakes, the moon and the stars, and the sounds of ravens, coyotes, and humans in grief and defiance. Cree language is woven through the poems, supporting the speaker’s songs and prayers, offering other ways to understand these connections, unravellings, and realignments.

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The book ends with “Pêyak-Nikamowin/One Song,” in which the speaker calls to his dream lover, “but he is gone / and the reeds are weeping.” His song of grief is in Cree, calling to his sweetheart, who in the dream had stood within sight for a moment but is now gone, and there’s no answer. Yet he remains, dreaming, on the riverbank, calling out “pekîwêyan nîcimos / nî-mâtoyân, nî-mâtoyân” (come home my sweetheart / I am crying, I am crying) and punctuating the cry with the sung vocables “hey-ya-ho-ho,” which shifts his moment of personal grief into a ceremony of mourning. But in that shift we are reminded that the speaker—and now singer—is still alive. The song still echoes in the world. Not unlike Thomas Darko singing his Ofo song into the bayou night, Scofield’s speaker sings his grief and longing into a wild world that’s already been revealed to be a shared community of concern. If the reeds are weeping in empathy with the speaker, then the speaker is not alone. The love he’s experienced is greater than one person, greater even than just the personhood of humanity, and the healing, when it comes, will be shared with all. Even in the final stanza of the book, we are reminded of continuity; there is something beyond longing and loss. And love makes it possible.

Love, then, becomes the binding cord that links us to the world, and from it come all the other meaningful connections between the ancestors and descendants of generations to come: respect, reciprocity, accountability, commitment, generosity. Connection through relationship. It’s not easy; it’s messy, and painful, and uncomfortable. It calls us to be better than we are, to be braver than we expected, in a living world that bears the memory of who we were and the vision of who we are meant to be. It asks us to open

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ourselves to vulnerability—emotional as well as physical—and to risk the blurring of our boundaries of self in the connection with others. But it requires action. Our humanity isn’t what we are, but rather what we enact—we choose to become human each and every day. Mvskoke poet Joy Harjo reminds us of this process in “It’s Raining in Hololulu,” along with just what our humanity requires of us in the world: “Rain opens us, like flowers, or earth that has been thirst for more than a season. / . . . / We listen to the breathing beneath our breathing. / This is how the rain became rain, how we became human. / . . . / We will plant songs where there were curses.” This is in part what Indigenous writers offer us: in place of settler colonial curses that disfigure and diminish us, our writers plant songs and stories of joy and sorrow, praise and loss, remembrance and hope, rage and defiance and dedication, old memories and new possibilities, deep roots in rich soil. As evidenced by Harjo’s benediction above and the work of many other Indigenous writers, the sharing and the tending of those stories and songs is an act of fierce, formidable, transforming love. In that planting, we renew the world and one another. It’s how we become human. a

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Chapter 2

How Do We Behave as Good Relatives?

In the old days it was said that the shining fish would come up from the water just to partake of our faces as we washed. The wind played a song in the reeds just to draw us near. The whole world loved the human people. Now it all pulls away from us and hides. In the old days when we were beautiful and agile, we asked the animals to lay down their lives for us and in turn we offered them our kinship, our respect, our words in the next world over from here, our kind treatment. In the old days it was said that we were humans. What people believe, falsely, is that all this can no longer be so. —Linda Hoga n (Chick a saw), Pow er

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I

n “This Is a Story,” Okanagan writer and language teacher Jeannette Armstrong introduces readers to Kyoti—Coyote—the Okanagan trickster-transformer, who returns to the lands of the People after a long absence in full expectation of a reunion and a celebratory salmon dinner, only to find that the once-teeming rivers have been dammed, the salmon no longer run in clear waters, and he’s been forgotten. What’s worse, the People have changed in the ensuing years. They’ve lost their language, their homes, and many of their old traditions, and have now taken on the destructive lifeways of the Swallows, white people and their evermore-ravenous culture, which he likens to “selfish Monsters that destroy People and things like rivers and mountains.” He confronts a “headman,” clearly an Indian Act leader, who responds to Kyoti’s entreaty to destroy the dams with the fear and derision of one broken by Canadian policy: Get out of here, Kyoti. Your kind of talk is just bullshit. If you say them things the People will get riled up and they might start to raise hell. . . . Them Swallows get mad real easy. Besides, we’ll just end up looking stupid. We gotta work with them now even if we don’t exactly like what they do. We gotta survive. We gotta get money to buy food and other things. We gotta have jobs to live. That’s how it is now, we can’t go back to the old times. We need them Swallows, they’re smart. They know lots that we don’t know about. They know how to live right. We just got to try harder like them. So get outta here. You’re not real anyway. You’re just a dream of the old people.

It’s only after he meets a young unnamed Okanagan man sitting at the river’s edge watching for salmon who don’t come, who greets him properly in the old language, that Kyoti fully realizes what he’s meant to do in this visit. The young man is a tradition bearer, but

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what’s more, he carries hope: he’s the community’s Salmon Chief, and though it’s been three generations since salmon were seen in the river, and although he’s held on to this faint hope while most of his community have given up, he continues to honour his obligations. Kyoti had grown despondent about the People and their lives, but this young Salmon Chief rekindles his love and sparks his purpose, and he announces to Tommy, the man’s elder and teacher, “I’m going to ask you to get the People together. The ones who can hear. Tell them that I am back. You know all of them. I am going to break the dams. I’m hungry and that young one at the river has waited long enough. All my children will eat salmon again.” At that moment, Kyoti shakes his staff, and the ground trembles in response.

What is it to become and live as a good relative? This seems a simple question, but both the good and the relative are far more complicated as we consider them more closely. Both centre around the idea of kinship and how it’s realized in the world as well as in our imaginations. Kyoti isn’t just a powerful transformer spirit with the power to disrupt the world—he’s a relative of the Okanagan people, one who has responsibilities, just as they have duties and commitments to him. Armstrong’s story insists not simply on the fact that they’re relatives, but that their relationship requires commitment and enacted obligations. The question of being and becoming a good relative itself presumes active and meaningful engagement—relatives aren’t just static roles or states of being, but lived relationships. Kyoti’s absence is in part why the People have come to this difficult state, as an old woman who remembers him weeps, “How come you never came back for a long time? Now look what happened.” His subsequent quest to help return the People to better, healthier ways is

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in part an acceptance of his own failure to look after his kinship responsibilities. He, like his children the People, must take up those obligations if a better future is to be realized. If, as I argue in Chapter One, “human” is a learned process rather than simply a state of being, so, too, is kinship—moreso, even. Relationships are storied, imagined things; they set the scope for our experience of being and belonging. But how does Indigenous literature inform the practice of good kinship? Do these works simply function as lessons or guides for proper behaviour, or do they do something else, something more significant and less directive? What difference to they make in helping or complicating the ways we understand our obligations to the diverse networks of relations and relationships with which Indigenous works are engaged? How, if at all, do the stories we tell make us better relatives? These are not easy questions, nor should they be; the answers are diverse and, inevitably, necessarily, complicated. But they take us beyond nostalgia and superficial claims of connection or mere biological inheritance to something deeper—something that makes demands of us, too. Yet “kinship” as a concept needs a bit of parsing out, here, beyond the idea of human relatedness discussed in Chapter One, for its more expansive significance isn’t self-evident; indeed, much of the academic discipline of anthropology is specifically dedicated to the study and debate of what kinship means and what it does. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon acknowledge that it “remains a central concept within anthropology despite having undergone many transformations,” while also being “a contested analytic concept”—in other words, kinship is important to understanding how human societies are structured and how people interact, but there’s always debate about it, and that debate has changed over time. Kinship can be biological relationship and genetic inheritance, with its various logics of identity transmitted through ideas of race, blood, and now DNA; this often heteronormative, patriarchal kind of kinship often presumes very narrow, fixed limits of belonging, wherein

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only certain authorized kinds of relatedness are seen as legitimate or even permissible. Yet it can be also be about extra- or even nonbiological cultural and community relationships, chosen connections and commitments, as well as political, spiritual, and ceremonial processes that bring people into deep and meaningful affiliation. For the purposes of this discussion, kinship, like empathy, is as much an act of imagination as it is a lived experience, and it’s thus an inevitably multidimensional concept. It’s about constitutive relationships that blur the various boundaries of belonging, and can at various times include or challenge any of the above categories and practices. I like Donna Haraway’s evocative observation that kin “is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible.” As we’ll see, this idea is very much in keeping with a wide range of Indigenous kinship practices and the literary works that consider them, where the range of relatives to whom we are responsible extends far beyond our biological relatives and, indeed, the category of the human itself. I’m interested here in some of the many ways that Indigenous writers articulate kinship and the work it does in the world. Different writers will necessarily foreground different ways and different engagements, with some highlighting biology and others emphasizing more expansive notions of kinship. In all cases, story makes meaning of the relationships that define who we are and what our place is in the world; it reminds us of our duties, our rights and responsibilities, and the consequences and transformative possibilities of our actions. It also highlights what we lose when those relationships are broken or denied to us, and what we might gain from even partial remembrance. Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko reflects on this other-than-human generosity and its effects on human imagination, empathy, and kinship:

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The people found the opening into the Fifth World too small to allow them or any of the small animals to escape. They had sent a fly out through the small hole to tell them if it was the world the Mother Creator had promised. It was, but there was the problem of getting out. The antelope tried to butt the opening to enlarge it, but the antelope enlarged it only a little. It was necessary for the badger with her long claws to assist the antelope, and at last the opening was enlarged enough so that all the people and animals were able to emerge up into the Fifth World. The human beings could not have emerged without the aid of antelope and badger. The human beings depended upon the aid and charity of the animals. Only through interdependence could the human beings survive. Families belonged to clans, and it was by clan that the human being joined with the animal and plant world. Life on the high, arid plateau became viable when the human beings were able to imagine themselves as sisters and brothers to the badger, antelope, clay, yucca, and sun. Not until they could find a viable relationship to the terrain—the physical landscape they found themselves in—could they emerge. Only at the moment that the requisite balance between human and other was realized could the Pueblo people become a culture, a distinct group whose population and survival remained stable despite the vicissitudes of the climate and terrain.

While the details differ across geographies and cultures, stories like this are common in every Indigenous story tradition I know: we learned to be human in large part from the land and our otherthan-human relatives, such as the relationship between Kyoti and the Okanagan people in Armstrong’s story, and our humanity is enhanced and enriched by actively—and imaginatively—engaging them again and again in respectful relationship. This doesn’t mean considering them to be the same as us, as they aren’t, but their difference isn’t deficiency—it’s simply difference, and is to be honoured

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as such, because each person’s difference brings new skills to help us survive and flourish as peoples. And whether fiction or nonfiction or a synthesis of the two, story helps us to recognize that others beyond ourselves have identities, desires, loves, fears, and feelings, and that our own behaviour can either enrich their lives or diminish them; poetry makes intelligible a whole range of emotions and embodied understandings that we otherwise struggle to articulate, or at least gives voice to our lack of understanding; sacred ceremony and song connect us with one another, and with the other-than-human world, and simultaneously remind us that we matter to the world, but that we’re not the centre of that world. Imagination and curiosity are essential to the empathy required for healthy, respectful, and sustainable relationships with a whole host of beings and peoples, from cedar trees and magpies to thunderstorms and moss-blanketed boulders. Simply put, there can be no true kinship without imagination. The more expansive our imaginations, the deeper our capacity for empathy, and the healthier our relationships and communities will likely be. And the opposite is equally the case: as our imaginations become impoverished and the scope and range of possibility becomes narrower and more limited, the health and well-being of the world around us will suffer, too. Yet, even at its best, empathy asks a great deal of us. Empathy often isn’t easy; tensions, misunderstandings, woundings, and conflicts threaten our capacity to see one another’s worth. And empathy can be scary for those invested in individualism as the primary site of identity, as the more expansive the range of peoples to whom we owe kinship obligations, the more important and potentially devastating our individual actions become. Our expanding relations thus mean that even our slightest actions have a meaningful effect on the world, and that can be a terrifying prospect, even for those who strive to behave in respectful, responsible ways.

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This embraiding of kinship and accountability has a profound imaginative influence on many Indigenous writers, who are writing and speaking into and against an oppressive colonial context that displaces, erases, or disfigures the broader narratives about Indigeneity in order to justify the occupation and exploitation of our lands, communities, and relations. From blood quantum and Indian status to race-based disenfranchisement and legislative paternalism, settler colonial ideas about personhood, kinship, and belonging have been at the heart of that process. They’ve been imposed on Indigenous peoples with relentless and insidious insistence. And because our distinctive kinship practices and understandings have been primary sources of our strength and resistance, they have been primary targets of settler-state policy and practice, with devastating results. These are very different ways of being in the world. Little surprise, then, that Indigenous writers have been returning to our own cultural ideas of kinship, the deep wellsprings for poetry, drama, and prose alike, reminding us of the profound power of our relationships to one another and to our other-than-human relations, and our obligations to the best of our traditions and their capacity for creating respectful, reciprocal connections that may just help to heal the ravages of colonialism. White Earth Ojibway writer and environmental activist Winona LaDuke reminds us just how deep and wide-ranging that dependence truly is, and how important its respectful care: Native American teachings describe the relations all around— animals, fish, trees, and rocks—as our brothers, sisters, uncles, and grandpas. Our relations to each other, our prayers whispered across generations to our relatives, are what bind our cultures together. The protection, teachings, and gifts of our relatives have for generations preserved our families. These relations are honored in ceremony, song, story, and life that keep relations close—to buffalo, sturgeon, salmon, turtles, bears, wolves, and

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panthers. These are our older relatives—the ones who came before and taught us how to live. Their obliteration by dams, guns, and bounties is an immense loss to Native families and cultures. Their absence may mean that a people sing to a barren river, a caged bear, or buffalo far away. It is the struggle to preserve that which remains and the struggle to recover that characterizes much of Native environmentalism. It is these relationships that industrialism seeks to disrupt. Native communities will resist with great determination.

That dual challenge—“the struggle to preserve that which remains and the struggle to recover”—is central to the work of Indigenous writers and storykeepers, too. It is these relationships and their accompanying obligations that distinguish the ways of the industrialized, commodifying, degrading consumer culture from those that affirm the intrinsic significance of all beings with whom we share this world, and of those elder relations to whom we owe so very much. This chapter considers just a few of the Indigenous literary works that seem to me particularly compelling in their explorations of kinship, focusing on two main sets of relationships: those that articulate our relations with the other-than-human world and those that consider kinship with the marginalized within our own human societies, namely queer and two-spirit Indigenous folks. Kinship as a general topic is far too big to tackle in its entirety here, especially as so much of the last forty years of scholarship in the field attends in some way to the relational concerns of Indigenous writing. Besides, what interests me in this discussion isn’t an argument about whether kinship matters, as that seems to me to be a given in Indigenous contexts, but some small part of the how and why of it for Indigenous writers, especially in their search for better ways of abiding in, with, and through the world. I look here to multi-genre Choctaw Nation writer LeAnne Howe as a guide to start this discussion, as she consistently considers

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these questions throughout her work, contemplating not only the connections but the ruptures in our experience. Her novel Shell Shaker is powerful in this regard, for kinship extends not only across the ages but also across states of being and even biology. All these connections constitute a cosmos of continual significance, wherein relationships form the fabric of existence and meaning-making. After locating the narrative in time and space—“Yanàbi Town, Eastern District of the Choctaws/September 22, 1738/Autumnal Equinox,” the first chapter, “Blood Sacrifice,” opens with the following invocation: “Ano ma Chahta sia hoke oke. Call me Shakbatina, a Shell Shaker. I am an Inholahta woman, born into the tradition of our grandmother, the first Shell Shaker of our people. We are the peacemakers for the Choctaws.” In recounting her name, she also places herself firmly within a genealogy and a purpose. And it’s set in a time in which her peacemaking duties are particularly important, for hers is a world that’s changing, and not in good ways. It’s an era of warfare, disease, and disruption, largely brought on by the corrosive influence of the Inkilish okla, the English, who seek to destabilize the region through internecine conflict, and, in the aftermath, lay claim to the land. Shakbatina survived the Englishinflicted smallpox, but continues to suffer from residual pain. Red Shoes, a great warrior and husband to her daughter Anoleta, has turned spy on his own French-allied people for the English. He has become greedy, “a giant Osano in the tradition of Hispano de Soto”—a human horsefly who draws life-giving sustenance from his own people, a force of carnage like the Spanish conquistadores who ravaged the Southeast in the 1540s, and whose memory still burned among the peoples they’d encountered. The Choctaws live in a world out of balance, where even the foundational bonds of kinship are at risk of crumbling. It all comes to a head in Yanàbi Town, where the Chickasaw Red Fox clan has unjustly blamed her daughter Anoleta for the mysterious murder of one of Red Shoes’s other wives, a Chickasaw woman,

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and now demand Anoleta’s death in recompense. It hardly matters that the murder was fully in the manner of the English, that it was clearly motivated to tear apart their relations—their cry is for vengeance, nothing less. The Red Fox people, though cousins to the Choctaws, are uncouth and greedy, and Shakbatina doesn’t understand them; the standards of behaviour that hold the Choctaws together in this terrible time don’t seem to function among them, and they seem ignorant of the machinations of the English and of Red Shoes. Yet the injustice of their demand is irrelevant. Without a life given to balance that of the lost Red Fox woman, war will come to Yanàbi Town. As peacemaker, the Shell Shaker can’t allow that to happen. Yet Shakbatina has the heart of a warrior, so neither can she allow her blameless daughter to be sacrificed to the whim of the Red Foxes. Instead, she offers to take Anoleta’s place as the blood offering: “The Red Fox politely accept my death in exchange for Anoleta’s life and agree that there will be no war between the Choctaws and the Chickasaws. In the presence of my family and all the people gathered in my yard, I stretch out on a log, face down, close my eyes, and pray for courage.” She will die as she lived, seeking balance between the need for peace and the inevitability of conflict; times and relations have changed, but obligations to kin and community remain. Shakbatina’s shocking death is only the beginning of the novel. The narrative then moves exactly 253 years later, also on the autumnal equinox, to present-day Oklahoma (in the novel, the early 1990s) and the murder of Redford McAlester, a Choctaw Nation chief and a corrupt and corrupting force not unlike Red Shoes two centuries earlier. Two of Shakbatina’s descendants, Auda and her mother Susan Billy, admit to the killing, but the circumstances are unclear and there were many who wanted McAlester dead. And for good reason—he, like Red Shoes, is a predator “gorged with bad medicine,” feasting on his people’s resources, a rapist, thief, and bully who takes pleasure in their most intimate pain and in turning the mechanisms of community against his own. In untangling McAlester’s murder

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and its radiating impact upon both the Billy women and the Choctaw people, the novel shifts temporalities, characters, and locations as the local, national, and even international consequences of Red Shoes’s betrayal and Shakbatina’s sacrifice continue to reverberate. Shakbatina and Red Shoes are not left in the past; they travel from past to present and across the ages, as does the mysterious figure of Big Mother Porcupine, who, as an old woman named Divine Sarah (after the actress Sarah Bernhardt), first guides Shakbatina into the world of the dead and plays a pivotal role in the novel’s conclusion. Shell Shaker’s Southeast is a land of layered realities and histories, some violent, some nurturing, where the colonial fragmentation and disfiguring sufferings of the past continue in the present, yet also contend with loving remembrance, contemporary struggle, and hope for reconnection and recovery—for one another, for the dead, and for the other-than-human. Personhood is decidedly not limited to the living, or to the human, and in recognition of the complexity of these diverse persons and states of being, Howe consistently, insistently, upends any attempt by the reader to romanticize or exoticize those relations and their possibilities. It’s a violent world as well as a loving one, where selfishness contends with selflessness in a struggle for the future; love is no guarantee of gentleness; blood carries its burdens, as well as its blessings. To retreat to the romantic is to add to the violences that have separated us from each other. But as Shell Shaker continually reminds us, it’s only through our complicated ambivalences and struggles that we can realize any hope that kinship might lead us toward a more ethical, more balanced world. Thus the question: “How do we learn to behave as good relatives?” It’s not enough to claim relations with other peoples—we must consider what those relations ask of us, and how we may learn to be kin in ways that make one another’s lives better. Red Shoes and Red McAlester use their ties to the Choctaw women in their lives to assert dominance and control; Shakbatina and her Billy descendants (female and male alike) draw on their kinship ties—notably,

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the women’s relationships and commitments, both immediate and extended—to counter the divisive, exploitative hunger of these men and make a different future possible. For them, being a good relative means being willing to sacrifice for one another, and it’s telling that they, not the self-focused Osanos, are the ones left standing at the end. It is Red Shoes’s refusal to sacrifice his pride, and himself, to end the growing catastrophe of warfare that leads to his undoing; and it’s Red’s refusal to serve his people that brings him to an ignominious end. In the blending of past and present, Shakbatina strikes a final blow against Red Shoes for her daughter Anoleta’s torment, for her own death, and for the horror and chaos he brought to the Choctaw people—sufferings that continue to impact the Choctaws of the modern era. Red McAlester dies with his pants around his ankles, and, with his death, Red Shoes’s brutal legacy also collapses, as Shakbatina affirms in the novel’s last section: “My story is an enormous undertaking. Hundreds of years in the making until past and present collide into a single moment. . . . It was then that I slipped my hands in front of her hands, and together we struck a pose. The day was all hers, but it was my day too.” Shakbatina is warrior and peacemaker alike, human sacrifice and killer both. Even when they stumble or drift away from their obligations, she and her descendants come back to them, and it’s through these commitments—and their recognition and acceptance of the ties that bind them together, in this world and those beyond—that a more hopeful, healthier future is made possible. To be good kin in Shell Shaker is, in part, to return to and uphold your obligations to one another, no matter what the cost. To do otherwise is to follow the parasitic Osano path, and that can only lead to devastation and grief. Every writer approaches the question of being a good relative differently; there’s no singular, prescriptive model, just as there’s no single practice of kinship for the many diverse Indigenous traditions in this hemisphere. But in asking the question and exploring its

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significance in these works and across time and place, we come to an inevitable conclusion: the dominant colonial stories about kinship are designed to destroy Indigenous peoples’ ties to our homelands, to one another, and to our other-than-human relatives, and ultimately serve to transform those lands into exploitable resources and diverse peoples into memories. To illustrate this point, take Shuswap leader George Manuel’s 1974 book The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (co-written with Michael Posluns), which offers this succinct diagnosis of settler colonialism and its advocates, an assessment that remains just as accurate over forty years later: “The fact of the matter is that there was never a time since the beginning of the colonial conquest when the Indian people were not resisting the four destructive forces besetting us: the state through the Indian agent; the church through the priests; the church and state through the schools; the state and industry through the traders.” And in every single one of these examples, that determined resistance was rooted in and in many cases dependent upon an expansive and complex sense of relations. We could look at any policy in Canada or the US and see this to be true; every setter-colonial policy, from the Indian Act regime in Canada to Termination in the US, from the potlatch ban to allotment, kinship relations—human and otherwise—are always an explicit target for attack. To be a good relative, then, in whatever ways that might be realized, is to counter these exploitative forces and the stories that legitimize them, while at the same time affirming—or reaffirming—better, more generative, more generous ways to uphold our obligations and our commitments to our diverse and varied kin. That greater commitment calls us to action, to purpose, to change. And Indigenous writers often offer up stories that take up these challenges in all their complexity and possibility. They’re not all happy stories—in fact, many are stark and relentless as they chronicle colonial devastation and its alternatives. But in warning or in hope, they’re powerful, new, and renewed visions of otherwise worlds and, very often, transformative ways of being.

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Let’s now return to the example of residential schools. What is often forgotten in discussions of residential school policy is that one of its fundamental purposes was to dismantle Indigenous resistance through a direct, sustained attack on families and the full network of relations and practices that enabled health and self-determination. As affirmed in 1890 by Hayter Reed, a bureaucrat in Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs, “The more remote from the Institution and distant from each other are the points from which the pupils are collected, the better for their success.” It was vital to target and unravel the bonds of relationality, as those were the most effective supports for resistance. One need not read very far into the literature about residential schools to see very clearly how knowing administrators, teachers, and even students were about the process of the assimilative project, its aims and intentions. For settler colonial “civilization” to take hold, every one of the students’ connections to one another— and to those persons and beings outside the authority of church, state, and school—would have to be broken. And in many cases they were, with devastating results for families and communities alike that continue today. But what the authorities didn’t take into account was the capacity for old bonds to be rewoven and new links to be formed as people began to share their stories and experiences, in person and in print. Shame and silence were no match for story; the suppressed truths couldn’t remain hidden forever. And throughout Canada, Indigenous writers were a vital part of that process, as Sam McKegney points out: “Employing a multitude of genres, narrative techniques, and perspectives, Aboriginal writers repeatedly mobilize narrative and poetry in creative efforts to intervene in the adverse aspects of [the residential school] legacy.” In his path-clearing book Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School, McKegney chronicles scores of works and dozens of Indigenous writers in Canada for whom the “writing back” to residential school was an important act of resistance

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and community building, from fiction by Eden Robinson (Haisla/ Heiltsuk), Tomson Highway (Cree), Robert Arthur Alexie (Teetl’it Gwich’in), and Beth Brant (Mohawk), to poetry by Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq) and Louise Halfe (Cree), to the autobiographical writings of Basil Johnston (Anishinaabe), Maria Campbell (Métis), and Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuit), among many others. For Indigenous peoples, imagination has always been vital to resisting, countering, and undoing the ravages of colonialism, especially given how relentless the attacks on our kinship networks and connections have been. Settler colonial populations have invariably sought and gained control over our lands by targeting the kinship bonds that have connected Indigenous peoples to those territories, while simultaneously attacking the imaginative capacity that strengthens those connections. This has been done through economics that turn one another and other-than-human beings into exploitable commodities; religious hierarchies that insist on divinely ordained patriarchy and white supremacy; educational practices that alienate and separate children from their families, languages, lands, and cultures; politics that ban relationships, marriages, and ceremonies outside the narrow range of Eurowestern acceptability; and yes, even art and literature, which still pathologize otherthan-human personhood and kinship as fictive, fantastical, or illusory. In all ways, we must work against the dominant representations with more complex, truthful visions and healthier, more affirming bonds of affiliation and affinity. These complications are even more significant among peoples for whom the practice of relationality is at least as important as the presence of genealogical connections. The simple fact of DNA relation isn’t actually kinship, or at least not entirely; to be a good relative, to be fully kin, we must put that relatedness into thoughtful and respectful practice, individually and collectively, and take up our responsibilities to one another and to the world of which we’re a part. Or, as the Potawatomi biologist and essayist Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it:

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Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.

If we don’t know these duties, it’s part of our ethical obligation to learn them, and to express them in a way that makes possible better, healthier, more respectful relations. The earth speaks in a multitude of voices, only some of which are human. We exist alongside one another, our lives intersecting and overlapping in limitless and often unexpected ways. Otherthan-human beings go about their lives as we go about ours; these plants, animals, stones, and other presences are our seen and unseen relatives, our neighbours, our friends or companions, sometimes even our enemies, too often our victims. Humans are only one species among millions, and ours are not the only priorities in the world. There are countless conversations taking place around us, in voices and languages of every imaginable form and frequency. Too often we don’t hear them, and when we do we rarely understand them except perhaps in ceremony—or art. Art can help focus our attention and translate some measure of that experience through imaginative empathy. Story, song, poem, and prayer all serve to remind us of our connections to one another, human and other-than-human alike. And we are in deep, desperate need of such interventions, to be good kin in a world of unfathomably complex relations. Kinship is inextricably realized in a context of expansive personhood, where humans are not the only people, where our human family members are not our only relatives to whom we owe attentive obligation. In the introduction to his collection All My Relations, Thomas King (Cherokee) affirms:

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“All my relations” is at first a reminder of who we are and of our relationship with both our family and our relatives. It also reminds us of the extended relationship we share with all human beings. But the relationships that Native people see go further, the web of kinship extending to the animals, to the birds, to the fish, to the plants, to all the animate and inanimate forms that can be seen or imagined. More than that, “all my relations” is an encouragement for us to accept the responsibilities we have within this universal family by living our lives in a harmonious manner (a common admonishment is to say of someone that they act as if they have no relations).

One line in this passage stands out: “to all the animate and inanimate forms that can be seen or imagined” (emphasis added). Imagination here is key, for these acts of relationship are at least as much exercises in imagination as they are in lived practice. When people are encouraged to imagine broadly, to approach the world expansively, their hearts and actions are more expansive, as well. Consider the Thanksgiving Address of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, in which the various beings of creation are thanked for their generosity and service to one another and to us. It can be a relatively short series of acknowledgements, or a very long and detailed ceremony of recognition and appreciation. What is common to all versions, spoken in traditional ceremonial oratory or in various written forms, is the repetition of thanks in each stanza, the naming of particular classes of beings— trees, medicine plants, food plants, animals, birds, the sun and the moon, the stars, the thunders, and so on—and some reminder that those gathered in thanks are bringing their minds together in unified harmony, in some variation of “and now our minds are one.” The aforementioned Kimmerer observes that “the listeners reciprocate the gift of the speaker’s words with their attention, and by putting their minds into the place where gathered minds meet. You could be

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passive and just let the words and the time flow by, but each call asks for the response, ‘Now our minds are one.’” Kinship and gratitude aren’t just individual expressions, but collective recognition of the interdependence between humans and other-than-human persons. Kimmerer further describes the Thanksgiving Address as “far more than a pledge, a prayer, or a poem alone.” It is these things, but more, too: “at heart an invocation of gratitude, but . . . also a material, scientific inventory of the natural world. Another name for the oration is Greetings and Thanks to the Natural Word. As it goes forward, each element of the ecosystem is named in its turn, along with its function.” In this invocation, close observations of the otherthan-human world are expressed in a ritualized narrative of gratitude to the cosmos, from the mundane to the marvellous; respectful relationships are embedded in empathy and humility before that multiplicity of persons. Humans are not the only beings who matter, but our expressions of thanks and the grounding of ourselves into those meaningful relationships do matter, not least because they keep our destructive capacity in check. The recognition of other-than-human personhood seems to parallel and depend upon deep histories with the land and profound familiarity with its varied peoples and their ways; as urbanization and, especially, industrialization increase, and as humans become more alienated from the land upon which we depend, personhood becomes more narrowly confined to the human. That shift—from humans in complex relationship with diverse other peoples to humans enacting our ruthless will upon a world of exploitable objects and resources—has many complex dimensions and causes. But there seems little doubt that it’s harder to engage in practices that result in wholesale environmental degradation, mass extinctions, destruction of vulnerable habitat, or extractive exploitation when you approach the world as a network of peoples, many of whom are related to you, and to whom you owe reciprocal and respectful obligation.

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How we understand kinship will shape how we abide in the world. If we have many relations to whom we owe more than superficial respect, a roughly if not entirely horizontal model of relationship, then monolithic settler colonial authority is difficult if not impossible to maintain or justify, and widespread exploitation of land, plants, and animals, as well as humans, is difficult to fully realize, because we recognize our implication in these relationships and their health. If, however, our familial obligations are vertical, with a clear hierarchy of authority that is mirrored by church, state, and industry, then a significant defensive network is eliminated. From there, other-than-human relations are more easily conceived as Others, and then as exploitable Others, and then simply as resources there for the taking, without reciprocity or consent. Violence begets violence; empathy and relationships diminish, human possibility grows narrower, more utilitarian, more narcissistic and selfish. And all life suffers. To be sure, being part of a family—no matter how large, small, supportive, or dysfunctional—is always a mix of challenge, compromise, negotiation, celebration, and struggle. We’re a constitutionally relational species, but that relationality isn’t only positive and affirming; sometimes the most transformative relationships we have are the difficult or even painful ones. Indeed, it was while living with an in-law with whom I had a very contentious relationship that I came to understand that many of our traditions about kinship aren’t as much about making people like each other as about helping ensure that our differences don’t tear us apart. We didn’t have to like each other, but we did have to try to find ways of living together in a situation that was less than ideal. Indeed, how we imagine family and who’s included in or excluded from that circle of relationship says much about what we believe and what we value in the world. We have difficulty enough understanding other humans, even those whose languages and cultural perspectives we share. Yet in our dealings with the other-than-human, our species too often pre-

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sumes an omniscience that is little more than a projection of our own arrogant sense of supremacy, especially in the industrialized West. Take animals, for example. So many of us were raised in some measure on books and movies about talking animals, from the middle-class rabbits of Beatrix Potter’s children’s books to the rather more harrowing lagomorphs of Watership Down, from the fussy, class-conscious, homosocial beasts of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to the majority of the Disney and Warner Brothers animation archives. Almost invariably these are animals in name only; in language, behaviour, class and social structure, and relationship, they manifest their creators’ ideas about the world, beastlike proxies that embody our various human biases. It’s hard for us to think like a beast, and more often than not in most of popular culture, we just want our beasts to be humans in fur coats, not themselves in all their inscrutable difference. It’s also worth pointing out how, not surprisingly, Eurowestern attitudes toward animals have been mobilized against Indigenous peoples since the onset of colonization, often conflating the two as a mutual category of dumb, mobile matter without intellect, emotion, law, language, or agency—and thus available to be exploited or killed without moral or legal consequence. Dismissed as animalistic, bestial, or savage, Indigenous peoples have long faced the same levels of brutal treatment meted out to animals. Indeed, to be “treated like an animal” is, in North America, to be the target of sadistic cruelty. This phrase says everything about how animals—and some humans—are understood in broader consciousness. For Indigenous writers who honour older notions of otherthan-human kinship, however, the boundaries between the human and the other-than-human are more permeable, the relationship more complicated, often fraught, and always less certain of human superiority. As beings with priorities and personalities of their own that remain only partially legible to humans, the Animal People stand apart in their difference, yet as active co-inhabitants of the

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world—as neighbours, rivals, allies, prey, and predators alike—they disrupt our confidence in our own superiority. Animals reflect some measure of recognizable social structure that often mirrors that of humanity, yet is marked by their distinctiveness, their own priorities and obligations, which stand in relation to but beyond human presumptions. Sometimes these beings interact with humans as equals, as friends or rivals; sometimes, as our old stories and ceremonies remind us, they become human, or humans become beasts, or beasts mate with humans and their progeny stand apart as great heroes or menacing forces in the world. Simplistic homogeneity is far less adaptive or reflective of our diverse realities than heterogeneity. Peoplehood isn’t limited to certain forms or bodies. I find Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles and Sweetgrass illuminating in this regard. It’s largely a novel about Nanabush, the Ojibway trickster-transformer, a figure about whom there are many stories of shapeshifting, mischief, even world-shaping creation, who arrives at Otter Lake Reserve in Ontario in the form of John, a good-looking, blonde white man on an Indian Chief motorcycle, and commences to do what such beings always do: make a mess of things. He brings truth, love, and chaos in his wake, but in so doing, lays bare festering wounds, unacknowledged losses, and unhealthy secrets that must be dealt with if the community has any hope of a healthy future. Transformer beings like Nanabush—and Armstrong’s Kyoti, discussed above—disrupt complacency and order. Often driven by excessive appetites for food, sex, and praise, they break down the established social order, but in so doing also disrupt inequitable power relations, frozen ideologies, and unhealthy traditions. But they remain curious about the People—all peoples, not just the human ones—and recognize the kinship bonds that connect them. They always leave for another adventure, but kinship and community is often what brings them back, and Otter Lake is no exception. It’s an Indigenous community like any other, with its share of

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enduring loyalties, interpersonal conflicts, historical traumas, and ongoing healing work. The overworked and recently widowed chief, Maggie Second, is struggling to sort out a complex land return and spending little time with her increasingly delinquent son, Virgil. It’s Maggie who captures John’s roving eye. But while John is busy watching Maggie, others are watching him. Otter Lake is a complicated place with a human history that has experienced the full measure of colonization, including land expropriation by the Province of Ontario and the cultural and familial legacies of residential school; its people struggle to hold on to who they are in spite of these challenges. Yet the reserve isn’t just a home for humans. Importantly, there’s also a community of raccoons who have called Otter Lake their territory for many years, and who have been waiting for Nanabush to return: Across most of the world—except those urban centres where they are more reviled than rats—raccoons are known as cute and clever creatures. Less well known is the fact that they possess long memories. Memories of a multi-generational length. The woods around Otter Lake held many raccoons. On that bright Saturday afternoon, at least a dozen or so were casually foraging along the side of the road. Most should have been sleeping in a hollow log or hole in the ground because they were nocturnal animals, but today was different. Something special was happening. Though it was hard to say how or why, it’s safe to say they were waiting, as they had been waiting for a very long time. And rumour had it, their waiting was soon to be over.

So begins a mock epic war between Nanabush/John and the raccoons of Otter Lake. As John begins to romance Maggie under the suspicious eyes of her son and her estranged brother Wayne, both of whom believe that the man is more (or less) than he seems, the raccoons see clearly, and they observe his movements and bide their time:

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He hated raccoons, and they hated him. It was a feud whose beginning had been lost in time and memory. But the hate remained and burned brightly. To his right, he saw another of the creatures, and behind it, four more. He definitely had the size advantage, but they had the numbers. Theirs had long been a stalemate, but that didn’t mean the idea of a final settling of scores wasn’t on their minds.

And John knows something is coming: “Every day he was here, there seemed to be more raccoons. They were gathering. This was not good.” As the novel progresses, John/Nanabush becomes an increasingly disruptive presence in Otter Lake and the lives of its human residents, sometimes intentionally, at other times simply due to his nature. Nanabush is a mischief-maker of the now and of another time, one of many beings who “had been born in an age when gods, monsters, humans and animals ate at the same table. Now man ate alone, while animals begged for scraps.” The great beings are gone, or reduced, like John/Nanabush; humans sit in blind domination over their animal kin, who struggle as best they can to survive in this changed world. Where he once inhabited a world of great powers and personalities, Nanabush now finds himself in a much-reduced time, and he hungers for the challenges of other days. Yet he also hungers for recognition of who and what he really is, but it’s largely only the raccoons who do recognize him, and he doesn’t relish the consequences of that particular acknowledgement. Throughout the novel, the raccoons appear again and again, confronting him with their memory of a darker time when he killed and ate a raccoon who had stumbled into his camp during a storm. He is a creature of appetite, and his hunger that night led him to inhospitality and cruelty—a transgression the racoons have never forgotten despite all the many generations that passed. Toward the novel’s end, when at last the raccoons defile his beloved motorcycle and threaten more damage to the machine, Nanabush is forced to accept

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responsibility for his action, and he makes amends through an acknowledgement of his long-denied crime and a gift of food in fitting recompense to the needy raccoon he’d killed—in this case, bags of store-bought groceries. In Taylor’s novel, as in so many Indigenous works about the interweaving of ages, worlds, and beings into our current time, the raccoons don’t become something else—they remain fully raccoons. They aren’t miniature humans; they behave largely as raccoons do, although for the purposes of Nanabush’s comeuppance they gather in far greater numbers than would their nonfictional counterparts. They see clearly, far more so than Maggie or other residents of Otter Lake: as we are reminded, “the land does not forget; it is in fact the memory of all who live on it. In today’s world, raccoons live closer to the earth than most people, so their memory too is longer.” Their memory is longer, and their language, too, is old—far older than those of their human neighbours. While it’s clear that the raccoons speak to and are understood by Nanabush, we never hear them speak a human tongue, either English or Anishinaabemowin. Instead, it’s Nanabush who speaks Raccoonish. Their world, not ours, is the baseline context for understanding. This is one of the novel’s deeper, more serious assertions. The act of reparation becomes a turning point in the novel. Virgil and Wayne, who are trying to thwart the trickster’s interest in Maggie, observe the great reconciliation council of Nanabush and the raccoons, and it marks the start of the full unravelling of John’s deception. They now know two things: John isn’t the innocuous human being others think he is, and the raccoons of Otter Lake are a powerful people who can hold even great tricksters to account. Yet even they disbelieve their own eyes; they try to rationalize it away and find other explanations. That’s part of the larger problem that brings Nanabush to Otter Lake in the first place: the People don’t remember who they are—they don’t remember their relatives. It’s what compels Maggie’s mother, the elder Lillian Benojee, to summon

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Nanabush back to the community as she’s dying, for she was the last living member of the community to believe in him—“not as a legend,” John/Nanabush tells Virgil in the final pages of the novel, “but as a real flesh-and-blood person. She saw me, touched me, loved me. You don’t forget a person like that.” Colonization has, through Christianity and residential schools, stripped so much of the community’s deeper understanding that they no longer recognize the language and personhood of the raccoons, just as they’re initially unable to recognize the presence of one of their greatest teachers and cultural figures. And this, I think, is a key insight offered in so much Indigenous writing: we have much to learn from the other-than-human world, but that learning can only come from humility and relational understandings. Without these, we’re adrift in the universe, isolated from each other and from the very foundation that gave us form and spirit in the first place. Only imagination and empathy can bring us back to those connections—and only if our other-than-human kin are willing to accept us back into the circle. And given the terrible harms we as a species have brought to them, and the continuing devastations we inflict on our many relatives, we may find our return to healthier, more compassionate relationships far more challenging than that of Nanabush and the raccoons. But return we must, if we’re to have any hope of a better future. It’s probably time to address one complication in all this talk about kinship, relationship, and connection: arguing for otherthan-human personhood is not arguing for a naïve or romantic conceptualization of the natural world. Relationality is always vexed, if it’s genuine; it’s only shallow understanding that assumes all relations with the other-than-human are necessarily benevolent. As religious studies scholar Graham Harvey notes in reference to animism, a broadly inclusive term for the relational cosmologies of most Indigenous peoples:

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Animists engage (responsively or proactively) with the real world in which, if they are correct, people must eat other persons, may be in conflict with other persons, will encounter death, and will need to balance the demands made by a series of more-or-less intimate and/or more-or-less hostile relationships. Sometimes they draw on established traditions or cultural discourses and practices. Sometimes they have to be innovative and creative.

My dad, a lifelong hunter, puts it most succinctly: “Nature will kill your ass.” A truly respectful understanding of relationality also means respect for other people’s capacity to cause each other harm. Indeed, much of the energy that goes into maintaining these relationships is to prevent offending the other-than-human peoples, whose anger is profound and dangerous when they’re treated with disrespect. Careful attention to the subjectivity of those other beings sometimes brings teachings and gifts, sometimes indifference, sometimes hostility. Relationships aren’t only positive; indeed, some relationships are quite conflict-ridden. Let’s return to the Cherokee story about the coming of disease to the world discussed in Chapter 1, but explore it here in greater length. Briefly summarized, it goes as follows: humans became a great menace to other animals. Once small in number, humans used the gifts of hunting they received from their Animal relations to grow numerous, and with greater numbers they became arrogant and cruel, killing without honour or appreciation, slaughtering for the sheer thrill of destruction. In anger, and desperation, the Animal chiefs gathered in council to figure out a response to the wanton cruelty. Powerful beings all, they decided that the surest way to put a stop to human depredations was to inflict diseases on them, a punishment earned by human ingratitude and hubris. Every deadly and debilitating disease known today has its roots in that council. Yet the story doesn’t end there, obviously, for we’re still here. Fortunately, the Plants were listening as the Animals cursed us with

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illness, and they took pity on us. Each disease was granted a cure by the Plants—but only if we were wise and humble in our request, and only if we took care to show thanks for the shared knowledge. Thus it is that so many of our medicines are drawn from the plant world, and so much care is taken by traditional people to honour the animals and their sacrifices. There are a few things to note in relation to our larger discussion. As Heidi Altman and Thomas Belt (Cherokee Nation) note, in this story—and indeed, in Cherokee tradition generally—“humans are considered to be anomalous, stuck in the midst of supernatural plants, animals, and other beings; guests in a complex spirit world. The spirit animals and plants have a history of their own before humans are introduced and the role of humans in the universe is that of odd pieces that must fit themselves into an already functioning whole.” Disrespect is a destructive use of free will and agency; a relationship of respect is affirming and builds ongoing relationships of care, as with the plants. Disease is the ongoing consequence of our disrespect, as medicine is of our respect. In both cases, the Animals and Plants behave independently, and both participate on their own terms. We pay the consequences for our actions. Better actions may mitigate those consequences, but they don’t fully undo them, either. And yet, this isn’t the end of the story, as that would be too simple. This story is a significant one, but it didn’t stop Cherokees from getting swept into the European deerskin trade in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Cherokee communities became increasingly dependent upon European trade goods and grappled with the catastrophic impacts of disease, dislocation, and social upheaval, the relational fabric of respect and reciprocity began to unravel. As hunting was the domain of men, and farming that of women—reflective of the roles of the first man and woman, Kanati the Lucky Hunter and Selu the Corn-Mother—the growing influence of colonial hunger had far-reaching effects. The historian Theda Perdue offers this insight on the matter:

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The commercial hunting economy of the eighteenth century undermined an earlier aversion to the exploitation of the natural world. The Cherokees began to see distinct advantages in killing as many deer as possible for their skins alone, and in a society heavily dependent on the trade, failure to do so condemned one’s family to severe deprivation. A hierarchical worldview began to emerge that gave men dominion over the animals and placed them at the top of a human hierarchy as well. When this worldview extended to gender, women no longer balanced men.

The origin story of disease didn’t cease to matter, nor did it go away, but interpretations changed as a result of changing circumstances. Indeed, some hunters cited the story to justify the wholesale killing of deer, as the animals had declared war on humans, and this was, in some way, payback. But that argument could only function when: (1) the full story wasn’t referenced, indicating either intentional disregard or only partial knowledge, and (2) when women were excluded from the conversation, as it was often the women who harvested the medicinal plants for healing uses. All at once colonialist economics struck a blow at gender complementarity, traditional kinship economies, and respect for earlier understandings of relational obligations. The “hierarchical worldview” that Perdue mentions is important not simply as a consequence of pressures from colonial commerce, but as an extension of missionary efforts, which specifically targeted kinship relations in its socio-religious transformation of Indigenous cultural practices and economies. The story continues to be told, and when I’ve heard it or seen it recounted it is always in its full form as a warning against disrespecting nature. In thinking about our relationships with the animal peoples, and the above cautions against abusing them and their generosity, we might take these considerations to a deeper place. Historically (and, for many rural and Northern communities, continuing today), meat consumption was dependent upon immediacy of relationship—

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hunters or farmers or ranchers lived among and slew the animals themselves, so there was an intimacy in both the living and the dying. How do these relations change when so many of us support factory farming, supermarkets, and meat that’s so disassociated from the horrific conditions of the animal’s short life? It’s worth listening to Muscogee Creek-Cherokee novelist, literary scholar, and musician Craig Womack on this point, too, as he offers a powerful and intentionally provocative argument in his essay “There Is No Respectful Way to Kill an Animal.” In this meditation on the ethics of hunting, in which he does a close reading of hunting scenes in Gerald Vizenor’s autobiography, Interior Landscapes, and D’Arcy McNickle’s novel The Surrounded, Womack challenges the all-toooften easy ways in which so many Indigenous people, especially Indigenous Studies scholars, argue in favour of hunting. It’s a richly considered essay and worth extended analysis, but here I want to note a few of his points. In particular, he takes on the ideas about kinship I’ve been discussing in this chapter, drawn from the work of Indigenous writers: One response I received to the ideas raised in this essay is that I have disregarded an agreement between animals and humans— one person called it a treaty—that allows feeding, to use his exact phrase, of “our kin.” I do not know how animals feel about this treaty, of course, or if they agree that they’d signed it, yet I feel it is valuable to try to contemplate how they might feel about being killed. Animals, not just us humans, have kin, and we would do well to imagine them if we want to take into account all—not some—of our relations.

Further, regarding hunting’s connection to important ceremonial practice, he writes:

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I can only counter, what about tribes considering nonviolent alternatives? . . . I can at least think about the fact that my religion, a pretty old one, is called the Green Corn religion, not the breaded and fried pork chop religion. Is hunting the only thing that can make a person Indian? Does every person in the tribe need to become a hunter? How realistic is that? Anyone living in an Indian community, or even away from one, knows not everyone is going to become a hunter. Some members can exercise personal sovereignty and decide against hunting.

Womack adds the important caveat that he’s not arguing against hunting for survival or need, but against hunting as an inevitable good that exists outside of moral reflection and consideration. It’s a challenging argument, especially when hunting is so fully interwoven with other besieged cultural practices and expressions, but it’s one that deserves some consideration. This relationship, then, is not just about how we perceive animals, but how they perceive us, and, equally important, how they perceive one another. We are in a complicated dance between imagination, kinship, tradition, settler colonialism, and the exploitation of the land and its peoples. No one is outside these pressures, but some—human and other-than-human alike—are burdened with the consequences and suffering more than others. If we are to find ways of living together well, of affirming our distinct and shared responsibilities to the relations with whom we share this world and upon whom we so often depend for physical and symbolic sustenance, we must do so within the understanding that settler colonialism has put us all in an untenable position. Ceremony, ritual, and empathy are a start, but they’re not enough. If we’re to find common ground and ensure a world where suffering is minimized, where traditional communities are strengthened, where resource exploitation is contained, and where the impacts of global capitalism are undone, we must do so with our differences intact and our hearts, minds, and spirits open to new

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ways of understanding old truths about obligation and relationship. These stories, poems, and performances can lead us in that direction. Perhaps the stories we tell and share make possible new, better relationships that honour the best of what we had while undoing the worst of what we’ve been given. What is clear is that the stories that will make a difference aren’t the easy ones. If they don’t challenge us, confound us, make us uncomfortable or uncertain or humble, then I’m not sure what they offer us in the long run, because to my mind it’s the difficult stories that offer hope of something better. This brings me to the other kind of kinship I want to discuss here, one that also challenges us to think bigger, broader, and more inclusively about what it is to be a good relative in a time and place of colonial fragmentation and commodification, where the emphasis on heteronormative notions of family obscure other, more generative and generous possibilities of belonging. If, as in the case of our animal relations discussed above, we take kinship to be more than “blood” or genetic relatedness, and if family is an expansive rather than reductive set of relations, then we must bring these considerations into our human-to-human experiences. And one of the best places to look is to the work of queer and two-spirit Indigenous writers, for whom kinship is a very powerful and equally vexed set of understandings. I use the term “queer” beside the increasingly prominent “two-spirit” quite deliberately here for a few reasons. First, the term “two-spirit” is a relatively recent appellation, a political term that emerged from a gay-and-lesbian Indigenous gathering in either Minneapolis or Winnipeg in 1990. It was coined to affirm the spiritual and cultural groundings of queer Indigenous folks, and to argue that Indigenous gender diversity and same-sex relationships included but were more than sexual acts or proclivities. It’s an important term of self-affirmation, and one that many people use today, especially in Canada. But it’s also a pan-Indigenous term that in many cases presumes a generic similarity across cultures, which

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is decidedly not the case, and does not translate well into many culturally specific understandings from communities with historical roles that we might today identify as similar to gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender identities. That doesn’t mean we didn’t or don’t exist in these communities—that we didn’t or don’t matter. It just means that the broad concept of “two-spirit” might not be the best terminology for describing the culturally specific realities of gender diversity and sexuality expressions in all contexts. Like many who came out in the 1990s, I like “queer.” It’s fierce, uncompromising, assertive. It’s a bit troubling, but also playful. And it’s inclusive without being reductive. Sarah Hunt (Kwagiulth) and Cindy Holmes give this helpful explanation for the use of the term: We view “decolonization” and “queering” as active, interconnected, critical, and everyday practices that take place within and across diverse spaces and times. While queer is often used as an identity category or umbrella term for non-normative sexual and gender identities, it emerged as a critique of essentialist constructs and identity politics. As a verb, queer is a deconstructive practice focused on challenging normative knowledges, identities, behaviours, and spaces thereby unsettling power relations and taken-for-granted assumptions. Queerness is then less about a way of “being,” and more about “doing,” and offers the potential for radical social critique. A decolonial queer politic is not only anti-normative, but actively engages with anti-colonial, critical race and Indigenous theories and geopolitical issues such as imperialism, colonialism, globalization, migration, neo-liberalism, and nationalism. . . . This politic seeks to queer White settler colonialism and the colonial gender and sexual categories it relies on—to render it abnormal, to name it and make it visible in order to challenge it.

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So unless a writer specifically uses “two-spirit” as a term of selfidentification, I prefer “queer” to describe those of us whose identities and relations reach beyond the narrow acceptability of the straight nuclear family—a structure that never found much purchase for Indigenous folks until the imposition of Christian values on our communities. Here I want to consider what queer and two-spirit Indigenous writers offer us in thinking about what it is to be good relatives, not as a matter of theoretical interest, but in the complicated, lived experience of embodied relationships. Specifically, how bodies in love—through love—create constitutive and meaningful relations between peoples that offer new or renewed possibilities for lasting and ongoing kinship. To share and give pleasure beyond difference, to open up and be vulnerable in all our woundedness and yet still to find beauty in and beyond those scars, makes other kinds of kinship possible, intentional and consensual affiliations that return us to one another and to our lands and histories. If relations like these are to have any significance, we have to see not only where we connect, but where we don’t, and how, if at all, we might bridge that gap in ways that don’t collapse our differences but hold them up in all their complexity. Kinship, like love, like creation, like sex, is a messy thing. It’s about what happens when bodies and imaginations come together in relationship, when boundaries are breached and something else comes into being, for good or ill—or, sometimes, for both. Kinship is the complex, embodied practice of sovereign belonging. It’s not just about our ties to one another, but to the willing, intentional re-creation and reaffirmation of those ties in daily interactions—we choose to be kin, and we’re chosen. It’s why there’s so much discussion on questions about Indigenous identity, about belonging being more than just a personal affirmation but that of the community to which we claim affiliation. Belonging is relational and reciprocal, not unidirectional. Here, I want to build on our earlier discussion to

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think about how kinship also comes into being through the lived interplay between bodies, minds, and spirits—living, dead, and other-than-human—and makes possible the living link between the past and the future within the bodies of the present. And like all things that are powerful, it’s also complex, untidy, and disruptive. We share a messy context. It’s one of trauma, with the intersecting and distinctive displacements, dislocations, exclusions, and rejections of colonialism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny. But that context isn’t only about the stories of wounding and damage; it’s firmly entangled with the beautiful, tenacious stories of connection, invention, and renewal—in other words, love. The Indigenous body has always been a colonial target, especially its capacity for love. Love and desire are powerful and threatening when they come from bodies deemed expendable by patriarchal authorities. Settler colonial hatred is powerful, too, and the horror of this kind of hate is not just in the immediate violence, which is bad enough, but in the way it seeps into your bones, how it robs you of your own sense of worth, and dignity, and even your own sense of presence. In “We Exist,” queer Konyangk’auwi poet Janice Gould articulates that grief: Indians must be the loneliest people on Earth— lonely from our histories, our losses, even those things we cannot name which are inside us. Our writers try to counteract the history that says we are a dead, a conquered People. But our words are like a shout in a blizzard.

If we stop here, we’re left with a bleak assessment of how this hating denial turns us into ghosts long before we’re dead. Gould does not

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end the poem in despair, however, nor does she end it in hope, but someplace in between: At sunrise the daughter lies on her bed, legs drawn up, fist in her mouth. I am poisoned, she thinks, beneath my heart. This is what it means to be Indian. My mother is not here. They mined her for her grief, following each vein, invading every space, removing, they said, the last vestige of pain. At dawn, this time of prayer, the daughter in a voice mined from a sickness of soul, tries to name the words which say we exist.

We exist. Plural in the present: we exist. Two words, powerful, but too often very difficult to say in a world that denies Indigenous humanity and presence. These hard-sought words are not hyperbole. Queerly gendered and feminized Indigenous bodies are under siege in this country, in this hemisphere, everywhere, and have been from the first moments of European Invasion; indeed, some of the earliest Spanish texts to come out of the Americas are rape accounts, such as Michele de Cuneo’s letter to a friend recounting his thrashing and rape of an enslaved Indian woman in 1493, or the repeated indignities chronicled by the one-time conquistador and later slaveliberating clergyman Bartholomé des Las Casas. We can also look to 1513, when conquistador Vasco Nuñez de Balboa led his soldiers against the village of Quarequa in what is now Panama. After slaughtering and dismembering the chief, Porque, and more than six hundred of his warriors, Balboa turned his attention to the

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“house of this kynge,” which was “infested with most abhominable and unnaturall lechery.” There he found “the kynges brother and many other younge men in womens apparell, smoth & effeminately decked, which by the report of such as dwelte abowte hym, he abused with preposterous venus.” Balboa ordered that the men, who numbered around forty, be fed alive to his hunger-maddened war-dogs. These are not only the historical events of a benighted age. Though war-dogs aren’t generally put into service today, hate crimes against Indigenous peoples continue across North America, with many accounts of women, transgender, and gender-diverse, queer/ two-spirit people being specific targets of sexualized violence, and many more crimes going unreported for various reasons. These accounts are also in the stories of residential school survivors, who were targeted for many reasons, but notably because of their Indigenous bodies. It was their very being—and their separation from families that could protect them—that made them prey. In “Some Like Indians Endure,” Paula Gunn Allen writes, “dykes remind me of indians / like indians dykes / are supposed to die out / or forget / or drink all the time / or shatter / go away / to nowhere / to remember what will happen / if they don’t.” But, she reminds us, “they don’t anyway—even / though the worst happens / they remember and they / stay / because the moon remembers / because so does the sun / because the stars / remember / and the persistent stubborn grass / of the earth.” Queer and Indigenous alike, we have all been taught that we don’t belong—not only among the powerful, but among one another. One of the greatest tragedies of colonization, transphobia, and homophobia is a belief that we’re unworthy of pleasure, absent of beauty, undeserving or incapable of love. But that’s not the end of the story. We’re stubborn people, queer folks and Indians and queer Indians alike. Green shoots rise quickly from burnt-over earth—and rarely, if ever, in solitude. Desire is shared between bodies. Voices call out from lungs powered by beating

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hearts and rushing blood. Lovemaking extends us across fragile flesh made moist and hot from mutual passion. The powers of hate tell us our bodies and our desires are abominations, fundamentally unworthy of love or even basic human regard, or worthy only when put to the service of patriarchal pleasure. To challenge that hate, we take on love—embody it, in bodies of all kinds, of all sizes, of all shades and shapes. Our messy bodies, and the messy interactions between them, are tangled in the peril and possibility of relationship. Driftpile Cree poet and theorist Billy-Ray Belcourt considers this complicated space in his poem “Sacred.” The scene is a round dance, that iconic symbol of Idle No More resistance, where he has come to join other Indigenous people in “a ceremony for both grief and love and each / body joined by the flesh is encircled by the spirits of ancestors who’ve / already left this world.” Yet the Indigenous man at the speaker’s side is poem’s immediate focus, and the opening stanza deserves to be read in full: a native man looks me in the eyes as he refuses to hold my hand during a round dance. his pupils are like bullets and i wonder what kind of pain he’s been through to not want me in this world with him any longer. i wince a little because the earth hasn’t held all of me for quite some time now and i am lonely in a way that doesn’t hurt anymore.

It’s a gutting scene of abject rejection at a moment when connection is the whole point of coming together in this time and place. To refuse a hand is to break the circle, and a round dance broken is a connection unrealized, simply because the man is presumably threatened by what he imagines the speaker represents. Pain and the hunger of loneliness are woven with deep empathy throughout the successive stanzas, with the speaker observing the growing physical distance between himself and the man, filling it instead “with the memories of native boys who couldn’t be / warriors

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because their bodies were too fragile to carry all of that / anger.” Yet there’s loving defiance here, too. He reflects on “the time an elder told me to be a man and to / decolonize in the same breath,” a reminder of all the ways colonial values, and especially patriarchy, so readily police our embodied beings, the woundings small and large that keep us from caring for one another and ourselves. The speaker refuses to be less than himself; he paints his nails as a protest and just because it pleases him, and he comes to the round dance because he wants to share in this moment and its purpose. He recognizes too well that, while both Indigenous, his own sovereign queer self stands in painful relationship to the man who refuses to take his hand, and that a whole history of colonial violence shares that space between them, too. The final line is both a heartbreaking acknowledgement and a hopeful invocation: “and even though i know i am too queer to be sacred anymore, i dance that broken circle dance because i am still / waiting for hands that want to hold mine too.” We return to the poem’s title—“Sacred”—and a question that hangs unanswered: is the speaker truly “too queer to be sacred anymore,” or is it just that this man and others can’t recognize it? The refusal of touch at this round dance is an overt refusal of basic humanity, but the hope for “hands that want to hold mine too” is a hope for touch that acknowledges the speaker’s beauty, his being, his self. Yet even in his pain, he never loses his compassion for the man, nor his clarity that this moment of profound disconnection comes from a place of deep cultural wounding; they are a consequence of colonial disruption and distortion, not an inevitability. Compassionate defiance in such moments of disconnection or potential rupture are often to be found in works by queer/two-spirit writers, for whom the interplay between Indigeneity, queerness, and belonging are often complicated and messy. “When your hands travel across my hemispheres,” Qwo-Li Driskill gently warns a new lover in “Map of the Americas,” “know these lands have been invaded

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before / and though I may quiver / from your touch / there is still a war.” In the context of the settler colonialism that has so wounded hir ancestors, Cherokee and otherwise, the histories we have all inherited are a result of bloodshed, loss, and catastrophe. “Sometimes I look at you,” Driskill writes, “and choke back sobs knowing / you are here / because so many of my people / are not.” Beth Brant’s “A Long Story,” in which the story of a lesbian mother whose daughter is taken from her because of her love for a woman parallels the theft of Indigenous children at the height of the residential school era, offers a further example of these complicated relationships. At one point, the narrator, Mary, comes home from the factory where she works, having kept a recently arrived letter from her daughter unopened the whole day, waiting until her partner Ellen comes home. Yet when she does read young Patricia’s words, the enormity of the loss overwhelms Mary, and she collapses in grief. Ellen offers to leave if it will bring the girl home to her mother, but Mary won’t surrender this love and this healing truth to her ex-husband’s homophobia. They share their grief and make love, finding healing in a moment of profound pain. Later, when she’s lost custody, she refuses to bow down either to her ex or the judicial system that rewarded his bigotry: “The word . . . lesbian. Lesbian. The word that makes them panic, makes them afraid, makes them destroy children. The word that dares them. Lesbian. I am one. Even for Patricia, even for her, I will not cease to be.” This refusal is not of her daughter, but of a society that takes children from loving parents based on bigotry and fear. The grieving mother whose children are taken to residential school suffers no less than Mary, and with equal justification. Both women are loving mothers who lose their children for no reason other than who they are, and the elemental injustice of these abuses cries out in righteous defiance across time and space. These are works of refusal, but more than that, they’re works of recognition and acknowledgement. They’re about transformative love in a time of war, of opening oneself up to a renewal of

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hope across a history of carnage, of acknowledging how our embodied histories separate us while also enabling the possibility to connect us, in different ways, for moments or lifetimes. And this, I think, is where kinship is of particular importance, especially for Indigenous peoples. The “I” in I am one stands in meaningful relation to the “we” in we exist. Together they’re an affirmation not only of individual survival, but of a community connected beyond the self. Relationship requires bodies; bodies connect; connections make good relations possible and meaningful, but they’re always complicated, contradictory, messy. So is orgasm. So is birth. So is death. Every breach of the boundaries threatens change; we are never the same afterward. Whether change is good or bad depends largely, but not entirely, on us; the rest is the context in which the crossing of boundaries happens—the shared and distinctive histories that carry a complicated and difficult weight all their own. But if the only thing defining us is trauma, or wounding, most of us wouldn’t be here. Our stories are about far more than the dominant presumption of Indigenous lack or deficiency; our bodies are not only objects of contestation, or devastation, or pain, or suffering. To return to Nason’s words, “to counter the power of Indigenous womanhood, you need to make acceptable the practice of hating Indian women.” It seems sensible, then, that to counter the practice of hating Indian women—or other Indigenous people of other genders and bodily experiences—we need to make love, in all its messy complicated diversity, acceptable again. And pleasure. And joy. To speak it, to celebrate it, to share it, to insist upon it. This, to me, is the heart of decolonization. Love isn’t saccharine sentiment. It’s not easy answers, or getting along all the time. It’s difficult, and fierce, and fabulous. It’s fragile, and it’s strong. It sometimes lasts a lifetime, and sometimes it ends, but it is always— always—ours. It’s our birthright, our legacy, our responsibility. We are worthy of it. And we can help one another see our own and one another’s beauty, defying fascist, body-hating fashions, holding up

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our messy loveliness together, with and for each other. More than anything, this is one thing we all share, and it is the best place to build understanding, alliance, and respect, within, across, and beyond our differences. I want to close with the poem “Labyrinth” by Esselen writer Deborah Miranda, which says it far better than I ever could: We breathe. You press your ear against my heartbeat. Thick as water, June night flows over skin. You turn your face, open your lips, take my nipple naturally as an infant, as if this is your due, your inheritance, as if you’ve known such sustenance your whole life. I could lie here, suckle you all night with no regrets but you are not my child and I am not your sanctuary: with your tongue and smooth teeth, you incise a maze we must untangle together. We’ve been working through the shell, love, complex outer layers of callus and hide. Now tenderness gets scary; now, the going gets rough. And the rough, oh love, it gets good. a

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Chapter 3

How Do We Become Good Ancestors?

sooner or later you have to fess up and count the holes in everything, if not for yourself then for everyone after and everyone before: this is what survival means — Gw en Benaway (A nishina a be/Métis), “The Business of Tr aum a”

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I

n her introduction to 1983’s A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women, the aforementioned Beth Brant offered the following words for Indigenous women writers, words that speak a truth well beyond their time: These hands fight back. The police, a battering husband, white men who would rape us and the land we live on. We use our fists, our pens, our paints, our cameras. We drive the trucks to the demonstrations, we tie the sashes of our children, dancing for the first time in the circle of the drum. We weave the blankets. We keep us a culture. Our hands live and work in the present, while pulling on the past. It is impossible for us not to do both. Our hands make a future.

Brant died in 2015. She is now more than a respected elder—she’s an honoured ancestor, among the best we have in Indigenous literature. Her words—the work of her hands and mind—continue to make a future for us, continue to guide good thought and courageous action. She sacrificed much as a working-class Mohawk lesbian writer to enable so many of us—especially Indigenous women, queer, and two-spirited folks—to speak our truths and have them heard today. So we hold her up, as we hold up our other worthy ancestors who faced great odds and still believed enough in the world to come that they put that hope into words. The past carries wisdom, tempered and sometimes shrouded by grief and great suffering; the future offers us hope, but with no certainty of anything but struggle. Where we are today, in all the possibility of now, is the delicate bridge between. We’re the ancestors of future generations, just as the ordinary people of past times became the ancestors to whom we now look for good guidance and cautionary example. We hope that the work we do today makes life better

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for those in the future, but the how of it, especially for those of us who are largely untethered from the cultural continuity of traditions and ceremonies, is a challenge to realize in the everyday. As Brant’s words remind us, continuity across the generations is how the People survive as the People: continuity of stories, languages, relations, ceremonies, and, of course, the very lives of the People themselves. Beyond these reasons, this concern of writers and communities is also in part due to the cataclysmic impacts of colonialism, which, in addition to taking lands, resources, spirituality, languages, and cultural practices, has included ancestors among its targets of expropriation, exploitation, and destruction. This targeting is literal as well as figurative. Given the almost unimaginable death rates that accompanied various waves of settler colonial intrusion, along with disease, starvation, dislocation, and direct violence—and mortality as high as ninety percent or more for many communities—there is also the crushing weight of possibility unrealized, of what might have been, had we not lost so many members of our families and our nations. What are the stories that disappeared in those losses? What opportunities were lost, alternatives foreclosed upon, traditions unshared, voices unheard? The miracle isn’t just that so many of our peoples managed to survive in spite of centuries of brutal oppression and insidious assimilationist pressure, although that’s impressive enough. The miracle is that so much was maintained in spite of it all, that so many new traditions were created to bear the values and distinctive visions of the People into the future. The nations that remain today aren’t the diminished fragments of fallen great nations, as is often implied in popular culture, in scholarship, even among some of our own. Rather, our nations today are the embodiment of the fierce, desperate hope and relentless insistence of our ancestors to continue on in whatever way they could. Indigenous people today honour that determination by being, and by carrying on that purpose to the best of our abilities. However we realize them, and in whatever

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form they take, Indigenous literatures are a vital expression of that imaginative commitment, righting—and writing—relations across time and space. We’ve thus far looked mostly at poetry and fiction, but nonfiction memoir and political commentary, too, offer important insights into the ways Indigenous writing works in the world. These genres belong fully in the study of Indigenous literary expression, for as Robert Warrior (Osage) rightly affirms, nonfiction “has been for more than two centuries a primary means through which Indigenous people in the Americas and elsewhere have articulated their experiences of modernity”; indeed, “even as fiction began its slow ascent to prominence in the middle of the nineteenth century, nonfiction remained for over a century the clearly dominant form for written Native expression.” To limit ourselves to the more ostensibly “creative” works is to silence generations of writers and obscure their important efforts on behalf of their communities and kin; in other words, it would be to ignore these important literary ancestors and the world they helped secure for their descendants. On 17 January 1893, in the sovereign Kingdom of Hawai‘i, a cabal of white US sugar plantation owners and businessmen, missionaries, and politicians put into effect their long-gestating conspiracy to overthrow Queen Lili‘uokalani, her government, and the sovereignty of the Hawaiian people. These men—newcomers to the island nation who’d insinuated themselves into positions of power—wanted US annexation of the Hawaiian islands to protect their financial interests and expanding ambitions, which had been threatened by the growing political resistance of the Kānaka Maoli and their prominent advocate, the formidable Queen who had the temerity to challenge white interests in her homeland. The businessmen’s coup succeeded in toppling the Kingdom, but only with the help of heavily armed US Marines; US exceptionalism became the governing doctrine over the explicitly white-supremacist “Republic of Hawaii.” Yet although Lili‘uokalani was imprisoned in the ‘Iolani

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Palace, her people politically marginalized in their own homeland, with harsh new laws quickly implemented to disenfranchise and dispossess them, they resisted nonetheless: physically, ideologically, spiritually, linguistically, and, significantly, through the written word—often at the same time. In the years before, during, and after the overthrow, Kānaka Maoli distributed petitions, founded newspapers, shared letters, wrote pamphlets, stories, essays, poems, songs, and books, communicated commitments to land and legacy through Hawaiian-language-specific genres that Kānaka Maoli political scientist Noenoe Silva identifies as “mo‘olelo (narrative prose, including history), mele (song, poetry, including oli [chant]), mo‘okū‘auhau (genealogy, including cosmogonical genealogy), and pule (prayer), among others”—genres specific to the place itself, as well as to its peoples. Indeed, Silva observes, “all genres of Hawaiian literature, with the exception of translated works from other languages, reflect our people’s close relationship to and deep love for the ‘āina [the land].” These things are inextricably connected: the Hawaiian people, the land with which they are in deep and abiding relation and from which their language emerges, and the political struggle to maintain both in good health and mutual care. Kānaka Maoli literature scholar ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui offers this helpful assessment of that constitutive relationship and its relevance to the continuity between ancestors and future generations: We continue to rediscover, reclaim, and reflect upon the wisdom and experiences of our ancestors through their words, their arts. We are part of their creative, performative, and literary genealogies or mo‘okūauhau. Mo‘o, succession, kū (to stand upright), ‘auhau (stalk, stem bones); kū‘auhau simultaneously means genealogy, the recitation of a genealogy, and traditions, particularly old ones, and historian. Thus, we are part of familial and literary mo‘okūauhau as much as we are mo‘okūauhau, as we continue

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to compose, critique, analyze, assert, argue, and share our own creative, intellectual, philosophical, analytical thoughts and experiences for ourselves, our communities, and others, including future generations, to help guide their paths, to help them understand us. I ka ‘ōlelo ke ola—words matter.

I’m particularly taken by this phrase: “to help them understand us.” For so many of our ancestors, the words they left behind were intended, both explicitly and implicitly, to communicate something of themselves and the world they lived in to those who would follow—just as the work of contemporary Indigenous writers endeavours to do the same for those yet to come. This has always been for purposes of cultural and genealogical transmission, as well as, importantly, political struggle. In the face of a powerful colonial society that rewrote Indigenous loss as a story of innate Indigenous deficiency rather than intentional settler violence, betrayal, and subterfuge, Indigenous peoples have storied our experience to empower the struggle of the present and to make the truth of struggle clear to future generations. This is where we return to Queen Lili‘uokalani, who, in addition to being a distinguished and dignified sovereign well regarded among her international royal peers, a skilled political strategist, and a relentless opponent of the US business and military interests that impinged on her people and their lands, was also a talented musician and writer. It was she who penned “Aloha ‘Oe” (Farewell to Thee), a mele that most North Americans know only through cheesy song renditions played on ill-tuned ukuleles in the Elvis Blue Hawaii mode (or, even worse, the Looney Tunes versions). In its uncolonized form, “Aloha ‘Oe” is a song about loss, departure, and remembrance. Though composed in 1878—more than a decade before the overthrow—it became a symbol of Hawaiian resistance after the Queen’s imprisonment, which makes its trivializing appropriation in US popular culture and tourism even more galling.

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While ostensibly about grieving lovers at the moment of separation, the song is just as intimately concerned with the ‘āina, the land, and its particular beauty, mentioning Hawaiian flowers and features (the ‘āhihi lehua, the singer, comparing the beloved with the “sweet rose of Maunawili”), locating their love within the “shaded bowers” of a rain-swept valley that would have been intimately familiar to a Kānaka Maoli audience, especially one well primed to read other layers of meaning about their struggle in the song’s lyrics. It’s the chorus, however, that really resonates beyond the theme of romance toward a grief for a land and national sovereignty taken but not extinguished. The lines given here are the Queen’s own English translation of the original Hawaiian: Farewell to thee, farewell to thee Thou charming one who dwell in shaded bowers One fond embrace e’er I depart Until we meet again Thus sweet memories come back to me Bringing fresh remembrance of the past Dearest one, yes, thou art mine own, From thee, true love shalt ne’er depart.

Those familiar with Victorian literary conventions may find the lyrics rather sentimental and rather too much of their time—not entirely unreasonable given the British influence on the Hawaiian monarchy in that period—but this would also be a reductive interpretation that misses the song’s deeper significance. Lili‘uokalani transcribed the song during her imprisonment, and, as she notes in her political autobiography, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen: Though I was still not allowed to have newspapers or general literature to read, writing-paper and lead-pencils were not denied;

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and I was thereby able to write music, after drawing for myself the lines of the staff. At first I had no instrument, and had to transcribe the notes by voice alone; but I found, notwithstanding disadvantages, great consolation in composing, and transcribed a number of songs. Three found their way from my prison to the city of Chicago, where they were printed, among them the “Aloha Oe,” or “Farewell to Thee,” which became a very popular song.

Lili‘uokalani acquiesced to the coup leaders’ demands in order to prevent widespread slaughter at the hands of armed Marines, but she remained defiant and dangerous, so the denial of news and communication was more than punishment—it was a deliberate effort by her enemies to prevent her from rallying resistance, as there had already been efforts by her supporters to restore her to the throne. Yet the “Republic” leaders had underestimated the power of song. “Aloha ‘Oe,” in its invocation of belonging to the land—“yes, thou art mine own”—its assertion that the singer and her beloved would “meet again,” and its reminder that “true love shalt ne’er depart,” embodied the people’s determination and refusal to surrender, just as their Queen refused to give up hope for a sovereign Hawaiian nation. Here again, as in the previous chapter, love and kinship are intertwined in mutual relationship, and the Republic’s efforts to sever that bond is an act of violence not only to the People but to their kinship with the land itself. “Aloha ‘Oe,” then, is a reminder, in her time and ours, of the importance of that continuing relationship and the struggle to maintain it. Queen Lili‘uokalani would spend the rest of her life fighting US imperialism and advocating for the Hawaiian cause; her autobiography is a passionate chronicle of the events leading to her government’s overthrow and a scathing critique of the hypocrisy and base injustice of US foreign policy. She directly condemns the capitalist interests that had so brazenly overthrown her Indigenous nation and subjugated its people; she challenges the missionary interests that

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had twisted the creed she herself espouses as a baptized Christian; she seeks to educate uninformed readers beyond her overthrown Kingdom and to disrupt the narrative of Hawaiian savagery that had so dominated the US press and popular media, caricaturing her as a grotesque, presumptuous primitive in absurd finery, her cause opposed to the white man’s God and natural law. Most strikingly, and with more than a little sharpness, her book continually reminds the US citizenry of its much-lauded principles and how they fall far short in the matter of Hawai‘i. Toward the end of Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, she makes a fierce statement on Hawaiian autonomy and the deeper threat to American democracy represented by the coup, including an eerily prescient observation: It has been shown that in Hawaii there is an alien element composed of men of energy and determination, well able to carry through what they undertake, but not scrupulous respecting their methods. They doubtless control all the resources and influence of the present ruling power in Honolulu, and will employ them tirelessly in the future, as they have in the past, to secure their ends. This annexationist party might prove to be a dangerous accession even to American politics, both on account of natural abilities, and because of the training of an autocratic life from earliest youth. [ . . . ] It would remain necessary for them to rule in Hawaii, even if the American flag floated over them. And if they found they could be successfully opposed, would they seek no remedy? Where would men, already proved capable of outwitting the conservatism of the United States and defeating its strongest traditions, capable of changing its colonial and foreign policy at a single coup, stop in their schemes?

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For Lili‘uokalani, the overthrow represents dangers far beyond her Kingdom and her people, to the very foundations of civil society itself. She ends with an invocation to Christian scripture and a plea: “Oh, honest Americans, as Christians hear me for my down-trodden people! Their form of government is as dear to them as yours is precious to you. Quite as warmly as you love your country, so they love theirs.” Yet this plea is not simply rhetorical. It’s a cry with a measure of despair: “But for the Hawaiian people, for the forty thousand of my own race and blood, descendants of those who welcomed the devoted and pious missionaries of seventy years ago—for them has this mission of mine accomplished anything?” If we read these words with only the isolated political purpose of the moment in mind, the answer would likely be no. Annexation proceeded in 1898; military occupation deepened after the Second World War; statehood followed in 1959, and with it an extractive tourist industry that sells a depoliticized and romanticized notion of “Hawaiianness” and has increasingly imperiled the economic, cultural, and environmental health of the Kānaka Maoli people in their own homeland, leading many to move to the mainland US just to make a living. So no, the Queen’s goal of reversing the overthrow by rallying principled public support among a broader US and international community was not realized. At least, not yet. But if we consider ho‘omanawanui’s words above, we can see that the Queen’s diverse writings most certainly succeeded in other ways—namely, to speak the justice of the Hawaiian cause to the ages, to help future generations of Kānaka Maoli know how hard their ancestors struggled to preserve their homeland in the face of overwhelming violence, and to offer fuel for the continuing fire of Hawaiian nationhood. The restoration would take longer than her life, and its struggle would continue. It continues today. Her work joins that of the many Kānaka Maoli writers and knowledge keepers of past ages—I’m a particular fan of Haunani-Kay Trask’s

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no-nonsense We Are Not Happy Natives—whose texts carry forward to today, reaffirming other ways of being in the world, other relations of significance than those deemed appropriate by colonial cultures, other constellations of land and lineage that are deserving of attention, respect, and reverence. In the end, Hawaii’s Story is not a closed narrative, but an ongoing story stretching across and speaking through the generations. And similarly, “Aloha ‘Oe” is not a lasting farewell, but a reminder that, indeed, the People and the land will meet again on their own terms—an affirmation of inevitable return, a restoration of loving, right relations, and a rejection of colonial claims that would deny these possibilities and their fulfillment. This is one aspect of our relationship with those who came before us—learning of their struggle to strengthen our own in the current time. There are others, certainly, some more positive, others more challenging. We move now from a focus very much on the storied relationship of the past with the present to one more firmly centred on life and death, for the unspoken context in which ancestors are considered is, of course, as dead relatives—to be an ancestor is to be no longer wholly of the living world. This doesn’t, of course, mean solely of the past; for cultures in which the past very much abides in the present, the space between our world and the Spirit World is often a thin membrane rather than a firm wall. This gives a sense of why the violation of Indigenous graves and burial sites— and the repatriation of stolen Indigenous bodies and belongings to communities—is an issue of such controversy, especially those who maintain older ceremonial protocols around the disposition of the dead. For how can we honour our relational obligations to the ancestors if even their burial remains are at risk of expropriation, exploitation, and destruction? The ways in which Indigenous peoples consider this relationship between the living and the dead, and other states of being between and beyond them, is a massive area of cultural complexity and the subject of more than a century of intrusive scholarly

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fascination. What interests me here is how Indigenous writers take up the question of the dead as ancestors with continuing relationships with the living, and how such considerations give us guidance for thinking of our own work as future ancestors. Without care for the dead and those who have gone before, there is nothing to transmit to those who come after; it’s why we look to our literary traditions, after all, to connect us to an ongoing heritage, to make meaning of our contemporary contexts, and to anchor our imaginations in a deeper set of significant relations. To start, I think it’s useful to look to the words of Klamath sociologist Clayton W. Dumont, Jr., who, in an essay on repatriation controversies, has written that “any adequate definition of sovereignty of minority cultures must include the right to assert uniqueness and difference through narrations of reality that differ from those of dominant societies.” One area in which this difference is most distinctly expressed is through a culture’s treatment of the dead. When reality is limited to the anthropomorphic material world, respect ends when human life is extinguished, and the bodily and funerary remains left behind are meaningful as symbols and artifacts only. Yet when reality is perceived as moving beyond the immediate human ego to encompass a wide range of beings and experiences, respect extends beyond life and connects each part of the kinship network to others. In this approach, the boundaries between our reality and the Spirit Worlds are thin and permeable, and they bleed into one another. Giving proper respect to the ancestors isn’t just good manners, it’s also good sense for the course of one’s own life, as any harm introduced into the network of relationships will affect every participant, living and dead alike. For this discussion, I want to consider the Hopi/Miwok poet, artist, and renegade anthropologist Wendy Rose, who has often turned her critical and creative work toward the besieged state of the Indigenous dead. In particular, her poetry and essays concern themselves with both the commercial traffic in Indigenous burial

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remains and the spiritual hauntings resulting from this legacy of colonialism. She draws on all her ancestors—Hopi, Miwok, and European—to sensitize herself to the relational and often liminal understanding of reality, while extending her anthropological training toward a keen-eyed subversion of the exploitative cultural biases that relegate Indigenous lifeways, bodies, and realities to dumb, objectified, and commercialized matter. While many anthropologists today are strong advocates for Indigenous peoples and have ongoing and mutually respectful relations with those communities—and some are Indigenous community members themselves—it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that the history of anthropology as a discipline is deeply rooted in a long history of grave-robbing and the exploitation of Indigenous communities across the world. After the soldiers and the missionaries come the academics, in this case anthropologists. Phrenologists, proto-evolutionists, degenerationists, Christian monogenists, and racist polygenists characterized the field in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and their legacy endures in the more than fifty thousand Indigenous dead remaining in universities and museums in the United States alone as of 2014, with only a small fraction of those repatriated or accessible to their affiliated tribes to date—and this figure does not include the ceremonial objects and burial belongings also stolen during this period. Long before the 1990 passage in the US of the landmark Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), which provides a legislative foundation for returning Indian ancestors and burial goods to their communities, American Indian people battled for the respectful treatment of their ancestors and belongings, in spite of frequent objections among anthropologists and historians that any concessions to such demands would undermine the scholarly understanding of the past. Rose was on the leading edge of that battle from her first entry into the field, as she studied anthropology and

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archaeology with an aim toward re-empowering Indigenous peoples over their own bodies and realities: When I talk about protecting the burial grounds, it is both a literal fact and a metaphor. The metaphor is to protect Indian people through, in some instances, trying to neutralize the very weapons that are being used against Indians, by mastering those weapons and then in a sense breaking them from within. It is also a literal fact in the poem by that name, “Protecting the Burial Grounds.” The poem was in fact written in front of a bulldozer, on top of an Indian cemetery, where we were sitting to prevent the bulldozer from just going through and ripping up the Indian graves.

In a relational reality, as noted earlier, the ancestors aren’t separated from the living by an impermeable barrier between life and death; no linear path from life to death exists. Instead, all realities are liminal and affect one another. Much of Rose’s work is marked by these liminal states, from her self-defined identity as a clanless Hopi “half-breed” between worlds to the hauntings of the dispossessed, restless ancestors who speak through the poems to be heard in their own time and ours. These are not disconnected realities; if anything, Rose’s foregrounding of her mixed heritage seems to sensitize her to the status of the Indigenous dead. For her, being “half-breed” (my use of this term follows hers) is “not just a biological thing. It’s not just a matter of having one parent from one race and the other parent from another race, or culture, or religion, or anything of that nature. But rather it’s a condition of history, a condition of context, a condition of circumstance. It’s a political fact.” Referencing the Blackfeet novelist James Welch, Rose names “halfbreededness” as not “hav[ing] enough of either group,” of being in the liminal state between two ostensibly stable states of being. In her stark and painful autobiographical essay “Neon Scars,” Rose writes: “I have heard

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Indians joke about those who act as if they had no relatives. I wince, because I have no relatives. They live, but they threw me away—so, I do not have them. I am without relations. I have always swung back and forth between alienation and relatedness.” This does not seem like self-hating “mixedblood angst” on Rose’s part. Rather, I understand it to be a poignant sensibility of the continuing legacies of colonialism, which have placed her outside of her father’s matrilineal traditions, as well as outside of her mother’s family, which rejects Indian “contamination.” Within the relatedness of that pendulum’s movement between belonging and exclusion, Rose writes with great love and longing of her natal family, particularly her Hopi kin, with which she most directly affiliates herself. They are, she notes, “more sympathetic to my situation.” Yet within the alienation of that same pendulum, she doesn’t abandon her longing for kinship; rather, she reaches outward to encompass all Indigenous peoples, and particularly those others whose own liminal reality is threatened. In Rose’s work, as in that of many Indigenous writers, that commitment to kinship extends beyond the living to the dead, and especially to those who also inhabit nebulous spaces and states of uncertainty. One of the shortcomings of NAGPRA is its general lack of procedures for repatriating so-called “unaffiliated” remains; that is, those ancestors and ceremonial belongings that aren’t clearly identified with a specific Indigenous community. NAGPRA has no federal equivalent in Canada, although there are various formal and informal processes that work to restore some of these ancestors and their belongings to their descendants. Due to legislative and procedural gaps in both contexts, many thousands of ancestors might never be returned to earth because of a lack of documentation of their patrimony. Rose’s work provides a pan-Indigenous gathering ground for these various ancestral voices. In most cases, she doesn’t assert a culturally specific poetic repatriation; rather, she reaches outward to spirits of various Indigenous peoples, offering a relational

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affiliation that doesn’t depend on blood or geography. For Rose, such an expansive view doesn’t detract from tribalism; as she has noted, “to be Pan-Indian is not to become less tribal. To be tribal and to be Pan-Indian exist side by side, and in fact Pan-Indianism is intended to protect those tribal identities, not to replace them.” Rather than appropriating other voices or trying to speak for the so-called “voiceless,” Rose listens to those who continue to be unheard, and through her poems encourages them to be heard by others. Few are less truly heard than the dead. Rose’s expansive relational principle is to my mind most elegantly expressed in two biographical poems originally from her 1985 collection, The Halfbreed Chronicles, in which she challenges not simply the immediate dehumanization of nineteenth-century materialist thought, but also its brutal and ever-popular associate, the freak show, in which Indigeneity and physical deformity were often states of fascinated spectacle for a largely white public. In “Truganinny,” the voice of the supposedly last Indigenous Tasmanian woman returns from the past to mourn the stuffed, mounted body of her husband and express her fear of the same fate. “Do not leave,” Truganinny tells the reader as she is dying in 1876, “for I would speak, / I would sing another song”: Please take my body to the source of night, to the great black desert where Dreaming was born. Put me under the bulk of a mountain or in the distant sea.

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Truganinny knows that white men are “waiting for me / to finish / my dying,” and she wants nothing more than to be “where / they will not / find me.” Rose includes an epigraph that informs the reader of Truganinny’s fate: her body was exhumed and put on display for more than eighty years. She didn’t find rest until she was cremated in 1976, over the objections of the Tasmanian Museum. In “Julia,” Rose follows a similar story, that of Julia Pastrana, an Opata Indian woman from northern Mexico who became a travelling exhibit, performing to a mocking public as “The Ugliest Woman in the World” or “The Lion Lady” or “Ape Woman” in reference to her facial deformities and the thick, dark hair that covered her body as a result of hypertrichosis. After she and her son died shortly after the latter’s birth in 1860, her manager-turned-husband had mother and child stuffed and mounted, and displayed their bodies until they were no longer profitable, then sold them. The baby was lost over the years, but Pastrana’s remains were on display into the 1970s, thereafter lying in storage at the Oslo Forensic Institute until her repatriation to her home state of Sinaloa, where she was buried in 2013. In Rose’s poem, Julia speaks directly to her husband, asking him to reassure her that it was just a dream, my husband, a clever trick made by some tin-faced village god or ghost coyote, to frighten me with his claim that our marriage is made of malice and money.

She wants to be something other than “The World’s Ugliest Woman,” to “see myself reflected / as the burnished bronze woman / skin smooth and tender / I know myself to be / in the dark / above the confusion / of French perfumes.” Yet in spite of her search for reassurance, she speaks to him from the Spirit World, and watches him through glass eyes:

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A small room from which to sing open the doors with my cold graceful mouth, my rigid lips, my silence dead as yesterday, cruel as the children and cold as the coins that glitter in your pink fist.

The poem closes on a plaintive note: “tell me, husband, / how you love me / for my self / one more time. / It scares me so / to be with child, / lioness / with cub.” As stuffed and mounted display pieces created for exploitative entertainment, both Truganinny and Julia Pastrana stand explicitly between life and death, not even offered the dignity of a peaceful burial. This taxidermic reality emerges again and again in Rose’s work. Her critiques of “whiteshamanism” similarly work to reclaim Indigenous ceremonies from this dehumanized performance, in which living spirituality becomes a stuffed and frozen mockery of its dynamic life. These are not theoretical concerns; in this relational reality, such disrespectful minstrelry creates tangible and lasting harm. There is little closure in these poems, little sense that the hoped-for resolution is in place—the speakers’ voices linger, as does their pain. We’re reminded that many ancestors remain in boxes and on storage shelves, on mantles, in filing cabinets and desks. Yet in directing her work toward repatriation of spirit, body, and voice— through poetry and prose alike—Rose challenges the taxidermic mentality that relegates Indigenous ancestors and living beings to the status of exploitable commodities, and asserts instead a mindful respect for the bonds of kinship, strength, and compassion that endure beyond death. Other Indigenous writers have located these issues at the centre of their works, and often, like Rose, link the exploitative treatment of

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the Indigenous dead with the continuing exploitation of living peoples, not unlike the experience of Thomas Darko in Geary Hobson’s The Last of the Ofos. Repatriation itself is the central conflict in Ghost Singer, a harrowing novel of the rightly vengeful dead by Anna Lee Walters (Pawnee/Otoe-Missouria), as well as in Gerald Vizenor’s more acerbic and satirical Chancers. Thomas King approaches repatriation from a different direction in his 1999 novel Truth and Bright Water: dismayed that so many Indigenous people’s bodies are still held by museums, the “famous Indian artist” Monroe Swimmer insinuates himself into these institutions in order to smuggle out the remains and return them to his reserve on the Canada/US border, and in particular to a river that has been contaminated by toxic medical waste. The scene is a troubling one. The bones Monroe throws into the water aren’t those of the People from that place; in fact, it’s intimated that one of the skulls belongs to a Cherokee girl who walked the Trail of Tears, far to the south. One might wonder whether Monroe’s dispersing of unaffiliated ancestral remains into these fouled waters is much of an improvement on their storage in a museum, but for Monroe—and perhaps King, too—the point is less about where they’re returned to than that they go back to the land and thus have at least a chance of connecting with the People. Again, closure is denied, but the continuity of relationship is at least a possibility. Ceremonies, bones, genes, blood: whether belonging to the dead or the living—or both—there is a continuity in Indigenous experience across time and space, as death itself is no sanctuary from colonialism. In Baby No-Eyes, my favourite of the many fine works by Māori writer Patricia Grace, the exploitation for research purposes of a dead Māori baby’s body by hospital staff is the narrative pivot around which the larger family and community stories revolve, and extractive research on Indigenous bodies—the dead and the living alike—is a central concern of the novel. Near the book’s conclusion, the baby’s mother Te Paaina tells the story of her daughter’s death in utero and subsequent mutilation at the hospital

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(an episode based on true events), and links this act directly to ongoing bio-prospecting by non-Indigenous researchers targeting Māori communities—always under the vague claim of universal good, and almost never with any material benefit to the People themselves. At a community meeting where such genetic research is being discussed, Te Paaina defiantly insists on the embraidment of past with present: “Genes are the ancestors within us.” In a more speculative context, the uses and abuses of Indigenous bodies as a way of breaking generational bonds become brutally manifest in a number of compelling works, including The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline (Métis), and “The Sin Eaters,” a short story by Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene). Alexie draws on the unorthodox Christian tradition in which marginalized scapegoats “ate” their community’s sins and thus took upon themselves the shame of the sin—sometimes voluntarily, but very often involuntarily—while purifying others with the act. Both works are set in times of environmental catastrophe, social upheaval, and militant surveillance—and, given the racist retrenchment of our current moment, increasingly terrifying in their plausibility. They consider how, like the land, Indigenous bodies, whether living or dead, are ongoing sites of struggle and face constant threats that extend well beyond the living world. Ecological devastation is the backdrop of both works. To save themselves from the ravages of the land they’ve poisoned—and, not incidentally, protect their authority and privileges—settlers turn, once again, to Indigenous peoples for their salvation. Alexie’s story is set in a not-too-recent time when the exploitative industrialization of North America has reached a tipping point and a disease is ravaging the white population. The only known cure is an unspecified quality in “Indian blood.” The solution to saving settler society, given historical experience, is predictable:

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Together, my parents and I stepped into our front yard and stared up into the sky. We saw the big planes roar noisily through the rough air above the reservation. We saw the soldiers step from the bellies of those planes and drop toward the earth. We saw a thousand parachutes open into a thousand green blossoms. All over the Spokane Indian Reservation, all over every reservation in the country, those green blossoms fell onto empty fields, onto powwow grounds, and onto the roofs of tribal schools and health clinics. Those green blossoms fell between pine trees, beside deep and shallow rivers, and among the sacred and utilitarian headstones of our dead.

The story’s Spokane Indian narrator, twelve-year-old Jonah Lot, is separated from his parents and gradually learns his ultimate fate: because there aren’t enough Indians to provide the curative blood needed for healing settler America—due in large part to the high mortality rate inflicted by colonialism—those who are deemed fertile and free of racial mixing are forced to have sex in order to reproduce and create the necessary biological resource bank. Here, ancestry matters more than ancestors, who are significant only in their blood quantum, not their relations: “Are you Joseph, Sarah, and Jonah Lot?” asked the soldier. Tears were running down his face. “Yes,” said my father. “Joseph is full-blood Coeur d’Alene, Sarah is full-blood Spokane,” the black soldier said to a white soldier. “The Coeur d’Alene and Spokane are both Interior Salish tribes, so there should be no problem of contamination with the child.”

Those who are “contaminated,” or who refuse to reproduce or are extraneous to the forced reproductive imperative due to age or

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infirmity, are eliminated. It’s a vision of society-wide settler colonial vampirism—metaphor turned material reality on an epic scale. When Jonah undergoes initial diagnosis to determine his suitability for the process, the experience goes well beyond bodily assault: I felt a hot pain as a needle slid into my left hip, through the skin, through the muscle and into the hip socket, into the center of the bone. But more than that, I felt the pain deep in my stomach, and beyond that, in the very spirit of my stomach. I felt the needle bite into me, heard the impossibly loud hiss of the hypodermic syringe as it sucked out fluid ounces of my soul, sucked out antibodies, sucked out pieces of all of my stories, sucked out marrow, and sucked out pieces of my vocabulary. I knew that certain words were being taken from me. I cried out in surprise and pain, and my cries sounded like tiny prayers. “Hush, hush, Jonah,” said the male doctor as he pushed the needle deeper into my body, as Dr. Clancy pushed another needle deep into my other hip. “You’re doing a brave thing. You’re saving the world.”

Of course, the world Jonah is saving is that of settler society— a society that includes people of colour and even Indigenous people attacking their own. His is a world of loving family and rich story and struggle and belonging—and, once again, that world of generous possibility is being torn apart for the supposed good of those who have always looked to Indigenous peoples as resources to be exploited or obstacles to be eliminated. Jonah, though little more than a child and still a virgin, is confined with a traumatized, defiant, but kindly woman already exhausted from multiple rapes that very day. After a brutal beating and the very real threat of death hanging over them, Jonah and the

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unnamed woman surrender to their captors’ breeding demands, ending the story trying to salvage a moment of tenderness in this experience of profound dehumanization and abuse, seeking a shared escape in spirit that’s not possible in body. “The Sin Eaters” gives us an extractive colonial world at its worst, where there is no longer transmission of knowledge, life, and legacy between Indigenous generations, except in the most basic way of procreative continuity. In Dimaline’s acclaimed novel, the affliction that faces white people as a result of environmental trauma is both evocative and illuminating: they can no longer dream. That power, however, remains with Indigenous people. As settler society unravels from the dual shocks of dreamlessness and climate catastrophe, they seek out Indigenous people for their salvation. Mirroring the history of colonization in the Americas, what begins as ostensible settler openness and genuine interest becomes something far more frightening. Grieving the loss of his husband to the government’s “Recruiter” agents, the storyteller and fugitive leader Miigwans shares an account of how their world came to be as it is with Frenchie, the young protagonist, who is also fleeing the Recruiters and seeks to learn more about why he and so many others are hunted: “At first, people turned to Indigenous people the way the New Agers had, all reverence and curiosity, looking for ways we could help guide them. They asked to come to ceremony. They humbled themselves when we refused. And then they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves. How could they best appropriate the uncanny ability we kept to dream? How could they make ceremony better, more efficient, more economical?”

As climate change’s impacts ravaged the coastlines, sending massive refugee populations flowing inland, Indigenous peoples were dispossessed once again by government fiat. But, as Miigwans recalls,

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all was not lost: “we were still hopeful. Because we had each other. New communities started to form, and we were gathering strength.” It’s then that “the Church and the scientists that were working day and night on the dream problem came up with their solution and everything went to hell.” When “ads asking for people with ‘Indigenous bloodlines and good general health’ to check in with local clinics for medical trials” yield few results, government scientists instead look to prisons, which Miigwans observes “were always full of our people.” But even the prison population is too small to bring dreams back to the settler society. It’s here that the story turns particularly grim: “It began as a rumor, that they had found a way to siphon the dreams right out of our bones, a rumor whispered every time one of us went missing, a rumor denounced every time their doctors sent us to hospitals and treatment centers never to return. They kept sending us away, enticing us to seek medical care and then keeping us locked up, figuring out ways to hone and perfect their ‘solution’ for sale. “Soon, they needed too many bodies, and they turned to history to show them how to best keep us warehoused, how to best position the culling. That’s when the new residential schools started growing up from the dirt like poisonous brick mushrooms. “We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across.”

Whereas “The Sin Eaters” ends on a note of tenderness in despair, The Marrow Thieves offers more hope for a future. It’s not the future Frenchie and his multi-tribal community of exiles had wanted or imagined—they’re still on the run, still trying to survive

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the settler authorities and the ecological devastation that surrounds them. But, coming from a wide range of backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, and traditions, what brings them together is something greater than what divides them, and, while the fight goes on, they do what Indigenous peoples have always done in response to colonial shatterings: they continue as best they can, sharing what remains, rebuilding to the best of their abilities in the ways they know how, doing what they can to carry something forward to those still to come: The Council spent a lot of time piecing together the few words and images each of us carried: hello and goodbye in Cree, a story about a girl named Sedna whose fingers made all the animals of the North. They wrote what they could, drew pictures, and made the camp recite what was known for sure. It was Bullet’s idea to start a youth council, to start passing on the teachings right away, while they were still relearning themselves. Slopper was tasked with putting that together, and he thrived under the responsibility. He even gave them a name: Miigwanang—feathers. We were desperate to craft more keys, to give shape to the kind of Indians who could not be robbed.

Yet this isn’t a naïve story of hard effort overcoming all struggles; the exiles acutely recognize that it “was hard, desperate work. We had to be careful we weren’t making things up, half remembered, half dreamed. We felt inadequate. We felt hollow in places and at certain hours we didn’t have names for in our languages.” This is a heavy weight on hearts already bowed with grief. Yet they continue, and it’s telling that, near the novel’s conclusion, the word Frenchie practises writing in syllabics is “family.” This, I think, is more than an incidental point. Family— kinship—carried through relations that extend through this life and beyond it, is key to the critique of settler expropriation and

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exploitation. Beyond both these texts, settler salvation has long figured, not in kinship or relationality, but in colonial notions of Indian “blood”—the resonant residue of vague and anonymous ancestors whose sole purpose is to validate settler claims to the land—and in Alexie’s story the colonial authorities will have it. The historical and contemporary parallels don’t escape Jonah, Frenchie, or the reader. Indian blood—figured here in blood as well as marrow (and its genetic extrapolation, DNA)—has long carried powerful symbolic resonance for settler societies: first pathologized as source of contamination, and later sought after as a totemic presence by settler colonial people to claim belonging without relationship. The latter is what scholars Eve Tuck (Unangax) and K. Wayne Yang have identified as a “settler move to innocence”: collectively, “those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all.” This is the unnamed Cherokee princess great-great-grandmother so common in the US—which Alexie himself almost always references in any discussion of Indigenous authenticity—or the similarly anonymous Métis great-great-grandmother increasingly encountered in Canada. These fetish/faux ancestors are brought out most often by those without ties or connections, typically to assert authority and entitlement but almost never to acknowledge responsibilities or obligations to living peoples or their imperilled lands. Again and again, we see evidence of the settler presumption that all things Indigenous are ripe for the taking: blood, identity, bodies, land, heritage, spirituality, being, voice. While Alexie and Dimaline explore these issues through speculative fiction, the racist collusion of science, religion, and politics is hardly outside the scope of reality. To offer one high-profile example, historian Ian Mosby published an article in 2013, which shocked many settler Canadians, about Canadian scientists subjecting residential school students to horrific experiments in the 1940s and ’50s to assess the impacts of

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malnutrion, with lifetime health consequences for the survivors. It’s no surprise that the target population served by the research resulting from this torture wasn’t Indigenous people—it was, of course, white Canadians. It’s not an isolated story; indeed, what’s more surprising than anything is that so many people were surprised—this is familiar and intimate knowledge for Indigenous peoples around the world. Going back to the specifically literary, we need look no further than the 2016 controversy over Joseph Boyden’s identity claims, or to the spring 2017 uproar over appropriation of Indigenous voice that accompanied an ill-conceived editorial in Write magazine, to see that such settler claims continue unabated, especially in Canada. Tuck and Wang argue convincingly that such moves “are hollow, they only serve the settler,” and, even worse, work as “excuses, distractions, and diversions from decolonization.” They shift attention from peoplehood to ethnicity, thus prioritizing settler colonial ways of thinking about belonging and further distancing us from the complicated obligations of Indigenous kinship. When vague claims to ancestry—real or perceived—are privileged over the actual, named ancestors whose particular lived struggles and experiences made possible our present, when non-Indigenous “authorities” affirm their untrammelled right to speak on and represent Indigenous matters, then Indigeneity is evacuated of significance as anything but a commodified and easily repurposed symbol. When the bodies of the ancestors are stripped of dignity and reduced to objects, when the ties between the living and the dead are dismissed and pathologized, when even the stories that make legible those relations and their commitments are taken from us, then the interpretive threads that link the past to the future become frayed, or even torn apart completely. Without those ancestors, without their stories, there is nothing to carry forward—there is nothing to bring to future generations. Fortunately, our storykeepers are also storytellers, and the

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possibilities for restoring and restory-ing those connections are limited only by our imaginations and the futures we envision. This, to me, is a vital way to think about being and becoming a good ancestor: it’s about those who imagined actual futures for us, those who didn’t accept the settler colonial “vanishing Indian” as a given. And it’s the Indigenous future we’ll consider as we wrap up this chapter about ancestors, for it’s only in the looking backward and forward— and in the imagining of different possibilities than the ones we’ve inherited—that a viable future is made possible. Well over a decade ago, I was chatting with a Sioux friend who teaches American Indian literature in the US. At the time, I was finishing up revisions to my first fantasy novel, a removal story not unlike that of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and we began discussing the fantasy genre and its relationship to Indigenous peoples. I was surprised to note how increasingly agitated she seemed to be with the conversation, until she finally said something along the lines of, “Daniel, I’ve got to be honest—I’m really uncomfortable with this idea of Native fantasy. Most of what’s written about Indians is fantasy anyway.” I knew exactly what she meant. Those words have stuck with me for all these years. And although I’ve continued writing these stories and books, and insisting on their value alongside more “realist” fiction, I hear her words now as both a caution and a challenge, in a time when competing imaginaries offer very different visions of the future as well as the past. As I understand that conversation, the tenuous but increasingly important place of Indigenous literatures in the academic community was significantly connected to the ways in which that body of literature is read as a realistic expression of Indigenous lives, experiences, and ways of being, as a counter to the stereotypes and outright lies of colonial writers and policy-makers. If the Eurowestern settler imaginary misrepresents Indigenous peoples to our detriment, a vital part of our struggle—from the earliest Indigenous writing in colonial languages all the way to the contemporary moment—has been to put

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forward and insist upon better, more accurate, and more honest depictions of Indigenous being. As a result, fantasy—and, worse, genre fantasy—was too slipshod, too compromised by the oppressive history of the colonial imaginary and its savagist projections. All true, but also, I think, incomplete. Very often, Indigenous and other marginalized writers take on the task of challenging stereotypes and misrepresentations, to offer our stories as imaginative and humanizing interventions against the dehumanizing projections of those in power. Given that so much of what people think they know about Indigeneity is self-serving colonial fantasy that justifies and rationalizes the continuing theft of Indigenous lands, violence against Indigenous bodies and relations, marginalization of Indigenous lives, and displacement of Indigenous being, there is a deep and urgent need for more accurate representations. And given the cultural capital of literature in this age, literary representations are some of the most powerful for pushing back against the colonial imaginary. It’s no wonder, then, that the relationship between “the real” and “the fantastical” is a fraught one. While many Indigenous writers could be said to write fiction that engages fantasy tropes, most aren’t explicitly fantasy writers. There are good reasons for this. To be tied too closely to fantasy is to risk being seen as silly, simplistic, escapist, or delusional, and these presumptions justify all kinds of exclusions and oppressive policies. For secular, post-Enlightenment readers of the industrialized West, the very ideas of spirit beings and little people, individualized and speaking animals, stones, and plants with powers to shape the reality around them and motivations of their own, human actions changing weather and affecting various elemental forces, and other worlds of being and kinship with the other-thanhuman peoples, are the stuff of childish make-believe or even pathology, not generally understood as the mature, experiential realities they are in most traditional Indigenous systems. Too much emphasis on these alternative understandings of the real and the

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possible (rather than the strictly symbolic and spiritual) thus put the hard-won access and respectability of Indigenous literatures at risk; after all, Indigenous literature courses, while not available in all departments or institutions, are now a bit more recognizably literary than are speculative fiction courses. Even the category of “magic realism” fails to fully meet this challenge, given its basic assumptions about the ultimate artificiality of the “magic” part of the definition. Yet the assumption of a singular model of “realism” as the dominant standard against which literary merit is measured is problematic, especially for those minoritized communities whose alternative ways of engaging that reality don’t always fit smoothly into the assumptions of Eurowestern materialism—what Leroy Little Bear (Blood) aptly describes as “jagged worldviews colliding.” Privileging this narrow definition of literary realism can actually work violence against our struggles for figurative and experiential liberation, for it presumes, first, that there’s a singular reality against which all others must be compared, and second, that any cultural expressions or understandings inconsistent with that interpretation are deficient at best, pathological at worst. And it’s worth returning to our discussion from the Introduction about the stories of Indigenous deficiency, which, while grossly stereotypical and often overtly racist, nevertheless remain the supposed reality of Indigenous experience for most of settler society. When “realistic” fiction demands consistency with corrosive lies and half-truths, imagining otherwise is more than an act of useful resistance—it’s a moral imperative. In its most transformative modes, speculative fiction offers a complementary and distinctive range of reading and interpretive strategies that can undo the violence of the deficit models of “the real” and offer transformative visions of other lives, experiences, and histories. Fantasy, science fiction, and horror merit consideration as serious literature with ethical import, deserving of critical and pedagogical regard. It’s time for a reappraisal of the relationship between realism and the fantastic, especially when considering the

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work that marginalized writers are doing to challenge oppressive lived realities through the intentional employment of the fantastic to imagine otherwise. Take, for instance, “The Undiscovered,” a short story by the late Oklahoma Cherokee science fiction writer and editor William “Sundown” Sanders. The scenario is a simple one: what if, sometime in the late sixteenth century, William Shakespeare had been shipwrecked on the east coast of North America following a drunken Portsmouth debauch that saw him accidentally stow away on the Moonlight bound for Virginia? And what if, after various adventures, he ended up a slave in a Cherokee community—and continued writing plays? It’s an intriguing conceit, and one that could easily be mishandled by focusing on the playwright’s overdetermined presence. But Shakespeare is just one voice in the story, and not the dominant one. Instead, that belongs to one of the town’s medicine men and the captive’s first real friend, Mouse, who recounts the tale to an unseen interlocutor from a neighbouring nation. He tells of a strange man they call Spearshaker, and the “talking skins” on which he made the marks that brought him such great acclaim among the Real People. When Spearshaker is heard, it’s through missives written on those skins during his exile among the Cherokees—which, incidentally, Mouse can’t read—and it’s through this dual voice of Mouse, whose affectionate friendship with the prisoner and distinctive worldview sets the frame for the narrative, and Spearshaker, the stranger in a strange land whose seeming familiarity to the English-speaking reader becomes more distant as the story proceeds, so that a strange kind of alchemy takes place. After Spearshaker is brought into the community, Tsigeyu— Wolf Clan mother and sister to Mouse—tasks the medicine man with teaching the stranger to “speak properly.” This begins a process of exchanging words and ways. Spearshaker is now embedded in

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Cherokee contexts, yet continues his own ways, especially his odd marking of deerskins. The resulting Elizabethan English fragments are the remnants of Spearshaker’s account, indicating both a growing appreciation for and continuing struggle to understand the Cherokees among whom he lives. After he helps defend the community against a raiding party of Catawbas, Tsigeyu adopts him as a brother, and he takes on a new role in the community. Mouse believes him to be a kind of medicine man, as he spends so much of his time putting strange marks on the leaves, and at long last Spearshaker explains what he’s doing: he’s writing a plei. This plei thing is a mystery to Mouse, and to the rest of the community, but following Mouse’s encouragement they accept Spearshaker’s strangeness and indulge his desire to produce this plei, which seems to be an account of a ghost-haunted young chief named Amaledi—Hamlet. What follows is both hilarious and poignant. Numerous misunderstandings and challenges in cross-cultural communication ensue, especially as, Mouse admits, “white people do everything differently from everyone else in the world.” This is a Cherokee cosmos, not an English one. Having no context for theatre of this kind, the Cherokee aktas are sometimes befuddled by Spearshaker’s instructions, but they do their best to understand it and help him realize his vision. Mouse tries to explain the process to his visitor: Or . . . let me try this another way. Don’t your people have dances, like our Bear Dance, in which a man imitates some sort of animal? And don’t your warriors sometimes dance around the fire acting out their own deeds, showing how they killed men or sneaked up on an enemy town—and maybe making it a little better than it really happened? Yes, it is the same with us. Now this plei thing is a little like those dances, and a little like the pretending of children. A group of people dress up in fancy clothes and pretend to be other people, and pretend to do various things, and in this way they tell a story.

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Eventually the plei takes place, and it’s a success—though for very different reasons than Spearshaker had intended: And the people loved it, all of it. How they laughed and laughed! I never heard so many people laugh so hard for so long. At the end, when Amaledi fell dead between his mother and Panther and the Platform was covered with corpses, there was so much howling and hooting you would have taken it for a hurricane. I looked out through the mats and saw Tsigeyu and Bigkiller holding on to each other to keep from falling off the bench. Warriors were wiping tears from their eyes and women were clutching themselves between the legs and old Dotsuya was lying on the ground kicking her feet like a baby. I turned to Spearshaker, who was standing beside me. “See,” I said. “And you were afraid they wouldn’t understand it.”

Yet rather than being delighted with the joyful response, as Mouse anticipated, Spearshaker is broken by it: He blinked slowly, like a turtle. I saw that his eyes were red. “Believe me, Spearshaker,” I told him, “they were laughing because it was such a funny story. And that was your doing.” His expression was very strange indeed. “They thought it comical?” “Well, who wouldn’t? All those crazy people up there, killing each other—and themselves—and then that part at the end, where everyone gets killed!” I had to stop and laugh myself, remembering. “I tell you,” I said when I had my breath back, “even though I knew the whole thing by memory, I nearly lost control of myself a few times there.” I got up. “Come, Spearshaker. You need to go to sleep. You have been working too hard.”

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But he only put his head down in his hands and made some odd noises in his throat, and muttered some words I did not know. And so I left him here and went to bed. If I live until the mountains fall, I will never understand white men.

Spearshaker’s vision was to create grand tragedy, but for the Cherokees observing this absurd scenario, he created something different, something that brought them together in laughter and affection. Unable to reconcile the two, Spearshaker abandons his art, though he remains among the People until his death a few years later. Mouse recalls the change with regret: “Whatever happened that night, it changed something in Spearshaker. He lived with us for many more years, but never again did he make a plei for us. . . . At last we realized that his medicine had gone, and we left him in peace.” It’s a poignant moment, but a hopeful one, too. For all their differences, for all their mutual strangeness to one another, they are kin to one another now, and love and generosity are what define their interactions. It’s a model we see far too rarely, and one we desperately need. Mouse shows the “talking skins” to his guest, but it’s not the content of the skins that matters most to him now—it’s the relationships these texts represent and their connection to his nowdead friend and Wolf Clan brother. “The Undiscovered” makes Shakespeare both less and more familiar to modern readers, just as the distant world of the sixteenth-century Cherokees feels closer and more tangible than the England of Shakespeare’s day. It’s a compelling revisioning of a past and a reimagining of different futures that might have been—and, perhaps, could be still. I like this story, as much for its imaginative grounding in Cherokee subjectivities and its gentle generosity as for its playful reimagining of Shakespeare and his place in the canon. It’s also a good point for returning to the theme of this chapter—becoming a good ancestor—as well as our earlier conversation about the presump-

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tions we bring to the idea of “literature,” and how those impact both Indigenous writing and speculative fiction. And here, too, we face the presumption of deficiency. Even with its hard-won advances, Indigenous literatures aren’t “literary” enough for many scholars and critics; to go back to my conversation about Indigenous fantasy, it’s no wonder my friend didn’t want to add the pathologization of fantasy and the scorn of genre snobbery on top of it. Again, deficit persists as the defining trope for Indigenous peoples in the settler colonial imaginary. In this construction, “real” Indigenous peoples are always Other, always diminished, always the reduced shadow of our former greatness. So if the “real” is that which is passed away or gathering dust on a museum shelf, the “real” of Indigenous experience must therefore only be about deficit and loss. The range of narrative possibility is narrowed to only the most disempowered or disempowering stories, where Indigenous realism is that which reinforces this particular perspective, which itself can serve as a colonialist fantasy of the deficient Indian who needs to be uplifted through majority beneficence. Canadians and Americans love their tortured, brutal, and generic Natives, who fade or die away or experience horrific violence as an inevitability of their Indigeneity, but they don’t seem to know what to do with the stories of Indigenous people who root their resistance in specific lands, enriching love, and ongoing and defiant presence. This language of deficiency is a precondition for low expectations. Both are crippling, for Indigenous peoples and for everyone else, as they diminish the depth of understanding between individuals, between peoples, and between our time and others. A relationship based on deficiency is, by necessity, an impoverished one. If the “real” is only about language loss, we miss the extraordinary language recovery efforts of many Indigenous communities. If the “real” is only about dysfunctional and abusive families, we don’t see the many Indigenous families where substance abuse is not a shattering problem or is only part of a much more expansive and

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complicated set of experiences, where there is strong and loving support across the generations, where education is valued as an expression of tradition, not in opposition to it. If the “real” is only about dispossession, then we lose the stories about communities fighting and succeeding to regain lands and inherent territorial rights and relational obligations to the other-than-human world. As famed UK fantasist China Miéville has pointed out, A realist novel, of whatever brilliance, is always limited by its relations to reality because of the paradigm in which it’s working. Whereas the fantastic is able to do certain things—and obviously ninety-nine percent of it doesn’t do those certain things, but it is potentially in its form able to do those things in a way that nothing else can. . . . I think there is something in the fantastic which has the potential to engage with the lived reality of modernity in a way that the supposedly realist cannot.

“Realistic fiction,” when framed by social presumptions that naturalize colonialism and its effects, and that presume the inevitability of Indigenous deficit, is as much a compromised perspective as that of escapist fiction that also avoids these contexts. Either option closes off options. There most certainly are Indigenous writers for whom the fantastic—in fantasy itself, or in its sibling genres, horror and science fiction—offers greater scope for addressing issues of decolonization and self-determination than realist fiction. As Ojibway critic Carter Meland notes in relation to science fiction: The question then becomes how do Indians who have written sf engage these themes of imperial expansion and righting what has been wronged. Decolonization, undoing colonial and imperial habits of thought, especially as they relate to indigenous people, is one of the central concerns of Native writers and schol-

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ars in general. Native sf writers are no different from their peers working in other genres. . . . For the moment, suffice it to say, that sf by Native writers concerning Native characters seeks to privilege Native power, to present Native ways of seeing and being as legitimate, and to explore the differing ways of perceiving the universe we all share.

For Indigenous writers of speculative fiction, the fantastic is an extension of the possible, not the impossible; it opens up and expands the range of options for Indigenous characters (and readers); it challenges our assumptions and expectations of “the real,” thus complicating and undermining the dominant and often domineering functions of the deficit model. Among the contemporary Indigenous writers doing fine work in this vein in North America are the previously mentioned Eden Robinson, Gerald Vizenor, and Drew Hayden Taylor, Richard Van Camp (Tłįchǫ), A.A. Carr (Navajo), Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet), Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (Mohegan), Daniel H. Wilson (Cherokee Nation), Blake Hausman (Cherokee Nation), Sequoyah Guess (United Keetowah Band of Cherokee Indians), Rebecca Roanhorse (Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo), Darcie Little Badger (Lipan Apache), Mari Kurisato (Cote First Nations Ojibwe), and the late Robert J. Conley (Cherokee Nation), Don Birchfield (Choctaw Nation), and the aforementioned Sanders. And there are many others across the world. Yet we must acknowledge, too, that fantasy, in its conventions, carries its own representational burdens that Indigenous writers are also necessarily working against. The savagism-versus-civilization binary elaborated by Roy Harvey Pearce, Robert Berkhofer, and other historians of ideas as the dominant ideological structure of the West—in both self-identification and representation of Others—is very much the world-building template in fantasy fiction. Indeed, if any literature can be said to be the safe haven of this intellectually and morally bankrupt concept, it is that nebulous

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textual archive known variously as genre, adventurer, or heroic fantasy, wherein largely white heroes possessed of courage and, sometimes, strange talents struggle to challenge evil and reaffirm the values of social conservatism and right order—namely, might is right. Civilization is bad or good; savages are noble or brutish—yet in either case, the conflict between a simplistic primitivism rooted or trapped in the past and a contemporary progressivism of technological complexity is the superstructure undergirding the narrative content of most genre fantasy. The textual archive that has grown up, mushroom-like, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s great shadow is, for better or worse, informed by the same ideological apparatus that shaped his legendarium, his great myth-building project. Tolkien’s epic story of English pastoral goodness besieged by swarthy techno-fascist hordes added a moral certitude, literary cachet, and coherent secondary-world mythology to heroic fantasy, a genre which, to that point, had largely been dominated by the violently misogynistic and racialized phallic fantasies of Robert E. Howard, creator of the Hobbesian barbarian Conan and the Puritan witch-hunter Solomon Kane, and whose own work was influenced in no small degree by the literary eugenics of the eccentric Rhode Island pulp writer H.P. Lovecraft. But why does this matter at all, especially in a discussion about becoming a good ancestor? A genre so vexed offers numerous objections to those who want to redeem it. Black fantasist Octavia Butler offers one of the best responses I’ve seen to this question in relation to why science fiction matters to Black people, and, by extension, their struggle for justice and liberation: What good is any form of literature to Black people? What good is science fiction’s thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology,

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or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what “everyone” is saying, doing, thinking–whoever “everyone” happens to be this year. And what good is all this to Black people?

The implication is, of course, that science fiction is very good for precisely those reasons—it makes us think more deeply, broadly, and creatively than we might otherwise have done, and it posits possibilities beyond those authorized by the very people who profit from our subjection. Further, fantasy matters because there’s good anecdotal evidence that genre fiction is the primary literary fiction read by most readers, including Indigenous and queer audiences, with fantasy, science fiction, horror, and supernatural romance among the most popular. If this is the case—and if we believe in the power of literature to liberate both imaginations and bodies—then abandonment of these genres isn’t a sensible or even ethical option. If we’re reading these works, they belong to us, and we can change the genres to reflect our imaginations, our fantasies, and not just those of an oppressive worldview that sees us as walking anachronisms. And here’s where escapism comes in, and where Tolkien as critic is particularly useful. In his often-overlooked but influential essay “On Fairy-Stories,” originally presented as a public lecture in 1939, Tolkien argues for the good of escapism. For Tolkien, the fantasy impulse to escape the oppressive and dehumanizing aspects of modern life is a positive impulse, but he distinguishes between the “escape of the prisoner,” who continues the struggle against those oppressive forces, and the “flight of the deserter,” who abandons the fight and his fellows. Escape, then, presumes an ongoing engagement with the world, not a repudiation of or a removal from it. At its best, fantasy offers places of sanctuary from which to continue the good fight.

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If the colonial imaginary is predicated on a fiction of Indigenous deficiency and absence, an empty frontier awaiting white supremacy to give it shape and substance, then what alternative does the escapist Indigenous imaginary offer to us as readers and as bearers of story? How might a different way of engaging our histories and imagining our futures chart a different course for relationships and different possibilities for the future? My friend’s words return, and I want to honour those. She’s right. “Fantasy” as it’s commonly understood for us is dangerous, because it’s so deeply entangled in settler colonial logics of dead matter, monolithic reality, and rationalist supremacy. But we can offer our imaginations as something entirely different. Terminology is just one issue; imaginative orientation is the more significant challenge—and, I think, the one that promises a better way forward. In thinking about speculative fiction in the context of what it means to be a good ancestor, and in considering how, as future ancestors, our work today is in part to offer better alternatives, I want to suggest a different term in place of fantasy, speculative fiction, or even imaginative literature. These terms and concepts are burdened by dualistic presumptions of real and unreal that don’t take seriously or leave legitimate space for other meaningful ways of experiencing this and other worlds—through lived encounter and engagement, through ceremony and ritual, through dream. I suggest instead that “wonderworks” is a concept that offers Indigenous writers and storytellers something different and more in keeping with our own epistemologies, politics, and relationships. It’s a term that gestures, imperfectly, toward other ways of being in the world, and it reminds us that the way things are is not how they have always been, nor is it how they must be. It’s in Indigenous wonderworks that some of the best models of different, better relationships are being realized, and it’s these stories that give me hope for a better future, even in these scary times. In short, I think wonderworks

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help us become better ancestors, as they allow us to imagine a future beyond settler colonial vanishings, a future where we belong. If the term “fantasy” presumes some measure of falsehood or deeply Freudian impulses too readily transformed into pathology and neurosis, it also presumes a kind of arrogant certainty over what is real and unreal, true and false, legitimate and delusional. “Wonder,” on the other hand, is a word rooted in meaningful uncertainty, curiosity, humility; it places unsolvable mystery, not fixed insistence, at the heart of engagement. It’s hard not to think of the Anishinaabeg concept of “Gitche Manitou” as an excellent example. Although often translated as “Great Spirit,” when I lived and worked among Anishinaabemowin speakers in Ontario, I was told that the creative force of the universe is more accurately understood as “Great Mystery”—not a jealous celestial patriarch to be obeyed, but a profound and ultimately unknowable mystery to be honoured and attended to, if never fully understood. Etymologically “wonder” is of uncertain origin, but always keeps astonishment, admiration, and even a bit of mindful fear at its core. Wondrous things are other and otherwise; they’re outside the bounds of the everyday and mundane, perhaps unpredictable, but not necessarily alien, not necessarily foreign or dangerous—but not necessarily comforting and safe, either. They remind us that other worlds exist; other realities abide alongside and within our own. Wonderworks, then, are those works of art—literary, filmic, etc.—that centre this possibility within Indigenous values and toward Indigenous, decolonial purposes. It’s a concept of increasing currency for Indigenous scholars. Brian Kamaoli Kuwada (Kānaka Maoli) and Aiko Yamashiro (Japanese/Okinawan/ Chamorro) remind us that wonder changes us and changes our world. When we stop marvelling at ourselves—ourselves in the most connected and expansive sense, that is, we as individuals, as activists, as communities, as past and future ancestors, as gods, as mountains

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and rivers and ocean—we lose belief in our ability to heal and transform even the deepest wounds. The act of bringing new life to our Indigenous stories reawakens our lands and peoples to remember the power we have always had, to feed our families and strangers, to care for the past and future. Hope is fed by our ability to apprehend and trust our storied connections, by the rush of unexplainable movement, by the unruly growing of our love and gratitude for the strange and marvellous ways we live on.

As Michael Lujan Bevacqua and Isa Kelley Bowman argue in the context of Chamorro wonder tales, “these histories of wonder flow seamlessly into the promotion of visions of futures of wonder that counter colonialism and promote ecosovereignty, the political and the cultural self-determination of an Indigenous people,” and call for “a new cartography of futures of wonder, activism, and literary criticism” that grounds wonder in specific relationships of specific peoples to specific lands and histories. It offers other possibilities than the template. It gives us a different future. Indigenous wonderworks are neither strictly “fantasy” nor “realism,” but maybe both at once, or something else entirely, although they generally push against the expectations of rational materialism. They’re rooted in the specificity of peoples to their histories and embodied experiences. They make space for meaningful engagements and encounters that are dismissed by colonial authorities but are central to cultural resurgence and the recovery of other ways of knowing, being, and abiding. They insist on possibilities beyond cynicism and despair. For example, if we read Eden Robinson’s classic Monkey Beach as simply a realist or even magical realist or Northern Gothic text, then all the encounters with the Spirit World—the little man with red hair, and the sasquatch (b’gwus)— are ultimately reduced to little more than delusional projections by the narrator Lisamarie, or dismissed as mere symbolism. And if, in this construction, she’s delusional, the teachings that connect her to

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the land and her family are, at core, little more than falsehoods— elegantly realized, but artificial in the end, even within the sweeping category of fiction. We can certainly read Robinson’s novel in various ways, and we should continue do so, but to ignore the wonder at the heart of the novel is to do violence to the ongoing struggles of the Haisla people to protect the health and integrity of their lands and communities—both of which include other-than-human peoples as part of that work. It’s a novel, yes. It’s fiction, yes, with fantastical creations drawn entirely from the author’s imagination. But is it “fantasy”? Perhaps it’s something else entirely. Does this matter at all? Many critics are quick to dismiss speculative literatures as escapist at best, reactionary at worst, and calling these stories wonderworks doesn’t change the rationalist bias that continues to dismiss Indigenous ways of knowing, spiritual and ceremonial traditions, and traditional concepts of other-than-human personhood as something other than “real.” Settler colonialism is a heavy weight on our bodies, as well as on our imaginations. Of what value, then, is wonder in a time of trauma like the one we inhabit? First, these works remind us that there are other ways of being in the world than those we’ve been trained to accept as normal. What good are wonderworks? They offer us hopeful alternatives to the oppressive structures and conditions we’re continually told are inevitable, material “reality.” As Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) notes in Walking the Clouds, her trail-cutting anthology on Indigenous science fiction, such work “returns us to ourselves by encouraging Native writers to write about Native conditions in Native-centred worlds liberated by the imagination.” Wonderworks give us alternatives that the champions of “the real” too often foreclose upon in despair and cynicism. They remind us that there are other ways of looking at and living in the world, different ways of engaging with one another and our other-than-human relations. They insist on difference, not as deficiency, but as distinction. They’re rooted in the land—not generic landscapes but specific places with histories,

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voices, memories. They carry the past forward. They give us a future, even if it’s only an imagined one. But without that imagined possibility, it’s all too easy to believe we don’t belong there, and that’s a road to a very frightening place indeed. Indigenous writers continue to produce work that articulates and even anticipates our potential for transformative change, if only we bring to it the best of our imaginative selves. Freedom of love, of desire, of life, culture, and political survival—these are only realized through the linking of our courage to our imaginations. We can’t possibly live otherwise until we first imagine otherwise. Our literary and literal ancestors made possible the world we now hold in trust. It’s our responsibility, for as long as we’re given to bear it, to carry their work forward, to help realize their hopes, and to ensure their fears never come to pass. We will have done our job as good ancestors if the world we leave is one more fully alive with the stories of our time and those before, if the struggle of those who came before is honoured and shared, if the justice of our fight and the rightness of our relations carry on beyond us. If anything, that’s the true wonderwork, the truest realization of being a good ancestor, and one worthy of deepest gratitude: imagining beyond the wounding now into a better tomorrow, working, writing, and dreaming a future into being. a

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Chapter 4

How Do We Learn to Live Together?

Have you got it? You got it, right? And now I want you to act on it. And tell your friends, and tell your friends to tell their friends, and tell their friends to tell their friends. That way we can all live together like a nice big happy family! —Wa awa ate Fobister, Agok w e

O

f all the vital commitments we have in this life, figuring out how to live together is the one we spend the most of our time and attention trying to figure out. It’s at least partly why we have custom, law, protocol, diplomacy, education, economies, and so on—these are all deeply concerned with sorting out ways of living together, or, more often, trying to manage the complexities of our inabilities to do so. How we become human, how

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we behave as good relatives, how we become good ancestors—all of these concerns are, in part, about living together within the context of autonomous identities in relationship. If relationship is the central ethos of Indigenous literature, then we must consider how these works articulate existing relational concerns and offer new possibilities, fresh perspectives on existing conflicts and struggles. Yet it’s not only the question of Indigenous and newcomer co-existence that requires consideration, it’s living with one another as Indigenous peoples, with our human and other-than-human kin, with our ancestors and those beings of worlds beyond our own, including those of the future. While grappling with the intrusions and catastrophes and possibilities of living with and among colonial populations while retaining our own ways, priorities, and relations, we must always be wary of giving priority to this narrow context at the exclusion of the others. This focus is difficult to achieve in the current moment in Canada, where “reconciliation” has become something of a phenomenon in the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s searing final report and transformative calls to action. Yet it’s telling that the singular term “reconciliation” has become the shorthand form of what was originally conceived as the compound “truth and reconciliation.” Truth has been largely dropped from the discussion, at least on the part of settler Canada—not surprisingly, given this country’s longstanding commitment to historical amnesia when it comes to Indigenous issues, as with the almost entirely unfulfilled promise of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples from the 1990s. Without truth, of course, reconciliation can only be surrender to the status quo, as it’s devoid of the accountability that comes from hearing, embracing, and answering to the truth. For Indigenous survivors of the residential schools, their families, and their supporters, reconciliation was always intended to be an active and ongoing relationship; for the Canadian government and many Canadians, reconciliation was a

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one-time process that made financial amends, a few good speeches, and then moved on to business as usual. When resource extraction companies have reconciliation liaisons and hard-right evangelical churches use reconciliation as the rationale for their renewed vilification of traditional values and traditions, we know the term is increasingly devoid of significance—even dangerous. We need to return truth to these discussions. We need to think of relationships as ongoing commitments, not one-time-only resolutions. If we’re going to figure out how to live together, we need to accept that we’re actually going to be doing so—and the terms of that relationship can’t only be those that benefit settler society. If we’re serious about establishing better relations than those we’ve had in the past—and if we’re serious as a country and as a broader, multinational, multicultural, and multivocal community—then we must return our attention to Indigenous voices, perspectives, and experiences. There’s simply no other way of moving forward. To do otherwise is to replicate the injustices and exclusions of the past, and that hasn’t ever served any of us very well. It’s simple: no truth, no reconciliation. Mi’kmaq scholar and educator Marie Battiste sets out the challenge with crystal clarity: Indigenous peoples worldwide are still undergoing trauma and stress from genocide and the destruction of their lives by colonization. Their stories are often silenced as they are made to endure other atrocities. . . . For them and for all Indigenous peoples worldwide, we seek to initiate dialogue, advance a postcolonial discourse, and work actively for a transformation of colonial thought. It becomes our greatest challenge and our honour to move beyond the analysis of naming the site of our oppression to act in individual and collective ways to effect change at many levels and to live in a good way.

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Learning how to live together is about living better in relationship, but for that to happen, we need to combine new action with transformed thought—our own, as well as that of others. Here, again, is where Indigenous writers come in. Stó:lō writer Lee Maracle is probably one of the most consistent and compelling truth-tellers writing today, and she is as insistent on the important work Indigenous peoples must do within as she is on the work non-Indigenous peoples are called upon to undertake. As a traditional teacher and orator, as well as a multi-genre writer, actor, activist, and educator, Maracle has committed much of her work to the telling of hard truths with fierce love, as realized in this principle: “If you have hard truths to offer up to someone make sure the voice is soft, the language beautiful and that you protect the dignity of the other. When the storm clears, make sure you all see sunshine” (italics in original). The truth must be told—change is impossible otherwise. But when its purpose is a better way of being, when continuing relations are a priority, the truth, no matter how difficult, makes it possible to realize a new, and, one hopes, happier set of possibilities. Of course, we know that the truth is often hard to face. There’s a lot of ugliness to sort out, a lot of unforgiveable cruelty to contend with, losses that can’t be undone. In Celia’s Song (2014), Maracle’s masterful follow-up to her 1993 classic Ravensong, both the eponymous seer Celia and the shapeshifting narrator Mink are witnesses to catastrophe and are thus reluctant truth-tellers. They see more than they want to see, but are compelled by their need to bring healing to a world out of balance, in this case Celia’s Nuu’chahnulth community, which is ravaged by both the colonially imposed traumas of residential school and the consequences of her people’s neglect of their longhouse and abandoned dead. Early in the novel, Mink makes this observation: “This story deserves to be told; all stories do. Even the waves of the sea tell a story that deserves to be read. The stories that really need to be told are those that shake the very soul of you. . . . This happened, even if it didn’t” (italics in original). The story that follows

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grapples with the fallout from these forms of neglect, realized by the double-headed sea serpent that had once guarded the longhouse, but, due to its disrepair, was let loose to torment the People, fuelled by the anger of the unburied dead. Celia, her family, and the secretive Mink work hard to rectify the damage, and they do so by facing their past and its impact on their present; they restore the longhouse, return to traditions of justice and generosity, return to their songs and ceremonies. They look within as well as without, and draw on the energies of all their extended community—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—to create a stronger, more respectful, more grounded present. It’s truth that actually makes it possible for them to live together; it’s truth-telling, even in its challenges, that enables them to imagine a future rather than linger in a present burdened by an unacknowledged past. A similar challenge faces the two protagonists in Richard Wagamese’s 1997 novel A Quality of Light, though for different reasons. While his later work has received far more critical praise, my favourite novel by the late and much lamented Ojibway novelist and journalist remains his second. It is the dual story of Joshua Kane, an Ojibway boy adopted at birth by a white Protestant couple in southwestern Ontario and raised fully as their own, and his best friend Johnny Gebhardt, a white boy seeking certainty in the world, and who desperately wants to be an Indian. Joshua’s debt to Johnny is an unexpected one: “I am Ojibway and the word that brought me to light was Indian. It was carried on the reed-thin shoulders of a boy who lived most of his life in darkness but who shone with the mantle of a hero. I became an Indian because of Johnny Gebhardt.” Even from the beginning, Wagamese confounds stereotypes about Indigenous identity, belonging, family. Joshua’s is not the story of many Indigenous adoptees, especially those of the Sixties Scoop, who were torn from families deemed unsuitable simply for being Indigenous; rather, he’s the child of a teenage mother, given (we assume) willingly to the devout and kindly Kanes and embraced

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in their love, with full knowledge of the fact of his Ojibway heritage but not of its content: It never mattered to me then that I was physically different from the people I called my parents. What mattered to me then was that I felt like a Kane. Ezra and Martha Kane were my parents, and when I was ten my world was shielded, wrapped and protected by the overwhelming love and sense of belonging they planted in me. There were no Indians and there were no whitemen. There was only life.

Yet it’s clear here that Joshua’s early life is an incomplete one. And he credits Johnny—an angry, abused, but loving child seeking some certainty in his unsteady life—with bringing the rest of his story into view: My life as a Kane was lit in the indigos, aquamarines and magentas of a home built on quiet faith and prayer. But Johnny changed all that. Where I had stood transfixed by the gloss on the surface of living, he called me forward from the pages of books. . . . He introduced me to the fragments of falsehoods that things like hate, anger, resentment and denial are built around. He introduced me to life’s stygian underbelly, a visceral world you have to navigate by instinct. He introduced me to Indians and he introduced me to myself. I became a better man, a better preacher and a better Indian because of Johnny Gebhardt.

From the beginning, this is not the story of cultural clash as much as conflation and compromise; the boys—one who’s an Indian and doesn’t know how to be one, the other who wants to be one but will never realize the goal, no matter how hard he tries—are like two binary stars circling this idea of Indianness, first as children who become blood brothers, then as men divided by time and belief.

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The novel opens in the aftermath of Oka with the news that Johnny has taken hostages and barricaded himself into an Indian Affairs office in Calgary with a list of demands for Indigenous rights, insisting that he’ll negotiate only with Joshua, from whom he’s been long estranged. Their division began when, as a sheltered teenager at a new school, Joshua was attacked at a school dance by a group of white students incensed by his interest in a white girl. Johnny rushes to his defense and ends up in jail. The incident is the first time Joshua has ever been made to feel the red-hot sting of racism and hatred, and he’s utterly unprepared for it, as well as its aftermath, when, bruised and full of rage, he confronts his parents for not letting him know what faced him. Unfamiliar with hate and anger, he swears to become a warrior like Johnny and get vengeance on his attackers: “John’s wrong, son,” my father said. “There’s more to being an Indian than just being a warrior.” “What do you know?” I said, pointing a finger at his face. “What do you know about being Indian? All my life you never said one thing, one thing to let me know what I was supposed to be. One thing to let me know how I was supposed to behave— what people expected of me, what they thought of me. You never told me anything. You never told me that they could hate me, that they wouldn’t want me, that they’d beat me. You just let me believe that I was Joshua Kane and that everything would be all right. Well it’s not all right. I’m an Indian! I’m not a Kane, I’m an Indian! And I don’t even know what that means! [”]

The scene is gutting, especially because the Kanes love their son desperately, and he loves them, but none are prepared for the reality of the racism he’s faced, and the fabric of kindness, faithfulness, and compassion that has supported their little world is unravelling.

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The next day, Ezra and Martha apologize to Joshua: “‘You are both an Indian and a Kane, Joshua,’ my mother said. ‘We were wrong not to teach you or help you learn to be both instead of just one. . . . God created you to be an Indian as well as our son, and we got so busy teaching you as our son that we neglected to help you learn to discover yourself as an Indian.’” Together they commit to that purpose, and Joshua’s identity expands to encompass both his current life and the new one opening up to him. Johnny, however, has no such option, which he confides to Joshua in his journal: You spent so much time and effort trying to come to terms with your identity. You’re lucky that you could find a history and a heritage. I never could. There’re not a lot of photographs depicting the rise of white trash, their ceremonies and their rituals. And that’s what we were, white trash. We weren’t supposed to be but my father created us in his image. He walked away from everything. From family, from tradition, from history, from community. Everything. That’s what white trash is—a motley collection existing without the life-enhancing benefits of background. No cultural, historical anchor. No rich emotional homeland. . . . History. I never had one. My father kept it all to himself. His story. That’s all I had. Not history, just his story. He mongrelized us, lessened us, defined us by his bleary-eyed vision of the world. Great. Try growing up with a bloodshot sense of yourself. [italics in original]

This aching hunger for a heritage is part of what binds the two boys together, with the fascinated Johnny serving as Indian guide to Joshua through their younger years. He’s fascinated, but also jealous, when Joshua reconnects with his Ojibway teachings. It’s also why Johnny reacts with fury when Joshua explains that he plans to go into the ministry to bring the two parts of his life together. It’s the beginning of their alienation from one another— Johnny, recently drawn into the activist circles of the American

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Indian Movement and alternately shamed and angered by Dee Brown’s indictment of US colonialism, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; and Joshua, whose similar horror upon learning of that history is tempered through the teachings he finds at Cape Croker, and, later, through Bible school. Both are men committed to changing the world for Indian people: Joshua through Christian ministry, Johnny through militant action. But the more Joshua works to bring his two worlds into accord, the more Johnny responds in anger and betrayal; it’s bad enough that he’s not an Indian himself, but for Joshua to refuse to be the one thing that will always be denied to him is beyond betrayal—it’s a moral failure of the highest order. Joshua’s response isn’t anger, it’s empathy rooted in his deepening understanding of himself as an Ojibway, not the noble savage “Indian” warrior stereotype that has so entranced Johnny. This distinction—one rooted in relations, the other in desire and appropriative fantasy—is a widening gulf between them, one that Johnny is unwilling or perhaps unable to see as part of his own doing, too: It was like I could see the chasm between us. My understanding was built on the tangible experience of healing myself of shame, confusion and sorrow, the palliative confutation of garbled emotions. Johnny’s was forged in anger, resentment and a need to be anything, anyone other than the spawn of his father, a wounding deep and immeasurable. Maybe it was the beginnings of the intuitive therapeutic sense I would develop that told me that this was a gap bridgeable only through a mutual healing. That as long as one of us continued to deny the source of the ache, confront and disarm it, we would be shouting forever across a yawning valley, believing the echoes of our youthful voices, our friendship, would one day call out answers. But they would be just that—mere echoes, dissipated and frail, insistent with the vocabulary of denial.

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In so many ways, these lines encompass the long, vexed relationship between Indigenous and settler people in this hemisphere. For how long will Indigenous peoples contend with settler Canada’s projection of what an “Indian” is or should be? How much has settler Canada refused to face its history, its violence, its ongoing theft of lands and lives? How much has it insisted on that silence as the price for reconciliation? How long can such unjust relations last? The passage becomes particularly poignant when, at the end of the novel, Joshua helps negotiate Johnny’s surrender and the hostages’ release: the men have reconciled as best they can, at last in accord on the need for justice for Indigenous peoples. They step out of the building together with every intention of rebuilding their friendship, only for Johnny to be mistakenly brought down by police when he pulls out two pistols he’d forgotten, intending only to lay them down. Johnny dies in Joshua’s arms, but his words aren’t ended. Honouring his friend’s last wish, Joshua reads out Johnny’s public statement, a declaration of justice for Indian people, of healing for all humanity, of restoration of a world in better balance than the one in which he’d been born, which ends with this plaintive cry: “ join us in the raising of this lodge, this circle of belonging, for the trail has been long, the battles thick and deadly and our spirits cry for the promise of rest.” In his final moments, Johnny urges Joshua to go home, and the novel ends with Joshua returning to Cape Croker for good, to continue his work and honour the best of both his teaching traditions. There, as an Ojibway man, he honours his friendship with the white boy who taught him what it was to be an Indian. A Quality of Light offers a model of relationship touched by tragedy but transfigured through love and empathy. Not all Indigenous visions of a shared future offer such hope; others are more cautionary in purpose. Although the aforementioned Indigenous futurisms scholar Grace Dillon rightly states that “it is almost commonplace to think that the Native Apocalypse, if contemplated seriously, has

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already taken place,” I’m not particularly drawn to post-apocalyptic fiction, television, or film. Apocalypse doesn’t interest me, nor does its realization in the paranoid settler fantasies of untrammelled might, untethered by law or custom, where white people return to a fetishized frontier to carve a new, righteous patriarchy out of the ruin that was civilization. In settler colonial fantasies of the end of the world, we’re all thrown back to a time of glorified, even sanctioned violence, a time where white patriarchs rule this bloody world with impunity. But it’s vital to remember that when Indigenous writers and other writers of colour imagine apocalypse, they think about what endures beyond it, and they imagine the living, loving, and connecting that takes place in the ruins of settler colonial excess; theirs are intersectional worlds where so many of the marginalized and dispossessed find ways of (re)making community together. There’s no space of purity or uncontested authority; women of all sexualities, and queer folks of all genders, shape the future of a world ravaged by patriarchy’s hubris. I think here of some of my favourite writers, the visionary Black futurists Nalo Hopkinson and Octavia Butler, whose fictional dystopias never take a singular model of power as a given, and who root transformative possibility in the minds, bodies, voices, and even dreams of those so often excluded from mainstream visions of the future. Indigenous writers, too, take up these themes with similar purpose: in addition to Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, discussed in Chapter 3, I would add the Tribe Series, by novelist and illustrator Ambelin Kwaymullina (Palyku) in Australia, and The Unplugging, a play by Yvette Nolan (Algonquin) set in the Canadian wild, in a future darkened by the failure of the world’s electrical grids. Yes, Indigenous and Black folks understand apocalypse—our peoples have lived it. For populations that faced eighty-percent mortality and higher due to European-inflicted disease, displacement, enslavement, starvation, military action, and internment policies over just a few centuries—and in some cases mere decades—the

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“end of days” isn’t just the stuff of doomsday religionists or science fiction, but of historical memory and lived experience. It’s the template for our survival today, and that, I think, is key: our peoples survived. The survivors—and those who didn’t survive, but who lived long enough to ensure that the next generation would live to have children of their own—became the immediate ancestors we look to now for guidance. And that makes those of us living today the post-apocalypse survivors of world-shaking catastrophes, the descendants of those who, by luck or skill or both, managed to continue on, to maintain some measure of what existed before, reaffirming or creating kinship ties, ceremonies, and relationships and building anew from the rubble and the ashes. When apocalypse appears as an overt theme in Indigenous writing, it’s more than speculation—it’s experiential, even in its most fantastical, because in a very real way it hasn’t ended. Our nations are still subjected to the terrible traumas of colonialism. We’re still seeing huge numbers of Indigenous children taken into state care and separated from families and communities; we’re still seeing terrible plagues of settler predation, substance abuse, suicide, malnourishment, disease, and impoverishment; we’re still losing access to our lands; and our languages are in most cases threatened or critically imperilled. The list goes on. The days of the Great Dying may be over for many of the People, but the Unravelling continues. Our apocalypse isn’t a singular event, it’s an ongoing and relentless process, not unlike settler colonialism itself. Our nations’ resistance continues, as does our hope that there’s a better world beyond the apocalypse. Our stories affirm this hope, most often by exploring kinship and its powerful capacity to strengthen us, our commitments, and our resolve. In (post-)apocalyptic works, Indigenous writers confront the racial logics of the state and their effects, not just on the human world but the other-than-human as well, and lay bare the self-serving hypocrisies and brutal realities of those more corrosive impositions.

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Make no mistake: even when there is beauty and grace to be found in these works, these are, at heart, horror stories. They deal with death and violence, the suffering of the good and the excesses of the wicked—and the struggles of a whole host of peoples in between. They abound with blood, carnage, and cruelty in ravaged versions of our world on the brink of destruction, or well on their way to that terrible end, and both grapple with the consequences of settler colonialism’s limited sense of kinship and personhood as central causes of the catastrophe. Blood rhetorics become part of the problem—reciprocal kinship becomes, if not a full solution, part of the return to wholeness. The broken world may be overturned, but another world awaits—or at least, its potential lies at the ready. That potential can be for good or ill—there is no guarantee that our future relations will be better than those of the past or present. This is powerfully illustrated in Almanac of the Dead, published on the eve of the 1992 quincentenary of Columbus’s invasion of the Americas, wherein Leslie Marmon Silko chronicles an exploitative capitalist world that is breaking apart, as the spirits of the colonized earth and the dead rise up against the destroyers of the land and its peoples, those who forget their relationships, or who turn those relationships into commodities. The novel is too long and complex to summarize adequately here, but it involves dozens of characters whose disparate stories draw together the threads of prophecy whereby Indigenous peoples return to their duties and commitments in a world ravaged by environmental and social catastrophe. Those who treat other peoples as property to be used, abused, and thrown away are particular targets of the spirits’ rage. Those who seek connection, love, and respectful obligation are given some measure of protection. Ultimately, however, transformation is coming, and it will be messy indeed: Because people everywhere had forgotten the spirits, the spirits of all their ancestors who had preceded them on these vast

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continents. Yes, the Americas were full of furious, bitter spirits; five hundred years of slaughter had left the continents swarming with millions of spirits that never rested and would never stop until justice had been done. [my emphasis]

In Silko’s novel, Indigenous peoples and Indigenous spirits of this land aid those enslaved peoples from afar: “Native Americans had been talking to ancestral spirits who lived in clay jars when the African slaves had appeared. The Native Americans had died off deliberately to spite the Europeans. In death their spirits had been set free to roam at will and to help other powerful ancestor spirits already set loose on the slave masters.” This is a five-hundred-year war, a war in which empathy and connection make possible the great resistance, and colonialist separations of race are far less important in determining one’s relationship to the world and the spirits than being conscious of mutuality and obligations. Clinton, a disabled Black Indian veteran who helps educate the “Army of the Homeless” about the intertwined histories of affiliation and oppression between Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa, visions a reality in which “people who were waiting and watching would realize the presence of all the spirits—the great mountain and river spirits, the great sky spirits, all the spirits of beloved ancestors, warriors, and old friends—the spirits would assemble and then the people of these continents would rise up.” In Silko’s world, this isn’t kinship based on blood relation, but on shared histories and values. Place and belonging are experiential, and demanding. They demand a reckoning. No one emerges unscathed in this sprawling, multidimensional novel, with its shifts in time and space, and relentless and explicit scenes of violence, which critic Jeff Berglund succinctly describes as “a prophetic work that acknowledges the sustained forms of colonialism against impoverished people and people of color, most specifically tribal people of the Americas. Silko’s novel reminds readers of

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the persistence of everyday neo-colonialism, pernicious forms that often go unrecognized and uncritically accepted.” Significantly, Berglund notes that “despite her focus on the Americas and its tribal peoples, Silko links the degradation of Africans and African diasporic peoples as targets of former colonial and continuing neocolonial regimes.” The most powerful statement of this mutuality is near the novel’s conclusion, when the lawyer Wilson Weasel Tail addresses a rapt audience: “How many dead souls are we talking about? Computer projections place the populations of the Americas at more than seventy million when the Europeans arrived; one hundred years later, only ten million people had survived. Sixty million dead souls howl for justice in the Americas! They howl to retake the land as the black Africans have retaken their land!”

Yet, importantly, the battle against exploitative capitalism, ecocide, and racism isn’t simply an act of ruthless revenge by the dispossessed or disembodied. It’s a battle on the land, as well as in the Spirit World, a return of older, stronger, more connecting ways of being. The Chiapas Marxist-turned-revolutionary Angelita La Escapía muses about this reciprocity in anticipation of something more than the struggles of the moment: No human, individuals or corporations, no cartel of nations, could “own” the earth; it was the earth who possessed the humans and it was the earth who disposed of them. Now it was up to the poorest tribal people and survivors of European genocide to show the remaining humans how all could share and live together on earth, ravished as she was. . . . All hell was going to break loose. The best was yet to come.

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Significantly, Almanac of the Dead doesn’t end with the victory of the spirits and the Indigenous and marginalized peoples, but with the beginning of the shift from colonialism to something more. If Almanac of the Dead is a prophecy about a different kind of future, that future depends in large part on more relational ways of relating to the earth, to the ancestors, and to one another. In arguing for Almanac’s status as one of the most important works of Indigenous literature published in the twentieth century, Craig Womack makes an important observation about the novel’s overall thrust: Silko’s metaphor is not entropy but a redistribution of energy. As things European fall back to earth, indigenous consciousness takes over. Ancestor spirits spiral and swirl around the world’s indigenous populations, urging them to rise up, and the continent begins a return to more communal ways of being. . . . Silko’s work is quite optimistic rather than the dark vision that has been described by the critics in regards to Almanac.

Further, he argues, “Silko does not flinch from one thing—Indians will get their land back”: The novel moves inexorably toward such a conclusion. The novel is less certain in terms of spelling out just how this land transfer will take place—whether through the bloody revolution that some of its most radical characters espouse or by the land and its cultures simply reverting to an indigenous consciousness as capitalism inevitably burns itself out . . . either way, voluntarily or by force, the land will regain its indigenous integrity. Unfortunately, the importance of Silko’s novel is so glaringly obvious that no one can see it, and whether American consciousness is voluntarily altered by choice rather than involuntarily by disaster is a frightening question that no one wishes to face.

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The better option is one rooted in different kinds of relatedness, different models of kinship, different ways of living with and on the earth and her varied peoples. This is the future for which Almanac of the Dead holds out hope: a new world on the other side of apocalypse—one way or another. There are many ways of imagining our shared future and the ways we might live together, many paths to possibilities beyond those we’ve inherited. Indigenous writers continue to grapple with these questions, and as more voices find their way to an audience, we have more options to draw from in imagining our own place in these possibilities. How we learn to live together depends entirely on our willingness to be fierce in our truth telling, our empathy, and our courage, as much as on the strategies we put into place for realizing those possibilities of living and being otherwise. In thinking about how we might live together—and under what conditions and possibilities—I want to consider the 2007 run of The Only Good Indian . . ., the last show by Toronto’s celebrated Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble. Founded in 1999 by actor-playwrights Michelle St. John (Wampanoag), Jani Lauzon (Métis), and Monique Mojica (Guna/Rappahannock), and later including Cheri Maracle (Mohawk) and Falen Johnson (Mohawk/Tuscarora), Turtle Gals was born out of a frustration with the diminished and often degrading range of stage roles available to Indigenous women and a desire to realize their own lives and imaginative visions on the stage and in conversation with their diverse communities. Their live shows drew on a range of sources, including traditional Indigenous oratory and storytelling techniques, contemporary Indigenous performance and dance, Golden Age Hollywood productions, vaudeville, nineteenth-century freak shows and Wild West performances, World’s Fairs, musical theatre, and, notably, the public performance tours of Indigenous writers and orators, many of whom travelled throughout North America and Europe to bring attention to their peoples’ calls for justice.

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This latter context is the one most relevant to this chapter, as well as to The Only Good Indian . . . (its title taken from the expression “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” long attributed to US General Philip Sheridan, but by his time already a well-known proverb throughout the American West). The play crosses the boundaries of time and space. Four contemporary actors—all powerful Indigenous women—share the stage with a range of historical personalities, including President Theodore Roosevelt and his wife Edith, Buffalo Bill Cody, writer and activist Gertrude Bonnin/Zitkala-Ša, performers Molly Spotted Elk and Tsianina Redfeather, and the Mohawk poet E. Pauline Johnson. The women attend casting calls and increasingly run up against the limited, stereotyped roles available to them. At the same time, the struggles of the Indigenous women performers of an earlier age unfold in parallel, revealing how much has changed from the days of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West—and how little has really shifted for the representation of Indigenous women’s lives on stage and screen. They’re trying to live and work together in an industry—and a broader society—that wants only stereotypes and colonial fantasies, not the lived realities of these two groups of women. The play is a searing critique of non-Indigenous stereotypes about Indigenous women, and an evocative exploration of the ways in which these artists navigate public expectations and life in the performing arts for both survival and self-expression, but it’s not concerned only with the presumptions of colonial society. Indeed, the most poignant and compelling scenes are those between the women themselves, where the conflicts, frustrations, and limitations of the world they inhabit are the backdrop to the more immediate challenges of their shared relationships, and the ways in which they end up being pitted against one another over the limited range of options and opportunities is a poignant undercurrent throughout the play. It’s a bit of a challenge to write about, as are all of the Turtle Gals’ performances, given the multi-vocal criss-crossings of eras,

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narratives, even personas, but a few key scenes and threads are particularly relevant to thinking about how we learn to live together. It’s not only about how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are able to co-exist, it’s about how Indigenous peoples may live together with one another in spite of all the pain and degradation that settler colonial society insists on inflicting upon us. I was fortunate to see The Only Good Indian . . . on the stage, and the scene that has stayed with me all these years later is a poetry slam between Gertrude Bonnin (Michelle St. John) and E. Pauline Johnson (Cheri Maracle), thrown together as “duelling poetesses” by Buffalo Bill and Edith Roosevelt. Dressed in the very best Victorian fashion, Bonnin and Johnson begin as foils for one another, placed explicitly into conflict by Buffalo Bill and his goading companion. They hurl stanzas from their poems at one another as though they might pierce each other with their word-weapons, each trying to maintain her dignity in an inherently degrading context where their intelligence, talent, even humanity are constantly held in question by their observers. Indigenous writers are almost never represented on the stage; to have two of the leading literary lights of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Indigenous literature sharing the same space, speaking their own lines, represented as strong-willed, strategic, vibrant, even flawed women is to my knowledge entirely unique to this production. And it provides a particularly compelling basis for considering how we might find common ground, and, perhaps, even love for one another in spite of our internal differences. Bonnin is figured as defiant, even angry, as she draws from her highly politicized work, whereas a more imperiously dignified Johnson draws from the nature poetry that had made her so famous. Johnson is clearly Buffalo Bill’s favourite, especially while she remains focused on her nature poetry, whereas Bonnin, for all her accomplishments as a violinist, librettist, and writer, is relegated to near primitive status because of her explicit stand against white

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supremacy. Their back-and-forth poetic riposte becomes increasingly fierce until Edith, watching with increasing white anxiety, cries out “Bill! Get these squaws confined to their dressing room, before they go on the warpath and we have a massacre.” In unison, but with varying emphasis (one emphatic, one questioning), the poets declare, “I am, I am not a squaw. I am, I am not.” As Buffalo Bill pushes the women to their dressing room, he says to them, “Nice work, girlies. Try that again and I’ll have you lynched.” The scene shifts on that menacing note, and Bonnin and Johnson’s conflict continues in the dressing room—as one of the contemporary characters, Mika (Jani Lauzon), steps into the same space a century away to don a tacky faux-Indian outfit, a parallel to the similar expectations of stereotyped savagery the poets are forced to confront. It’s here that their argument takes on a larger, more poignant significance, one that invokes the larger debates about how best to address colonial limits and expectations: Gertrude: Every time we grace the stage, we must speak for our people. Your poems challenge nothing. Pauline: You musn’t have read “Cry from an Indian Wife,” “The Death Cry,” “As Redmen Die.” Gertrude: Then why are you cow towing [sic] to the privileged elite by choosing one of your less stimulating pieces[?] Pauline: I have worked very hard to be discerning with my audience, to enlighten them, so our plight might be heard. (Pause) I don’t forget where I am.

At the same time, the contemporary character Rebecca (Falen Johnson) enters the dressing room, and she and Mika carry on a conversation about dressing up in Indian kit and war paint. Mean-

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while Bonnin and Johnson continue their debate, as the latter removes her Victorian dress and dons buckskin and other “Indian” accoutrements, though their conversation now takes place in less confrontational tones: Gertrude: For whom are you dressing? Pauline: For my audience—I represent a refined English poet reciter and a strong fiery Mohawk woman performer to disarm the “fair Indian maiden” portrayal we read about, written by people who’ve never met an Indian woman. Gertrude: We lower ourselves by this feigning and by doing so, we only serve to prolong our own sorrow at their hands. Our grandparents and children need more from us Pauline. Gertrude carefully studies the items that Pauline is putting on. Pauline: They wouldn’t listen if I didn’t show a well-mannered Indian. I wear the attire they’ve imaged in their minds, in order to get our message across, to upset the Indian Extermination, non-education theory. Gertrude: For whom are you speaking? Pauline: “I stand by my blood, my race.” My father was a renowned Chief, and most beloved to me, as are our people. I am proud to be Miss Johnson and Tekahionwake at once.

Again the scene shifts to Rebecca and Mika putting on the Indian costume and war paint, and as Johnson finishes her preparations, so too does Mika—two strong Indigenous women garbed in white expectation in order to be heard and simply make a living.

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The play goes toward more violent places, where the racist projections of white men’s desire imperil Indigenous women and girls, and where those same men insist that the only good Indian women on stage are those subjected to those same stereotypes. In the contemporary time, Mika, Rebecca, and now Rachael come together to share their frightening accounts, bonding over a particularly traumatic moment on a movie set where Rachael is asked to comment on the absence of pubic hair on a wax dummy of her own brutalized, butchered body. It’s a surreal moment, all the more so as Rachael is played by Michelle St. John, who recounts an event that actually happened during the production of Conspiracy of Silence, a television miniseries about the 1971 murder of Cree teenager Helen Betty Osborne. That scene transitions to a very different one, where images of many smiling, happy, and strong Indigenous women flash across the stage as the women sing “A Song of Hope,” by Tuscarora singersongwriter Jennifer Kreisberg. The action then flashes back and forth between the present and the past, between the contemporary performers trying to make a living in an industry that wants only non-speaking, sexualized stereotypes in buckskin, and a bygone era where the expectations were largely the same. Time begins to collapse: Buffalo Bill and Teddy and Edith Roosevelt become increasingly frantic, their music discordant and disturbing, and the Indian performers of the past transition across eras to become the women of the present, their past struggles and disappointments and concessions strengthening the determined women’s work today. As Buffalo Bill and the Roosevelts disappear into darkness, the lights come up on today’s Indigenous women, who have taken the means of artistic production into their own hands, creating their own films, their own plays, casting themselves and their contemporaries in works that reflect and represent their ways of being in the world, their understandings, dignity, and desires. It’s no longer the colonial imaginary that determines the

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story, it’s Indigenous artists’ imaginations—and, in particular, those of Indigenous women artists—that are now fully centred on the stage, and they come together to perform, to dream, to imagine, in collaboration and in community. Shared creation becomes a transformative act of love. It makes living together and loving one another not merely possible, but beautiful.

Here, at last, is where we come to it. How do we learn to live together? The problem has never been a lack of available options, alternatives for finding meaning and purpose in relationship with one another. What’s too often missing is love in all its forms. Finding common ground that honours justice, embraces the truths of our shared history, and works for better futures takes courage and imagination— but most of all, it takes love. It’s the gentle love Richard Van Camp writes about in “Show Me Yours,” where the members of a wounded northern community find humour and reconnection by walking around with their baby pictures hung around their necks: “Whites, Natives, Inuit—oh we all laughed together when we seen each other and there are just so many beautiful babies inside us all.” They see past the weight of the world and celebrate the endless possibilities in those little faces, and their humanity is affirmed. It’s in the many forms of full, fierce love in an Anishinaabe community, love realized and unrequited and surrendered and returned, chronicled across the linked stories in Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm’s revelatory The Stone Collection. It’s in the love of the land, the waters, and the possibilities of the true self given voice at last in Gwen Benaway’s Passage—one of my favourite works of poetry of the last decade. It’s in the hope and heartbreak of inheritance and the struggle of one generation to take up the

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burdens of another in Aaron Paquette’s young adult fantasy, Lightfinder. It’s the loving commitment to the world beyond the everyday, as chronicled in Armand Garnet Ruffo’s creative and critical work on visionary Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau. And it’s in the interplanetary love between Indigenous women brought together to care for dozens of dogs on a trip to Mars, finding intimate connection and a shared purpose far from home in Darcie Little Badger’s “Né Łe!” The list goes on. So many stories, poems, songs—so much work dedicated to possibilities beyond the impoverished imaginations of those who would long ago have seen Indigenous peoples disappear. So many visions of love made manifest in words, reminding us that we’re worthy of being loved, and called to love in turn. This, I think, is how we learn to live together. We love: courageously, insistently, defiantly. We love the world enough to fight for it—and one another. Perhaps the final words here should go to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg), the prolific multi-genre scholar, writer, and radical resurgence activist, whose work takes up love as a powerful site of political and imaginative struggle. She centres Indigenous women and queer/two-spirit people in this work, insisting that decolonization must be rooted in alternatives to the violent exclusions of the patriarchs. In particular, I look to her short story “for asinykwe,” which to my mind brings together the threads of struggle, hope, possibility, and fierce, courageous love in building a just future better than anything else I’ve read. I can think of no words more appropriate for this purpose than the story’s final few lines, which honour a woman who sets herself to the task of healing her world, one worthy act at a time: she never asked for any recognition, because she wasn’t doing it to be recognized. she did it because it filled her up.

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she just carefully planted those seeds. she just kept picking up those pieces. she just kept visiting those old ones. she just kept speaking her language and visiting her mother. she just kept on lighting that seventh fire every time it went out. she just kept making things a little bit better, until they were. a

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Chapter 5

Reading the Ruptures

The man asks me, “Do you speak Cherokee?” But it’s all I ever speak, The end goal of several generations of a smuggling project. We’ve slipped the barriers, Evaded border guards. I smile, “Always.” —Kim Shuck (Cherok ee Nation), “Smuggling Cherok ee”

T

his is a book about stories, and how and why they matter. It’s about the stories we tell, and the stories others tell about us. It’s about how stories can either strengthen, wound, or seemingly erase our humanity and shared connections, and how our stories are expressed or repressed, shared or hidden,

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recognized or dismissed. Stories are bigger than the texts and the bodies that carry them. When absent, they leave gaps that communicate as surely as the presences. These last thoughts are about what happens when the meaningful stories of our place and belonging are denied us, and how, through their returning, we can knit the jagged edges of our histories across the woundings of time, space, and experience. I grew up a nerdy, light-skinned, mixed queer Cherokee kid in the working-class mining town of Victor, Colorado, deep in the traditional homeland of the Ute people. My mother’s kin came to the region in the early twentieth century as part of the gold rush, and I’m the third generation to be raised on its pine- and aspencovered slopes. It’s beautiful country, in spite of the scars from the old mines and the current open-pit mine operation, but it’s also a hard place to make a living or to hold on to dreams. Yet for me, in the security of my childhood home, youth was idyllic. I’m very blessed to have known a home life where I never once doubted that I was loved and cared for, where I was safe to daydream and be my fey, embryonically gay self without judgment, where my parents’ burdensome financial struggles and their own years-long emotional estrangement didn’t impinge on the care they showed me. It helped that Dad quit drinking when I was six and resolved to be a better father than he’d been to my older half-siblings, and that Mom had vivid memories of abuse at her own mother’s hands and refused to inflict that scarring legacy on her only child. And although I wasn’t particularly popular among my peers and at times experienced a fair bit of homophobic taunting, with “Tinkerbell” and “fairy” being the epithets of choice for quite a few years, it was admittedly pretty benign compared to that experienced by so many others in similar circumstances—even in the same school. So I was largely free to immerse myself in fantasy worlds and imagine belonging someplace else, someplace where geeky misfits of diverse heritage could be lauded as heroes, where

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genderqueer boys could love gentleness and beauty without shame. Home was my own little sanctuary far from the uncertainties of class, race, gender, and desire. As a child, it was enough. Beyond that relatively safe cocoon, however, my family’s intermingled histories and realities were marked by rupture, and those absences and gaps became more significant and more troubling as I grew older. To return to Lee Maracle’s epigraph from Chapter 1—“Find freedom in the context you inherit”—rupture was our inheritance, though one from which it was very difficult to find freedom, if for no other reason than we didn’t recognize the rupture for what it was. But there were hints, and more than hints. Our fractured family history led me to a state of abject terror as a three-year-old, when I found out my daddy was “an Indian”; it made me impatient when Dad watched his TV westerns, especially if there were Indians on the screen; it led me to associate my mixed heritage with class shame and to want to escape to something more “respectable,” something far from the place I increasingly associated with a whole range of imagined deficiencies. The gaping absence of story about who we were, where we came from, and where we belonged fuelled my escapist teenage anglophilia and led me instead to see England as a pilgrimage site of gentility and sophistication, far from the coarse realities of my mundane world of mountain hardship and beaten-down imaginations. When I went to university I came under the influence of a charismatic professor, and my insecurities left me vulnerable to this much older man, whose own Eurocentric class anxieties gave him insight into my hunger for respectability and belonging. And although I stepped away from the ledge of self-hate and despair—marked by something close to a nervous breakdown when I was about twenty—and began to embrace my family and our messy, enmeshed, even shattered histories, in the years since I’ve come to recognize just how formative these ruptures have been to who we are and how we abide in the world.

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As a writer and scholar for whom story is the central axis of understanding, the absences and the hard-fought returnings of some of our stories—who we are, where we come from, how we came into relationship with one another—have carried some of the deepest grief and the most transformative joy in my life. Some people are fortunate to have access to these things from cradle to grave, but not all of us have that luck. For many, our lives are a process of restoring—re-storying—the bonds that connect us and our families to those who came before and to those who come after, while grappling as honestly and fiercely as possible with the consequences of the ruptures in those relations. In both its noun and verb forms, rupture speaks of violence, violation, fragmentation, pain. It comes to Middle English from Anglo-Norman and Latin terms for breaking and tearing apart, mostly bodily limbs and bones, but also laws and customs, even social orders. With human bodies it’s about tissue torn asunder, flesh ripped, boundaries breached; often it’s about something putrid bursting forth, wrongness unleashed. It’s about what erupts outward, as well as what forces its way in. It’s a word that invariably refers to violence to bodies: human, geological, political. It’s never a good thing. But it’s always meaningful. In reflecting on why Indigenous literatures matter, I’ve never considered literature to be simply that body of creative expression on a bookshelf or electronic device. Our literatures are the storied archives—embodied, inscribed, digitized, vocalized—that articulate our sense of belonging and wonder, the ways of meaningmaking in the world and in our time. Sometimes those literatures are the stories we tell around the kitchen table or the songs shared at the ceremonial ground; sometimes they’re spoken at a microphone at the back of a crowded coffee house or read in solitary silence at the end of a long day; sometimes they’re discussed with vigour in a classroom or whispered softly over a lover’s damp skin. However they’re

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shared, our literatures speak of our continuity and presence in the world today. But ruptures, too, can be read. The absences tell stories of their own.

In 1828, when prospectors found gold in that part of Cherokee territory claimed by the state of Georgia, thousands of white settlers descended on the lands of what had become the Cherokee Republic. This was followed by Georgia’s brutal harassment of the Nation, which was precipitated by the Republic’s defiant adoption of a written constitution that affirmed the Cherokee people’s collective intention to remain firmly rooted in our ancient homeland—even while explicitly disenfranchising Cherokee women and Cherokees of African heritage. That year also saw the election of Andrew Jackson, the Indian-hating advocate of white supremacy and Indian expulsion, to the US presidency. In 1830, with Jackson’s enthusiastic support, Congress passed the notorious Indian Removal Act, which provided for forcible eviction and relocation of Indians from lands desired by white Americans. One of the saddest missed opportunities in our history can be traced to this moment, as the Act passed the House of Representatives by a mere five votes—and I wonder what might have happened if five people made a different choice that day. Unsurprisingly, the lands to which the Indians would be “removed” were at the time already inhabited yet deemed unfit by whites, whereas the stolen lands were almost invariably rich in natural resources and potential for white profit. The leaders of the Nation, most notably Principal Chief John Ross, fought removal through all available channels: appeals to Congress (which were supported by such influential whites as Daniel

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Webster and David (Davy) Crockett), letters to newspapers throughout the country, and lawsuits brought before the US Supreme Court—Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), both of which would come to be foundational decisions for US Indian policy. By 1835, however, the pressures of removal policy and coercive trade and commerce restrictions, Georgia’s increasingly brutal and illegal attacks on Cherokee sovereignty, and US/Georgiaagitated inter-tribal conflict, led a few hundred Cherokees to sign what would be known as the Treaty of New Echota with the federal government, thereby exchanging all Cherokee territory for other Indians’ land in the Indian Territory in what is now northeastern Oklahoma. The signatories were not the elected leadership of the Nation, which had boycotted the treaty meeting. Self-ordained leaders, they saw surrender as the only hope for survival, and they—and the People—paid a heavy price for that decision. In spite of the fact that nearly sixteen thousand Cherokees signed petitions opposing the treaty and had no voice in its illegal and unrepresentative creation, Congress ratified the fraudulent document in 1836. It passed by a single vote in the Senate—another what-if moment. Two years later, the vast majority of Cherokees, many enslaved African Americans (including many of Cherokee heritage), and some intermarried and allied whites were driven from their homes and rounded up into filthy, disease-ridden concentration camps by federal soldiers and border-trash militiamen. Over the next few months and through brutal weather, illness, and innumerable dangers, the dispossessed captives set out on a thousand-mile death march that would come to be known as the Trail of Tears, or the Cherokee Removal. It’s important to remember that dozens of other tribes were removed, as well; ours gained greater notoriety only because we were considered by whites to be the “most civilized” Indian nation, but up to a hundred thousand Indigenous people were uprooted as a result of the Indian Removal Act. From the beginning of the ordeal to its end, through a late, blazing sum-

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mer and an early, bitter winter, up to a third of the Cherokees perished, with unknown numbers of enslaved African Americans dying alongside them. About a thousand Cherokees managed to avoid capture; these escapees became the core of what is now the Eastern Band, the only Cherokees to remain a continuous community in the old homelands of the Nation. A few thousand Cherokees were already living in Indian Territory—including the Old Settlers, who sought to avoid white expansion a few years before removal, as well as the Treaty Party, who avoided the agonies of the Trail through their betrayal—when the survivors of the Trail arrived in their new home. On 22 June 1839, three of the four leaders of the Treaty Party were executed in carefully coordinated attacks just weeks after the newcomers’ arrival, including leading figures Major Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and John Ridge. All were well known advocates for Cherokee sovereignty before they signed the Treaty, but they came to the conclusion that the Nation had more to gain from surrender than continuing resistance, and their killings plunged the Nation into turmoil. The Republic was quickly torn between the minority loyal to Stand Watie, the most prominent surviving Treaty Party leader and relative of the Ridges and Boudinot, and the majority loyal to John Ross, the elected Principal Chief of the removed Nation. Most of my Spears and Foreman ancestors were firm partisans of Chief Ross; I’m directly descended from his long-time ally James Spears, who in 1839 was believed to be among John Ridge’s primary executioners, along with his brothers and some in-laws. It was probably true given the family bonds (James’s father John had long been friends with Ross, and served with him under then-General Andrew Jackson in the 1814 Horseshoe Bend campaign against the Red Stick Creeks), the longstanding political commitment to Cherokee land sovereignty, and James’s earlier arrest for attacking a pro-Removal agitator in the head with a rock. James was married to Elsie Foreman (or Alsi/Ailsey, depending on the chronicler), who also came

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from a prominent family of Ross loyalists, for a time the most notable of whom was her brother, the Reverend Stephen Foreman, a devout, Cherokee-speaking Presbyterian minister and an influential leader in the Nation before and after Removal, though later a vocal supporter of Stand Watie and chattel slavery. Elsey’s halfbrother, Richard “Bark” Foreman, was considered a skilled Indian “root doctor” and collaborated to some degree on a book with a white physician about “Indian medicine.” Yet I’m related, too, to Cherokees who supported the Treaty, and these tangled relations complicate any easy righteousness about ancestral loyalties. In spite of continued conflict with Watie’s own supporters, most of the Old Settlers finally joined the Ross party, and all set to work on rebuilding the Nation with the reunification Constitution of 1839. Beyond its political and historical import for the Cherokee Nation as a whole, this document holds particular personal significance, as alongside the signatures of Stephen Foreman and other extended family members, the 1839 Constitution bears the “x-mark” signature of the aforementioned James Spears, my third greatgrandfather. Leech Lake Ojibwe scholar Scott Lyons calls x-marks “a sign of consent in a context of coercion,” especially in the context of Indigenous treaties with Eurowestern agents in which such “signatures of assent” often appear, given that those treaties were almost always monolingual English-language documents of forced negotiation and surrender. James Spears’s “x” alongside his English name on an English-language document affirming Cherokee solidarity and sovereignty might not immediately be legible as the same kind of sign. But the great political and kinship rupture in the Nation at that time was a direct result of settler colonial land hunger and displacement policies, the pressures of Eurowestern economics and cultural imperialism, and relentless militarism combined with assimilationist missionary efforts, so the systemic “context of coercion”—another context we’ve inherited—looms very large indeed

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over a document otherwise written and mobilized to affirm Cherokee nationhood, reunification, and defiance. As such, that x-mark—and the document on which it is said to appear, at least in transcribed versions of it—also represents the complicated political commitments of a man whose actions both helped tear the Nation apart (by helping execute the younger Ridge) and suture it together again (through the 1839 Constitution), even if imperfectly and for only a little while. Unlike his brother-in-law Stephen Foreman, who was an able writer and held positions of documented prominence in the Nation, and from whom we have writings and even a striking photographic portrait, this x-mark represents the single material trace (that I know of so far) of James’s life in his own hand. Aside from a scant handful of mentions by others, there is nothing else to indicate his existence. Nothing, that is, except his descendants. And the only stories we have are the ones we’ve been able to recover from the documentary record. Nothing about his life, loves, commitments, or personality has come down in family story; no mention of his work, bloody and otherwise; no history or documents shared from generation to generation. And that’s more than we have for Elsie/Alsi/Ailsey, our third greatgrandmother in that line; most of what we’ve found in the archive privileges the men and renders the women invisible aside from their names. Our embodied memory goes back only to Elsie and James’s grandson, my great-grandfather Amos, and only because of my dad, who at the time of this writing is the only living relative to have known him, even if only for the first fourteen years of his life. Of James we have only an x-mark and a legacy; of Elsie, only a name. The archive is both an imperfect tomb and site of resurrection. For now, it has to be enough.

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The Nation rebuilt quickly and surpassed all expectations in its reconstruction. Male and female educational seminaries and a public school system were established, along with a revived national newspaper (The Cherokee Advocate, which exists today, once again, as the Cherokee Phoenix), a national capital, city improvements, homes, and farmsteads. Though plagued by financial problems and grappling with its own displacements of and conflicts with Indigenous neighbours, oppression of enslaved African Americans and Black Cherokees, and continuing land hunger from white settlers, the Nation still managed to establish itself firmly in its new home. This period of relative calm was shattered by the US Civil War, which reignited the conflict between the Ross (Union) and Watie (Confederate) parties, a conflict that exploded across the Nation. When Union troops were pulled from Indian Territory and Confederate forces took their place, Ross was forced into alliance with the Confederates. This relationship, although made under coercion and disavowed by Ross before his death in 1866, was used to justify the victorious federal government’s demand that the Nation cede nearly half its territories and allow railroad access through its lands. This step prompted a mass influx of white settlers into land once promised by the US to remain Indian country “forever.” By the 1880s, the pressure was on once again for the extinguishment of Indigenous title to the lands of Indian Territory and their transition to states fully within the legal structure and political authority of the US. The method used this time was direct assault on the tribal body itself through allotment, the splitting of land formerly held in common into individual parcels (for Cherokee heads of household, generally 160 acres). Families frequently selected their allotments together or in near proximity. After all individual tribal members received their basic allotments, the “surplus land” was

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opened to white settlement, thus effectively shattering tribal authority and autonomy over lands once collectively held. Cherokees weren’t part of the initial allotment process, which was focused on smaller and less ostensibly “civilized” peoples, but subsequent Congressional measures further circumscribed tribal sovereignty until, in 1898, the Dawes Commission began the process of extinguishing the Cherokee body politic, along with those last holdouts of the “Five Civilized Tribes”—the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles—forcibly enrolling tribal members on what would come to be known as the Dawes Allotment Rolls (the lists of names from which Cherokee Nation citizenship is today derived). Tribal laws and courts were eliminated that same year by the Curtis Act; US citizenship was forced on tribes in Indian Territory in 1901, thus fully extending federal authority over communities exploited by and unrepresented in state and federal politics (including taxation and the draft, without the protections of the Bill of Rights). The Five Tribes fought to establish the State of Sequoyah out of the Indian Territory, an Indian-majority state alongside the looming state of Oklahoma, but Republican President Theodore Roosevelt worked against their efforts in order to prevent political advances by the Democratic Party in the newly created western states, where the Republicans were in greater danger of losing power. In 1906, my grandmother Pearl was born, most likely at home on the plot of land that would be her father’s allotment. In 1907, Oklahoma and the Indian Territories combined to become the single state of Oklahoma, an event that formalized the US’s elimination of Indian title to the land and the official termination of our tribal republics. Tribal governance receded to community-level work, and the dream of strong, self-sustaining Indian Nations went underground for the first part of the twentieth century—yet it was never extinguished. That dream was rekindled in the 1970s and remains strong today—although allotment remains the great rupture in this history, far more traumatic for us than either Removal or the events

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that followed the Civil War, for in those circumstances the Nation was gravely injured but still largely physically intact, both in terms of land and population. Allotment utterly transformed the Cherokee body politic in what is today Oklahoma; every Cherokee family from the region has stories about the catastrophic impacts of that policy, and those who still maintain their allotments and the physical ties to the land, history, and culture that accompany it are the fortunate exceptions. Ours is a pretty typical story. My paternal great-grandfather, Amos Spears, left Oklahoma around 1920 with his family, including his oldest daughter Pearl, moving from his inadequate primary land allotment in the lush green hill country of Vera, just north of Tulsa, to a larger ranch on the arid prairies of eastern Colorado, land far more suited in size, if not aesthetics, to support his wife Essie and what would eventually tally up to seventeen children. Documents in his allotment jacket show that he tried on more than one occasion to sell his allotments, but was denied at least once due to his high blood quantum; it was standard policy of the time for Indians of “halfblood” or higher to be considered incompetent to manage their own financial affairs. There’s no indication in the documentary record why he was finally given permission to sell, but in 1920 Amos joined thousands of other Cherokees who—through choice, desperation, or deception—surrendered their allotments to white settlers and left the Nation to build lives elsewhere. I found the detailed maps with his allotments, along with those of his mother Mary Jane (Crockett) Spears, brother Dennis, oldest son Edward, and extended Riley kin in close proximity; I’ve driven within viewing distance of those places, now fenced in and inaccessible as someone else’s private land, well marked with “No Trespassing” signs along dirt roads with Confederate flags on prominent display. It’s hard not to wonder what the sale of those lands has cost us in the years since, as we’ve scattered across the continent.

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The land speaks, but even if we listen, too often we don’t understand its voices. Even so, there are other ways of understanding these legacies and histories. One is by reading the allotment maps. I see these plat maps as something akin to our literature: a set of complex, hybrid texts chronicling both Indigenous suffering and survivance, texts worthy of contemplation, understanding, even mourning, for they, too, reveal an aspect of our adaptive defiance too easily missed in simplistic notions of land loss and assimilation. The maps weren’t of our own making, imposed as they were by a nation-state hell-bent on our long-term erasure; but even so they reflect the labour that thousands of Cherokees undertook to hold on to some measure of connection and autonomy under brutal circumstances, labour inscribed in the seemingly endless names written in crisp, clean handwriting across erratic patchwork parcels of land of every size and shape, encompassing nearly all of what would become northeast Oklahoma. Take just one map as an example: Township 23 North, Range 13 East. See page 196. One of over two hundred extant plat maps of the Nation, these maps do more than simply chart geographic features: they chronicle relationships, names, families, lineages. Amos’s main allotment is in section 27, near the now nearly vanished town of Vera; his brother’s allotment is directly beside his to the west; his oldest boy, Edward, has three fragmented allotments—one directly north of Amos’s land, one directly south, and another, larger tract to the northwest of Amos’ brother Dennis’s holdings. None of these were large enough to make a real living, especially for farmers. To the east and north, they’re flanked by related Rileys: Polly Ann, Richard, Mamie, Mabel, Ruth, John, Printice. A whole passel of Gritts are nearby; other notable family names within close walking distance are Ross, Swimmer, Downing, Christie, Shade, Coody, and even a related Foreman or two. And then there are the Bendabouts, the Breads, Bigfeathers, Hummingbirds, Livers, Whitmires, Bigmules. Amos’s second postage-stamp allotment is in

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Plat map of Cherokee Nation allotments, c. 1906. Amos’s main allotment is in section 27, alongside those of his brother, eldest son, and extended kin. Map courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Township 22 North, Range 17 East, closer to Claremore, not far from Will Rogers’s family landholdings, and not too far from those of his mother Mary J. (Crockett) Spears and siblings John and James. Mary’s allotment jacket includes appeals for land parcels also claimed by her neighbours (she lost every case). She seems to have been something of a disturber of the peace, which

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may explain why Amos and Dennis lived at a remove from her and the younger children, who may or may not have been half-siblings, given the long estrangement between her and their father Charles. Mary lived among Boudinots, Wards, Whirlwinds, Starrs, Adairs, Foremans, and Henrys. Every map is like this, a two-dimensional mosaic of storied relations on the land, a profound narrative moment at the edge of a transformative epoch in the Nation’s long history. More than representations of fragmented land holdings and assigned property owners, the maps might be considered cartographic kinscapes that affirm Cherokee relationality with, across, and beyond the physical bounds of the contested territory. While each map is an imperfect abstraction of the land itself, kinship relations are inscribed across the map overtop of random and irregular parcels to such an exaggerated degree that the map’s artificiality is heightened, while the relationships affirmed by the kinscape are, ironically, rendered more vibrant and real than the vague marks delineating land parcels. Cherokee readers with familial ties to the names marked on those maps engage the texts with varying degrees of relational anticipation; these relations, in turn, connect self and family to specificities of place across time and space. The more you know the relationships, the more the maps reveal about the connections and the fracture points, the obligations and the evasions, the ongoing links and the attenuated ties. To that end, these cartographic kinscapes communicate relational continuity in the Cherokee reader while simultaneously thwarting any hope of narrative closure. There can be no real closure in the ruptured histories and physical displacements explicitly realized by the maps and their colonial purpose. These maps both invoke and displace kinship; in reading them as both maps and family histories, they connect us at the very moment they disrupt those connections. Thousands of names spread across the surfaces of this kaleidoscopic tapestry of letters, numbers, and lines, each representing innumerable connections,

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divisions, continuities, and ruptures. When you know some of these storied relations, the kinship patterns inscribed on this representational landscape begin to make sense, though they can never fully capture the reality of the lived experience on the physical land itself. Even in this painful fracturing of the Nation, the people clearly maintained their connections and relations as best they could. It’s clear that’s what my family did, at least for a while. And the more stories we learn, the more we realize just how much folks were able to hold on to—as long as they remained on the land and in specific relation to one another. Of course, once they surrendered those lands, by choice or otherwise, others stepped in and claimed them, and the displacements expanded yet again, even generationally. Old relations were severed, or at least severely attenuated. Contiguous family allotments became alienated from one another; new fences went up, new crops were planted; people scattered. Over the past hundred years, the vast majority of these allotments have left Cherokee hands, and with them have gone so many of the deeper relations and meaningful stories that had maintained the Nation and kinship ties for so long. Some people stayed and maintained those old fires of family and culture; some returned in time, reconnecting as best they could, in close proximity if possible, but still nearby. Mine is one of the many families that never came back to live in the Nation. In the leaving, we left behind the majority of stories that would make sense of what remained, leaving a gaping hole in our family consciousness—which is not to say, importantly, that nothing remained. It’s vital to emphasize this key point: not all families left; not all people disappeared; not all fires went out. Many people kept those fires, remaining behind to feed the embers until the flame of nationhood could be stoked strong again. Those of us whose families left the Territory owe those who remained a deep and lasting debt of gratitude and acknowledgement. Our experiences as dispossessed outlanders is certainly Cherokee, but in so many ways they’re of a

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radically different kind than those of people who were land-rooted and culturally Cherokee; legal scholar and historian Rennard Strickland (Osage-Cherokee) has identified such experiential distinctions through different categories of Indian people in Oklahoma: sociocultural Indians, legal Indians, and individuals of Indian descent (not entirely different from the legal, living, and dead Indian categories posited by Thomas King in The Inconvenient Indian). One more in the list of the many colonization-inflected complications to these relationships through the ages and across hemispheres. Amos’s oldest daughter, my grandmother Pearl, was a teenager when her family moved to Colorado. Within a few years, she was married and began a family of her own with Jesse Jake Justice, a dark-skinned but bigoted man of ambiguous heritage who throughout his life insisted he was fully “Black Dutch”—not an uncommon claim for people unwilling to admit to Indigenous, Black, Jewish, or otherwise othered lineage. Pearl would have four children before she died at age 39 in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Colorado Springs: one child, Alice, died in infancy; my dad Jimmie and his older sister Alverta would live to adulthood, as would their half-brother, Larry, who was born out of wedlock well after Pearl and Jake divorced, and who appeared in my life for only one brief summer before disappearing again for good. The last time my father saw his grandfather Amos was after Pearl’s funeral, when the old man collected his deed to the house she’d lived in. Amos eventually moved to California, where he died in 1975 at age 99, six months and three days before I was born. As Jake actively discouraged the children’s contact with Pearl’s family, Dad never had much to do with the Spears relatives again aside from very occasional visits from various aunts and uncles, and a yearly phone chat with his mom’s youngest brother Gus, who died in 2016 having lived well into his nineties. Given his conflicted relationship with his own father, once Dad was independent as a teenager he had almost no contact with relatives in the extended Justice family either, although his sister did.

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Amos Spears and Pearl (Spears) Justice (later Bowers), early 1940s, likely Colorado Springs. Photo courtesy of the author.

Even now, at the edge of 90, Dad takes a strange bit of pride in the fact that he’s always been something of a loner who doesn’t much like to be bothered by other people, especially extended family, although his mother’s death three-quarters of a century ago is still an acute loss. He was just nine when Pearl went away for

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treatment, and fourteen when she died. In the last few years of her life, he saw little of her due to her declining health and his father’s intransigence. Dad was also a small, phenotypically Native boy who came of age when being visibly Indian in an explicitly racist society was accompanied by both social disadvantage and material danger. He was defiant, always ready to fight anyone who said something ugly about him being an Indian, as that was the thing that most characterized his much-loved mother. But while always immensely proud of being Indian in an ethnic sense, when growing up he never really had a chance to learn what it was to be culturally Cherokee. This, I think, is the most painful, tangible rupture of all. Had Pearl lived, Dad would likely have stayed more firmly connected with the Spears family, as he clearly preferred them to his Justice relatives, who, it seems, were largely unkind. (He tells a heartbreaking story about his paternal grandmother, who, one Christmas when he was around eight or nine, gave him a bag of dirty marbles but said they were a gift from Santa. Dad realized at that moment that Santa didn’t exist, for he knew the real Santa would never give dirty marbles to a child. It was the first of many disappointments Dad would face as a boy.) Even if read through the lens of nostalgia, it seems clear that Pearl was the one truly loving and dependable person in his childhood, the one who called him “Sonny-Boy” and showed him kindness when no one else would. When he lost her, he lost the link to a family, a tradition, a people; it might have sustained him in his loneliness. Instead, alcohol and the rootless career of a cross-country trucker would be his life for the better part of four decades. In spite of a rich and complicated life with four consecutive wives and multiple children of blood and affinity alike, there’s always been a part of Dad that’s been closed off and protected, a direct consequence of his mother’s death and the loss of everything she represented. But as I grew older, and, as an undergraduate, began to reach across the generational divide where my grandmother and paternal

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family once stood, Dad took the journey back with me. We got our citizenship at the same time, though I was in my early twenties and he was in his sixties. Even now, when the Cherokee Phoenix arrives in the mail, he chats with me on the phone about it, asking if I, too, got my “Indian paper.” He took great joy in getting phone calls from Principal Chief Chad Smith at election time a few years back, although now with his mid-stage dementia he insists that Chief Smith came to visit him in person to discuss Cherokee politics, as if imaginatively recreating a blood memory of Chief Ross and James Spears in council together at the 1839 Constitutional Convention. He loves hearing all about my trips to Oklahoma, political issues in the Nation, my view on the current administration, what our allotments look like today, and what work I’m doing on Cherokee writing. Until recently, this belonged to just the two of us; my eldest brother, the only one of the three children from Dad’s first marriage that he raised, wasn’t much interested for many years, as his childhood associations with Dad’s Indianness revolve largely around alcoholism and neglect. No judgment—I had a very different father growing up than he did, and I’m grateful for it, though sad that my brother was denied the same. My other half-siblings are interested but conflicted for various reasons; it’s my nephews and nieces who are the most curious about this branch of the family, though it’s at an even greater remove for them than it has ever been for me. As the unofficial family historian, I put together as detailed a family history as I could, which I sent to my half-siblings, and this has brought some of us into closer communication than ever before; I’m grateful that my eldest brother is now a citizen and eager to reconnect with this part of the family. It feels like at least one generational wound might be healing up, one rupture scabbing over. As is often the case, rupture isn’t limited to only one generation, one group of kin; Mom’s family, too, is marked by these painful fracture points and silences; if anything, it’s more profound for her given how extensive the genealogical archive is for Cherokees. The

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vast majority of American families have no such documentary trail to follow, and that is certainly the case with Mom’s various family lines, which are notably sparse compared to Dad’s, even considering the ruptures in his family history. She’s always been supportive of my work, but has admitted to feeling a bit left out, wishing I was as attentive to her side of the family as I’ve been to his, especially given that I’ve been more involved with her brothers and sisters growing up than I’d ever been with Dad’s. As best we can tell, she’s descended from German Jewish Schryvers, English Smalls, and ambiguous Sparkses, who are, depending on the records you examine, either Chickasaws unjustly left off the final rolls or, far more likely, white folks squatting on Chickasaw land for years to claim it. Either way, the history of that family functionally ends two generations back, leaving little more than a legacy of hints and presumptions. I’m Cherokee by citizenship, history, political relationship, and family lineage, but not by language, culture, or groundedness in lands alive with Cherokee significance; what I hold in one hand is absent in the other. So many of us know this reality, in so many communities, families, selves. I’ve accepted that I’ll never have all the stories to knit the pieces of my family’s experience together in a seamless whole. But flawless restoration to a state of perceived perfection isn’t something I desire, for the scars tell their own beautiful and terrible truths of continuity, and only living flesh forms scars. For Indigenous peoples the world over, that, too, can be a victory. But we can share more than our stories of suffering and scarring— we can share our strength, our laughter, our love. I belong to all of these lines, the intact and the unravelled, the tangled and the torn. Like all human beings, I’ve inherited some stories that have woven their way into my consciousness of self, but others remain unheard, unspoken, unremembered. There are gaps in our shared kinship that will never be bridged, absences too complete to fill, but there are some frayed edges that knit together with only minor scarring to show. It’s in both the honest whole and the

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honest fragments that our fragile humanity is most beautifully realized. And it’s the shared stories and the shared silences together that shape the complicated contours of our narrative selves. By reading the ruptures as well as the presences, the intact as well as the broken, we may come to a humbler sense of wonder, and, I hope, a generosity toward ourselves and each another, a recognition of the myriad ways our experiences likely shouldn’t reach across our difference but thankfully so often do. It’s in that strange alchemy of self and other that we find what matters most. And it’s in the sharing of our stories that we realize we’re not alone in the struggle, that others, too, seek to comprehend both the ruptures and the connections, that there is an important purpose for resisting settler colonialism and its erasures. Moving across vast stretches of geography and years, and in spite of all the forces that work to keep us silent and broken, disconnected from the world, from ourselves, and from each other, our stories help to restore our relations and remind us of our connections, our commitments. They remind us that we matter. We matter for our own sake, and for those of our kin. We matter on our own terms, and for those who inherit what we are meant to pass on. We matter because stories abide in living cultures and living peoples. We carry the hopes, dreams, fears, and fierce determination of those who came before, those who had faith enough to trust in us that we might carry that bundle forward, imperfect as we may be, and continue that act of faith into a future where we belong, for as long as there is a world left to honour with story, song, prayer, and love. a

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Conclusion

Keeping a Fire

G

eary Hobson, author of The Last of the Ofos and a long-time advocate and scholar of Indigenous literatures, ends his correspondence with a simple but evocative phrase: “Keep a fire.” Those words are a reminder, an affirmation, and a commitment all at once. They hold us accountable and hold us up. It’s a phrase about the work we do and the reasons we do it, and makes clear that our task is to feed that fire, protect it, keep it going—it won’t live on its own without attention and care. Like anything that matters, we’ve got to look after it. The work matters, too. I’ve been infinitely blessed to have had my life transformed by the power of Indigenous story and to see it do the same for friends, family, students, and strangers. To read and listen to these words— in prose and poetry, ceremony and song—and to share, study, consider, and teach them, is a sacred trust, one in which imaginations are set free of settler shackles and new possibilities of humanity, kinship, heritage, and relationship are realized. I know that Indigenous literatures matter, because I’ve seen how they’ve changed the

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lives of so many people—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike— and I’ve experienced the same in my own life. Yet this experience was always enmeshed with more problematic, even absurd complexities that speak to the place of literature in our lives and identities, its power . . . and its danger. As a bookish, daydreamy child and teen, I always looked to books to help understand the world and other people; they helped me navigate the treacherous waters of awkward social interaction, even as their main value was to remind me that other worlds were possible beyond the contexts of my little mountain town. As I grew older and entered my teens, other questions began to emerge, especially around identity. Who was I? Who were we? I knew that through my dad’s family we were Cherokee, but didn’t know what that meant. So, in the absence of culturally grounded family who could help me answer those questions, I did what I’d always done: I went to books. And the book I chose—recommended by a family friend—was the first book I’d ever read from an Indian perspective. Not just Indian—Cherokee. The book was The Education of Little Tree, a funny, tender book that was advertised at the time as the autobiographical reminiscences of a mixed Cherokee man with the evocative name of Forrest Carter. It is the story of a wiser-than-his-years child raised by his country-wise, moonshine-running, half-blood Granpa and fullblood Granma in the Tennessee mountains during the Great Depression. The trio and their coonhounds navigated a world of racist whites, devoted Black sharecroppers, dishonest Christians, generous Jewish tinkers, big-city criminals, “guvmint” law enforcement, and Indian agents. For all our differences, Little Tree felt so familiar to me; I, too, grew up in the mountains, with a Cherokee father the same age as my peers’ grandfathers, and a mother who, before becoming more conservative in her theological and political beliefs later in life, raised me as a pagan Unitarian Universalist in all but name. I roamed the hills around my hometown with my pugs at heel, had a strong dislike of Baptists, raided neighbourhood rhubarb

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patches, and lived a life not entirely unlike that of Little Tree. We read the book aloud to my dad, who also found that it spoke to him and his own experience as a mixed-race Cherokee boy growing up on the Colorado plains in the Depression. We loved it. The book quickly supplanted my previous favourite, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, all the more so because it was about me—it was about us. I would never be a hobbit, but damn it, I could be a Cherokee like Little Tree. I read it every year. I suggested it to others. It told me a story that was so familiar; it became part of my story of self. It wasn’t until I was an undergraduate that I learned the shattering truth: The Education of Little Tree was not an autobiography—it was entirely fictional, in the worst way. It was a lie. The author’s name as Asa Earl Carter, not Forrest. He wasn’t a sweet Cherokee kid raised in kindness to know “the Way,” a vaguely mystical philosophy of natural equanimity, by his isolated Cherokee grandparents in the Appalachian hill country—he was a vicious, violent white supremacist and segregationist who used Cherokees in his fiction as thinly veiled stand-ins for the lost Confederate cause. It’s beyond the scope of this discussion to revisit the incident in detail—I’ve written about it elsewhere—but what’s important here is how and why Little Tree was so important to me, and why the revelations about its authorship were so devastating. Without reliable stories of our past and our relations, I turned, as always, to books to make sense of who we were, and in a broader culture that accorded high cultural capital to book learning, these books took on a kind of infallible authority. The reason Little Tree felt so familiar was not because of its supposed autobiographical authenticity, but because it so skilfully manipulated stereotypes in the broader culture that reinforced what most people knew—or, more accurately, thought they knew—about Indians. And in the absence of viable family stories and any lived experience of grounded Cherokee culture, The Education of Little Tree filled that space with simplistic, romantic noble savages disconnected from community, ceremony, and kinship. The Cherokees of Little

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Tree were every bit as fantastical as Tolkien’s burrow-dwelling hobbits . . . and far more dangerous. This story used to embarrass me, but having heard very similar accounts from other Indigenous folks about their complicated encounters with all kinds of problematic texts—from the romanticized German fantasies of Karl May to Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves and Disney’s Pocahontas, all the way to the more recent film Moana and the comic-book series Scalped—it now serves a more emblematic purpose. The erasure of consciousness that led me and my family to Little Tree was never accidental—it was by social design, the corrosive consequence of a settler colonial education system, popular media, and political culture that always figured Indians through absence, ignorance, misrepresentation, degradation, and diminishment. As a result of my grandmother’s death when Dad was a teenager, we were isolated from the contexts that might have challenged these simplistic stereotypes of vanishing noble savages and brute primitives with stories of multidimensional relationships and complex lived experiences, so we did the best with what we had available. And what was available, in a colonial country where Indians were supposed to have vanished along with the buffalo, was never intended to do anything but diminish us. At their best, in various ways, Indigenous literatures do something different. By virtue of their very existence, Indigenous literatures affirm Indigenous experiences, presence, and possibility. Their value isn’t in their ethnographic accuracy; to reduce these diverse imaginative works to simple cultural reportage is to obscure the visionary commitment and creative capacity of the writers and their creations. Some works will accurately reflect cultural contexts; others won’t. Not all Indigenous writers are culturally grounded, and those who are won’t always share cultural teachings or with full accuracy, for all kinds of reasons—some deliberate, some inadvertent. Some will embed the overtly political in their aesthetic considerations; some will choose a different approach. But all work by

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Indigenous writers adds to a deep, broad, ancient, and profound archive of Indigenous expression that affirms—indeed, insists upon—the right, responsibility, and capability of Indigenous artists to speak our truths into the world on our terms, for our purposes, for the continuity of our peoples and relationships in all their diversity and complexity. I know Indigenous literatures matter because I’ve experienced it in my own life, and I’ve seen how these works have affected the minds and hearts of my students: the Sixties Scoop survivor who, for the first time, read a book by an Indigenous writer who’d gone through the same catastrophic experiences, and who gave voice to the student’s own long-unspoken anguish and isolation; the gay Lebanese Canadian student who read Craig Womack’s Drowning in Fire and wept during his presentation, for it was the first time he’d read something about same-sex relationships from a writer of colour that affirmed the possibilities of a long and lasting love with another man; the non-Indigenous student who took the course to find a connection with her Indigenous stepson and ended up starting a reading group at his school to support him and his friends; the Métis student who, as a result of Beatrice Mosionier’s In Search of April Raintree, acknowledged at long last her family’s longshamed Métis heritage and began the long process of taking up the responsibilities of those relations; the non-Indigenous senior citizen who scandalized the class on the first day of our Indigenous literature course by announcing she had enrolled to find out why “all the Indians are drunks,” and who ended it by getting kicked out of her canasta club for confronting her friends’ antiIndigenous racism—so many profound and powerful examples, so many people whose lives have changed, I hope, for the better as a result of these writers’ words. Whether Indigenous or nonIndigenous, whether rooted deeply in culture or disconnected for generations, whether new to literary studies or widely read in the field, these students’ engagements with these works and worlds

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have taught me so much about the transformative power of Indigenous imaginations. And I’ve had the profound pleasure of watching young Indigenous writers find their own voices through these courses and these works, or hone talents already well underway; of watching Indigenous and non-Indigenous students alike undertake the challenge and delight of studying Indigenous literatures professionally. It’s rewarding but also difficult work, especially to navigate the ethical and emotional complications that come from a field that’s grappling with the ongoing legacies of colonial erasure, co-optation, and misrepresentation. It challenges us to think and do better, and there’s no way of always getting it right. But I’m enormously heartened to see so many brilliant minds and expansive hearts coming together to make things better through Indigenous voice and story. It gives me hope that the future world will be an improvement on the one we’ve inherited, that different stories will mean different possibilities, that we can live, love, and imagine otherwise, and that we can do it together. It’s our inheritance and our right; it’s our responsibility, as it’s always been, and, with luck and commitment, as it always will be. This, to me, is the fundamental reason why Indigenous literatures matter. They reflect the truths of our survival and our own special beauty in the world to which we belong. They don’t hide the traumas or the shadows; they don’t make everything neat and tidy, or presume that the horrors of colonialism will be easily put to rest—like zombies, vampires, and ungentled ghosts, settler colonialism is nothing if not persistent. But our literatures remind us that our histories are more than tragedy, more than suffering, more than the stories of degradation and deficiency that settler colonialism would have us believe. They remind us that we’re the inheritors of heavy, painful legacies, but also of hope and possibility, of a responsibility to make the world better for those yet to come. That work remains unfinished by those who came before; it’s our work to undertake now. Our literatures connect us to one another, build imaginative possibilities for

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and between our varied forms of community, show us possibilities we didn’t know existed, or return us to knowledge we had forgotten or put to the side. It’s a sacred trust. In all their forms and functions, in themselves and in their study, on their own merit and in accord with our other expressive methods and ceremonial practices, our literatures give us guidance and keep our nations going; they help us make sense of our continuity and strengthen our struggle to put the world, at long last, back in balance. This is the fire we keep: to hold what we were given and pass it on, maybe even add to its strength along the way. We belong to this time, as we belong to those that came before, and as we will belong to those times and places and relations that come after us—in all our difference and uniqueness, in all the ways our diverse peoples recognize meaning and belonging, in this world that our kin have inhabited since before spoken word and inscribed thought. Indigenous literatures matter because Indigenous peoples matter. And that, to me, is a mighty good cause for celebration. a

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Appendix

A Year of #HonouringIndigenousWriters @justicedanielh

I was relatively late coming to social media. I find many technologies to be irritating and intrusive, especially those as commonplace and even expected as Facebook and Twitter, and although I’ve taken them up to stay current with my teaching and research, I tend to be a bit of a reactionary grumbler about the whole thing. It was Idle No More that prompted my first forays into social media: I kept nagging my colleagues at UBC to let me know when events were going on in the community, and they tired of telling me that all the news was on Facebook, finally insisting that I’d need to get online if I wanted to know what was happening. And they were right. In an indignant response to someone’s comment about what they perceived as a lack of Indigenous literature, I decided on 31 December 2015 to start tweeting the names of Indigenous writers, past and present, to push back against the frequent assumption that our literary history is any less complex, robust, or diverse than that of other peoples. My first writer was Beth Brant, who had died just a few months earlier, and whose life and legacy were still very much in my mind as I pondered writers whose work had influenced my own

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literary journey. The responses were so enthusiastic and encouraging that I decided to make it a year-long project. The hashtag #HonouringIndigenousWriters came about a week into the project as a suggestion from Leanne Simpson, whose facility with Twitter was much more sophisticated than my own. It should not have been as big a surprise as it was that I ended up with far more names in the end than a single leap year could accommodate—encouraging evidence that the archive of Indigenous literature is vast and always growing, from the past through recovery efforts to the present and future, thanks to our nurturing of emerging voices and support not only for established but also often unfairly forgotten writers deserving of more attention. Sadly, during that year we lost at least one important voice in Canada, that of Sharron Proulx-Turner—further confirmation that we must honour our writers far more, especially those who, like Sharron, do so much to nurture, mentor, and advocate on behalf of the field and its writers. These are the 366 writers featured in #HonouringIndigenousWriters, but the list is not reproduced here verbatim; some entries have been revised for clarity, to include more accurate information (including, in some cases, recent passing to the Spirit World), or to expand on text titles. I inadvertently repeated one writer; this error remains, but if readers want to add Tenille Campbell (Dene/Métis), Nicola I. Campbell (Nle7kepmx, Nsilx, and Métis), Garry Thomas Morse (Kwakwaka’wakw), Molly Billows (Homalco), Alicia Elliott (Tuscarora), or Samantha Marie Nock (Métis), they won’t be disappointed. And although I did my best to ensure that the writers listed here were actually Indigenous, one of my anonymous reviewers pointed me to some pretty conclusive evidence that Betsey Guppy Chamberlain (3 May) was not, in fact, Algonquin, but rather was a white woman who wrote very problematic stories about Indians. Her name remains in the list to reflect the tweet’s history, but with the caveat attached. Given the many names included below, the complexities of Indigenous identities in the wake of settler colonial-

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ism, and the ongoing popularity of “playing Indian,” it’s certainly likely that other revisions will be required, in which case future editions will be revised to reflect this new information, but in the absence of good evidence for such revisions I will err on the side of inclusivity. As a result of these various changes, some of the entries here will be longer than the 140-character limit of the actual tweets. Given these necessary revisions, this is my preferred version of the list. Readers familiar with Indigenous literature may be surprised to find that some of the most prominent and perhaps expected writers in the field are not on the list. This was a deliberate decision, as some writers are either already well recognized or are highly problematic, and thus have no need of further visibility. While there were a few writers I felt it best to avoid entirely, a writer’s absence from the list shouldn’t necessarily be considered a statement on my opinion of their work or character, just as the presence of a writer isn’t necessarily evidence of the same, either. As inclusive as I tried to be, there are inevitably major gaps in the list. While I did meet my goal of foregrounding Indigenous women and queer/two-spirit writers, specifically transgender Indigenous writers are woefully underrepresented. Similarly, there is a significant dearth of Black Indian writers and Indigenous writers from Africa, as well as a complete absence of Freedmen writers in this list. It’s been humbling to see just how minimal my own learning in these specific literary traditions has been, and I definitely have work ahead to ensure that my future projects are just as committed to representing Black and African Indigenous writers as much as other Indigenous communities. For those seeking a recommended reading list of Indigenous literature, this is a good place to start. I’d also suggest Tomson Highway’s From Oral to Written: A Celebration of Indigenous Literature in Canada, 1980–2010 (Talonbooks, 2017), which offers summaries of nearly 200 works by Indigenous writers spanning a thirty-year period. a

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A Year of #HonouringIndigenousWriters 1 January–31 December 2016 An Indigenous Lit Twitter Project

January 1 Jan: Beth Brant/Degonwadonti (Bay of Quinte Mohawk), 1941–2015. Multi-genre writer. Writing as Witness 2 Jan: Patricia Grace (Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa, and Te Ati Awa Māori). Fiction writer. Potiki; Baby No-Eyes 3 Jan: Will Rogers (Cherokee Nation), 1879–1935. Social/political commentator, columnist, humorist. Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President 4 Jan: Cheryl Savageau (Abenaki). Poet. Dirt Road Home; Mother/Land 5 Jan: Queen Lili‘uokalani (Kānaka Maoli), 1838–1917. Political commentator, memoirist, composer. “Aloha ‘Oe,” Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen 6 Jan: Ray Young Bear (Meskwaki). Poet & novelist. Black Eagle Child; Manifestation Wolverine 7 Jan: Gloria Anzaldúa (Chicana), 1942–2004. Multi-genre critical/creative writer, theorist, visionary. Borderlands/ La Frontera 8 Jan: Linda Hogan (Chickasaw). Multi-genre poet/writer. Power; People of the Whale; Indios 9 Jan: David Cusick (Tuscarora), ca. 1780–ca. 1840. Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations (1828) 10 Jan: Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota). Contemp. poet, mixed-media artist, educator. Chromosomory

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11 Jan: Bertrand N.O. Walker/Hen-Toh (Wyandot), 1870–1928. Poet & storykeeper. Tales of the Bark Lodges 12 Jan: Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation). Multi-genre writer-theorist. “Colonialism: A Love Story”; This Wound Is a World 13 Jan: Louis Owens (Choctaw/Cherokee). 1948–2002. Novelist, essayist, critic. Mixedblood Messages 14 Jan: Janet Campbell Hale (Coeur d’Alene/Kootenay). Multigenre writer. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture 15 Jan: Tony Birch (Koori). Fiction writer, curator, cultural critic. Shadowboxing; Ghost River 16 Jan: Molly Spotted Elk (Penobscot), 1903–1977. Writer of traditional stories, actress. Katahdin 17 Jan: Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe/Métis/Irish), comics writer & animator, game designer, scholar. Deer Woman; Copper Heart 18 Jan: D’Arcy McNickle (Flathead/Cree-Métis), 1904–1977. Novelist, historian, activist. The Surrounded 19 Jan: Gwen Benaway (Anishinaabe/Cherokee/Métis). Poet & essayist. Ceremonies for the Dead; Passage 20 Jan: Ambelin Kwaymullina (Palyku). Young adult writer & illustrator. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf 21 Jan: Zitkala-Ša/Gertrude Bonnin (Yankton Sioux), 1876– 1938. Journalist, librettist, essayist, activist. American Indian Stories; Oklahoma’s Poor Rich Indians 22 Jan: Nora Marks Dauenhauer (Tlingit), b. 1927. Poet, editor, and fiction writer. The Droning Shaman 23 Jan: Gogisgi/Carroll Arnett (Cherokee), 1927–1997. Poet and scholar. Night Perimeter 24 Jan: Keri Hulme (Kai Tahu Māori), b. 1947. Multi-genre fiction writer & poet. The Bone People

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25 Jan: Bamewawagezhikaquay/Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibway), 1800–1842. Poet, translator. The Sound the Starts Make . . . 26 Jan: Rachel Qitsualik (Inuit/Scottish/Cree). Multi-genre writer/publisher. “Skraelings”; Ajjiit 27 Jan: Louis Riel (Métis), 1844–1885. Political leader and visionary, diarist, prose writer, poet. “Crucifiez-le,” “Sir John A. Macdonald” 28 Jan: Wendy Rose (Hopi/Miwok), b. 1948. Poet, artist, essayist, anthropologist. Itch Like Crazy; Bone Dance 29 Jan 2015: Mourning Dove/Christine Quintasket (Okanagan), ca. 1884–1936. Novelist and traditional tale writer. Cogewea 30 Jan 2015: Elias Boudinot (Cherokee Nation), ca. 1802–1839. Cherokee Phoenix editor, essayist, speaker. “An Address to the Whites”; Poor Sarah 31 Jan: Sarah Biscarra-Dilley (Barbareno Chumash/Yaqui). Multi-genre artist/writer. Black Salt Collective.

February 1 Feb: Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm (Anishinaabe). Poet, fiction writer, editor, publisher. The Stone Collection; My Heart Is a Stray Bullet 2 Feb: Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman/Ohíye S’a (Santee Dakota), 1858–1939. Writer, lecturer, activist. Indian Boyhood; The Soul of the Indian 3 Feb: Witi Ihimaera (Māori), b. 1944. Fiction writer. Bulibasha; Nights in the Garden of Spain 4 Feb: Esther Berlin (Diné). Poet and artist. From the Belly of My Beauty 5 Feb: Lynn Riggs (Cherokee Nation), 1899–1954. Playwright, poet. The Cherokee Night; The Iron Dish

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6 Feb: Arigon Starr (Kickapoo). Comic book writer, songwriter/ musician, playwright. Super Indian 7 Feb: Dr. Carlos Montezuma/Wassaja (Yavapai), c. 1865–1923. Editorialist, writer, reformer. Wassaja 8 Feb: Marilyn Dumont (Cree/Métis). Poet, educator. that tongued belonging; The Pemmican Eaters 9 Feb: (Woodrow) Wilson Rawls (Cherokee Nation), 1913–1984. Novelist, lecturer. Where the Red Fern Grows 10 Feb: Ella Cara Deloria/Aŋpétu Wašté Wiŋ (Yankton Dakota), 1889–1971. Novelist, scholar. Waterlily 11 Feb: LeAnne Howe (Choctaw Nation). Multi-genre writer, artist, scholar. Shell Shaker; Choctalking on Other Realities 12 Feb: Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi), 1830–1899. Lecturer, writer. Red Man’s Rebuke; Queen of the Woods 13 Feb: Marie Annharte Baker (Anishinaabe). Poet, critic, storyteller, performance artist. Indigena Awry 14 Feb: John Joseph Mathews (Osage), 1894–1979. Novelist, scholar, naturalist. Talking to the Moon 15 Feb: Gloria Bird (Spokane). Poet, scholar, teacher. Full Moon on the Reservation; River of History 16 Feb: Sherwin Bitsui (Diné). Poet and teacher. Flood Song; Shapeshift 17 Feb: George Copway/Kahgegagahbowh (Mississauga), 1818– 1869. Writer, lecturer, Methodist missionary. The Traditional History and Characteristic Sketches of the Ojibwa Nation 18 Feb: Chantal Spitz (Mā’ohi). Novelist and essayist. L’Ile des rêves écrasés/Island of Shattered Dreams 19 Feb: Vickie Sears (Cherokee). Short story writer. Simple Songs 20 Feb: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Paiute), ca. 1844–1891. Writer, reporter, activist. Life Among the Piutes 21 Feb: Eric Gansworth (Onondaga). Writer, visual artist, scholar. If I Ever Get Out of Here

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22 Feb: Haunani-Kay Trask (Kānaka Maoli). Poet, scholar, activist. We Are Not Happy Natives; Act of War 23 Feb: Chip Livingston (Creek). Poet, essayist, teacher. Naming Ceremony; Museum of False Starts 24 Feb: Warren Cariou (Métis). Editor, artist, mixed-genre writer. Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs; Lake of the Prairies 25 Feb: Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O’odham). Poet, linguist, editor. Jewed’l-hoi/Earth Movements 26 Feb: George Manuel (Secwepemc), 1921–1989. Political leader & activist, writer. The Fourth World 27 Feb: Gail Tremblay (Onondaga/Mi’kmaq). Poet, teacher, artist. Close to Home; Indian Singing 28 Feb: Carter Revard (Osage). Poet and scholar. Winning the Dust Bowl; How the Songs Come Down 29 Feb: Armand Garnet Ruffo (Anishinaabe). Multi-form writer, poet, filmmaker, biographer. The Thunderbird Poems; A Windgo Tale

March 1 Mar: Joanne Arnott (Métis). Poet, performer, & teacher. Steepy Mountain: Love Poetry; Salish Seas 2 Mar: Joseph Johnson (Mohegan), 1751–1776. Minister and activist. “To Do Good to My Indian Brethren” 3 Mar: Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kānaka Maoli). Poet and scholar. The Salt-Wind 4 Mar: Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak (Inuit). Writer and storyteller. T Is for Territories; Northern Lights 5 Mar: Sara Sue Hoklotubbe (Cherokee Nation). Mystery novelist. Sinking Suspicions; The American Café 6 Mar: Epeli Hau’ofa (Tongan), 1939–2009. Anthropologist & multi-form writer. “Our Sea of Islands”

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7 Mar: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Nishnaabeg). Scholar, musician, writer. Islands of Decolonial Love; This Accident of Being Lost 8 Mar: Geary Hobson (Cherokee-Quapaw/Chickasaw). Scholar, fiction writer, poet, mentor. Last of the Ofos 9 Mar: Maria Campbell (Métis). Writer, storyteller, filmmaker. Stories of the Road-Allowance People 10 Mar: Bernard Assiniwi (Cree/Algonquin), 1935–2000. Writer, actor, scholar. La Saga des Béothuks 11 Mar: Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard (Samoan). Poet, scholar, teacher, editor. Alchemies of Distance 12 Mar: Anthony Apakark Thrasher (Inuvialuit), 1937–1989. Memoirist. Thrasher . . . Skid Row Eskimo 13 Mar: Ruby Slipperjack-Farrell (Ojibwe). Writer, painter, educator. Honour the Sun, Weesquachak 14 Mar: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Gĩkũyũ). Multi-genre writer, editor, scholar, activist. Decolonising the Mind 15 Mar: Ruth Muskrat Bronson (Cherokee Nation), 1897–1982. Advocate, educator. Indians Are People Too 16 Mar: Louis Bird (Omushkego Cree). Storyteller and knowledge keeper. The Spirit Lives in the Mind 17 Mar: Deborah Miranda (Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation). Multi-genre writer, scholar. Bad Indians; The Zen of La Llorona 18 Mar: Carole LaFavor (Ojibwe), 1948–2011. Novelist, HIV/ AIDS educator/activist. Along the Journey River 19 Mar: Sharron Proulx-Turner (Métis Nation of Alberta). Poet and memorist. what the auntys say 20 Mar: Waawaate Fobister (Grassy Narrows First Nation). Playwright, actor, public speaker. Agokwe 21 Mar: Kim Shuck (Cherokee Nation). Poet, essayist, beadworker. Smuggling Cherokee; Rabbit Stories 22 Mar: Adrian C. Louis (Lovelock Paiute). Poet, fiction writer. Random Exorcisms; Evil Corn; Skins

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23 Mar: Melissa Lucashenko (Murri). Fiction writer, essayist. Steam Pigs; Hard Yards; Mullumbimby 24 Mar: Aaron Paquette (Cree Métis). Young adult writer, public speaker, artist. Lightfinder 25 Mar: Molly McGlennen (Anishinaabe). Poet, scholar. Fried Fish and Flour Biscuits 26 Mar: Evelina Zuni Lucero (Isleta/Ohkay Owingeh). Novelist, editor, educator. Night Sky, Morning Star 27 Mar: Moses “Moke” Manu, Jr. (Kānaka Maoli), 1837–c. 1900. Mo‘olelo and multi-genre writer. 28 Mar: b: william bearheart (St. Croix Chippewa). Poet. “A Tanager”; “Cycles”; “The End of Golf” 29 Mar: John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee Nation), 1827–1867. Novelist, newspaper editor. The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated Mexican Bandit 30 Mar: Mitiarjuk Attasie Nappaaluk, C.M. (Inuit), 1931–2007. Multi-genre writer, educator. Sanaaq 31 Mar: D.L. Birchfield (Choctaw), 1948–2012. Novelist, satirist. How Choctaws Invented Civilization and Why Choctaws Will Conquer the World

April 1 Apr: Alexis Wright (Waanyi). Novelist, essayist, land activist. The Swan Book; Take Power, Like This Old Man Here 2 Apr: Michael Sheyahshe (Caddo Nation). Comic book writer, artist, game designer. “Strike & Bolt” 3 Apr: Alootook Ipellie (Inuit), 1951–2007. Multi-genre writer, artist, translator. Arctic Dreams and Nightmares 4 Apr: Tracey Lindberg (Cree-Métis). Novelist, legal scholar, blues singer. Birdie

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5 Apr: Bev Sellars (Xat’sull). Memorist, political leader. They Called Me Number One 6  Apr: Jorge Cocom Pech (Maya). Poet, essayist, scholar. Muk’ult’an in Nool 7 Apr: Lenore Keeshig-Tobias (Anishinaabe). Poet, storyteller, naturalist. “Stop Stealing Native Stories” 8 Apr: Robert J. Conley (Cherokee Nation), 1940–2014. Novelist, historian, essayist. Ned Christie’s War; The Way of the Priests; The Cherokee Nation 9 Apr: Laura Tohe (Diné). Poet, multi-genre writer, librettist. No Parole Today; Code Talker Stories 10 Apr: Yvonne Fly Onakeme Etaghene (Ijaw/Urhobo). Novelist, performance activist, poet. For Sizakele 11 Apr: Jordan Wheeler (Cree/Anishinaabe/Assiniboine). Novelist, screenwriter, producer. Brothers in Arms 12 Apr: Laura Da’ (Eastern Shawnee). Poet & teacher. The Tecumseh Motel; Tributaries 13 Apr: Peter Blue Cloud/Aroniawenrate (Mohawk), 1935–2011. Multi-genre writer. Alcatraz Is Not an Island 14 Apr: Gordon Henry (White Earth Chippewa). Poet, fiction writer, scholar. The Failure of Certain Charms 15 Apr: Jordan Abel (Nisga’a). Poet, editor, digital artist. Un/inhabited; Injuns 16 Apr: Catharine Brown (Cherokee Nation), ca. 1800–1823. Diarist, correspondent, teacher. Cherokee Sister 17 Apr: Gregory Scofield (Métis). Poet, memoirist, teacher. I Knew Two Métis Women; Kipocihkân 18 Apr: Dan Taulapapa McMullian (Samoan). Poet, painter, filmmaker. Coconut Milk; Sinalela 19 Apr: Louise Bernice Halfe (Cree). Poet, essayist. Burning in This Midnight Dream; The Crooked Good 20 Apr: Jesse J. Cornplanter (Seneca), 1889–1957. Writer, illustrator, carver. Legends of the Longhouse

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21 Apr: Sequoyah Guess (Keetoowah Cherokee). Novelist, storyteller, filmmaker. Kholvn; Nocturne 22 Apr: Rita Joe (Mi’kmaq), 1932–2007. Poet, memoirist. We Are the Dreamers; Song of Rita Joe 23 Apr: Cynthia Leitich Smith (Muscogee Creek). Children’s & YA author. Indian Shoes; the Feral trilogy 24 Apr: Tiffany Midge (Standing Rock Sioux). Poet, editor. The Woman Who Married a Bear 25 Apr: Mini Aodla Freeman (Inuit). Memoirist, translator. Life Among the Qallunaat 26 Apr: Nils Aslak Valkepeää/Áillohaš (Sámi), 1943–2001. Poet, musician, artist. Beaivi áhčážan 27 Apr: Cherie Dimaline (Métis). Fiction writer, editor, mentor. A Gentle Habit; Red Rooms; The Marrow Thieves 28 Apr: Lois Red Elk (St. Peck Sioux). Multi-genre writer, quill & bead worker. Dragonfly Weather 29 Apr: Tim Tingle (Choctaw Nation). Novelist, YA writer, storyteller. House of Purple Cedar; Saltypie 30 Apr: Monique Mojica (Guna/Rappahannock). Playwright, actor. Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots

May 1 May: Basil Johnston (Anishinaabe), 1929–2015. Multi-genre writer, lang. teacher, storyteller. Candies; Ojibway Heritage; Moose Meat and Wild Rice 2 May: Betty Louise Bell (Cherokee). Novelist, lit scholar. Faces in the Moon 3 May: Betsey Guppy Chamberlain (Algonquin), ca. 1797–1886. Multi-genre writer. “A Fire-Side Scene” [Since this tweet was posted, I’ve learned that Chamberlain was not, in fact, Indigenous.]

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4 May: Albert Wendt (Samoan). Poet, fiction writer, editor, scholar. Leaves of the Banyan Tree; Nuana 5 May: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux). Multi-genre writer, scholar. I Remember the Fallen Trees 6 May: Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo). Poet, editor, comic creator. Eulogy for the Moon 7 May: Beatrice Mosionier (Métis). Memoirist, novelist, YA writer. Come Walk with Me 8 May: Kevin Loring (Nlaka’pamux). Playwright, actor, producer. Where the Blood Mixes 9 May: Jovette Marchessault (Montagnais), 1938–2012. Novelist, playwright, artist. Triptyque lesbien 10 May: Barbara Cameron (Hunkpapa Lakota), 1954–2002. Poet, essayist, activist. “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like an Indian from the Reservation” 11 May: Winona LaDuke (Anishinaabe). Essayist, novelist, environmental activist. Last Standing Woman 12 May: Robert Arthur Alexie (Gwich’in), 1957–2014. Novelist. Porcupines and China Dolls 13 May: Allison Hedge Coke (Huron/Métis/Cherokee heritage). Poet, memoirist, editor, performer. Streaming; Blood Run 14 May: A.A. Carr (Laguna Pueblo/Navajo). Novelist, filmmaker. Eye Killers 15 May: Rolland Nadjiwon (Potowatomi). Poet, essayist, fiction writer. Seven Deer Dancing 16 May: Tanaya Winder (Duckwater Shoshone). Poet, artist, educator. Words Like Love 17 May: David Treuer (Leech Lake Ojibwe). Novelist, educator. Little 18 May: Carol Lee Sanchez (Laguna Pueblo), 1934–2011. Poet, visual artist, teacher. From Spirit to Matter 19 May: William S. Yellow Robe (Assiniboine). Playwright, poet. Grandchildren of the Buffalo Soldiers

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20 May: Robert Sullivan (Nga Puhi Māori). Poet, editor, educator. Star Waka; Voice Carried My Family 21 May: Anna Jacobson (Yup’ik). Language teacher, storyteller, novelist. Elnguq 22 May: Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi). Literary biologist, essayist. Braiding Sweetgrass 23 May: Wayne Keon (Nipissing First Nation). Poet, fiction writer. My Sweet Maize 24 May: Briceida Cuevas Cob (Yucatec Maya). Poet. U yok’ol awat peek’; Ti’ u billil in nook’ 25 May: Daniel H. Wilson (Cherokee Nation). Science fiction, humour, & comic book writer. Robopocalypse 26 May: E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (Mohawk), 1861–1913. Poet, speaker, activist. The White Wampum 27 May: Zacharias Kunuk (Inuit). Filmmaker, screenwriter, carver. Atanarjuat; The Journals of Knud Rasmussen 28 May: Chris Bose (Nlaka’pamux). Poet, multi-genre writer, musician, filmmaker. A Moon Made of Copper 29 May: Marie Clements (Métis). Playwright, director, filmmaker. The Road Forward; Copper Thunderbird 30 May: Waubgeshig Rice (Wasauksing First Nation). Fiction writer, journalist, storyteller. Legacy 31 May: Fred Seagayuk Bigjim (Iñupiaq). Multi-genre writer. Echoes from the Tundra; Plants

June 1 June: Lee Maracle (Stó:lō). Multi-genre writer, orator, performer, activist. Celia’s Song; I Am Woman 2 June: DeWitt Clinton Duncan (Cherokee Nation), 1829–1909. Essayist, poet. The “Too-qua-stee” Letters.

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3 June: Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Ojibwe). Scholar, poet, novelist. White Earth Constitution, Griever 4 June: Roberta Hill (Oneida Nation): Poet, scholar, teacher. Star Quilt; Cicadas 5 June: Cathy Tagnak Rexford (Iñupiaq). Multi-genre writer, filmmaker. A Crane Story; The Namesake 6 June: Hanay Geiogamah (Kiowa/Delaware). Playwright, producer, director, editor. Body Indian; 49 7 June: Herb Wharton (Kooma). Poet, memoirist, novelist. Kings with Empty Pockets; Yumba Days 8 June: Drew Hayden Taylor (Curve Lake Ojibway). Multi-genre writer, editor. Motorcycles & Sweetgrass 9 June: Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel (Mohegan). Fiction writer, historian, storyteller. Wabanaki Blues 10 June: Markoosie Patsang (Inuit). Writer, pilot. Harpoon of the Hunter 11 June: N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa/Cherokee). Multi-genre writer, visual artist. In the Presence of the Sun 12 June: Philip McLaren (Kamilaroi). Novelist, screenwriter, scholar, artist. Lightning Mine 13 June: Wilma Mankiller (Cherokee Nation), 1945–2010. Multi-genre writer, political leader. Mankiller 14 June: Velma Wallis (Gwich’in). Fiction writer, memoirist. Two Old Women; Raising Ourselves 15 June: M.L. Smoker (Assiniboine/Sioux). Poet. Another Attempt at Rescue; I Go to the Ruined Place 16 June: John Kneubuhl (Samoan), 1920–1992. Playwright, screenwriter. Think of a Garden; Mele Kanikau 17 June: Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers (Blackfoot/Sámi). Screenwriter, filmmaker. Bihttoš; Bloodland 18 June: Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa). Novelist, essayist, bookseller. Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country

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19 June: Humberto Ak’ab’al (K’iche’ Maya). Poet. Poems I Brought Down from the Mountain 20 June: George Clutesi (Tseshaht), 1905–1988. Multi-genre writer, artist, actor. Stand Tall, My Son 21 June: Briar Grace-Smith (Nga Puhi/Ngāti Wai). Multi-genre writer. Haruru Mai; The Strength of Water 22 June: Orlando White (Diné). Poet, teacher. LETTERRS; Bone Light 23 June: Leialoha Apo-Perkins (Kānaka Maoli). Multi-genre writer, publisher. The Oxridge Woman 24 June: Kimberly Blaeser (Anishinaabe). Poet, essayist, critic, editor. Apprenticed to Justice 25 June: Marvin Francis (Heart Lake First Nation), 1955–2005. Multi-genre writer, artist. city treaty 26 June: Natalie Diaz (Mojave). Poet, language revitalization advocate. When My Brother Was an Aztec 27 June: Juan Gregorio Regino (Mazatec). Poet, essayist, scholar. Ngata’ara stsee/Que siga lloviendo 28 June: Michelle St. John (Wampanoag/Carib). Playwright, actor, director. Colonization Road 29 June: Charles Gibson (Muscogee Creek), 1846–1923. Humourist, news columnist. “Gibson’s Rifle Shots” 30 June: Harold Cardinal (Cree), 1945–2005. Writer, political leader, activist. The Unjust Society

July 1 July: Ellen van Neerven (Mununjali). Fiction writer, poet, editor. Heat and Light; Comfort Food 2 July: Joy Harjo (Mvskoke). Poet, musician, memorist. Crazy Brave; For a Girl Becoming 3 July: Margarita Ku Xool (Mayan). Poet. Chan lol (La florecita)

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4 July: Mark Kalluak, C.M. (Inuit), 1942–2011. Writer, educator, translator. Unipkaaqtuat Arvianit 5 July: Eden Robinson (Haisla/Heiltsuk). Fiction writer, essayist. Monkey Beach; Terminal Avenue 6 July: William Sanders (Oklahoma Cherokee), 1942–2017. Multi-genre writer. East of the Sun and West of Ft. Smith 7 July: Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (Montaukett/African American), 1869–1944. Multi-genre writer. Driftwood 8 July: Daniel David Moses (Delaware). Playwright, poet, essayist. Pursued by a Bear; Delicate Bodies 9 July: Elise Paschen (Osage). Poet, editor. Bestiary; Infidelities 10 July: Duane Niatum (S’Klallam). Poet, editor, teacher. The Crooked Beak of Love 11 July: Helen Pearse-Otene (Māori). Playwright, actor, graphic novelist. The Matawehi Fables series. 12 July: Helen Haig-Brown (Tsilhqot’in). Screenwriter, filmmaker. The Cave; My Legacy 13 July: Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve (Rosebud Sioux). Multi-genre writer. The Trickster and the Troll 14 July: Anna Lee Walters (Pawnee/Otoe-Missouria). Multi-genre writer. The Sun Is Not Merciful 15 July: Craig Womack (Muscogee Creek/Cherokee). Fiction writer, literary critic. Drowning in Fire 16 July: The Turtle Gals. Playwrights, performance ensemble. The Scrubbing Project; The Triple Truth 17 July: Beth Cuthand (Cree). Poet, essayist, fiction writer. Voices in the Waterfall 18 July: Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo/Sioux), 1939–2008. Multi-genre writer, scholar. The Sacred Hoop 19 July: Diane E. Benson (Tlingit). Playwright, columnist, poet. When My Spirit Raised Its Hands 20 July: Royal Roger Eubanks (Cherokee Nation), 1879–1955. Cartoonist, fiction writer. “The Middle Man”

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21 July: Sue McPherson (Wiradjuri/Torres Strait Islander). Multi-genre writer, artist. Grace Beside Me 22 July: Davida (David) Malo (Kānaka Maoli), 1793–1853. Poet, translator, historian. Moolelo Hawaii 23 July: Joseph Marshall III (Sicangu Lakota). Multi-genre writer. The Long Knives Are Crying 24 July: Todd Downing (Choctaw Nation), 1902–1974. Detective fiction, multi-genre writer. The Cat Screams 25 July: Marianne Aweagon Broyles (Cherokee). Poet. The Red Door 26 July: Duncan Mercredi (Cree-Métis). Poet, storyteller. oomsikakispanik, Wolf and Shadows 27 July: Victoria Kneubuhl (Samoan/Kānaka Maoli). Playwright, novelist. Murder Casts a Shadow 28 July: Roberta Reyes Cordero (Chumash/Yaqui/Mestiza). Poet, peacemaker. “Bow-Riders: The Way to Swaxil” 29 July: Rita Bouvier (Métis). Poet. Blueberry Clouds; papîyâhtak 30 July: Rita Mestokosho (Innu). Poet, political leader. Eshi Uapataman Nukum 31 July: Kim Scott (Noongar). Novelist, poet, young adult writer. Benang; That Deadman Dance

August 1 August: Richard Van Camp (Tłı̨ chǫ). Multi-form fiction writer, storyteller. Night Moves; Little You 2 August: NoViolet Bulawayo (Ndebele). Novelist, short story writer. We Need New Names 3 Aug: Tihema Baker (Māori). Speculative fiction writer. Watched 4 Aug: Debra Magpie Earling (Bitterroot Salish). Fiction writer. Perma Red; Lost Journals of Sacajawea

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5 Aug: Joséphine Bacon (Innu). Poet, filmmaker. A Tea in the Tundra/Nipishapui nete mushuat 6 Aug: Doris Pilkington Garimara (Mardu), 1937?–2014. Multi-genre writer. Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence 7 Aug: Frances Washburn (Lakota/Anishinaabe). Novelist, biographer. Red Bird All-Indian Traveling Band 8 Aug: Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree). Songwriter, multimedia artist, philanthropist. Power in the Blood 9 Aug: Konai Helu Thaman (Tongan). Poet, educator, scholar. Kakala; Songs of Love 10 Aug: Mary TallMountain (Koyukon Athabaskan), 1918–1994. Poet. Light on the Tent Wall 11 Aug: Elizabeth Woody (Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs). Poet, artist. Seven Hands Seven Hearts 12 Aug: Alistair Te Ariki Campbell (Rarotongan Māori), 1925–2009. Multi-genre writer. Dark Lord of Savaiki 13 Aug: Louis Little Coon Oliver (Muscogee Creek), 1904–1991. Poet. Chasers of the Sun 14 Aug: Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet). Experimental fiction writer. Bleed into Me; Mongrels 15 Aug: Sia Figiel (Samoan). Poet, novelist. Where We Once Belonged; They Who Do Not Grieve 16 Aug: Garcilaso de la Vega (Quechua Inca), 1539–1616. Historian. Comentarios Reales de los Incas 17 Aug: Ora V. Eddleman Reed (Cherokee), 1880–1968. Editor, journalist, fiction writer. Twin Territories 18 Aug: Velma Wallis (Gwich’in). Multi-genre writer. Two Old Women; Raising Ourselves 19 Aug: Tulia Thompson (Fijian/Tongan). Poet, fiction writer, blogger. Josefa and the Vu 20 Aug: Luther Standing Bear (Oglala Lakota), 1868–1939. Memoirist, commentator. My People, the Sioux

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21 Aug: Paul Seesequasis (Cree). Editor, journalist, fiction writer. Tobacco Wars 22 Aug: Heid E. Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Chippewa). Poet, food writer. Cell Traffic; Original Local 23 Aug: Ann Plato (Montaukett/African American), ca. 1824–? Poet, essayist. Essays 24 Aug: Santee Frazier (Cherokee Nation). Poet. Dark Thirty 25 Aug: Monique Gray Smith (Cree/Lakota/Scottish). Fiction writer, consultant, public speaker. Tilly; Speaking Our Truth 26 Aug: George Henry/Maungwudaus (Mississauga), ca. 1807–ca. 1851. Interpreter, performer. An Account of the Chippewa Indians 27 Aug: Pita Nwana (Igbo), ca. 1881–1968. Fiction writer, carpenter. Omenuko 28 Aug: Diane Burns (Anishinaabe/Chemehuevi), 1957–2006. Poet. Riding the One-Eyed Ford 29 Aug: Jordan Wheeler (Cree/Ojibwa/Assiniboine). Screenwriter, novelist, YA writer. Brothers in Arms 30 Aug: Serie (Cherie) Barford (Samoan). Poet, short story writer. Tapa Talk; Entangled Islands 31 Aug: Anders Larsen (Sámi), 1870–1949. Novelist, journalist. Bæivve-Alggo

September 1 Sept: Chrystos (Menominee). Poet, activist. Not Vanishing; Fire Power; In Her I Am 2 Sept: Hilario Chacin (Wayuu). Poet, fiction writer, historian. Los Hijos de la Lluvia 3 Sept: Sy Hoahwah (Comanche/Arapaho). Poet. Night Cradle; Velroy and the Madischie Mafia 4 Sept: Glenn J. Twist (Cherokee Nation/Creek), 1917–1995. Storyteller, writer. Boston Mountain Tales

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5 Sept: Connie Fife (Cree), 1961–2017. Poet. Poems for a New World; Speaking Through Jagged Rock 6 Sept: Sage U’ilani Takehiro (Kānaka Maoli). Poet, activist. Honua 7 Sept: Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz). Essayist, memorist. Starvation Mode; My Body Is a Book of Rules 8 Sept: Rauni Magga Lukkari (Sámi). Poet, playwright, translator. Losses beaivegirji; Lex Sápmi 9 Sept: Margaret Noodin (Anishinaabe). Poet, language teacher, scholar. Weweni 10 Sept: Larry Loyie (Cree), 1933–2016. Children’s book writer. The Lawrence Series. The Gathering Tree 11 Sept: Jean Hager (Cherokee heritage). Mystery writer. Molly Bearpaw series; Mitch Bushyhead series 12 Sept: David Unaipon (Ngarrindjeri), 1872–1967. Writer, inventor, advocate. Native Legends 13 Sept: Margo Kane (Cree-Saulteaux). Playwright, performer, director, artist. Moonlodge 14 Sept: Fernando de Alva Cortés Ixtlilxóchitl (ca. 1568–1648). Historian, interpreter. Historia chichimeca 15 Sept: Al Hunter (Anishinaabe). Poet, activist. Spirit Horses; Beautiful Razor 16 Sept: Yvette Nolan (Algonquin). Playwright, director. Annie Mae’s Movement; The Unplugging 17 Sept: Samuel Mānaiakalani Kamakau (Kānaka Maoli), 1815–1876. Writer, historian. “Ka Mo‘olelo Hawai‘i” 18 Sept: Charles H. Red Corn (Osage). Novelist. A Pipe for February 19 Sept: Emma Lee Warrior (Peigan). Poet, short story writer. “Compatriots” 20 Sept: Hendrick Aupaumut (Mohican), 1757–1830. Memorist, diplomat. “A Narrative of an Embassy to the Western Indians” 21 Sept: Natasha Kanapé Fontaine (Innu). Poet. N’entre pas dans mon âme avec tes chaussures

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22 Sept: David Eggleton (Rotuman/Tongan). Poet, short story writer, editor. The Conch Trumpet; Seasons 23 Sept: Annette Arkeketa (Otoe-Missouria/Muscogee Creek). Playwright, essayist, filmmaker. Ghost Dance 24 Sept: Diane Jacobson (‘Namgis). Memorist. My Life in a Kwagu’ł Big House; My Life with the Salmon 25 Sept: Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee heritage). Poet, editor, scholar. Walking with Ghosts 26 Sept: Luci Tapahonso (Navajo). Poet, essayist, short fiction writer. A Radiant Curve 27 Sept: Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Nunukul), 1920–1993. Poet, activist, educator. We Are Going 28 Sept: Juan Wallparrimachi (Quechua), 1793–1814. Poet, freedom fighter. “My Mother,” “Partida” 29 Sept: Tommy “Teebs” Pico (Kumeyaay). Poet. IRL; Hey, Teebs 30 Sept: Susan Power (Standing Rock Dakota). Fiction writer. The Grass Dancer; Sacred Wilderness

October 1 Oct: Janet McAdams (Creek heritage). Poet, novelist, editor. The Island of Lost Luggage; Feral 2 Oct: David Groulx (Ojibwe). Poet. Wabigoon River Poems; A Difficult Beauty; Under God’s Pale Bones 3 Oct: Esther Supernault (Saulteaux). Speculative fiction writer. Wind Walker 4 Oct: Lisa Linn Kanae (Kānaka Maoli). Multi-genre writer. Islands Linked by Ocean; Sista Tongue 5 Oct: John Milton Oskison (Cherokee Nation), 1874–1947. Multi-genre writer, editor. Black Jack Davy 6 Oct: Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan). Multi-genre writer, teacher, activist. Slash; Breath Tracks

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7 Oct: Hans Aslak Guttorm (Sámi), 1907–1992. Poet, fiction writer, editor. Golgadeamen; Koccam spalli 8 Oct: Jared Thomas (Nukunu). Playwright, YA writer. Love, Land, and Money; Calypso Summer 9 Oct: Jennifer Storm (Ojibway). Fiction writer. Deadly Loyalties; Fire Starters 10 Oct: Hone Tuwhare (Ngāpuhi Māori), 1922–2008. Poet, playwright. No Ordinary Sun; Piggy-back Moon 11 Oct: Julie Pearson-Little Thunder (Muscogee Creek). Playwright. The Woman Who Was Captured by Ghosts 12 Oct: Juanita Pahdopony (Comanche). Poet, artist, storyteller. “Grandmother Golden Orb”; “Bouncy, Lively” 13 Oct: Joan Naviyuk Kane (Inupiaq). Poet. Hyperboreal; The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife 14 Oct: Blake M. Hausman (Cherokee Nation). Novelist, teacher. Riding the Trail of Tears 15 Oct: Irvin Morris (Navajo). Multi-genre writer, teacher. From the Glittering World 16 Oct: Rosanna Deerchild (Cree). Poet, performer, radio host. this is a small northern town 17 Oct: Ruby Langford Ginibi (Bundjalung), 1934–2011. Multi-genre writer. All My Mob 18 Oct: Asani Charles (Choctaw/Chickasaw/African American). Poet, teacher. Word Songs for Grandmas 19 Oct: Mavis Bryant Pierce/Ha-dya-no-doh (Seneca), 1811–1874. Orator, advocate, interpreter. Address on the Present Condition and Prospects of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of North America. . . . 20 Oct: Wayne Arthurson (Cree). Mystery novelist, nonfiction writer. Fall from Grace; A Killing Winter 21 Oct: Leslie Belleau (Ojibway). Fiction writer, poet, playwright. The Colour of Dried Bones 22 Oct: Dianne Yeahquo Reyner (Kiowa). Playwright, director, performer. Weaving the Rain

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23 Oct: Gerry William (Spallumcheen). Science fiction writer. The Black Ship; The Woman in the Trees 24 Oct: Mahealani Perez-Wendt (Kānaka Maoli). Poet, legal advocate. Uluhaimalama 25 Oct: Zainab Amadahy (Cherokee heritage/African American). Multi-genre writer. Moons of Palmares 26 Oct: Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler (Lac des Mille Lacs First Nation). Speculative fiction writer, artist. Wrist 27 Oct: Tara June Winch (Wairadjuri). Fiction writer. Swallow the Air; After the Carnage 28 Oct: Loretta Todd (Cree/Métis). Filmmaker, screenwriter, storyteller. Kainayssini Imanistaisiwa 29 Oct: JudyLee Oliva (Chickasaw). Playwright, scholar. Te Ata; On the Showroom Floor 30 Oct: Tim Giago (Oglala Lakota). Poet, journalist. The Aboriginal Sin; Notes from Indian Country 31 Oct: Kirsti Paltto (Sámi). Poet, playwright, fiction writer. Vilges geađgi; Guržo luottat

November 1 Nov: Lois Beardslee (Ojibwa). Fiction writer, artist, storyteller. The Women’s Warrior Society 2 Nov: Jack D. Forbes (Powhatan/Renape/Lenape), 1934–2011. Poet, novelist, scholar, activist. Red Blood 3 Nov: Lisa Bird-Wilson (Métis). Poet, fiction writer, historian. Just Pretending; The Red Files 4 Nov: Bruce Pascoe (Bunurong/Yuin/Tasmanian). Multi-genre writer, editor. Shark; Dark Emu 5 Nov: nila northSun (Shoshone/Chippewa). Poet, historian. a snake in her mouth; love at gunpoint

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6 Nov: Lara Mann (Choctaw Nation). Poet, educational scholar. “A Song of Ascents and Descents” 7 Nov: Garry Gottfriedson (Secwepemc). Poet, YA writer, rancher. Skin Like Mine; Whiskey Bullets 8 Nov: Jean Starr (Cherokee), 1935–1994. Poet. Songs of Power; Tales from the Cherokee Hills 9 Nov: Shirley Cheechoo (Cree). Playwright, director, performer. Path with No Moccasins; Johnny Tootall 10 Nov: Philip H. Red Eagle (Dakota/Steilacoom-S’Klallam). Poet, essayist, fiction writer. Red Earth 11 Nov: Emma LaRocque (Métis). Poet, essayist, scholar, educator. “Tides, Towns, and Trains”; “Commitment” 12 Nov: dg nanouk okpik (Inupiaq-Inuit). Poet. Corpse Whale 13 Nov: Leela Gilday (Dene). Singer-songwriter. Sedze; Spirit Song, Solid Wood; Heart of the People 14 Nov: Catherine Knutsson (Métis). Speculative fiction writer. Shadows Cast by Stars 15 Nov: Roxy Gordon (Choctaw), 1945–2000. Multi-genre writer, musician. Some Things I Did; Breeds 16 Nov: Samuel Wagan Watson (Mununjali/Birri Gubba). Poet. Hotel Bone; Love Poems and Death Threats 17 Nov: Traci Sorell (Cherokee Nation). Children’s lit writer. We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga 18 Nov: Margaret Pokiak-Fenton/Olemaun (Inuvialuit). Children’s lit writer, artist. Fatty Legs 19 Nov: James Thomas Stevens/Aronhíotas (Akwesasne Mohawk). Poet. Combing the Snakes from His Hair 20 Nov: Sophia Alice Callahan (Muscogee Creek), 1868–1894. Fiction writer. Wynema: A Child of the Forest 21 Nov: Marcie R. Rendon (White Earth Anishinaabe). Poet, playwright, children’s writer. Powwow Summer 22 Nov: Lance Henson (Cheyenne). Poet, playwright. Keeper of Arrows; Coyote Road; another train ride

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23 Nov: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Igbo). Novelist, essayist. Purple Hibiscus; “The Danger of a Single Story” 24 Nov: Kung Jaadee (Haida). Children’s writer, traditional storyteller. Raven’s Feast 25 Nov: Duane BigEagle (Osage). Poet. Bidato, “My Grandfather Was a Quantum Physicist” 26 Nov: Margaret Verble (Cherokee Nation). Fiction writer. Maud’s Line 27 Nov: Jules Koostachin (Cree). Multi-genre writer, filmmaker, scholar. Remembering Inninimowin 28 Nov: Rosa Chávez (K’iche’/Kaqchikel Maya). Poet, playwright. Casa soliaria; Quitapenas; Awas 29 Nov: Joe Dale Tate Nevaquaya (Yuchi-Comanche). Poet, artist. Leaving Holes and Selected New Writings 30 Nov: Janice Gould (Koyoonk’auwi). Poet, scholar, musician. Earthquake Weather; Doubters and Dreamers

December 1 Dec: Jack Davis (Noongar), 1917–2000. Playwright, memoirist, poet. Jagardoo; No Sugar; A Boy’s Life 2 Dec: Joan Tavares Avant (Mashpee Wampanoag). Columnist, historian, memoirist. People of the First Light 3 Dec: Shane Belcourt (Métis). Screenwriter, filmmaker, musician. Tkaronto; Keeping Quiet 4 Dec: Ernestine Hayes (Tlingit). Multi-genre writer, educator. The Tao of Raven; Blonde Indian 5 Dec: Cinnamon Spear (Northern Cheyenne). Fiction writer, screenwriter, filmmaker. Pride & Basketball 6 Dec: Janet Rogers (Mohawk/Tuscarora). Poet, screenwriter, radio host. Unearthed; 6 Directions

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7 Dec: Alexander Posey (Muscogee Creek), 1873–1908. Poet, journalist, humorist. Fus Fixico Letters 8 Dec: Erika T. Wurth (Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee). Poet, fiction writer. Crazy Horse’s Girlfriend 9 Dec: Joseph A. Dandurand (Kwantlen). Poet, playwright. I Want; Please Do Not Touch the Indians 10 Dec: Joseph Nicolar (Penobscot), 1827–94. Political leader, historian. Life & Traditions of the Red Man 11 Dec: ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui (Kānaka Maoli). Poet, scholar, artist. “Kanaka Maoli 9-11”; “mo‘oku‘auhau” 12 Dec: David A. Robertson (Swampy Cree). Graphic novelist, fiction writer, publisher. 7 Generations 13 Dec: Peter Jones/Kahkewāquonāby (Mississauga), 1802–1856. Orator, translator, historian. History of the Ojebway Indians 14 Dec: Oktyabrina Voronova (Sámi), 1934–1990. Poet, librarian. Snezhnitsa; Chahtli; Yealla 15 Dec: Harry Robinson (Okanagan), 1900–1990. Traditional storyteller. Nature Power (w/Wendy Wickwire) 16 Dec: Alanis Obomsawin (Abenaki). Screenwriter, filmmaker, singer-songwriter. Waban-aki; Kanehsatake 17 Dec: D.O. Fagunwa (Yoruba), 1903–1963. Novelist, teacher. The Forest of a Thousand Demons 18 Dec: Maggie Culver Fry (Cherokee Nation), 1900–1998. Poet, columnist, fiction writer. The Witch Deer 19 Dec: Penina Ava Taesali (Samoan). Poet, essayist, arts educator/activist. Sourcing Siapo 20 Dec: Paul Cuffe Jr. (Pequot [or Wampanoag]/African American), 1797–1843?. Memoirist. Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Paul Cuffe, a Pequot Indian 21 Dec: Jennifer Elise Foerster (Muscogee (Creek) Nation). Poet. Leaving Tulsa 22 Dec: Jeff Barnaby (Mi’kmaq). Screenwriter, filmmaker. Rhymes for Young Ghouls; Etlinisigu’niet

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23 Dec: Katherena Vermette (Métis). Poet, novelist, children’s writer. North End Love Songs; The Break 24 Dec: Louis-Karl Picard Sioui (Huron-Wendat). Multi-genre writer, artist. Au pied de mon orgueil 25 Dec: Wanda John-Kehewin (Cree). Poet. In the Dog House 26 Dec: Nicole Watson (Birri-Gubba). Crime fiction writer, columnist, lawyer. The Boundary 27 Dec: Sandra Lynn Lynxleg (Ojibwa). Poet, educator. Glass Beads 28 Dec: Sable Sweetgrass (Kainai Nation). Playwright, essayist, filmmaker. Awowakii; IPOWAHSIN at Home 29 Dec: Paula Nelson (Eastern Band Cherokee). Poet, artist, performer, educator. CHANT 30 Dec: Michael Nicole Yahgulanaas (Haida). Writer, artist, illustrator. Flight of the Hummingbird; Red 31 Dec: Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee Nation). Playwright, lawyer. Sliver of a Full Moon; Waaxe’s Law

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Bibliographic Essay

Citational Relations

A number of Indigenous feminists and other scholars of colour have advocated powerfully for a more mindful and ethical consideration of our citational practices in academia. I think here especially of the work of Audra Simpson (Mohawk) and Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), Sara Ahmed’s feministkilljoys blog, and the Citational Practices Challenge by Eve Tuck (Unangax), K. Wayne Yang, and Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández—and especially that we not continue to replicate the closed circuit of white heteropatriarchy in affirming the same small group of voices over and over again. (See Ahmed’s “Making Feminist Points,” at https://feministkill joys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/; the “Open Letter from Indigenous Women Scholars Regarding Discussions of Andrea Smith,” at https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/opinions/open-let ter-from-indigenous-women-scholars-regarding-discussions-of -andrea-smith/; and the Citational Practices Challenge at http://www .criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/citation-practices/.) I think of these important interventions not only as ethical practices but as relational ones, acknowledgements of intellectual genealogies from which we all benefit and which require expansive diversity to remain healthy and

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transformative. Always citing the same small circle of voices is both harmful to the health of the field and disrespectful to the many fine scholars and writers whose work informs, enhances, challenges, and complicates our broader conversation. It’s also a political choice that too often silences the less empowered and enfranchised, who are often the ones with the most trenchant understandings. As Tuck, Yang, and Gaztambide-Fernández note in the site above, “We want to interrogate the techniques of selection in our own work. We desire to be more intentional about our citation practices, to more fully consider the politics of citation. We aim to stop erasing Indigenous, Black, brown, trans*, disabled, POC, QT*POC, feminist, activist, and disability/ crip contributions from our intellectual genealogies.” I hope this volume honours this broader commitment to meaningful, expansive, and transformative inclusivity; where it falls short, I will endeavour to do better. Citations and broader references have been included as a bibliographic essay to allow for easier reading of the main body, with last names of those authors cited directly highlighted in bold. I also wanted the bibliography not to be merely a list of sources, but a conversation about the embraided influences of words, ideas, and voices on the topics at hand. No scholar comes to these ideas and this work without being part of a much broader community, and I’ve been very blessed to have been deeply transformed by the good work of others. This essay, of course, can’t possibly address every person and every work that has impacted this volume, but these are, I hope, a good sampling of the works that made my book possible. The epigraphs that welcome readers into this volume come from Deborah Miranda’s autobiographical history of her Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen family in California, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Heyday, 2013), p. 208, and Leanne Simpson’s story, “caged,” from her first creative collection, Islands of Decolonial Love: Stories & Songs (Arbeiter Ring, 2013), p. 103. These are two essential works for anyone interested in multi-genre Indigenous writing. a

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Preface

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Notes for the Long Rebellion

The opening epigr aph is from LeAnne Howe’s very fine (and very funny) Choctalking on Other Realities (Aunt Lute, 2013), p. 38. The citation from Marie Annharte Baker (as Annharte) is in her collection of literary and cultural criticism, AKA Inendagosekwe (CUE Books, 2013), p. 207. My use of the relational term “other-than-human,” rather than the distancing “nonhuman,” comes from a discussion of Irving Hallowell’s work among Ojibway people in Canada, so thoughtfully considered in Graham Harvey’s study, Animism: Respecting the Living World (Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 17–20. The book is a favourite of mine. I asked Alice Te Punga Somerville for permission to share the story from her Māori course, and she generously agreed—wado, Alice! Chrystos’s words invoked here come from “Gathering Words,” in Fire Power (Press Gang, 1995), p. 129.

Introduction

u

Stories That Wound, Stories That Heal

The epigr aph comes from the fully revised edition of Mini Aodla Freeman’s compelling 1978 memoir, Life Among the Qallunaat, co-edited by Keavy Martin, Julie Rak, and Norma Dunning (University of Manitoba Press, 2015), pp. 63–64. The volume is part of the “First Voices, First Texts” series, which brings out-of-print work by Indigenous writers back into public conversation and, often, returning to the author’s original intentions, which were often obscured by heavy-handed interventions by non-Indigenous editors. The Afterword, by Martin, Rak, and Dunning, offers a thoughtful reflection on the book’s challenging publication history, the ethics of editing Indigenous life writing, and the editors’ collaborative relationship with Freeman in bringing the new edition to publication. (Incidentally, Martin’s Stories in a New Skin is essential reading for anyone interested in Inuit literature and story traditions, as well as a thoughtful consideration of the aesthetics and ethics of studying them.)

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The lasting popularity among settlers of the “deficiency narrative” is powerfully dissected by Jean O’Brien in her study Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Eve Tuck’s “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” is a bracing and important analysis of “damage-centred” research and its impacts on Indigenous peoples (Harvard Educational Review 79.3 [Sept. 2009], pp. 409–28). For insightful discussion of the way that Canada’s media have framed and shaped representations of Indigenous peoples, Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers, by Mark Cronlund Anderson and Carmen L. Robertson (University of Manitoba Press, 2011) is vital reading and gives context for my comments. The reference to Louise Halfe’s Blue Marrow comes from p. 30 (Couteau Books, 2004); all her work is highly recommended. David’s comment was one among many helpful revision suggestions for a draft of this book. An extremely useful resource for considering terminology is Chelsea Vowell’s Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Issues in Canada (HighWater Press, 2016), especially chs. 1 and 2. “Turtle Island” is a reference to the continent of North America, which in many Eastern Woodlands origin accounts is built on the back of a giant turtle floating in a world ocean, with the soil having been brought from the depths by a smaller creature and spread across the turtle’s back to create the foundation of the lands we now inhabit; in most Cherokee accounts, it was the little Water Beetle who brought the mud to the surface. Storyteller and novelist Sequoyah Guess tells an evocative version of the account to Christopher Teuton in Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), pp. 39–40. TVO’s Chantal Braganza provided a thoughtful explanation for the change from lowercase “indigenous” to uppercase “Indigenous” in an online 7 October 2016 article (http://tvo.org/article/current-affairs/shared-values/why-we-decided -to-capitalize-black-aboriginal-and-indigenous-). She offered one of the most succinct explanations I’ve seen, stating firmly that the change was “in recognition of these terms as identities and not adjectives.” Kathy English, the Toronto Star public editor, made this comment about their

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stylebook change: “This matters to Indigenous people. This matters to Black people. And, it matters to the respectful and fair reporting on our greater community of people overall” (https://www.thestar.com/opinion/ public_editor/2017/05/26/respect-dignity-and-fairness-conveyed-in -capital-letters-public-editor.html). If only more publications demonstrated such courtesy. The discussion of Chican@ Indigeneity has long been complex and controversial, but Domino Renee Perez’s “New Tribalism and Chicana/o Indigeneity in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa” is a great analysis; it can be found in The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 489–502. Today in Canada there’s less of an issue of “playing Indian” than of “playing Métis,” as Adam Gaudry and Daryl Leroux argue powerfully in their essay “White Settler Revisionism and Making Métis Everywhere: The Evocation of Métissage in Quebec and Nova Scotia,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (spring 2017), pp. 116–42, an essential read on the topic, alongside the works of Chris Andersen (“Métis”: Race, Recognition, and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood) and Chelsea Vowell (from her “âpihtawikosisân” blog to Indigenous Writes, noted above, especially ch. 4). In the US, the most common way this is played out is in claims to vague Cherokee heritage, usually the “great-great-grandmother” as “Cherokee princess,” which I discuss elsewhere. Patrick Wolfe’s first quoted statement comes from his book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (Cassell, 1999), p. 2; the second and third quotes are from his “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006), p. 388. Glen Coulthard made his observation about returning to the term “colonizer” over “settler” at the Indigenous Resurgence in the Age of Reconciliation conference at the University of Victoria, on 17 March 2017. Beth Brant’s observations about literature come from “The Good Red Road: Journeys of Homecoming in Native Women’s Writing,” in the collection Writing as Witness: Essay and Talk (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1994), p. 8. I’ve often quoted Marilou Awiakta’s wisdom on “art for life’s sake,” which seems especially relevant here. It’s gleaned from Thomas

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Rain Crowe’s “Marilou Awiakta: Reweaving the Future,” appalj (fall 1990), p. 43. Jace Weaver’s inclusive definition for Indigenous literature comes from his seminal work That the People Might Live: Native American Literature and Native American Community (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. ix—core reading for anyone interested in doing work in the field of Indigenous literary studies, it remains one of my touchstone critical texts to which I often return. Penny van Toorn’s Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2006), is a tour-de-force contribution to the field (introduced to me by the aforementioned Alice Te Punga Somerville), sadly hard to access in North America but very well worth the time and effort to find a copy; we lost a profound and generous thinker when she passed away in 2016. I cite p. 11 of her book. Lee Maracle’s cautionary notes about literature and oration are from “Toward a National Literature,” in her collection Memory Serves, edited by Smaro Kamboureli (NeWest Press, 2015), pp. 203, 207. Everyone should have a copy of this book. Leanne Simpson’s observations about the limiting power of the page are from “Theorizing Resurgence from Within Nishnaabeg Thought,” in her visionary Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Arbeiter Ring, 2011), p. 34. The “kitchen table” is a frequently invoked site for knowledge transmission in Indigenous literature and criticism; the best source I know for that discussion is Lisa Brooks’s afterword to American Indian Literary Nationalism, by Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack; the essay, “At the Gathering Place,” is a masterful analysis of the interweaving of history, place, and kinship (University of New Mexico Press, 2006), pp. 225–52. J. Edward Chamberlin makes a compelling argument for a wide range of cultural productions serving as literature in If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (Vintage Canada, 2004), especially pp. 19–20, whereas some of the cautionary notes about wampum-as-text can be found in Christopher B. Teuton’s extended discussion of wampum in Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature (University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 46–50. For those interested in Indigenous young-adult and children’s literature and representa-

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tions of Indigenous peoples in that body of work, the research of Nambé Pueblo scholar Debbie Reese is an important and courageous guide, especially her blog, American Indians in Children’s Literature (https:// americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.ca).

Chapter 1

u

How Do We Learn to Be Human?

The ch apter epigr aph comes from Lee Maracle’s introduction to the story, “Goodbye, Snauq,” in Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada’s Past (Toronto: Anchor Canada, 2005), p. 205. Thomas King’s quotation is found in every chapter of The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2003). Here, it’s from p. 2. The references to Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibway Country: Traveling in the Land of My Ancestors (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2003), are as follows: on “Ojibway” as “Ozhibii’ige,” pp. 10–11; “Books. Why?,” p. 141. The entirety of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Danger of a Single Story” (TEDGlobal 2009), together with the full transcript, can be found at https://www.ted .com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_stor y/ transcript?language=en (accessed 27 September 2014). Ethology is a scientific field with many fine practitioners engaged in public education. Among their best works are Jonathan Balcombe’s Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Mark Bekoff’s Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (University of Chicago Press, 2010). For the animal species listed here, I’d suggest the relevant species-specific volumes from the Animal series published by Reaktion Books. (By way of transparency, I should note that the badger reference comes from research for my own Animal volume, Badger, published in 2015.) For the Cherokee story of the origin of disease and medicine, see James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee (1900; reprinted Dover Publications, 1995). Not all Cherokees love Mooney’s work; indeed, there’s a lot of criticism about what he presented and how he wrote about it, but this is still the version of the story most often cited, and I take Robert J. Conley’s

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guidance in doing so, as he cited that version in his Cherokee Nationcommissioned The Cherokee Nation: A History (University of New Mexico Press, 2005), pp. 7–10. Christopher Teuton writes about some of the critique of Mooney’s work in his essay “Indigenous Textuality Studies and Cherokee Traditionalism: Notes Toward a Gagoga Rhetoric,” Textual Cultures 6, no. 2 (Autumn 2011), pp. 139–40. A compelling study of the rise of monotheism is Jonathan Kirsch’s God Against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (Penguin 2005). The contemporary complexities of Cherokee identity categories are well documented. See in particular Eva Marie Garroute’s Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (University of California Press, 2003), Circe Sturm’s Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (University of California Press, 2002), and Mark Edwin Miller’s Claiming Tribal Identity: The Five Tribes and the Politics of Federal Acknowledgment (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). There’s also a great discussion of these matters woven throughout Christopher B. Teuton’s aforementioned Cherokee Stories of the Turtle Island Liars’ Club, which he co-wrote with traditional storytellers Hastings Shade, Sammy Still, Sequoyah Guess, and Woody Hansen. References to Ella Deloria’s Waterlily are from the 2009 Bison Books edition (University of Nebraska Press). On being a good Dakota, see p. xxxiv; on Waterlily’s adjustment as a new bride, p. 162; and on the troubling experience with the family of strangers at the Dakota camp and Waterlily’s reflection on good behaviour, pp. 213–16. Penelope Kelsey’s comments on Waterlily come from her study Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Indigenous Worldviews (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), p. 84. I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for addressing the issue of gender in Waterlily, and for the honest concern about what they noted as the novel’s “patriarchal framing.” María Eugenia Cotera’s Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonâlez, and the Poetics of Culture (University of Texas Press, 2008) offers a helpful summary of Deloria’s gendered focus in Waterlily, drawing thoughtfully on the work of Sioux literary scholars

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such as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Joyzelle Godfrey, among others. I cite p. 156, although the full study is worth a read for those interested in this discussion. Geary Hobson’s fine novella was published by the University of Arizona Press in 2000, and citations are as follows: on the death of Thomas’s family and being a “lone cypress,” pp. 60–63; on being poor and speaking Ofo by himself, p. 64; on doing doctoring among his Tunica relatives, p. 85; Dr. Smight’s condescending comments, p. 96; on the beating of the Pamunkey children and Thomas’s departure from the Smithsonian, pp. 105–10; Thomas plays the flute and sings into the bayou night, p. 111; his death notice, pp. 113–14; Simon’s observation about Indians, p. 102. My previous discussion of the book is in Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 179–94. Warren Cariou’s comments about that which remains can be found in “Going to Canada,” the foreword to Across Cultures, Across Borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures, edited by Paul DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque (Broadview Press, 2010), p. 21. Thomas King’s explanation for why Indigenous writers focus on the contemporary is found in The Truth about Stories, p. 106. The citation to Forget’s letter to the Blackfoot Agency agent comes from Keith D. Smith’s collection, Strange Visitors: Documents in Indigenous–Settler Relations in Canada from 1876 (University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 87–88. Most citations of E. Pauline Johnson’s work are from Margery Fee and Dory Nason’s very fine edited collection Tekahionwake: E. Pauline Johnson’s Writings on Native North America (Broadview, 2016): “The Cattle Thief,” p. 137; “A Cry from an Indian Wife,” pp. 131–33. “The Man in the Chrysanthemum Land” is in Tekahionwake: Collected Poems and Selected Prose, edited by Carole Gerson and Veronica Strong-Boag (University of Toronto Press, 2002), pp. 152–53. I’ve learned a great deal from the different but equally compelling interpretations of Johnson’s work from Haudenosaunee scholars Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca) in Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), especially ch. 1, and Rick Monture (Mohawk from Six Nations of the Grand

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River) and his book We Share Our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River (University of Manitoba Press, 2014), primarily ch. 2. Dory Nason’s comments on love and Indigenous women’s activism come from “We Hold Our Hands Up: On Indigenous Women’s Love and Resistance,” which can be found online at Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/ we-hold-our-hands-up-on-indigenous-womens-love-and-resistance/; originally posted 12 February 2013). Theodore Roosevelt’s advocacy of allotment is cited from Kristin T. Ruppel’s Unearthing Indian Land: Living with the Legacies of Allotment (University of Arizona Press, 2008), p. 29. Beth Brant’s discussion of Johnson comes from “The Good Red Road: Journeys of Homecoming in Native Women’s Writing,” from the aforementioned Writing as Witness, pp. 5–7. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm offers insight into the issue of Indigenous erotica in “Erotica, Indigenous Style,” her introduction to Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica (Kegedonce, 2003), p. xii. The references to Gregory Scofield’s poems are from the first edition of Love Medicine and One Song (Polestar, 1997): “He Is,” pp. 21–22; “Pêyak-Nikamowin/ One Song,” pp. 107–9. Joy Harjo’s poem with its evocative line inspired this chapter’s title and its concerns; “It’s Raining in Honolulu,” comes from her collection How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2002 (W.W. Norton, 2002), p. 194.

Chapter 2

u

How Do We Behave as Good Relatives?

The epigr aph is from Linda Hogan’s brilliant, beautiful, and heart-breaking novel Power (W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 229. Jeannette Armstrong’s story is from All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction, edited by Thomas King (McClelland and Stewart, 1990), and I quote, in order, pages 133–35 and 132. I cite the introduction to Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon’s edited collection, Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (Duke University Press, 2001), p. 1, whereas the quotation from

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Donna Haraway comes from her 2016 book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, p. 2). As is the case with so much of her corpus, this is a brilliant and challenging work that merits much pondering and multiple reads. Leslie Marmon Silko’s comments on the Fifth World are in her essay “Landscape, History, and Pueblo Imagination,” from The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 273, while the quotation from Winona LaDuke comes from All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life (South End, 1999), p. 2, a powerful book that only becomes more relevant as time goes on. LeAnne Howe’s Shell Shaker is my favourite of her many excellent fiction, nonfiction, theatrical, and filmic works, and it deserves a much more extensive discussion than I’ve been able to provide here. Certainly it merits frequent rereading. I’ve cited pp. 1, 11, 16, 22, and 222. George Manuel’s words are from his classic book The Fourth World: An Indian Reality, co-written with Michael Posluns (Collier-Macmillan, 1974), p. 64. Reed’s chilling statement is quoted in John S. Milloy’s influential early indictment of the Indian residential schools: A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (University of Manitoba Press, 1999), p. 30. The quotation on Aboriginal writers responding to residential school comes from Sam McKegney’s Magic Weapons (University of Manitoba Press, 2007), p. 12; it’s an essential read for those interested in the powerful ways Indigenous peoples have responded to traumatic experiences through creative arts. Robin Wall Kimmerer discusses the ethos of gratitude and reciprocity (p. 110) and the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address (p. 115) in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed, 2013). This work and her earlier book, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (Oregon State University Press, 2003), are evocative mediations on the relationship between the plant people and humanity. King’s idea of “all my relations” comes from the introduction to his aforementioned edited collection of the same name: All My Relations, p. ix. The difficulty for humans to think like another animal is quite

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provocatively explored in Charles Foster’s Being a Beast: An Intimate and Radical Look at Nature (Profile, 2016); even the friendly household dog reveals its own unique strangeness in Alexandra Horowitz’s Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know (Scribner, 2009). The war between Nanabush and the raccoons is chronicled throughout Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles and Sweetgrass (Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2010); I’ve quoted a number of pages, including 32–33, 92, 100, 256, 278, and 331. Nanabush takes many names in the novel, all of them explorers or colonial-era white Johns whose lives intersected with and often diminished those of the peoples with whom they came into contact, such as: John Prestor/Prester John, a twelfth-century Christian explorer and missionary to Asia; John Smith, of Pocahontas fame; John Richardson, author of Wacousta, the classic whiteman-gone-native Canadian novel; and John Tanner, a white captive of Shawnees who eventually acculturated into Saulteaux culture as a guide, trapper, and translator; among others. Graham Harvey’s Animism is once again quoted here, this time p. xx. The discussion by Heidi Altman and Thomas N. Belt can be found in “Tōhi: The Cherokee Concept of Well-Being,” from Under the Rattlesnake: Cherokee Health and Resiliency, edited by Lisa J. Lefler (University of Alabama Press, 2009), p. 14. The quotation from Theda Perdue’s very fine book Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (University of Nebraska Press, 1998) is on p. 85. Womack’s provocative challenge to the ethics of hunting come from his essay “There Is No Respectful Way to Kill an Animal,” which appeared in a special Animal Studies–themed issue of Studies in American Indian Literatures 25, no. 4 (winter 2013); I’ve quoted from pages 24–25. The essay I cite here by Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes, “Everyday Decolonization: Living a Decolonizing Queer Politics,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 19 (2015), p. 156, is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersections between Indigenous, queer, and decolonial politics and action. Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang relate the history and terminological origin for “two-spirit” in their now somewhat dated but still essential Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality (University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 2. The anthology Sovereign

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Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature, which I co-edited with Qwo-Li Driskill, Lisa Tatonetti, and Deborah Miranda (University of Arizona Press, 2011), was inspired in part by that volume, among others; our introduction (pp. 1–17) offers more extensive commentary on terminology relating to Indigenous sexualities and gender identities/expressions. Michele de Cuneo’s letter is quoted in David E. Stannard’s American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 84. Daniel Castro’s Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Duke University Press, 2007) is a helpful critical assessment of Las Casas and his legacy. Balboa’s slaughter of the “kynges bother and many other younge men in womens apparell” in Quarequa is chronicled in Jonathan Goldberg’s Sodometries: Renaissance Text, Modern Sexualities (Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 180. Gould’s “We Exist” is published in her book Beneath My Heart (Firebrand, 1990); the quoted lines are on pp. 33–34. Allen’s “Some Like Indians Endure” is cited from the above-mentioned Sovereign Erotics, p. 24. Billy-Ray Belcourt is one of the finest young Indigenous poets working in Canada today, and I’m so pleased his work is in the world. “Sacred” is found in his collection This Wound Is a World: Poems (Frontenac House, 2017), p. 17. It’s worth seeing Qwo-Li Driskill’s “Map of the Americas” on the page, as part of the pattern poem itself forms the outline of the Americas; it’s published in Walking with Ghosts (Salt, 2005), and the cited stanzas are on p. 11. Beth Brant’s “A Long Story” is from her edited collection A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women (Firebrand, 1988); I’ve quoted from pp. 104–6. The stanzas from “Labyrinth” are quoted with permission from Deborah Miranda’s chapbook, Deer (Flying Turtle, 2003), p. 18. Finally, Full-Metal Indigiqueer (Talonbooks, 2017), by Joshua Whitehead (Oji-Cree), is an astonishing first book of poetry. It had just been released at the time I was working on the final copy edits of this book, so I didn’t have a chance to discuss it in any depth, but it belongs in this discussion too.

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Chapter 3

u

How Do We Become Good Ancestors?

The epigr aph is from “The Business of Trauma,” in Gwen Benaway’s fierce second book of poetry, Passage (Kegedonce, 2016), p. 46. Beth Brant’s powerful statement on Indigenous women’s writing and other labour is in her above-mentioned anthology A Gathering of Spirit, p. 12. The exact numbers for demographic decline in the Americas after 1492 have long been a matter of strong debate, with estimates ranging from the low millions for the entire hemisphere to twenty-five million or more. Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (Vintage, 2005) offers an excellent analysis of the debate, the evidence, and the larger context, especially in Part One, “Numbers from Nowhere.” It’s necessary reading for anyone interested in the most recent research on the populations, cultures, and lifeways of the pre-Invasion Americas. Another important though less recent source is Russell Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987). Robert Warrior’s observations come from “Indigenous Nonfiction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 188. There are many significant works on the history of Hawai‘i, the overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani, and the continuing sovereignty movement—far too many to note here—but a few I’ve found particularly useful are Haunani-Kay Trask’s From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i (University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993); A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, edited by Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘opua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaika‘ala (Duke University Press, 2014); and Noenoe K. Silva’s Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2004). The quotation from the aforementioned Silva, as well as the one from ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui, come from their respective contributions to The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature cited above. Silva’s piece is “Hawaiian Literature in Hawaiian: An Overview,” and the quotation is from pp. 102–3; the citation from ho‘omanawanui’s essay “I ka ‘Ōlelo ke Ola, in Words Is Life: Imagining the Future of Indig-

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enous Literatures” is from p. 676. The Queen’s own English translation of “Aloha ‘Oe” is from a handwritten document in the Hawaii State Archives Digital Collection (http://gallery.hawaii.gov/gallery2/main.php?g2_view =tags.VirtualAlbum&g2_tagName=Music&g2_itemId=3310&g2_image ViewsIndex=1). The history of “Aloha ‘Oe”—and especially its uses (and abuses) in settler colonial contexts—is quite impressively unpacked in Adria L. Imada’s “‘Aloha ‘Oe’: Settler Colonial Nostalgia and the Genealogy of a Love Song,” in American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37, no. 2 (2013), pp. 35–52; highly recommended. The citations from Queen Lili‘uokalani’s autobiography, Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, are from the 1964 Charles Tuttle reprint edition, pp. 289–90 and 371–74. The quotation from Clayton W. Dumont, Jr., is in “The Politics of Scientific Objections to Repatriation,” Wicazo Sa Review 18, no. 1 (spring 2003), p. 109. Amelia V. Katanski provides a helpful discussion about repatriation in “Embodied Jurisgenesis: NAGPRA, Dialogue, and Repatriation in American Indian Literature,” in Debra Madsen’s edited collection The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature (Routledge, 2016). The most recent numbers I’ve been able to find about ancestors who remain in US museums is from the US National Parks Service’s National NAGPRA Frequently Asked Questions webpage (https://www.nps.gov/nagpra/FAQ/INDEX.HTM; last accessed 13 April 2017), with 50,518 individuals eligible for repatriation, but this includes those who remain in possession as well as those that have been repatriated—and this counts only those in US holdings, and only those that are culturally affiliated remains, not those who are, for whatever reason, unaffiliated with a specific community. The actual numbers worldwide are undoubtedly in the hundreds of thousands, if not much, much higher. An excellent history of anthropology’s troubling relationship with Indigenous peoples and its continuing legacies is found in Robert E. Bieder’s Science Encounters the Indian, 1820–1880: The Early Years of American Ethnology (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). The quotation from Wendy Rose is from an interview with Laura Coltelli, published in the latter’s Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak (University of Nebraska Press, 1990), pp. 122–23, 125, 129; her essay “Neon

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Scars” is from Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat’s 1987 collection I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (Bison Books, 1989), p. 255. Both “Truganinny” and “Julia” are in Rose’s collection Bone Dance: New and Selected Poems, 1965–1993 (University of Arizona Press, 1994), and the citations are respectively from pp. 54–55 and 60–62. It’s worth noting that Truganinny/Truganiny was not the “last” Indigenous Tasmanian, in spite of settler myths to the contrary. Rose’s essay “The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on Whiteshamanism” is in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance (South End, 1992), pp. 403–422. Kathryn Napier Gray offers a smart analysis of these poems in a somewhat similar vein in her essay “‘Keep Wide Awake in the Eyes’: Seeing Eyes in Wendy Rose’s Poetry,” which I encountered too late in the proofing process to include here, but it merits attention (Transatlantic Voices: Interpretations of Native North American Literatures, edited by Elvira Pulitano, University of Nebraska Press, 2007, pp. 129–49). The repatriation genre of Indigenous literature deserves further study. The three novels mentioned here are: Anna Lee Walters’s Ghost Singer (University of New Mexico Press, 1988); Chancers, by Gerald Vizenor (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000); and Truth and Bright Water, by Thomas King (HarperCollins Canada, 1999), the latter of which I write about in some detail in Our Fire Survives the Storm (cited above), pp. 169–79. The citation to Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes is from the University of Hawai‘i Press edition of 1998, p. 280. Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves was published, to immediate acclaim, in 2017 (Dancing Cat Books), just in time to include this brief discussion in the book; I’ve quoted from pp. 88–90 and 214. Sherman Alexie’s “The Sin Eaters” appears in his collection The Toughest Indian in the World (Atlantic Monthly, 2000), and citations are from pp. 82–83 and 115. Ian Mosby’s article, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” Histoire sociale/Social History XLVI, no. 91 (May 2013), pp. 145–72, is eye-opening reading that puts the lie to any claims that residential schools were benign in intent or operation. Kim TallBear’s Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False

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Promise of Genetic Science (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) is widely regarded as the best work on the complex interplay between genetic science and Indigenous identity (and identity claims). The essay by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1.1 (2012), p. 10, is a piece that every person doing work in any area of Indigenous Studies, or who is interested in matters of decolonial justice, should read. It includes a good description, by Vine Deloria, Jr., of the “Cherokee Princess,” although that phenomenon is well considered in the above-mentioned work by Circe Sturm, as well. Leroy Little Bear’s description comes from “Jagged Worldviews Colliding,” in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, edited by Marie Battiste (University of British Columbia Press, 2000), pp. 77–85. The quotation from China Miéville comes from his interview with John McDonald in International Socialist Review (issue 75, or online at http://isreview.org/issue/75/fantasy-science-fiction-and-politics; accessed 14 April 2017); Dan Hassler-Forest offers a thoughtful critique of the reactionary politics of much of the fantasy genre in “Steampunk Remade: China Miéville and the Political Potential of Fantasy Literature,” in Infinite Earths (29 April 2013, http://79.170.40.240/infiniteearths.co.uk/?p=427; accessed 14 April 2017). Carter Meland’s observation comes from his essay “American Indians at the Final Frontiers of Imperial SF,” in issue 5 (February 2009) of the online magazine Expanded Horizons (http://expandedhori zons.net/magazine/?page_id=150; accessed 14 April 2017). I still draw from these classic intellectual histories—Roy Harvey Pearce’s Savagism and Civilization (University of California Press, 1988), Robert Berkhofer’s The White Man’s Indian (Vintage, 1979), Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (Routledge, 1992), William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (Hill and Wang, 1983), and Richard Slotkin, especially his Regeneration Through Violence (University of Oklahoma Press, 1973)—to help make sense of the savagism/civilization binary and its corrosive history in the US. While the pipe-smoking Catholic don of Oxford University and the tough-talking Texas libertarian would seem, at first glance, to have little in common, their secondary worlds are in some ways complementary, for each

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presents a cosmos where heroic/tragic acts of righteous conquest affirm the right of chosen men to lay claim to lands, resources, and peoples, a world where manly virtue is ordained, and, for a time at least, rewarded (although in Tolkien’s legendarium power accompanied by hubris always collapses in upon itself, with other power only occasionally surviving). There are more women in positions of authority in Tolkien’s work, and far less sexual violence than in Howard’s, plus Tolkien was a widely tolerant man whose politics were far from those of Howard’s racial fantasies; yet together, and in different but sometimes complementary ways, the two men’s works influenced the ideological template for the bulk of fantastic literature produced today. This conflation is admittedly a bit unfair to Tolkien, given that the ethical and aesthetic concerns of his legendarium are a world apart from Howard’s racist Hyborian Age. It’s more in how Tolkien’s work has been taken up rather than what it represents in and of itself; it also doesn’t escape my notice that some of the biggest Tolkien geeks I know are Indigenous readers, so there’s something there deserving of respectful attention, too. As for Howard, well, he and his work have far less of my sympathy. Australian scholar Helen Young’s Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness (Routledge, 2016), especially ch. 1, offers a compelling analysis of the influence that both men had on the subsequent genre and its explorations of race. Octavia Butler’s oft-cited words are from her essay “Positive Obsession,” in the second edition of Bloodchild and Other Stories (Seven Stories, 2005), pp. 134–35. Christopher Teuton’s work on reading in the Cherokee Nation—and the high number of genre and popular writers named in the survey responses he distributed—is illuminating; it’s in “Conceptualizing American Indian Literary Theory Today,” from Studies in American Indian Literatures 19, no. 2 (winter 2007), pp. 175–83. The best version of Tolkien’s famous essay is in Tolkien on Fairy-Stories: Expanded Edition, with Commentary and Notes, edited by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (HarperCollins, 2014). I’d be remiss not to mention another inspiration for my use of “wonderworks” in these contexts. When I was a boy growing up in the US, PBS

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ran a regular series of children’s literary adaptations featured under the title WonderWorks. Among the many films included under that banner were the Narnia series, Bridge to Terabithia, and Anne of Green Gables (my personal favourite). The literary resonance with a different kind of wonderwork seems entirely apt to me, even if these two uses are in reference to very different bodies of literature. Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada and Aiko Yamashiro edited a very fine special issue of Marvels & Tales (30, no. 1, 2016), specifically on the topic of Indigenous wonder tales, and I draw from their contribution “Rooted in Wonder: Tales of Indigenous Activism and Community Organizing,” pp. 20–21. The Chamorro context cited in Michael Lujan Bevacqua and Isa Kelley Bowman’s essay “Histories of Wonder, Futures of Wonder: Chamorro Activist Identity, Community, and Leadership in ‘The Legend of Gadao’ and ‘The Women Who Saved Guåhan from a Giant Fish,’” is in the same issue; my citation is from p. 72. The quotation from Grace Dillon’s Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (University of Arizona Press, 2012), comes from p. 11.

Chapter 4

u

How Do We Learn to Live Together?

The epigr aph to this ch apter is from Waawaate Fobister’s multiple Dora Award–winning one-performer play Agokwe, published in Two-Spirit Acts: Queer Indigenous Performances, edited by Jean O’Hara (Playwrights Canada Press, 2013), p. 133. The collection also includes works by Muriel Miguel and Kent Monkman. There’s excellent work on the unfolding narrative around reconciliation and national apology, with the following as just a few important sources for further study: Sheryl Lightfoot’s recent book Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution (Routledge, 2016) is an essential study of the larger context in which these discussions take place, and her essay “Settler State Apologies to Indigenous Peoples: A Comparative Assessment,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 2 (2015), pp. 15–39, offers vital insight into the ways that different countries have

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undertaken these initiatives—and where they fall short; David Gaertner has written extensively on reconciliation in Canada, and his essay “Translating Reconciliation,” in Translating Effects: The Shaping of Modern Canadian Culture, edited by Louise von Flotow, Sherry Simon, and Kathy Mezei (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), pp. 444–57, is a useful and nuanced critique. A particularly compelling work on the ways Indigenous artists have responded to and engaged with TRC and the emerging national conversation is The Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, edited by Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016). Regarding the rise of evangelicalism and renewed attacks on traditional Indigenous spiritualities and Indigenous identities more broadly, see Mary Annette Pember’s 2012 article in Indian Country Today, “Will Arson Attack Cause Holy War Between BornAgains and Natives?” (https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/news/ native-news/will-arson-attack-cause-holy-war-between-born-agains-and -natives/; accessed 14 April 2017); and the Indian Country Today Media Network provided ongoing coverage of the various ways that missionary intrusions continue, from these attacks to the targeting of Indigenous children for adoption and the undermining of the US Indian Child Welfare Act. Marie Battiste’s comments are quoted from “Introduction: Unfolding the Lessons of Colonization,” in her edited anthology Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision (University of British Columbia Pres, 2000), p. xxii. Lee Maracle’s statement about “hard truths” is from “Indigenous Women and Power,” in her aforementioned Memory Serves, p. 142. The quotation from Celia’s Song (Cormorant Books, 2014) is on p. 7. I cite Richard Wagamese’s A Quality of Light at some length (Doubleday Canada, 1997); in order of appearance, the references come from pp. 8–9, 153, 201, 250–51, and 320. As a fun aside, Joshua begins making his connection back to his Ojibway heritage through a contact at Cape Croker Reserve, or Neyaashiinigmiing, home of celebrated Anishinaabe writers Basil Johnston, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Lenore Keeshig-Tobias, and John Borrows, among others. A very suitable site indeed for a literary homecoming in

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Ojibway territory. Also, the celebrated two-spirit artist Kent Monkman, noted above, was the cover artist for A Quality of Light. On the matter of the Indigenous apocalypse, I find Grace Dillon’s words to be particularly useful, especially in the context of Indigenous science fiction as a whole: “Introduction: Imagining Indigenous Futurisms,” Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (University of Arizona Press, 2012), p. 8. The various citations to Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991) come, in order, from pp. 424–25, 724–25, and 749. Jeff Berglund’s commentary on Silko is drawn from his Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), pp. 149–50. Although I’m not a fan of the homophobic currents in Silko’s epic novel, I certainly agree with Craig Womack’s assessment of its significance: see his trail-cutting Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 253, 255–56, for more discussion of the novel and its place in Indigenous literature. I’m grateful to the Turtle Gals’ Michelle St. John for her copy of The Only Good Indian . . . for use in this volume, as I’d long wanted to write about it, but to date the script remains unpublished. I worked from the version identified as Draft 15, 5 November 2007, with listed authors Jani Lauzon, Michelle St. John, Cheri Maracle, Falen Johnson, and Monique Mojica. I draw particularly on pp. 23–29, 34–38, and 50–52, and am deeply appreciative to all of them for their generous permission for me discuss the play here. Wolfgang Mieder convincingly traces the origins of Sheridan’s attributed remark in his essay “‘The Only Good Indian Is a Dead Indian’: History and Meaning of a Proverbial Stereotype,” Journal of American Folklore, 106, no. 419 (winter 1993), pp. 38–60. Richard Van Camp is one of the most generous human beings I know, and this generosity is fully on display in “Show Me Yours,” in The Moon of Letting Go (Enfield and Wizenty, 2009); I cite p. 6. Leanne Simpson’s writings, both creative and critical, are profound and transformative; the citation from “for asinykwe” is in the aforementioned Islands of Decolonial Love, pp. 128–29.

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Chapter 5

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Reading the Ruptures

The epigr aph is borrow ed from the eponymous poem of Kim Shuck’s Smuggling Cherokee (Greenfield Review Press, 2005), p. 37. The meditation on “rupture” is drawn from the word’s detailed etymology in the online Oxford English Dictionary. For an excellent examination of federal land allotment policy and its impacts on Cherokees, the best still remains one of the first: Angie Debo’s And Still the Waters Run (Princeton University Press, 1940), which made Debo a pariah among Oklahoma’s oil-rich white elite and a hero among the Indian people whose cause she so fiercely championed at great cost to herself and her career. Other important sources include Kristen T. Ruppel’s Unearthing Indian Land: Living with the Legacies of Allotment (University of Arizona Press, 2008), and especially Rose Stremlau’s Sustaining the Cherokee Family: Kinship and the Allotment of an Indigenous Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Stremlau discusses bureaucratic paternalism and “competence” provisions against high blood-quantum Cherokees on pp. 194–95. While I thought myself rather clever in coming up with “cartographic kinscapes,” I’ve since learned that “kinscape” has been employed to great effect by Dr. Brenda Macdougall, chair in Métis Research at the University of Ottawa, in discussing Métis relationality across expansive distances and identity beyond reductive notions of blood—and before her, by social scientists in the UK, to illuminate risks in families with transmissible genetic conditions (alongside the related “timescapes” and “genescapes”). In each case, either actual or metaphorical familial connections and geographic relationships are central to how these varied kinscapes are understood, although all three bring different considerations to the term and employ them in quite distinctive ways. My use of “kinscape” here is specifically a text-based focus on legible and interpretable relations to land—particularly the allotment maps—and thus the cartographic extension of the concept. The history of anti-Black racism in the Nation is well documented in Circe Sturm’s previously referenced Blood Politics as well as Tiya Miles’s The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: Uni-

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versity of North Carolina Press, 2012). An excellent single-volume history of Cherokee Removal is Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green’s The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents, second edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005). Three important works on the Indian history of what is now Oklahoma include Muriel Wright’s classic A Guide to the Indian Tribes of Oklahoma (University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), Rennard Strickland’s The Indians in Oklahoma (University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), and Blue Clark’s updated complement to Wright’s book Indian Tribes of Oklahoma: A Guide (University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). These scholars—Choctaw, OsageCherokee, and Creek, respectively—engage that region’s very complicated history with care and insight, and their works are highly recommended. I long wondered if the “James Spear” accused of killing John Ridge was the “James Spears” (plural) who signed the 1839 reunification Constitution, and if this was the same man as my ancestor. When I joined the First Families of the Cherokee Nation, genealogists at the Cherokee Heritage Centre in Park Hill, Oklahoma, confirmed that they’re one and the same, as did further research in Emmet Starr’s Old Cherokee Families: Notes of Dr. Emmet Starr (Volume One: Letter Books A–F), edited by Jack D. Baker and David Keith Hampton (Baker Publishing, 1988). X-marks have a long and fascinating history. Scott Lyons’s book X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) offers an important analysis of the rhetorical functions of these symbols; I cite p. 1. A distinctive but related set of images are clan pictographs used by Indigenous peoples to sign documents. See Heidi Bohaker, “Reading Anishinaabe Identities: Meaning and Metaphor in Nindoodem Pictograms,” Ethnohistory 71, no. 1 (2010), pp. 11–33. Together these discussions give nuanced understanding of the ways that alternative Indigenous “assent marks” operate, even in contexts that might otherwise be seen as non-Indigenous or utterly compromised. Strickland’s three categories come from the above-cited The Indians in Oklahoma, p. 162, whereas King’s categories can be found in The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Doubleday Canada, 2012), especially ch. 3, “Too Heavy to Lift,” in which he explicates the categories with wry humour leavened by grim truth-telling. (It’s

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perhaps the best single-volume history of Indigenous–settler relations available; accordingly, I often assign it for my “Indigenous Foundations” course, joined now by Vowell’s Indigenous Writes, discussed above.) Amos Maxwell’s two-part article on “The Sequoyah Convention” Chronicles of Oklahoma 28, nos. 2–3, remains the most comprehensive study I’ve seen on the tragic failure of the State of Sequoyah to be realized; much more work needs to be done on this important period in the history of Indian Territory.

Conclusion

u

Keeping a Fire

My first published essay was a reflective piece on the whole mess of Little Tree, and I followed up a few years ago with a review essay on the movie version of the book. The first was “A Lingering Miseducation: Rethinking the Legacy of Little Tree,” in Studies in American Indian Literatures 12.1 (2000), pp. 20–36; the second is in Seeing Red—Hollywood’s Pixeled Skins: American Indians and Film, edited by LeAnne Howe, Harvey Markowitz, and Denise K. Cummings (Michigan State University Press), 2013, pp. 127–32. The big exposé that revealed Forrest Carter to be Asa Earl Carter was Dan T. Carter’s “Southern History, American Fiction: The Secret Life of Southwestern Novelist Forrest Carter,” in Rewriting the South: History and Fiction, edited by Lothar Hönninghausen and Valeria Gennaro Lerda (Francke, 1993), pp. 286–304. Although I disagree with some of the directions he takes in his critique, David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual (Graywolf, 2006) offers a provocative analysis of Carter’s novel and the stereotypes it draws upon. Some of these fierce and fabulous emerging Indigenous voices are Jorge Vallejos, Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith, Tyler Pennock, Sophie Bender Johnston, and Gwen Benaway, among many others. I’m grateful beyond words to continue to learn from these powerful thinkers—their words and works give me great hope for the future.

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Copyright Acknowledgements

The author and the publisher are grateful to the following, who granted permission to reproduce work under copyright. Billy-Ray Belcount, for the stanza from the poem “Sacred,” p. 108. Gwen Benaway, for the lines from the poem “The Business of Trauma,” epigraph, p. 113. Chrystos, for the passage from the prose poem “Gathering Words,” p. xviii. SALT Publishing, for lines from the poem “Map of the Americas,” by Qwo-Li Driskill, pp. 109–10. Janice Gould, for the lines from the poem “We Exist,” pp. 105–6. West End Press for lines from the poem by Paula Gunn Allen “Some Like Indians Endure,” p. 107, and for lines from the Wendy Rose poems “Truganinny,” p. 128, and “Julia,” pp. 129–30.

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W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., for lines from the Joy Harjo poem “It’s Raining in Honolulu,” p. 70, from How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems: 1975–2001, by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 2002 by Joy Harjo. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Deborah Miranda, for the poem “Labyrinth,” p. 112. Gregory Scofield, for lines from the poems “He Is,” p. 68, and “PêyakNikamowin/One Song,” p. 69. Kim Shuck, for lines from the poem “Smuggling Cherokee,” epigraph, p. 183. Leanne Simpson and ARP Books, for passages from the prose poem “caged,” epigraph, p. vii, and the short story “for asinykwe,” pp. 180–81. The Turtle Gals (Cheri Maracle, Michelle St. John, Falen Johnson, Monique Mojica, Jani Lauzon), for the dialogue and scene instructions from the play The Only Good Indian …, pp. 176–77.

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Index

Almanac of the Dead (Silko), 169–72 “Aloha ‘Oe,” 118–20, 255 alphabetic literacy, Indigenous practices of, 22 alphabetic writing, 16 Altman, Heidi, 98 American Indian/Native American terminology (US), 7 American Indians in Children’s Literature (blog), 247 ancestors: apocalypse of lived experience, 167–68; bio-prospecting, 132–38; and continuity across generations, 114–15; as dead relatives, 123–24; as exploitable commodities, 130; exploitation for research, 131,

“Aboriginal peoples,” as generic category, 7 academia, citational practices, 241–42 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi: dangers of singular stories, 36–37 adjectival use of “indigenous,” 7, 244–45 Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri, 8; The Stone Collection, 179; Without Reservation, 66 Alexie, Robert Arthur, 86 Alexie, Sherman, “The Sin Eaters,” 132–35, 138 Allen, Paula Gunn, “Some Like Indians Endure,” 107 All My Relations (King), 87–88

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138–39; forward imagining of the future, 139–40; Indigenous relationship to, xvii; literary ancestors, 116; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, US), 125, 127; reckoning and resistance by, 169–72; relationship to future generations, 28, 114, 117–18; repatriation of Indigenous bodies and belongings, 123– 26, 255; restorying of bonds, 186–87 ancestry: settler claims to, 8–9, 138–39, 245 animals: ethics of hunting, 97, 99–100; Indigenous portrayals of, 91–92, 252; portrayals of in popular culture, 91–92. See also otherthan-human world animism, 96–97 Annharte, xvi–xvii anthropology, 255; as history of grave-robbing, 124–25 apocalypse: Indigenous apocalyptic works, 167–69; of lived experience, 168; settlercolonial fantasies of, 167 Armstrong, Jeannette, “This Is a Story,” 72–73, 76

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art: for life’s sake, 21, 245; and politics, xviii assimilation process, and residential school system, 85 Australia: Aboriginal literature, bias against, 19–20 authenticity: of identity claims, 8–9, 138–39, 245; weaponization of universal values, 27–28 Awiakta, Marilou, 21, 245 Baby No-Eyes (Grace), 131–32 Baker, Marie Annharte, xvi–xvii Balboa, Vasco Nuñez de, 106–7, 253 Battiste, Marie, 159 Belcourt, Billy-Ray, “Sacred,” 108–9 Belt, Thomas, 98 Benaway, Gwen: Passage, 179; “The Business of Trauma,” 113 Berglund, Jeff, 170 Berkhofer, Robert, 149 Bevacqua, Michael Lujan, on Chamorro wonder tales, 154 Billows, Molly, 214 bio-prospecting, 132–38 Birchfield, Don, 149 Black chattel slavery, and Cherokees, 14–15 Black Indians, 15 Black people: affiliated Indigenous histories of oppression, 170–71; and Five Tribes

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Freedmen, 15; relevance of science fiction to, 150–51 blood: and claims to ancestry, 8–9, 138–39, 245; colonial notions of “Indian” blood, 138–39 blood quantum, 194, 262 Blue Marrow (Halfe), 4 Bonnin, Gertrude (Zitkala-Ša), 174, 175–77 Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (Erdrich), 35–36 Boudinot, Elias, 189 Bowman, Isa Kelley, on Chamorro wonder tales, 154 Braganza, Chantal, 244 Brant, Beth, 86, 213; on E. Pauline Johnson, 64; on Indigenous literature, 17 Brant, Beth – works: A Gathering of Spirit, 114; “The Good Red Road,” 64; “A Long Story,” 110 Brown, Dee, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 165 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Brown), 165 Butler, Octavia, 167; science fiction, relevance to Black people, 150–51 Campbell, Maria, 86 Campbell, Nicola I., 214 Campbell, Tenille, 214

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Canada: citizenship oath, 13–14; Indigenous, as terminology, 6–7. See also residential school system Cariou, Warren, 65; narratives of persistence, 56 Carr, A.A., 149 Carter, Asa Earl, The Education of Little Tree, 206–8 Celia’s Song (Maracle), 160–61 ceremony, and art, 87 Chamberlain, Betsey Guppy, 214 Chamorro wonder tales, 154 Cherokee Advocate, 192 Cherokee Nation: family displacements, 198–99; in Indian Territory, 189, 192–204; Indian title to land, elimination of, 192–94; land allotment policies, 192–98, 262; plat maps, 195–98; plat maps as cartographic kinscapes, 197– 98; reunification Constitution, 190; State of Sequoyah, 193, 263; white settlement in Indian Territory, 192–94 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 188 Cherokee Phoenix, 192 Cherokee Removal (Trail of Tears), 188–89 Cherokee Republic: eviction and relocation (Indian Removal Act), 187–88; Treaty of

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New Echota, 188; written constitution, 187 Cherokees: constitutional amendment, 15; and Five Tribes, 15, 193; gender complementarity, unravelling of, 98, 99; “Old Settler” emigrants, 15, 16; origins of disease and suffering, 39, 97–99, 247–48 Chicanos/Chicanas: as Indigenous peoples, 8, 245 Chickasaws, 14; and Five Tribes, 15, 193 Choctaws: and Five Tribes, 15, 193 Chrystos, xviii citational practices, 241–42 Cody, Buffalo Bill (in The Only Good Indian . . .), 174–76, 178 coexistence: and harmonious relations, 28; and love, 160–61, 179–81; as ongoing commitments, 159–60; with other-than-human world, 39; postcolonial discourse on, 159; relational concerns, 157–58 colonial apocalypse, survivors of, 5 colonial imaginary, and misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples, 140–43 colonialism: commercial traffic in Indigenous burial remains,

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124–25; displacement of Indigenous presence, xvi–xvii; and structures of power, 12. See also Indigenous deficiency community, Indigenous relationship to, xvii compassionate defiance, 109–10 Conley, Robert J., 149 Conspiracy of Silence (television miniseries), 178 Cooper, James Fenimore: The Last of the Mohicans, 49, 53; Leatherstocking Tales, 49 Costner, Kevin, Dances with Wolves, 208 Cotera, María Eugenia, 47 Coulthard, Glen: use of “colonizer” instead of “settler,” 12 Coyote/Kyoti, as trickstertransformer, 72–73, 76 Creeks: and Five Tribes, 15, 193 cultural capital: of Indigenous traditions, 22–23; of literature, 20–21 cultural destabilization through intermarriage, 11–12 Cuneo, Michele de, 106 Dakota people: Waterlily (Deloria), 42–47 decolonization, 257; backlash against, 65; and community

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resurgence, xviii; and love, 111–12; and queering, 103; and science fiction, 148–49 Deloria, Ella Cara, Waterlily, 42–47, 248 Dennis, Patrick, Auntie Mame, 17 descendants: Indigenous relationship to, xvii; relationship between the living and the dead, 123–24; restorying of bonds, 186–87 destructiveness, warnings against, 38–40, 97–99 difference, as distinction, 155 Dillon, Grace, 166–67; Walking the Clouds, 155 Dimaline, Cherie: The Marrow Thieves, 132, 135–37, 167 disease, Cherokee story on origins of, 39, 97–99, 247–48 Driskill, Qwo-Li, “Map of the Americas,” 109–10 Drowning in Fire (Womack), 209 Dumont, Clayton W., Jr., 124 economics, role in commodification of identities, 57–58, 86 The Education of Little Tree (Carter), 206–8 empathy: and accountability in critical work, xix; capacity for, 77; other-than-human

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kinship, 75–79; and relational understandings, 96 Erdrich, Louise, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country, 35–36 erotica: love, and sexuality, 66–69 escapism, 148, 151, 152 ethnicity: commodification of identities, 57–58, 86; and Indigenous identity, 59–60 ethology, 38 Eurowestern colonialism: conflation of Indigenous peoples and animals, 91–92; settler, as identity category, 12 Eurowestern literature, singular stories, dangers of, 36–37 Eurowestern religious traditions, and human exclusivity, 40–41 Eurowestern science, and ethology, 38 fantasy genre: and escapism, 148, 151, 152; influence of Tolkien on, 258; as interventions against colonial imaginary, 140–43; savagism– civilization binary, 149–50, 258; and speculative fiction, 149–52; as wonderworks, 152–56, 259 First Nations, as terminology, 7

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“First Voices, First Texts,” 243 Fobister, Waawaate, 157 “for asinykwe” (Simpson), 180–81 Foreman kin: Elsie/Alsi/Ailsey, 189–90, 191; Richard “Bark,” 190; Stephen, 190, 191 Forget, Amédéé Emmanuel, 59 The Fourth World (Manuel, Posluns), 84 Franklin, Sarah, 74 freak shows, 128–30 Freedmen, Five Tribes, 15 Freeman, Mini Aodla, 1 Full-Metal Indigiqueer (Whitehead), 253 future, Indigenous relationship to, xvii Gaertner, David, 4 A Gathering of Spirit (Brant), 114 generosity: and accountability in critical work, xix The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy (Dimaline), 209 “Gitche Manitou,” concept of, 153 Globe and Mail: adjectival use of “indigenous,” 7, 244–45 good, concept of, 29 Gould, Janice, “We Exist,” 105–6 government policies: affect on immigrant attitudes, 14; land allotment policies, 192–98,

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262. See also residential school system Grace, Patricia, Baby No-Eyes, 131–32 Guess, Sequoyah, 149 The Halfbreed Chronicles (Rose), 128–30 “halfbreededness,” 126–27 Halfe, Louise, 86; Blue Marrow, 4 Hallowell, Irving, 243 Haraway, Donna: kin as oddkin, 75 Harjo, Joy, “It’s Raining in Hololulu,” 70 Harvey, Graham, 243; on animism, 96–97 hate crimes, 106–7 Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, Thanksgiving Address, 88–89 Hausman, Blake, 149 Hawai‘i: Kānaka Maoli, 7, 61; language-specific literature genres, 117; resistance against US annexation, 61, 116–23; sovereignty movement, 120–23, 254 Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Lili‘uokalani), 17, 119–23 heroic fantasy: savagism– civilization binary, 149–50, 258

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Highway, Tomson, 86, 215 historical amnesia, 158–59 Hobson, Geary, 205; The Last of the Ofos, 48–56, 131 Hogan, Linda: Power, 71 Holmes, Cindy, on decolonial queerness, 103 ho‘omanawanui, ku‘ualoha, 122; relationship between ancestors and future generations, 117–18 Hopkinson, Nalo, 167 horizontal model of relationship, 90 Howard, Robert E., 150, 258 Howe, LeAnne, xv; Shell Shaker, 79–83 humanity, and becoming human: connection through relationship, 69–70; and empathy, 75–76, 77; and ethnicity, 57–58; Eurowestern religious traditions, 40–41; as existential question, 36; human destructiveness, 38– 40; “Indians” as not human, 62; kinship as target of colonial authorities, 58–60; kinship relations and responsibilities, 28, 41–42; love, and sexuality, 66–69; narratives of persistence, 56–57; nature vs. nurture, 34; other-thanhuman world, 37–38; and

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poetry, 60–61; teachings as shaping stories, 33–35 humans, as guests in spirit world, 98 Hunt, Sarah: on decolonial queerness, 103 hunting: and ceremonial practice, 100–101; ethics of, 97, 99–100 identity: “authenticity” of identity claims, 8–9, 138–39, 245; insecurity, 9 Idle No More, 65, 213; “Sacred” (Belcourt), 108–9 I Knew Two Métis Women (Scofield), 17 imagination: and kinship, 77; and relational understandings, 96; and resistance, 86–88 The Inconvenient Indian (King), 199 Indigenous, as terminology, 6–9; adjective vs. proper noun form, 6–7, 244–45; omissions, and displacements, 8; and settler ethnicity logics, 7–8 Indigenous deficiency stereotypes, 244; and the Inuit, 1; and literary realism, 142, 147–49; low expectations of, 147; toxicity of, 2–4 Indigenous literatures, 17–24, 246; as affirmation of engagement, 208–11; as

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affirmation of presence, xvii; American Indians in Children’s Literature (blog), 247; antiBlackness in, 15; perceived deficiency of, 147–49; “First Voices, First Texts,” 243; guiding questions, 27–29; invisibility of, 19–20; as political, xvii–xviii; problematic texts, 206–8; as “writing back” to residential schools, 85–86 Indigenous peoples: adjectival use of ‘indigenous’ as political diminishment, 7, 244–45; “authenticity” of identity claims, 8–9; media representations of, 244; population decline, 61–62, 254; survival of across generations, 114–15 Indigenous presence: colonial displacement of, xvi–xvii; literatures as affirmation of, xvii; pre-contact cultures, 6 Indigenous women: love, power of, 65; sexual violence against, 106–7 inequality, support of by single stories, 37 In Search of April Raintree (Mosionier), 209 Interior Landscapes (Vizenor), 100

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intermarriage, and cultural destabilization, 11–12 Inuit, 1, 7 “It’s Raining in Hololulu” (Harjo), 70 Jackson, Andrew, 189; why Cherokees revile him as the murderous bastard he really was, 187 Joe, Rita, 86 Johnson, E. Pauline: nature poems, 63–64; The Only Good Indian ..., 174, 175–77, 249; performance art, 61 Johnson, E. Pauline – works: “A Cry from an Indian Wife,” 63; “At Crow’s Nest Pass,” 63; “Autumn’s Orchestra,” 63; “The Cattle Thief,” 62, 64; “The Man in the Chrysanthemum Land,” 64; “The Song My Paddle Sings,” 64; The White Wampum, 62–63 Johnson, Falen, 173, 176 Johnston, Basil, 86 Jones, Stephen Graham, 149 “Julia” (Rose), 129–30 Justice kin: Jesse Jake (grandfather of Daniel), 199; Jimmie J (father of Daniel), 199–203

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Kānaka Maoli people, 7; languagespecific literature genres, 117–18; love of the land, 117, 119, 120; resistance against US exceptionalism, 61, 116– 17; sovereignty movement, 120–23 Kelsey, Penelope Myrtle, 43 Kimmerer, Robin Wall: on cultures of reciprocity, 86–87; Thanksgiving Address, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, 88–89 kindness, and accountability in critical work, xix King, Thomas: on stories, 34 King, Thomas – works: All My Relations, 87–88; The Inconvenient Indian, 199; The Truth about Stories, 57; Truth and Bright Water, 131 kinscapes, 262; plat maps as cartographic kinscapes, 197–98 kinship: and accountability, 77–78; anthropological concept of, 74; birth family vs. chosen family, 48; and community, 92–96; connectedness to lands, 7–8; connection through relationship, 69–70; and ethnicity, 57–58, 59–60; familial fragmentation,

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48; and “halfbreededness,” 126–27; horizontal model of relationship, 90; and imagination, 77; with other-than-human world, 97–101; reciprocal kinship, 168–70; relations and responsibilities of, 28, 41–42, 73–74; relationship between the living and the dead, 123–24; and relatives, as lived relationships, 73–75; restorying of bonds, 186–87; and sharing of stories, 203–4; as sovereign belonging, 104– 5; storykeepers, 139–40; as target of colonial authorities, 58–60, 84–86; vertical model of relationship, 90. See also relatives knowledge: boundaries of, 25; oral transmission of, 25–26; systemization of, 24 Kreisberg, Jennifer, 178 Kurisato, Mari, 149 Kuwada, Brian Kamaoli: on wonder, 153–54 Kwaymullina, Ambelin, Tribe Series, 167 Kyoti/Coyote, as trickstertransformer, 72–73, 76, 92 “Labyrinth” (Miranda), 112

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LaDuke, Winona: Native environmentalism, 78–79 La Escapía, Angelita, 171 land: and connectedness of kinship, 7–8; Indigenous relationship to, xvii; memory of, 95; land allotment policies (US), 192–98, 262; urbanization, as alienation from, 89 language: loss of, 52, 55; recovery efforts, 147–48 Las Casas, Bartholomé des, 106 The Last of the Mohicans (Cooper), 49, 53 The Last of the Ofos (Hobson), 48–56, 131 Lauzon, Jani, 173, 176 Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper), 49 Lightfinder (Paquette), 180 Lili‘uokalani, Queen: “Aloha ‘Oe,” 118–20, 255; autobiography of, 17, 119–23; resistance to US exceptionalism, 116–17 literacy, and missionization, 22–23 literary criticism, Eurowestern: and cultural capital of Indigenous traditions, 23–24 literature: and art, 21; distinction from oral tradition, 20–21; internalized biases of “readers,” 17–18; and “literary” assumptions,

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xv–xvi; as mark of human value, 20; privileged status of “literature,” 18–19; problematic texts, 206–8; realism, relationship to the fantastic, 142–43; as storied archives, 186; terminology of, 16–24; and writing, 16 Little Badger, Darcie, 149, 180 Little Bear, Leroy, 142 love: Cree tradition of love medicine, 67–69; and decolonization, 111–12; of Indigenous women, 65; in queer/two-spirit writings, 103–6; settlercolonial violence against the Indigenous body, 105–8; and sexuality, 66–69; transformative love, 107–11 Lovecraft, H.P., 150 Love Medicine and One Song (Scofield), 67–69 Lyons, Scott: on x-mark signatures, 190 magic realism, and Eurowestern materialism, 142 Manuel, George, The Fourth World, 84 Māori literature, 5 “Map of the Americas” (Driskill), 109–10

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Maracle, Cheri, 173 Maracle, Lee, 24; experiential contexts of becoming human, 34; love, and the telling of truths, 160–61 Maracle, Lee – works: Celia’s Song, 160–61; “Goodbye, Snauq,” 33; Ravensong, 160 The Marrow Thieves (Dimaline), 132, 135–37, 167 May, Karl, 208 McKegney, Sam, Magic Weapons, 85–86 McKinnon, Susan, 74 McNickle, D’Arcy, The Surrounded, 100 “med-sins,” 4–5 Meland, Carter, 148–49 mele, 117; “Aloha ‘Oe,” 118–20, 255 Métis: relationality, 262; as terminology, 7 Mexico: indio, as terminology, 7 Miéville, China, 148 Miranda, Deborah, “Labyrinth,” 112 misogyny, 65 missionization, and literacy: in suppression of Indigenous culture, 22–23 Moana (Disney film), 208 Mojica, Monique, 173 Monkey Beach (Robinson), 154 mo‘okū‘auhau, 117

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mo‘olelo, 117 Morrisseau, Norval, 180 Morse, Garry Thomas, 214 Mosby, Ian, 138 Mosionier, Beatrice, In Search of April Raintree, 209 Motorcycles and Sweetgrass (Taylor), 92–96, 252 Nanabush, 92–96, 252 narcissism: art without politics, xviii Nason, Dory, 64–65, 111 National Post: adjectival use of “indigenous,” 7, 244–45 nation-state policies. See government policies Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, US), 125, 127, 255 Native environmentalism, 78–79 natural environment as commodity, 39 nature vs. nurture, 34 “Neon Scars” (Rose), 126–27 Nock, Samantha Marie, 214 Nolan, Yvette, The Unplugging, 167 nonfiction memoir, 116 The Only Good Indian . . . (Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble), 173–78

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oral tradition: distinction from literature, 20–21; relationship between storyteller/audience, 25–26 Ortiz, Simon, 56 Osborne, Helen Betty, 178 other-than-human world, 243; consequences of disrespect for, 97–99; cultures of reciprocity, 86–89; as fictive kin, 86; Indigenous relationship to, xvii; and Indigenous traditions of coexistence, 39; interdependence of animal and plant world, 75–79, 251–52; and kinship relations, 72–73, 75–79, 87–88, 97–101; loss/lack of recognition, 96; portrayals of in popular culture, 91–92; recognition of, 89–91; story traditions of, 37–38 Otter Lake Reserve, 92–96 Pan-Indianism: and poetic repatriation, 127–28 Paquette, Aaron, Lightfinder, 180 Parton, Dolly: the true and rightful Queen, 13 Passage (Benaway), 179 Pastrana, Julia, 129–30

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patriarchy: of colonial violence, 109; against Indigenous women, 65; white frontier patriarchy, 49 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 149 the People. See Indigenous peoples Perdue, Theda: gender complementarity, unravelling of, 98–99 Perez, Domino, 17 plat maps, 195–98 Pocahontas (Disney film), 208 poetic repatriation, and PanIndianism, 127–28 poetry: alliances and connections through, 65–66; dual purpose of, 60–61; E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake, 61–65 political commentary, 116 politics, and art, xviii Posluns, Michael: The Fourth World, 84 “Protecting the Burial Grounds” (Rose), 126 Proulx-Turner, Sharron, 214 pule, 117 pulp romance experiment, 17–18 A Quality of Light (Wagamese), 161–66 queer/two-spirit people: birth family vs. chosen family, 48;

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decolonization, and queering, 103; kinship relations, 79; queer vs. two-spirit as terminology, 102–3, 252–53; two-spirit as political term, 102 raccoons, and Nanabush, 92–96, 252 racism: “authenticity” of identity claims, 8–9; and stereotypes of Indigenous deficiency, 3; against Indigenous literature, 19–20 reading: aloneness of, 36 the real: alternative understandings of, 141–42 realism vs. magic realism, 142 reconciliation, 259–60; relational concerns of coexistence, 157–58 Redfeather, Tsianina, 174 Reed, Hayter, 85 Reese, Debbie: American Indians in Children’s Literature (blog), 247 relationality: and disrespect for other-than-human world, 97–99; as support for resistance, 85, 86 relationship(s): disconnection from, 4–5; as pathways for connections, xvii

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relatives: cultures of reciprocity, 86–89; horizontal model of relationship, 90; inclusion/ exclusion in circle of relationship, 90; kinship, and accountability, 77–78; kinship relations and obligations, 79– 83, 86–87; as lived relations, 73–75; other-than-human kinship, 72–73, 75–79, 87–88; vertical model of relationship, 90. See also kinship religion, patriarchy of, 86 reparation: Motorcycles and Sweetgrass (Taylor), 95–96 repatriation: ancestors as exploitable commodities, 130; of Indigenous bodies and belongings, 123–26, 255; Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, US), 125, 127; unaffiliated remains, 127–28, 131, 255 research, exploitation for, 131, 138–39 residential school system: generational impact of violence, 65, 251; kinship as target of colonial authorities, 58–60; malnutrition experiments, 138–39, 256; resistance against, 85–86;

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sexualized violence of, 107; theft of children, 110 resistance: in Hawaiian literature, 116–17; and imagination, 86–88; as motivation for writing, xvi–xvii; against settler colonialism, 84–85 Richardson, John: Wacousta, 49 Ridge, John, 189 Ridge, Major, 189 Riley kin: 195; Jennie (Shields), 14–15 Roanhorse, Rebecca, 149 Robinson, Eden, 86, 149; Monkey Beach, 154 Roosevelt, Edith, 174, 175, 176, 178 Roosevelt, Theodore, 174, 178; policies against American Indians, 61, 193 Rose, Wendy, on treatment of ancestors and belongings, 124–26 Rose, Wendy – works: The Halfbreed Chronicles, 128–30; “Julia,” 129–30; “Neon Scars,” 126–27; “Protecting the Burial Grounds,” 126; “Truganinny,” 128, 256 Ross, John, 187–88, 189, 192 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 158 Ruffo, Armand Garnet, 180

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ruptures: as absence of story, 183–87; defined, 186 “Sacred” (Belcourt), 108–9 St. John, Michelle, 173, 178 Sanders, William “Sundown,” 149; “The Undiscovered,” 143–46 Scalped (comic book series), 208 science fiction: and decolonization, 148–49; relevance to Black people, 150–51 Scofield, Gregory: I Knew Two Métis Women, 17; Love Medicine and One Song, 67–69 self: Indigenous relationship to, xvii; transformation to other, 36 Seminoles: and Five Tribes, 15, 193 settler, as terminology, 9–16; accountability and obligation, complexity of, 16; as identity category, 12; negative associations, 10–11 settler colonial guilt, and stereotypes of Indigenous deficiency, 4 settler colonialism: appropriation of peoples’ knowledge, 25, 214–15; commodification of identities, 57–58, 86; and decolonial queer politic, 103; familial fragmentation, 48;

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“Indians” as not human, 62; Indigenous peoples as Other, 147; Indigenous resistance against, 84–85; intermarriage, and cultural destabilization, 11–12; kinship practices as target of, 78, 84; paternalism of, 61; persistence of, 210; social/ cultural consequences of the Unravelling, 168–69; socioreligious transformation of cultural practices, 98–99; superiority of human exclusivity, 40–41; and terra nullius, 9; vanishing Native stereotype, 49; violence of against the Indigenous body, 105–8; white frontier patriarchy, 49; and wonderworks, 155–56 settlers: “authenticity” of identity claims, 8–9, 138–39, 245 settler society: historical amnesia of, 158–59 sexuality, 253; cultural realities of gender diversity, 103; love, and erotica, 66–69 sexual violence, 106–7 Shakespeare, William: reimagining of as Spearshaker, 143–46; The Tempest, 17

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Shell Shaker (Howe), 79–83 Sheridan, Philip, 174 “Show Me Yours” (Van Camp), 179 Shuck, Kim, 183 Silko, Leslie Marmon: Almanac of the Dead, 169–72; other-thanhuman kinship, 75–76 Silva, Noenoe, 117 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake, 214; “for asinykwe,” 180–81; relationship between storyteller/audience, 25–26, 246 “The Sin Eaters” (Alexie), 132–35, 138 singular stories, dangers of, 36–37 Smith, Chad, 202 social hierarchies of Eurowestern religious traditions, 40–41 social media, 213–14 “Some Like Indians Endure” (Allen), 107 Spears kin: Amos, 193–94, 195, 199–200; James (grandfather of Amos), 189, 190, 263; Mary Jane (Crockett, mother of Amos), 194, 196; Pearl (daughter of Amos), 193–94, 199–201 speculative fiction, 142–43, 149–52 Spirit World, relationship between the living and the dead, 123–24

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spoken word: relationship between storyteller/audience, 25–26, 246 Spotted Elk, Molly, 174 stereotypes: of belonging and identity, 161–66; of Indigenous deficiency, 2–3, 209, 210; of Indigenous women, 174, 178; internalized biases of “readers,” 17–18; of not paying taxes, 13, 14; roles of Indigenous actors, 174; vanishing Native stereotype, 49, 51, 206–8 The Stone Collection (AkiwenzieDamm), 179 stories: as good medicine, 5–6; recognition of as literature, 20–21; relational contexts of the oral, 25–26; relationship between storyteller/audience, 25–26, 246; role of difficult stories, 101–2; role of in becoming human, 33–35; sharing of, 203–4; singular stories, dangers of, 36–37; terminologies discussion, 6–26, 244; toxicity of, 2–4; value of, 183–84 storykeepers: as storytellers, 139–40 Strickland, Rennard, 199

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Taylor, Drew Hayden, 8, 149; Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, 92–96, 252 Tekahionwake. See Johnson, E. Pauline Te Punga Somerville, Alice, 5 Thanksgiving Address, Haudenosaunee Confederacy, 88–89 “There Is No Respectful Way to Kill an Animal” (Womack), 100–101 “This Is a Story” (Armstrong), 72–73, 76 Thrasher, Anthony Apakark, 86 Tolkien, J.R.R.: The Hobbit, 207; influence on fantasy genre, 258; legendarium of, 150; “On Fairy-Stories,” 151 Toronto Star: adjective vs. proper noun form of “Indigenous,” 244–45 tradition(s): rediscovery and reclamation of, 117–18, 137, 205, 211 Trail of Tears (Cherokee Removal), 188–89 transformative change: as imagined possibility, 156 transformative love, 107–11 transformer beings: Kyoti/Coyote, 72–73, 76, 92; Nanabush, 92–96, 252

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Trask, Haunani-Kay, We Are Not Happy Natives, 122–23 Treaty of New Echota, 188 Tribe Series (Kwaymullina), 167 “Truganinny” (Rose), 128, 256 truth, and historical amnesia of settler society, 158–59 Truth and Bright Water (King), 131 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 158, 259–60 Tuck, Eve, 138, 139 Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble, The Only Good Indian ..., 173–78 Turtle Island, 6; origin stories, 244 two-spirit people. See queer/ two-spirit people “The Undiscovered” (Sanders), 143–46 United States: American Indian/Native American terminology, 7; annexation of Hawai‘i, 61, 116–23; Curtis Act, 193; Dawes Allotment Rolls, 193; exceptionalism, 116; Indian policy decisions, 188; Indian Removal Act, 187–88; Indian title to land, elimination of, 192–94; land allotment policies, 61, 192–98, 262; Native American Graves

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Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 125, 127, 255; State of Sequoyah, 193, 263; Termination and Relocation policies, 59–60, 187–88, 190; Trail of Tears (Cherokee Removal), 188–89; white settlement in Indian Territory, 192–93 universal values, weaponization of, 27–28 The Unplugging (Nolan), 167 urbanization, and alienation from the land, 89 vampirism: “The Sin Eaters” (Alexie), 132–35, 138 Van Camp, Richard, 149; “Show Me Yours,” 179 van Toorn, Penny, 22 vertical model of relationship, 90 Vizenor, Gerald, 149; Chancers, 131; Interior Landscapes, 100 Wacousta (Richardson), 49 Wagamese, Richard, 161–66; A Quality of Light, 161–66 Walking the Clouds (Dillon), 155 Walters, Anna Lee: Ghost Singer, 131 wampum belts, social function of, 23

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Index / 284

Warrior, Robert, on Indigenous nonfiction, 116 Waterlily (Deloria), 42–47, 248 Watie, Stand, 189, 190, 192 We Are Not Happy Natives (Trask), 122–23 Weaver, Jace, on literature, 21, 246 “We Exist” (Gould), 105–6 Whitehead, Joshua, Full-Metal Indigiqueer, 253 whiteshamanism, 130 The White Wampum (Johnson), 62–63 “wîhkês,” 4–5 Wilson, Daniel H., 149 Without Reservation (AkiwenzieDamm), 66 Wolfe, Patrick, 9–10 Womack, Craig: on Almanac of the Dead, 172; Drowning in Fire, 209; “There Is No Respectful

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Way to Kill an Animal,” 100–101 wonder, and wondrous things, 153–54, 259 wonderworks, 259; as alternative to fantasy, 152–56 writing: and literature, 16; resistance as motivation, xvi–xvii x-mark signatures, 190–91 Yamashiro, Aiko, 153–54 Yang, K. Wayne, 138, 139 Yellowknives Dene: Glen Coulthard, 12 Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin), 174, 174–75 Zobel, Melissa Tantaquidgeon, 149

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Books in the Indigenous Studies Series Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Blockades and Resistance: Studies in Actions of Peace and the Temagami Blockades of 1988–89 / Bruce W. Hodgins, Ute Lischke, and David T. McNab, editors / 2003 / xi + 276 pp. / illus. / ISBN 0-88920-381-4 Indian Country: Essays on Contemporary Native Culture / Gail Guthrie Valaskakis / 2005 / x + 293 pp. / illus. / ISBN 0-88920-479-9 Walking a Tightrope: Aboriginal People and Their Representations / Ute Lischke and David T. McNab, editors / 2005 / xix + 377 pp. / illus. / ISBN 978-088920-484-3 The Long Journey of a Forgotten People: Métis Identities and Family Histories / Ute Lischke and David T. McNab, editors / 2007 / viii + 386 pp. / illus. / ISBN 978-0-88920-523-9 Words of the Huron / John L. Steckley / 2007 / xvii + 259 pp. / ISBN 978-088920-516-1 Essential Song: Three Decades of Northern Cree Music / Lynn Whidden / 2007 / xvi + 176 pp. / illus., musical examples, audio CD / ISBN 978-0-88920-459-1 From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing / Deena Rymhs / 2008 / ix + 147 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-021-7 Lines Drawn upon the Water: First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands / Karl S. Hele, editor / 2008 / xxiii + 351 pp. / illus. / ISBN 9781-55458-004-0 Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations / Linda M. Morra and Deanna Reder, editors / 2009 / xii + 336 pp. / illus. / ISBN 978-1-55458-181-8 Aboriginal Peoples in Canadian Cities: Transformations and Continuities / Heather A. Howard and Craig Proulx, editors / 2011 / viii + 256 pp. / illus. / ISBN 9781-055458-260-0

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Bridging Two Peoples: Chief Peter E. Jones, 1843–1909 / Allan Sherwin / 2012 / xxiv + 246 pp. / illus. / ISBN 978-1-55458-633-2 The Nature of Empires and the Empires of Nature: Indigenous Peoples and the Great Lakes Environment / Karl S. Hele, editor / 2013 / xxii + 350 / illus. / ISBN 978-1-55458-328-7 The Eighteenth-Century Wyandot: A Clan-Based Study / John L. Steckley / 2014 / x + 306 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-956-2 Indigenous Poetics in Canada / Neal McLeod, editor / 2014 / xii + 404 pp. / ISBN 978-1-55458-982-1 Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat / Margery Fee / 2015 / x + 318 pp. / illus. / ISBN 978-1-77112-119-4 Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission / Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, editors / 2016 / viii + 376 pp. / illus. / ISBN 978-1-77112-169-9 Learn, Teach, Challenge: Approaching Indigenous Literatures / Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra, editors / 2016 / xii + 580 pp. / ISBN 978-1-77112-185-9 Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island / Sophie McCall, Deanna Reder, David Gaertner, and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, editors / 2017 / xviii + 390 pp. / ISBN 978-1-77112-300-6 The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic / Rachel Bryant / 2017 / xiv + 244 / ISBN 978-1-77112-286-3 Why Indigenous Literatures Matter / Daniel Heath Justice / 2018 / xxii + 290 / ISBN 978-1-77112-176-7

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