Being and Becoming Ute: The Story of an American Indian People

“Indigenous” Nature Connection? A Response to Kurth, Narvaez, Kohn, and Bae (2020)

Settler Violence? Race and Emergent Frontiers of Progress in Honduras Christopher A. Loperena (bio) The displacement of black and indigenous peoples from sites of economic opportunity in Honduras, and the systematic enclosure of the natural resources within their territories, is intimately tethered to white socio-spatial imaginaries and the politics of frontier making. In this essay, I analyze how elite investors, with support from the state and multilateral development banks, mobilize the ideology of national progress to further disenfranchise rural communities of color and to legitimate acts of violence against land and environmental activists. This violence has increased dramatically since the 2009 coup against Manual Zelaya Rosales, which was followed by a surge in extractivist activities throughout the national territory. In the quest for land, mestizo elites harness both legal and physical coercion to seize vital natural resources within indigenous and black territories.1 The process of turning indigenous territories into frontier zones for economic development underscores not only the racialized dimensions of dispossession but also the ways in which violence is used to hasten the power and racial domination of mestizo settlers over indigenous and black peoples.2 Settler colonialism, according to Patrick Wolfe, entails conquering the land and then populating the conquered territory with the victorious people. Although qualitatively different from the colonial project imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese—at least from an ideological perspective, since it was contingent on the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the national body politic—settler colonialism remains pertinent to analyses of race relations in Latin America. Wolfe states that settler colonialism is an ongoing process premised on a “logic of elimination.”3 Through an analysis of settler violence, I elucidate the relationship between settler colonial logics and contemporary development practices in Honduras. The ongoing removal and elimination of indigenous and black peoples is epitomized by the targeted repression and killing of key indigenous social movement activists, including the March 2016 assassination of Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Cáceres. [End Page 801] The logic of elimination is also expressed through legal arrangements that erode collective property rights and undermine black and indigenous sovereignty over the natural resources within their territories. Although Honduras has signed and ratified international legal conventions on the territorial rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, the state has aggressively pursued development projects that directly violate these rights. Even communities in possession of titles to their lands are subject to these forms of expropriation, particularly when the motive is couched within the discourse of national progress. Progress as Settler Colonial Logic In Latin America, national progress is crucially bound up with white socio-spatial epistemologies, which relegate indigenous peoples to a mythical past and thus render invisible contemporary indigenous peoples’ existence and political vitality.4 Indeed, the ideology of indo-Hispanic racial mixture, or mestizaje, has been used to negate indigenous and black territorial claims and to buttress the political and economic aspirations of the mestizo elite. The incorporation of indigenous peoples into the nation through the ideology of mestizaje ultimately furthers the whitening project on which postcolonial national identity was founded.5 Aspirations to whiten the nation gain material coherence through development practice. Following Keisha-Khan Perry, I understand development projects as the spatial dimension of the whitening ideology.6 The proliferation of extractivist economic activities within black and indigenous territories asserts national sovereignty over the natural resources to which rural communities of color lay claim, and thereby buttresses white spatial imaginaries. Sharlene Mollet’s research in the Honduran Mosquitia illustrates how indigenous land use practices are defined as backward and thus deemed, by the state, unsuitable for market production.7 In this way, racist understandings of indigenous inferiority position mestizo colonos (settlers) as more apt to use the land productively and thus legitimates their continued presence and spatial dominance over black and indigenous peoples. Indeed, the notion of “idle” or “underutilized” land has served as a central justification for the usurpation of lands in areas populated by indigenous and black peoples and which have been folded into the agrarian reform policies adopted by the state, beginning with the Agrarian Reform Law of 1962. Because indigenous and black peoples’ lands were often classified as underutilized, they were subject...

Book Review| November 01 2021 Review: Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2019. 250 pp.; 166 illustrations, index; clothbound, $37.95; eBook, $30.35. Farina King (Diné) Farina King (Diné) Northeastern State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2021) 43 (4): 132–134. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.4.132 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Farina King (Diné); Review: Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell. The Public Historian 1 November 2021; 43 (4): 132–134. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2021.43.4.132 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search Anthropologists Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell collaborated to reframe the Jesse H. Bratley Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, which led them on a journey to trace hundreds of pieces and glass-plate photographs and determine how Bratley gathered them from diverse Native American communities. According to the co-authors, the collection embodies “objects of survivance,” especially as “material memories” for Native American communities from which the objects originated, such as those of S’Klallam, Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Havasupai, Hopi, and Seminole peoples (30–31). While Montgomery and Colwell aim to align with Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s tenets of survivance in which “Native actors become the protagonists” (31) that not only survive but thrive, their book presents several missed opportunities.1 The “protagonist” of the book predominately remains Bratley, the white assimilationist instructor, rather than the Native American progenitors of the objects. Instead of focusing more on the relationships between... You do not currently have access to this content.

Indigenous Continuance Collaboration and Syncretism Simon J. Ortiz (bio) Delivered as the keynote address at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Conference, University of Georgia, April 10, 2008 Dai-stuudeh-eh wai. We are here today. Dzaadze-eeskha-haadih-steh-eh-nuh. We are nowhere else but here. We are here: in this place and in this moment. Right now, we are not anywhere else. It is important to be conscious of this. It is significant and so important that our very Existence is dependent upon this acknowledgment, realization, agreement, and acceptance. We, as Indigenous human peoples, know ourselves within the world we have cultural knowledge of; that is, we know ourselves within the cultural world of the Indigenous tribal communities of which we are members. Our Indigenous worldview encompasses our identity; our identity as Indigenous peoples is founded on our Indigenous worldview, and it arises from that worldview. As a result, we are no other cultural human beings but who we are as Indigenous peoples. Aacqumeh stuudah. I am of and from Aacqu, Acoma Pueblo. There is no other cultural human person that is me. I am not primarily American in nationality, nor am I primarily a citizen of the state of New Mexico. Aacqumeh stuudah means my Indigenous identity is solely that of being a member of the Acoma Pueblo cultural community. Simple? Yes. Too simple? Perhaps. Today, numbers of us do not acknowledge our Indigenous tribal identities. Because we feel we cannot; we are confused; we feel ambiguous and uncertain. And we feel invalid when we do acknowledge, claim, and announce our Indigenous identities. We sometimes even feel we are imposters. Imposters? Yes, imposters who are [End Page 285] posing as Indigenous tribal peoples! That's absurd, isn't it? Yes, it is, yet there are those among us who feel like that. They feel like imposters, whether comfortably or not comfortably may vary, even, at the same time, knowing, realizing, and admitting it is the circumstance and condition of colonization that has caused or precipitated the feeling of being imposters. It is a maddening feeling, isn't it? Even if we don't always feel like that as part of our Indigenous human condition, we are familiar with the feeling, aren't we? And this is a consequence or result, as I said just now, of the colonization of our land, culture, and community. And this is intimately, constantly, and consciously made apparent and known to us because of the colonial language we use all the time, namely, English. Although there other colonial languages we are colonized victims of in the Americas, including Spanish, French, and Portuguese, I shall refer mainly to the English language because it is the one that is most prevalent, dominant, and overwhelming today for those of us who live in the United States. We cannot help but feel Americanized. That's too true. No matter how "Indian" we are. No matter how Indigenous we are, we feel Americanized. No matter how Indigenous we feel our tribal identities make us, we feel Americanized. No matter how much or how little we speak our Indigenous languages, we feel Americanized. No matter what we do to practice our Indigenous traditions and customs and no matter how hard we try to live according to the cultural philosophies of our tribal elders, we still feel Americanized. No wonder we feel invalid when we identify ourselves as Indigenous tribal peoples. And no wonder some of us may feel like imposters even when we feel at the same time it is absurd to feel like imposters! We are in this quandary and dilemma because we are unconsciously and consciously living within colonialism. Because it is the history of colonialism that has circumscribed us and, in a manner of speaking, has determined us, our identity, and our feelings about ourselves. And that has been achieved not only by our more or less forced acquiescence but also with our complicity because of our constant, persistent, and insistent use of the English language that I mention above as the main colonial language we face and with which we have to contend. No wonder, then, we might say, we are so Americanized...

In many ways, the structural violence of settler colonialism continues to dominate the lived experience of Indigenous populations, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in contemporary Australia. One aspect of this structural violence concerns the regulation of Indigenous identity, today perpetuated through state monitoring of the ‘authenticity’ of Aboriginal people. This article argues that the contest over Indigenous identity perpetuates a form of symbolic political violence against Indigenous people. It considers the ways in which structural violence against Indigenous identity has featured in Australia's settler colonial regime and examines the particular violence faced by urban-dwelling Aboriginal people, who endure much contemporary scrutiny of the ‘authenticity’ of their Indigeneity. As a case study, the article examines the symbolic violence associated with a particular legal case in Australia and, in light of this analysis, concludes that settler colonies could make a decolonising gesture by legislating for the protection of Indigenous identity.

Revealing and Revelling in the Floods on Country: Memory Poles within Toonooba

Book Review| April 01 2022 Review: Living in Indigenous Sovereignty, by Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara with Gladys Rowe Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara with Gladys Rowe. Living in Indigenous Sovereignty (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2021). 264 pages. ISBN 9781773632384. Niamh Timmons Niamh Timmons Oregon State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Ethnic Studies Review (2022) 45 (1): 92–94. https://doi.org/10.1525/esr.2022.45.1.88 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Niamh Timmons; Review: Living in Indigenous Sovereignty, by Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara with Gladys Rowe. Ethnic Studies Review 1 April 2022; 45 (1): 92–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/esr.2022.45.1.88 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentEthnic Studies Review Search Living in Indigenous Sovereignty works to address white settler relationships with Indigenous Peoples and Nations. Elizabeth Carlson-Manathara, the principal writer of the book, grounds narratives by 16 nonacademic predominantly non-Indigenous activists who likewise grapple with settler and Indigenous relations in Canada. Carlson-Manathara argues that Indigenous-led social movements such as Idle No More and surfacing legacies of settler violence made apparent by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people (MMIWG2S) detail legacies of settler violence that were surfaced by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Carlson-Manathara argues that settlers reorienting to alliances with Indigenous Peoples and Nations can transform the lives of settlers beyond these relationships. This follows calls made by Indigenous activists in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the unsurprising discovery of hundreds of Indigenous bodies at former residential schools. While Indigenous activists and scholars have made these calls... You do not currently have access to this content.

Marlene Kong: one of Australia's few Indigenous doctors

Wakefield's Offspring

Introduction Darkness is often characterised as something that warrants heightened caution and scrutiny – signifying increased danger and risk. Within settler-colonial settings such as Australia, cautionary and negative connotations of darkness are projected upon Black people and their bodies, forming part of continuing colonial regimes of power (Moreton-Robinson). Negative stereotypes of “dark” continues to racialise all Indigenous peoples. In Australia, Indigenous peoples are both Indigenous and Black regardless of skin colour, and this plays out in a range of ways, some of which will be highlighted within this article. This article demonstrates that for Indigenous peoples, associations of fear and danger are built into the structural mechanisms that shape and maintain colonial understandings of Indigenous peoples and their bodies. It is this embodied form of darkness, and its negative connotations, and responses that we explore further. Figure 1: Megan Cope’s ‘I’m not afraid of the Dark’ t-shirt (Fredericks and Heemsbergen 2021) Responding to the anxieties and fears of settlers that often surround Indigenous peoples, Quandamooka artist and member of the art collective ProppaNow, Megan Cope, has produced a range of t-shirts, one of which declares “I’m not afraid of the Dark” (fig. 1). The wording ‘reflects White Australia’s fear of blackness’ (Dark + Dangerous). Exploring race relations through the theme of “darkness”, we begin by discussing how negative connotations of darkness are represented through everyday lexicons and how efforts to shift prejudicial and racist language are often met with defensiveness and resistance. We then consider how fears towards the dark translate into everyday practices, reinforced by media representations. The article considers how stereotype, conjecture, and prejudice is inflicted upon Indigenous people and reflects white settler fears and anxieties, rooting colonialism in everyday language, action, and norms. The Language of Fear Indigenous people and others with dark skin tones are often presented as having a proclivity towards threatening, aggressive, deceitful, and negative behaviours. This works to inform how Indigenous peoples are “known” and responded to by hegemonic (predominantly white) populations. Negative connotations of Indigenous people are a means of reinforcing and legitimising the falsity that European knowledge systems, norms, and social structures are superior whilst denying the contextual colonial circumstances that have led to white dominance. In Australia, such denial corresponds to the refusal to engage with the unceded sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples or acknowledge Indigenous resistance. Language is integral to the ways in which dominant populations come to “know” and present the so-called “Other”. Such language is reflected in digital media, which both produce and maintain white anxieties towards race and ethnicity. When part of mainstream vernacular, racialised language – and the value judgments associated with it – often remains in what Moreton-Robinson describes as “invisible regimes of power” (75). Everyday social structures, actions, and habits of thought veil oppressive and discriminatory attitudes that exist under the guise of “normality”. Colonisation and the dominance of Eurocentric ways of knowing, being, and doing has fixated itself on creating a normality that associates Indigeneity and darkness with negative and threatening connotations. In doing so, it reinforces power balances that presents an image of white superiority built on the invalidation of Indigeneity and Blackness. White fears and anxieties towards race made explicit through social and digital media are also manifest via subtle but equally pervasive everyday action (Carlson and Frazer; Matamoros-Fernández). Confronting and negotiating such fears becomes a daily reality for many Indigenous people. During the height of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, which extended to Australia and were linked to deaths in custody and police violence, African American poet Saul Williams reminded his followers of the power of language in constructing racialised fears (saulwilliams). In an Instagram post, Williams draws back the veil of an uncontested normality to ask that we take personal responsibility over the words we use. He writes: here’s a tip: Take the words DARK or BLACK in connection to bad, evil, ominous or scary events out of your vocabulary. We learn the stock market crashed on Black Monday, we read headlines that purport “Dark Days Ahead”. There’s “dark” or “black” humour which implies an undertone of evil, and then there are people like me who grow up with dark skin having to make sense of the English/American lexicon and its history of “fair complexions” – where “fair” can mean “light; blond.” OR “in accordance with rules or standards; legitimate.” We may not be fully responsible for the duplicitous evolution of language and subtle morphing of inherited beliefs into description yet we are in full command of the words we choose even as they reveal the questions we’ve left unasked. Like the work of Moreton-Robinson and other scholars, Williams implores his followers to take a reflexive position to consider the questions often left unasked. In doing so, he calls for the transcendence of anonymity and engagement with the realities of colonisation – no matter how ugly, confronting, and complicit one may be in its continuation. In the Australian context this means confronting how terms such as “dark”, “darkie”, or “darky” were historically used as derogatory and offensive slurs for Aboriginal peoples. Such language continues to be used today and can be found in the comment sections of social media, online news platforms, and other online forums (Carlson “Love and Hate”). Taking the move to execute personal accountability can be difficult. It can destabilise and reframe the ways in which we understand and interact with the world (Rose 22). For some, however, exposing racism and seemingly mundane aspects of society is taken as a personal attack which is often met with reactionary responses where one remains closed to new insights (Whittaker). This feeds into fears and anxieties pertaining to the perceived loss of power. These fears and anxieties continue to surface through conversations and calls for action on issues such as changing the date of Australia Day, the racialised reporting of news (McQuire), removing of plaques and statues known to be racist, and requests to change placenames and the names of products. For example, in 2020, Australian cheese producer Saputo Dairy Australia changed the name of it is popular brand “Coon” to “Cheer Tasty”. The decision followed a lengthy campaign led by Dr Stephen Hagan who called for the rebranding based on the Coon brand having racist connotations (ABC). The term has its racist origins in the United States and has long been used as a slur against people with dark skin, liking them to racoons and their tendency to steal and deceive. The term “Coon” is used in Australia by settlers as a racist term for referring to Aboriginal peoples. Claims that the name change is example of political correctness gone astray fail to acknowledge and empathise with the lived experience of being treated as if one is dirty, lazy, deceitful, or untrustworthy. Other brand names have also historically utilised racist wording along with imagery in their advertising (Conor). Pear’s soap for example is well-known for its historical use of racist words and imagery to legitimise white rule over Indigenous colonies, including in Australia (Jackson). Like most racial epithets, the power of language lies in how the words reflect and translate into actions that dehumanise others. The words we use matter. The everyday “ordinary” world, including online, is deeply politicised (Carlson and Frazer “They Got Filters”) and comes to reflect attitudes and power imbalances that encourage white people to internalise the falsity that they are superior and should have control over Black people (Conor). Decisions to make social change, such as that made by Saputo Dairy Australia, can manifest into further white anxieties via their ability to force the confrontation of the circumstances that continue to contribute to one’s own prosperity. In other words, to unveil the realities of colonialism and ask the questions that are too often left in the dark. Lived Experiences of Darkness Colonial anxieties and fears are driven by the fact that Black populations in many areas of the world are often characterised as criminals, perpetrators, threats, or nuisances, but are rarely seen as victims. In Australia, the repeated lack of police response and receptivity to concerns of Indigenous peoples expressed during the Black Lives Matter campaign saw tens of thousands of people take to the streets to protest. Protestors at the same time called for the end of police brutality towards Indigenous peoples and for an end to Indigenous deaths in custody. The protests were backed by a heavy online presence that sought to mobilise people in hope of lifting the veil that shrouds issues relating to systemic racism. There have been over 450 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to die in custody since the end of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991 (The Guardian). The tragedy of the Indigenous experience gains little attention internationally. The negative implications of being the object of white fear and anxiety are felt by Indigenous and other Black communities daily. The “safety signals” (Daniella Emanuel) adopted by white peoples in response to often irrational perceptions of threat signify how Indigenous and other Black peoples and communities are seen and valued by the hegemony. Memes played out in social media depicting “Karens” – a term that corresponds to caricaturised white women (but equally applicable to men) who exhibit behaviour

Darryl Leroux’s Distorted Descent provides a fascinating glimpse into the broader colonial structural issues at play in what he calls the “race-shifting” or “self-Indigenization” phenomenon that has taken hold over the last decade or so in the United States and Canada. Leroux spends the majority of the book focused on white settlers of French descent in various communities across eastern Canada and the United States, breaking down the methods and justifications they use to craft a contemporary Indigenous identity. For the most part, Leroux’s focus is on white people who either claim Métis identity using genealogical methods that connect them to an Indigenous (usually First Nations) relative as far back as twelve generations or claim Indigeneity for a distant non-Indigenous relative. It is important that Leroux distinguishes between white settlers claiming Indigenous heritage when there is none to be found and Indigenous people struggling to reconnect to communities after US and Canadian assimilationist policies and institutions, such as the “sixties scoop” and residential/boarding schools, severed ties.Leroux’s intensive research into online French genealogy message boards yields a series of patterns through which white settlers make fraudulent claims to Indigeneity. Distorted Descent offers names for these patterns; for example, settlers using an Indigenous relative three hundred years in the past are manufacturing Indigeneity through “lineal” descent. Settlers attempting to claim Indigeneity by rewriting a distant settler relative as Indigenous do so through “aspirational” descent.Much of the book serves as a well-researched and astutely historical critique of settler focus on blood quantum and generational cut-offs as sole indicators of Indigeneity. It traces the ways in which settler concepts of genetics have been used to erase Indigeneity and claims to territory in both Canada and the United States. Importantly, blood quantum models of determining Indigeneity have served to undermine Indigenous systems of kinship, and this trend continues in the recent upswing in white claims to Indigenous identity. Leroux draws on the work of esteemed Métis scholars Chris Andersen and Brenda Macdougall, for example, to outline how settler ideas of Indigeneity have ignored structures of kinship and claiming in the Métis nation, actively threatening Métis sovereignty as a result.The crucial part of Leroux’s argument is not in his study and description of the phenomenon itself but in his framing of race shifting and the self-Indigenization movement as part of broader patriarchal white supremacist structures of colonial dispossession, even beyond Leroux’s identification of the roots of many of these so-called Indigenous groups in white supremacist organizations. In claiming a false Indigenous identity, many settlers have used their invented status to actively undermine and dispossess living Indigenous groups. Leroux brilliantly frames this as “[facilitating] white futurity in response to conventional reconciliation frameworks” (219). Leroux places this “new” phenomenon in context, thus presenting it as a continuation of centuries of colonial oppression—just with a different face.It is important to note that Leroux is not a historian—his roots in sociology and anthropology are clear in this book—but it is precisely the importance of a historical framing of many of the topics in Distorted Descent to which I would like to turn. While most of the book is dedicated to white settlers claiming Métis identity, there are sections where Leroux discusses settler claims to First Nations/Native American identities for similar purposes. The quick shift between two very different groups of Indigenous peoples at points throughout the book—the individuality of single nations aside—risks conflation of unique circumstances and historical and contemporary relationships with colonial power. Various nations and Indigenous groups have different practices of kinship and claiming that get lost in Leroux’s contemporary analysis of the issue and heavier focus on fake Métis claims without making the book solely about claims to Métis identity.While the book does talk about some differences between assimilation policies in the United States and Canada, it misses an opportunity to look at how historical differences between Indigenous relationships with US and Canadian settler states in place impact the kinds of rhetoric used to dispossess Indigenous peoples and how settler recognition—and de-recognition—are shaped by these contexts. These factors need to be considered when discussing issues of fake claims to Indigeneity, particularly in the northeastern United States, where there is a much longer history of colonial dispossession than in western regions. Indigenous nations like the Mashpee Wampanoag, for example, have continued to struggle for federal recognition in the face of a centuries-long attack on their sovereignty and claim to their home territory. While there are indeed white settlers taking advantage of this, the conversation is a great deal more nuanced than the scope of this book could address.Overall, Distorted Descent joins the ranks of important works, such as those of Kim Tallbear, about colonial attempts to control Indigeneity, and it will inform what will no doubt remain a robust and crucial conversation in this contemporary moment.

Métis Survivance:Land, Love, and Futures in Cherie Dimaline's Dystopian Novels Celiese Lypka "Who knows what it's like to leave, to give up a piece of land? If you do, it might haunt you forever, follow you till you come back." Marilyn Dumont1 Although widely different in their composition of Indigenous futurisms, Métis author Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (set in the dystopian future, [2017]) and Empire of Wild (set in the present as a dystopian landscape, [2019]) reveal the impossibility of a shareable future between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism. In both novels, Indigenous bodies and land are co-opted by settler communities to be mined for capital gain. The Marrow Thieves presents a horrific future in which Indigenous bodies are harvested for their ability to dream, something that non-Indigenous peoples have lost the ability to do. The narrative focuses on a young man named Frenchie, who is trying to make sense of the colonial past and present, while looking toward an Indigenous-centric future. In Empire of Wild, Joan searches for her husband who loses control over his mind and body after suggesting they sell her family land to developers for mining and pipeline projects. The protagonists of both texts are Métis,2 and the novels can be read as quests to find a sustainable community for the characters who, through processes of colonization, have forgotten Métis practices and ways of being—knowledge that is integral to healing and reconnecting with the land to build a better future in a postcapitalist world. Both Frenchie and Joan3 begin their respective narratives lost and alone, in search of a specific place or person rooted in "decolonial love," what Leanne Betasamosake [End Page 27] Simpson outlines as "a rebellion of love, persistence, commitment, and profound caring" that is a "generative refusal of colonial recognition."4 Kyle Whyte articulates how, through the sustained militaristic campaigns of settler colonialism across the globe (which includes damaging ecosystems for colonial gain, violent assimilation, and containment processes, as well as forced dependency and instilling conditions of mass fear), Indigenous peoples "already inhabit what our ancestors would have understood as a dystopian future."5 This essay analyzes the representation of Métis communities within the dystopian settings of both novels, identifying the fractures of Métis identity as a result of land dispossession. Dimaline's dystopias detail various ways in which Indigenous people and the land they live on have been devastated by the violence of settler colonialism, leaving them in a nightmarish landscape where they are insidiously disconnected from land and Indigenous ways of being. I argue that through the processes of learning and putting into practice Indigenous storytelling rooted in landedness—what acclaimed Métis scholar Emma LaRocque defines as "Metis love of land"6—the protagonists come to embody decolonial love that cultivates Indigenous futures by upending colonial constructions of identity and community through relational resilience. Landedness, in its relationship with "a particular and unique land area … where we carry out body and home-stitching everydayness" is a "place where we become familiar" to ourselves, a place where we live and grow in decolonial love that nurtures Métis identity outside of colonial structures. This idea is particularly important in Dimaline's novels, as landedness is continuously threatened by the dystopian structures that abolish Indigenous land and ways of being. Reading the colonial history of North America reveals the specific and insidious instances in which Indigenous peoples have been systematically eradicated to legitimize settler state claims to land, practices, and power. However, as Danika Medak-Saltzman identifies, "Yet, and despite the best efforts of settler colonial societies to deny Native peoples the possibility of meaningful futures, narratives about the future have always been, and remain, deeply entrenched in, and important to, Native communities."7 And it's important to note, more specifically, how Indigenous storytelling embodies the interplay between the past, present, and future, acting as a method of narrative resistance in the face of the ongoing violent and linear colonization processes. At the same time, it also offers persistence in Indigenous peoples' connection and relationship to the land by providing...

Myths, Erasure, and Violence:The Immoral Triad of the Morrill Act Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (bio) and Amanda R. Tachine (bio) the land-grab universities (lgu) project leaves us in awe and deeply curious. The result of years of meticulous research, LGU points to the fact that fifty-two land-grant universities in the United States would not exist without the dispossession of lands through the violent removal and killing of Native peoples. Much of the existence of these universities has relied and continues to rely on myths, erasure, and violence. We engage these concepts separately, yet it is worth noting that they are interconnected, forming an immoral triad in which each element builds each the other. Their beginnings are steeped in violence, they are marinated in myths, and their continuation is based in erasure. Bryan Brayboy and his colleague Jeremiah Chin have written about the importance of detangling origins and beginnings (Brayboy and Chin 2020). Origins are tied directly to cosmological events. For many Indigenous peoples, emergence is manifested in our origin stories, which are different from our beginning stories (Brayboy and Chin 2020; Vaught, Chin, and Brayboy n.d.). The conditions that make it possible for land-grant universities to exist begin with the violent separation (effectively the erasure) of Indigenous peoples from their lands, a process whose essence is a spiritual and ontological attack. Universities have established beginning stories (often denoted by "est." followed by the date of their founding), which are not the same as origin stories. The beginning stories of universities, pleasurable marinations of myths, omit the origins and write new stories that are rooted in the erasure of Indigenous peoples' connections to place. In our response, we link and unmask the myths, erasure, and violence. Myths LGU asks us to rethink what we have come to believe and know about land-grant institutions. Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone write, "Behind the myth [of gifts of free land] lies a massive wealth transfer masquerading as a donation" (2020, 1). This revelation challenges the beginning stories of these institutions through the meticulous analysis of how eleven million acres of land were set aside for their creation. We see the dangers of myths that emerge in this moment. The power of myth (Brayboy and Chin 2020) is not [End Page 139] in its initial telling. Power is in the initial retelling, and the one after that, and the one after that, and so on. In each retelling, the myth edges toward "truth," and there we can see the ongoing harmful wreckage unfolding. The original peoples fade from existence, and the retelling of myths becomes the prevailing truth in their absence. Prevailing "truth" springs from what Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron call "genesis amnesia," the "naïve illusion that things have always been as they are" (1977, 9). As the original peoples fade away, historians interpret and analyze, universities entrench themselves and their stories, and time marches on. The myth becomes "truth." Lee and Ahtone have offered us a powerful opportunity to revisit the beginning, to question it, reimagine it, and rewrite it.1 We see and feel the tensions in that rewriting. Tensions reside in the fact that we are both scholars of higher education and have made arguments that Indigenous peoples earning degrees is one way for tribal nations and communities to strengthen and build capacity. We understand the inherent tensions in suggesting that schooling as a way to engage in self-determination. We also understand the messy practicalities associated with knowing that we are both Indigenous peoples and graduates of universities that received some of their land base from the Morrill Act and the other challenges concomitant with the beginnings of our universities. The myths have become truths. We are products of the myths and of lands that were involuntarily turned over for the larger project of higher education in the United States. We pause to wonder about who benefits from these myths. Language is important; words and text have the power to plant (and nurture) the seeds of myths, casting away groups of peoples and imaginaries. Candis Callison (Tahltan member) and Natalie Diaz (Mohave) provoke us to examine the power of language, its...

Reviewed by: Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas by Quynh Nhu Le Xu Peng (bio) Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas, by Quynh Nhu Le. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. Xiii + 250 pp. $39.95 paper. ISBN: 978-1-4399-1627-8. Starting with a poem that connects the Sand Creek massacre in Colorado (1864) to the massacre of Vietnamese people in My Lai (1968), Quynh Nhu Le's book Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas presents an alternative reading of the lived experience of Asian and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Responding to the vast corpus of scholarship in ethnic studies, Asian American studies, and Indigenous studies that tends to treat Asian and Indigenous peoples as two separate subjects or objects, Le pioneers the effort in bringing these two different yet interlaced experiences together, and confronts this crossing with regard to the imposition of settler colonialism and liberal ideology. By employing a comparative approach to reading the literary representation ranging from the United States and Canada to Mexico and Brazil, she argues that Asian and Indigenous encounters have revealed the structure and the nuanced forms of "settler racial hegemonies" through "settle racial tense" (4–5). At the same time, however, the antiracial and anticolonial narratives produced by these two groups in turn are complicit in the construction and the domination of settler racial hegemonies. Le's book consists of four chapters. The first one, "Historiographical Tensions," invites us to read Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men (1980) and Gerald Vizenor's Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003). Through these two historiographies, Le examines the heroic and warrior traditions in U.S. Asian American and Indigenous historical narratives, which are easily integrated as the "rememorialization of their stories" (57) into "the formation and maintenance of U.S. settler colonial power" (29). Even if these stories aim to resist U.S. hegemony, they still end up obscuring "the violence on and incorporation of Asian and Indigenous peoples in U.S. settler colonial and imperial processes" (27). On [End Page 514] the other hand, by delving into the feelings and memories of the characters produced and circulated in both narratives, Le locates the "affective ruptures" (28) from which the solidarities between these two groups may develop. Chapter two shifts its attention from historical to "Legal/Juridical Tensions," and from the U.S. to the Canadian context. By reflecting upon the public apologies of two Canadian prime ministers, Brian Mulroney in 1988 and Stephen Harper in 2008, in light of Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan (1981) and Marie Clements's play Burning Vision (2012), Le calls attention to the movements and narratives of redress and reconciliation. Public apologies, in this case, provoke and justify "settler racial structures of feeling" (62) among Asian and Indigenous peoples, and eventually turn their voices into a settlement with the settler racial state, which is also shown in other literary and theatrical representations reminding us of the settler colonial grammars. In the meantime, the shared emotion of grief and grievances between these two groups are metaphorically depicted to "reveal the instabilities in settler racial hegemonies" (94). Moving from British settler colonialism to that of the Spanish and Portuguese, Le unpacks another history and presence, focusing on "Economic Tensions" in chapter three. She first refers back to José Vasconcelos's and Gilberto Freyre's critiques of mestizaje/mestiçagem discourse in Mexico and Brazil, respectively, in order to contextualize the "representations of critical resistance to global capitalist encroachment in Latin America" (96), featured in Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). Through her readings, she discloses how "co-constitutive representations of Indigenous and Asian peoples" (105), in their dialogue with economic changes and global capitalism, rearticulate settler and racial legacies of discourses on mestizaje/mestiçagem. Thus, the narrative of racial mixture is limited in the sense that it fails to theoretically exhaust the tension as well as the intimacy shared by these two groups. The last chapter, "Biopolitical Tensions," strongly resonating with the lived experiences of Asian and Indigenous...

In this chapter Danielle tells a story grounded by the four quadrants of the medicine wheel, which hold knowledge about what it means to build trusting relationships between white settlers and Indigenous Peoples. The story is grounded in the heuristic study she completed for her dissertation and in her learning while working as a mental health counsellor in Deninu Kųę́ First Nation. The story moves through the four parts of the circle: (a) understanding the Truth about colonization, (b) acknowledging unequal privilege and power, (c) showing up in a good way, and (d) participating and collaborating with Indigenous Peoples. The centre point, or anchor, of the circle comes from a teaching from Indigenous Elders that suggests Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples should be travelling on the river together, but each in their own canoes. The story was written from the author’s position as a white settler. At the end of the chapter the story is captured through a colourful painting of two canoes in a river. One canoe has two Indigenous people in it; the other canoe holds two white settlers. In the painting vines not only connect to the individuals, but they integrate all relations, including the four-legged, winged, finned, rooted, Mother Earth, Grandmother water, the sun, and the canoes. Danielle concludes that when we understand that everything is connected, we can understand the teachings of what it means for white settlers and Indigenous Peoples to be travelling on the river together in two canoes.