Abstract

This chapter argues that the Indian wars are wars in Indian family structures, and led to harmful repercussions for all state subjects. Tanana Athabascan's poem “The Housing Poem” shows the resilience of indigenous kinship structures against ongoing state interventions and disruptions. It also shows the challenge that indigenous families continue to face in asserting cultural and economic systems of kinship against legal definitions which legitimate the isolated nuclear family as the only possible domesticity. The primacy of “single-family occupancy” was used as grounds for the eviction and splintering of native families, beginning in the assimilation period and continuing today. The use of the term occupancy evokes a foundational concept of Indian occupation as always contingent and unstable as a property right during the assimilation era.

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