Deborah Miranda, Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, and Metaphors of Representation

Abstract

Deborah Miranda, Natalie Diaz, Tommy Pico, and Metaphors of Representation Colleen G. Eils (bio) In the spring of 2018, two Mohawk brothers, seventeen-year-old Lloyd Skanahwati Gray and nineteen-year-old Thomas Kanewakeron Gray, joined a campus tour at Colorado State University. According to news reports, a woman on the tour called campus police officers on the teens, reporting them as suspicious and “creepy.” Police arrived, removed the brothers from the group, and subjected them to questioning before determining that they had done nothing wrong. Close attention to the woman’s police report reveals it was not only the teens’ presence on the tour that she found upsetting, but their quiet withholding of the information she demanded. According to reporter Mary Hudetz (Apsaalooké/Crow), the woman was immediately suspicious of the teens: “‘Their behavior is just really odd,’ she said from the Colorado State University campus. ‘They won’t give their names. . . . They just really stand out.’ The teens’ quiet disposition and dark clothing were unnerving, the caller told the dispatcher. Campus police responded by pulling them from the tour, patting them down and asking why they didn’t ‘cooperate’ when others asked them questions” (Hudetz; ellipses in original). The disproportionate force with which the teens’ measured privacy was met is not new to Indigenous youths in North America, but demonstrated for national audiences the ways in which compulsory visibility, or non-Indigenous expectations of access to Indigenous—in this case, Mohawk—bodies and stories, is part of the US’s and Canada’s colonial projects. Expectations of access to Indigenous lives are, perhaps paradoxically, part of larger colonial processes of historical erasure of Indigenous experiences and knowledges. Sometimes these erasure attempts happen through forcible destruction, for example through boarding schools, adoption policies, and genocide; in other cases, attempts take the form [End Page 82] of overwriting narratives and imposing interpretation on Indigenous lives. Writer Terese Mailhot (Seabird Island First Nation) describes the bind at the heart of colonial narrative projects: “No matter what we write, white people can turn our stories into weapons, an excuse to be paternalistic. If we depict ourselves as educated and self-sufficient, they might advance the narrative that our tragedies are long past, that we should dust ourselves off and move on” (Mailhot). She continues, “No matter what we do, we’re still Indian, and often we don’t get to speak for ourselves” (Mailhot). Billy Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree) explains the human cost of having to disrupt stereotypes to avoid objectification and to be recognized as fully human: “In narratives that hinge on proving our humanness, Indigenous people sit stilled in the role of the described. As the described, our words are pit against us” (Belcourt). Indigenous narratives come with the risk of effacement: readers, as Mailhot and Belcourt argue, can and do overwrite Indigenous presence with the stories they are looking for.1 Refusing readers access to narratives would be understandable in the face of overwhelming perils of representation, yet as the Gray brothers’ experience illustrates, silence is hardly a safer option for Indigenous people; it, too, can be weaponized in metaphorical and literal ways. Indigenous writers—and individuals—face a representational bind in which both Indigenous silence and narrative can be overwritten and used against them, often with material effects. And yet, Indigenous literature, storytelling, and self-representation remain vibrant. Further, Indigenous storytelling thrives even against centuries of physical and epistemological violence and determined efforts at archival erasure and exclusion; recovery projects, among other efforts, gather what’s present and note what’s absent, gleaning what they can from just underneath the colonial narratives written on the surface of both. Doing so requires varied, creative critical methodologies, tailored for and by the range of storytellers, contexts, histories, and projects that constitute American Indian literature and storytelling. Personal and communal memoirs rooted in tremendous historical recovery work, such as Deborah Miranda’s (Esselen/Chumash) Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013), navigate both archival erasure and contemporary representational politics. In her discussion of “queer Indigenous writing as critical methodology,” Lisa Tatonetti describes the work of Janice Gould (Koyoonk’auwi Maidu) as a “Palimpsest of pasts and presents that fluidly intersect, overlap, and...