LandBody: Radical Native Commitments

Abstract

LandBody:Radical Native Commitments Diana Rose (bio), Robert Geroux (bio), and Kennan Ferguson "Who are a people?" and "What is land?" may seem to be separate questions, but they are not. Despite colonial incursions, Native communities continue tribal lifeways, constructing and reconstructing systems of reciprocal survival. Place is not a neutral backdrop, "where something happens." Connection to a specific land comprises a central component of indigenous being, a commitment to site specificity contrary to the current celebrations of migration, individualism, and cosmopolitanism. Land and body—both of them collective, both of them transformative—cannot therefore be separated. This symposium invites a variety of Native scholars to illuminate, interrogate, and implement these connections. Where most conventional political thinking orients around subjects such as state, law, and authority, the authors here emphasize relationships to power and existence which highlight place and interconnections between people and other beings. They insist upon a richer and more imbricated notion of politics than that of settler-colonial society, with its reliance on the isolated individual, capitalist value-form, and alienable land. In contrast, these scholars point to a longer history of collectivity and commitments to land and flourishing, even in the face of the massive power of the states which repeatedly deny and undercut their very existence. In a time where theorists—political and otherwise—increasingly focus on the role of the non-human in the social life of humans, few still take seriously the philosophical traditions of Native communities, where ongoing discussions about the connections between human beings, non-human lifeforms, and geographical and physical landscapes persist. Such contemporary categories as "the environment," "actants," and "medicinal plants" all too often replicate these dualities; the Native theorists in this symposium instead argue for (or, daringly, presume) concomitance. Humans, other animals, plants, and what too many dismiss as "geographical features" such as mountains and rivers interact, interweave. Land and people and power cannot be separated. The symposium begins by questioning the relationship of indigeneity to land itself. Bernard Perley calls his theorization of this complexity between land and belonging "translocality." A Maliseet scholar writing from the continent's opposite coast, Perley notes the disasporic nature of much Native existence. While the white popular [End Page 973] imagination locates American Indian and First Nations existence as predominantly on reservations and reserves, Perley underscores both the violent dislocations which created such spaces, as well as the fact that most Natives live outside the boundaries of "their" reservations, whether in cities or in distant towns. Yet, Perley argues, this does not undermine the necessary connection to land, rather it demands complex "cosmogonies" which attend to the praxis of living with and through sacred lands in multiple languages and locations. These emergent vitalities—located at literal touchstones such as the now-submerged Tobique Rock, or in language practices including translations between Maliseet, Menominee, Oneida, and Anishinabemowin—constitute the continued, contested survivance of Native peoples. Talia Gomez Quintana also sees the indigenous resistance emanating from both remembrance and physical location. In "Hiaki Vatwe," Gomez Quintana traces the recognition of space and land as kin to humans, along with non-human animals and elements such as the Yaqui River. Settler colonialism seeks the same power as that which animates the Yoeme people: when the Mexican government seeks to tame, transform, and dam the Hiaki Vatwe, it strikes at the lifeblood of those who have lived with the river as partners. Fortunately, Gomez Quintana argues, the river has taught resistance: the Talking Tree's lessons on how to fight colonial settlement were made intelligible though travel along the river, and the Deer world (home to language, the Yaqui people, and songs of memorialization) arises from its water. But, she shows, this conflict continues, with the existence of the Yaqui Nation pitted against the state's desire for a new aqueduct. Water projects are similarly analyzed as usurpations by Giovanni Batz. He historicizes such "development" as the newest settler-colonial invasion strategy. Others have long sought the lands of the Ixil (shared, in part, with the K'iche' and Q'anjob'al), but the Ixil have in part protected their ways of life through a combination of strategic and military resistances. In the wake of...