Migratory Subjectivity in E. Jane Gay’s Choup-nit-ki, With the Nez Percés

Abstract

Due to its unusual publishing history, E. Jane Gay’s Choup-nit-ki: With the Nez Perces has not received the critical attention it deserves. Through the book’s photographs and text, Gay stages a migratory, polyvocal narrator who rejects the unitary identity that establishes both the writer’s and the colonizer’s authority. This article studies textual features such as shifting focalization, the splitting of the writing subject into multiple personae, and the humor extracted from social contradictions to show how Gay’s book both cites and challenges nineteenth century conventions governing genre and gender. Contemporary theory (Deleuze and Guattari, Braidotti, Butler) provides concepts that can aid our appreciation of the text’s originality. Gay’s self-presentation cracks the restrictive nineteenth century mold of femininity and liberates the subject, even as, ironically, the author collaborates in the project of imposing on the Nez Perce the constraints legislated through the Dawes Act. Gay’s book illustrates the author’s ambivalence about the Allotment policy that attempted to end tribal organization on the Nez Perce reservation.