(Re)Mapping Indigenous Presence on the Land in Native Women's Literature

Abstract

are a narrative tool that must be part of Native feminisms; they serve as fertile grounds wherein the layers of geography are unfolded, explored, and expounded upon. Native identity, social relations, and politics are often conceived, represented, and determined as geographically and historically situated and bound to a particular community and era, even while the historical onslaught of legislation continues to rip that grounding out from under Native people and narratives of progress provide the underpinnings for Federal Indian policies. Conceiving of Native spaces that encourage the dismantling of boxed geographies and bodies defies Cartesian subject status.2 Engaging both historic attachments to particular geographies and imperial histories that undermine such attachments, Native conceptions of space defy a dominant, Cartesian model of imperial subjectivity in which consciousness emerges out of itself (I think; therefore I am), and in abstraction from the particularities of history and geography. Esther Belin does just that through her poetic deconstruction of the Federal Indian Policy of Termination and Relocation and its consequences for later generations. By understanding that space is produced and productive, which Belin makes clear in her writing, we unbury the roots of spatial colonization and lay bare its concealed systems. Critical Native feminisms will reassess and assert spatial practices that address colonial mappings of bodies and land and remap our social and political lives according to cultural values and contemporary needs. I am deeply interested and invested in meanings of space, place, and territory that reside in the discourse of U.S./Canadian nationalism and Native nationalisms. Often such discourses are rooted in masculine notions of ownership, seen in the personification of land as a she and an analogy of woman to nation, but