Sovereign Flows and the Obligation of Repayment

Abstract

AbstractStephen Graham Jones’s 2020 novel, The Only Good Indians, depicts the haunting and killing of four Blackfeet friends—Ricky, Lewis, Cassidy, and Gabriel—by the spirit of an elk cow called “Elk Head Woman,” who stalks the men after they have killed her and her unborn calf. Their punishment, and the unpayability of their debt to the ghost, entail asking what lies beyond a regime of rights when those rights have been judged to be always already ignorable by settler-colonial society. But Elk Head Woman’s haunting also positions violence against the land (via fracking) and its more-than-human inhabitants as a metonym for settler-colonial violence against Indigenous women and girls. This essay asks what justice may look like beyond a framework of individual rights that create a temporal enclosure, tying people and harm to moments in time and specific places, arguing that the mobility of intergenerational debt and its unpayable reparations across times and places constitute a sovereign flow—the enduring movement of an ethical–political object (here, the elk-Blackfeet law) created between sovereign peoples (human and more-than-human) that persists apart from the settler-colonial state across whose legal and geographic spaces and time the flow moves.[The Only Good Indians’] fictional dramatizing of settler-Indigenous-nonhuman relations shows a world apart from settler-colonial social justice and forms of democratic inclusion: a haunting that . . . [refuses] violence against Indigenous women and ongoing forms of capitalistic extraction on tribal lands.