Theorizing Native Studies

346 Pages·2014·7.088 MB·English

by  Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (eds.)

theorizing NATIVE STUDIES

theorizing
NATIVE STUDIES
Edited by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith
Duke University Press Durham and London 2014
© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper ∞
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Arno Pro by Copperline Book Services, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Theorizing Native studies / edited by Audra Simpson
and Andrea Smith.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978–0–8223–5667–7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978–0–8223–5679–0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Indians of North America. 2. Indians of North America—
Ethnic identity. 3. Indians of North America—Politics and
government. i. Simpson, Audra. ii. Smith, Andrea.
e77.2.t446 2014
970.004'97—dc23
2013047599
Contents
vii Acknowledgments
1 INTRODUCTION | AUDRA SIMPSON AND ANDREA SMITH
31 CHAPTER ONE | DIAN MILLION
There Is a River in Me: Theory from Life
43 CHAPTER TWO | TERESIA TEAIWA
The Ancestors We Get to Choose: White Influences I Won’t Deny
56 CHAPTER THREE | GLEN COULTHARD
From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx,
Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh
99 CHAPTER FOUR | ROBERT NICHOLS
Contract and Usurpation: Enfranchisement and Racial Governance
in Settler- Colonial Contexts
122 CHAPTER FIVE | CHRISTOPHER BRACKEN
“In This Separation”: The Noncorrespondence of Joseph Johnson
149 CHAPTER SIX | MARK RIFKIN
Making Peoples into Populations: The Racial Limits of Tribal
Sovereignty
188 CHAPTER SEVEN | SCOTT LAURIA MORGENSEN
Indigenous Transnationalism and the aids Pandemic: Challenging
Settler Colonialism within Global Health Governance
207 CHAPTER EIGHT | ANDREA SMITH
Native Studies at the Horizon of Death: Theorizing Ethnographic
Entrapment and Settler Self- Reflexivity
235 CHAPTER NINE | MISHUANA R. GOEMAN
Disrupting a Settler- Colonial Grammar of Place:
The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie
266 CHAPTER TEN | VERA B. PALMER
The Devil in the Details: Controverting an American Indian
Conversion Narrative
297 Bibliography
321 Contributors
323 Index

vi | Contents
Acknowledgments
This volume started (of all places) in a hotel room. Exhausted and yet wide
awake in the middle of the night in Sydney, Australia, we started talking
about work we were reading in Native studies that pushed conversations
in the field toward different horizons. We kept returning to the work of five
different scholars and were remarking on their use of “theory.” Trained
very differently, but with complementary notions of the centrality of power
and effect to the project of scholarly inquiry, both of us were so excited by
the direction analysis took when enlivened by different forms of literature.
We decided then, in the middle of the night, to organize at a later time a
panel that interrogated, or at the very least reflected, this question of the-
ory; the venue was yet to be determined. And then we went about our busi-
ness. That was six years ago. The field has changed significantly since then,
with remarkable, book- length studies that unabashedly mobilize theory
in its many iterations. But this volume remains a testament to that earlier
moment and its unfolding in different forms of analysis, demonstrating the
articulation of Native studies to comparative literature, politics and politi-
cal theory, social movement theory, religious studies, traditional narrative,
and other forms of discourse.
Our panel grew from an imagined five members in total to an actual-
ity of four panels (and more than twenty papers), spread throughout an
entire day, at the 2008 Native American and Indigenous Studies Associa-
tion (naisa) meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There we saw a packed
room, with vigorous and engaged discussion around the utility of theory,
the models in play, the ethics of knowledge production, and so on. We then
assembled another panel for the American Studies Association (asa) meet-
ing in 2009 with other contributors, who also spoke of the centrality of the-
ory and critique to the work that they do. The overwhelming response of
participants there signaled to us that this should become a book. In 2010 we
edited papers from those who could contribute to a book, and then we con-
vened a workshop at Columbia University that allowed for a close reading
of these texts by participants, invited discussants from the broader Colum-
bia community, and had a day of exceptional conversations. This book is
the fruit of that labor, and the labor of extraordinary reviewers and readers,
who were attentive to our argumentation, our data, and our theorizing. We
thank our anonymous reviewers for their careful and close readings. We
would also like to thank our earlier participants: Chris Andersen, Jennifer
Denetdale, Vince Diaz, Brendan Hokowhitu, Jackie Grey, John McKinn,
Aileen Moreton- Robinson, and Jacki Rand. We offer thanks to our discus-
sants: Ned Blackhawk, Sora Han (naisa), Beth Povinelli (Columbia), and
Dylan Rodriguez (asa). We also thank the terrific chairs who managed
these panels beautifully, as discussions were lively and sometimes intense:
Jessica Cattelino (naisa) and Lisa Kahaleole Hall (asa). We thank Co-
lumbia University for the resources to hold the seminar and workshop,
“Theorizing Native Studies,” through the Diversity Initiative; it was ex-
pertly organized through the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
(cser). We thank the director of cser, Frances Negrón- Muntaner, for her
institutional support and Teresa Aguayo for her elegant and tireless efforts
on behalf of this final seminar at Columbia—a seminar so crucial to the
life of this project that it that moved the papers into chapters. We thank
Lakota Pochedley, who helped us with editorial and bibliographical assis-
tance prior to submission. And we thank our wonderful editor, Courtney
Berger, and her assistant, Deborah Guterman, for their support, their en-
thusiasm, and their stewardship of this project.

viii | Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION | Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith
It is ironic that at a time when there seems to be a turn against theory within
the field of Native Studies, this volume proposes to center the importance
of theory. Native studies, with its distinct intellectual and political gene-
alogies, arrives at the question of theory from a different perspective than
other fields. While there may be a backlash against theory in other fields (as
seen in the publication of volumes such as Against Theory, Theory’s Empire,
and so on), Native studies has made an explicit turn toward theory. The
more recent focus in Native studies on theory could suggest that the dis-
cipline is simply following the intellectual trajectory of mainstream schol-
arship. In this volume, however, we propose that distinct engagement of
Native studies with theory usefully intervenes not only in Native studies
but also in the larger debate around the usefulness of theory in general.
In particular, theory is often positioned as the opposite of other concepts
considered more important, such as theory versus practice, theory versus
community- based scholarship, theory versus truth, and theory versus po-
litical engagement. Suspicion about the turn toward theory in Native stud-
ies also remains. It is not uncommon to hear the complaint within venues
in Native studies that theoretical projects are inherently “Western,” are
nonindigenous, and spoil the possibility of scholarly production outside
the confines of intellectual traditions that have been used to uphold and
contextualize forms of defining difference and thus dominating that which
was and still is defined as different. As such, theoretical projects are often
accused of being insufficiently grounded in the needs of Native communi-
ties. Rather than dismissing these critiques, however, we argue that these
critiques actually provide a helpful theoretical foundation for a politically
grounded and analytically charged form of Native studies. This volume
proposes that the project of theorizing Native studies troubles these sim-