Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte

315 Pages·2019·6.55 MB·English

by  Christopher J. Pexa

Translated Nation
Translated Nation
Rewriting the Dakhota Oyate
Christopher Pexa
M
i University of Minnesota Press
N
Minneapolis
Si
Ti London
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Transgressive Adoptions:
Dakota Prisoners’ Resistances to State Domination Following the 1862
U.S.-Dakota War,” Wicazo Sa Review 30, no. 1 (2015): 29-56. Portions of
chapter 2 were published as “More Than Talking Animals: Charles Alexander
Eastman’s Animal Peoples and Their Kinship Critiques of United States
Colonialism,” PMLA 131, no. 3 (2016): 652-67; and “Citizen Kin: Charles
Eastman’s Reworking of U.S. Citizenship,” SAIL 29, no. 3 (2017): 1-28.
Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pexa, Christopher, author.
Title: Translated nation : rewriting the Dakhota Oyate / Christopher Pexa.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical
references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018039742 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0070-0 (he) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0071-7 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Dakota Indians—Historiography. | Dakota Indians—History—19th
century. | Dakota Indians—Government relations—History—19th century. | Dakota
Indians—Intellectual life. | Dakota Indians—Interviews. | BISAC: HISTORY / Native
American. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Native American. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic
Studies / Native American Studies.
Classification: LCC E99.D1 P49 2019 (print) | DDC 978.004/975243—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039742
For my parents, Donna and Dennis
Contents
Preface ix
Note on Language and Orthography xiv
Introduction: Ambivalence and the Unheroic Decolonizer 1
1. Transgressive Adoptions 3 3
First Interlude: Grace Lambert, Personal Interview, 61
Fort Totten, Spirit Lake Nation, August 10,1998
2. (Il)legible, (Il)liberal Subjects: Charles Alexander 89
Eastmans Poetics of Withholding
Second Interlude: Interview with Grace Lambert, 137
Tate Topa Dakhota Wounspe (Four Winds Dakota
Teaching) Program, March 10,1993
3. Territoriality, Ethics, and Travel in the Black Elk Transcripts 147
4. Peoplehood Proclaimed: Publicizing Dakhota 183
Women in Ella Cara Delorias Waterlily
Third Interlude: Interview with Lillian Chase, Tate Topa 221
Dakhota Wounspe Program, Fort Totten, Spirit Lake Nation,
February 26, 1993
Conclusion: Gathering the People 235
Acknowledgments 243
Appendix: Dakhota Pronunciation Guide 247
Notes 249
Index 289
Preface
In Cannon Ball, North Dakota, during the summer and fall of 2016,
in order to protect Iqyaq Wakhaqgapi Wakpa (River That Makes
the Sacred Stones), or the Missouri River, from incursion and spo­
liation by the Dakota Access Pipeline, the #NoDAPL movement
was born—or rather, it reemerged as the latest face of a centuries-
long struggle against colonization of territories historically occupied
by the Ocheti Sakowiq Oyate, or People of the Seven Council Fires.
The Oyate are the confederacy of allied bands comprising the east­
ern Dakhota-speaking Sisithuqwaq (Sisseton, or Dwellers of the
Fishing Grounds), Bdewakhaqthuqwaq (Mdewakanton, or Dwell­
ers of Spirit Lake), Wahpethuqwaq (Wahpeton, or Leaf-Dwellers),
and Wahpekhute (Wahpekute, or Leaf Shooters) bands, the middle
Nakhota-speaking Ihaqkthuqwaq (Yankton, or Dwellers at the End)
and Ihaqkthuqwaqna (Yanktonai, or Little Dwellers at the End), and
the western Lakhotiyapi speakers, the Thithuqwaq (Teton, or Prai­
rie Dwellers). #NoDAPL and the camps at Cannon Ball were founded
as nonviolent and prayerful acts to protect the water. And while the
Oyate have long occupied these lands, its reemergence in such an in­
ternationally visible and powerful way is remarkable. As founder of
the Sacred Stone Camp, LaDonna Brave Bull Allard observed, “This
is the first [physical] gathering of the Ocheti Sakowiq (Sioux tribes)
since the Battle of the Greasy Grass (Battle of Little Bighorn) 140
years ago.”1 Although the water protectors camps at Cannon Ball were
eventually evacuated and bulldozed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs,
the movement lives on in the chorus of Mm Wichoni (water is life or
water is alive)—a phrase that has accrued broadly ecological mean­
ings in addition to ones specifically grounded in Dakhota/Lakhota/
Nakhota2 sovereignty and ways of knowing.
We live in a time of Indigenous resurgence where, as Leanne Simp­
son (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) declares, we are moving “ourselves
beyond resistance and survival, to nourishment of our nations through
the rebuilding of our own political and intellectual traditions.”3 The
X PREFACE
figure i. Grandmas (from left to right) Lydia, Lillian, Grace, and Rachel
Langer Young (with unidentified man in middle and child on right) in Fort
Totten, North Dakota, circa 1940. Photographer unknown.
making of decolonial space at Standing Rock was a meaningful mo­
ment of resurgence for Dakhota Oyate and other Indigenous allies.
But it was one whose global visibility and appeal the settler-state re­
sponded to with radically increased surveillance, militarized police
force, and violence. Part of that violence was representational and
involved state disinformation campaigns, as with the Morton County
police department’s allegation that water protectors were engaged
in “an ongoing riot” on November 20, 2016, as they attempted to
hold their position on the Backwater Bridge just outside the Ocheti
Sakowiq camp.4 How and to what effect settler regimes represent re­
surgent indigeneity as both eminently knowable and aberrant, and
PREFACE XI
the strategies of Indigenous mobilization and resurgence these char­
acterizations give rise to, are in large part what this book is about.
Between the Battle of Greasy Grass and the water protectors at
Cannon Ball is a kind of long pause, a drawing in of breath. It is in
the duration of this pause that Translated Nation enters. It interro­
gates how Dakhota intellectuals used and revised liberal frameworks
of belonging, including notions of citizenship, property holding, and
territory, both to conceal from settler view and to reclaim for Dakhota
communities core relational philosophies based in the thiospaye, or
Dakhota extended family. I begin with the 1862 U.S.-Dakhota War’s
assault on Dakhota peoplehood, and I end not with the 1934 Indian
Reorganization Act, which sought to devolve some measure of self-
determination back to tribes, but with oral histories of Dakhota elders
given in the 1990s. While this is a work of Indigenous literary criticism
that foregrounds questions of representation, it also rearticulates com­
munity history and presence by centering Dakhota archives past and
present. As both of these things, it has been strongly shaped by critical
methods and approaches from literary Indigenous studies. The kinds
of questions I ask here include the following: What acts of Indigenous
relinking to the past appear in the guise of complicity, or of acceding
to assimilations demands? How do notions of decolonization based
in resistance privilege whats active and explicit rather than what’s un­
derstated and covert? What forms of decolonial freedom come into
view when we look beyond assimilation and resistance? How has the
assimilation era often been misconstrued as a period of vacantness
rather than one that laid the discursive and conceptual ground for
contemporary Indigenous politics based in resurgent peoplehood?
Translated Nation offers an interrogation of settler-colonial regimes
of legibility that sought to make assimilation-era Indigenous people
legible as subjects of the settler-state, and of how Dakhota intellectuals
both used and defused these modes of control to rewrite and remake
the Oyate in literary forms. Reading written and oral materials—
letters from Dakhota prisoners, interviews by Nicholas Black Elk
(Oglala), autobiographies, political tracts, and children’s books by
Charles Alexander Eastman (Wahpethuqwaq), pageants and novels
by Ella Cara Deloria (Ihaqkthuqwaq), as well as contemporary oral
histories of elders from the Mm Wakhaq Oyate (Spirit Lake Nation,
or People)—I argue that it is in the most colonially complicitous poses
where we find Dakhota staking out representational territory for other
XII PREFACE
Dakhota and doing the future-oriented work of remaking the people
by reinvigorating the peoples ethics.
This is a tribally specific, even a Dakhota-centric, study, but its
readings of Dakhota texts will, I hope, provide some analogies for
how other tribal peoples not only survived settler-colonists attempts
to eradicate and replace them but also laid groundwork for their own
resurgences. I use Dakhota terms when possible, and I play the role
of translator in substituting key terms in Dakhota when their English
equivalents hold (or withhold) crucial relational meanings. These
substitutions have allowed me not only to teach my readers some­
thing about the wide range of ways in which Dakhota concepts and
meanings informed the work of the intellectuals I examine but also
to leverage linguistic translation in our present moment as a mode of
cultural reclamation. For Dakhota language students (like myself), I
hope that placing literary texts in conversation with the rich meanings
and nuances of certain Dakhota words and concepts will be useful.
Another of the books aims is to further develop an Indigenous
peoplehood framework. Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee) defines In­
digenous “peoplehood” as being a matter of participating in the “re­
lational reality of the tribal nation.”5 I reframe here Justices notion
of “relational reality” in relation to Dakhota authors’ performances
within, and citations of, historical, oral-historical, literary, and ethno­
graphic genres. Specifically, I explore how modern forms of Dakhota
relationality cite cosmological contexts in which peoplehood is a
shared existential and political condition for various classes of beings,
including humans, animals, and other-than-human persons such
as spirits, rocks, and lightning. As an alternative to settler-colonial
views of land as property or space abstracted away from interper­
sonal, everyday relations, land emerges from these Dakhota texts as
a sociopolitical location. Its political actors include these human and
other-than-human persons, and through their mutual dialogue, the
land becomes a common place, first in the sense of being a trope of
Dakhota historical presence in long-occupied homelands, and second
as a place held in common among Dakhota persons through which
the ethical norms of peoplehood may be exercised.
Translated Nation explores what a concept of decolonial trans­
lation, considered as a tool for withholding knowledge and for cre­
ating opacities, could mean for how we think about Indigenous life
and community rebuilding during moments when survival appears
perhaps least likely, and ambivalences most disabling. As a critical
PREFACE xiii
intervention, decolonial translation describes how the upholding of
settler-colonial logics of representation, of “playing Indian” in a bad
or retrograde sense, in fact created space for Dakhota intellectuals to
cite, in ways that were illegible to settler audiences, Dakhota ethical
norms as a means of linking back to and reconstructing a peoplehood
based in ethics of the thiospaye. Translation shows up as intertextual
proliferation and is a resurgent rather than resistive textual practice.
This exploration entails a shift in how we imagine lived experiences
of indigeneity during the federal policy era of allotment and assimi­
lation, when Indigenous individuals’ forms of self-publicity were of­
ten demonized as “savagely” authentic on the one hand or Christian,
genteel, and harmless on the other—an either/or that has also cru­
cially opened space for reclamations of gender identities that had been
criminalized by the state.
This book invokes but ultimately goes beyond a standard periodi­
zation. To tell the story of the Oyate’s remaking only by focusing on
the years between, say, the 1862 war and the 1934 Indian Reorgani­
zation Act would unduly privilege the settler-states sense of time. In
fact this book begins in the near present with Dakhota women, some
of whose voices run through its chapters. It began especially with my
uncidaq, my maternal grandmother, Rachel Charboneau (nee Langer
Young), and in the conversations I overheard among adults and rela­
tives who would gather around her kitchen table in her white and
salmon, state-of-the-art Marlette mobile home in Rapid City. There
were stories of young lovers frozen to death in the back of a hearse,
scandalous stories of living lovers, weird stories about the relations
between ghosts and humans, horror stories of the Grey Nuns’ board­
ing school, and long-ago stories of talking animals, rocks, lightning,
and other powerful nonhuman persons. They drew me in as a lis­
tener again and again, populating my childhood dreams and going
to work on me still even as a much older person, leading me to ask
my uqci and her sister, my grandma, Grace Lambert, about some of
these stories and about how they could be devout Catholics yet relish
telling me about how the Wakirjyaq (Thunder Beings) once blasted
a missionary’s giant wooden cross from the top of Crow Hill. From
that kind of contradiction, some of the main lines of this book began
to take shape.