“To Be Made Colonized: Indigenous Peoples, the Archive, and US Boarding Schools”
In School Magazines: Archiving Encounters in the British Colonial World, edited by Catherine Sloan and Sneha Krishnan.
University of Massachusetts Press, Forthcoming.
Click for abstract
Off-reservation boarding schools mark a period of history that demonstrates additional methods of settler colonization and elimination beyond outright physical violence. National archives, as particular colonial formations, at once preserve that period by housing boarding school artifacts while simultaneously obviating the subjectivity of Indigenous peoples. Instead, these state institutions create and endlessly reinscribe Indigenous people as always already colonized subjects. Employing experience as a methodology, this chapter recounts research undertaken relative to a boarding school journal, using it as a conduit through which to comprehend the relationship between these institutions and settler colonialism. While integrating the journal in its argument, this chapter also refuses disclosure of the contents of the journal, instead centralizing the idea that boarding schools and archives exist as intimately related colonial institutions, shaping understandings of Native peoples within the US imaginary. Maintaining such a formation across time and space requires “evidence” and/or “proof” of the boarding school as an “authentic” Native experience. Consequently, these institutions are always already bound up within the logics of settler colonialism, while actively informing contemporary social discourse and political possibilities for Native peoples’ sovereignty and self-determination struggles. This chapter examines Indigenous peoples as artifacts produced within the archive to imagine alternative epistemologies in methodology and knowledge production that may work in service to sovereignty and self-determination struggles.
“A Settler Colonial Failure: Decolonial Promise Turned Decolonial Fear”
In How to Decolonize the Feminist
and Queer Studies Classroom, edited by Atia Sattar.
NP: Press Publications, Forthcoming.
Click for abstract
This work is based on my 2020 course, “Indigeneity and Blackness in Settler Colonialism,” taught for the Interracial Dynamics Cluster course series. The course explored how Indigenous and Black people endure and sometimes flourish under the conditions of settler colonialism and relied on Indigenous feminist and Black feminist theories. During the course’s ten-week term, the students demonstrated extraordinary growth and saw connections between Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty that had decolonial and anticolonial possibilities.
After I walked through the students through our time together in our final class, they discussed links between Blackness and Indigeneity, only this time thinking about their praxis. Despite their work on Indigenous sovereignty, the students expressed their fear of a devolution into chaos without government and determined that decolonization was probably best but likely too risky. Their conclusion vanished me as an Indigenous woman and scholar even as I stood before them and erased hundreds of Indigenous nations. I pointed this out, and they fell silent. They expressed astonishment and confusion about how they could have reasoned themselves to that position after having devoted so much time and intellectual energy to thinking otherwise. Ultimately, I asked them to always remember that feeling of astonishment and sense of confusion, to hold close to them the ease with which they collectively reified a colonial narrative that perpetuates oppressive conditions that extend beyond the classroom.
“The Obligations of Our Ecological Relations: A Challenge for Land Acknowledgments”
With Angela Robinson in Knowing Life: The Ethics of Multispecies Epistemologies, edited By Brianne Donaldson.
Routledge, Forthcoming.
Click for abstract
Forthcoming.
“Resisting Colonial Education: Zitkala-Sa and Native Feminist Archival Refusal”
In the International Journal of Qualitative
Studies in Education, Volume 24, Number 5.
Click for abstract
This paper examines resistance through a Native Feminist lens, employing the
boarding school memoirs of Zitkala-Sa. Within a “story” of appropriation in
methodology, it considers protest and parody, and presents archival refusal as
modes of resistance to colonial education.