Bad Writing, Bad Art

The self-published “source book” The Destruction of the People, by the pseudonymous collective author, coyote man (most likely Maidu cultural leaders, Tom Epperson and Leland Scott with amateur ethnographer and scribe, Tom Rathbun), was published in 1973 by Brother William Press in Berkeley, California, one year before Robert Heizer’s similarly titled and more well-known The Destruction of California Indians. Coyote man’s book offers a California Indian theory of violence to contest the western liberal humanist one. Part of a grassroots, local history market, this idiosyncratic text, which masquerades as an (auto)ethnography, tells the story of the Destruction but in an ambiguous voice, placing “the white man’s story” in the appendix and foregrounding stories of violent encounters between California Indian peoples, told from the perspective of the Maidu. A flawed, convoluted, problematic text that mixes amateurism with authenticity in an undecidable manner, a troubling mix of good and bad ethics, it is nonetheless a “people’s book” that was sold at social gatherings and ceremonies for years (though it is now out of print and in limited supply—the persistent problem of the disappearing archive outside of mainstream history and its maintenance). It is bad writing, transcription, or a collage, a mingling of voices that move through origin stories of violence; prophecies of coming destruction; accounts of forced removal; strife and negotiation between different Native peoples, including calculations to pay off the debt of having killed someone from another tribe or family (a fair trade of people, generally; the live for the dead, but also sometimes with beads).1 As well as a discourse on western violence and genocide.2 It often lets colonizers off the hook but moves narratively toward an unstable collective of tribes who have negotiated peace among themselves under threat of extermination, emphasizing Indigenous plural politics and sociality through an affect of exhaustion. A tenuous way forward. Read through a prophetic lens, attuned to antisociality and despair (staying with its troubling aspects), it narrates a becoming (anti)social through violence and its mode of relationality and a (re)turn of sorts to an interrelational collective that has anticolonial prophetic undertones. It raises the question of what constitutes “a people,” and therefore a people’s voice, in terms that refuse consolidation into any sort of nationalism or easy oppositional stance.

With Indigenous Inhumanities I have tried to capture something of this intricate and indeterminate voice in its fraught response to the Destruction that continues to affect our people. I have attempted to attend to colonial and imperial violence through a California Indian angle of perception in an interrelational mode or to at least prepare the way for one, to prepare the dance grounds. This was not and should never be an easy task as it is the difficulty of the task—the bad feelings shared in common, the double binds of coloniality against which we bang our heads—that provides a way through, a way to keep going, to outlast the difficulty itself. And yet, as with the stories in The Destruction of the People and the figures in Frank Day’s paintings, there should also be a certain effortlessness, an absence of the strict morality of labor and its accomplishments with their heavy movements, both internal and external. This worklessness, if and when it is present in Indigenous Inhumanities, is meant to engage what coyote man called our people’s “complex and subtle system of thought.”3 Difficulty need not mean burden or weight.

The weight here is the burden of the human, its violence and enticements. I have sought to find in the un/work, the theory and praxis, of activists, artists, authors, elders, and ancestors a way outside of this burden, an Indigenous antihumanism, if you will, that orients us in a different, anticolonial direction. For me, this path has been indicated often by aesthetics, its failures and refusals, particularly in its eccentric and anti-institutional mode. An enigmatic violence, this is an aesthetics that is an extension, not a sublimation or expression, of the violence, giving us a way to reorient the Destruction. Miranda’s writing of a layered destruction of lesbian intertextuality and the absence of California Indian literature, in turning to the archive that supposedly destroys Indigenous voice, points in such a direction. As does Day’s mapping of the forces of the destruction through image and language, in outmoded and dangerous forms of representation understood to possess a certain amount of the neutral, of luck. From my vantage point, both offer us a distinctly California Indian approach to implementing the inhuman forces of the Destruction against the colonial present.

This is especially true for the hidden/not hidden text that, like a blade of bear grass, weaves throughout this book tying the chapters together, Tommy Pico’s IRL. In this long poem, Pico engages the impoverishment that is the English language but through excess, through overabundance. Written as a Kumeeyay epic story in the vein of a birdsong cycle but also in the form of an extended text message or social media post, with their vernacular and abbreviations as well as concomitant oversharing, IRL mourns the loss of Indigenous language by destroying the limits of poetic form and the boundaries between the literary and the everyday, online life and the “real” world.

Throughout the poem, Teebs, Pico’s poetic persona, strains against the limits imposed by a language forced onto him and his people, “the English fucking language with its high beams in my face,” a language that is both his, his innermost self, and yet radically foreign, an impersonal personality that perpetually limns the ambiguity of public and private, a conflict that takes the form of complex expressions of rules and boundaries overthrown.4 Against the control of death employed by the colonizer, Teebs offers information about protocols concerning death and peoples’ names by breaking the protocols, appealing to the names of those who have died, because he can’t be alone. He puts their names into the poem, giving everything away, just like his email password, because, in a postapocalyptic sense of revelation, and because of anthropology’s incessant gaze, there are no more secrets. The epic story follows Teebs, moving from boy to boy, chasing Muse, a pulsing light that flits from one person to the next, as unreliable as desire and the incredibly nuanced as well as banal emotions of Teebs, drifting and surging from irritation, loneliness to elation. Like language, sex is also a reflection on genocide, described by Teebs as having one’s land crammed full of brawny English men and still being unable to get laid. Flirting, Teebs describes to his date how he stares into fires at wakes because so many people on the reservation die; his date’s response: “I’m not looking for anything serious.” Teebs connects everything in the poem immediately to some amalgamation of the political, epistemological, and ontological. The loss of the name of a god he doesn’t believe in is connected directly to his description of growing his poems long as an extension of and replacement for cutting his hair in mourning, a third form of the poem, which slams into, through enjambment, the anticolonial discourse that weaves throughout. In this situation of language, art is never safe or enough: “Art is not very kidneys. / Your dialysis is not very well / composed.”

The use of Grindr messages, engagements with pop culture that keep crashing into genocide, the destruction of the distinction between truth and fiction, are due to, as we’ve seen, what Teebs calls “a dark part inside of me” formed by having a sense of what is lost but having no access to it.5 This conditions a type of bad writing, as Pico notes in an interview:

I recently did my birth chart and it basically said I enjoy bending the truth to a certain extent, and that’s kind of true because I will stretch the shit out of the truth if it’s in service of a punchline. That’s kind of all writing is. I don’t lie to my friends, I don’t lie to my family or other loved ones, but when it comes to writing I see that as the opportunity to chop and screw a lot of things I’ve learned and thought I knew.6

In part this is an intentional lack of commitment to an ethics or politics of clarity that would make what one says or writes easily believable or understandable. As Trinh T. Minh-ha notes, “Clear expression, often equated with correct expression, has long been the criterion set forth in treatises on rhetoric, whose aim was to order discourse so as to persuade.”7 She continues, “The language of Taoism and Zen, for example, which is perfectly accessible but rife with paradox does not qualify as clear (paradox is illogical and nonsensical to many Westerners), for its intent lies outside the realm of persuasion. The same holds true for vernacular speech, which is not acquired through institutions and therefore not repressed by either grammatical rules, technical terms, or key words.” And the same can be said for the expression of many Indigenous concepts that have historically been treated as nonsensical, as mere belief, or even as dangerous and diabolical. To take this further, sometimes one needs to write badly in order to break through what Mark Rifkin calls settler common sense, which he defines as “the ways the legal and political structures that enable non-native access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as given, as simply the unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and personhood.”8 The imposition of clarity and disciplinary force of good writing carry around connections to this position in its assumptions of privileged occupancy, a sense of progressive history, as well as the reproduction of a certain organization of the social through subjectivity and personhood. It is a structure of writing that especially affects bad subjects or those who don’t live up to the ideals of western humanist literacy, and, in a settler colonial context, places Indigenous people in the complex position to choose between assimilation or exclusion.

This is an issue for evaluation that affects creative forms in general. Eric Michaels, for instance, in speaking about aboriginal art on the international market in the late 1980s, makes the observation that none of the work that is sold is ever designated as “bad,” which he quickly and logically asserts also means that none of the work can ever be seen as especially good.9 More than a problem for just the market, this is an issue that gets to the heart of the problem of aesthetic evaluation and something like cultural authenticity in relation to Indigenous creation. This observation about the resistance of Indigenous art to western, nationalistic, market-oriented evaluations and recognition offers a sense of a different force or perhaps trajectory that Indigenous making presents. In Michaels’s analysis of the situation, he quickly eschews the racist and, as he deems it, “vulgar” interpretation that all aboriginal art is bad, and yet, he also opts to suspend judgment and refrains from offering any criteria through which to judge aboriginal art.10 This is a rhetorical move, done because Indigenous making is already the product of too many discourses, the site of too much colonial knowledge production. Rather than being negated or absent, Indigenous creation is overloaded with meaning, has too much presence but of the wrong kind, as do the voices of Indigenous people.

Onondaga and Mi’kmaq artist and scholar Gail Tremblay describes the situation in which “pressures about ‘authenticity’ and indigenous art tend to be a struggle between outsiders who want indigenous art to be traditional and other outsiders who pressure indigenous artists to make work that is ‘universal’ and not related to indigenous culture, history, and politics.”11 For Michaels, this leads to a form of negative dialectics as the contradictions presented by the many competing discourses, for instance art or tradition, individual or collective, and so on, have no apparent resolution, and so he sits in the space of ambivalence about the value of the art while indicating the social and political conditions under which the art is produced and to which the art and artists are subjected.12

Returning to the observation that Indigenous making seemingly has a nonstick surface in terms of its value, perhaps Indigenous art is all bad, not in the sense of aesthetic value but rather in its behavior. One could read this as a kind of refusal or failure inherent to the art work, as well as the work of the artists, in their relation. To see this, it is important to understand the dilemma in which Indigenous creators and work find themselves. Caught between the intentional destruction of “traditional” modes of authority, a term that acts as a corrective to the anthropological evaluation of authenticity, and the inherently political position of being colonized and surviving destruction, Indigenous creators confront a discursive space of meaning that is overflowing with coloniality. In Native California, this issue manifests in both the amazing number of California Indian and other Indigenous creators and their substantial collective body of work, together with the absence of these artists from places of value in dominant discourses. This is in part because they have already been “explained,” made known by a knowledge production industry that seeks to wring every little bit of value out of them as possible.

In this sense, as we saw, Miranda’s notion and use of story as praxis acts as an inversion that reorders the relations of power, diminishing and redistributing the accumulation of esteem and privilege through knowledge constructs. Stories are not owned; they are acts of relation and collectivity. They invite imagination but not in opposition to the truth. They are situational, elicit critical thought, often operate through ambiguity. Stories are fragments that never stop interacting, sometimes go on for months, and, as in Pico’s use of the internet abbreviation for meeting up in real life, IRL, can confuse story with life itself. Stories don’t have an absolute end or point, a fact that, as Trinh T. Minh-ha notes, “keeps the mind puzzling.”13

Story without the weight of literature or art and their heavy infrastructures of value and meaning can then be seen as liberated. The characteristics of writing and story as seen in the works of California Indian artists are freed to be workless through their very badness. This extends to the importance of bad feelings. In discussing the difficulty of writing about difficult emotions in art, Jennifer Doyle provides a profound analysis of how depression functions in the performance art of Payómkawichum and Mexican American artist James Luna as a sort of antihistory.14 Focusing on Luna’s “The History of the Luiseño People (Christmas, La Jolla reservation 1990)” and a 2009 performance of the piece at an event organized by her, Doyle describes Luna’s work as engaging in a form of “political depression” that pushes back against the desires of a settler audience to mourn through imperialist nostalgia, to “weep over the bodies it has buried,”15 in a cathartic manner often associated with theater and performance art. During the performance, Luna performs depression in a living room scene in which he drunkenly calls family members, friends, and an ex on Christmas night, speaking a “depressed talk” to them with a clearly unsettlingly detached and unsatisfyingly forced intimacy. For Doyle, Luna is creating a radical estrangement from the audience who continue to try to enlist him in a romantic fantasy about a traumatic past, to want to hear him speak his trauma sincerely as a type of witnessing, which is a biopolitical, state-oriented project of reconciliatory healing, as described by Dian Million.16

This estrangement is heightened, for Doyle, in the 2009 performance, which includes a prelude of Luna and his friends drinking in the parking lot and then a preparatory smudging of the room with sage. During this performance, Luna is more hostile and angry, creating a palpable and then unbearable awkwardness for most of the audience, who begin to leave. As more and more people leave, the demand on those remaining, to bear witness to the exodus, causes even more people to leave. For Doyle, Luna was experimenting with the audience, something that he has done with other performances (see “Take a Picture with a Real Indian,” for example). The performance asked audience members to shift from being passive members of an audience to “something more challenging, [to] keeping company with a difficult and drunk man.”17 This highlights the role of depression as “a crisis in affect in which all forms of relationality become unbearable” and asks of the audience what it means to be in relation to a certain political and affective negativity associated with the afterlife of genocide. “Luna does not present history and depression as knowable, as a straight forward narrative of cause and effect (history makes us sad). Nor does he position his work as a compensatory form of healing, in which talking through the historical trauma of settler colonialism will make him and his audiences feel right.”18 Rather, Luna performs a refusal to heal, to seek a whole self and happiness, to adjust, to, at the very least, find some connection with the audience, who are increasingly placed in an awkward situation.

This alienating of the audience is, however, not a critical operation, à la Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect, which focuses on a certain consciousness raising, a rationalization and display of the artifices of theater toward critical judgment and revolutionary consciousness. As I discussed in chapter 5, one of the hallmarks of California Indian refusals of settler discourses and epistemes is the co-opting of destructive western powers to be turned against the settler and other colonial projects, but from a position of weakness. This working with dangerous forces is part of California Indian conceptions of power. In this case, Luna is adopting the forces of alienation and connecting them to the destructive side of the inhuman and its effects, alcoholism, depression and other negative feelings, the spectacle, as well as the impossible settler desire for an origin, which is easily exploitable and the source of much Native humor and poking fun. This is definitively not a critical denaturalization, which would seek to dispel these effects toward some sort of liberated reconciliation, but rather a roll of the dice, playing with forbidden affects and materials. It is a much more humble endeavor while also being much more profound. Doyle puns that Luna’s performance is “moving” in that it moves the audience to leave, which I think is precisely the point. The dream of the performance is the disappearing audience. And we know that Luna, in his most well-known performance/installation, “The Artifact Piece (1987),” which he sedated himself for, has trafficked with the dead, work that continued with his engagement with Ishi’s photographic archive in “Ishi: The Archive Performance” (2016). Luna initially draws the audience in with the promise of fulfillment where only a violent lack exists, drawing them into a void. By playing on the ir/reality of the savage, with various technologies and their attempts to tame these powers through rationality, such as estrangement, Luna is seeking to make the audience disappear into their own in/security, into their lack of risk in the encounter. And into their tepid western humanism and aesthetics.

At bottom, this is the question of/for California Indian art. How does it engage what David Lloyd calls the “lure of western aesthetics,” the formation of subjects of the state through an aesthetic project that “performs its ideological function through its claim to compensate for the fragmentation of humans by the division of labor and social conflicts with an exemplary experience of wholeness and harmonization”?19 I would argue that it does so with a distinctly California Indian strategy of turning the lure back on itself, weaponizing the fragmentation of the “human,” the very forces of the inhuman, according to a California Indian conception of power and for anticolonial purposes. This is a movement that calls the very project of western art into question. There is a fundamental ambivalence in western aesthetics where this struggle takes place. In it, literature and art maintain the separation necessary for development to occur by holding the western division between art and knowledge, and between the human and nature, stable along disciplinary lines and providing opportunity for the pedagogical project of making human, making subjects of the state (with severe repercussions for education). And yet, this relation between aesthetics and knowledge also becomes the site for anticolonial struggle and refusal, as the emphasis on the empirical and its rejection are merely two sides of western humanism. Lloyd makes clear that the racial-colonial foundations of western aesthetic philosophy offer up the promise of a certain liberation, a form of freedom that both undergirds western liberal conceptions, including those legally enshrined, and imposes a “regime of representation” that creates differential determinations of humanity based on proximity to this concept of freedom and distance from a “natural” state of necessity, in effect the savage.20 This is a historical movement of development from a state of nature to a humanized order of freedom that produces an immanently racial schema. Again, the distinction between the savage and the Native functions as the engine of progress, as the “threshold that divides the Savage into the latent or protohuman and the outcast, the latter being discarded to the realm of mere affectability.”21

Luna didn’t seek to correct this racial-colonial error but to weaponize it by turning it toward a more fundamental movement of error. In the struggle over the inhuman, what else would an anticolonial position look like? In doing so, he acknowledges and refuses the profound fact that the western conception of art is connected intimately to its conception of critique in which, as described by Lloyd, “art cancels and preserves its magical antecedent” in a movement away from necessity toward liberation that “preserves and opposes the irrational moment of rationality itself.” Akin to Bracken’s concept of the savage philosopher, art becomes for Lloyd, citing Theodor Adorno, a “deinstrumentalized magic” that “generates the historical from the threshold condition of prehistory by inaugurating the development of the human out of the Savage through reflective representation.”22 In part, this explains the dual projects of anthropology and history and their interests in the savage and the native, respectively. Together, through preservation and critical reform, they create an abstraction of the savage/native into both a conception of aesthetics that guarantees their “scientific” projects and a notion of radical critique they differentially employ toward their own institutionalization (anthropology is much more “critical” in this sense) while simultaneously “liquidating” actual Indigenous peoples’ ways of thinking and living by circumscribing them to the realm of belief or depoliticized culture in a genocidal logic of developmental humanization. One can begin to understand, then, the double bind that Luna was confronted with in engaging art practice. Following Luna and other California Indian artists, confronting this double bind is what Indigenous Inhumanities has sought to do.

I can’t sing the part in

that Beyoncé song at

karaoke where the music

gets all soft and I try

to croon ooh baby, kiss me-

Maud has to take

the mic be the feeling gets

bigger than my voice n

the feeling I think it’s her My God

’s shadow walking down a hall-

way away but like I said I

lost my voice n don’t know

her name Maybe it’s

Wa’ashi or Pemu,

says this clairaudient

to me apropos of nothing

But I’ll never know 4

sure So I can’t call after her

n then I’m like, crying

at a Beyoncé song

r u kidding me Teebs get

it together bitch My dad grows

his hair long Black waves

cascade down his back Bc knives

crop the ceremony of his

grandfather’s hair at the NDN boarding school

I cut mine in mourning

for the old life but I grow

my poems long. A dark

reminder on white pages.

A new ceremony. I grab

the mic back from

Maud Flip for a new song to

flash across the karaoke

screen Fist breath low

n ready James

is finally following me

back on Insta so I take a

somewhat risque

selfie send it DM

n right after message

OOOPS! omg I

meant to send that

to someone else gosh

so embarrassed oops!

He responds w/

a pic of his computer

screen His phone #

on it so we

text n he’s like

come over n I’m like

do u have A/C he says

Yes n I just straight up drop the mic

n Leave.23

In the end, we’re punk first.

—Dead Pioneers