(Re)Turning

Bad Indians

Along these lines, this book seeks to linger in, be complicit with, what Miranda has robustly called the “bad Indians”: those who did whatever they had to do to survive—lied, burned down missions, assassinated priests, drank too much, fought colonizers and each other, fucked, kept secrets, gossiped, slacked off, refused to work, continued to perform ceremony despite restrictions, forgot how, became too white, were never white enough, lived and breathed resentment, wore government-issued shoes, ran away from boarding schools, didn’t live up to colonial expectations to be less/more Indian, acted badly and were bad at being Indian. As Paiute artist and front man for the punk band Dead Pioneers, Gregg Deal, says/sings:

My cheekbones aren’t high enough

I don’t have enough beadwork

Or turquoise

I do my best to celebrate November like a month long birthday for Indians

For those of you who don’t know, which is probably most of you

It’s National Native American Heritage Month

And unfortunately celebrating feels like I’m celebrating my birthday by myself

No one seems to know it’s even happening

Even with the Facebook notices

I’m a bad Indian

My favorite movie genre is westerns

My last name isn’t a sentence

I’m not patient

But I am stoic

Usually only when I’m mad

Or just thinking really hard

People don’t know how to pronounce the name of my Tribe

And that makes me tired

Can’t and won’t say prayers in Paiute

Mostly because I’m not fluent

. . .

And I would be justified in punching him

I would be justified in cursing him out

I would be justified in calling him racist

But that would make me a bad Indian

Which contradicts that old saying

You know the one:

The only good Indian is a dead Indian

But I’m a bad Indian.43

An impossible situation, through an often-unstated evaluation of Indianness, too many interpretations of our stories, behaviors, actions, and ideas have sought to tame them, make them palatable to colonial tastes and sensibilities. To know them by controlling them; to control by knowing. This book foregoes such pacification, evaluation, and translation by leaning into both the Indianness and the badness, into the very impossibility to be. By foregoing knowing or failing to be entirely legible, it lives alongside bad Indians in our rawness, past, present, and future, as a mode of study enacted by both Miranda and Day, without reservation and without judgment. Operating within an ethic of uncivil discourse, it seeks a certain indeterminacy, a refusal or failure to be fully known, staying bad because to be judged good is to be captured, rendered utilitarian. Not a matter of agency or will, this mode of writing is rather attuned to weak power, a California Indian conception of attenuated agency,44 and operates by getting lost in the work, foregoing judgment, eschewing comparison as meaning-making, pushing against the increase in knowledge (identification and categorization), refusing national literatures and the assertion that works are part of the colonial humanist treasury that is the canon.

Miranda’s conception of the bad Indian is also a manifestation of bad feelings in common, of the despair that grips hold of a people when confronted with overwhelming destruction, and it offers an (anti)social and affectively configured angle of perception.45 Despair is a mode of endurance, perhaps counterintuitively. It approaches the neutral by letting go of control. Despair does not end with death as hope does, which is teleological and seeks a closed and bounded existence (see, e.g., Jonathan Lear’s misreading of the Ghost Dance as a form of hope46). Hope is, perhaps ironically, as Maurice Blanchot has shown, intimately linked to suicide, as both seek meaning through a certain humanness and a sense of closure.47 In other words, they have a similar orientation toward death, a human end. Despair, on the other hand, is attuned to a death that never arrives and that it therefore outlasts, an inhuman continuity. And it does so without effort. In relation to writing, language, art, and knowledge, despair introduces a certain unmusicality, a dissonance without resolution, without reconciliation, as it unsettles emotions. An unresolved continuity, despair’s unmusicality is not a movement (musical or otherwise) with a humanistic end, a harmonious whole, but the unending sustain of feedback, an unpoetic/poetics of noise, feelings of unrest, an inhuman voice—one that damages the eardrums, creates an anticolonial tinnitus that merges with the voices of the dead.

Bad Indianness is an affective perception from underground, when one is down in it and going through it. As Day describes in chapter 5, the Maidu went underground to survive. Such perception he equates with the Maidu relation to nonhuman beings such as ants, with whom they share kinship, but it is also a perception from earth dwellings as bunkers that comes out of the Ghost Dance’s afterlives, going underground and waiting for the colonial world to disappear. In profound misery and humiliation, ghost dancers found ecstatic ways to outdo colonial violence and cooptation. Miranda makes a similar observation in her writing alongside the archival body of work of one her ancestors, Isabel Meadows, on the stories passed down from the time of the genocidal Spanish missions. Miranda notes that Meadows often relates tales deemed irrelevant by the anthropological recording machine she uses: stories about adulterers, deserters of spouses, children whose fathers cannot be identified, alcoholics, men who rape granddaughters, lecherous jokes by old women, women who blind husbands with hot coals. Deeming them a sort of anticolonial gossip, Miranda asserts that “such tales take up as much if not more space as the linguistic data, creation stories, and place names typically mined from her [ancestor’s] materials.”48 Describing Carmeleños, Mission Indians incarcerated at Carmel Mission, who died of sadness, drunkenness, too many accidents, from fights, stabbings, and clubbings, so much drinking and sorrow, Meadows and Miranda also highlight the sexual promiscuity and gender and sexual fluidity of the incarcerated Natives through archival traces ambiguously etched (coded) in J. P. Harrington’s anthropological notes.

This complex assemblage of Indigenous sociality under severe constraint (colonial, cisheteropatriarchal, white supremacist, Manichean), confronting imminent death, as the abundant necro-statistics in Mission archives show, is where bad feelings in common bleed into intense dreaming. Miranda instructs us to “push into the pain” in order to see its value (or antivaluation) as “the only way through that allows preservation of an Indigenous identity.”49 A hard truth, prepared by a colonial perception, it can be reappropriated for thinking Indigenous sociality with and beyond colonial Manicheanism. To paraphrase Frantz Fanon, the only truth is what ends colonization.50 Even the most difficult and racially charged representations carry within them the refusal and failure of Indigenous people to participate in the system, a dangerous energy; in California Indian parlance a poison. For example, “‘The Indians are instructed how to live as rational individuals . . . but . . . in these matters they behave like children of eight or nine years, who have not yet acquired a constant or steady disposition,’” writes Father Juan Amoros of the Indians at Carmel in 1814, adding that “‘they are prone to anger . . . and a spirit of vindictiveness.’”51 Bad Indians hold onto this vindictiveness as a way of holding onto their Indianness. It is an anger that is not recuperable for a productive agenda; it is, for example, the “incandescent” rage Vine Deloria describes after reading accounts of the ghoulish collection of Native bodies for research.52 It is a refusal of and/or failure to become human, to be normed as adult through reproductive maturity.

Miranda describes the spatio-temporal disorientation caused by grief and anger and its distorting effects in the section of Bad Indians titled “Ularia’s Curse.”53 This is a curse that killed Sargent, “The American [who] ran Estéfana and her children off the land at Rancho El Potrero.” Telling of the exodus of the tribe from their land, Meadows by way of Miranda describes Ularia’s final act before dispersing:

sitting there on the banks of the river, her worn skirts heavy and wet with rain and mud, her hair burnt short in mourning. She didn’t have much left to work with—no bundles of mugwort, no roots, no cocoon rattle, not even a clapperstick. She was just an old Indian woman, beaten by soldiers, chastised by priests, her last grown child hung from the big oak as a horse thief by the Americans. . . . But out of habit, Ularia leaned down, her spine crackling with age, and scooped a handful of Carmel’s clear water in her palm, brought it to her lips, drank it down. She tasted the cold roots of mountains off to the north. She felt the sharp grit of river sand in her worn molars, sparkle of a stray flake of gold, scales of a little fish on her tongue. And Ularia remembered: the river would be here long after she was gone. . . . She reached down, plucked a smooth round stone from beneath the water, spoke to it in the old language. She gathered salt from the estuary to the west, a gritty sand mixed with ocean and fresh-water spirits. She added charcoal from that last fire built on the river’s banks by the refugees, great oaks reduced to ashes. She smudged the curse in the scent of toasted chia seeds made for the journey away, the scorched redbud of the basket that held them. Ularia made that curse of mud, the decomposing body of our mother black and thick enough to trip even a strong stock horse; she made that curse from slick water weeds that can tangle a man’s legs, pull him down beneath the surface; she made that curse out of a rainstorm’s rage, conjured waves ten years hence into heavy walls that would fall like the stones of a church in an earthquake.

The river did not act immediately. It took ten years before it took revenge on Sargent, “drank him down, and cleansed itself of his greed,” finishing what Ularia had begun. We don’t know the temporality of the dead just as Ularia didn’t know the time of the river. But we feel them in common. Revenge is a long affair and is the work of more-than-(just)-human coalitions. It develops affective communities around it; revenge is an Indigenous feminist orientation.54 In the end, decolonization will not be human-led.

The antisocial sociality of vindictive bad Indians incarcerated at missions, organized around pain and pleasure, as detailed by Miranda, is not the same as the antisociality the practitioners of the Ghost Dance have of and with the dead, and yet there is something in common. This in-common is partially what makes the phrase “California Indian” mean something (beyond the facile and utterly arbitrary, thin, and temporary geopolitical border of the state of California and by extension the United States—already disrupted by Alta California, Baja California and Baja California Sur, and the imaginary “Island of California”). The commonality that links those subjected to the missions, to the fur trade, and to the gold rush, to settler colonialism and Spanish conquest (and the postcolonial nation state), and to their deep and wide-ranging onto-epistemological projects is a form of social history that undermines both the social and history with an Indigenous interrelational and experiential framework. In other words, despite obvious historical differences, this common social history links mission and digger Indians in a tenuous identity that began with ex-nomination of tribal names by government officials. This tenuous coalition is also an angle of perception from the nowhere and nowhen of “California” and the dead.

Failed Indians

Bad Indians are in a profound way failed Indians. They have failed at the impossible, contradictory demands of being Indian (being a “good” Indian), and they have, importantly, failed to be human in the way the settler colonial and western imperial projects demand in their conscription of Indigenous people. If having bad feelings in common is a form of sociality organized around a certain kind of despair that refuses the idealism of hope for a more difficult relation to the future, one that makes survival and continuance possible outside of state norms, failure is the mode through which despair manifests itself. An alternative to the dichotomy of pessimism and optimism, failure is an errant path that keeps going, fails even to interrupt itself, failing to stop, offers continuance in a way eclipsed by the call to be successful under the colonial system. Moving beyond even the success of sovereign subjects implied by certain conceptions of Indigeneity, to fail is to undo state-mediated and/or recognized (domestic dependent) successes under colonial occupation, to see these “successes” as failures and paths down an alternative path. In fact, in a settler state ruled by ideologies of success, positive thinking, and the gospel of prosperity, Native Americans are the original failures, the original losers. And surviving is failing but doing it well. Not as a mode of progress, failing and failing better means destroying the very notion of progress that has decimated Indigenous lives and worlds and means doing so by our continued existence. We fail to go away. We have failed to die. Failure is often seen as a perhaps unfortunate step on the path to success, but success is an end. Emphasizing failure for its own sake, outside of means-and-ends thinking, brings an end to ends, to successes. Failure freed from success as a value and goal is continuity through a sustained discontinuity, a radical break with the colonial world.

What does it mean to succeed in a settler colonial society? Sandy Grande urges that we should refuse the signs of success that wed us to the state and the western imperial humanist project in our ongoing attempts to hospice this brutal system into its demise. Grande advises, “Refuse the perceived imperative to self-promote, to brand one’s work and body. This includes all the personal webpages, incessant Facebook updates, and Twitter feeds featuring our latest accomplishments, publications, grants, rewards, etc. etc. Just. Make. It. Stop. The journey is not about self—which means it is not about promotion and tenure—it is about the disruption and dismantling of those structures and processes that create hierarchies of individual worth and labor.”55 This call to refuse success is also a cultivation of failure and its collectivity. To refuse to be an individual will always create an indeterminacy between refusal and the failure to achieve. The failure to become human and/or to be a good Indian is tied to the deepest structures of the colonial project, its alternatingly murderous and disciplinary core, the brutal process of humanization that operates through a desire for recognition. Failure offers a completely different way of thinking about how to contest these structures. Rather than a heroic narrative of direct confrontation or maverick disruption that would solidify the subjects who resist—offering a redemptive narrative and the horribly misleading, humanistic, and historically progressive “arc of justice” trajectory—failure has no individual heroes, undoes hierarchies not by toppling and then replacing them but by eroding the conditions that make hierarchies possible, is deeply acentric and nonlinear in its forces and “actions.”

Failure is an Indigenous ethic, the very atmosphere of Indigenous worlds. What has been lost through colonization in different degrees are the millennia of practices Indigenous polities have engaged in to mitigate violence and prevent the accumulation of power and wealth, particularly in the hands of individuals. To encourage collectivity, Indigenous societies have organized to render impossible the types of success that motivate the western imperial project. Many Indigenous societies, California Indians included, have participated in pluralistic, antihierarchical, and decentralizing modes of governance. These are practices that include all sorts of beings in complex networks of relationships and meaning that exceed the bounds of goal-based human politics. Without romanticizing (conflicts certainly arise), California Indians created these more-than-human social systems to handle these conflicts in ways that are nuanced, textured, and to include often difficult interrelationalities and coalitional gatherings. Deeply anti-intellectual from the beginning, the colonial project and, particularly, the imposition of a western knowledge framework has sought to destroy these millennia of political and knowledge forms. Tongan and Fijian scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa makes this point about the reduction of Oceanic ontologies, trade networks, social relationships, complex power structures, elemental and spiritual forces, intricate languages, and the sheer expansiveness of cosmological perceptions of what he calls a “sea of islands” to small, dependent “islands in a faraway sea,” dominated and “developed” (read: exploited) by colonial powers.56 Targeting human and more-than-human relationships, women and third-gendered people and their leadership roles, leaders and intellectuals more broadly makes clear the threat this world of Indigenous knowledge poses to the simplifying, brutal, extractive, minimizing colonial form. The disciplinary practices of the boarding schools, removal of children through adoption, the violently imposed rupture with the land, and the replacement of nonhuman kin and relations with a colonial production system based on extraction and exploitation show the means by which colonialism destroys the plurality and relationality, the capaciousness and expanse of Indigenous worlds. The supposedly most “primitive” of California Indian tribes, for instance, have the most complex languages, a linguistic capaciousness that is grammatically at odds with the subject-focused and action-oriented, instrumental coloniality of English.57 Such is the colonial process of humanization, an enforced ontological hierarchy of relations with humans at the top, abstracted, replicated, and imposed at a global scale through homogenization.

From the colonial perception, Indigenous peoples failed at becoming human. Interpreted as savage, childlike, animalistic, and, importantly, unable to appropriately distinguish between categories of beings and therefore unable to appropriately assert mastery over the land through the invented category of “nature” as resource, Indigenous people have inhabited the threshold between culture and nature within this system. Such a figure of failure, neither fully cultural nor natural, is the conditioning force for the successes of the colonial humanizing project. But, Indigenous peoples are also essential for the continuity of the settler state, which manages its claims to legitimacy through Indigeneity. Indigenous failure, then, is an opening onto bringing about systemic failure of the settler project; by operating within this space of necessary, ongoing failure, Indigenous peoples sabotage and wreck the system from the outside/inside space of indetermination. When our ancestors refused the “gifts” of civilization, failed to be good Indians, they pointed the way. To do things in a good way is invariably to also do things in a bad way (seriously, fuck ’em).

As J. Halberstam writes in relation to queer conceptions of failure, “while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.”58 The toxic positivity of enforced goodness includes the settler state and its western imperial project. In their book The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam outlines a theory of failure, what they call “low theory,” that has wide-ranging implications for thinking about failure as an errant path outside of western and colonial norms. As they write, “low theory tries to locate all the in-between spaces that save us from being ensnared by the hooks of hegemony. But it also makes its peace with the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal.”59 Indicating or orienting us toward a form of study that is a “stroll” down uncharted paths, that enters the path the “wrong” way by eschewing seriousness and rigor and all the infrastructures of scholarship and the recognitions they imply and instead emphasizes the frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant, Halberstam seeks an unbecoming and a long detour outside the bounds of academic disciplines that are crumbling anyway. Foregoing the crisis consensus described by Boggs and Mitchell and its imperative to rescue and restore, Halberstam offers a loose framework for ecstatically riding academic institutions, and by extension the settler state, into their deaths as a way to continue, to ride the forces of failure into an uncertain future. And to do so, like the family of losers in the final scene of the film Little Miss Sunshine, by embodying a “neo-anarchistic credo of ecstatic losers: ‘No one gets left behind!’”60

These forces of failure include being undisciplined away from the modes of training and learning that assert what is already known according to approved models of knowing; losing one’s way as a particular practice of charting alternative pathways; refusing professionalization (being a critical academic) by joining what Moten and Harney have robustly defined as the undercommons of the university (steal for the collective; be in but not of); turning to local and subjugated forms of knowing that the state and the western imperial project seeks to delegitimate, erase, and/or conscript; being stupid by inhabiting the limits of knowing and resisting mastery; privileging the naive or nonsensical; and being suspicious of memorialization, to name a few attributes. Significantly, these all indicate a turn to the collective, caustically eating away at the infrastructures of individual achievement and meritocracy on which the successes of the colonial state depend. Understanding that everyone participates in intellectual activity and is a theorist in their own right, not just a small class of intellectual elites, as part of a social project, is imperative for reframing pedagogical as well as social and material relationships. For Halberstam, a turn to failure operates within the framework of counterhegemony, the competing set of ideas that work against the “rightness” of dominant perception, so-called common sense or the intuitive. In an Indigenous context, the refusal of rightness can be summed up in a word by asking: What is the settler “good”? Representations of the Ghost Dance, for instance, as disorganized, unpopular, deceptive (carried on by “con-men”), superstitious, apolitical, primitive, in other words, as a failure, is the commonsense version of a western civilizationist understanding. This book both refuses and revels in such interpretations by engaging in what Miranda describes as the struggle in the realm of story, of narrative, of gossip, and it insists on the collective aspect of the Ghost Dance as a pluralistic theory, on the importance of failure that it elicits, and on the Indigenous socialities that underlie it. While the Ghost Dance cannot be interpreted as a success (both definitionally speaking, as the dead have yet to return and also in the “minor” role it played in California Indian responses to destruction), it is undoubtedly an anticolonial political formation in the way it contests colonial social and material relationships and offers a profound discontinuity toward Indigenous continuity outside, and with and through, colonial frameworks. In a similar way, Day and Miranda chart a map of failure through the dangerous colonial archives and images, stories and discourses, through the failed realm of the unrecognized. A map akin to Moten and Harney’s concept of planning as opposed to policy, which refuses the “compulsion of scarcity” for an “ongoing experiment with the informal, carried out by and on the means of social reproduction.”61

Whereas Halberstam and other proponents of “low theory” promote a turn to pop/low culture as an intellectual resource for thinking in terms of failure, Indigenous studies offers its own sense of low or minor theory outside of and against a settler colonial conception of populism, as Jodi Byrd has argued. For Byrd, “there is no way to incorporate the Indigenous body or Indigenous nations into the United States without either a horrible physical erasure or a complete disavowal of the violent history of colonization.”62 In their essay “in the city of blinding lights: Indigeneity, Cultural Studies and the Errants of Colonial Nostalgia,” Byrd reads unconscious eruptions within popular texts, often presented as the source of populist energies, for the incongruities and unresolved tensions of disavowed Indigeneity. This is particularly the case for texts that seek to include Indigenous peoples, such as the 2001 video of a dramatic reading of the Declaration of Independence by a multiracial and multicultural cast of celebrities, analyzed by Byrd. Byrd highlights the moment in the reading when Oneida actor Graham Greene, the only Native in the video, appears on the screen to read the infamous section: “He . . . has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all sexes, ages, and conditions.” For Byrd, Greene’s reading indicates a core issue at the heart of any call for populism within a settler state. The very relation between a state like the United States and Indigeneity is conditioned by, while simultaneously disavowing, the necessity of a liminal Indigenous subject caught in a sort of half-life, conscripted and yet continually disavowed (Greene is represented as the “good” Indian who redresses the United States’ racism by reading its racist doctrine in a show of multiracial and multicultural solidarity, bringing the “bad” Indian back into the fold). Such a formation of Indigeneity perhaps explains swings between liberal and conservative settler claims to populism, both based on a form of authoritarianism that seeks to shield itself from an incommensurable yet paradoxically necessary Indigeneity perceived as threat, a deep-seated anxiety at the core of settler identity. Bad Indians refuse inclusion and fail to behave in an inclusive manner, seek “the destruction of all sexes, ages, and conditions” as merciless Indian savages, and they exacerbate the anxiety of the settler as a form of weak power. For Byrd, then, “until the ongoing colonisations of indigenous peoples around the world are recognized and redressed, the project of liberal democracy, no matter how inclusive it becomes, will remain a lost cause.”63

Failure operates within this irreconcilable and unassimilable space of Indigeneity, a repetition of these unconscious symptoms of settler anxiety and dread. Failure indicates a core weakness within the settler armature and structure that depend on success, action, inclusion. By tapping into this stress point, Indigeneity as failure offers an opportunity to, as Byrd argues elsewhere, “both stop the world of signification and force a continual grinding within the systems of enlightenment that produce the subject at the site of freedom, equality, and conviviality through genocidal dispossession.”64

Ghost Dance

In such a way, the Ghost Dance goes wrong from the very beginning. The Ghost Dance went wrong and is what went wrong. It was and is a failure but of a very particular kind. A response to what anthropologist Robert Heizer dubbed “the destruction of California Indians,” the dance began in Nevada and initially spread, like gossip, to Northern California and Southern Oregon through social gatherings of tribes (big times) and ceremonies, offering a speculative, contaminative, otherworldly (anti)sociality with and through death in its deferred departure/arrival. Taking place between 1869 and 1871 and lasting in various forms, gone underground in a sense,65 much longer, it has three components: (1) the return of the dead; (2) the end of the world; and (3) the bloodless extermination of the whites, who would “burn up and disappear without even leaving ashes.” Failing to bring about the end of the world (the world already having ended), seemingly only lasting a couple of years (though never really stopping), it nonetheless has bent time and space toward dance, song, and prophecy, toward the infinite arrival of the dead. It was and is a failure with a profound and lasting disorienting effect, connecting it to an original disruption or error, what some call prophecy. Such an angle of perception offers a reading of the Destruction as inter-relation, a relationality interrupted by the infinite distance of the dead’s incessant arrival, the antisocial, that incites a new sociality and mode of resistance as refusal/failure.

The three elements of the Ghost Dance offer in/comprehension through: (1) socializing under extreme conditions (renewed relations with the dead, having bad feelings in common); (2) thinking within a postapocalyptic temporal and spatial framework (the end of the world as a certain kind of foreclosure of revelation or eschatological logics, in other words, history); and (3) a refusal of violence (grappling with genocidal violence as a form of Indigenous felt theorizing). Together these offer an anticolonial interpretive practice and a corresponding poetics in sync with—in discontinuous continuity with—Indigenous and other anticolonial forms of living together. Yellowknives Dene political theorist Glen Coulthard refers to these interrelational practices as grounded normativities: “the modalities of Indigenous land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.”66 Grounded normativity includes forms of governance, social and political relationships, interpretive positionings, modes of ethicality, artistic and cultural practices, coalitions, antagonisms, complicities, affective communities, and epistemologies and ontologies (and their indistinction), reassembled and reinvested by the infinite destruction. These renewed relationships obviously include the dead but also include relationships with other beings and media, technological and otherwise, introduced into Indigenous frameworks, as well as the (often forced, sometimes chosen, often undecidable) relationships created through what Byrd calls the “transit of empire” and Lisa Lowe “intimacies”—the difficult connections between survivors of white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, rationalist, developmental, civilizationist, imperial and colonial western humanisms as well as their political and social structures.

The Ghost Dance is often associated with the names of charismatic prophets, the Paiute Doctor Wodziwob in this case,67 Wovoka (also Paiute) in 1890, Tsali (Cherokee) in 1811, and Tenskwatawa (Shawnee) in 1805. Seneca scholar Michelle Raheja, however, notes that prophetic form and content (as represented in and by Indigenous film) do not hinge on individual leaders but demonstrate prophecy to be a collective practice “from the ground up . . . Rather than relying on a messianic figure or divine intervention . . . film reads the Indigenous body itself as a prophetic text.”68 Extending the cinematic lens, what constitutes the assemblage of bodies and voices is something that has prophetic and proleptic force. The circulation of the prophetic message by specific actors is of course important but so are the grassroots, interrelational circulations of prophecy that can spring up anywhere and spread like wildfire. As seen in the Ghost Dance, dreaming is radically democratized and contagious, as everyone dreams and anyone can be a dreamer. Further, having so many die in such a short time span touched everyone; it rendered sociality in different terms and changed the relationship to time.

Such dreaming is hard, conditioned as it is by the complete dismantling and replacement of the Indigenous world. Under its thrall, terrible and seemingly nonsensical decisions can be made. There is no satisfactory explanation for killing or calling for the death of doctors, mixed-race children, or dogs, or for turning over Joyas (third-gendered people) to the Spanish.69 Such things challenge comprehensibility. Foregoing explication and analysis, refusing, that is, to translate such difficult decisions into colonial knowledge forms, we at the same time confront the risk of falling into the trap of colonial metaphysics and a too-clean conception of the mystical. Dreaming is imperfect, antagonistic, a struggle, and deeply interwoven with complex and often tentative forms of sociality that include the living, the dead, and other beings. Dreaming is also often wrong, even detestable. To say it is immanent is a bit redundant as Indigenous relating and communicating incorporate all manner of beings, including the so-called spiritual. There is no such thing as “Indigenous mysticism.” The phrase is an oxymoron. Indigenous onto-epistemologies are a step beyond the western split between positive science and mysticism. Dreaming is dirty, of the mud. Intense dreaming as prophecy is nonmystical and nonmessianic. Through it, we stay with the difficulty of interrelation and read and hear prophecy rhetorically (proleptically) and materially (collectively), in its grain, and in relation to its (anti)socializing force.

The Ghost Dance was also a significant Indigenous anticolonial response to destruction. Lakota scholar Nick Estes, in writing about the 1890 Ghost Dance performed by the Lakota, describes it as part of an anticolonial theory and movement that had been growing among Native peoples and which he links to the No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) resistance over a century later.70 For Estes, the dance, particularly the visions, were a utopian dream “that briefly suspended the nightmare of the ‘wretched present’ by folding the remembered experience of a precolonial freedom into an anti-colonial future.”71 This vision of the destruction of the colonial relationship, for Estes, fed resistance to the United States, along with an “unrelenting” oppositional spirit, by bringing the dancers into intimate relationship with the dead, as described by an unnamed Lakota man:

The people, wearing the sacred shirts and feathers, now formed a ring. . . . All walked cautiously and in awe, feeling their dead were close at hand. . . . The leaders beat time and sang as the people danced going round to the left in a sidewise step. They danced without rest, on and on, and they got out of breath but still they kept going as long as possible. Occasionally someone thoroughly exhausted and dizzy fell unconscious into the center and lay there “dead.” . . . After a while, many lay about in that condition. They were now “dead” and seeing their dear ones. As each one came to, she, or he, slowly sat up and looked about, bewildered, and then began wailing inconsolably.72

This inconsolable wailing is a clear manifestation of what Dian Million calls “felt theory,” “the emotionally laden affective force” that “transcend[s] the individual’s experience,” an “affective force [that makes] it necessary that these stories become a collective story.”73 A material manifestation of the unmusicality of despair, the sustain of feedback, the wail is what Moten describes as the ambiguous entrance into and expulsion from society, a “music, which is not only music, [that] is mobilized in the service of an eccentricity, a centrifugal force, sociality’s ecstatic existence beyond beginning and ending, ends and means.”74 The wail is, in other words, a performative gesture. While seemingly having the return of the dead as a goal, such wailing cannot be recuperated into the meaning-making systems and instrumentality of colonial life. These felt experiences function, rather, as communal knowledge, overcoming hierarchies that place such forms of knowing beneath those of western colonial institutions or delegitimize them altogether, particularly along gendered and material lines.75 The gathering together to dance at the command of the dead demonstrates the collectivizing force of having such bad feelings in common. As the unnamed Lakota man further explains, “Waking up to the drab and wretched present after such a glowing vision, it was little wonder that they walked as if their poor hearts would break in two with disillusionment. But at least they had seen! . . . They preferred that to rest or food or sleep. And so I suppose the authorities did think they were crazy—but they weren’t. They were only terribly unhappy.”76 An antisocial sociality based on broken hearts, a terrible unhappiness, for Million, is “not an act of accretion, but a strategic felt comprehension that has the power to change a paradigm, or reinvest a political movement with a new vision to act. This is the power of intense dreaming, of the felt intensification when boundaries shift and other views become available.”77 It is a condition for visuality as such; no such thing as an individual, purely rational sight. This other view is a new angle of perception created by disorientation, falling down dead, the dreams the dead offer, broken hearts, wailing, and a new collectivity, from nowhere and nowhen. They had seen! They see past comfort, food, and sleep, through and with exhaustion, starvation, and insomnia. Pushing seeing past the distinction between sight and its opposite, this is another opening onto the realm of the avisual I discuss in chapters 2 and 5.

As I mentioned, optimism and pessimism become indistinguishable through such failure. People danced out of despair for a certain kind of hope, with a frantic and desperate sort of joy, and yet it’s only through the ambiguity of joining with the dead (do we meet in their world or ours?), making community with them, that another world seems possible. For Estes, this is because the Ghost Dance was both an understanding and a messaging of the fact that “Indigenous life could not be remade inside reservations, nor within a colonial system, but only through the complete destruction of both.”78 Indigenous conceptions of life evade the idea of scarcity imposed by both systems, a concept constructed and enforced by genocidal approaches to land acquisition (and production), resource extraction, individualistic capitalist economics and ethics and their concomitant civil order, the confinement of Indigenous peoples to open air prisons (reservations), and a produced notion of dependence based on a civilizing mission and the treaty system. Indigenous life resists such subjection. This concept of scarcity is completely anathema to Indigenous interrelations with each other and the world. The concept of an economics of abundance as opposed to scarcity is borrowed from Indigenous forms of sociality and material relations.79 The abundance of a destroyed world took the form of direct resistance and a refusal of the destructive “gifts” of settler society and its system of recognition. Speaking of the Lakota’s Ghost Dance movement, Estes writes:

as a resistance movement, its tactics included complete withdrawal from reservation life; opposition to reservation authorities; the creation of resistance camps in remote areas far removed [from] the influence of the agency; the pilfering of annuity distribution centers (and sometimes white settlers’ cattle and crops); the destruction of agricultural equipment; and the refusal to send children to school, to speak English, to participate in censuses, and to attend work, church, or agency and council meetings; their tactics also included the refusal to live on assigned allotments, to obey “agency chiefs,” to cut one’s hair, to quit dancing, to wear white clothing and attire, or to use metal tools. In short, the movement posed a comprehensive challenge to the colonial order of things.80

For Wovoka, who taught nonviolence and pacifism, a message of self-removal was due to the fact that, according to Estes, “under present conditions, armed Indigenous resistance was futile.”81 Such an impossible situation, emanating directly from a sense of abundance and prophecy and yet confronted with the impossibility of direct insurrection, explains the ambiguity around violence associated with the Ghost Dance and Indigenous anticolonial movements more generally, and it offers a hint as to the infrathin distance between refusal and resistance as strategies.

Estes describes how both settler public discourse and debate among the Lakota over the “alleged pacifism” of the Ghost Dance created a division in a people fighting to survive over their tactics of resistance, between “legitimate” nonviolent pacifists and “illegitimate” and “criminal” violent militants, echoing the long colonial legacy of dividing Indigenous people into a “savage”/“Native” dichotomy. As I discuss in chapter 4, the Spanish held a debate in 1550–51 over the most just form of conquest and absorption of Indigenous peoples into the Christian brotherhood and western civilizationist project, whether through enslavement (due to inherent irrationality and perversion) or by appealing to their human rationality and social sensibility, that hinged on this same divide. It is a divide that also undergirds the infamous sloganeering by Richard Henry Pratt for the U.S. boarding school project, to “kill the Indian to save the man,” with the term “Indian” standing in for a constellation of attributes that constitute the “criminal”/extrajudicial “savage,” attributes that salvage ethnographers were invested in preserving as the founding archive of many U.S. museums and universities. For Estes, settlers create moral categories to differentiate “good” and “bad” Indians in order to project criminality onto “bad Indians” and hide “the US’s own criminal enterprise.”82 While this is certainly true, and the criminalization of the Ghost Dance itself (which, of course, led to catastrophic results for the Lakota) gives evidence of this—mobilizing the ambiguity of its violence—the problem, however, goes much deeper.

Indigenous people by our very existence pose a threat to the continuity of the United States even while our presence is needed for its coherence. Elizabeth Povinelli theorizes the conceptual and discursive gymnastics that settler modes of representation, policy, and law have enacted in order to mobilize Indigenous priority, a concept necessary for British and U.S. property law, while effectively debilitating Indigenous polities in order to make them manageable, thereby transposing Indigenous priority onto the settler as their own inheritance, what she calls “the governance of the prior.”83 Robert Nichols describes how this necessitates a paradoxical retroactive attribution of ownership onto Indigenous peoples in order to dispossess them of land transmuted into property and an entirely new relational form.84 A complex process of Indigenization ensues through which the settler seeks to found/find a nationality, a logical impossibility for them, by appealing to western developmental conceptions of civilization while holding Indigenous people in a liminal space of limited sovereignty, neither fully inside nor outside a fabricated U.S. nationhood, as guarantee.

As I discuss in chapters 2 and 3, the discourse of nonviolence plays an important role in managing this liminality while also creating the conditions for founding. In brief, in the name of law, democracy, and nonviolence, the United States and its (often extrajudicial) agents (Patrick Wolfe’s “settler horde”85) enacted extreme amounts of violence on Indigenous peoples, perhaps nowhere more directly than in what is now called California. This incursion into Indigenous worlds was a form of law-making through “illegal” occupation and genocidal warfare—sometimes held accountable as the force through which the law makes its way, makes itself, a movement ritualized by stochastic violence and then apology and such things as the Truth and Healing investigations currently underway in California. What follows is law-preserving violence, the creation of “legal” systems of violence through monopolization by the state, violence done in the name of the law itself, as described by Walter Benjamin.86 By definition, the “savage” in this framework was understood to be lawless, hence all the mythologies about the lawless west; genocidal violence was committed by settlers, then, in the name of founding the law, in moving history and progress forward through territorial acquisition, and, it can’t be forgotten, in realizing manifest destiny as the evangelical millenarianism of end times, God’s law over the whole of the earth.87 Law and lawlessness are then two sides of the same colonial coin and really have nothing to do with Indigenous ways of being. Lawless, godless, sexually depraved, unable to keep relations straight between each other and with all sorts of other-than-humans, the Indian “savage” was paradoxically both too natural and too unnatural for existence, too cultural and not cultural enough, and therefore needed to be corrected. An original error. What is perhaps needed is a theorization of violence and its refusal from an Indigenous standpoint, one made available in the Ghost Dance.

The Ghost Dance, in its profound refusal of violence, puts violence and the dead into conversation and calls for an exploration of this relationship at the moment of so-called founding, rejecting colonial violence for another world. The project initiated by the Ghost Dance operates in intimate proximity to what Fanon describes as the failure to be able to be: “I couldn’t hope to win. . . . I wanted to be typically black—that was out of the question. I wanted to be white—that was a joke. And when I tried to claim my negritude intellectually as a concept, they snatched it away from me.”88 A profound double bind, this condition is one that Fanon devastatingly defines as being damned. “Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned.” Such a condition of ontology, a lack of being, is what Moten (drawing on Nahum Chandler’s concept of paraontology) describes as pre-ontology, the anoriginal displacement of ontology or the very condition for ontology. “Ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space”—in a word, damnation—marks the site of an intense investigation into nothingness, for Fanon as for Moten, as well as a counterintuitive condition for sociality and creativity otherwise in the very poverty of world.89 “Poverty in this world is manifest in a kind of poetic access to what it is of the other world that remains unheard, unnoted, unrecognized in this one. Whether you call those resources tremendous life or social life in social death or fatal life or raw life, it remains to consider precisely what it is that the ones who have nothing have. What is this nothing that they have or to which they have access? What comes from it? And how does having it operate in relation to poverty?”90 Inverting the sociality founded on continuation of the violent conditions of primitive accumulation, Moten and Fanon’s respective theories of sociality, based in common abjection and poverty, have strong resonances with the Ghost Dance. Not the same as the Ghost Dance, of course (a relation that needs to be sussed out, particularly as it engages the ongoing conversation between Blackness and antiblackness and Indigeneity and genocide, as theorized by Jodi Byrd, Tiffany Lethabo King, Joanne Barker, Jack Forbes, Shona Jackson, and Sandy Grande, among others). While Moten’s conception of a creative sociality coalesces around a common condition of having nothing, being nothing, a paradoxical abundance in nothingness, it likewise puts into conversation such nothingness with the relation to the dead in the form of remaining in the hold of the ship. This relation between nothingness and Blackness offers, as he notes, a perception from nowhere, no standpoint, a poetics of/from the very poverty of world, a fantasy in the hold. The perception from nowhere is a perception that he shares with Fanon. As Halberstam notes, “Fanon, according to Moten, wants not the end of colonialism but the end of the standpoint from which colonialism makes sense.”91 This absence of standpoint as an end to a certain kind of common colonial sense is, for Moten, the condition for belief in the world: “Eventually, I believe, [Fanon] comes to believe in the world, which is to say the other world, where we inhabit and maybe even cultivate this absence, this place which shows up here and now, in the sovereign’s space and time, as absence, darkness, death, things which are not (as John Donne would say).”92 Such a reframing of violence as the stuff of life, though a life lived otherwise, before ontology, outside and beside it, as absence, darkness, death—things that are not, in other words, “exhaustion as a mode or form or way of life, which is to say sociality”—calls for a return to Fanon’s theorization of violence to understand this form of radical sociality, which I discuss in chapter 3 as grounding the conditions of research against the state.93

How does Moten’s poetics without standpoint relate to Miranda’s writing from The End of the World? How does Fanon’s call for a new humanism from the position of the global south—a south-to-south relation of recognition outside of dominant cold war ideological positions, one initiated through a violent reclaiming of humanity—relate to Coulthard’s refusal of recognition and call for a return to grounded normativity against the settler state? And how do these poetics and interrogations of the position of the human in colonial situations relate to each other? These questions help frame, give us an angle on, the project of this book: to bring the writing of disaster—representation in the ongoing aftermath of devastating violence and its destructive self-erasure—into conversation with the critique of the human—the questioning of the value and material systems organized and developed around the figure of the western liberal humanist subject as master of the world—as they each emanate from the socialities and refusals/failures of the wretched of the earth.

It is my contention that the Ghost Dance and the turn to the dead offer a way to think this conversation, especially as it bears on California Indian studies, which currently is at an inflection point. “California Indian studies” is a field and phrase that has always been in contention, but the stress of its reference is threatening to explode the whole thing; the container can no longer hold the meaning. New powers are at work, and they have begun to pull the threads that have tenuously held together a coherent field of study. The institutional, colonial version can no longer contain and manage California Indian people (as it was created to do), and the grassroots version of study as survival, of collective and agonistic anticolonial refusal, of opting out and failing, is a rising tide washing away the other. Not necessarily outside, within the belly of the beast so to speak, California Indian studies also cannot be positioned inside the imposed western humanist system. Such is the importance of the turn away from the world, while we wait for the return of the dead, the world to turn over, and the settler colonial system to burn up and disappear without even leaving ashes.

From this (absence of) standpoint, the Ghost Dance was an attempt to confront the violence of the law on prophetic terms, in anticipation, proleptically, terms that were completely incomprehensible to the settler, who could only understand it as either a threat (preparations for an uprising) in the most banal sense of a purely instrumental, lawless violence or as a product of cultural belief. “The most widely used text on the movement, The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee, written in 1896 by armchair ethnographer James Mooney, for instance, distorted the meaning of the Ghost Dance. Pandering to the sympathies of a U.S. public in an attempt to make the Ghost Dance more palatable, Mooney used cultural relativism to justify its existence.”94 In this sense, Indigenous conceptions of power, violence, prophetic vision and interpretation, and their concomitant socialities are misconstrued by settlers as either culture in its rupture from politics, and thereby as a sign of Indigenous peoples’ lack of historical temporality (if sympathetically received) or as manifestations of irrational savage temperaments, feelings, bodies, desires, and ideas, as vindictiveness. The first interpretation leads Estes to assert that the Ghost Dance is definitively not a form of cultural revitalization, which commits him to a purely political interpretation that casts violence entirely in ethical terms related to liberation and is often indirectly carried on through critical exposure. This is an understandable move that is very common in Native American studies, especially considering the seductive force of cultural representation and its long-standing destructive material effects. The approach has led Indigenous and allied scholars to make deep interventions into the ethics and politics of research, as well as to assert self-determination and sovereignty through representational practices. The approach, however, risks conflating critique with politics and historicity and only understanding a movement such as the Ghost Dance as a form of political resistance, translating it into contemporary terms.

But perhaps we should turn to the ancestors who participated in this fragile, outrageous attempt to bring about a different world, one that was doomed to failure, the same way they turned to their ancestors and relations (of all sorts): irreverently and with the best and worst intentions; indignantly in relation to the work; stubbornly against the light and goodness of the settler reality; and with all the rage and inconsolable sadness that carried them past exhaustion into the infinite (into a vision of profound joy at the indeterminate point of their “death”!). Perhaps we should follow them into this failure along a curve carried so far that it loses trajectory and becomes both a straight line and a circle, which would mean navigating the dangers of the waters of culture outside of the culture/nature and culture/politics splits. This would entail returning to Indigenous conceptions of power, violence, and the prophetic, according to their perilous paths through archival logics, interrelationally, such that colonialism is dragged into the abyss. One way to do this is by following the fraught and unproductive path of the savage.