Notes

1. Cora Du Bois, 1870 Ghost Dance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 26, 10.

2. Du Bois, 1870 Ghost Dance, 15.

3. Du Bois, 26.

4. Du Bois, 16.

5. Du Bois, 13.

6. Du Bois, 10.

7. “The Ghost Dance challenged industrialization in California. A Wintu and Yana man named Norelputus adapted the Ghost Dance into the Earth Lodge Religion, whereby dancing in subterranean houses protected participants from the end of the world. Near Grindstone, a Pomo prophet named Santiago McDaniel heard the Earth Lodge Religion. McDaniel may have been an indentured servant [slave] as a young boy, but he was reclaimed by his community. After hearing the Ghost Dance, McDaniel traveled throughout Mendocino County, preaching the message,” and “McDaniel made labor and economic relations central to the message be brought to the reservation. . . . Indigenous People carried these hopeful messages to workplaces during the following decades” (Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer, We Are the Land: A History of Native California [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022], e172–73, 173–74).

8. Du Bois, 1870 Ghost Dance, 20.

9. Du Bois, 19.

10. Du Bois, 20.

11. Du Bois, 24.

12. Du Bois, 25.

13. Du Bois, 15.

14. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (New York: Routledge, 2010).

15. Du Bois, 1870 Ghost Dance, 17.

16. Du Bois, 9.

17. Du Bois, 20.

18. Du Bois, 16.

19. Du Bois, 17.

20. William Shipley, Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of Hanc’ibyjim (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1991), 50–52.

21. Du Bois, 1870 Ghost Dance, 22.

22. From Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982): “One does not proceed from day to night. Whoever follows this route finds only sleep—sleep which ends the day but in order to make the next day possible; sleep which is the downward bending that verifies the rising curve; sleep which is, granted, a lack, a silence, but one imbued with intentions and through which duties, goals, and real action speak for us. In this sense the dream is closer than sleep to the nocturnal region. If day survives itself in the night, if it exceeds its term, if it becomes that which cannot be interrupted, then already it is no longer the day. It is the uninterrupted and the incessant. Notwithstanding events that seem to belong to time, and even though it is peopled with beings that seem to be those of the world, this interminable ‘day’ is the approach of time’s absence, the threat of the outside where the world lacks” (267).

23. Du Bois, 1870 Ghost Dance, 17.

24. Du Bois, 24.

25. Du Bois, 25.

26. Du Bois, 23.

27. Du Bois, 10.

28. Du Bois, 11.

29. Du Bois, 9.

30. Du Bois, 15.

31. Du Bois, 6.

32. Du Bois, 20.

33. Du Bois, 10.

34. Du Bois, 10. I am riffing on Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of the surround: “In films like Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) or Shaka Zulu (1987), the settler is portrayed as surrounded by ‘natives,’ inverting, in Parenti’s view, the role of aggressor so that colonialism is made to look like self-defense. Indeed, aggression and self-defense are reversed in these movies, but the image of a surrounded fort is not false. Instead, the false image is what emerges when a critique of militarised life is predicated on the forgetting of the life that surrounds it. The fort really was surrounded, is besieged by what still surrounds it, the common beyond and beneath—before and before—enclosure.” The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013), 17.

35. Damon B. Akins and William J. Bauer Jr., We Are the Land: A History of Native California (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021), e172–73.

36. Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), e12, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373810.

37. Cutcha Risling Blady, “Why I Teach ‘The Walking Dead’ in My Native Studies Classes,” Nerds of Color, April 24, 2014, https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2014/04/24/why-i-teach-the-walking-dead-in-my-native-studies-classes/.

38. Tommy Pico, IRL (Austin: Birds, 2016).

39. Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitchell, “Critical University Studies and the Crisis of Consensus,” Feminist Studies 44, no. 2 (2018): 435.

40. On aesthetic humanism, see David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019).

41. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 740.

42. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1993), 93.

43. Dead Pioneers, “Bad Indian,” released November 18, 2021, Bandcamp, https://deadpioneers.bandcamp.com/track/bad-indian-single.

44. Lowell Bean, “Power and Its Applications in Native California,” Journal of California Anthropology 2, no. 1 (1975): 25–33.

45. This is an adaptation of Paul Celan’s configuration of the “angle of reflection” from which the poet speaks who reflects their existence and physical nature in their language that becomes shape and presence. He writes, “The poem holds its ground, if you will permit yet another extreme formulation, the poem holds its ground on its own margin. In order to endure, it constantly calls and pulls itself back from an ‘already-no-more’ into a ‘still-here.’” This “still-here” is the strangeness of the edge of nonexistence. Paul Celan, “The Meridian,” in Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (New York: Routledge, 2003), 49.

46. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).

47. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 103.

48. Deborah Miranda, “‘They Were Tough Those Old Women Before Us’: The Power of Gossip in Isabel Meadows’s Narratives,” Biography 39, no. 3 (2016): 375.

49. Miranda, “‘They Were Tough,’” 379.

50. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 14.

51. Miranda, “‘They Were Tough,’” 380.

52. David Hearst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000), xvi–xvii.

53. Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 2013), e40–42.

54. See Jodi Byrd et al., “Rage, Indigenous Feminisms, and the Politics of Survival,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 46, no. 4 (2021): 1057–71.

55. Sandy Grande, “Refusing the University,” in Toward What Justice, ed. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (New York: Routledge, 2018), 61.

56. Epeli Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 147–61.

57. Jaime de Angulo, Indians in Overalls (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1950/1990); Dorothy Lee, “Linguistic Reflections of Wintu Thought,” International Journal of American Linguistics 10, no. 4 (1944): 181–97.

58. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 3.

59. Halberstam, Queer Art, 2.

60. Halberstam, 5.

61. Moten and Harney, Undercommons, 74.

62. Jodi Byrd, “‘in the city of blinding lights’: Indigeneity, Cultural Studies, and the Errants of Colonial Nostalgia,” Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2009): 19.

63. Byrd, “‘in the city of blinding lights,’” 26.

64. Jodi Byrd, “Still Waiting for the ‘Post’ to Arrive: Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and the Imponderables of American Indian Postcoloniality,” Wicazo Sa Review 31, no. 1 (2016): 75–89.

65. Note the significance of earth lodges.

66. Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 13.

67. William J. Bauer, California Through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016), 135; Akins and Bauer, We Are the Land, 154.

68. Michelle Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 180.

69. On the killing of doctors, see Robert Heizer, They Were Only Diggers: A Collection of Articles from California Newspapers, 1851–1866, on Indian and White Relations (Ramona: Ballena Press, 1974), 113–14. On the killing of mixed-race children and dogs, see Du Bois, 1870 Ghost Dance, 7, 20, 22. On killing Joyas, see Deborah Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 259.

70. Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London: Verso, 2019).

71. Estes, Our History, e166.

72. Estes, e165.

73. Dian Million, “There Is a River in Me: Theory from Life,” in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. by Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 32.

74. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 746.

75. Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 57.

76. Estes, Our History, e166.

77. Dian Million, “Intense Dreaming: Theories, Narratives, and Our Search for Home,” The American Indian Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2011): 321.

78. Estes, Our History, e166.

79. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990); Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (New York: Urzone, 1987); and Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Vol. 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 1991), for a few examples of such “borrowing.”

80. Estes, Our History, e169.

81. Estes, e167.

82. Estes, e168.

83. Elizabeth Povinelli, “Governance of the Prior,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 1 (2011): 13–30.

84. Robert Nichols, “Theft Is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession,” Political Theory 46, no. 1 (2017): 3–28.

85. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 392.

86. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). The police, in this sense, can only ever function in a genocidal manner as they, as Benjamin describes, simultaneously preserve and make in the moment the law’s violence. And the law will always be willing to enact extreme forms of violence to preserve and extend itself.

87. A project that has never ended, as made clear by the contemporary evangelical political movement in the United States, one that echoes the Zionist movement in Israel and supports it.

88. Fanon, quoted in Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 141.

89. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 739.

90. Moten, 776; my italics.

91. Jack Halberstam, “To the Wild Beyond: With and for the Undercommons” [introduction], in The Undercommons, 8.

92. Moten, quoted in Halberstam, “To the Wild Beyond,” 8.

93. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 737.

94. Estes, Our History, e167.

1. Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice,’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9 (2007): 67. See also her Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014).

2. Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal,” 69.

3. Simpson, 69.

4. Simpson, 69.

5. Simpson, 75.

6. Simpson, 74.

7. Simpson, 70.

8. Simpson, 74.

9. Audra Simpson, “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of ‘Refusal’: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia,” Postcolonial Studies 20, no. 1 (2017): 20.

10. Gilberto Rosas, Barrio Libre: Criminalizing States and Delinquent Refusals of the New Frontier (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).

11. Simpson, “The Ruse of Consent,” 27–28.

12. Simpson, 27.

13. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event (New York: Routledge, 2010), 48.

14. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. (Wivenhoe, Eng.: Minor Compositions, 2013), 96, 98.

15. Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 124.

16. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz and trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), 290, 291–92. “When this nationalist reformist movement, often a caricature of trade unionism, decides to act, it does so using extremely peaceful methods: organizing work stoppages in the few factories located in the towns, mass demonstrations to cheer a leader, and a boycott of the buses or imported commodities. All these methods not only put pressure on the colonial authorities but also allow people to let off steam.” Fanon, Wretched, 27–28; “This tendency of law [to prohibit the use of wholly nonviolent means] has also played a part in the concession of the right to strike, which contradicts the interest of the state. It grants this right because it forestalls violent actions the state is afraid to oppose.” “While the first form of interruption of work is violent [the limited labor strike] since it causes only an external modification of labor conditions, the second, as a pure means, is nonviolent. For it takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike not so much causes as consummates.”

17. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 7, 47, 127.

18. Vine Deloria, “American Indian Metaphysics,” in Power and Place: Indian Education in America, ed. Vine Deloria and Daniel R. Wildcat (Golden, Col.: Fulcrum Publishing, 2001), 2.

19. Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!),” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2, no. 1 (2013): 27.

20. Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought,” 21.

21. Watts, 21.

22. Watts, 23.

23. Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 355.

24. Christopher Bracken, Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2.

25. Bracken, Magical Criticism, 7.

26. Bracken, 7.

27. Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 19.

28. Byrd, Transit, 17.

29. Byrd, 9.

30. Byrd, 10.

31. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

32. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010).

33. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology, trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2009/2014).

34. De Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 47.

35. De Castro, 47.

36. De Castro, 48.

37. See, for example, James Clifford’s introduction “Partial Truths” to James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). In it, he discusses the resuscitation of anthropology that is, referencing Rodney Needham, facing its intellectual disintegration and redistribution into neighboring disciplines. As a last resort, anthropology turns to a reinvestment in a renewed ethnographical practice as a bulwark against its disappearance in “an iridescent metamorphosis.” The new ethnographic field at the time sought to perform the voice of the Indigenous subject but at the very least invested itself with the plural energy of Indigenous thought and ways of being, anticipating de Castro’s argument that does away with the ethical consideration of representational tact for which Clifford, Marcus, and the authors in the collection argue.

38. De Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 48, my italics.

39. Vanessa Watts, “Indigenous Place-Thought,” 29. Watts notes Stacy Alaimo’s discussion of the agency of dirt as an example: “In this relationship with dirt, humans are responsible to land the way an owner might be responsible for a pet,” as Alaimo describes dirt as “something worthy of proper care and feeding.”

40. Byrd, Transit, 16.

41. Byrd, 17.

42. Mark Minch-de Leon, “Race and the Limitations of ‘the Human,’” in After the Human: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century, ed. Sherryl Vint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 206–19.

43. Tiffany Lethabo King, “Where We Intend to Meet after the ‘Turn,’” in “The Black Shoals Dossier,” Tiffany Lethabo King, Stephanie Latty, Stephanie Lumsden, Karyn Recollet, and Megan Scribe, and ed. Beenash Jafri, Lateral 12, no. 1 (2023), https://csalateral.org/issue/12-1/black-shoals-dossier/; Deborah Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2013), 203.

44. Tiffany Lethabo King, “Where We Intend to Meet.” See also King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019).

45. King, “Where We Intend to Meet.”

46. Tiffany Lethabo King, “Humans Involved: Lurking in the Lines of Posthumanist Flight,” Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 180.

47. King, “Humans Involved,” 180.

48. A comment made during the Otherwise Worlds conference, referenced in Tiffany Lethabo King et al., eds., Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler-Colonialism and Anti-Blackness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020), 6.

49. Against Womack, Pulitano argued instead for a superior hybridity that was (no surprise) less exclusionary of non-Native viewpoints and more reconciliatory; in this sense, her book breaks down to an evaluation of good and bad Indigenous theorists, not qualitatively but based on how they relate to her intellectual agenda. Warrior argued against the hegemony of the western canon as colonial tool, the progressive historical narrative of the novel as cultural achievement, and the “preoccupations of literary studies” with the cutting edge of theory.

50. King, “Humans Involved,” 164–65.

51. King, 164–65.

52. King, 163.

53. King, 178.

54. King, 165.

55. King, 165–66.

56. King, 166.

57. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).

58. Fanon, Wretched, 57.

59. Peter Burnett, “State of the State Address,” delivered January 6, 1851.

60. Lowe, Intimacies.

61. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 2.

62. Hartman, “Venus,” 10.

63. Hartman, 13.

64. Hartman, 13.

65. Hartman, 14.

66. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

67. Byrd writes, “Deleuze and Guattari re/deterritorialize America as the world, coming full circle to find its west in its east and its east in its west, a worlding anew, in Gayatri Spivak’s terms, that decenters all static, grounded belongings and locates them instead in becomings: becoming-Indian, becoming-woman, becoming-America.” Byrd, Transit, 13.

68. The Sequoya League, Mission Indian Federation, Northern California Indian Association, Indian Board of Cooperation, and the California Indian Brotherhood are a few examples. Some of these were complex, run by non-Natives, or were used to exploit California Indian people for dues or governmental grants, but they all express the coalitional energies of California Indian communities.

69. Brendan Hokowhitu, “Indigenous Existentialism and the Body,” Cultural Studies Review 15, no. (2009): 101–18.

70. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes, “If there is need for a ‘study of the historic continuity of a single culture’, why can’t this be African? Why can’t African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?” Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 1986), 439. David Lloyd has highlighted the shift to a spatial mode of literary analysis Ngūgī’s anticolonial work calls for in his chapter “Ngūgī: Decolonizing the Curriculum,” in Ngūgī in the American Imperium, ed. Timothy J. Reiss (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2021): 325–44. Lloyd notes that, against some interpretations of Ngūgī’s call to abolish English departments in Kenya as identitarian along the colonial model, “On the contrary, the mode of spatialization is not merely the replacement of Africa as the originating centre, with the ‘development’ of an African literature being traced from its origins to its apex in independent national existence. The structure of the proposed curriculum performs a far more radical and displacing break with the norms of curricular formation.” This break takes the forms of orature—“the oral forms of poetry, storytelling, and performance that are absolutely contemporary with the university,” a centering of the student and community as collaborator, a concentric model or relationality between specific locations (as opposed to a singular line of historical development), and a recentering or differential, relational, and plural understanding of the networks of cultural forms against the centrality of Europe and its categories and disciplines. See chapter 4 for more.

71. See chapter 5.

1. Colleen Flaherty, “Anthropologist Says She’s Being Punished for Views on Bones,” Inside Higher Ed, February 14, 2022, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/02/15/anthropologist-says-shes-being-punished-views-bones.

2. Ryan Quinn, “San José State Anthropologist Against Reburying Bones Retires,” Inside Higher Ed, July 5, 2023.

3. Chairs’ Report to the SAA Board of Directors, “SAA Statement Concerning the Treatment of Human Remains Follow-up Report,” https://documents.saa.org/container/docs/default-source/catf/cnar-repat-report-on-statement-final-edition.pdf.

4. Indigenous Archaeology Collective, “Open Letter from the Indigenous Archaeology Collective,” News From Native California, June 29, 2020. https://newsfromnativecalifornia.com/open-letter-from-the-indigenous-archaeology-collective/.

5. Indigenous Archeology Collective, “Open Letter.”

6. I borrow this somewhat tongue-in-cheek definition of rhetoric from Marianne Constable: “Rhetoricians don’t just read the lines . . . They read between the lines; they read around the lines. They read parentheticals. (They read so carefully that they even read signs that are not there . . .) They love words and silences—and libraries, but they don’t usually say anything about that. More often they say outrageous things about the scholarship of more serious disciplines—like anthropology, history, sociology, law, philosophy—while claiming that these caricatures are based on their own careful readings . . . A rhetorician, after a careful reading of texts of and about law, might suggest that there are many more interesting ways of talking about law and justice than as a dichotomous conflict between natural law and legal positivism, between ought and is, divine and human. To the rhetorician, jurisprudence appears less a debate as to the meaning of ‘law’ than an inquiry into complicated relations between law and justice around particular questions of action or of what to do . . . precisely the questions that philosophy does not answer.” Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 25.

7. Elizabeth Povinelli, “Governance of the Prior,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 1 (2011): 13–30.

8. James May, “New California Repatriation Law Includes Enforcement Teeth,” Indian Country Today, October 31, 2001.

9. Note CalNAGPRA’s (2001) focus on California Indians and inclusion of a mechanism for nonfederally recognized California tribes to file claims as well as authorization of the imposition of civil penalties for failure to comply, and National NAGPRA’s code of regulations passed in 1995 and amended in 1997, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2010, including the rule for the disposition of the “culturally unidentifiable” (43 C.F.R. 10.11).

10. Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9 (2007): 78.

11. Gerald Vizenor, Wordarrows: Native States of Literary Sovereignty (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).

12. Tommy Pico, IRL (Austin: Birds, 2016).

13. Glen Coulthard, “Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the ‘Politics of Recognition’ in Canada,” Contemporary Political Theory 6 (2007): 452.

14. Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal,” 19.

15. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 60–61.

16. Winona LaDuke, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), 77.

17. Quoted in Jim Watson, “Exhibition Explores the Life of Amateur Archaeologist Ralph Glidden,” Catalina Islander, April 12, 2013, https://thecatalinaislander.com/exhibition-explores-the-life-of-amateur-archaeologist-ralph-glidden/.

18. Sarita See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York: NYU Press, 2017).

19. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Acting Bits/Identity Talk,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 776.

20. Spivak, “Acting Bits/Identity Talk,” 776.

21. UCOP, NAGPRA Policy (1991), 2.

22. This work is now largely done by a repatriation coordinator on each campus.

23. Lalo Franco, California Senate Hearing, February 27, 2008. Morningstar Gali reports, “On February 26, 2008, Native American Tribal Leaders, Cultural Heritage Directors, Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) experts, and UC Berkeley administrators testified at a Senate hearing held at the State Capitol. The hearing was held following Tribal protests of UC Berkeley’s violations of federal law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Tribal leaders and representatives have voiced concern that UC Berkeley has denied the Tribes’ right to bring to rest hundreds of thousands of sacred objects and ancestral remains. UC Berkeley also eliminated their special NAGPRA unit that was created for the purposes of ensuring compliance with the laws. The hearing room was full with 60 Tribal Officials, Native American supporters, and less than a handful of UC Berkeley Administrators and Officials. Senator Dean Florez, Chairman of the Committee on Government Organization facilitated the informational hearing as an intervention to the ongoing eight-month battle between Native American Tribal Representatives and UC Berkeley officials and administrators, including Chancellor Birgeneau.”

24. Tony Platt tells some of this story in his book The Scandal of Cal: Land Grabs, White Supremacy, and Miseducation at UC Berkeley (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2023).

25. Clare Counihan notes in a personal conversation about land grant universities: “[The Morrill Act] is also connected to post-civil war segregation; the Morrill act required that land grant institutions—all public and focused on vocational/technical training—be accessible to Black peoples; in the south, rather than desegregate, states created separate institutions, establishing at least part of the foundation for the HBCU system.”

26. Robert Nichols, “Theft Is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession,” Political Theory 46, no. 1 (2017): 3–28.

27. Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

28. Gerald Vizenor, Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 75.

29. Larri Fredericks, California Senate Hearing, February 27, 2008.

30. Joanne Barker, “The Recognition of NAGPRA: A Human Rights Promise Deferred,” in Recognition, Sovereignty Struggles, and Indigenous Rights in the United States, ed. Jean O’Brien and Amy E. Den Ouden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 107.

31. Barker, “Recognition,” 102–103.

32. Barker, 95–96.

33. Barker, 105.

34. Larri Fredericks, email correspondence to AIGSA, 2007.

35. Barker, “Recognition,” 104.

36. Lee Maracle, “Oratory on Oratory,” in Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007), 57.

37. Maracle, “Oratory,” 59.

38. Maracle, 58.

39. Maracle, 68.

40. Constable, Just Silences, 75.

41. Constable, 75.

42. Constable, 75.

43. Constable, 85.

44. Constable, 85, 87.

45. Constable, 25.

46. Constable, 89.

47. Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 10.

48. Million, Therapeutic Nations, 10.

49. Million, 12.

50. Million, 19.

51. Nikolas Rose, quoted in Million, 18.

52. Joanne Barker, introduction to Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, ed. Joanne Barker (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 3.

53. Million, Therapeutic Nations, 8.

54. Million, 8.

55. Brittani Orona and Vanessa Esquivido, “Continued Disembodiment: NAGPRA, Cal NAGPRA, and Recognition,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 1, no. 42 (2020): 50–68, 56.

56. Orona and Esquivido, “Continued Disembodiment,” 57.

57. Orona and Esquivido, 58.

58. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, quoted in Orona and Esquivido, 61.

59. Jack Norton, Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried (San Francisco: The Indian Historian Press, 1979).

60. Orona and Esquivido, “Continued Disembodiment,” 54.

61. Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 2.

62. Related to Lowe’s Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015), it is also necessary to connect the museumizing practices being discussed in this chapter to their impact on other communities and peoples within the history of what became known as California and U.S. imperialism and how this process structures the very formation of the state and yet makes possible coalitional and relational possibilities.

63. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 3.

64. Vizenor, Crossbloods, 78.

65. The original title of Vizenor’s research project was “The Woodland Tribal Trickster as a Compassionate Mixblood.”

66. See the chapter “Shadow Survivance” in Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

67. School for Advanced Research, “History of SAR,” School for Advanced Research, https://sarweb.org/about/history-of-sar/.

68. David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), e12–14, https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823282371/under-representation/.

69. School for Advanced Research, “Mission,” School for Advanced Research, https://sarweb.org/about/mission-2/.

70. Vizenor, Crossbloods, 63.

71. Vizenor, 64.

72. Vizenor, 63.

73. Vizenor, 64.

74. Vizenor, 66, 67.

75. Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 78.

76. Gerald Vizenor, Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), xv.

77. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).

78. Vizenor, Crossbloods, 66.

79. Vizenor, 66.

80. Vizenor, 71.

81. Eyal Weizman, “Forensic Architecture: Notes From the Field and Forums,” documenta 13 (2012): 5–6.

82. Weizman, “Forensic,” 9.

83. Weizman, 16.

84. Weizman, 16.

85. Quoted in Weizman, 9.

86. Vizenor, Crossbloods, 66.

87. Beth Piatote, Antíkoni, in The Beadworkers (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2019), e124.

88. Piatote, Beadworkers, e159.

89. Piatote, e159.

90. Piatote, e161.

91. Gerald Vizenor, “Aesthetics of Survivance,” in Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 87.

92. Vizenor, Native Liberty, 87.

93. Vizenor, 88.

94. Vizenor, 88.

95. Piatote, Beadworkers, e147.

96. Quoted in Vizenor, Crossbloods, 65.

97. Robert H. McLaughlin, “Refracting Rights through Material Culture: Implementing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act,” paper prepared for the Cultural Policy Workshop, University of Chicago, 2000.

98. Coyote Man, Songs of the California Indians Vol 1: Mountain Maidu (Recording) Pacific Western Traders (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1975).

1. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 18.

2. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 50.

3. Sekula, 22.

4. Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 9 (2007): 67. See also her Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 74.

5. Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal,” 67.

6. Simpson, 67.

7. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979).

8. Tony Bennett, “Cultural Studies and the Culture Concept,” Cultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2015).

9. Boas, quoted in Bennett, “Cultural Studies,” 551, 551–52.

10. See the American transcendentalists for a similar strategy but in literature, or note the number of Native stories that have been translated into “American folklore.”

11. Richard Haller, quoted in Bennett, “Cultural Studies,” 552.

12. Bennett, “Cultural Studies,” 551–52.

13. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, ed. and trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014), 43.

14. De Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, 42.

15. De Castro, 42.

16. De Castro, 55.

17. De Castro, 91.

18. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

19. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xl.

20. Bennett, “Cultural Studies,” 552.

21. Bennett, 553.

22. From an Achumawi story about the creation of light.

23. Tommy Pico, IRL (Austin: Birds, 2016).

24. Jean Baudrillard, quoted in Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 221.

25. Pico, IRL.

26. Pico.

27. Pico.

28. Pico.

29. Pico.

30. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 83.

31. Patrick Wolfe, “After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in US Indian Policy,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2013): 22.

32. See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

33. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Maria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 5.

34. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 257.

35. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 6.

36. Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 4.

37. Smith, Everything, 4.

38. Gerald Vizenor, Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 182.

39. Vizenor, Native Liberty, 182.

40. Smith, Everything, 6.

41. Gerald Vizenor, Crossbloods: Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 90.

42. Vizenor, Crossbloods, 86; Native Liberty, 167.

43. Vizenor, Crossbloods, 86.

44. Pauline Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 94.

45. Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs, 93.

46. Wakeham, 88.

47. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

48. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Jonathan Cape (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 132.

49. Gerald Vizenor, “Edward Curtis,” in Native Liberty, 206.

50. For example, see Pheng Cheah’s analysis of Karl Marx’s organismic philosophy in “The Rationality of Life: On the Organismic Metaphor of the State,” Radical Philosophy 112 (Mar./Apr. 2002).

51. Vizenor, Crossbloods, 90.

52. Vizenor, 89.

53. Vizenor, 89.

54. Barthes, Mythologies, 165, 84.

55. Barthes, 86.

56. Also see Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-age-of-the-world-target.

57. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in an Extramoral Sense,” in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, trans. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 252.

58. Ishi was a Yahi Indian who spent the majority of his life in the Sierra Nevada foothills as a refugee from settler violence. His tribe was massacred in successive attacks, until Ishi and his family went into hiding. With the exception of an encounter with a group of surveyors, in which the surveyors took everything of value from the camp, including the blanket in which Ishi’s sickly and elderly mother was hiding, the tribe was considered extinct for nearly forty years. In 1911, Ishi came into the Northern California town of Oroville looking for food. He had burnt off his hair, a sign of mourning, and it is thought that he had outlived everyone in both his tribe and his family. He was at first arrested for “thievery” and then taken by anthropologists to live in the University of California Berkeley Museum of Anthropology as both a research assistant and a display until his death in 1916 from tuberculosis. During this time, he befriended Kroeber, calling him affectionately “Big Chiep.” His presence had also caught the imagination of the American public as “the Last Wild Indian.” The recovery of his remains from the Smithsonian and subsequent burial is a controversial case of repatriation detailed in Orin Starn’s Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).

59. Vizenor, Crossbloods, 93.

60. Robert Bellah, quoted in Vizenor, 95.

61. Vizenor, 95.

62. Vizenor, 95.

63. Barthes, Camera Lucida.

64. Paul Virilio, quoted in Chow, Age of the World Target, e5–e6.

65. Chow, e5–e6.

66. Chow, e6–e8.

67. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 4.

68. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 118–19.

69. De Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics.

70. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

71. Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner, “The Moral Fabric of Linguicide: Un-Weaving Trauma Narratives and Dependency Relationships in Indigenous Language Reclamation,” Journal of Global Ethics 14, no. 2 (2018): 266–76.

72. Cutcha Risling Baldy, We Are Dancing For You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018).

73. Don Hankins, “Restoring Indigenous Prescribed Fires to California Oak Woodlands,” in Proceedings of the Seventh California Oak Symposium: Managing Oak Woodlands in a Dynamic World, ed. Richard B. Standiford and Kathryn L. Purcell (Berkeley: US Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station, 2015).

74. Save California Salmon, https://www.californiasalmon.org/about.

75. Vanessa Esquivido, “The Social Life of Basket Caps: Repatriation Under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, in Hopes of Cultural Revitalization,” McNair Scholars Journal 11 (2007): 51–70; Carolyn Smith, “Weaving pikyav (to-fix-it): Karuk Basket Weaving in-Relation-with the Everyday World” (PhD diss., UC Berkeley, 2016).

76. Ira Jacknis, “Alfred Kroeber and the Photographic Representation of California Indians,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 20, no. 3 (1996): 4.

77. See introduction.

78. Jacknis, “Alfred Kroeber,” 7.

79. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 14.

80. Barthes, 7.

81. Barthes, 7, 31, 52, 88.

82. Bennett, “Cultural Studies,” 556.

83. Bennett, 557.

84. Bennett, 557.

85. Jenny Reardon and Kim TallBear, “‘Your DNA Is Our History’: Genomics, Anthropology, and the Construction of Whiteness as Property,” Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (2012): S234.

86. Bennett, “Cultural Studies,” 557.

87. Bennett, 557.

88. Edward Winslow Gifford, Californian Anthropometry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1926), 298.

89. See, for example, Geertje Mak, “A Colonial-Scientific Interface: The Construction, Viewing, and Circulation of Faces via a 1906 German Racial Atlas,” American Anthropologist 122, no. 2 (2020): 327–41.

90. See Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

91. Judith Lowry (illus.), with Chiori Santiago (auth.), Home to Medicine Mountain (New York: Children’s Book Press, 2002); Chag Lowry (auth.) with Rahsan Ekedak (illus.), Soldiers Unknown (Temecula, Calif.: Great Oak Press, 2019); Michelle LeBeau, “A Healing Process,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 23, no. 2 (2002): 109–16, the oral history of my great-uncle, Leonard Lowry.

92. Theresa Harlan, She Sang Me a Good Luck Song: The California Indian Photographs of Dugan Aguilar (Berkeley: Heyday Press, 2015).

93. Harlan, She Sang.

94. L. Frank and Kim Hogeland, First Families: A Photographic History of California Indians (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2007).

95. Frank and Hogeland, First Families, xi.

96. Of this last one, titled, “Modesta Avila (Ajachamem), prison photo, 1889,” the caption explains, “Angered by the noise and filth of the Santa Fe railroad running through her mother’s land and that they had never paid for the right of way, Modesta Avila protested: locals said she hung her laundry on a clothesline across the tracks; Santa Fe said she placed a railroad tie across the tracks. Either way, a railroad agent removed it before the train came. Four months later Modesta Avila was arrested and charged with attempting to obstruct a train. She was sentenced to three years in San Quentin. She died, at the age of twenty-two, after serving two years of her sentence.” Frank and Hogeland, First Families, 119.

97. Frank and Hogeland, xi.

98. Frank and Hogeland, 184.

99. Frank and Hogeland, xi.

100. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Rosetta Books, 2005), 4.

101. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.

102. Barthes, 6.

103. Achumawi, The Creation of Light.

1. And, yes, I’m including the Holocaust, which did have a similar force, but largely for a western audience—Gaza is a global and globalizing event in a different way.

2. Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University, 2009), 83–84.

3. Though the efficacy of the IOF is also in question, as Hamas’s successes make evident.

4. Nichanian, Historiographic Perversion, 49.

5. Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 135.

6. Lawrence J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991). As LeBlanc describes: “[Senators] Helms, Hatch, and a few other outspoken critics of the convention in the Senate were left with no practical alternative but to work for ratification under conditions that would reduce the convention to no more than a symbol of opposition to genocide. The Sovereignty Package was intended to accomplish that objective.” Note 6, above 241.

7. Quoted in Lawrence J. LeBlanc, “The ICJ, The Genocide Convention, and the United States,” Wisconsin International Law Journal 6 (1987): 43–74, 43.

8. See Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee for two of many examples.

9. “During the drafting of the Genocide Convention, the United States opposed the inclusion of a proposed article that would have broadened the definition of genocide to encompass acts targeting the cultural identity of a protected group, stating: In the first place, the new and far-reaching concept of cultural genocide, i.e., the destruction of a culture, had no connection with the better known conception of genocide as the physical destruction of members of a human group. For the inclusion of cultural genocide in the convention on genocide, it was not enough to say the acts enumerated in [the proposed article] shocked the conscience of mankind. In the second place, [the proposed article], as it now stood or in any amended form, would not meet the wishes of those who favoured its retention . . . If the objective were to preserve the culture of a group, then it was primarily freedom of thought and expression for the members of the group which needed protection. Such protection came within the sphere of human rights. If the individual’s fundamental right to use his own language, to practice his own religion and to attend the school of his choice were protected, that would be tantamount to protecting the group of which the individual was a member. GAOR, 3rd session, Pa11 I, Sixth Comm. (83rd meeting), at 203, 25 Oct. 1948. 29 Genocide Convention art. III-IV.” International Court of Justice, “Declaration of intervention of the United States of America,” Document Number 182–20220907-WRI-01–00-EN.

10. Samera Esmeir, “The Violence of Non-Violence: Law and War in Iraq.” Journal of Law and Society 34, no. 1 (2007): 99–115.

11. David Kazanjian, “Re-flexion: Genocide in Ruins,” Discourse 33, no. 3 (2011): 367.

12. Brendan Hokowhitu, “Indigenous Existentialism and the Body,” Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2009): 101–118.

13. Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), e13–e14.

14. Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018).

15. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 33.

16. Chow, Age of the World Target, e17–18.

17. Hupa scholar Jack Norton is likely the first historian in the context of California to use rigorously the term genocide as defined by the United Nations. He did so to claim that a genocide was committed against his people in Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1979). This is an important point to keep in mind when discussing the racial and colonial regime of genocide discourse, especially since non-Native historians have generally erased or minimized Norton’s contribution. Brendan Lindsay is an exception to this racist and colonial trend.

18. Rodríguez, White Reconstruction, 135.

19. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 36.

20. Kazanjian, “Re-flexion,” 368.

21. Rodríguez, White Reconstruction, 135, 139.

22. Kazanjian, “Re-flexion,” 369.

23. Kazanjian, 369.

24. Mahmood Mamdani, “Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Africa,” Identity, Culture and Politics 3, no. 2 (2002): 3.

25. Rodríguez, White Reconstruction, 139.

26. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited by Peter Demetz and translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

27. See Esmeir, “Violence of Non-Violence.”

28. Samera Esmeir has analyzed this violence done in the name of the law describing it in its performative force as the institution of juridical humanity.

29. See Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013).

30. Rodríguez, White Reconstruction, 135.

31. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 282.

32. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xxi.

33. Norman Finkelstein, “History’s Verdict: The Cherokee Case,” Journal of Palestine Studies 24 no. 4 (1996): 32–45, 36.

34. Quoted in Rodríguez, White Reconstruction, 138.

35. Gavin Newsom, California Governor, “Executive Order N-15–19 of June 18, 2019 [apology to California Indians],” Office of the Governor, https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/6.18.19-Executive-Order.pdf.

36. Mamdani, “Making Sense,” 2.

37. Nichanian, Historiographic Perversion, 5. Along with Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe participated.

38. David Stannard, Norman Finkelstein, and Cherokee-identifying non-Native scholar Ward Churchill have critiqued the works of a number of historians of the Holocaust for their claims about its singularity and their refusals to acknowledge genocide against Native Americans, including Deborah Lipstadt, Steven Katz, and Daniel Goldhagen. More recently, Gary Clayton Anderson’s Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (2014) and his refusal to acknowledge that the United States committed genocide against Native Americans has set off another round of debates over the use of the term genocide in the Native American context, taken up by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Benjamin Madley, and Jeffrey Ostler, among others.

39. Alan Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (New York: Routledge, 1995); Gavriel Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflection on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 13, no. l (Spring 1999): 28–61.

40. Nichanian, Historiographic Perversion, 81.

41. Million, Therapeutic Nations, 3.

42. Nichanian, Historiographic Perversion, 62.

43. Jodi Byrd, “‘Living My Native Life Deadly’: Red Lake, Ward Churchill, and the Discourses of Competing Genocides,” American Indian Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2007): 311.

44. Ward Churchill, “An American Holocaust? The Structure of Denial,” Socialism and Democracy 17, no. 1 (2003): 29–30.

45. Quoted in Byrd, “‘Living My Native Life Deadly,’” 328.

46. One of the captives was released, and thirty-eight Dakota men were hanged, the largest mass execution in U.S. history.

47. Byrd, “‘Living My Native Life Deadly,’” 327.

48. Churchill’s ouster echoes the circumstances around ex–Harvard University president Claudine Gay in the current moment of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. There are differences, however: Gay’s actions were far less principled than Churchill’s, who has remained steadfast in his support of Palestinians, and her position far more powerful. She is also the first Black woman to be president of Harvard while Churchill is a white man pretending to be Native.

49. Nichanian, Historiographic Perversion, chapter 2.

50. See Jodi Byrd, “‘in the city of blinding lights’: Indigeneity, Cultural Studies, and the Errants of Colonial Nostalgia,” Cultural Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2009): 13–28.

51. Nichanian, Historiographic Perversion, 78.

52. Nichanian, 70.

53. Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness: The Extermination of the Jews and the Principle of Reality,” in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2012), 178.

54. Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” 178. See also Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); the turn to oral history, ethnohistory, memory, and now the forensic approach to other-than-human narratives are all part of this general problematic.

55. Martin Rizzo-Martinez, We Are Not Animals: Indigenous Politics of Survival, Rebellion, and Reconstitution in Nineteenth-Century California (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 6.

56. Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller (New York: Little, Brown, 1981), 133.

57. Lucy Young, as told to Edith V. A. Murphy, “Out of the Past: A True Indian Story Told by Lucy Young, of Round Valley Indian Reservation,” California Historical Society Quarterly 20, no. 4 (1941): 350.

58. Young, “Out of the Past,” 358.

59. Young, 353.

60. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 6.

61. Quoted in Rizzo-Martinez writes in We Are Not Animals, epigraph.

62. Michael F. Magliari, “The California Indian Scalp Bounty Myth: Evidence of Genocide or Just Faulty Scholarship?,” California History 100, no. 2 (2023): 4–30.

63. Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014).

64. Nichanian, Historiographic Perversion, 51.

65. Tony Platt, “When Our Worlds Cried: California’s Genocide,” review of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, by Benjamin Madley, News from Native California 29, no. 4 (2016).

66. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016), 5.

67. Madley, An American Genocide, 7.

68. Madley, 6.

69. Madley, 5.

70. Madley, 13, 5, 6; emphasis added.

71. Madley, 5.

72. Madley, 3.

73. Madley, 2, 124, 146, 171, 203.

74. Madley, 10.

75. Madley, 13.

76. Madley, 10.

77. Madley, 11.

78. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 1–14, 2.

79. Hartman, “Venus,” 14.

1. William Shipley, The Maidu Indian Myths and Stories of Hanc’ibyjim (Berkeley, Calif.: Heyday Books, 1991), 31.

2. Shipley, Maidu Indian Myths, 32.

3. Shipley, 34.

4. Shipley, 35.

5. Shipley, 36.

6. Shipley, 37–38.

1. Quoted in Robert Heizer, The Destruction of the California Indians: A Collection of Documents from the Period 1847 to 1865 in which Are Described Some of the Things That Happened to Some of the Indians of California (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1993), 37, my italics.

2. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 59.

3. Robert Heizer, They Were Only Diggers: A Collection of Articles from California Newspapers, 1851–1866, on Indian and White Relations (Ramona: Ballena Press, 1974), 113–14.

4. Cora Du Bois, 1870 Ghost Dance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 7.

5. Deborah Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 253–84, 259.

6. Marc Nichanian, “Catastrophic Mourning,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 108.

7. Nichanian, “Catastrophic Mourning,” 111.

8. Katherine McKittrick, “Diachronic Loops/Deadweight Tonnage/Bad Made Measure,” Cultural Geographies 23, no. 1 (2015): 11.

9. McKittrick, “Diachronic Loops,” 12.

10. Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 18.

11. McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” 19.

12. McKittrick, 23.

13. If there is any doubt that such structures remain the same, Sandy Grande, in an excellent piece titled “Aging, Precarity, and the Struggle for Indigenous Elsewheres” (International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 31, no. 3 [2018]: 168–76), discusses the financialization of aging and other “social ills” through social impact bonds that allow governments to harness private capital to fund social programs in which investors invest money and receive dividends based on rates of success, on things such as recidivism.

14. Nichanian, “Catastrophic Mourning,” 110.

15. Dian Million, “Intense Dreaming: Theories, Narratives, and Our Search for Home,” The American Indian Quarterly 3, no. 3 (2011): 313–33, 36.

16. Nichanian, “Catastrophic Mourning,” 114.

17. See Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).

18. Quoted in Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 88–89.

19. Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 3 (1984): 467–97.

20. I take up this issue in the next chapter.

21. Taussig, “Culture of Terror,” 468.

22. Taussig, 468.

23. Taussig, 469. Taussig, the anthropologist, predictably excludes the healer’s name.

24. Taussig, “Violence and Resistance in the Americas: The Legacy of Conquest,” in The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), 44.

25. Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021).

26. Stephen Best, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018), 2.

27. Million, Therapeutic Nations. See introduction.

28. Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion. See previous chapter.

29. Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994): 147–61.

30. David Lloyd, “Ngūgī: Decolonizing the Curriculum,” in Ngūgī in the American Imperium, ed. Timothy J. Reiss (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2021).

31. Related concepts to writing destruction: Marc Nichanian’s writing catastrophe; Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation; Christina Sharpe’s in the wake; Maurice Blanchot’s writing of disaster; Deborah Miranda’s writing at/from the end of the world; Giorgio Agamben’s remnants of Auschwitz; Sara Dowling’s translingual poetics; and Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature.

32. There is a venerable tradition of anthologies of the destruction of California Indians. Such collections of archival documents, compiled in order to sketch an image of a topic, constitute a genre that produces what Michel Foucault, in his meditation on the archive of criminality calls a “kind of herbarium.” Michel Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” in The Essential Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (New York: New Press, 2003). Decidedly not books of history, these collections are, following Saidiya Hartman, “a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body” (“Venus,” 2). A small sample of titles include Robert Heizer, The Destruction of California Indians (1974); Heizer, They Were Only Diggers: A Collection of Articles from California Newspapers, 1851–1866, on Indian and White Relations (1974); Heizer and John E. Mills, The Four Ages of Tsurai: A Documentary History of the Indian Village on Trinidad Bay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952); Alan J. Almquist and Heizer, The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Clifford Trafzer and Joel Hyer, Exterminate Them! Written Accounts of the Murder, Rape, and Enslavement of Native Americans During the California Gold Rush (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999); and Madley’s nearly two-hundred-page-long eight appendices to An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2017).

33. These questions bear on more fundamental questions about the referential and/or performative dimensions of the phrase California Indian as well as literature, not to mention existence.

34. See Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); and Gerald Vizenor, “Penenative Rumors,” in Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2000).

35. Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2013), e176.

36. Miranda, Bad Indians, e171.

37. Miranda, e132.

38. Miranda, e50.

39. Miranda, e101. See the section “Juan Justo’s Bones.”

40. Miranda, e129, e132.

41. Janice Gould, Earthquake Weather (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), xii.

42. Deborah Miranda, Indian Cartography (Greenfield: Greenfield Review Press, 1998).

43. Elaine Marks, “Lesbian Intertextuality,” in Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts, ed. Elaine Marks and George Stambolian (New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), 370.

44. Gould, Earthquake Weather, 7.

45. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 149.

46. Miranda, Bad Indians, e117.

47. From Deborah Miranda, “Old Territory. New Maps,” in The Zen of La Llorona (Cromer, Eng.: Salt Publishing, 2005).

48. Marks, “Lesbian Intertextuality,” 372.

49. Marks, 366.

50. From Janice Gould, “Six Sonnets: Crossing the West,” in Doubters and Dreamers (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011).

51. From Gould, “Six Sonnets.”

52. Miranda, “Old Territory.”

53. From Miranda, “Old Territory.”

54. Miranda.

55. Miranda.

56. Miranda.

57. Mary Louise Pratt as cited in Mishuana Goeman, Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 2.

58. Goeman, Mark My Words, 3, 4.

59. For examples, see Simpson, “The State Is a Man”; Risling Baldy, We Are Dancing for You; Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); and Paula Gunn Allen, Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Source Book (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).

60. Goeman, Mark My Words, 7.

61. Miranda, Bad Indians, e117.

62. Miranda, e117.

63. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013).

64. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 139.

65. Miranda, Bad Indians, e131–32, my italics.

66. Miranda, e195–96.

67. Miranda, e197.

68. Rei Terada, “Impasse as a Figure of Political Space,” Comparative Literature 72, no. 2 (2020): 146.

69. Terada, “Impasse,” 147.

70. Miranda, Bad Indians, e114, e125.

71. Miranda, e187.

72. Miranda, e136.

73. Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–70.

74. De la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics,” 343.

75. María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given: Racial Geographies Across Mexico and the United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), e57–e58, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1215/9780822374923.

76. Saldaña-Portillo, Indian Given, e43–e44.

77. Saldaña-Portillo, e46–e48.

78. Saldaña-Portillo, e58–e59.

79. Saldaña-Portillo, e59–e61.

80. On the point about a presupposed humanity, see Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); on retroactive attribution of ownership, see Robert Nichols, “Theft Is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession,” Political Theory 46, no. 1 (2017): 3–28.

81. Elizabeth Povinelli, “The Governance of the Prior,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 1 (2011): 13–30.

82. Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).

83. Echoes Blanchot’s definition of literature in Space of Literature.

84. Miranda, Bad Indians, e119.

85. Miranda, e118.

86. Miranda, e58–e59.

87. Miranda, e3.

88. Miranda, e136–46.

89. Miranda, e138.

90. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 19.

91. Miranda, e27.

92. Miranda published several essays based on her engagement with Meadows’s archive and references a planned book, The Hidden Stories of Isabel Meadows, in one of the essays.

93. Miranda, “‘They Were Tough Those Old Women Before Us’: The Power of Gossip in Isabel Meadows’s Narratives,” Biography 39, no. 3 (2016): 373–401, 374.

94. Deborah Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 253–84, 255.

95. Miranda, “Extermination of the Joyas,” 265.

96. Miranda, 256–57.

97. Miranda, 255.

98. See Dorothy Lee, “Linguistic Reflections of Wintu Thought,” International Journal of American Linguistics 10, no. 4 (1944): 181–97.

99. Kim Tallbear, The Critical Polyamorist (blog), http://www.criticalpolyamorist.com.

100. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?,” Mississippi Review 11, no. 3 (1983): 26.

101. Miranda, Bad Indians, e99–101.

102. Miranda, e100. Emphasis added.

103. Miranda, e100.

104. Miranda, e100.

105. Miranda, e101.

106. Miranda, e101.

107. Vine Deloria, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden, Col.: Fulcrum Publishing, 1992), 62.

108. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), 89.

109. Lloyd, “Ngūgī,” 327.

110. Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind, 89.

111. See both Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind; and Lloyd, “Ngūgī.”

112. Lloyd, “Ngūgī,” 332.

113. Miranda, Bad Indians, e119.

114. Miranda, e172.

115. Audra Simpson, “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice,’ and Colonial Citizenship,” Junctures 9 (2007): 67–80.

116. The two poems discussed in this section, Deborah Miranda’s “Dear Friend” and Janice Gould’s “Ancestors,” were shared with me by Deborah Miranda while I was seeking permissions for the other poems discussed in this chapter. Gould’s “Ancestors” is going to be published in a forthcoming, posthumous memoir being edited by a number of Gould’s associates, including her partner, Mimi Wheatwind, and Deborah Miranda. “Dear Friend” was published in Miranda’s Altar for Broken Things: poems (Kansas City: BkMk Press, 2020).

1. This condition of obscurity of the catastrophe has undergone revision recently with California governor Gavin Newsom’s 2019 executive order apologizing to California Indians and the creation of the Truth and Healing Council.

2. In my own case, this access is mediated through the massive salvage ethnographic survey that took place in California during the early twentieth century.

3. LA186.042. I take Frank Day’s words from the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, an online archive hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, https://cla.berkeley.edu.

4. Rebecca Dobkins, “From Vanishing to Visible: Maidu Indian Arts and the Uses of Tradition” (PhD diss., UC Berkeley, 1995), 119. I cite from this dissertation because, while Dobkins has a few short publications drawn from its materials, the bulk of it remains unpublished. Due to the paucity of commentary on Day’s work and the extensive and Dobkins’s exceptional research, this dissertation is one of the best resources for his work and life.

5. LA186.034. Konkow and later Concow are colonial transliterations of Kóyo⦁mkàwi.

6. Day’s images depicting violence against women deserve special consideration, which I do not have space to address here.

7. Peter Nabokov, “Pacific Western Traders,” News from Native California 25, no. 2 (2011/2012).

8. Lucy Lippard, “Frank Day: Inside Place, Inside Art,” Museum Anthropology 24, no. 2–3 (2001): 30.

9. Louis Marin, “Opacity and Transparence in Pictorial Representation,” Est: grunnlagsproblemer I estetisk forskning 2 (1991): 55–66.

10. I borrow and adapt this notion of refusal from Audra Simpson’s important concept of “ethnographic refusal”; see more detailed discussion in the introduction and chapter 1.

11. Marin, “Opacity and Transparence,” 57.

12. Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

13. Nichanian, “On the Archive.”

14. Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 221. Jodi Byrd begins the conclusion to her book Transit of Empire on Zombie imperialism, with an epigraph by Jean Baudrillard: “The apocalypse is the end of secrecy. Literally, it is the discovery, the revelation when everything is said. It is the end of metaphors and secrets. The nuclear bomb is the Sun cast on the Earth, of the end of the Sun as a metaphor, as distance. It is the Sun materialized on Earth: the end.”

15. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geofrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

16. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 2.

17. Lyotard, 4.

18. Lyotard, 6.

19. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics, ed. and trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014).

20. Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University, 2009), 98.

21. Jean-Luc Nancy, quoted in Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, 102.

22. Sascha Scott, “Awa Tsireh and the Art of Subtle Resistance,” Art Bulletin 95, no. 4 (2013): 597–622.

23. Frank LaPena, quoted in Dobkins et al., Memory and Imagination: The Legacy of Maidu Indian Artist Frank Day (Oakland: Oakland Museum of California, 1997), 29.

24. Dobkins, “From Vanishing to Visible,” 93.

25. Dobkins, 97–98.

26. LA186.013.

27. Dobkins, “From Vanishing to Visible,” 115.

28. Dobkins, 115.

29. Dobkins, 92.

30. Roland Dixon, quoted in Dobkins, 92.

31. See Dorothy Lee, “Linguistic Reflections of Wintu Thought,” International Journal of American Linguistics 10, no. 4 (1944): 181–97.

32. Lowell Bean, “Power and Its Applications in Native California,” Journal of California Anthropology 2, no. 1 (1975): 28.

33. LA186.005.

34. LA186.015.

35. Dobkins et al., Memory and Imagination, 28.

36. The neutral is the space of indetermination. Theories of the image often indicate a sort of vanishing point or disappearance of the image itself in its very function of representing and also its power to make disappear that which it represents by risking replacing it. The neutral is often used as a way to indicate this space of indetermination and nonmeaning that images, in their difference from what they represent, evade by creating meaning through separation, but it also points to the fact that everything does disappear, leaving only the image. Day’s paintings, for me, operate in this space of the neutral in complex ways related to his conception of preservation through image.

37. Transcribed explanation of the painting from Rebecca Dobkins’s dissertation archive, provided by Dobkins.

38. In his article “Stratifying the West: Clarence King, Timothy O’Sullivan, and History” (American Art 29, no. 2 [2015]: 34–41), Jason Weems notes that more than the epistemological effect of making what is obstinately invisible visible, stratigraphy makes it possible to visualize time differently, connecting it to a much more shallow sense of human history in relation to the catastrophist rhythms of geological eras. It also enables both intellectual and economic resource extraction, which together facilitated colonial expansion.

39. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 48–49.

40. LA186.031.

41. Kim TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and the New Materialisms,” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, ed. Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017), 181.

42. For a historical analysis of the slow banishment of other than human beings from Indigenous political worlds to the realm of belief, see Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–70.

43. TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary,” 191.

44. TallBear, 180.

45. See Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).

46. TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary,” 185.

47. TallBear, 189.

48. Vine Deloria Jr. quoted in TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary,” 188.

49. See David Shorter, “Spirituality,” in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199858897.013.20.

50. Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), e12, https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1215/9780822373810.

51. Povinelli, Geontologies, e26.

52. Lee, “Linguistic Reflections,” 186.

53. LA186.031. Day claims that Tay⦁yee is an older name for Kóyo⦁mkàwi.

54. LA186.024.

55. LA186.042.

56. LA186.005.

57. LA186.026.

58. LA186.009.

59. LA186.005.

60. In discussions of audio recording technology, a distinction is sometimes made between a commodified form of presence that comes about through production quality, something that encourages consumption, and the generally edited-out presence of the body and/or environment, which ambient and experimental projects will seek to capture. But at a technical level, the recording of sound and the nearly unlimited capabilities of copying and disseminating it produces cut the relationship to the site and moment of performance or necessity of being there. The sense of presence that Day is asserting is intimately linked to the song-stories he is relaying, which always tend toward and indicate an origin, but one only known through a resonance that dissipates and brings out of phase through dissonance the play of absence and presence that western metaphysics continues to return to and attempts to escape.

61. LA186.034.

62. LA186.034.

63. LA186.034.

64. Gerald Vizenor, “Anishinaabe Pictomyths,” in Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 180.

65. See Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theater,” trans. Thomas G. Neumiller, TDR: The Drama Review 16, no. 3 (1972): 22–26.

66. LA186.042.

67. LaPena, “Frank Day, a Remembrance,” in Dobkins et al., Memory and Imagination, 30. From a description of the painting: “In the practice of Maidu dance, dancers experience spiritual and physical transformation, becoming representative of the spirit of the animal they impersonate in their regalia. In this painting, a deer dancer leaves his footprints, as well as the deer’s hoof prints, in the earth as he dances. He is joined by a centipede, which similarly leaves marks upon the earth. This toto, a frequently performed dance, is taking place at Bloomer Hill, the area where Frank Day’s father Billy had a round house” (84). LaPena further comments: “While the deer dancer begins to cause the mountains and valleys to take shape, one can see that it is his own dancing feet and the deer toe staffs that are helping break down and shape the earth and stone. As the pressure from the earth escapes, it is seen that a cloud personifying some ‘being’ is formed in the sky” (103n47).

68. LaPena, “Frank Day, a Remembrance,” 83. The wind snake is a creature that Day explains in detail in one of his recordings, discussed later in this chapter.

69. Povinelli, Geontologies, e63.

70. Dobkins et al., Memory and Imagination, 83.

71. For one powerful example, see Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film Naked Spaces—Living Is Round (1985).

72. Lee, “Linguistic Reflections,” 182.

73. LA186.046.

74. Letter to Rebecca Dobkins, 1/12/93, as cited in her dissertation.

75. Dobkins, “From Vanishing to Visible,” 140.

76. Dobkins, 143.

77. LaPena, “Frank Day, a Remembrance,” 29.

78. LaPena, 28.

79. LaPena, 28.

80. Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Limited, Inc., ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman and Samuel Weber (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1.

1. This includes debts unpaid between different groups of people outside of Native communities. “The Chinese stole some cattle and accused the People of doing it. The White men then hung four people. The People never liked the Chinese because of this. They felt as though the Chinese owed them four.” Coyote Man, The Destruction of the People (Berkeley: Brother William Press, 1973), 87. Here we see the genocidal logics of racial competition in relation to white supremacy but from a different angle of perception through a Maidu calculus of violence that treats Chinese migrants as a tribe. Four of their people would have settled the dispute.

2. Coyote Man, Destruction, 3–4.

3. Coyote Man, 1.

4. Tommy Pico, IRL (Austin: Birds, 2016).

5. Pico, IRL.

6. Tommy Pico, interview by Tobias Carroll, “‘I Said What I Had to Say’: An Interview with Tommy Pico,” Vol. 1 Brooklyn, June 14, 2017, https://vol1brooklyn.com/2017/06/14/i-said-what-i-had-to-say-an-interview-with-tommy-pico/.

7. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 16.

8. Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xvi.

9. Eric Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art: Tradition, Media, and Technological Horizons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 143.

10. Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art, 144.

11. Gail Tremblay, “Issues in Contemporary American Indian Art: An Iroquois Example,” Native Case Studies, The Evergreen State College, https://nativecases.evergreen.edu/sites/default/files/case-studies/TremblayIssuesincontAmIndian_Art.pdf, 5.

12. Michaels, Bad Aboriginal Art, 147.

13. Trinh, Woman, Native, Other, 150.

14. Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), 98–104.

15. Doyle, 103.

16. Dian Million, Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013).

17. Doyle, Hold It Against Me, 103.

18. Doyle, 103–4.

19. David Lloyd, Under Representation: The Racial Regime of Aesthetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), e26.

20. Lloyd, e212.

21. Lloyd, e35–e37.

22. Lloyd, e249.

23. Pico, IRL.