Introduction
Researching
My great-great-grandmother, Susie Evans, wore a locket that contained an image of Kintpuash, a.k.a. Captain Jack, the insurgent leader of the Modoc who fought the U.S. military to a standstill in the lava beds of Northern California. Kintpuash was later convicted by a kangaroo court and executed, his skull stripped of flesh and shipped to the Smithsonian. She also wore a bullet on a chain around her neck. The bullet, the family story goes, was from a missed shot by a U.S. soldier who nearly killed Susie. Susie survived two massacres by the U.S. government: one when she was living with the Modoc (she herself was Achumawi/Pit River) and the other during the Snake War, a guerrilla war fought by a coalition of tribes against the U.S. invaders, at the so-called Battle of Infernal Caverns in northeastern California (near Likely, for those familiar with the area). Until the day she died, Susie insisted that Kintpuash was her leader. In that bullet lies existence for many California Indians: the luck of a missed shot. In the image of Kintpuash lies our future, an end to colonialism mediated by our relations to the dead (Kintpuash, as already mentioned, was also a ghost dancer).
The Infernal Caverns, to this day, are off-limits to California Indian people who might want to go pay respects to the dead—left to decay in the caves by the U.S. military—or to bury them; during the battle, U.S. soldiers pushed a boulder in front of the entrance to try to bury the survivors alive, but the surviving Indians escaped through an unknown outlet. The dead remain there. Today, the caves are surrounded by private land owned by ranchers who have a distinct anti-Indigenous agenda and refuse access. The “battle field” is, however, a California Historical Landmark, complete with a memorial to the soldiers who died, and anyone seeking to pay respects to the deceased settlers is allowed entrance. My cousin, Chag Lowry, has been working diligently to gain access to the caves to no avail.
I don’t offer this story as an entrance to the personal. The weight of a boulder has made that impossible. After all, it is not my story. It is Susie’s. It has been passed down through family but bears the marks of such a colonial, genealogical formation. Like the ancestors “buried” in the Infernal Caverns, the personal in me remains in deep limbo. Neither buried nor exposed, it is nonetheless off-limits. This relation to the dead depersonalizes us, brings us into their challenging company. There is also no folklore or ethnography here—merely the praxis of survival for those who escaped out the back door. This story is not for consumption or the accumulation of knowledge but undermines these things. What must remain of this story is a missed bullet and an unending resistance to the U.S. empire. Survival and a Fuck You until the end, until we surpass the end, into the infinite. Nothing more. Nothing less. Out of respect for Susie, that is what I hope my words are: a bullet and resistance/refusal/failure of the worst, most infinite kind. That is my family legacy, one that includes white settlers as well as other California Indian tribes (Mountain Maidu and Washoe) and other stories that I keep from you or, as in chapter 2, tell to intervene in the dominant discourses.
Ethnographic Refusal
Audra Simpson’s well-known concept of “ethnographic refusal” plays no small part in how I position this story and in the politics of research it performs. Simpson’s own performance of the concept, beginning with her essay “On Ethnographic Refusal” and extending into her book Mohawk Interruptus, operates as a chiasmus in the form of a refusal of ethnography and an ethnography of refusal (of the settler state). It is a tactical and textual response to the discursive situation of knowledge production about Indigenous peoples, which, as Simpson asserts, is an imperative of empire. Through techniques of knowing, the settler state’s arms of knowledge production reduce the complex social and political formations of Indigenous worlds to consumable and knowable units of “culture” that stand in for territorial spaces and are easily abstracted from them. Anthropology, in particular, plays a material role in translating Indigenous worlds into imperial relationships, even going so far as to attempt to represent Indigenous peoples by proxy or to ventriloquize Indigenous voices. As Simpson says, “anthropology has imagined itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonized.”1
Following in the footsteps of other Indigenous scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr. and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, with her concept of ethnographic refusal, Simpson crystallizes research and its writing into sites of significant anticolonial struggle. These sites of struggle put peoples’ very existences and interpretive worlds on the line. Simpson describes a rupture that took place as peoples “left their own spaces of self-definition and became ‘Indigenous,’” separating these new definitions from their embeddedness in their worlds.2 This separation caused by being defined as Indigenous occurs because “‘Indigenous’ is a category that did not explicitly state or theorize the shared experience of having their lands alienated from them or that they would be understood in particular ways.”3 In other words, culture, as an imperial translational tool, depoliticized Indigenous social and political relationships, separating them from the newly minted category “nature/resource” against which the settler colony defines human. It also depoliticized the material practices of colonization and genocide, likewise naturalized and caught in the rationalizing and universalizing category of “Indigenous.” These effects are made possible, for Simpson, by what she calls the “violence of form” of western knowledge production, which “might be an innocent tale of differential access to power, of differing translations of events, were there a level field of interpretation within which to assert those different translations.”4 A deeply destructive mode of colonial un/knowing, culture and the violence of form render the very interpretive worlds of Indigenous peoples nonexistent. Absent an interpretive field, Indigenous peoples’ primary strategy is a refusal to participate in the translational process. This refusal operates at both the material and semiotic levels.
Whereas Simpson’s use and analysis of ethnographic refusal as a strategy (and tactic) has been interpreted by many as asserting a strong form of agency by further separating the political from the cultural and reinforcing the sovereign subject, I prefer to read it as operating in the discursive entanglements of representation Simpson details, outside the political and cultural divide, in the ambiguous space created by the chiasmus—ethnography of refusal and refusal of ethnography—that admits its own failure from the beginning by its own strained logic. How can one write a refusal of one’s own writing? And do so without it being recaptured in the dominant discourse as a mode of ethical reform of the discipline itself? Caught in the dilemma of what Simpson describes as “discursive wrestling” at the site of representational violence that enacts material dispossession, refusal becomes an opening onto absented interpretive worlds in a way that doesn’t pass through the abstractive and extractive categories of culture and Indigeneity as conceived by western humanist colonialism, that outdoes both the cultural and the political and their mutual exclusions. In discussing the impact of the Indian Act on her Kahnawake community, their response to attempts to control the terms of membership/citizenship by the Canadian state, and the discursive struggle involved in creating an ethnography about the issue, Simpson asks, “How does one write about this or analyze what is so clearly offensive to the anthropological sensibilities of access, of replicable results, in some ways of ‘fairness,’ and reconcile all this with the plight of those who are struggling every day to maintain what little they have left? And when they are struggling so clearly with the languages and analytics of a foreign culture that occupies their semantic and material space, and naturalizes this occupation through history-writing and the very analytics that are used to know them?”5 Noting, reflexively, that the Indigenous scholar’s work relies upon empire as well, Simpson’s refusal of/as research touches on failure and the impersonal in a way that resonates with a California Indian metaphysic of luck and weak power, as I discuss in chapters 4 and 5.
Refusal is not critique. In Simpson’s ethnography, refusal is that which is “arrived at at the very limit of discourse.”6 It is the coming to a specific territory, which she locates in “the space of method, critique, and construction,” yet not of it and certainly not for it. In this antagonistic representational space, the struggle is over “the making of claims and staking of limits,” claims and limits that convey “a tripleness, a quadrupleness, to consciousness and an endless play” of positions that includes determinations of who or what gets to know certain things and how.7 An obstinate freedom through a negotiated and yet determined drawing of limits, it is also a relational and often fraught play that takes place on the surface before your very eyes and in a confrontation without resolution: “I am me, I am what you think I am and I am who this person to the right of me thinks I am and you are all full of shit and then maybe I will tell you to your face.”8 Such a notion of refusal rails against recognition, which Simpson defines as “the political practice, rooted in philosophical formula of seeing, unencumbered, what and who is before you—seeing as one ought to be seen, in a way that is consistent with one’s sense of self and property.”9 For Simpson, this notion of recognition operates conceptually and materially by enforcing dispossession and then granting a certain “freedom” through legal tricks: consent and citizenship. Simpson calls this maneuver “the ruse of consent,” and it, like culture, operates through abstractive and extractive methods to separate out individuals from their embeddedness in worlds, subjecting Indigenous people individually to modes of legal violence through the signing of agreements and their being assumed to (passively) consent to the law as the only path to “justice.” Along with anthropological representation, these are the conditions for the deeply unequal scene of articulation that Simpson confronts with refusal and its violence of form.
But refusal has many faces, as Simpson implies by engaging a politics without easy answers. In her essay “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of Refusal,” Simpson embraces the difficulty implied by her concept of refusal; notably, she puts the U.S. and Canadian border, which she discusses in terms of Indigenous border crossers, in relation with the U.S. and Mexican border through the work of Gilberto Rosas. Rosas’s book Barrio Libre attends to the movements of youth who cross the border due to neoliberal conditions of capital, trade agreements, and the imposition of a colonial border, and who are confronted with militarized violence, passing through sewers, across brutal, life-ending deserts.10 Simpson summarizes: “They are walking through indeterminacy, through pain, refusing to die or to let go of a sense of themselves as a collective that does this sort of thing. In doing so, they inhabit a posture of profound self-determination even in conditions of danger and precarity, where a state perceives them to be criminal in their very act of movement.”11 Simpson sees the assemblage of a collective sense of freedom found by these youth through pain and difficulty, the hard stories Rosas tells, and the “context and scene of the youths’ articulation” as a mode of difficult refusal akin to the struggle with and through sovereignty she and her people face.12
The indeterminacy of refusal opens it up to other differential and imbricated understandings. Trinh T. Minh-ha, for instance, has theorized the complex interplay of refusal in relation to refugees as those who, having been refused, having been designated a tide of human refuse, refuse the terms of their recognition and incorporation into national and state institutions: “the only way to survive is to refuse. Refuse to become an integratable element. Refuse to allow names arrived at transitionally to become stabilized. In other words, refuse to take for granted the naming process. To this end, the intervals between refuge and refuse, refused and refuse, or even more importantly between refuse and refuse itself, are constantly played out.”13 Similarly, Moten and Harney offer two constructions that draw out this interval between refuse and refuse in order to differentiate, without necessarily separating, it from institutionalized critique. The first is to refuse that which has been refused to you in order to find/found a new sociality among all those who have likewise been refused, across and by way of the two refusals.14 The second is to refuse refusal itself, that is, to refuse the choice to refuse what has been offered as possible by the state, akin to Simpson’s ruse of consent. As they describe, “the first right” is “the right to refuse rights.”15 This exit strategy from the position of critique, through the interval between refuse and refuse, is a radical passivity and indifference toward institutions and the subjectivities they invest and depend on. The exit nullifies the meanings accreted through opposition, nullifies the play of recognition that necessarily determines the critical relation as one against and, therefore, stealthily for. What refusal is, then, is an ethics of disloyalty that attempts to outplay its own co-optation by the state in the form of critique and professionalization. Refusing to refuse seems to me to be an accurate description of the postapocalyptic conditions in which Indigenous and other communities offer anticolonial resistance, refuse to take part in a system that absorbs resistance, fail at being (intransitively), simply fail and continue to fail by failing.
The indetermination of the chiasmus—refuse research/research as refusal—opened up by Simpson as a response to the violence of form resonates with the Ghost Dance’s refusal of violence as a collective mode of study, another chiasmus balanced on the preposition of (a refusal of violence/the violence of refusal). And it participates in the politics of a complete withdrawal from the colonial system (because, as both Fanon and Walter Benjamin have argued, the tempered use of such tactics, such as a limited workers’ strike, falls too easily into the mode of reform and therefore of a critical operation that serves the state and its ends16). Ethnographic refusal, in this sense, is not a corrective of representational practices in anthropology but a refusal of the project of anthropology as the handmaiden of colonialism, part of the intellectual arm of the state, even in its most critical modes. For both Fanon and Benjamin, the instrumental strike (for better wages and such) is an expression of a certain violence wielded by the strikers but used in a way that fortifies the colonial legal system by redirecting revolutionary energies toward reform, hence its protected legality (similar to the professional critic). Like the ghost dancers before them, both Fanon and Benjamin advocate instead a totalizing and therefore noninstrumental undoing of the system. What needs to be worked out is what an absolute refusal of the colonial knowledge production industry looks like. Refusal in this sense isn’t only directed toward the self (even a collective “self”) in the sovereignty of the autonomous subject, an instrumental and oppositional relation, but facilitates the failure of the system that relies on such subjects—and therefore the failure of subjectivity in the western colonial humanist formation. It is an ongoing revolt and reassembling of the social through a more collective orientation outside of the system, with and through the destruction, in this case in the violence of form and the dilemma it presents. Research as a continuation of the destruction is a way to respond to this dilemma by annihilating the ends of the violence of form.
Story
I began this section on research with story, because story operates in the anticolonial space of interaction between oppositional research and interrelational space. It is also a significant site of Indigenous intellectual production, and has been since time immemorial. Story is not the colonizer’s narrative and operates within the weak force of antivaluation described by Moten and offers a way to annihilate the ends of the violence of form described by Simpson. Outside of colonial and imperial formations, story is the path that research takes. Like the Ghost Dance, story has been ongoing. One is already in it. In many ways it can’t be escaped. Story grasps at the point of the absence of power. It is not structured to allow for accumulation or centralization, whether in the form of the author’s identity or ego, the edifice of truth, or the force of action. Story always operates in the Creator’s absence, offering a weak I at best. Who tells the story? Who knows? It belongs to no one. Story is never complete; it is always a perpetual beginning, perpetually at midnight. It is nocturnal, in the dead of winter, even when uttered during the day or during other seasons or when it takes place in the daytime. It is a destruction that never arrives, always impending, leaves us on the edge of our seats, even when it is boring. The closest thing to story is prophecy. This is because story is untimely, always improper. Even when on the nose, it holds within it a certain inaccuracy, and when wrong a certain truth. It shifts our gaze, oscillating, never settling. Story doesn’t belong or encourage belonging. It un-belongs us. Removes us from the here and now, from place. Story is without value. Stories cannot be compared, only told again and again, told differently. All the effort, skill, and knowledge that go into telling a story derive from ignorance. It is the nullification of knowledge, not its accumulation or overvaluing. It has a weak, improper form, headless and tailless.17 It is the opposite of ownership, the need for security and stability, the need to know, to be sure, to take and give account. In the telling, it sweeps these away. It is impersonal. It connects the inside to the outside in a profound ambiguity. There’s always something uncomfortable or even intolerable about story even while it connects us through its inherently collective form. It seethes. We can never know where it comes from. It forgoes the certainties of the empirical sciences that police the boundaries of truth and fiction, nor is it the critical overcoming of this division, which always carries the opposition within it. It is outside of this division, indifferent to it. While it is collective, it is not instrumental; it doesn’t consider the reader or assume an established community of readers. It doesn’t derive its force from preestablished language and its web of meanings. It slides by and under these. It doesn’t assign places. It doesn’t seek to be in the place of truth. It is the very force of communication itself, the communal; it does not communicate. Nothing gets done. It is a weak power that undoes the binary between power and impossibility, holding them together in their extreme separation and undoing them by their common meaning (through their opposition). Story operates as an enigmatic violence that acknowledges the violence of accumulation, of the center, and mitigates this violence through decentering, through distributing it among the listeners, the beings addressed and included in story, the very materiality of connection, as the very means of sociality and interrelation, to ensure that no power coalesces. This violent liberation from power through its suspension is both the means of communication and what is communicated in story, to be repeated again and again. It is the restoration of indeterminacy. While human power accumulates and builds, centers, is here and now, is in conformity with the laws of action, story has little force. Its force is a negation of this power of the human. It is, in form, nothing but refusal and thereby a failure, which is the greatest accomplishment. Story is the absence of here and now where what happens does not come to pass as an event. What happens does not happen, does not become past. It rather recurs unendingly, in both its and our horror, confusion, and uncertainty. The force of story is not just telling but also untelling what has been told and retelling in the wake of destruction, as destruction, pushed past its own limit.
Frameworks
The major frameworks of this book and the research it performs are the critique of the human and the writing of disaster as they intersect and relate to California Indian studies. Operating within the imperial logics described by Simpson and a politics of reconciliation with the state, the dominance of anthropological and archaeological research, alongside the institutional historiographic focus on California as a “case” of genocide (and to a lesser extent the domestication of California Indian art and literature), call for a dismantling of the field as it has been known and a turn to the communally determined modes of study that make up another stream that has always been here. This is a hard turn, as evidenced by the Ghost Dance as a mode of study that calls for an anticolonial absolute.
Indigenous Inhumanities engages the ongoing strategic and relational emergence of the Ghost Dance as an anticolonial and postapocalyptic response to the destruction. As a form of endurance and radical refusal/failure, the Ghost Dance indicates that our ancestors were not only well aware of this ending but sought to confront it with a refusal of its violence and continue after it and to do so collectively and in relation to the dead. This continuation has made its way, often surreptitiously, into our knowledge and artistic production, as well as into our political and social forms. As a practice of dying without death and therefore of exceeding the human, the Ghost Dance opens onto an expanded politics and a corresponding expanded literature and poetics. To trace these expansions, I attend to the figure of the inhuman, which I locate at the intersection of the critique of the human and writing disaster. A turn to the dead, the turn to the inhuman forces that lie outside of human control; it is an abdication of control that seeks a more difficult freedom, less human, less individual, less “alive.” We do not and cannot fully know the extent of these forces.
Critique of the Human
The critique of the human in Indigenous studies has a line of continuity going back to time immemorial. It’s a basic principle of Indigenous thought and relationality without necessarily being formulated, but, in response to the imposition of western humanism, Vine Deloria Jr. has more recently described what he calls an American Indian metaphysics, in which “the world, and all its possible experiences, constitute a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything [has] the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because, ultimately everything is related.”18 Vanessa Watts calls this principle “place-thought,” the embodied “network in which humans and nonhumans relate, translate, and articulate their agency” and “a theoretical understanding of the world via a physical embodiment.”19 Place-thought as a form of knowing and theory is not limited to human beings but emanates from a “non-distinctive place where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated.”20 The position of the human in each instance is mediated by the specific relations that more-than-human communities have with each other, so it is difficult (if not unethical) to generalize. Nonetheless, the violent imperial imposition of the western colonial process of humanization has brought together a coalition of Indigenous scholars from multiple communities and their nonhuman kin to contest this homogenization. In a humanist “reality,” “the idea of ‘society’ has revolved around human beings and their special place in the world, given their capacity for reason and language,” relegating Indigenous knowledge at best to a form of belief at odds with that reality.21 In contrast according to Watts, “habitats and ecosystems are better understood as societies from an Indigenous point of view; meaning they have ethical structures, inter-species treaties and agreements, and further their ability to interpret, understand and implement.”22
Marisol de la Cadena, writing about Indigenous social movements in Bolivia, describes how demands from these movements on states seem to short-circuit political discourse and understandings, whether progressive or conservative. This because the notion of politics that operates in most states is western humanist through and through. Building on the work of Bruno Latour, de la Cadena details how the social-political worlds of Indigenous peoples, occupied by “powerful earth-beings,” as she calls them, were expelled from the concept of politics via a split in western metaphysics between politics—the realm of human sociality and governance—and science—the mode of knowing that humans applied to the nonhuman world to control its forces. Such a split rendered Indigenous social forms nonsensical and illegible and initiated the translational practice of researching Indigenous peoples through “culture” described by Simpson. As de la Cadena writes, “Ethnographic works were precisely where these practices belonged—not in politics.”23
This translational practice through ethnographic representation has given western thought access to Indigenous ways of being and forms of knowing abstracted from material conditions. In the introduction to his book Magical Criticism titled “What Are Savages For?,” Christopher Bracken describes the strange movement of suppression of and desire for the “savage” as a theoretical movement by which the figure of the “savage” through translation and sublation founds radical western critique. Summarized by J. G. Frazer as being “unable to discriminate clearly between words and things,”24 the “savage” inability to appropriately order the world, all the inappropriate relationships, is simultaneously justification for genocidal violence and the hidden source of the west’s most adventurous thought. Bracken’s ironic psychoanalysis of western philosophy and its obsession with the “savage philosopher” exposes this ambivalence (intentionally ironic because Sigmund Freud is one of the main contributors to this discourse). For Bracken, the association occurs through a projection of Indigenous peoples’ thought and ways of being into the past as fictional intellectual forebears of western philosophy, a project best realized by ethnography/ethnology, particularly of the salvage variety. The translation follows from Indigenous people first having been judged as diabolical: “Writing of his voyage to Quebec in 1608, Samuel de Champlain remarks that it is a fundamental principle among ‘the savages’ of Canada ‘that all the dreams that they have are true.’ Only the ‘Divell’ [devil], however, would cause mortals to confuse the recollection of images from sleep with the perception of objects by waking consciousness.”25 This diabolical interpretive system, based on dream, is understood to be a fundamental error, something that goes wrong from the very beginning, before the beginning begins, an idea taken up by several continental philosophers, perhaps most notably by Friedrich Nietzsche. “For Nietzsche, however, mistaking an ideal for a real connection is not an error that can be corrected by further study. It is the very ‘precondition’ of study.”26 One studies to go awry by following an original disruption. One plays Indian to become a “savage philosopher.” And real Indians become a satanic scare.
Killed for their thoughts and ways of being or disciplined and punished into being “more human,” the “Indian” and its savagery is distinct from the salvageable Native—transmuted through figuration into a “poetic logic” as alternative to and respite from the severe scienticity of western thought since the Enlightenment. The next stage in the developmental history of progressive enlightenment is a return to “magic,” a new communalism, a reenchantment of the world through a violently suppressed thought and ontology, a new but now universal Indigenization, made palatable, tamed, by passing through and being refined by theoretical discourse, mobilized as critique (self-reflexive, no less!). Jodi Byrd makes a similar argument in relation to poststructuralists borrowing from ethnographic representation for alternative social, political, and theoretical formations. Byrd focuses in particular on two figurations of the Indian: Jacques Derrida’s “tattooed savages,” which become the signs of the play of presence and absence that haunts the project of deconstruction; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “Indians without ancestry,” which mark the antigenealogical, asignifying, stateless war machine on a path without memory that operates rhizomatically on the edges of the frontier as site of becoming. Byrd notes the multiple functions of the Indian as a colonial and imperial referent that continues to produce knowledge as well as a theoretical sign through which new energy, “presignifying polyvocality,” is reintroduced into the stale signifying regime of the west.27 “The Indian sign is the field through which poststructuralism makes its intervention, and as a result, this paradigmatic and pathological Indianness cannot be circumvented as a colonialist trace.”28
The ethnographic sign of the Indian travels through reading practices and colonial readerships, making its way into the history of western philosophy as a figure of radical alterity, a counterpoint to the Enlightenment and, as Bracken shows, the means through which it is revived. Along these lines, Byrd notes David Kazanjian’s discussion of the figure of the Indian in the work of Immanuel Kant as one example among too many to list.29 The Indian is the condition for western thought just as Indianness is the condition for U.S. empire. It is, as Byrd quips, “an undeconstructable core within critical theories.”30 The pathways through which western theories transcribe and translate, abstract and absorb Indigenous relations and forms of thought are apparent. Note Bruno Latour’s assertion that actor network theory is a form of anthropology that seeks to know nonhuman actors in ways akin to how cultural anthropology describes Indigenous people;31 the new materialist desire to “reenchant” the material world with a form of quasi-agency;32 the displacement of the human from the central position in animal studies and posthumanism in general. The most explicit example is, perhaps, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s posthumanist anthropology, which seeks to cut out the middleman, with de Castro claiming that anthropology is nothing more nor less than the transcription of Indigenous thought and transformation into concept for its circulation in theory.33 The figure of the Indian serves for de Castro as a site for “the re-establishment of a certain connection between anthropology and philosophy via a new consideration of the transdisciplinary problematic that was constituted at the imprecise frontier between structuralism and poststructuralism during that brief moment of effervescence and generosity of thought that immediately preceded the conservative revolution.”34 This is a clear doubled trajectory of anthropological and philosophical reading of the Indian: “it is absolutely essential to recall what Taylor (2004: 97) has stressed are ‘the Amerindian foundations of structuralism,’” which de Castro seeks to link to the “dissident structuralism” of Deleuze.35 And if there was any doubt as to the orientation of this project, de Castro clarifies that it is in the end a disciplinary one: “But in the end, anthropology is what is at stake. The intention behind this tour through our recent past is in effect far more prospective than nostalgic, the aspiration being to awaken certain possibilities and glimpse a break in the clouds through which our discipline could imagine, at least for itself qua intellectual project, a denouement (to dramatize things a bit) other than mere death by asphyxia.”36 This last part about the discipline dying from asphyxia is in response to what de Castro sees as the threat of critique of the representational history of anthropology, one that caused the discipline to imagine its own death, which would have been an actual anticolonial movement.37 Instead, de Castro envisions anthropology metamorphizing into the ideal of anthropology as “a permanent exercise in the decolonization of thought” and offers “a proposal for another means besides philosophy for the creation of concepts.”38 One wonders if Indigenous people ever get to create concepts on our own.
Any number of Indigenous scholars have recently pointed out the irony if not the audacity of this “nonhuman turn.” This critical attention ranges from Zoe Todd’s noticing the similarities between Latour’s claim that climate is a matter of “common cosmopolitical concern” and Inuit cosmological thought and legal order (more strongly, her claim that “ontology” is just another word for colonialism) to Kim Tallbear’s critiques of animal studies (for emphasizing a western biocentrism) and new materialism (for universalizing particular Indigenous thought and secularizing it; see chapter 5) and Watts’s thorough analysis of how new materialists adapt Indigenous conceptions of distributed agency such that the epistemological-ontological divide that produces ontological hierarchies in western metaphysics remains intact.39 For Byrd, this transit of Indianness operates as various iterations of Carlos Castaneda, the pseudo-shaman and peyote-tourist/anthropologist on whose writing Deleuze and Guattari based much of their concept of becoming-Indian: “Carlos Castaneda represents the becoming-Indian as a pathological colonizing condition of faux-Indian, a pathology that haunts any left intellectual who steps forward to ventriloquize the speaking Indian by transforming the becoming-Indian into replacing.”40 This radical liberation through flow and lines of flight, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, for Byrd, undergirds much of posthumanist thought. But the real Indians with ancestry continually break up the party, discomforting theorists who play theoretical Indian. “Every time flow or a line of flight approaches, touches, or encounters Indianness, it also confronts the colonialist project that has made that flow possible. The choice is to either confront that colonialism or to deflect it. And not being prepared to disrupt the logics of settler colonialism necessary for the terra nullius through which to wander, the entire system either freezes or reboots.”41
Rather than a rigged conversation with the colonizer via colonial discourses that seek to transcribe, translate, and abstract in order to play Indian and keep up with new trends in theory, the critique of the human opens other conversations between Indigenous peoples and studies and other oppressed groups and their modes of research and writing. Black studies has a profound and incredibly rich critique of the category of Man and a discourse on other humanisms. This conversation is somewhat latent in this book, though I have addressed it briefly in another publication.42 In part, this latency is because this book is very much about centering California Indian studies, a “minor” “regional” field of Native American and/or Indigenous studies, and reorienting the field away from the institutional version that has held sway within academia toward a mode of intellectual resurgence by, with, and for California Indian people. So, the book is already engaging certain “internal” differentiations and imbrications, from and with Native studies and Indigenous studies, which both have their specific discursive registers, geographical and historical imaginaries, positionalities, and horizons of intelligibility, and from and with the official (read: colonial) version of California Indian studies. Thus, my engagement with Black studies, similar to my engagement with queer theory on this topic, has remained in what Deborah Miranda and Tiffany Lethabo King have each differently described as the subterranean streams that nonetheless nourish the work.43 To bring it out and into focus here in the introduction worries me that I am performing a kind of epistemic violence. I also don’t want it to be an apology. In this book, there is not the sustained engagement, dialogical and otherwise, that is needed for this kind of work. It is not a book about Black and Indigenous relations or the intersections of Black and Indigenous studies, or Afroindigeneity. And yet, the Black and Indigenous relationship is all over this work; the imbrications, resonances, and differentiations give the book some of its shape, and I would be remiss to not address it.
I do so with a caution in mind that King, who has delved deeply into the relations between Black people and study and Indigenous people and study in their book The Black Shoals offers in a dossier that includes Black and Indigenous feminist scholars’ responses to Black Shoals. King writes:
Even when the academy finds it convenient to engage the “Black and Indigenous Studies turn,” it is done with violence. So often the curatorial practices of non-Black and non-Indigenous scholars that attempt to stage a meeting between Black and Indigenous peoples (and the fields) are structured by an impulse to discipline, block, capture, and contain what is possible and potentially transformative (unsettling) about Black and Indigenous relation. Over the years, I have witnessed non-Black and non-Indigenous scholars demand that a Black and Indigenous gathering and or agenda give an account of non-Black and non-Indigenous positionality or use a language that speaks to their role in the relationship. While the language(s) of Black and Indigenous relations are not exclusive, the relation and it’s grammars, idioms, and syntax are particular.44
Creating a speculative space for gathering outside of such violence with their title for this piece, “Where We Intend to Meet after the ‘Turn,’” King does so with a deep suspicion of the institution. “Over the years, I have struggled to find academic spaces free of interlopers, saboteurs, and institutional blockades.”45 Considering the violence of academic institutions toward Indigenous and Black peoples, which has been both epistemic and very material, directly supporting genocide and slavery both past and present, as well as the failures by even the most progressive agendas at universities to substantially address these violences, suspicion is a mode of protection and survival. The gathering after the turn, then, looks proleptically ahead to conditions that would not reproduce the violences of antiblackness and ongoing colonization. King is clear that the horizon is not inclusion into the category of the human on its terms. This is an impossible task anyway as the absorption of Black lives into the category of the human would, according to them, cause, “the social order and the scaffolding that upends and holds together the human [to] collapse.”46 Concomitantly, as King asserts, were Native peoples to be fully incorporated into the human, the nation-state as political form would cease to exist: “practices of Native refusal and decolonization and Black ‘skepticism/pessimism’ and abolition argue that the U.S. police state can no longer determine the conditions of possibility for being considered human.”47 The horizon is the end of the western humanist imperial project.
In the meantime, while the Black and Indigenous studies turn is having its moment, it is important to understand that these types of gatherings have been going on all along: a conversation is happening, has been happening, keeps happening without needing institutional sanction or recognition. The turn of Black and Indigenous languages of interrelation is rather an infinite curve carried past the point of the settler carceral state, past the distinction between line and circle, outlasting; it is not the linear turns of fashion and commodification. The ongoing turn is an infinite conversation between Indigenous antihumanism and Black humanisms otherwise. As Jared Sexton has argued, we should approach this conversation from the position of the amateur, from a lack of desire for mastery and therefore through antidisciplinarity.48 It should subsist in the refusal of colonial demands for intelligibility, inclusivity, and civility; in other words, it should fail to be good, the best path toward good feeling. It remains unruly, unassimilable, a rupture in the smooth workings of theoretical and knowledge production. Across this infinite interrelational form, conversation follows the paths of pleasure and comes to an understanding without knowing. It is story told collectively.
This turn to relation isn’t to elide the difficulty of surviving the necropolitical state or the fraught aspects of this conversation and mode of relating. Indigenous studies, for instance, has been critiqued in turns by other critical fields as being too identitarian, ahistorical, historically focused, land focused, sovereignty focused, not secular, exceptionalist, exclusionary, relying on colonial tools and definitions, using “self-evident” or oppositional categories, to name a few. The infamous debate between Elvira Pulitano and Craig Womack over the “essentialism” of place-based Indigenous frameworks for producing and understanding literature marks one moment of disciplining/policing; Robert Warrior’s necessary critique of the exclusion of Native “creative nonfiction” from the category of literature and from literary studies engagements, and the still-fraught position of Native art as either too cultural or not cultured enough in avant-garde art contexts mark two more.49 The list could go on, but the disciplining of Native studies from the position of authority by non-Native scholars needs to stop. To King’s point, staged conversations of Black and Indigenous studies by non-Black and non-Native scholars have often played these fields against each other, using one framework to critique the other. In many instances, Black studies in such contexts has been used as a disciplinary device to bring Native studies into alignment with this or that scholar’s critical agenda, and vice versa. And while conversations between Black and Native or Indigenous scholars have also at times operated from their respective standpoints and commitments in a critical manner that seeks to shore up one discipline at the expense of the other, this is a more productive, agonistic engagement than the staged conversations critiqued by King. It does, however, raise the question of how the conversation can take place and where. Critical or agonistic engagements invested in the political form of the conversation are, of course, better. An acknowledgment of the infinite interrelation as a coalitional path toward ending western humanism as a project has my vote.
King’s suspicion extends to discursive spaces as well, particularly that of the posthuman. The “post” of posthumanism marks a dilemma between the promotion of a reflexive mode of criticism that seeks the accomplishment of the Enlightenment through the dissolution of the human figured as exceptional (and universalizingly white, European), a project that has always had investments in the historical complications of Indigeneity and Blackness, and what King calls external pressure, which they describe as “specifically the kind of pressure that ‘decolonial refusal’ and ‘abolitionist skepticism’ as forms of resistance that enact outright rejection of or view ‘posthumanist’ attempts with a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’”50 This pressure is needed “in order to truly address the recurrent problem of the violence of the human in continental theory.”51 Posthumanism must be interrogated for its investments in whiteness in order to address the diminishment of and unspoken reliance upon Indigenous, Black, anti-racist, and anticolonial configurations of the human that have radical decolonial and abolitionist possibilities and which, under the current order, too easily get co-opted, domesticated, and pacified.
In the long-standing question and imposition of the western human, King finds common ground between Native, Indigenous, and Black scholars and scholarship. The human, and its overcoming, as a problematic operates within the commodified turns of western theoretical production and acts as a disciplinary force against Black and Indigenous scholars, students, and activists. As King observes, “I have watched graduate students of color experience this kind of stress, anxiety, and unease as they confront the pressure to ‘take up’ more contemporary impulses within Western ‘critical theory’ to move ‘beyond the human’ or toward the posthuman.”52 The demand to give an account of oneself and one’s work in relation to such a theoretical edict ends up, according to King, centering whiteness, an identity that seeks to disappear its already universalizing force into nonrepresentation (subjectlessness and nonidentity). This discursive power structure, in its attempt to modify the category of the human, positions certain people (white, male, able-bodied) as materially central to the production of such knowledge and is, therefore, for King, already an identitarian project.53
Instead, King calls for an examination of how Black and Indigenous feminists, with attitudes of misanthropy and misandry, refuse and remain skeptical of systems, institutions, and orders of knowledge that “secure humanity as an exclusive experience and bound identity in violent ways.”54 This is not the same project as western posthumanism, which in certain iterations sees itself as the extension and completion of the imperfectly realized Enlightenment, a progressive and rationalizing project, one that often syncs seamlessly with the colonial institution. Rather than the universalization of white disappearance as a form of hyper-inclusion, King’s approach is specific, dialogical, and relationally agonistic. Grounded in Black and Indigenous struggles, it remains antagonistic to the settler carceral state and, in line with the body of work of Sylvia Wynter, distantly suspicious of the turns of the western episteme. “In the work of Sylvia Wynter, one senses a general suspicion and deep distrust of the ability of Western theory—specifically its attempt at self-critique and self-correction in the name of justice for humanity—to revise its cognitive orders to work itself out of its current ‘closed system,’ which reproduces exclusion and structural oppositions based on the negation of the other.”55 Wynter, of course, has had a massive impact on Black studies and its investigation of the liberal human and its worlding systems and forces, including its persistent production of Black existence as sub- or nonhuman. For King, Black studies, in this sense, is a racialized and gendered project: “Both Black studies’ distrust of the ‘human’ and Black feminism’s distrust of humanism in its version as man/men (which at times seeks to incorporate Black men) relentlessly scrutinize how the category of the human and in this case the ‘posthuman’ reproduce Black death.”56 From this angle of perception, one of suspicion, King looks to bring decolonial refusal and abolitionist skepticism into conversation around the ironic demand to move beyond the human when Indigenous and Black people cannot seem to escape death and have never been fully absorbed into the category of the human.
The Writing of Disaster
Some of the agonistic friction in this conversation comes from the frames of reference. As mentioned, Moten theorizes Black study from no standpoint, from the radical sociality of the hold of the ship, the very conditioning of being—or, for King, drawing on Wynter, the conditioning of human/Man. Indigenous studies, however, thinks both genocide and place together, which requires a different understanding of interrelation, one exemplified by the Ghost Dance. Genocide, for King, is one of the primary points of contact between Indigenous and Black scholars through the logics of conquest (a topic I take up in chapter 3), and they use it to counter the framework of settler colonialism as land-focused in a way that is bounded by U.S. territorialism and property logics and their discourses of historical trajectory. As a mode of agency that privileges the settler, both in the actions of colonization and in the reflexive analysis of this history, according to King, settler critique effaces both the relations of Black, Indigenous, and other peoples affected by empire and the continuing modes of conquest bound up in the figure of the conquistador human, which links the United States to empire and the broader western humanist project. How to think the relation to land and place, grounded normativity, in the wake of genocide and environmental destruction under empire is a significant project for Indigenous studies.
The figure of the human impacts the very archives and genealogies of thought and study as different peoples are understood only through their relations to the colonizer, creating siloed histories and archives of the oppressed and a narrow definition of “freedom” according to the western liberal human forged along the paths of this singularizing relation (from an abstract enslavement to freedom). Analyzed in Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe discusses the hidden connections between the transit of European liberalism as colonial export, settler colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to show how the massive extraction of wealth from Indigenous lands and enslaved and indentured bodies was the necessary condition for the “rights of man” of the French Revolution in 1789.57 As Fanon writes, “The wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth. Europe is literally the creation of the third world. The riches that are choking it are those plundered from the underdeveloped peoples.”58 This material substructure of Man/the human based in genocide, the production of property, and slavery and its liberal ideology of freedom shapes the archives, subsuming colonial violence in narratives of reason and progress, and divides knowledge into academic disciplines that foreclose knowledge of intimacies between oppressed peoples as well as alternative formations of sociality and relation. One thinks of the Oregon “lash law” or Black Exclusion law that allowed whites to keep Black slaves in the territory that we now call Oregon for a period of three years before freeing and forcing them to leave the territory (if they didn’t leave, they would be whipped, hence the name “lash law”). The lash law passed in large part through the leadership of Peter Burnett who became California’s first governor. In California, Burnett attempted unsuccessfully to pass a similar Black Exclusion law according to his vision of an entirely white western United States. California did pass a fugitive slave law a year after Burnett left office, and southern slave owners were allowed during his term to keep possession of their slaves when they brought them to California to participate in the gold rush. Burnett also oversaw the enslavement and genocide of California Indians; though taking an active part in it himself as governor, he credited the inhuman forces of history, progress, and fate: “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between races until the Indian race becomes extinct must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.”59
What remains underexamined is the relation between California Indians and Black people during this time, an effect of the siloing of history. This siloing, as Lowe has shown, impacts the material basis of research in the organizational forms and categories of the archive and makes its way through discursive procedures into narrowly focused disciplinary practices and field formation.60 Other colonial relations between California Indians, Chinese, Mexicans, Hawaiians, and Filipinos have been examined somewhat more, though they still remain obscure due to that same siloing. An example of the effect of this force is the general exclusion of non-whites in the mid-nineteenth century from testifying in a criminal court against white people. This exclusion from legal representation usually gets narrated as affecting the specific peoples taken as objects of study from a disciplinary standpoint; texts in California Indian studies, for instance, often mention this law but narrate it as affecting California Indians without mentioning its effects on Chinese migrants. What is compelling is perhaps thinking about the well-known impromptu bands of raiders and mixed communities that developed outside the law and the developing settler society of California as a space of anti-law and anti-state coalition-building. These are groups marginally referenced in various histories of California but they fall outside the space of analysis due to their difficult fit in the siloed archives.
Along with the significance of California for the development of American anthropology and archaeology, genocide has become one of the discursively defining relationships between the state and California Indians. In chapter 3, I address the effects of the campaign to recognize that a genocide took place in California and the relationship between historiography and the international legal definition. The archives of both slavery and genocide rest upon founding violence that, as Lowe shows, makes its way into disciplined forms of knowing as well as into the law. How we narrate this story, through what criteria, and with what resources, matters. The official narrative, even when it recognizes harms done by the settler state, will always work in the service of ongoing colonialism, by default. To envision what California Indian studies can be outside such a centripetal force requires engaging genocide through the disorienting terms of the Destruction. More capacious than genocide, destruction includes the effects of colonial violence on nonhuman worlds (without recentering human life), the extra-definitional effects of genocide such as on culture, and, importantly, the narrow pathways of justice and knowledge that wind communities tighter into the Destruction itself, defining how we address and know it within the terms of the destruction. The field that has most profoundly developed such a discussion is a loose association of projects in a multitude of contexts that take up writing and research in the wake of extreme violence that can be tentatively termed, after Maurice Blanchot’s seminal work, the writing of disaster. This mode of writing and research has important resonances with the current interest in discourses of catastrophe.
Rather than attempt to address or summarize the dizzying range of such work, here I note the importance for the approach of this book, and, for me, for California Indian studies, of the anti-historiographical and storied research and writing of Saidiya Hartman. Hartman’s work provides one of the most profound meditations on the intimacies of present experiences with the lives of the dead, specifically the unrepresented and unrepresentable lives and deaths of Black girls and women, from the Atlantic slave trade to reconstruction and after, with the lives of those surviving the afterlives of slavery. It is an approach to story that I see as having a deep resonance with the storying practices and work with and against the archive of Deborah Miranda, though in the terms of “literature” in her case. It is also an answer in some ways to Simpson’s implied question: what does it mean to write your refusal to write? And to do so from the non-standpoint of the poverty of world addressed by Moten, one exacerbated by the very structures of knowing and aesthetics formed around the western liberal figure of the human. California Indian studies, as I conceive of it in this book, is the struggle over this frame. It’s not about California Indians, as the institutional version would have it, containing us with disciplinary knowledge procedures. Rather, California Indian studies is an anticolonial and antihumanist angle of perception on the humanized world against which it struggles toward that world’s end. Such a collective struggle takes place, for me, in the vexed realm of the inhuman, which brings together the various refusals and failures of the human and the research and writing of destruction.
What Hartman highlights is the need to work within a representational practice of failure, a practice that Halberstam echoes in their call for a queer art of failure. This call to work with failure is in part a response to the dilemma of the archive described earlier. The dilemma is one where any access or lack of access to the lives of the dead are mediated through colonial and racialized structures of power, that is, the human. In California, as we’ll see in chapter 3, the archival dilemma takes the form of the need to rely on the “voices of killers” in the genocidal archive to build a case for the recognition of genocide. Because of this condition and situation of impossibility, Hartman emphasizes the need for “an untimely story told by a failed witness,” to counteract the received or authorized account and its stabilization of the “event” as event.61 A form of study as failure acknowledges its own inability to replace or become the institutional version and leans into this inherent failure to turn away from such demands. For Hartman, the turn away takes the form of emphasizing the incommensurability between prevailing discourses and the “event,” amplifying the instability of the archive, and refusing the realist illusion that dictates the institutional version of research.
This practice turns Hartman to the question of story. She asks, “how does one tell an impossible story?”62 It is in the indeterminacy, at the limits of writing, history in her case, as narration that Hartman finds an inhumanist form of writing that approaches this question. And she does so by following the most difficult demands of the dead, the “existences relegated to the nonhistorical or deemed waste,” who “exercise a claim on the present and demand us to reimagine a future in which the afterlife of slavery has ended.”63 It is an impossibility that requires submission to failure, beginning with the acknowledgment that the dead cannot be saved, the past cannot be changed, we are too late to avert the destruction, there is “no way to derange the archive.”64 Letting go of the desire to recuperate, to humanize the dead, to make them work for us, as a form of mourning that appeases the living, is the way to liberate the dead and to liberate the powers of the dead in all their inhumanist glory. This is a difficult mode of writing and research that must bear on those who perform it, who live with the images of destruction of ancestors, who either “emerge from the encounter with a sense of incompleteness” or give in to becoming with the dead in the absolute turn.65
The indetermination between emerging incomplete or turning toward the dead, a perhaps entangled dilemma, is where Hartman’s critical fabulation bumps into the Ghost Dance. Following Stephen Best’s slight reorientation of what he calls “melancholic historicism,” rather than an initial desire for recovery that proves impossible, from the world to destruction, what if we begin with the full turn to the dead and all their powers of disorientation, with the destruction itself, and move from there toward the world, carrying us past the divisions between life and death, confusing refusal and failure? As we’ll see in chapter 4, Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians does not seek a lost literature but the End of the World that cannot be contained in stories and the stories that acknowledge the impossibility of such containment and destroy attempts at making it known. Literature has often been understood to be the speech that confronts the disaster with the powers of mourning, which is perhaps why in California there is no literature of genocide. We forgo mourning, do not seek literature, especially the literature of the colonizer; rather we seek stories and their failure, their intimacy with the destructive powers of the dead.
California Is a Fiction
Indigenous Inhumanities doesn’t perform an intimacies of California, or of the Western Seaboard, or the Pacific and Pacific Rim, a desperately needed project. And yet, the formation of California Indian studies it argues for, by, with, and for California Indian people is meant to make such modes of interrelation and shifted angles of perception possible. It is not a call for a closed project but an interrelational one. In this sense, this book prepares for a study to come by seeking the destruction of the modes of research that have forestalled its arrival and, in their destruction, the corpse from which it sprouts. This book bears all the marks of its limitations. It is also committed to weak formations such that it continuously pulls back from making strong theoretical statements even while it engages them (and sometimes makes them) and from canonical and disciplinary commitments and materials, though it sometimes engages these as well. To Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known pairing, it is equally paranoid and reparative, while remaining suspicious of both for their tendencies to attempt to “fix” the colonial system, to better it or at least live with it with the least amount of harm.66 The angle of perception of this book is an inside/outside one that rather lets that system die and contributes to the process of its death and decay with a corrosive force, a bit of acid sprayed on the inflection points and joints. It takes up a minor position, a regional study, ambiguous and excluded texts and materials, in a cross- or a-disciplinary manner, and yet it also addresses the absolute. It turns to the dead and waits for their arrival, dancing, spinning, and singing until the world turns upside down, a radical disorientation, the intractable force of the void. Like a wounded index finger or a broken sign, it points toward an Indigenous inhumanities through the very force of its failure.
As Deborah Miranda writes, “California is a story.” California is a fiction but one with real, material consequences. Situated as it is on the Pacific Rim, a palimpsestuous site of competing and layered colonialisms, of militarization, California is already betrayed positionally by the idea of settler colonialism as westward expansion (a west that is east, according to some renditions67), part of the completion of manifest destiny, which takes the United States, specifically the “contiguous forty-eight states,” as the pre-concluded horizon, reifying its existence through its own eschatological and teleological narrative. California fits uncomfortably into the United States, also a fiction, as much as it fits uncomfortably into the dominant regional divisions of the “nation” state (the southwest). Relations to the Pacific and eastward, some made along colonial and diasporic pathways, pull California in other directions, as do hemispheric relations. California is not a container, and when it is it is a leaky one. The Ghost Dance is called the California Indian Ghost Dance to distinguish it from others, particularly the one began by Wovoka that made its way across the plains twenty years later. But the dance began in Nevada and moved to both Northern California and Southern Oregon, ignoring and refusing these geopolitical entities, disturbing the identity of it being specific to California Indians and of the name California Indian itself.
Native American studies, likewise, is a fluid field, but it does have its trajectories and tendencies. It tends to be closely allied if not at times indistinguishable from First Nations studies or Aboriginal studies in Canada, yet it has a more fraught or complex relation to Indigenous studies south of the U.S. border and in Oceania, not to mention other parts of the world, specifically the global south. At times, it has even privileged white settler colonial studies and made some sort of intellectual map that includes alongside the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Israel has played a more ambiguous role in this formation. But, of course, this formation is nation-state-specific in terms of its geographical imaginary. What of the U.S. empire, which expands extensively outside the nation-state border? Jodi Byrd has, perhaps, asked this question the most rigorously in Native studies, putting critical Indigenous theory into conversation geographically and intellectually with the various intimacies produced through imperial expansion and maintenance, including the formations that have come to the United States along the threads of empire, constantly disrupting accepted territorial (geographic and intellectual) formations. And then, of course, there is the hemispheric approach that seeks to relate Indigeneity across the American Project of western humanist conquest. Each of these approaches is a fiction based in material reality with discursive and performative powers of its own to mold things.
Beginning with California is a way to choose not to choose, to acknowledge all these layers of Indigeneity without commitment. We were given this identity. It’s a weak one that doesn’t have the legal, material, or theoretical weight of the others. It is imbricated with them but also shakes the colonial foundations on which they continue to subsist. It has also long been a coalitional name for organizing California Indian communities.68 Neither American, whether in the U.S. exceptionalist exclusionary use of the term or in relation to the continent-centric Western Hemisphere (Amerigo Vespucci never “found” us), nor a bounded political identity of its own. It is both more humble than these but, like Hau’ofa’s Oceanic vision of the world and cosmos as a sea of islands, it is a capacious vision that moves outward from place. In friction with Native American, with its bordering framework, as well as Indigenous, with its basis in international human rights discourse and fraught relation to universalization and the Enlightenment,69 California is a force of derealization of colonial form. Having taken many shapes through colonial demarcations, California remains somewhat boundless, though the force of colonization and genocide has produced a scarred shape that has been a defining identity for anticolonial action. This is to say, like any identity, it is of course an often violently realized fiction that undergirds the production of fact. As Deborah Miranda says, California is a story, and yet, California is a story and carries with it such force, the connections to place, the teeming worlds that have been decimated, the polyvocality, the indeterminacy and the dead. When each California Indian community says the word California, they mean the specific interrelationships to place, to other beings, to other communities, to ancestors, moving from their storied worlds to a more expansive view through what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes as concentric rings of relevance.70
Even in California, these are very different landscapes, often different histories, such as the relation between those who survived the missions and those the gold rush and those who survived both. California is not the state of California, part of the United States. It precedes its name, or, rather, the name improperly references this more boundless before as well as the boundless after, after the settler state falls. California is an improper name, imprecise, a catachresis, as is California Indian. And yet, California is a place, an Indigenous one first and foremost though it may be differentiated by those who underwent missionization, which connects them to the broad project of Spanish colonization across the hemisphere and then the postcolonial nation-state, Mexico in particular; and the tribes further to the north and further eastward who weren’t subject to the missions but who were perhaps affected by the Russian fur trade, connecting them to tribes up the northwest coast and into Siberia, or the gold rush and its capitalistic, genocidal fervor; or those with ties across the high desert and mountains through what is now Oregon, Nevada, Utah, and Idaho. California leaks and bleeds, spilling across the land and into what the Maidu painter Frank Day calls the great mystery, the Pacific Ocean, Mon⦁dow⦁wi [big water].71 These are the colonial movements as well as the transit of empire. The movements of Indigenous peoples prior to and during colonization strain the limits of a bounded container.
And yet we have always been here. For ten millennia or since time immemorial we have been related to these lands, even as these lands change, and we change along with them. We relate to them still even in the most recent moment of colonialism that, though temporally shallow, has caused the greatest changes. Even after California has been terraformed more than any other place on the planet, we relate to it with and through the destruction. We tear down dams, take back land, carry our ancestors home. California and California Indian have no stable referents and yet because of this, they have become powerful sites of collective, anticolonial organizing.
Indigenous Inhumanities is interested in the inhumanist mode of study by California Indian peoples that have confronted destruction. Written over a long decade, the chapters take different forms and voices in response to the materials discussed and in relation to my thinking at the time of their creation. The choice of materials is largely a matter of luck or happenstance, as research would have it. This is to say, the reader will not find a smoothly developing and continuous mode of argumentation and writing. The consistency lies elsewhere, along with the heart. Each, though, refracts something of this heart in their commitments to ending colonization and ongoing anti-Indigenous genocidal logics. They also each engage the legacy of California Indian studies and brilliance by appealing to the thought of our ancestors, placing Indigenous ways of thinking and doing at the center. The knowledge has always been there; it’s just a question of how we refract the long inflection of its troublingly prophetic orientation.
Most important, perhaps, this book is a response to the Destruction, and coming to understand something of the Destruction has been the guiding principle. To say something about it is both of a wholly other order and also cannot be disentangled from the process of understanding, of unlearning learning. That California Indian studies is the space from which to try to say something about destruction has been the slowest of realizations for me (not unusual in my case, to be honest). I am both thankful for it and must at the same time apologize for taking so long to those who have long been doing the work much better than I ever could. I must count my blessings that I find myself in the company of such amazing California Indian scholars, past, present, and future. The goal of this book is to attend to various points of inflection of our shared field, California Indian studies, with respect for the longer turn that has been ongoing and destroys the very notion of it being contained as a “field.” This book is, in this sense, a modest offering to them and to the brilliance of our people.