Notes
Introduction: Conquest Projects
Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an Indian.”
Walker, Every Warrior, 103, italics original.
Simpson, Always Done; Vizenor, Fugitive Poses.
Deloria, Custer Died, 78.
Jakes was imprisoned at a facility where state-identified young men, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-one and (with the exception of a few inmates) categorized by the state as Black, were sentenced to captivity. Part of the state captivity project—and part of the state Division of Juvenile Affairs’ “treatment” across its locked facilities—was compulsory schooling. Vaught, Compulsory. Captivity and its instruments are removal projects that banish the captive person from relations to people and place, endeavoring to erase their interconnected existence even as their image may be magnificently distorted as a categorizing projection onto the stage of societal order: the criminal and the inmate.
Deloria, Custer Died, 31, italics added.
Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 18.
Sojoyner, “Black Radicals,” 245.
Robinson, Forgeries, xii–xiii.
Vizenor, “Custer,” 21.
Newton, “Enforcing.”
Fletcher and Singel, “Indian Children,” 964.
The designations and self-identifications of American Indian, Indian, Native, Native American, Indigenous, and more have meanings that shift with context, purpose, and peoples. We use terms to best align with context and people.
Vizenor, “Custer,” 21.
Rodriguez, Forced Passages; James, Warfare; Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?; Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Sojoyner, First Strike.
Newcomb, Pagans.
Miller, “Doctrine of Discovery.”
Cohen, “Transcendental Nonsense,” 814.
The third case in the Marshall Trilogy, Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832), is important to Federal Indian Law in solidifying the exclusivity of the relationship between the federal government and Tribal governments, to the exclusion of state law.
Johnson v. M’Intosh, 588–89, 592, emphasis added.
Trask, Native Daughter, 31.
Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1721–22.
Robinson, Black Marxism, 66.
Coulthard, Red Skin.
Cherokee Nation, 17.
Deloria, Indian Declaration of Independence, 115. Importantly, Deloria’s writing inverts Marshall’s declaration of “domestic dependent” to “dependent domestic.” We are unsure of his intent but think it significant since the order of the words highlights the conditions imposed by the Court—dependence and domesticity are both relative, and subservient to the United States.
Johnson, 574.
Harris, “Whiteness as Property.”
Deloria, Custer Died; Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality.”
Canby, Nutshell, 62.
Million, Therapeutic Nations, 11.
Harjo, Conflict Resolution, 5.
1. Jakes’ Refusal, Squanto’s Revenge
Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 166; Grande and McCarty, “Indigenous Elsewheres.”
Deloria, We Talk, 115.
Silko, Ceremony, 16.
Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, i.
Thomas, Political Life, 23.
Harjo, Spiral to the Stars; Barker, Sovereignty Matters; Coffey and Tsosie, “Cultural Sovereignty”; Brayboy, “Toward a Tribal Critical Race Theory”; Raheja, “Visual Sovereignty”; Womack, Red on Red; Wilkins and Lomawaima, Uneven Ground.
Simpson, Always Done.
Erdrich, Antelope Wife, 22.
Deloria and Wildcat, Power and Place, 79, 86.
Standing Bear, My People, 110.
Jacobs, White Mother; Lomawaima, Prairie Light; Piatote, Domestic Subjects.
Bishop Henry Whipple to the editor of the New York Daily Tribune, in Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 162–63.
Child, Boarding School Seasons.
Newcomb, Pagans, 19.
Child, Boarding School Seasons, 27.
Pratt, Official Report.
Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood.
In addition to cultural and linguistic genocide, assimilation into a gruesomely violent social order included being used as experiment subjects for the effects of disease, malnutrition, and physical pain; incorporated into a cultural practice of secretive child predation and assault; blended into a brutal labor economy; psychologically degraded and tortured; killed.
Meriam Report on Indian Administration.
Lorde, Sister Outsider; Simpson, “State Is a Man”; Brown, “Man in the State.”
To be clear, individual white women teachers can and do radically resist and even refuse. And we’re not saying teachers across race and gender don’t sometimes take up maternalist tactics, expertly. They do. We are not asserting a facile or total collapsing of identity with ideology and praxis. We are pointing to an overwhelming trend. And that trend is this: over time and up through the present moment, maternalist cartels have ravaged the pliable cluster of mechanisms that form the school–prison trust in aspirational alignment with the patriarchal war machine. The aspiration is hopeful—hopeful for rights and power in a conquest context, which means hopeful for the powers of discovery, possession, and carcerality. Aspiration makes maternalism a kind of zealotry—more driven, more surgical, more dangerous. The patriarchal conquest state can confidently mobilize maternalism because the system itself ensures that maternalists remain nothing but its profoundly dangerous handmaidens.
Strong, American Indians and the American Imaginary.
Wadhwa, Restorative Justice; Goldberg, “Overextended Borrowing.”
Deloria, Playing Indian, 191.
Million, Therapeutic Nations, 8.
Williams, “Object of Property,” 8.
Million, Therapeutic Nations, 10–11.
Coulthard, Red Skin, 109.
Simpson, Always Done, 2.
Ceci, “Squanto.”
Coulthard, Red Skin, 13, italics original.
Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 191.
Erdrich, Four Souls, 47.
Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, “Indigenous Oceanic Futures”; Trask, Native Daughter.
Goeman, “Ongoing Storms.”
Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, Seeds; White, Mohawk.
James, Resisting State Violence, 6.
McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 18–19.
Simpson, “Ethnographic Refusal,” 73.
2. A Name and a World: Refusal Relationality
Though the american war against Vietnam is part of the same conversations this book joins, we also acknowledge we can by no means rightly attend to it here.
Basso, Wisdom; Blu, “Homeplace.”
Erdrich, Night Watchman, 345.
Simpson, Always Done, 15.
Balibar, “Nation Form,” 336–37, emphasis added.
Erdrich, Night Watchman, 193.
Belcourt, Wound, 30.
Erdrich, Little No Horse, 60.
Vizenor, Trickster, x.
Columbus is also an archive of merging european forces. Papal bulls functioned as one part of a network of powers (Italian merchants, Portuguese capitalists, Spanish monarchies, etc.) that gave rise to the Portuguese empire—an empire nation deserving more credit for Columbus’s ultimate expeditions than any other and which coordinated Italian capitalists to shape the early contours of the Atlantic slave trade. Columbus “embodied the connective” among european power entities that moved rapid-speed toward conquest. He became synecdoche. Robinson, Black Marxism, 110.
Goeman, “Spatial Practice,” 179, italics added.
Vaught, “Vanishment.”
Brayboy and Chin, “Terrortory,” 23.
Piranesi in Rome, “Inscriptions.”
Wynter, “Mistook the Map,” 161.
Goeman, Mark My Words, 3, 4.
Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 15, emphasis added.
Vizenor, 15, emphasis added.
We use the terms mothers and women in multiple ways. In these terms we certainly reference people who self-identify this way and who understand their role in relation to specific generations this way. We also use these terms to reference groups of people self-, family-, community-, socially, and state-identified in these ways, which of course do not always overlap. We know exclusions and inclusions occur across these dimensions of identification. When we are describing mothers who were and are the target of conquest assault, we mean that states and allied citizenries imagine Native women as mothers or potential mothers, and the individual specificity of their lives is irrelevant to conquest.
Robinson, Black Marxism. 82, italics added.
Robinson, 86. We note that an attention to racial formations beyond the limited historical scope of the United States generatively troubles analyses of white supremacy and racial versus political identities within the social, political, and legal boundaries of the United States. The european racism and racialism to which Robinson and others refer were formed and shaped in the political construct of controlling or decimating what might look like ethnic or Indigenous nations.
Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 51.
Byrd, Transit.
McClintock, “Angel of Progress.” This relational/temporal tension is not new. Writing in 1992, Anne McClintock presciently challenged the use of prefixes to the word colonial and its derivations as reifying temporal orientation that “reduces the cultures of peoples beyond colonialism to prepositional time. . . . [and] confers on colonialism the prestige of history proper; colonialism is the determining marker of history” (86). Colonialism is an effect, an experience, and an epiphenomenon of history, not its maker.
Alfred, “Sovereignty”; Barker, Sovereignty Matters.
Baldwin et al., “Negro in American Culture,” 205.
Erdrich, Night Watchman, 80.
Erdrich, 90.
Bendery, “Savanna’s Act.”
As we know, this was short-lived, and many departments are now enjoying increased funding, as well as post–January 6 sympathy.
We spend this section engaging the state’s co-optation of MMIW—a retrenchment of colonial war powers that would recenter the United States even as attempting or pretending to reverse, prevent, or remedy. However, we are mindful of the self-determination of MMIWG2S as people and a movement not only in resistance to state, societal, and interpersonal violence but also as autonomous, agentive, and generative communities. We want to make clear the way MMIW in a conquest frame flattens the systems of violences that are core to the school–prison trust. We remain mindful of the complexities, while recognizing the narrow specificity of our analytic purposes and the limitations of our authorial capacity. For work by Indigenous women on the issue of MMIWG2S, please see Lavell-Harvard and Brant, Forever Loved, and Anderson and Belcourt, Keetsahnak, among many others.
Simpson, “State Is a Man.”
Bendery, “Savanna’s Act,” italics added.
Gilpin, “Rates of Rape and Assault”; http://www.CSVANW.org/; MMIW, “MMIW USA”; Carrier Sekani Family Services, “Highway of Tears.”
Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem.
Simpson, “State Is a Man.”
Simpson.
Major Crimes Act and United States v. Kagama.
Klein, “Survived Abuse.” Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women are a group of people defined by shared devastation, and we cannot even begin to record the grief and trauma visited on women, families, and communities or the urgency of remedy. We want to make clear that we understand that state and individual violence against Indigenous women needs unconditional, resourced attention. The approach to that should center the experiences and concomitant histories of Indigenous women. Our hope here is to contribute to a larger conversation observing how this dynamically violent system is connected to the school–prison trust.
Furlow, “Hospital’s Secret.”
AP News, “The Latest.”
Brayboy and Chin, “Terrortory.”
Jeremiah Chin, “Red Law, White Supremacy: Cherokee Freedmen, Tribal Sovereignty, and the Colonial Feedback Loop,” John Marshall Law Review 47 (2014): 1227–68.
Bendery, “Savanna’s Act,” italics added.
Deer, Beginning and End of Rape, 17. And, we might add, only those men capable of owning property—originally codified, but still in the dominant imagination as white, landowning, heteronormative, and so on.
There is extensive scholarly and creative work by and about Native women from which our narrow project of beginning to map the school–prison trust draws but cannot represent. For further reading, see the work of Kate Shanley, Joanne Barker, Heather Shotton, Amanda Tachine, Mishuana Goeman, Paula Gunn Allen, Beth Piatote, Gretchen Bataille, Kim TallBear, Tsianina Lomawaima, LeAnne Howe, Cherie Dimaline, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, Leslie Marmon Silko, Cutcha Risling Baldy, Jodi Byrd, and many others.
Hu, “Disenrollment.”
Wilkins and Wilkins, Dismembered.
Silman, Enough, 9.
Child, Boarding School Seasons, 13.
One of the ways Native women in the U.S. go missing and murdered is to be incarcerated in both state and federal prisons, the latter owing often to nation-to-nation relations and causing a removal far from home.
Winder, Why Storms, 17.
3. Slipstream Shuffle
Simpson, “Ruse of Consent,” 12.
Lyons, “Rhetorical Sovereignty.”
Erdrich, Night Watchman, 276.
Owens, “As If,” 14–15.
Shanley, “Love and Read”; Fanon, Black Skin.
Deal, in “The Last,” suggests that in fact he had to do very little but walk around public places or stand wearing costume-like, Made-in-China fake regalia, and it was non-Native people who performed in relation to him. There is a rich, long conversation about performance and colonialism. Khubchandani, Ishtyle; Muñoz, Disidentifications; Mercer, Travel and See.
Under U.S. law, Indian is defined as any person who is a member of a federally recognized tribe, 25 U.S.C. § 479. For federal recognition as an Indian Tribe, federal law requires showing a history of recognition: “a body of Indians of the same or a similar race, united in a community under one leadership or government, and inhabiting a particular though sometimes ill-defined territory.” Montoya v. United States. These elements of ethnicity, territoriality, continuity, and leadership (Canby, Nutshell) define the contours of Tribal Nationhood under federal law, requiring a fictitious racial purity, centralized authority, and geographic stability that white supremacy prioritizes for its own citizens and works tirelessly to make impossible for anyone else—american democracy is by definition exclusive and singular.
Thomas, Political Life, 42.
Roberts, Fatal Invention; Zuberi, Thicker than Blood; TallBear, “DNA Politics.”
Byrd, Transit.
Coulthard, Red Skin, 13, italics original.
McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, 5.
Owens, “As If”; Shanley, “Love and Read”; Vizenor, Manifest Manners.
Hall, “Cultural Identity”; Gilroy, Black Atlantic; McKittrick, “Who Do You Talk To”; Brand, In Another Place; Hartman, Lose Your Mother.
Barker, “Confluence,” 6.
Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity,’” 17.
Mercer, Travel and See; Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity.’” “Identification is, then, a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination or a lack, but never a proper fit, a totality.” Hall, 17.
Muñoz, Disidentifications. “The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications” (31).
Many cultural studies scholars have examined the concept of hybridity. Muñoz, for example, writes, “Hybrid catches the fragmentary subject formation of people whose identities traverse different race, sexuality, and gender identifications” (31).
Said, Culture and Imperialism, 336.
Said.
Robinson, Forgeries, xiii.
Robinson, Black Movements.
Roy, Public Power, 59.
Williams, “Prisoners Could Serve.”
Williams.
Williams.
Williams, Alchemy.
Dimaline, Marrow Thieves, 88.
Robinson, Black Marxism, 72–73.
Boggs, Racism.
Brayboy, “Tribal Critical Race Theory”; Grande, “American Indian Geographies”; Denetdale, “Chairmen”; Piatote, Domestic Subjects.
Roberts, “Abolition Constitutionalism,” 113.
James, introduction to New Abolitionists, xxii.
Rodriguez, Forced Passages.
Million, “River in Me,” 32.
Excerpt from Hughes, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.”
Brayboy, “Tidemarks”; Green, “What’s in a Tidemark.”
Allen, “Some Like Indians Endure,” 9–13.
Gilmore, “Is Prison Necessary?”