Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism

The Transit of Empire This page intentionally left blank The Transit of Empire Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism Jodi A. Byrd University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis | London Publication of this book was made possible, in part, with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A version of chapter was published as “‘Been to the Nation, Lord, but I Couldn’t Stay There’: American Indian Sovereignty, Cherokee Freedmen, and the Incommensurability of the Internal,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , no. (). Copyright by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo- copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press Third Avenue South, Suite Minneapolis, MN - http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Byrd, Jodi A. The transit of empire : indigenous critiques of colonialism / Jodi A. Byrd. p. cm. — (First peoples : new directions in indigenous studies) ISBN ---- (hardback : acid-free paper) ISBN ---- (paperback : acid-free paper) . Indians of North America—Government relations—History. Indians of North America—Colonization—United States. Imperialism—Social aspects—United States. Racism—United States—History. I. Title. E.B .—dc Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. For Jay This page intentionally left blank Onward, James, and remember me as a goddess on your transit. Let this trip be the transit of night— not the loss of a faint speck in the wilderness of sky . go on, James, and journey for the discovery of great peoples . avoid the misery of ignorance and sermons, James. Look to history for harmony—set out well as your acts precede you— harmony, James, be harmonious with these people: I am their star too. I know their mana, their skill in crossing oceans . ROBERT SULLIVAN, CAPTAIN COOK IN THE UNDERWORLD This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface: Full Fathom Five xi Introduction: Indigenous Critical Theory and the Diminishing Returns of Civilization xv 1. Is and Was: Poststructural Indians without Ancestry 1 2. “This Island’s Mine”: The Parallax Logics of Caliban’s Cacophony 39 3. The Masks of Conquest: Wilson Harris’s Jonestown and the Thresholds of Grievability 77 4. “Been to the Nation, Lord, but I Couldn’t Stay There”: Cherokee Freedmen, Internal Colonialism, and the Racialization of Citizenship 117 5. Satisfied with Stones: Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization and the Discourses of Resistance 147 6. Killing States: Removals, Other Americans, and the “Pale Promise of Democracy” 185 Conclusion: Zombie Imperialism 221 Acknowledgments 231 Notes 235 Index 271 This page intentionally left blank Preface Full Fathom Five This book is my attempt to account for the traverse of U.S. empire by res- urrecting indigenous presences within cultural, literary, and political con- texts. This project is very personal for me as well. My father passed away one week before Barack Obama was elected president and as I was work- ing on this book. While his life had become unlivable through whatever it was that chased him on the roads linking Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas, I always thought his struggle was, in the end, about home, place, and belonging. We Chickasaws lost our country twice—once through the removals Tocqueville described in Democracy in America, and then through allotment and the creation of the state of Oklahoma in . And though the Chickasaw Nation has certainly rebuilt and is today just as unconquer- able and unconquered as it ever was, there is a difference between recov- ered and having never lost in the first place that stands in breach still for those of us attempting to theorize the legacies of colonialism within indigenous worlds. For my dad, I think, that loss was unmappable, ungriev- able, and unapproachable within the constraints of U.S. settler society. And though he spent his life as a medical doctor, a family practitioner trying to heal American Indians and white settlers in Valentine, Nebraska, or in In- dian Health Service in the Sisseton-Wahpeton community, that loss flitted on the edges, drove him crazy, haunted him, and prompted anger whether toward those he loved or toward those towns and communities that built up rural with a dogged determinism to never admit to any wrongdoing. That loss never allowed the United States to be home, even though the lands the United States was built upon might in fact be so. Before he died, my dad read parts of my book and many of my articles, and always he had opinions. He would call at o’clock in the morning on the road from the sandhills of Nebraska or on his way back from his horses in Thackerville, Oklahoma, to share his thoughts and insights on what this book and my work should always be about. “Did you know Tocqueville was there at removal?” he would ask. He was obsessed with Tocqueville’s xi xii PREFACE description of the Choctaw dogs who threw themselves into the Missis- sippi to chase after their owners who were unable to take them on the boats into Indian Territory. But more often than not, he’d tell me his phi- losophy about Indians in America. “We didn’t have time, money, or power,” he’d say more than once. “You put that in your book. That’s what your work is missing.” And then he’d laugh and tell me he couldn’t wait to read more. Since he last called, I have thought of little else. Indians did not have time, money, or power. The indigenous critical theory scholar in me wants to argue with my dad, to point out all the ways the Chickasaws and other indigenous nations have always had power, time, and resources through relationship with land, complicity in chattel slavery, negotiations with the British, French, Spanish, and Americans, or in the very ability to rebuild one more time out of the destruction the militaries, laws, and legislative bodies left behind. But there is something also fundamentally true in what my dad wanted me to say for him, particularly in the ways Indians figure and do not within the academic, literary, cultural, and political inquiries that seek to delineate the problems facing so many people, be they settlers, diasporic immigrants, or natives in those lands stolen from indigenous peoples. A book like this cannot do much in the way of power or money, but the one thing it might be able to do is offer some of my time spent thinking about theory, narrative, and politics and the place of indigenous peoples within contemporary theories of postcoloniality, queerness, and race. I hope that was what my dad had in mind when he offered me those challenges to think through the syllogistic traps of participatory democracy born out of violent occupation of lands. This book, then, is a journey of sorts, its method mnemonic as it places seemingly disparate histories, temporalities, and geographies into conver- sation in the hopes that, through enjambment, it might be possible to per- ceive how Indianness functions as a transit within empire. My method here suggests a reading praxis inspired by Blackfeet novelist Stephen Graham Jones’s Demon Theory, in which he delineates genre as mnemonic device in order to retell the Medea story through horror narrative.¹ The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime. To read mnemonically is to connect the violences and genocides of colonization to cultural pro- ductions and political movements in order to disrupt the elisions of multicultural liberal democracy that seek to rationalize the originary historical traumas that birthed settler colonialism through inclusion. Such a reading PREFACE xiii practice understands indigeneity as radical alterity and uses remembrance as a means through which to read counter to the stories empire tells itself. Lumbee scholar Robert A. Williams Jr. has argued that “the American Indian emerges as a distinct problem in Western legal thought,” but I con- tend here that ideas of the Indian and Indianness—the contagion through which U.S. empire orders the place of peoples within its purview—emerge as distinct problems for critical and postcolonial theories.² As a transit, Indianness becomes a site through which U.S. empire orients and repli- cates itself by transforming those to be colonized into “Indians” through continual reiterations of pioneer logics, whether in the Pacific, the Carib- bean, or the Middle East. The familiarity of “Indianness” is salve for the liberal multicultural democracy within the settler societies that serve as empire’s constituency. In the wake of this transit, and indeed as its quality as colonialist practice, one finds discordant and competing representations of diasporic arrivals and native lived experiences—what I call cacophony throughout this book—that vie for hegemony within the discursive, cultural, and political processes of representation and identity that form the basis for what Wendy Brown has identified as the states of injury and Fou- cault and others have termed biopolitics. Bringing indigeneity and Indians front and center to discussions of U.S. empire as it has traversed across At- lantic and Pacific worlds is a necessary intervention at this historical mo- ment, precisely because it is through the elisions, erasures, enjambments, and repetitions of Indianness that one might see the stakes in decolonial, restorative justice tied to land, life, and grievability. As Willow Rosenberg in Joss Whedon’s television series Buffy the Vam- pire Slayer once said, “A vague disclaimer is nobody’s friend.”³ The Transit of Empire is built upon a number of foundational premises that may or may not be givens within critical theory but that are rapidly emerging as foundational to the disciplining of American Indian and indigenous studies.

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