Spirals of Transformation: Turtle Island Indigenous Social Movements and Literatures Laura M De Vos a Dissertation Submitted In
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Spirals of Transformation: Turtle Island Indigenous Social Movements and Literatures Laura M De Vos A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2020 Reading Committee: Dian Million, Chair Habiba Ibrahim, Chair Eva Cherniavsky José Antonio Lucero Program authorized to offer Degree: English ©Copyright 2020 Laura M De Vos University of Washington Abstract Spirals of Transformation: Turtle Island Indigenous Social Movements and Literatures Laura M De Vos Chairs of the Supervisory Committee: Dian Million Department of American Indian Studies Habiba Ibrahim Department of English Spirals of Transformation analyzes the embodied knowledges visible in Indigenous social movements and literatures. It demonstrates how a heuristic of spiralic temporality helps us see relationships and purposes the settler temporal structure aims to make not just invisible, but unthinkable. “Spiralic temporality” refers to an Indigenous experience of time that is informed by a people’s particular relationships to the seasonal cycles on their lands, and which acknowledges the present generations’ responsibilities to the ancestors and those not yet born. The four chapters discuss the Pacific Northwest Fish Wars, several generations of Native women activism, Idle No More, and the No Dakota Access Pipeline movement respectively. Through a discussion of literatures from the same place, the heuristic helps make visible how the place- based values, which the movements I discuss are fighting for, are both as old as time and adapted to the current moment. In this way, spiralic temporality offers a different conceptualization than what the hegemonic settler temporality is capable of. Spirals of Transformation: Turtle Island Indigenous Social Movements and Literatures Laura De Vos Spirals of Transformation: “Our bodies contain all of these rings and motions” ........................... 1 Spiralic Theories of Time ............................................................................................................. 10 Un-settling Temporality ................................................................................................................ 17 “Place is a way of knowing”: Relationality, Story, and Social Movements across Time ............ 24 Chapters ........................................................................................................................................ 37 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................. 42 Chapter 1. “This paper secures your fish”: Settler “Progress” vs. Indigenous Continuity ........... 47 Elizabeth Woody’s Spiraling Cultural Continuity ........................................................................ 50 Settler Property v. Indigenous Relationality ................................................................................. 58 “Conservation” vs. the Traditional Indigenous Fishery ................................................................ 69 “You just do what you have to do to make sure your children and grandchildren will have a decent life”: Treaty Fishing in the South Salish Sea..................................................................... 82 “I know the white man says I’m breaking his laws, but what about my laws?”: Treaty Fishing on the Columbia River ....................................................................................................................... 98 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 109 Chapter 2. “[I]t’s a system of families that keep who we are alive”: Native Women’s Ongoing Fight for Corporal, Spiritual, and Political Sovereignty ............................................................. 112 Women of All Red Nations......................................................................................................... 119 In Support of Native Families: Dian Million’s “The Housing Poem”........................................ 125 Revising Red Power: Winona LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman ............................................... 130 “Like Mother Earth / her will to live / is strong / against overwhelming odds”: Yvonne Wanrow (Swan)’s Struggle Against the U.S.’ Genocidal Plan ................................................................. 144 “[H]er absence stopped time”: MMIWG2S & The Round House ............................................. 155 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 166 Chapter 3: Spiralic Time and Cultural Continuity for Indigenous Sovereignty: Idle No More and The Marrow Thieves ................................................................................................................... 171 Indigenous Resurgence & Spiralic Time .................................................................................... 175 “When the circle is made, we the ancestors will be dancing with you and we will be as one” .. 180 “[T]o set the memory in perpetuity”: Spiralic Temporality in The Marrow Thieves ................. 185 “Our history is still unfolding” ................................................................................................... 210 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 213 Chapter 4. “[T]his is what the prophecy looks like”: Radical Relationality, Spiralic Temporality, & the #NoDAPL Movement ....................................................................................................... 217 “[T]his is what the prophecy looks like” .................................................................................... 220 Indian Wars Again, and Again, and Again ................................................................................. 225 Writing the River ........................................................................................................................ 233 “They’re living the dream” ......................................................................................................... 244 Water is Life, All Across Turtle Island ....................................................................................... 249 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 261 Forward: “Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end” .............................. 264 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 282 Acknowledgments....................................................................................................................... 283 Spirals of Transformation: “Our bodies contain all of these rings and motions” We left shells on stone. My family’s hands move to release shells The memory of origin. We wear these elements at necessary times for strength. We remember how helpless we were, leaving our beginning. Not knowing, not expecting our tasks to be part of immense concentric rings. Water is always present. The salmon in the season of warm winds. The roots in spring. Huckleberries, deep colored and round, Roll into exquisite baskets with mountain designs. The fir boughs cover the berries for coolness and fragrance. The red choke cherries hang as if heavy with snow, bittersweet to the tongue. The deer walks quietly in our lives. The elk, heavy with challenge, whistles, his horns bent back over his rich brown shoulders. Our bodies contain all of these rings and motion. Elizabeth Woody, “Shells on Stone” As I write this introduction in the spring of 2020, while being an uninvited guest in Coast Salish territory (particularly that of the Duwamish), a pandemic rages across the world. While I think about how indebted I am to these lands and waters, and to the peoples who took care of it for millennia (before settler capitalists invaded their territories and interrupted their traditional relationships with all of Creation), I realize I am in the middle of another return of familiar settler violence. Of course, the whole of what is currently the U.S. is negatively affected by the settler government’s delayed response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is actively putting profit before people—especially Black, Brown, and/or Indigenous people. It does not read as a coincidence that the Indian Health Service (IHS) was only afforded $40 million in the U.S. Congress’ plan to fight the pandemic, or that even that has been held up for weeks by De Vos 1 bureaucratic hurdles.1 With the IHS perpetually underfunded and understaffed, and entirely unprepared to support a large outbreak of the virus in the many (urban and remote) communities it serves, the National Indian Health Board (NIHB) has called for at least triple that amount.2 By not properly assisting the IHS and the NIHB in their efforts to protect the Indigenous peoples of these lands, the U.S. is failing to fulfill its treaty responsibilities once again (Mapes). It is also putting Indigenous people and peoples at risk of a reenactment of the devastation caused by the smallpox brought by early settlement (Wilkinson 537).3 As Lummi Chairman Lawrence Solomon explains, “We have been around this for a long time, we hear the