Dynamic tensions in indigenous sovereignty and representation: A sampler

When I arrived in Aurukun, west Cape York, it was the heat that struck me first, knocking city pace from my body, replacing it with a languor familiar to my childhood, although hea more northern. Fieldwork brings with it its own delights and anxieties. It is where I feel competent and incompetent, where I am most indebted and thankful for the generosity kindness of strangers. I love the way “no-where” places quickly become somewhere and some to me. Then there are the bodily visitations: a much younger self haunts my body. At time adult self abandons me, leaving me nothing but an awkward adolescent: clumsy, sweaty, too m body, too white, too urban, too disconnected or unable to interpret the social rules. My body in that this is not my home, but home for Wik and Wik Way people. Flailing about unmoored from socio-cultural system that I take for granted, and take comfort from – and I draw sustena Anxiety circles, closes in on me, who grows distant and unsure, fragmented. Misusing Deborah Rose, I’m tempted to say I’m separated from my nourishing terrain. Indeed it can feel like nation (not the country) slipped out from under my feet.

Development of a Tribally-led Gardening Curriculum for Indigenous Preschool Children: The FRESH Study

Reviewed by: Beyond Settler Sovereignty: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination by Mark Rifkin Penelope Kelsey Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Sovereignty: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 296 pp. Cloth, $99.95; paper, $26.95. Mark Rifkin's Beyond Settler Sovereignty offers a series of important critical insights as it brings the theoretical body of queer temporalities into conversation with the field of Native American and Indigenous studies. In the first chapter, Rifkin relies upon non-Native theorists like Henri Bergson, Lauren Berlant, Albert Einstein, Johannes Fabian, and Elizabeth Freeman to lay groundwork for understanding settler heteronormative conceptions of time; he then engages Native American and Indigenous studies scholars like Kevin Bruyneel, Mishuana Goeman, Deborah Miranda, Audra Simpson, Dale Turner, Robert Warrior, and others to build parameters for understanding how Indigenous formulations of time might differ and proceeds to debunk the myth of a "global 'coevalness'" (21). In fact, Rifkin warns, to insist upon a shared experience of time between settler and Indigene "reduces the immanent trajectories of indigeneity (processes of Native becoming) to a set of points—the supposedly shared now of the present, modernity, national history, and so on" (26). In this chapter, Rifkin also sets up important theoretical concepts that he will track throughout the book like storying and backgrounding. In his second chapter, Rifkin opens with an anecdote about viewing the film Lincoln and its silent portrayal of Seneca hahësnowa:nëh (Chief) Ely S. Parker, a representation that he finds ultimately stands for Native peoples' struggles for sovereignty and the ways in which Native American identity precludes inclusion in a national narrative that centralizes the Civil War as integral to becoming. For Rifkin, Lincoln's imagining of the Civil War and its meaning can be better apprehended by analyzing "how periodization participates [End Page 323] in the storying and unfolding of national time, giving shape to the present and the sense of its potentials by reactivating . . . an inherent perceptual tradition" (50). Rifkin traces a process he calls the emancipation sublime and uses it to denote the war's meaning as a vehicle for making apparent the state's inherent democracy, a process that disallows Native peoples' inclusion in the "temporality of the union" (51–52). Rifkin's argument is convincing in many ways, but would be helped by spending time on the intersections of "the union" and Parker's role in both it and the Iroquois Confederacy, given the founding fathers' employment of Hodinöhšö:ni:h governance as a template for designing US democracy. This concern is a minor quibble in a book spilling over with impressive insights about Indigenous temporalities and their relationship to sovereignty, however. Rifkin concludes the chapter with an analysis of non-Native depictions of Indigenous military actions in the 1862 Dakota Conflict as "temporally exceptional" (67). In the third chapter, Rifkin analyzes how allotment sought to impose settler temporality upon Native people through its enforcement of nuclear family structures, individualized land ownership, and participation in a cash economy and its dismantling of traditional forms of governance and cultural expression (namely clothing, language, religion, gender). Focusing upon John Joseph Mathews's novel Sundown, Rifkin argues its main character Chal's "feeling of queerness" as he comes of age attests to "the emergence and persistence of modes of perception, experience, and memory that link Osage people to that place" (98–99). Rifkin explores the Osage mineral estate as furnishing "a basis for common experiences of time" and reflecting a "duration of peoplehood," in spite of allotment efforts to divide Osage lands and dissolve these ties. Rifkin concludes that Mathews's portrayal of Osage people during the "Great Frenzy" gestures toward Osage ways of occupying the land that emphasize silences and "becoming," and depicts signal markers of Osage temporalities that run counter to American development narratives. Rifkin's fourth chapter centers on portrayals of the Ghost Dance in Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens [End Page 324] in the Dunes, focusing on the role of prophecy, cross-temporality, and asynchrony in Indigenous temporal formations that he terms prophetic temporality. Rifkin sees Alexie's deployment of the Ghost Dance as an...

Decolonizing Gender and Sexuality:Reading for Indigenous Liberation Anne Spice (bio) Joanne Barker's, ed., Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017 Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017 Aída Hernández Castillo's Multiple InJustices: Indigenous Women, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016 As the North American academy scrambles to address emerging political horrors and movements for justice, a new salvo of Indigenous studies scholars reclaim space for the deep praxis of decolonization. These works demonstrate the crucial position of gender and sexuality in settler colonialism and decolonization movements, inspiring new lines of organizing and scholarship. I read these three books as I moved through spaces of Indigenous land reoccupation and defense in what is, for now, called British Columbia. I read at a pipeline resistance camp on Wet'suwet'en territory, at a logging blockade on Haida Gwaii, and in a traditional pit-house on Lil'wat land. My reading was interspersed with conversations with Indigenous warriors and land defenders about sovereignty, raising children, building networks of support, cultural teachings, responsibility, toxic masculinity, homophobia and transphobia, feminism, decolonizing strategies, survival skills, incarceration, living on the streets, domestic violence, addiction, gender roles, white supremacy, intimacy and sex, medicine and ceremony, and enacting Indigenous law and protocols. These conversations informed my reading and seemed wholly appropriate given the way these books move between activist work, academic research, and Indigenous community relations. Each book centers Indigenous feminism, gender, and sexuality, and taken together they map an important shift in studies of Indigenous law, land-based struggle, and sovereignty. Each resists the separation of gender and sexuality into identity categories outside the political struggles for [End Page 301] Indigenous survival. If, as the authors argue, the imposition of heteropatriarchy and the ubiquity of gender-based violence were and are central technologies of colonial governance and Indigenous pacification, then movements for justice, radical resistance, and Indigenous resurgence must center the decolonization of gender and sexuality. In so doing, we might develop strategies for resisting neoliberal logics of inclusion and the normalization of white possession. We might resist the oppression and marginalization of Indigenous women, queer, and two-spirit people. We might challenge the political and industrial regimes that produce gender-based violence and threaten the reproduction of our Indigenous nations. Reading the three books together provides a rich and nuanced picture of how Indigenous gender and sexuality maps onto relational fields from grassroots land occupation to the local tribal council to settler state governance to international human rights courts. Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, edited by Joanne Barker (Lenape, Delaware Tribe of Indians) is an interdisciplinary collection. The book features essays that focus on the political stakes of gender and sexuality in contemporary Indigenous life. From an array of Indigenous nations and embedded contexts, the collection centers on "the polity of the Indigenous—the unique governance, territory, and culture of Indigenous peoples in unique and related systems of (non)human relationships and responsibilities to one another" (2017, 7). As Barker points out in the introduction, the liberal work of the settler state has been to police Indigenous peoples into normative gender and sex roles as a technology of governance that aims to replace Indigenous polities with obedient citizens. The studies in this volume challenge the disarticulation of gender and sexuality from studies of race and ethnicity or law and politics. The separation of these discussions into separate fields has left the raced and gendered implications of settler colonialism outside the realm of "the political," with implications for Indigenous scholarship and community relations. As Barker explains, "Imperialism and colonialism require Indigenous people to fit within the heteronormative archetypes of an Indigeneity that was authentic in the past but is culturally and legally vacated in the present" (3). The work of Indigenous sovereignty, then, is not a politics outside of Indigenous gender and sexuality—it is about wresting our bodies and relations from the individualizing liberal gaze that would make us feathered facsimiles of white heterosexual citizens. [End Page 302] Critically Sovereign is rooted...

About the Contributors

United States Policy toward China: Diplomatic and Public Documents, 1839–1939. Selected and arranged by Paul Hibbert Clyde, Department of History, Duke University. [Duke University Publications.] (Durham: Duke University Press. 1940. Pp. xv, 321. $3.50.) Get access United States Policy toward China: Diplomatic and Public Documents, 1839–1939. Selected and arranged by Clyde Paul Hibbert, Department of History, Duke University. [Duke University Publications.] (Durham: Duke University Press. 1940. Pp. xv, 321. $3.50.) Earl Swisher Earl Swisher University of Colorado Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 46, Issue 3, April 1941, Pages 655–656, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/46.3.655 Published: 01 April 1941

Reviewed by: Collective Biologies: Healing Social Ills through Sexual Health Research in Mexico by Emily A. Wentzell William Sorensen Collective Biologies: Healing Social Ills through Sexual Health Research in Mexico. By Emily A. Wentzell. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, p. 221, $25.95. In chapter one of Collective Biologies, there was a dramatic situation which riveted the reader's attention: a Mexican man was carjacked and kidnapped by narcotraficantes. He escaped; he was later interviewed by Wentzell. This was a compelling opening to more cerebral and repetitious writing throughout the rest of the book. Yet perhaps we need this repetition, for the subject matter is complex. Wentzell is an American anthropologist who recruited men already enrolled in a biomedical human papillomavirus (HPV) cohort study. The original study began in 2005 in Cuernavaca, whereby 3,000 men were tested for HPV every 6 months. While the testing component was in process, Wentzell stepped in to interview 84 participants, including the spouses of some of the men. Most of the couples were interviewed together. Her goal was to describe how being connected to a medical study would aid the biological and social wellbeing of others with whom they were related. On a broader level, Wentzell questioned the U.S. medical paradigm, which values individualism. There is good justification for doing these interviews: HPV is very prevalent (globally), can be deadly (certain strains develop into cancer), and men tend not to talk about their behavior or medical history. What they had to reveal is the subject for this book: Middle-class voices in a richly varied society, a society that includes poor Indigenes and wealthy elites, from narco-gangs to corrupt government agencies. But these participants are in the middle and perceive themselves as the vanguard of a future Mexico. Her conclusion is that these participants think of themselves as entities beyond mere individuals, as larger composites, yet biological in nature. These composites have different layers. The first level highlights "companionate" marriage or relationships (mutual, intimate, communicative, and respectful). Then comes the family unit. Then the citizen in a larger social unit, embracing mestizaje, which navigates away from European or indigenous identities. These subjects unfold as chapters 3, 4 and 5, respectively. Not only do these participants think and act this way, in larger composites; they also aid the biological and social wellbeing of others across the various levels. Wentzell's skill in describing these biological abstractions is impressive. She has the capacity to weave complex subjects together: class differences, Mexican gender norms, national stereotypes, history, the economy, [End Page 461] racial stereotypes, sexual disease transmission, familial and educational concerns, perceptions of governmental function, and more. She may improve her book by looking deeper into an examination of study bias. She is convincing up to a point, then seems to miss describing a possible Hawthorne effect from her study. Also, there is not sufficient acknowledgement of volunteer bias. Wentzell never comes full circle at the end the book by looking back at her preface. In the preface she brings up Covid-19 and mask-wearing behavior in Iowa; there would be interesting parallels with HPV and Covid-19 if discussed. To her credit, she nails down the complexity of HPV infection and that misunderstandings about HPV spread will inevitably arise–there is a large latency time to deal with, or unclear pathways of transmission. Still, 75% of the couples blamed men as the major transmitters of HPV. There is much harm in this outcome. Consequently, Wentzell develops a model of collective biologies based largely on people's misunderstanding. She acknowledges these points, sure, but more effort should be made to emphasize limitations of scientific knowledge of HPV transmission, and that model-making cannot possibly be finished (we see this same problem with Covid-19). Lastly, there are other theories that may explain why men, or women for that matter, psychologically change over time, and in the direction of "more companionate" humanity. For example, the theories of Erikson or Levinson's adult stage development in men can explain Wentzell's male participant behaviors (that is, men become more expansive as they age, they think of others more, they empathize more, and they develop a...

Martin Duberman and other social historians claim that the “series of riots” that took place at the Stonewall Inn (Manhattan’s West Village) in late June 1969 have become “the emblematic events in modern lesbian and gay history” (Duberman 2002). The emblematic status of those events has also created an emblematic narrative, under whose terms the Stonewall moment dispelled darkness, secrecy and silence and inspired liberation, visibility, public, political engagement. The emblematic narrative also equates language before Stonewall with secret codes, private messages, and in-group argot. This book argues that secrecy and concealment were a small part of the connections linking language and sexuality before Stonewall. And this book uses a Queer Historical Linguistics (QHL) rather than the assumptions of the emblematic narrative to examine what language and sexuality before Stonewall entailed. This chapter introduces the method and theory associated with QHL and demonstrates QHL’s usefulness for studies of language before Stonewall. QHL builds on the idea that queerness is a “mesh of possibilities” (Sedgwick in Tendencies, Duke University Press, Durham, 1993) and a messy formation (Manalansan in Radical History Review 120:94–106, 2014), and refers to practices and subject positions located “on the edges of logics of labor and production …” (Halberstam 2010). QHL depends on an assemblage of data (an archive) gathered through a scavenger methodology (Halberstam in Female Masculinity, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998), and analyzed through the work of close reading (Freeman in Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010; Levine in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015), and through the framework of homohistory (Menon in Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film, Palgrave, London, 2008). Unlike in historical studies where “meaning succeeds as replacing itself-as itself- through time” (Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke University Press, Durham, 2004), QHL refuses to “…take the object of queering for granted” (Goldberg and Menon in PMLA 120(5):1608–1617, 2005). Several examples conclude the chapter to illustrate what QHL-oriented inquiry entails.

When people think of academic libraries, they don’t usually think of them as wild places, or <em>de</em>humanizing institutions. Quite the opposite, in fact. The disciplinary order of the library is generally considered to be, along with higher education itself, an expression of the highest form of humanist discourse and ideals. Not only do these books bear an intellectual kinship with one another, but they are also all published by Duke University Press, and in their writings, the authors have each acknowledged one another as friends. The lessons offered by Nathan Snaza, Jack Halberstam, and Julietta Singh are useful to academic librarians because they call into question some of the metaphors, objectives, and stated values of our profession—things we tend to take for granted like mastery, discipline, universality, and order—and describe some of the ways in which these concepts are derived from colonial projects. Together, these books provide insight into what queer desire and decolonization have to do with each other, calling some of librarianship’s foundational principles into question and expanding the range of what can be thought in our own field.

The concept of duty is overrated (Fire) The swamiji's testicles have grown too big for his loincloth (Fire) It's a dyke thing (Junky Punky Girlz) Eswar Allah tero Naam (Junky Punky Girlz) Before ex...

In a contentious field characterised by divergence of opinion, Indian Literary Nationalism intervenes in recent controversial debates on the role of hybridity, suggesting common sense strategies rooted in the material realities of various communities. These essays deal with issues the authors have been wrestling with throughout their careers. Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior, assert being a 'nationalist' is a legitimate perspective from which to approach Native American literature and criticism. They consider such a methodology not only defensible but also crucial to supporting Native national sovereignty and self-determination, an important goal of Native American studies, generally. However, the authors do not believe the nationalism suggested in Indian Literary Nationalism is the only possible approach to Native literature. Each invites Natives and non-Native allies who support tribal national sovereignty and nationalist readings of Native literature to join the discussion. With this writing, each author acknowledges and honours the foundational contribution of Simon Ortiz in his 1981 'MELUS' essay, 'Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism'. It has been over thirty-five years since academe has accepted the legitimacy of American Indian literature. Weaver, Warrior, and Womack now call for more Native voices to articulate literary criticism and for clearer thinking about what links the literature to Native communities.

Bending, Turning, and GrowingCree Language, Laws, and Ceremony in Louise B. Halfe / Sky Dancer's The Crooked Good Angela Van Essen (bio) The Crooked Good, nêhiyaw poet Louise B. Halfe / Sky Dancer's third book of poetry, is an epic poem that narrates ê- kwêskît's journey toward healing.1 This story is complex and multilayered, because her journey is neither singular nor straightforward. Instead, her journey is curved, circular, and deeply connected to the stories of her relatives: her ancestors, her children, her siblings, and her parents. Her path is also intimately tied to ceremony, language, land, and sacred stories. Indeed, the book can be understood as a journey home, where, as nêhiyaw scholar and poet Neal McLeod explains, "'Being home' means to be a nation. … It involves having a collective sense of dignity. A collective memory emerges from a specific location, spatially and temporally, and includes such things as relationship with the land, songs, ceremonies, language, and stories" (Cree Narrative Memory 54).2 I do not intend to explore all of the complex aspects of peoplehood and nêhiyaw sovereignty in The Crooked Good in this article, but I do maintain that in order to understand this book on a deeper level, readers must pay close attention to the nêhiyaw itwêwina (the Cree words) that Louise Halfe uses in her poetry, because these words are deeply rooted in nêhiyaw laws, histories, sacred stories, and ceremonies; these words guide readers home, where home is nêhiyânâhk (Cree territory). In many instances, these words are what Métis writer Maria Campbell and others have termed word bundles.3 In a 2004 interview Campbell explained how she cautions her students "not to just settle for the word, but imagine that the word is carrying this big huge bundle. What's inside? What are the roots of that word? What is the story? Is there a song in the bundle, a ceremony, a protocol? Where did it come from? The word bundle is full of treasure" (200). This concept of a word bundle [End Page 71] is especially productive given the polysynthetic nature of nêhiyawêwin, as well as the nested meanings that reside in itwêwina. When describing Anishinaabemowin, an Algonquian language that is closely related to nêhiyawêwin, Basil H. Johnston tells us that "in my tribal language, all words have three levels of meaning: There is the surface meaning that everyone instantly understands. Beneath this meaning is a more fundamental meaning derived from the prefixes and their combinations with other terms. Underlying both is the philosophical meaning" (6). nêhiyawêwin is structured similarly, and each Cree word, therefore, has nested layers of meaning. In paying close attention to just a few of the nêhiyaw itwêwina in The Crooked Good, I demonstrate how one word can function as a "big huge bundle" because of the layers of meaning it has, as well as the connections it has to other words, ceremonies, and laws. By performing this sort of reading, I am purposefully not settling for the surface layer of the words or for the glossed English translations (provided at the back of the book). Instead, I demonstrate that by approaching these words with care, curiosity, and respect—and in relationship with nêhiyawak (Plains Cree people)—these words begin to open up the text in ways that connect our understanding of the narrative to the rich Cree intellectual traditions that underpin Halfe's work. This approach to the text was initially guided by an Indigenous literary nationalist approach, with the movement's foundational scholars, such as Robert Warrior, calling for critics to see Indigenous studies as growing out of a longer intellectual history, suggesting that Indigenous literatures should be read in their particular historical and tribal contexts. In his article "Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?" Scott Richard Lyons reminds educators and scholars that teaching and studying Indigenous literature is always political and that this work should ideally "focus on local and community levels in hopes of lending support to the work already being done there" (465). He goes on to point out...

In Gramsci's Common Sense, Kate Crehan offers us another excellent book, this time focused expressly on three important and often not well or fully understood categories in Gramsci's work: 'subalterns,' 'intellectuals,' and 'common sense.' Crehan succeeds in producing a smooth and seamless discussion of some of Gramsci’s most popular, important, and, also, misinterpreted concepts poising each for use in analysis and interpretation.

Journal Article Ricardo D. Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert M. Joseph, editors. Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2001. Pp. xxiv, 448. Cloth $64.95, paper $21.95 Get access Salvatore Ricardo D., Aguirre Carlos, and Joseph Gilbert M., editors. Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2001. Pp. xxiv, 448. Cloth $64.95, paper $21.95. Deborah Poole Deborah Poole Johns Hopkins University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 108, Issue 4, October 2003, Pages 1184–1186, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.4.1184 Published: 01 October 2003

This essay is a nonlinear narrative that attempts to “unthink” the ways in which Australian Indigenous peoples' identity, sovereignty, and law are discussed. An Australian Aboriginal law narrative and poetry are part of the unthinking language used to discuss these definitions. The essay challenges some of the Australian definitions of Indigenous identity, sovereignty, and law, which come out of a Western epistemology and value system. This challenge includes the role of the United Nations' special rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of Indigenous peoples and its lack of female representation. The essay goes on to critique Australia's lack of maturity in accepting its geographical location in the Southern Hemisphere. The overall critique, however, is balanced with a suggested alternative governance system based on the classic thinking of Australian Aboriginal senior law persons.