By Scott Richard Lyons
In the course of the eighteenth and 19th centuries, North American Indian leaders normally signed treaties with the eu powers and the yank and Canadian governments with an X, signifying their presence and assent to the phrases. those x-marks indicated coercion (because the treaties have been made below unfair conditions), resistance (because they have been frequently met with protest), and acquiescence (to either a European Read more...
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In other words, to more things. One thing leads to another because while Indian identities may be constructions, they are not just imaginary things playing games in the kingdom of meaning. Identities connect deeply to our material, political world. ”4 A “social location” is, among other things, your place in a hierarchy and the vantage point from which you watch the world go by; and it can predict how your identity will likely be interpreted and treated by others. ”5 Providing a host of hard examples of how Native women are generally perceived and treated in our world— from being seen as a novelty, to being ten times more likely than white women to die a violent death (and “the National Guard will not spend hours of manpower scouring for your missing body”), to suffering from “ethno-stress” because you know that “you are no longer a priority”6— LaDuke reveals the implacably political nature of Native female identity, as well as how one’s Indian identity can intersect with other axes of identity, such as gender, sexuality, and class.
Although the idea that today’s postmodern world destroys all distinctions between inside and outside probably goes too far—there are still places in which such distinctions make sense, the tribal private among them—it nevertheless seems true that inside/outside is delineated by a dotted line at best. Things get out and things come in, and there seems to be absolutely no way to prevent that. So, if there is a “door” to be imagined between public Indian space and the tribal private, it would be best envisioned as a screen door.
The narrative, it seems, had colonized the women’s own personal experiences. Whether this was because of a desire to produce a certain critical discourse in the Indian space of my classroom, or to the return of a repressed historical trauma, is impossible to say. In any case, despite new scholarship on boarding schools that complicates greatly the discourse of victimization—I am thinking here of Tsianina Lomawaima’s They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of the Chilocco Indian School (1995), Brenda Introduction 23 Child’s Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (2000), and Amanda Cobb’s Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females, 1852–1949, as well as other recent histories describing the boarding-school experience as multiple, mixed, and diverse—it will probably be a while before the boarding schools receive more complex treatment in the realm of public memory.