Poetics & Politics of Indigenous Women's Sovereignty

Poetics & Politics of Indigenous Women's Sovereignty

The author reads from the first 5 pages of the introduction to elaborate the linkages between oral tradition, poetics, and Indigenous women's political engagement with sovereignty.

Long ago, before the U.S. and before Mexico and before Canada, but not before borderlands, a tree spoke to the people. Some say it was a palo verde tree that made strange, unintelligible noises; others call it an old mesquite, but all agree that the Surem wisemen could not make out the buzzing words repeated in the branches. A council of elders decided to seek out the aid of twin daughters who lived on Grandmother’s Mountain. The girls, some call them women, agreed to help despite their father’s doubts, but the family went first to the ocean—most likely the Gulf of California—rather than the desert grove and the talking tree. From a saltwater fish, the sisters learned a new language, unfamiliar to their Surem people, and the fish taught them how to interpret the strange message. The family returned to their concerned people and the sisters stood on either side of the dry bark to translate a foreboding prophecy. The tree told the Surem of the coming tide of conquest, colonization, and Christianity. Though the sisters repeated warnings of violence and devastation—even self-destruction—the Surem also listened to descriptions of creative inventions and renewal through baptism. When the girls finished their recitation, the Surem found themselves divided. Some people chose to face these strange events and enemies head on, and today they call themselves the Yaqui, the Baptized Ones. Those who turned away from the prophecy went underground and are still known as the Surem, the Enchanted People.
Perhaps around the same time that the sisters bent their heads to translate whispers in Sonoran branches, the people on the shores of the Salish Sea and throughout the Puget Sound interpreted signs of change and transformation as well. In variations on a theme, Indigenous storytellers described the heroic interventions and intrusions of the changer. Twanas called him “Dokibatt,” while the Salish named him “Dokwibalth.” The Klallam called her “Nukimatt,” and some said there was not one, but four sibling transformers, three male and one female; or they were twins, one creative and the other destructive. Whether singular or plural, male or female, change and transformation were born of the inter-racial union between a mortal mother and a celestial father. Together these supernatural, shapeshifting, multiracial beings delivered the moral and practical lessons that made sense of the Salishan and Sound world, preparing the people to confront secular challenges with sacred knowledge. The changes and transformations wrought by these figures have been both creative and destructive, but collectively, like a natural law, their actions balance and order the world. Some might recognize the unions of familiar women and strange men as a sign of change on the horizon or perhaps as an abomination, but many are sure that the transformer “came once to create, a second [time] to change, and will come again to make the world over again when it becomes old.”
Through the efforts of girls and women able to import knowledge from other worlds, and with the help of their daughters’ mixed-race progeny, Indigenous North Americans have managed to survive centuries of change foretold by talking trees and wrought by unpredictable transformers. Tribal oral traditions explain communal strategies to comprehend and control ruptures in the social order, including those initiated under colonialism. Stories like the talking tree and transformer narratives describe the importance of Native women’s roles in both encountering and engendering change and conflict. A central assumption of this book is that such stories, though they only serve here as a starting point, should prepare scholars to anticipate and indeed seek out evidence of Indigenous women’s prominent roles in negotiating conquest and navigating change—whether in the past or the present—and that these and other stories constitute a form of “case law” that makes up the legal traditions of Indigenous people. For historians of the North American West, evidence of Indian women’s confrontations with colonizers who spoke foreign languages and fathered tumultuous children should be abundant, and signs that Indigenous women faced imperial legal regimes with their own legal philosophies in hand should be obvious—and yet, such histories remain to many as unintelligible as the sound of talking trees and the howling winds of change.
Though many historians have been reticent to link laws to legends, this work builds on generations of interdisciplinary scholarship that pays critical attention to the poetics and politics of Indigenous legal history, while making its focus on the efforts of Indian women to achieve corporeal sovereignty—authority over their own bodies and progeny. An important argument underlying this book is that Indigenous women’s efforts to claim and defend personal and embodied autonomy deserves the same sort of historical scrutiny that histories of treaty negotiation and federal Indian law have attracted in the years between Felix Cohen and Robert A. Williams. This introduction’s title draws on Joy Harjo’s poem, “Returning From the Enemy,” which shifts between mythic sagas, pointed critiques, and tragic memories to chronicle a woman’s personal journey toward decolonization. In linking the personal and political struggles of twenty-first-century Indigenous women to epic origins and violent pasts, the poet offers historians a useful model in conceptualizing Native women’s encounters with colonialism and the law.
I have bowed my head to those who would disrespect me. My neck appears to
be broken in half by shame. I have lost my country.
I have handed my power over to my enemies. My shoulders bear each act of for-getfulness.
I have abandoned my children to the laws of dictators who called themselves
priests, preachers, and the purveyors of law. My feet are scarred from the steps
taken in the direction of freedom.
I have forgotten the reason, forgive me. I have forgotten my name in the lan-
guage I was born to, forgive me.
The enemy immigrated to a land he claimed for his God.
He named himself as the arbitrator of deity in any form.
He beat his Indian children.
The law of the gods I claim state:
When entering another country do not claim ownership.
It’s important to address the souls there kindly, with respect.
And ask permission.
I am asking you to leave the country of my body, my mind, if you have any-
thing other than honorable intentions.

Harjo’s verse suggests that modern-day Indian women can point to oral traditions as evidence of their creative and critical power, recite histories of survivance—the combined acts of survival and resistance in the face of colonial denigration and dispossession—and formulate sophisticated critiques of North American imperialism and occupation. Taking its lead from Harjo and a growing cadre of Indigenous women who are simultaneously academics, activists, and artists, this book takes seriously the claims of those who call themselves Native feminists that their activism is the legacy of deities and grandmothers who faced down the enemy in epic and historic times.