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The Effects of Removal on American Indian Tribes - Clara Kidwell

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The Effects of Removal on American Indian Tribes - Clara Kidwell

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The war of 1812 instilled in Americans a greater sense of national identity. How do you think that this bolstered American nationalism influenced Indian removal?

Kidwell writes that, "European settlers had brought well-established beliefs in the power of herbal medicines, which were based on similarities of form between plants and the human body, while Native beliefs were based on the idea that plants were living beings." Do you find any insights in this statement regarding the varying attitudes toward and relationship between people and environment?

Indigenous food sovereignty maintains a fragile equilibrium between people and the forces of the environment. Native people practiced ceremonies such as the Green Corn ceremony that served to renew the world in the spring for the upcoming year. How does the relationship between space and power vary between European colonizers and indigenous peoples?

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The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma has used cultural GIS mapping to "protect the Trail of Tears" and thus, protect Choctaw culture. This mapping project starts by marking Nanih Waiya Mound, the site of their ancestral homeland and origin story. It then maps their movements, relocation, and relationships to land throughout the continued period of Indigenous dispossession starting in the 1700's.

In Amir Sheik's talk last week, he referred to "counter-mapping" as an agent of change against oppressive hegemonic systems, spaces and structures. This GIS holds data allowing Choctaw people's to trace the routes their ancestors took, effectively countering settler colonial politics of erasure.

In what other ways does this project work to document power over space through time? What possibilities does GIS technology offer in countering Indigenous erasure more broadly?

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Heritage Day: Trail of Tears. A GIS Approach

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Donald Vann (Cherokee artist), Men with Broken Hearts, 1994

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Donald Vann (Cherokee artist), Men with Broken Hearts, 1994

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Open Letter From Indigenous Women Scholars Regarding Discussions of Andrea Smith

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Open Letter From Indigenous Women Scholars Regarding Discussions of Andrea Smith

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In 2015, a group of Indigenous Women Scholars shared an open letter voicing concerns about "he profound need for transparency and responsibility in light of the traumatic histories of colonization, slavery, and genocide that shape the present" in response to disputed claims surrounding Andrea Smith's Cherokee identity, including claims that she herself said she has no Cherokee ancestry. Despite this, Smith asserted herself as a "Native woman" in her scholarly and activist work.

The letter brings up important points regarding Indigenous representation and cultural survival.

As the letter asks for reflection and care in making sense of Smith's contradictions, it also acknowledges that 'Playing Indian' enables and contributes to the settler-colonial logic of Indigenous erasure.

Reading the letter, is it possible to connect Smith's taking up of space in Indigenous academic and activist networks with the concept of accumulation by dispossession?  If so, how?

The letter asks for transparency, self-reflexivity, and honesty from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars in considering complex histories of violence. What are your reflections on this?

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We write to respond to widespread public discussion of well-known scholar-activist Andrea Smith's history of contradictory claims to Cherokee identity through both enrollment and lineal descent. While concerns about her claims have been known and discussed within various indigenous women's circles for years, many people are hearing details about them for the first time. The news has provoked a variety of responses from those committed to antiracist, antisexist, and anticolonial analyses and actions, including shock, incredulity, fear, anger, denial, and great sadness. Thus, differing and sometimes conflicting assumptions about the meanings and intentions of this discussion are circulating on social media. A prominent fear is that the discussion is motivated by a desire to undermine, police or ostracize an individual; another is that the work people find important in developing their understandings of colonization and sexual violence might now have to be jettisoned.

We hope to reframe this discussion and to collectively clarify what we believe to be core issues at stake. We are indigenous women scholars from a number of different indigenous nations, communities, academic disciplines, and geographies who are committed to working for gender, sexual, and racial justice in the context of decolonization. We write with the intention to open up discussion. We hope to elicit productive dialogues about deeply fraught and painful issues, and to suggest paths forward for continued and complex analysis of the roles identity plays in the work we do. We do not claim to represent all indigenous women in Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) or a monolithic indigenous feminism. There is diverse work within NAIS and Native/Indigenous gender, sexuality, and feminist studies, and also diverse perspectives within Native/Indigenous academic and activist communities about feminism. We respect that diversity. Additionally, we want to acknowledge the kinds of professional vulnerabilities that NAIS scholars are subject to, especially intergenerationally, through the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Therefore, we did not invite untenured or adjunct faculty to sign this statement.

We call first and foremost for accountability to the communities in which we claim membership. This is not a call for the punitive or the exclusionary. This case evokes people's fears and vulnerabilities about very real histories of disenfranchisement, expulsion, discrimination, and normative policing in Indian Country and beyond. Thus it bears repeating: our concerns about Andrea Smith do not emerge from statist forms of enrollment or non-enrollment, federal recognition or lack thereof. They are not about blood quantum or other biologically essentialist notions of identity. Nor are they about cultural purity or authenticity, or imposing standards of identification that those who would work for or with indigenous communities must meet.

Rather, our concerns are about the profound need for transparency and responsibility in light of the traumatic histories of colonization, slavery, and genocide that shape the present. Andrea Smith has a decades-long history of self-contradictory stories of identity and affiliation testified to by numerous scholars and activists, including her admission to four separate parties that she has no claim to Cherokee ancestry at all. She purportedly promised to no longer identify as Cherokee, and yet in her subsequent appearances and publications she continues to assert herself as a non-specific "Native woman" or a "woman of color" scholar to antiracist activist communities in ways that we believe have destructive intellectual and political consequences. Presenting herself as generically indigenous, and allowing others to represent her as Cherokee, Andrea Smith allows herself to stand in as the representative of collectivities to which she has demonstrated no accountability, and undermines the integrity and vibrancy of Cherokee cultural and political survival. Her lack of clarity and consistency in her self-presentation adds to the vulnerability of the communities and constituents she purports to represent, including students and activists she mentors and who cite and engage her work. This concerns us as indigenous women committed to opening spaces for scholars and activists with whom we work and who come after us.

Asking for accountability to our communities and collectivities is not limited to Andrea Smith. Asking for transparency, self-reflexivity, and honesty about our complex histories and scholarly investments is motivated by the desire to strengthen ethical indigenous scholarship by both indigenous and non-indigenous scholars. This is one of the core guiding values of indigenous feminisms, and we believe that the long history of indigenous feminisms cannot and should not be reduced to Smith's work as representative or originary, even as we recognize that her work on sexual violence and colonialism has had a profound impact on a wide range of constituencies.

Though some express fear that the power of indigenous feminist critique might be undermined by raising these concerns, such fear is a reflection of the urgent need for scholars in and beyond indigenous studies to extend their reading and citational practices to include the length and breadth of indigenous women's writings and activism over the years. Indigenous women have always been at the forefront of their communities in naming and combatting colonization, genocide, and gendered violence. Looking at the US and Canada alone, work by Paula Gunn Allen, Kim Anderson, Beth Brant, Chrystos, Sarah Deer, Ella Deloria, Jennifer Denetdale, Mishuana Goeman, Joy Harjo, Sarah Hunt, E. Pauline Johnson, Winona LaDuke, Emma LaRoque, Lee Maracle, Bea Medicine, Dian Millon, Deborah Miranda, Dory Nason, Melissa K. Nelson, Jessica Bissett-Perea, Kimberly Robertson, Luana Ross, Priscilla Settee, Audra Simpson, Leanne Simpson, Lina Sunseri, Elle-Maija Tailfeathers, and Melanie Yazzie to name only some, demonstrates the vitality and richness of indigenous women's voices that speak against the racial, gendered, and sexualized violences of colonialism.

Given the intellectual and emotional labor that Andrea Smith's silence and lack of accountability has required us all-supporter or critic-to undertake, we would like to also ask for reflection and care in the stories generated to make sense of her contradictions and her silences. The history of Cherokee removal and dispossession is deeply woven into the same southeastern landscapes shaped by slavery and anti-black racism, and the Cherokee Nation's disenfranchisement of the Freedmen must continue to be ethically addressed and challenged. So too must efforts to expunge the rolls of entire families in indigenous nations across this continent. At the same time, we recognize that histories of "playing Indian" have gone hand in hand with dispossession of land in Indian Territory during allotment. Playing Indian is enabled by and supports the dominant narrative that indigenous peoples are vanishing or already vanished. The material consequences of that narrative includes ongoing claims by the state, by science, and by non-indigenous individuals to indigenous lands, sacred sites, remains, and both individual and group representations of us. Our concerns are grounded in these histories, and we challenge both individual and structural forms of indigenous erasure.

Smith's self-acknowledged false claims and lack of clarity on her own identity perpetuate deeply ingrained notions of race-black, white, and Indian-that run counter to indigenous modes of kinship, family, and community connection. When she and others continue to produce her as Cherokee, indigenous, and/or as a woman of color by default, they reinforce a history in which settlers have sought to appropriate every aspect of indigenous life and absolve themselves of their own complicity with continued dispossession of both indigenous territory and existence.

The stories we tell have consequences, and the harm that some stories produce goes beyond their individual context. One of the devastating consequences of Smith having served as the often singular representative of indigeneity in a variety of academic and activist social justice contexts is damage to strategic alliance building, especially between indigenous and non-indigenous women of color. Accountability to communities, kinship networks and multiple histories is part of the difficult work scholars of indigenous and critical race studies must be willing to undertake to ensure that our work combats rather than reinforces or leaves untouched the intricate dynamics of heteropatriarchal racist colonialism.

Our desire here is to help move forward productive conversations surrounding the specific case of Andrea Smith and to also contextualize them within larger discussions long held in NAIS, a crucial field of inquiry. We hope that this current moment can provide scholars and activists involved with NAIS, critical ethnic studies, gender, sexuality and queer studies, and multiple activist communities an opportunity to expand their methodologies, citational practices, pedagogies, curriculum, advising/mentoring, and political organizing. We hope to foster collaboration across our fields and communities that builds our solidarity with LGBTQ, women of color, and all progressive anti-racist and decolonial scholars and activists, and that contributes to our ethical, integral, and accountable relations with one another. We do not ask anyone to step back from dialogue and disagreement, only that all proceed thoughtfully, with awareness of the often conflictual histories of dispossession, oppression and loss that underpin these conversations.

Respectfully,

Joanne Barker (Lenape [Delaware Tribe of Indians]), Professor of American Indian Studies, San Francisco State University

Jodi A. Byrd (Citizen of the Chickasaw Nation), Associate Professor of American Indian Studies, English, and Gender and Women's Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Jill Doerfler (White Earth Ojibwe), Associate Professor, American Indian Studies University of Minnesota-Duluth

Lisa Kahaleole Hall (Kanaka Maoli), Associate Professor of Womenʻs and Gender Studies, Wells College

LeAnne Howe (Enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Eidson Distinguished Professor in American Literature, University of Georgia, Athens

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, Wesleyan University

Jean OʻBrien (White Earth Ojibwe), Distinguished McKnight University Professor, History, University of Minnesota

Kathryn W. Shanley (Nakoda), Professor of Native American Studies, University of Montana

Noenoe K. Silva (Kanaka Hawaiʻi), Professor of Hawaiian and Indigenous Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Shannon Speed (Citizen of the Chickasaw Nation), Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies, University of Texas at Austin

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate), Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin

Jacki Thompson Rand (Citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Iowa

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Open Letter From Indigenous Women Scholars Regarding Discussions of Andrea Smith

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We write to respond to widespread public discussion of well-known scholar-activist Andrea Smith's history of contradictory claims to Cherokee identity through both enrollment and lineal descent. While concerns about her claims have been known and discussed within various indigenous women's circles for years, many people are hearing details about them for the first time.

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What are the “three pillars” of white supremacy?

What are some ways we see within the Andrea Smith reading and current day that the white supremacy system has people “trapped” and “seduced into participating into other pillars?” Is there a way to not live within the three pillars?

Andrea Smith discusses the disappearance of Native Americans and “settler colonialism” within “Race Theory.” What are some ideas/examples Andrea Smith uses to emphasize the importance of not grouping Native Americans with other groups within race theory, and why it is important to not “regulate to the past” the colonization of Native Americans? ("the balance of coercion began to change") p.71

What does it mean when white supremacy as described in the reading, "engulfs" or harms Indigenous, Native American, or people of color's identity? What are ways we see “whiteness” harming people, or becoming a personal item some have?

How is “nation-hood” challenged within the article? What does Andrea Smith propose about “sovereignty,” within the lens of a colonist America and the term “settlers of color?” How does “radical relationality to land” (p. 86) change the ideas of “nation-hood”?