Brief response to special issue on Settler Colonialism

July 18, 2017 | Autor: Rosa-Linda Fregoso | Categoria: Settler Colonial Studies
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This article was downloaded by: [Melissa Adams-Campbell] On: 22 October 2014, At: 11:36 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Settler Colonial Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rset20

Brief response to ‘Indigeneity and the colonial work of the archives’ a

Rosa-Linda Fregoso a

Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA Published online: 20 Oct 2014.

To cite this article: Rosa-Linda Fregoso (2014): Brief response to ‘Indigeneity and the colonial work of the archives’, Settler Colonial Studies, DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2014.957260 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2014.957260

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Settler Colonial Studies, 2014 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2014.957260

SPECIAL FEATURE: SETTLER ARCHIVES Brief response to ‘Indigeneity and the colonial work of the archives’ Rosa-Linda Fregoso

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Latin American and Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

These three essays destabilize the traditional sense of the ‘archive’ as a site for the collection, storage, and preservation of knowledge; they do not take the archive and the archival processes for granted. Instead, they enact an interrogation of a range of archival procedures. One aspect that all three essays share is a decolonizing approach. In fact, I would have renamed the original panel ‘decolonizing the archive’ given their shared project of unsettling the coloniality of power that shapes the archive. This shared decolonial framework allows these essays to emphasize naming and identifying instances of colonialist violence in the making of the archive, and its power to constitute, legitimate, and authenticate subjects as humans before ‘positive law’ or the juridical law of the liberal state. Each of these essays enact what Ashley Glassburn Falzetti, following Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Aileen Moreton-Robinson, calls a ‘decolonizing methodology’ that encourages native scholars to ‘turn the gaze on colonial powers and describe the colonial violence they see’.1 All three share a project of analyzing the archives as forms of what Gayatri Spivak calls ‘epistemic violence’ and as elements of what Anibal Quijano refers to as the colonial matrix of power.2 Courtney Rivard’s essay, ‘Archival recognition: the Pointe-au-Chien’s and BiloxiChitmacha Confederation of Muskogees’ quest for federal recognition’ does a fine job of describing this colonialist violence in her mapping of the collusion and complicity of archives with state power or, in her words – and I love this phrasing – how archives like the Huntington do ‘the epistemological dirty work of the neocolonial US state in the process of federal recognition’ of tribal communities like the Biloxi-Chitmacha Confederation of Muskogees and the Pointe-au-Chien. Extending critiques of the archive by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, Rivard examines the limits of relying on archival collections as evidentiary basis for proof of the existence of a social collectivity. As she argues, the knowledge of indigenous peoples constructed and legitimated by the archival process is itself neither natural, transparent, nor neutral, but rather an instrument of colonialist violence produced by the non-indigenous and shaped by their own colonialist worldview. Thus, the reliance of the US state on this overwhelmingly compromised instrument of colonialist knowledge calls into question the entire system of recognition of subjects before the law. As a member of the Miami nation of Indiana, Ashley Glassburn Falzetti examines the erasure of a gendered subjectivity rooted in Indigeneity, an erasure that stems from the colonialist re-inscription and archiving of Frances Slocum as ‘white’. Drawing from her own ancestral archive, Falzetti revisions the absence/presence of Indigeneity in the structure of archives legitimating indigenous dispossession and historical erasure, and the struggle over ownership and subjectivity of Frances Slocum’s narrative. As decolonial thinkers like María Lugones and Joanne Barker have argued, colonial violence is not a unidimensional process, but rather racialized and gendered.3 © 2014 Taylor & Francis

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R.-L. Fregoso

Falzetti’s study of the colonialist transformation and reappropriation of Frances Slocum’s life story on behalf of the nation-making project reminds us that wars continue to be waged over the body of women; it reminds us of the persistence of a colonialist rescue fantasy premised on white female purity and innocence. Colonialist violence in the case of Frances Slocum takes multiple forms, from land dispossession and removal of the Miami from their ancestral homeland, to the erasure of her Miami daughters’ and grandchildren’s struggle for land rights, to the re-invention of ‘herstory’,4 to the confiscation of her gendered subjectivity in the project of remaking a Miami indigenous woman into a voiceless victim, lacking in agential subjectivity. For me, this is the linchpin: an investment in a modernist bio-essentialized whiteness or bloodlines that occults not just Frances Slocum’s subjectivity, but ‘herstory’ in collective struggles for claims over land rights and counter-discourses of belonging and membership. Falzetti’s intervention opens up a space for another imaginary: for a decolonial perspective that means thinking from the ‘spaces that modernity could not and still cannot imagine’, as Catherine Walsh puts it, ‘thinking from epistemologies that were subalternized in the process of colonization’.5 Finally, Melissa Adams-Campbell’s case study of Life of Black Hawk similarly interrogates the power of the archive to legitimate indigenous subjects, focusing on struggles over land rights, and what constitutes ‘legitimate’ archival evidence. Here we have evidence of competing, contradictory epistemologies, one in which evidence of land rights as relationship to land/territory (rather than ownership) is based on the collectivity and shared through oral histories; and the other, whereby land rights as ownership or private property is based on the supremacy of the individual subject and written documentation/contract law. For the Sauk and Mesquakie peoples, Black Hawk’s text is evidence of their claims for belonging to the land; whereas for the colonialist state, embodied in the Indian Claims Court, Black Hawk’s text is inauthentic and non-credible as evidentiary basis for proving rights to land/territory. I also appreciated Adams-Campbell’s re-interpretation of Black Hawk’s testimonial from an individual autobiographical archive to an intersubjective historical one, for this gestures to an alternative understanding of the human, both in the embrace of the figuring of intersubjectivity and hence collectivity in Black Hawk’s testimonial. For as many native scholars have noted, for Indigeneity, humans are envisioned as members of complex kinship networks and clan affiliations and an individual’s interrelatedness and sense of belonging entails a multiplicity of duties and obligations to the social/collective – which is what Black Hawk’s text ultimately enacts, as Adams-Campbell so insightfully argues. And so my question is about decolonial thinking about the archives not just as instances of colonialist violence, but in terms of possibilities, as sites of contingencies. ‘Indigeneity’, Guillermo Delgado proposes, ‘kept alive radical (i.e. relevant to roots) non-Cartesian epistemologies, relational ontologies, and even the oraliture of native languages that survived the intrusion of colonial languages’,6 and for this reason, as indigenous scholars have argued, Indigeneity is the counter-memory of coloniality, occupying the same time–space of colonialism. Indigeneity is a starting point for imagining other understandings of the human, humanity, the archive, beyond the logic of colonial violence. This suggests the need to think about transformative practices, to move beyond colonial terror. How can we imagine a decolonialized archive? This decolonialized archive would not only unsettle the power of coloniality in the archive, including the archive as an inscription of positive law, colonial violence, and the operation of the liberal, colonialist state. It would be a space of creative possibilities, contingencies, iterations, and adaptions of the archive, the making of a counter-memory of the archive, a counter-archive, that occupies the same time–space of settler colonialism. These three excellent essays are a first step in that direction.

Settler Colonial Studies

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Notes on contributor

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Rosa-Linda Fregoso is the Professor and former Chair of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her major publications, six books and edited collections, cover issues of human rights, feminicide, and gender violence, media and visual arts, race, cultural politics, and esthetics, in the Américas, including: Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas (co-edited with Cynthia Bejarano, Duke University Press, 2010); Feminicidio en América Latina (Mexico, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y Centro de Investigaciones Interdiciplinarias en Ciencias y Humanidades, 2011); meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2003), winner of the MLA Prize for US/Latino/a, Chicano/a Literary and Cultural Studies; and The Bronze Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1993). She also edited The Devil Never Sleeps and Other Films by Lourdes Portillo (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2001) and Miradas de Mujer (co-edited with Norma Iglesias, CLRC & COLEF, 1998).

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Quote from Ashley Glassburn Falzetti, ‘Archival absences’, Settler Colonial Studies. On decolonizing methodologies, see Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Bodies That Matter: Performing White Possession on the Beach’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 4 (2011): 57–72; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books Ltd, 1999). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313; Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America’, Nepentla: Views From the South 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–80; Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2007): 168–78. See María Lugones, ‘Decolonial Feminism’, Hypatia 25, no. 4 (2010): 742–59; and Joanne Barker, ‘Women’s Work: Gender, Sovereignty, and the Discourse of Rights in Native Women’s Activism’, in Indigeneity, Collected Essays, ed. Guillermo Delgado and John Brown Childs (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, 2012), 3–53. ‘Herstory’ is a feminist neologism that emphasizes history written from a feminist perspective, which focuses on women’s points of view. It was coined by Robin Morgan, in her Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Random House, 1970). Rosa-Linda Fregoso’s translation of Catherine Walsh, ‘Interculturalidad y Colonialidad del Poder: Un pensamiento y posicionamiento “otro” desde la diferencia colonial’, in Interculturalidad, descolonización del estado y del conocimiento, ed. Catherine Walsh, Álvaro García Linera and Walter Mignolo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo, 2006), 21–70, 23. Guillermo Delgado-P., ‘Andean Indigeneity as Epistemic Dis/Juncture of Globalization’, in Indigeneity, Collected Essays, ed. Guillermo Delgado and John Brown Childs (Santa Cruz: New Pacific Press, 2012), 177–203, 178.

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