American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The question that titles this article is deceptively simple. It invites answers that do not, and cannot, exist. One can only address the remainder of a settler colonial project, particularly one as successful as the United States. It is impossible to write about that which cannot be known, and yet there is an ethical imperative to do so. In looking for answers to the question of settler colonialism, I have only a narrative, one that tries to resist the seduction of identity-based claims and yet writes through and pauses on identity's shadows, reversals, and ambivalences. The intimacy and obligation of what Gayatri Spivak has called ghostwriting, and the expectation of failure entailed within it, animates this piece of writing. The ghosts here are not only my grandfather, his mother, or my Native American and Palestinian comrades, family members, and loved ones. The ghosts are everything that happens in the act of writing itself, the affective registers of documenting, living, dying, and struggling with the question and the successes of settler colonialism.

Hawai'i's most renowned song, "Aloha 'Oe," was composed by Queen Lili'uokalani before she was deposed by missionary settlers. Circulating in the cultural imaginary since the late nineteenth century, "Aloha 'Oe" was transformed from a love song into a dirge that erased the sovereign rights of Lili'uokalani in and beyond Hawai'i. This article theorizes "settler colonial nostalgia" as a gendered material and symbolic process of effecting indigenous displacement and expropriation. Providing an alibi for settler society and its beneficiaries, performances of the song center settler subjects as nostalgic witnesses to, rather than participants in, the loss of the Hawaiian kingdom. Yet the politics of melancholy prove unstable, as Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and islander musicians continue to resignify "Aloha 'Oe" as performances that sustain Native counter-hegemonies.

This paper explores how hip-hop artists mobilize sound and style to manage loss, build new futures, and create resilient communities. Embracing an "untraditional" medium, young people contest settler violence and hegemonies of shame by expressing unique, politicized possibilities of being Indigenous, or what I am calling (ab)originality: a style of being first, fresh, and foremost. Heritage is an act of reverent rebellion: an individual honors continuity, but defies the trappings of tradition, which shackle Indigeneity to the geography and the customs of the past. Through love and creativity, artists claim visibility, voice, and everywhere.

In this paper, I argue that settler colonialism is a project of desire, and that attention to desire is particularly useful for understanding the relationship between racialized subjects, whose access to political power in settler regimes is tenuous and uneven. Drawing upon psychoanalytically-inflected theories of race, I examine how this desire is articulated, and look to its effects. To do so, I offer a reading of the 2004 South Asian-American film, Indian Cowboy, reflecting on how racialized subjects negotiate and express the desire to access and be included in settler subjectivity.

This article identifies a seminal instance of Indigenous influence on Western thought. It does so by revealing a form of idea power exercised by Indigenous Americans: the power to transmit messages through the medium of people who came to meet and learn from them. In 1894, the Kwakwaka'wakw people of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, invited the anthropologist Franz Boas to take part in their system of Indigenous governance, the potlatch. At a series of dances and feasts, Kwakwaka'wakw leaders performed the notion of transformation, offering a dynamic vision of humanity as a single, varied, and constantly changing global community. Guided by an Indigenous intellectual, George Hunt, the Kwakwaka'wakw civilized Boas into a new way of seeing. They turned him from a static concept of culture, focused on the differences between groups of people, toward a dynamic concept of culture, focused on the universality of global experience—an experience of diversity. To identify such episodes of Indigenous influence, scholars must open a new archive—the vast corpus of Indigenous thought and action compiled by anthropologists—and begin writing a truly global history of ideas.

The writers of the 2006 Osage Constitution had to work against processes of settler colonialism which attempt to deny Indigenous peoples a political future. The Constitution provides a foundation, but much work still remains in order to build a strong Osage Nation that can truly serve its people. This paper uses the metaphor of Osage ribbon work to envision such a future for Osage governance, moving away from the binaries that underwrite colonialism. Ribbon work reminds us that it is possible to create new and powerful forms out of an ongoing colonial process. In picking up the fabric both torn apart and created through the colonial process and stitching it into new patterns, Osage people must form the tangled ribbons of colonialism into unique structures that can serve Osage needs, artfully weaving the 2006 Constitution into something that can act, not as a pure alternative to modernity, but as something truly possible in this moment of colonial entanglement. In viewing the future potential of Osage governance as a purposeful process of cutting, folding, and stitching together, it is possible to speak to the challenges of this colonial moment without again denying the agency of Indigenous political formations.

By centralizing the experiences of seven, urban, self-identified Two-Spirit Indigenous people in Toronto, this paper addresses the settler-colonial complexities that arise within contemporary queer politics: how settler colonialism has seeped into Pride Toronto's contemporary Queer politics to normalize White queer settler subjectivities and disavow Indigenous Two-Spirit subjectivities. Utilizing Morgensen's settler homonationalism, the authors underscore that contemporary Queer politics in Canada rely on the eroticization of Two-Spirit subjectivities, Queer settler violence, and the production of (White) Queer narratives of belonging that simultaneously promote the inclusion and erasure of Indigenous presence. Notwithstanding Queer settler-colonial violence, Two-Spirit peoples continue to engage in settler resistance by taking part in Pride Toronto and problematizing contemporary manifestations of settler homonationalism. Findings highlight the importance of challenging the workings of settler colonialism within contemporary Queer politics in Canada, and addressing the tenuous involvements of Indigenous Two-Spirit peoples within Pride festivals. The article challenges non-Indigenous Queers of color, racialized diasporic, and White, to consider the value of a future that takes seriously the conditions of settler colonialism and White supremacy.

This paper seeks to decentralize the human and interrogate the ways in which settler colonialism shapes the land itself by engaging with indigenous epistemologies that take seriously notions of place, relationship with the land, and the spatially located lifeways of non-human beings. Analyzing public discourse around the ongoing lawsuit filed by the Humane Society against the states of Oregon and Washington and the Columbia River Indian tribes over the "humane" trapping and euthanizing of sea lions that endanger salmon populations, I reveal that the dominant rubric for human/"nature" relationships in the Northwest—shared natural resource management—has become ossified. By deconstructing the hegemonic notions of "nature" and the commons and to whom they belong that are encoded within the lawsuit, this paper demonstrates that the conquest of Native peoples and conquest of the land are co-constitutive, and that processes of settler colonialism must be considered in light of their geographically specific locations.

This article outlines and interrogates the neglected settler-colonial discourse of White Appalachians, in particular their construction of a White indigeneity. In order to justify occupation and reconcile themselves to the wider settler-colonial society, influential settler Appalachian scholars and activists positioned themselves as a colonized Indigenous people, advancing the once-paradigmatic Colonialist model of Appalachian exploitation. This discursive replacement of American Indians allows settler Appalachians to assert their own White subjectivity as a form of indigeneity and their ownership of the land as decolonization.

Fluent Dakota-speaking elders Clifford Canku and Michael Simon have translated from Dakota into English fifty letters written by three-dozen Dakota prisoners of the 1862 US-Dakota War. Both translators are Dakota Presbyterian ministers as well as traditional Sun Dancers, and are descended from two of the letter writers. Many letter writers, like the translators, were Christian Dakota who still followed some of the traditional ways. Dr. Canku and Rev. Simon requested that I appear on several panels with them to put the project in historical context and speak about their translation process before audiences who were primarily non-Native. This essay presents the various historical perspectives I attempted to balance in these panel discussions, as well as my analysis of why the two elders ultimately decided to leave out this historical context and retain only my discussion of the translation process for their forthcoming book on the Dakota letters. They intend the book principally for Dakota young people and traditionalist elders.

This paper offers a re(-)view of a landscape montage called the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail. The United States National Park Service has placed trail markers along county, state and interstate roadways that generally parallel one route taken by Cherokee Indians who were forced to migrate from the southeast United States to "Indian Territory" west of the Mississippi River during the early part of the nineteenth century. The American roadway, with its pastiche of signage that now includes the Trail of Tears, can be shown to maintain the poetics of "unsettled settledness" often visible in other cultural texts of settler societies. The (in)congruity and (ir)reconcilability of signifiers in anxious negotiation appear haunting and sometimes humorous. I use the method of image-texting to merge signifiers in the landscape. This involves breaking the integrity of photographs and texts to create (sur)real composites in order to reflect the "thinking-feeling" that went along with my reading carefully and deeply this landscape of difficult heritage.