WHY NOT NOW: Native Poetry and Critical Erotic Relationality reads the poetry of Native poets as sites for theorizing human, inhuman, and more than human relationality and for reclaiming Indigenous forms of intimacy. This dissertation works at the intersection of Native and Indigenous studies, theories of gender and sexuality, environmental studies, and affect to re-shape dominant discourse surrounding environmental catastrophe and refusal in contemporary twentieth and twenty-first century Indigenous poetics. Centering on collections produced by poets such as Sherwin Bitsui, Natalie Diaz, and Tommy Pico, I argue that Native poetry subverts hyper-romanticized, hyper-sexualized representations of indigeneity by expanding on frameworks of relationality to include conversations about ‘the everyday.’ WHY NOT NOW incorporates eco-eroticism as a methodology to conceptualize how Native poetry expresses the resonances of everyday human and more than human encounters, and how that resonance is vital for disrupting settler colonial imaginaries which seek to reduce relation into a totalized, hierarchical system. Drawing from the work of Dian Million, I examine the role of emotions in producing and sustaining felt knowledges and social political attachments, arguing that intimacy in the everyday is as important/significant as large-scale mobilizations, as it localizes relationality and challenges attempts at erasure of Indigenous ways of relating and being. These poems support critical fabulations of Native agency and desire, as a way of seeing, thinking, and writing about the constantly shifting network of interconnectedness between human, inhuman, and more than human beings while existing within it.

The Savage Screen: Horror, Indigeneity, and Settler Cartographies of Being, critically analyzes the representation of Indigenous peoples in post-1970s North American mainstream horror media, arguing that despite their surface-level sympathy towards Native peoples, these narratives frequently instrumentalize the image of “the Indian” in ways which reify colonial, white supremacist gender and racial hierarchies. Each of the films I examine uses overlapping aesthetic and rhetorical strategies which position settler subjects as innocent victims of vengeful Native violence, a narrative strategy I have termed the “resistance as revenge” narrative. By producing geographic and temporal distance or by figuring Indigeneity as a total absence, these works position white settler subjects as technologically, ethically, epistemologically, and ontologically superior to Indigenous peoples, thus reaffirming the very colonial hierarchies which these narratives purport to critique.

While The Savage Screen places emphasis on contemporary representations of Indigenous peoples in horror, I connect the narrative strategies of these recent genre works to early colonial texts and captivity narratives. My argument is that the recurring representational strategies that are used in contemporary mainstream horror reveal that the settler-colonial imaginary of North America is still deeply haunted by the restrictive notions of the human upon which the project of the nation-state has been premised.

Turning towards Indigenous authored texts, I show that Indigenous horror encodes and performs a different set of relations with people, land, and other-than-human kin than those offered by colonial humanisms. Works by Indigenous writers and filmmakers speak back to the settler-colonial worldviews which seek to justify and normalize violence against Indigenous people, offer a different set of ontological and social relations, and invite audiences to remember that Indigenous storytelling practices are key tools in helping to dismantle the constrained colonial ontologies that all beings have been figured into. Works discussed include Prophecy, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, The Ghost Dance, The Hills Have Eyes (both the 1977 and 2006 versions), Rhymes for Young Ghouls, and The Only Good Indians.

Reductionist discourses in various academic disciplines have tended to treat the Native authors of collaboratively written autobiographies as objects of Euro-American study rather than subjects of knowledge production. To develop a decolonial practice of reading as-told-to Indian autobiographies, this dissertation engages with scholarship in the fields of Native American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies to offer queer readings of the autobiographies of Helen Sekaquaptewa, Polingaysi Qoyawayma, and Don Talayesva, Hopi people who were born during the 1890s amid the federal Indian policy era of assimilation. This study focuses on the primary texts' narrations of discipline in Indian boarding schools and highlights Hopi perspectives on the role of gender and sexual normalization in the colonial assimilation project.

Chapter One, "`I am talking. She is writing.': Autobiographical Indiscipline in Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa," develops the term autobiographical indiscipline to name the mode of collaborative self-authorship that these Hopi authors employed to represent the continuation of their Hopi identities. Chapter two, "Remembering Polingaysi: A Queer Recovery of No Turning Back as a Decolonial Text," examines the gendered facets of the trope of living "between two worlds" and the imbrication of sexual, racial, and nationalist politics underlying Indian boarding schools' policing of students' genders. Chapter three, "Twins, Whips, Tricks, and Clowns: Sovereign Erotics in Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian," explores the history of sexuality in America and its inherent ties to race making in the context of state-sponsored ethnologic projects. Chapter four, "Decolonizing Voth's Archive: Re-narrating Ethnographic Photographs in Hopi and Settler Colonial Contexts," re-narrates images from the archive of Mennonite missionary H. R. Voth through the voices of Hopi autobiographical subjects.

Despite its particular Hopi context, this dissertation belongs to a broader intellectual context regarding the delimitation of literary and national boundaries and the politics of canon formation, which forms the core of American Studies. My theory of autobiographical indiscipline has implications for a range of Indian autobiographies as well as other forms of literature that blur the definitions of the autobiographical genre, such as ex-slave narratives, autobiographical fiction, and fictional autobiography.

Galaxies like Islands, Islands like Galaxies: Envisioning Futurity in Seascape Technologies examines Indigenous Futurisms as a political and aesthetic movement that bridges art-forms (literature, performance, comics, media) to combat “settler futurity.” Indigenous conceptions of temporality, contact, alternative worlds, apocalypse, and revolution are all themes/tenets of Indigenous Futurism and can be expressed artistically through multimedia forms. My project's methodology is defined by its engagement with moʻolelo, Kānaka Maoli storytelling. Moʻolelo as methodology envisions alternative futures that are liberated from a colonial matrix and challenge western epistemological conceptions of temporal progress. This dissertation features Native artists creating projects of cultural expression that reimagine uses for technology that are not predicated upon continued modes of capitalism and settler logics. Therefore, I develop a theoretical framework that employs anti-colonial/decolonial future-making actions and discourses or “futurities,” at the intersections between Indigenous aesthetics and science and technology studies. I engage spatio-temporal Kānaka frameworks by outlining the sections of my dissertation not in chapters—but in wā. The term Wā or Ta-Va (space-time) resonates throughout Oceania and is similar but different between cultures. In the Native Hawaiian context, wā means period of time, epoch, era, time, occasion, season, or age. It can also mean space, interval, or as between objects or time. Material, ephemeral, and affective registers are engaged: it can be thought of as the space between things or a rolling interval. Wā speaks to complex temporal overlays between engaging the space of the past, present, and future within this dissertation. As sea-voyaging in Oceanic cultures is central to life, I am outlining my chapters as wā as to signify movement between ideas—like traversing between mini-theoretical islands of thought. Similar to how the ocean is complex with immense depth and secret go-ons beneath the surface, I use the theoretical concept of wā to understand and critically unpack the theories, art, and ideas within this dissertation.