Indigenous peoples throughout the world have a difficult, tenuous, and troubled relationship with science. Despite positivist commitments to scientific value-neutrality, empirically produced knowledge about the social and natural world is inherently political and politicized, and indelibly linked to statecraft, empire, and colonization. Yet, contrary to popular misconceptions, indigenous approaches to science are not exclusively oppositional, though invasive and non-consensual scientific research practices certainly warrant opposition from indigenous communities. This thesis applies interdisciplinary methods from science and technology studies, critical legal studies, and literary analysis to demonstrate how contemporary Ojibwe poet Heid Erdrich uses poetry to illuminate the complicated cultural, ethical, legal, and political nodes connecting science and contemporary indigenous lives. Through close readings of several of Erdrich's poems, the following chapters demonstrate how Erdrich challenges mainstream legal and scientific discourses by activating and appropriating scientifically-conversant metaphors to create emergent narratives of indigenous mobility, identity, and generational continuity.

Salvage Constellations investigates how some Indigenous communities in northern California are represented in ethnological archives, and how such archival entanglements work to transform present acts of cultural knowledge production and political exchange. Using multi-sited archives and public records as both a source and subject of inquiry, this project argues that archival practices and rationalities not only play a co-constituting role in the material dispossession of Indigenous peoples in California and elsewhere, but shape the conditions of legibility for Indigenous knowledges and constrain epistemological self-determination—even as modes of archival access, consultation, and community collaboration improve. Moreover, by enlisting the writings of Native American poets, scholars, and activists, and bringing them in tension with and in relation to German Jewish essayist Walter Benjamin’s writings on collecting and historical remembrance, this study probes the potential of alternate practices of archival reading and memory, and foregrounds how Indigenous groups’ own political and epistemological interventions are transforming contemporary practices of archival and institutional stewardship.