UC San Diego

In "Feathers, Skins, Bodies, and Bones: Palimpsesting Temporality, Movement, and Resistance in Native North American Literatures," I flesh out the deep histories of the waterways and land places of the territory known in the 18th century as the Old Northwest (now the U.S. Midwest). I utilize a palimpsestic methodology to read and analyze literary, historical, and material sources that have common central referents from the eighteenth-century to the present day. Palimpsest is not just my method by also my structure: texts, persons, representations, and/or places connect across the introduction and throughout all chapters, even though their deeper exploration is central to one chapter. By (re)writing deep histories, I illustrate the ongoing necropolitical agendas French, British, and U.S. colonialisms directed at Native bodies, knowledges, and lands as well as demonstrate how the Native peoples and epistemologies are what make the current knowledge of the land places and imperial U.S. narrative possible. To perform this work, I explore texts such as the dispatches of French colonial explorers Père Marquette and Louis Joliet, the travel musings of transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, the field journals of U.S. colonial agents Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, the mediated biography of Ma-katai-me-she-kia-kiak (also known as Black Hawk), the fiction of contemporary native author Sherman Alexie, and the HBO television series Deadwood. Additionally, I examine the visual representations of indigenous peoples in ethnographic texts, phrenological treaties, paintings, university seals, and by sports mascots. I begin and end with David Milch's Deadwood to demonstrate how historical authority seeks to contain and devalue native knowledges to "put the Indian in the cupboard."