UCLA

Sewing Intimacies, Routing Refusals analyzes the relational qualities of Dakota aesthetics in sewing, letter-writing, dance, and adornment to illustrate how they challenge carceral containment in and beyond boarding schools. Despite totalizing, gendered attacks on Native bodies and epistemologies, how did/do Dakota women use relational aesthetics to reject settler colonial violence by figuratively and literally escaping? This research contributes to carceral studies and boarding school histories, and extends queer aesthetics, to engage the liberatory capacities of Indigenous aesthetics. Using a gendered analysis of intergenerational carceral violence and resistance related to boarding schools, Sewing Intimacies conceptualizes Dakota aesthetics as a crucial site to resist ongoing forms of gendered state violence.

I draw on critical archival practices, to read between the gaps, slippages, and ellipses in the photos and boarding school records of several students (my maternal relatives), garment factory reports from the National Regional Archives in Kansas City. I combine this method with participant observation ethnography and reflexive autoethnographic experiences communicating to my relatives in epistolary form. Throughout three chapters I analyze attempts to escape, highlighting the intimate routes my grandmothers took toward joy, and the ways they circumnavigated school surveillance. I attend to the adornment practices of my direct maternal grandmother at Wahpeton Indian School while comparing Dakota crafting to the expectations outlined in garment factory reports to find the hidden transcripts of refusal that formed quotidian acts of sabotage and escape. I demonstrate how queer expressions of radical relationality communicated and cultivated through aesthetic crafting practices with each other and more than human kin are contiguous articulations of the Dakota ontological imperative to “be a good relative.” This leads me to the argument that Dakota aesthetics demonstrate a fundamentally different understanding of beauty that undermines the capitalist and heteronormative scaffolding of the boarding school. Finally I conclude with an analysis of data from the 2021 virtual sewing group (The Sewing Intimacies Project) I facilitated in 2021 and the jingle dress dancers at the No Dakota Access Pipeline Movement in 2016 to demonstrate how digital commons and sound sustains radical relational kinship both in activist spaces and crafting circles. I show that it is the subjectivity of jingles and other adornment objects that help to bridge kinship across space and time. Overall, Sewing Intimacies demonstrates that Dakota aesthetics undermine gendered state violence precisely because they are relational sites that can (and do) nourish Indigenous sovereignty and liberatory futures.