Some Black feminist notes on Native feminisms and the flesh

Abstract

I pay close attention when I hear Black and Native/Indigenous women speak in the idiom of flesh. The flesh as folding and unfolding matter that is both a site targeted by relations of conquest for ruin and a site of our shared hopes for regeneration. I experience “the flesh” as a Black and Native feminist gathering place or connective tissue. I argue that the fields of Black and Indigenous feminist studies in the Americas often meet each other at and sometimes recognize a shared intimacy in each other’s fleshy stories of horror and ecstasy. My intention on this occasion is to offer a brief Black feminist meditation on Native feminist works that speak in [the] flesh.

I begin the meditation with Hortense Spillers, a Black feminist grammarian of the flesh. Spillers’ invocation and theorization of the flesh in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” enables an opening that brings Black flesh into proximity with Indigenous flesh at a scene of inaugural New World violence. In a brief passage in the essay, Spillers writes that “socio-political order of the New World with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and Indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile” (Spillers, 1987). While Spillers does not explicitly address Indigenous genocide in the essay, my own reparative and generous read situates this text as a possible point of departure for thinking about Blackness and Indigeneity as the flesh that makes Europe’s man the epitome of the human. Sylvia Wynter explains that this 15th century notion of “Man” (Man 1) as the ideal human emerged in an era of colonial conquest and settlement through the degradation of Indians and Negros as other and lesser humans (Wynter, 2003).¹ Man 1 and its “sequence,” is a mode of being that requires genocide, mutilation, displacement, and the negation of Black and Indigenous peoples and their ways of living (Spillers, 1987). From the space of Black feminism, and the specific site of Spillerian theories of the flesh, I reflect on the ways that Native feminisms offer a robust theory of the flesh, the human, conquest, and theorizing that exceeds the confines of white settler colonial studies bringing us closer to Black feminist utterances of flesh.

In 2016, Audra Simpson grounded her article “The State is a Man,” in a theory of flesh. More specifically, Simpson grounded her analysis of heteropatriarchal settler machinations of the Canadian state’s ongoing genocide of Indigenous people in the refusing and hungry flesh of Theresa Spence (Simpson, 2016). Engaged in a “hunger strike”—more specifically a fish broth diet consumed once in the morning and once in the evening—Spence demanded that Prime Minister Steven Harper meet with her to account for the state’s violence against First Nations peoples. Spence’s use of her own body/flesh as a site of reckoning confounded the logics of recognition, the normative symbolics and politics of fasting, and Indigenous presence in Canada. While Theresa Spences’ own flesh is subjected to the ongoing genocide of the Canadian state, her fast was read as a failure in that it attempted to thwart the process and teleos of Indigenous death. Simpson argued that Spence’s fish broth fast represented a refusal to adhere to the settler temporality of affixing Spence’s flesh to a naturalized trajectory of death. Theresa Spence rearranged her death bound flesh into a site of durational force and dissent that made her flesh appear “excessive” in the eyes of the genocidal settler Canadian state (Simpson, 2016). Spence’s excessive flesh resonates with Spiller’s own theorization of Black female flesh as a site of both violation and possible rearrangement outside of the humanist terms of recognition.

Within Native feminist examinations of the violence of conquest and settlement like Simpson’s, one finds unflinching interrogations of the way that the conquistador human produces “flesh.” Native women’s political campaigns and struggles, such as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement, have had to contend with the ways that Native and Indigenous women, Two Spirit, and trans people are rendered “flesh.”² Native feminist thought, speech, and action have always to contend with the gratuitous violence that attempts to render them flesh.

The settler colonial turn away from flesh

The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st marked a moment in which Women of Color scholarship and activism was growing in popularity. Within the academy and social justice organizing the rubric of violence unified a number of constituents nationally and globally. Organizing against interpersonal and state-sanctioned violence became the suture that connected an international movement anti-violence, prison abolition, and anti-imperialist activists. The World Trade Organization protests, post 9/11 immigrant rights organizing, reproductive justice work, and the 2004 protests of the stolen presidential election were to some extent animated by the anti-violence movement led by Women of Color. At the epicenter of this organizing Groups like INCITE! Women of Color against Violence and Critical Resistance were at the epicenter of this organizing and produced scholarship, analyses, and political education materials that relied heavily on the works of Native and Black feminists.

Prominent Indigenous activists and scholars, such as Madonna Thunder Hawk, Stormy Ogden, Winona La Duke, Sandy Grande, and Andrea Smith, whose claims to Cherokee identity have come under scrutiny, became flash points of a movement that centered the ways that imperial and colonial violence continues to perpetuate itself in multiple forms across the globe. Largely due to the increased attention that Women’s of Color coalitional work as well as Andrea Smith’s and Native women’s scholarship was receiving, Native feminist thought began to circulate widely and garner US and international acclaim. The theoretical and discursive fulcrum in the academy and in activist circles tilted toward the body of scholarship being produced by Native and Women of Color in the US. Texts like The Sacred Hoop (1983), From a Native Daughter (1993), Inventing the Savage (1998), Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (2004), Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005), and INCITE’s Anthology: Color of Violence (2006) which elaborated on colonization’s connection to other forms of racialized and gendered violence have been the primary sources consulted for theorizing the historical and contemporary violence of coloniality.

On the heels of the popularity of Women of Color’s and Native feminist texts, the scholarship of White scholars in White settler states began as counter-current to gain traction and currency.³ The late Patrick Wolfe’s book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology had been published in 1998 and Wolfe’s 2006 essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” was often the text circulated first and most widely. The 2006 essay recycled the phrasing from the 1998 text, “Invasion is a structure, not an event,” that would be quoted and cited widely over the next five to six years and into the present (Wolfe, 2006). Patrick Wolfe’s theorization of settler colonialism as a structure (diffuse, omnidirectional, and productive) appeared to have inspired a reanimation of White scholarship on processes of settlement, land theft, and colonization in the settler states of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. In 2010 on their blog, Lorenzo Veracini and Edward Cavanaugh announced the necessity and emergence of a new field of study devoted to settler colonialism as a unique and irreducible form of domination.⁴

According to the origin story that settler colonial studies tells about itself, its body of knowledge that marks it as a distinct area of studies emerges in the 1990s, primarily out of Australian settler scholarship. As an area of studies, it regards settler colonialism as a “distinct social, cultural and historical formation with ongoing political effects” (Edmonds, 2013). Its genesis is indebted to the intellectual labor of Australian scholars Patrick Wolfe, Lorenzo Veracini, and Ed Cavanaugh. In 2010–2011, the open access journal called settler colonial studies launched its debut issue. With an open access journal, the field has the infrastructure and capacity to travel transnationally and gain appeal. As a transnational theoretical movement, it travels from Australia and New Zealand to Canada, South Africa, the US, and other imperial European sites.

To date, the late Patrick Wolfe is named as a foundational figure in the field and continues to influence the burgeoning North American field of settler colonial studies. While scholars in Native Studies do acknowledge the explicit attempts that Wolfe made to develop the analytics of settler colonialism in relation to “Indigenous thinking and scholarship that exists far longer than settler nations,” his work has been used in ways that often end up consolidating settler colonial studies as a white field that displaces Native and Indigenous Studies (Wolfe, 2016).⁵ In 2006, Wolfe made the compelling case that settler colonialism was a more apt theoretical frame and structure from which to think about power in settler states. Wolfe argues that settler colonialism is larger than genocide and is the best way of conceptualizing the elimination of the Native in settler societies. As a structure, settler colonialism is an ongoing process that can contain other formations and that settler colonialism—and its logic of elimination—looms much larger than genocide. Wolfe proclaims that, “To this extent, it is a larger category than genocide” (Wolfe, 2006: 402).

While settler colonialism is an invaluable frame, what does Wolfe and the field’s displacement of genocide achieve? Where does the attention to flesh go?

In 2011, in a series of blog posts that ran through 2017, Lenape scholar Joanne Barker tried to slow the rapidly moving tide of white settler colonial studies by posting a set of provocations that exposed the limits of the analytic of settler colonialism. In a 2011 post on the “Tequila Sovereign” blog titles, “Why Settler Colonialism Isn’t Exactly Right,” Barker expresses concern with the etymology of “settlement” and what it connotes and calls forth as a form of political discourse.⁶ Barker is disturbed by the way that the term “settle” refers to actions like reconciling and “making friends.” Settlement’s legal definition of agreement or conclusion connotes a state of completion and reconciliation which is far from the reality of the violent and unresolvable antagonism between occupiers and Indigenous peoples. More specifically, the term connotes and encourages a “reconciling of these histories”—of white imperial violence and indigenous death and subjugation—“within the current structure and social formation of the nation-state.” Barker contends that settler colonialism does not capture “the current structure or social formation of the U.S.”

In fact, Barker prefers to hold onto “harsher terms” like imperialism and colonialism because they facilitate a more precise understanding of current militarized violence and which supports people who are strategizing for “empowerment and revolution.” Barker sustained and nuanced this analysis, and even engaged in a dialogue with Patrick Wolfe and Mark Rifkin in spring of 2011, over the course of nine blog posts. In 2017, Barker levied another critique of the field due to its structuralist rigidity and its inadvertent erasure of Black people. In the post, “The Analytic Constraints of Settler Colonialism,” Barker works through a troubling tendency “a certain analytic within the studies [that] has, however unwittingly, foreclosed and even chilled understandings of Black and Indigenous histories and identities in ways that derail our understandings of U.S. imperialism as a social formation and so our work with one another.”⁷ Because settler colonial studies, and more specifically Wolfe’s formulation of invasion as a structure, performs like a “Marxist structuralist” problem for thought, it “rearticulates the problematics of structuralism. It treats society as a fixed, coherent thing that can be objectively described.” As a fixed and coherent “thing,” the settler state and its structure of invasion are states to negotiate, reconcile with, and reform rather than abolish. Furthermore, due to the structuralist limitations of the discourse of settler colonialism, Barker struggles to think about or situate movements like #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #NoDAPL, and #MMIW as contemporary oppositional politics that could be in coalition with one another under a settler colonial regime. More importantly, Barker is concerned about the political implications of a settler colonial studies whose decolonial imaginary renders “reparations” and “return” antithetical political objectives without merit.⁸

I share Barker’s concerns. White settler colonial studies’ hold on the imaginations of humanists and social scientists crowds out ongoing discussions between Black and Native feminisms, particularly Black and Native idioms of the flesh.⁹ Native and Black feminist theories of flesh provide us with the necessary grammars for dreaming and articulating our decolonial and abolitionist visions.

Native and native feminist studies of the flesh

Native feminist scholars’ unique contribution to discussions of conquest, genocide, and settler colonialism is the attention it gives to the making and unmaking of flesh. In Trask’s 1993 book, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaii, Trask gives painful and sustained attention to the brutal nature of genocide in a way that does not reduce genocide to an epiphenomenon of settler colonialism. Genocide and the making of the Native body and land as less than human or flesh remains the focus and the distinguishing feature of settler colonialism. In From a Native Daughter, Haunani Kay Trask invokes settler colonialism in a way that centers it’s genocidal capacities.

Trask writes, “Modern Hawaii, like its colonial parent the United States, is a settler society; that is, Hawai’i is a society in which the indigenous cultures and people have been murdered, suppressed, or marginalized for the benefit of settlers who now dominate our islands” (Trask, 1993). While Trask uses settler/s in an illustrative capacity; they are just modifiers working in a descriptive capacity. The sentence above is put into motion and animated by the naming of the kinds of violence committed by settlers for their benefit or self-actualization. Far from a “damage-centered” (Tuck, 2009) statement, the use of the verbs “murdered, suppressed or marginalized” direct our attention to the methods and processes of genocide that settlers/conquistadors use to self-actualize (Trask, 1993). Genocide is theorized as a relational process in which Indigenous peoples experience multiple (and ongoing) kinds of death in order for conquistador/settlers to live.

In 2006, Trask’s essay “The Color of Violence” developed an analysis of colonialism that renders the relationship between racism, genocide, and colonization bare. Specifically, Trask states that “Colonization was the historical process, and genocide was the official policy” (Trask, 2006). It seems as if colonialism is a larger structure or formation that becomes particular and specific to Indigenous peoples when it appears in its genocidal form. What distinguishes the form of colonialism in Hawai’i and the US from other non-settler forms of colonialism is Native genocide. Trask states that, “During the course of little more than a century, the haole onslaught had taken from us 95% of our Hawaiian people” (Trask, 2006). Again, genocide is the defining feature of this form of colonization, not settlement. And when settlement is invoked, it is always tethered to the violence of genocide.

Because Trask sustains a focus on the gratuitous forms of violence that the US enacts against and toward the making of flesh, Blackness can also emerge within Trask’s Native feminist analytic. Trask states, “Today, the United States is the most powerful country in the world, a violent country created out of the bloody extermination of Native peoples, and the enslavement of the forcibly transported peoples, and the continuing oppression of dark-skinned peoples” (Trask, 2006: 82).

Native feminists’ individual and collective works in the 1990s and into the 2000s created opportunities to think about conquest and colonialism as fundamentally constituted by slavery, as much as it is constituted by genocide. Prior to the emergence of white settler colonial studies and the subsequent debates and discussions about the necessity to parse and make distinctions between imperial, colonial, settler colonial, post and neo colonial forms of power, Native feminist literature like Leslie Marmon Silko’s attempted to think about the annihilating and death dealing or making power of conquest in the Americas. Throughout Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, as Yaci, Indigenous and Latina/x characters trace the origins and significance of an ancient text, Silko provides the reader with an unflinching meditation on gratuitous violence. Silko’s own grammar throughout the novel names the subjects who committed genocide from the 15th century until the present as “butchers,” “destroyers,” and at times “sorcerers.”

Rarely (if ever) does Silko refer to white perpetrators or their descendants as “settlers” throughout the text. In fact Silko uses “harsher terms,” terms that Joanne Barker says are called for in order to replace “settler” and its etymological and connotative origins in sentiments of “reconciling,” and “making friends” while the settler nation state continues to enact violence and disavows political commitments to the return of land and reparations for slavery (Barker, 2018). In this way, Silko’s grammar of violence becomes the point of suture, or the connective tissue that brings both Indigenous and Black flesh and life into the same frame. Silko’s, Trask’s, and Simpson’s attention to the repertoires of violence that conquistador-settler enact on Native flesh approach the Spillers’ own invocations of the flesh as a critical site of analysis. Native and Black practices of reading the flesh offer an invaluable sensorium and methodology from which to pursue questions of genocide, slavery, conquest, and settlement in the Americas. As scholars pursue the connections between antiblackness and settler colonialism, it is imperative that they center Native feminist analytics that focus on the flesh.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Chad Infante for redirecting me to Audra Simpson’s text and reminding me of her theorization of flesh.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Tiffany Lethabo King is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. Her research is situated at intersections of slavery and indigenous genocide in the Americas. King’s is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019) and a co-editor of the anthology Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism (Duke University Press, 2020). She can be reached at tking37@gsu.edu

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