Off the Map,Beneath Our Feet

The imaginary consolidation of America as a sovereign nation-state situated on a state-centric international topography was and remains predicated on spatializing practices bound up with the ongoing eradication of indigenous people(s) and simultaneous effacement, or at least repression, of the violence of the (neo)colonial encounter. The American nation-state is founded on the all-but-forgotten bodies and worlds of indigenous peoples and is continually secured by a narrative constellation that reduces the decimation of people(s) to a clearing of space on which a sovereign nation could be constructed or within which it could evolve. This article will trace the various techniques of decimating indigenous cultures and bodies that facilitate efforts of nationalist historiography that reduce indigenous cartographies to mere space situated within a narrative trajectory of American national unification.