A Similar Place

Prologue

On Monday, April 20, 2015, I was slated to teach Dakota writer Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s (1995) short story “A Good Chance” in an undergraduate course titled “Native Women’s Literature.” The story follows an unnamed narrator as she returns home to the Crow Creek reservation in South Dakota to inform her old friend Magpie, who is on parole following his arrest for participating in a riot at the Custer Court House, that his poetry has led to a scholarship for him to study at a university in California. ¹ Before she is able to tell him, however, he is killed while in police custody. I sat in my home on April 19 writing my lesson plan, wondering how to teach this story about the complicated way forward for Native youth in the aftermath of the American Indian Movement; a story that grapples with the role of the academy in decolonization; a story that explores the spaces among and between the city and the reservation; a story about the legacies of colonialism alive and well in the enactment of police violence. I spent the day re-reading Cook-Lynn’s story, searching for passages to have students read aloud, alongside extant materials to give them context. This was also the day that Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore, Maryland, 2,852 miles from where I sat on Lummi/Coast Salish territory in Bellingham, Washington and 1,431 miles from the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota where Magpie had lived.

To not ask students to reckon with the resonance between these two deaths was impossible, but the pedagogical matter of how to frame this discussion fomented a series of questions that continue to animate my intellectual inquiry. At the forefront on April 19, 2015 was my desire to resist making the connection between Magpie and Freddie Gray only through narratives of violence, especially narratives that created spectacles of Black and Native suffering for a classroom of mostly White students. I sought to heed the work of Kwagiulth (Kwakwaka’wakw) scholar and organizer Sarah Hunt, who reminds us of the ways that Native bodies have “become sites of naturalized violence, and are marked by this violence while the perpetrators are not marked in the same way” (Hunt, Holmes, & Piedalue, 2014, p. 549). Hunt’s observation demands pedagogical practices that enable students to see how this process of marking operates—to explore how histories of violence held in common enable bodies to circulate marked or unmarked.

However, to do this only through close readings of the bodies of the dead risks creating what Saidiya Hartmann (1997) has called “scenes of subjection,” or spaces of performative enjoyment that depend on the “spectacularization” of Black and Native pain to “provide wholesome pleasure to the upright and virtuous” (p. 22). ² What is more, a one-to-one comparison of these two deaths and the incumbent histories of slavery and settlement also traffics in what Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd (2011) has referred to as “the conflation of racialization and colonization” wherein “prevailing understandings of race and racialization . . . depend upon an historical aphasia of the conquest of indigenous people” (p. xxvi). Thus, any approach to bring together these stories on April 20, 2015 required navigating two spaces. On one hand, it had to reject a narrative dependent on what Hunt has referred to as the “normalized” or “naturalized geographies of violence” that calculate Black and Native life only in terms of social death rather than social value. ³ On the other, it also had to allow for a reckoning with the specificity of Black and Native histories, rather than conflating them through comparison. It was clear to me that I needed some other methodological model through which to engage these stories in the classroom, grounding them in narratives of resistance rather than violence. In her article, “An Indigenous View on #BlackLivesMatter,” Nishnaabeg writer and organizer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2014a, 5 December) provides a simple, clear model through which to navigate this constellation of responsibilities and challenges”.

In her article, Simpson explores the connections between the #BlackLivesMatter movement and Indigenous movements, such as #MMIWG2S (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two Spirit Peoples) and #IdleNoMore, after the Ferguson decision in which a St. Louis grand jury voted not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Mike Brown. She says, “As black communities respond to the Ferguson decision in cities across the United States, their rage resonates with me in a familiar way because it comes from a similar place as my own” (Simpson, 2014a, para. 3, my emphasis). She honors the “expression of tremendous black love for children and family, a tremendous black love for culture, body and people,” recognizing that not only is this the “same fertile ground that birthed the so-called ‘Oka Crisis’ and the Idle No More movement” but that “this same ground compels the ongoing resistance of indigenous women and Two Spirit people . . . to all forms of colonial gendered violence” (Simpson, 2014a, para. 4). The “fertile ground” of which she speaks brings together the affective spaces of love and outrage, pouring out “against a colonial system that is designed at its core to destroy black and indigenous love,” and the literal territory of Turtle Island that these movements share, the foundation on which they stand.

In the classroom, Simpson’s “similar place” provides a pedagogical model that emphasizes affective and territorial connection, privileging the narratives of resistance through which life endures in a continuing history of violence rather than depending on the spectacularization of Black and Native death. In this way, Simpson’s notion of “a similar place” is a methodology of what Eve Tuck (Unangan) and K Wayne Yang (2012) have called “indigenous futurity” that is tied to territory, drawing connection through shared place rather than (only) shared experience of violence. ⁴ Because of this, it creates a method of pedagogical inquiry that privileges spatial belonging in narratives of resistance, leading to comparative analysis that stems from a foundational recognition of territory rather than one that substitutes acknowledgment for engagement. ⁵

This method of foundational recognition is necessary if we are to reckon with Byrd’s (2011) imperative that to address the violences through which U.S. imperialism is maintained, we must “reconceptualize space and history to make visible what imperialism and its resultant settler colonialisms and diasporas have sought to obscure” (p. xxx). As she notes, this “means imagining an entirely different map and understanding of territory and space” (Byrd, 2011, p. 229). Simpson’s “similar place” can help us do just that, by grounding any comparative approach in an understanding of territory and space that sees resistance not only resulting from shared histories of violence but also resulting from experiences of sharing territorial and affective place. Magpie and Freddie Gray come together not in death, but in the affirmation of their lives through the continued resistance of Black and Native peoples, evidenced through the “fertile ground” on which Simpson centers our attention.

Contouring “Land as Pedagogy” in Literary Criticism

In what follows, I expand this pedagogical methodology built around Simpson’s reflections into a broader model of literary criticism that enables a comparative approach to 21st century memoirs written by Black and Native women. This approach centers readings of the territorial epistemologies of memoirs as self-narrativizing texts, wherein authors situate themselves within and in relation to land. In doing so, I hope to connect Simpson’s (2014a) article to other work of hers, in which she emphasizes the need to understand “land as pedagogy” in which “the land, aki, is both context and process” (2014b, p. 7). Using the connection Simpson draws between the space of affective experience and territorial location, I look to memoirs by Jesmyn Ward and Deborah Miranda (Chumash/Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen) to explore how each is grounded in the use of territorial epistemologies that mobilize place-based practices of self-narration to express grounded experience in territory within broader histories of place. I conclude by gesturing toward ways this form of literary praxis might prove useful for considering the intersections of contemporary movements against anti-Black racism and settler colonialism throughout Turtle Island. Building on work exploring the relationship between anti-Black racism and settler colonialism, this article seeks to understand how Black and Native women writers have negotiated and articulated their relationship to space in the form of self-narrative. ⁶

In developing this approach through the close reading of two contemporary memoirs, I use the understanding of “land” put forward by Sandra Styres, Celia Haig-Brown, and Melissa Blimkie (2013), wherein this term “takes seriously the materiality of land” while also paying attention to the “emotional and intellectual aspects of Land” (p. 37). I read Ward’s Men We Reaped: A Memoir and Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, both published in 2013, through the lens of Simpson’s “similar place” to see how both use practices of self-narrativization not as acts of self-description, but of personal and collective resistance to embodied geographies of control. In doing so, I hope to highlight how Ward and Miranda’s memoirs end up “denaturalizing colonial spatial arrangements,” which, Hunt et al. (2014) argue, is necessary for building resistance movements, because resistance “entails not only examining dominant paradigms of knowledge, but also being attuned to those ways of being which are situated beyond the boundaries of dominant discourse” (pp. 557-558). Here, memoir as a praxis of self-narration becomes essential to resistance because it connects affective and territorial dimensions in order to emphasize the “similar place” from which they arise. In what follows, I highlight how these authors use memoir to explore ways of being that, as Hunt suggests, are situated “beyond the boundaries,” both of conventional literary forms and of the geographies of violence mapped onto Black and Native bodies.

This comparative approach builds on the important work developed by Black and Native feminist writers. In particular, I use Ward and Miranda’s memoirs as narratives through which to understand the points of intersection between Katherine McKittrick’s (2006) invocation of Édouard Glissant’s “poetics of landscape,” which she develops in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, and Tahana Athabascan scholar Dian Million’s (2013) “felt theory,” presented in her book Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. Bringing these methodologies to bear on these contemporary memoirs highlights the relationship between what McKittrick (2006) describes as the “combination of material and imagined geographies” through which Black women are “[unfixed] . . . from their ‘natural’ places and spaces by bringing into focus the ‘sayability’ of geography” (p. xxiii) and what Million (2013) identifies as the central role that Indigenous “women’s first-person and experiential narratives” played in “reframing . . . the dense web of affective discourses, stories, and narratives of profanity and carnality . . . within human rights and white feminist mobilizations of victims’ rights for social change” (pp. 56-57). ⁷ In doing so, I demonstrate ways that contemporary memoir, as narratives that illuminate discursive boundaries through experiential language, can influence resistance movements that understand the specificities of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism while also marking the common foundation of dispossession and the concomitant discursive geographies through which that dispossession is obscured and maintained.

This inquiry takes Simpson’s “similar place” as an opportunity to see the enactment of “land as pedagogy” in memoirs, extending the pedagogical imperative from which it arose into a method of literary criticism that retains a commitment to responsible pedagogy and accountable scholarship. I move through this piece keeping in mind the two questions that appear in the epigraph, both of which emphasize the need to consider how practices of self-storying and experiential narration embody alternative geographic memories that can resist geographies of violence. How does looking at contemporary memoirs by Black and Native women emphasize the underlying, foundational geographic fabric through which this experiential narrative is made possible, made meaningful, and made praxis?

“Where the Wind Will Not Reach”: Ward’s Spatial Dimensions of Affective Embodiment

In her 2013 memoir Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward uses narratives of spatial belonging, history, and movement to structure her expression of experiential knowledge and self-narration. Ward structures the memoir so that it moves toward itself, combining a chronological history focused on her hometown and her family while working in reverse chronology to write the stories of five young Black men in her life who all died between 2000 and 2004. Alternating chapters, Ward explores how the personal and collective histories are bound up in place, moving through Oakland, Pass Christian, New Orleans, Ann Arbor, Palo Alto, and DeLisle. Place is at the heart of Ward’s text because the histories of these places are inextricable from her attempt to reckon with her affective connection to place and her experience of the recurring deaths of her loved ones.

Through the methodology of her memoir, Ward articulates the inextricability of her story from those of the men in her life who have been killed, from the places that she’s moved across, and from the history of those places. She uses the collective first person to title the historical chapters of the text while naming the others after the individuals whose lives and deaths she chronicles. Collective experience and individual life hurtle together, traveling across space and through history to meet for the telling of her brother’s death on a road along the Gulf. Here, Ward uses spatial language and place-based storytelling not to claim space as her own but rather to explore how people become claimed by place. For instance, in the chapter titled “We Are in Wolf Town: Distant Past-1977,” Ward (2013) frames the history of Black male death in her family by using spatial language:

Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend the circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural. (p. 14)

In this framing, the men in her family history, their stories, and their memories are embedded in their spatial movement. For Ward, the spatial dimensions of Black male life (and death) she experiences are directly tied to the place of DeLisle, Mississippi, formerly known as “Wolf Town.” She notes that “when people ask me about my hometown, I tell them it was called after a wolf before it was partially tamed and settled . . . Calling it Wolf Town hints at the wilderness at the heart of it” (Ward, 2013, p. 9). Reckoning with the spatial preordination that seems to determine the life span of her family across generations, she confesses, “Sometimes, when I think of all the men who’ve died early in my family over the generations, I think DeLisle is the wolf” (Ward, 2013, p. 14).

Reckoning with the dissonant experience of place as a villain and as home, Ward’s memoir exemplifies McKittrick’s (2006) suggestion that, for Black women, “naming place is also an act of naming the self and self-histories” (p. xxi). Her invocation of land belies a complicated arithmetic of belonging, rather than a simple claiming of space. In doing so, she invokes the “demonic” facets of the “demonic ground” of which McKittrick speaks. Ward’s memoir refuses a linear structure that gestures constantly toward the future, embodying the demonic as a “non-deterministic schema . . . a process that is hinged on uncertainty and non-linearity because the organizing principle cannot predict the future” (McKittrick, 2006, p. xxiv). For Ward (2013), this future is unpredictable because it is “debilitating darkness,” a darkness embodied and spatialized through “a cellar in the woods, a wide, deep living grave,” which she imagines during a sleepless night (p. 174). Rather than waking her sister during a night fraught with a “renewed . . . sense of abandonment, worthlessness” after her father leaves, Ward (2013) pictures “the open mouth of that cellar off in the darkness, in the future, gaping as a grave” (p. 152).

The place of the grave, beneath yet also part of the land, remains a central experiential location for Ward. She experiences life as “a hurricane,” in which she, her family, Black men, Black Southerners, extending outward in a continuing fractal of relations, “board up to save what [they] can and bow low to crouch in that small space above the dirt where the wind will not reach” (Ward, 2013, p. 249). The place between “that small space above the dirt” and the grave beneath the same dirt is not only a conceptual place, but a literal one, a place to which she is both continually coming and going, and from which Roger Eric Daniels III, Demond Cook, Charles Joseph Martin, Ronald Wayne Lizana, and Joshua Adam Dedeaux will never return. However, her crouching in that space, existing where the wind will not reach, rejects violence as the final contour of her self-narration and, instead, signals her own resistance in territorial, geographic, and spatial terms.

“Making Story Again in the World”; Miranda’s Territorial Epistemologies

In Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir, Deborah Miranda uses self-narration to reckon with similar questions about the relationship between geographies of violence and resistance. Just as Ward’s self-narration is inextricable from her grounding of geographies of anti-Black violence in what is now the United States, Miranda signals the territorial connections between her own history and U.S. history. Beginning the memoir in 1770, she uses a combination of poetry, history, photographs, and fiction to confront the intertwined but distinct histories of U.S. independence and the missionization of California by the Spanish. In this way, she lays contemporary geographies of U.S. territorial claims as a palimpsest onto both the land and her body, reflecting on how her presence contradicts official history with a place-based history that functions, in Million’s (2013) words, “as affective, felt, intuited as well as thought” (p. 57). Bringing the affective to bear on the history of California is at the core of Miranda’s project.

In her memoir, Miranda provides a history of the California missions that confronts the “one-dimensional, flat, and worst of all, untrue” story that is taught to California youth through the fourth-grade mission project, which requires all students to complete a project on one of California’s twenty-one missions. For Miranda, the methodology of this project, in which the history of California is told through the history of missionization, signals a broader organizing trend in the stories of California Indians—one in which “fourth graders, their parents, their teachers, tourists to the missions, even historians, often learn and perpetuate only one story about California Indians: conquest, subjugation, defeat, disappearance” (p. 193). Through her memoir, Miranda searches for a form of self-narrativization that is capable of telling the “many other stories” that California Indians have; a methodology able to honor the fact that these stories “aren’t easy; they are fractured.” Miranda (2013) seeks to “make story again in the world,” to take those fracture stories and “make them whole,” which requires “a multilayered web of community reaching backward in time and forward in dream, questing deeply into the country of unknown memory” (p. 193). She finds this methodology in a territorial narrative that serves both the epistemological and ontological projects of memorialization, which she articulates as necessary for “making story again in the world.”

Miranda’s grandfather, Thomas Anthony Miranda, is a recurring figure throughout Bad Indians. Thomas, along with his parents Thomás and Inés and his sister Carmen, ground Miranda’s (2013) exploration of the relationship between California Indian-ness and territory as she notes their inclusion on the 1905-1906 Kelsey census as “Indians without land” (p. 68). Miranda (2013) reckons with the complicated role that the Kelsey census, which counted non-reservation Native peoples in California, plays in the territorial epistemology of her people and herself:

The Kelsey census is a long story. Suffice it to say that without it, my family would not have been officially Indian, but with all its incomplete, inept, careless record-keeping, the Kelsey census obliterated the Esselen people. Its inaccurate “count” of Esselen people encouraged [American cultural anthropologist] Alfred Kroeber’s 1925 pronouncement that Esselen people and culture were extinct, thus making it easier for Sacramento Bureau of Indian Affairs Superintendent Lafayette A. Dorrington to drop us off the list of landless tribes who would benefit from a reservation. (p. 68)

Here, Miranda highlights the multiple facets of personal and tribal memory borne out of this moment through which she is marked as “Indian” but also removed as an “Indian” from her traditional territory. Miranda’s narration of this multilayered web, wherein she sketches out how seeming contradictions can be understood instead as rhizomatic logics through which her self-storying gains meaning, echoes Million’s (2013) reading of Beatrice Culleton’s In Search of April Raintree. Million explains, often “there is no one truth available” to Native women, “in history books, from the mouths of the system’s surrogates, or even within their beleaguered family” (p. 63). Building on this self-narration as an affective embodiment of her grandfather’s history (and that of their people), Miranda “makes story again in the world” by highlighting how these rhizomatic logics appear in one of her grandfather’s favorite stories as well.

Referring to a story of Thomas’ that she transcribes earlier in her memoir, Miranda (2013) brings forward the story of her grandfather “being drawn to a mysterious light while working as a vaquero far from his birthplace in Monterey” (p. 194). Revisiting this story at the end of her book, she notes that she has “learned two important and seemingly oppositional facts about that light. One, the light my grandfather yearned toward came from the top of Mt. Diablo, about three hundred miles away” (Miranda, 2013, p. 194). As she explains, this mountain is a place of importance for local Native peoples, who consider it to be a place “of emergence . . . where the world began after a great flood” (Miranda, 2013, p. 194). For Miranda (2013), this signifies the connection that her people maintained to their territory: “Who we are is where we are from. Where we are from is who we are” (p. 194). In terms of Simpson’s “land as pedagogy,” Miranda uses this story to understand land as the context through which she is able to self-narrate her own history alongside and through histories of California Indians more broadly, as well as the territory that makes up California itself. However, through multiple, simultaneous readings, she is able to also invoke what Simpson refers to as “land as process”—an important facet of land-as-pedagogy.

Miranda (2013) observes that “another way to read this story is to know that the light my grandfather was mesmerized by was actually the first airplane beacon erected in California, set on top of Mt. Diablo like . . . the Good Colonizing Seal of Approval” (p. 195). Rather than sacred, in this reading, Mt. Diablo becomes profane. These conflicting interpretations of her grandfather’s narrative are both grounded in territory and space, but one depends on understanding “this story as an example of the foolishness of a naïve Indigneous man [and] his failure to comprehend modern technology” (Miranda, 2013, p. 195). This second reading troubles Miranda (2013), who confesses that she would rather ignore this part to “keep the mythological fantasy of some blood-memory of the connection between indigeneity and land, and not see the blood of genocide pooling around that airplane beacon” (p. 195).

However, she concludes that such an impulse would maintain the one dimensionality and linearity of the narrative, neglecting the complex territorial epistemology signified by her grandfather’s attraction to this distant light. Instead, she argues that “we can look at both interpretations simultaneously,” acknowledging the fact that although “the airplane beacon” is a “terrible violation . . . my grandfather’s wandering soul was drawn back, given a path to return to that site” (Miranda, 2013, p. 196). By bringing together these two interpretations, Miranda allows for multiple stories to exist within the same space, both literally and figuratively. In doing so, she affirms Million’s argument that, in writing first-person experiential narratives, Native women are “thinking and problematizing nuances of truth and telling, silence, silencing, and their lived truth practices,” highlighting the “affectively charged experiential” (p. 67) that is essential for methodologies of resistance that can, as Sarah Hunt suggested in the introduction to this piece, move “beyond the boundaries of dominant discourse” (p. 557).

Here: Similar Places of Contemporary Resistance

There are “similar places” here, to use Simpson’s term. When these memoirs are considered comparatively, we can begin to see how these multiple narratives are living, and moving but still sharing a “similar place.” Both use experiential self-storying to explore how individuals and communities are bound to the history of U.S. imperialism, exacted through territorial, geographical, and topographical mechanisms. Paying attention to the spatial dimensions of resistance in Ward and Miranda’s memoirs provides a grounded approach to understanding the intersections of Black and Native women’s resistance to the geographies incumbent in anti-Black racism and settlement in the United States, while allowing the space, both literal and figurative, for tribal and communal specificity to remain meaningful locations.

In the case of Men We Reaped, we can recognize McKittrick’s (2006) exploration of how Black women use spatial epistemologies to resist violence. As she argues, “ongoing geographic struggle by black women is not simply indicative of the adverse effects of geographic domination, but…is entwined with strategic and meaningful languages, acts, expressions, and experiences” (p. xxxi). Ward (2013) uses spatial language to articulate resistance and survivance as a literary praxis in this way. She observes that her “grief scabs over like [her] scars and pulls into new, painful configurations as it knits” and that, because of this, “it hurts in new ways” (p. 239). Recollecting the way in which men were pulled “from the beyond” by “the pain of the women they left,” Ward invokes the spatial movement of her bodily scarring to articulate embodied experiences of living with grief.

For Ward (2013), this scarring embodies both personal and national histories, while also being an indelible element of a resilience distinctly bound to Southern Black womanhood:

I thought being unwanted and abandoned and persecuted was the legacy of the poor southern Black woman. But as an adult, I see my mother’s legacy anew. I see how all the burdens she bore, the burdens of her history and identity of our country’s history and identity enabled her to manifest her greatest gifts . . . This is how a transplanted people survived a holocaust and slavery. This is how Black people in the South organized to vote under the shadow of terrorism and the noose. This is how human beings sleep and wake and fight and survive. (p. 250)

In Ward’s honoring of her mother, we see McKittrick’s “poetics of landscape.” Just as Ward describes this territorial embodiment as the basis of survival through “a holocaust and slavery,” McKittrick (2006) asserts that the “poetics of landscape allow black women to critique the boundaries of transatlantic slavery, rewrite national narratives, respatialize feminism, and develop new pathways across traditional geographic arrangements” (p. xxiii) In this way, Ward’s memoir is a salient example of the “poetics of landscape,” a literary praxis through which Black women can “offer several reconceptualizations of space and place, positioning [themselves] as geographic subjects who provide spatial clues as to how more humanly workable geographies might be imagined” (McKittrick, 2006, p. xxiii). Most significantly, these spatial clues gesture toward “more humanly workable geographies” that resist the colonial claiming of land, because “the poetics of landscape are not derived from the desire for socioeconomic possession” but rather a “grammar of liberation, through which ethical human-geographies can be recognized and expressed” (McKittrick, 2006, p. xxiii).

The “grammar of liberation” that is evident in the spatial geographies of Men We Reaped is what brings together Ward and Miranda’s experiential narratives of resistance in a similar place—“here.” The title of Ward’s final chapter, “We Are Here,” asserts continued presence against the exigencies of a history that attempts both spatial and temporal erasure of Black life. In Bad Indians, after moving through a reckoning with familial and structural histories of violence, Miranda (2013) ends up at the same “here” as Ward, although in a different place. She notes that “the loss of land is a kind of soul-would that the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation still feels; a wound which we negotiate every day of our lives” (p. 202). However, in the final pages, she doesn’t “know whether to laugh or cry” when she finds out that some of her people’s traditional lands still exist, as part of the Santa Lucia Preserve, “a combination private, corporate-owned real estate holding and nature conservancy consisting of Bradley Sargent’s former ranch, itself stolen from Indians” (Miranda, 2013, p. 203). Much like Ward’s tribute to her mother, Miranda’s consideration of the Santa Lucia Preserve becomes both the affective and territorial means through which she is able to understand the spatial dimensions of the history she spent the memoir recovering.

After her initial dismay at the development of part of the land into luxury homes, she learns that the developed areas are designed to make enough profit to enable the conservation of the majority of the land into perpetuity. For Miranda, this spatial organization encapsulates her embodied experience as a California Indian. Looking out at El Potrero, the land inhabited by her great-great-great-great-great-aunt Estéfana, Miranda (2013) laments that “despite the miracle of this land’s existence, El Potrero and the other Indian ranchos and rancherias have not been, and will never be, turned back over to the descendant of tribes from that area” (p. 204). This soul-wound, the loss of land is an irrevocable part of Miranda’s experience as a California Indian. However, she observes that “another truth exists beside the harsh one: there is a pathway open to . . . my tribe, our families—to return to a place which formed us” (Miranda, 2013, p. 204). For Miranda, this exemplifies the geographies of grief with which she, much like Ward, lives. Echoing her mending of the simultaneous narratives of her grandfather’s story of the light, Miranda (2013) remarks, “what was stolen from us hasn’t exactly been returned, but then, we aren’t exactly our ancestors either” (p. 204).

The affective geographies of Ward and Miranda’s memoirs demonstrate how both use memoir as a literary praxis that can reconfigure U.S. imperial history and the claims of such imperialism over territory, both geographic and embodied. This is essential for considering how we approach these spaces in pedagogical ways, because both require that we honor the constellations of multiple spatial histories and narratives of place to reckon with the reality of compounded geographies of violence in this territory. The “similar places” that Simpson locates in her own affective response to the Ferguson decision and extrapolates into broader connections between #BlackLivesMatter, #IdleNoMore, and #MMIWG2S are essential geographic methodologies in the still-breathing histories of resistance that have always accompanied attempts at dispossession, enslavement, and elimination.

Reading this pedagogical imperative through the literary memoirs of Ward and Miranda is generative, because, for both authors, survivance is a literary act that cannot be removed from embodied narration. Reflecting on those who survive, Ward (2013) declares,

We honor anniversaries of deaths by cleaning graves and sitting next to them before fires, sharing food with those who will not eat again. We raise children and tell them other things about who they can be and what they are worth: to us, everything. (p. 250)

This telling is essential to Miranda (2013), who affirms that

the stories still exist, and testify that our connections to the land live on beneath the surfaces of our lives, like underground rivers that never see the light of day, but run alive and singing nonetheless. The stories call us back. (p. 203)

Emphasizing the geographic templates of literary survivance, Ward and Miranda offer one possible answer to the questions posed by McKittrick and Million that appear in the epigraph to this piece. Both link experiential knowledge and the expression of geographies as both territorial and embodied methodologies to make visible violent geographies of affective and bodily control. Highlighting these elements of self-narration can not only help us to understand the intertwined histories of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism but can also emphasize the shared histories of resistance embroidered into this place. In The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, Jodi Byrd (2011) observes that “it is time to imagine indigenous decolonization as a process that restores life and allows settler, arrivant, and native to apprehend and grieve together the violences of U.S. empire” (p. 229). As we do and support the work of resistance, it is vital that we listen to the experiential knowledge evoked through self-narration and that we trace the geographic maps of affective and embodied experience therein.

Epilogue

On April 20, 2015, I had my students read Leanne Simpson’s “An Indigenous View on #BlackLivesMatter” alongside a viewing of the conversation between poets Claudia Rankine and Robin Coste Lewis titled “The Poet as Citizen.” In this conversation, Coste Lewis (2014) describes writing her collection Voyage of the Sable Venus as “interior journey” that required her to think about

what it means to inhabit a Black female body in this country at this time…what it means not to inhabit the space, not to have a space to inhabit, though you are in space . . . it’s a very strange, to put it mildly, a kind of interior struggle to will yourself into history when history tells you that you do not exist.

My discussions with students that day made it clear that, in teaching both Native and Black literatures responsibly, both discretely and as part of broader education on North American literatures, there is a pernicious demand, both implicit and explicit, that we affirm the presence of the North American settler colonial nation-state through the reproduction of pedagogies that negate geographic and embodied knowledge. We need to resist the demand for an approach to literature that thinks nothing of the bodies or land of which it speaks or we commit repeated affirmations of the settler state, including the structures of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism on which it was built.

As I reflect on teaching this course again, as well as teaching all the courses on women’s literatures, U.S. and Canadian multiethnic literatures, and Native literatures that I will need to teach in the future, I am left thinking about the realities of geographic embodiment to which Simpson’s piece speaks. Both memoirs presented here emphasize the ways in which space, history, and self are brought together through this kind of embodiment: Miranda’s tribal memoir reflects how different maps are carried in and through her body, evidenced through her exploration of the relationship between familial and colonial genealogies of physical violence. And when Ward (2013) tells the story of her brother, the story where the past and present of the memoir meet, she notes, “This is the last summer that I will spend with my brother. This is the heart. This is. Every day, this is,” emphasizing how continuously she carries these stories with her (p. 213).

How do we think about the future of this embodiment when Rankine has to make pre-emptory room in her critically acclaimed Citizen: An American Lyric for the names of future Black lives lost at the hands of police? (2014a) ⁸ When, over Miranda’s vociferous objections, the Pope still canonizes Junipero Serra, father of the California mission system? When, as Ward (2013) notes, “by the numbers, by all official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing” (p. 237)?

There is also the dangerous horizon of inertia in this, as evidenced by Rankine’s blank page described above. As Rankine (2014b) observed about trying to come to an end for Citizen, “The hard thing was getting out of the book because…one thinks narratively of resolving the problem of the book at the end of the book and, obviously, there’s no resolution because it is what it is—it’s our lives.” Rankine’s simple affirmation of presence sustains Hunt et al.’s (2014) recognition of “the importance of looking at how forms of violence are not only connected but are produced in and through space” (p. 564). However, in her act of writing—as in Cook-Lynn’s, Ward’s, and Miranda’s—is also contained the very resistance to it. When we recognize, as Simpson does, that geographies of resistance and violence come from a similar place, we also begin to see the diverse strains of existence sharing that space as well.