This session, linked with the 20th/21st Century LLC's roundtable devoted to "Democracy and the Novel," will examine key texts and contexts for Indigenous literatures and their historically fraught relationships to the US. Rather than presuming geographical, legal, or other forms of incorporation, panelists will instead explore Indigenous disidentifications with, and challenges to, US democracy. How have Indigenous literatures engaged with, revised, or refused principles of democratic government and social values? How have they challenged notions of democratic inclusion in settler states? In answering these questions, the panelists will turn to diverse texts from the mid-19th century to today.
For instance, Hannah Manshel, in “Bad Faith and the American Indian: Against US Democratic Inclusion,” will examine Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s (Oneida) Our Democracy and the American Indian (1920) to consider the intersections between property, democracy, and contract and treaty law in US state violence against Indigenous people. She will argue that Kellogg shows the way in which participation in American democracy is predicated on private property ownership, from which Native people are either constitutively excluded or, to borrow a term from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, into which they are predatorily included. Kellogg’s writing serves as a trenchant critique of the assumption written into both treaty law and US Supreme Court Precedent (Lone Wolf v Hitchcock, 1903), that the US Congress—or any US governmental institutions—acts “in perfect good faith” with regard to tribal control of land. In pointing out that this US Democracy from which Native people are excluded is in fact founded on Haudenosaunee principles of governance, Kellogg draws attention to the hypocrisy and contingent nature of US democratic principles of inclusion and equality, while she also draws upon a variety of Indigenous traditions to propose an alternative form of democratic participation that involves a reimagined relationship to property based upon communal control of land.
Justin Tackett’s paper, “Atlantic Ridge: John Rollin Ridge’s ‘The Atlantic Cable’ and Democracy in Transit” examines the poetry of mid-19th century Cherokee poet and writer, John Rollin Ridge (Yellow Bird). Often considered the first Native American novelist, John Rollin Ridge (Cheesquatalawny, or Yellow Bird) performed his poem, “The Atlantic Cable,” at an 1858 celebration in Sacramento, California, shortly after the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid. His wife ultimately published the poem in his posthumous Poems (1868). At first glance, Tackett will argue, Ridge’s poem looks like typical transatlantic cable verse, praising America’s technological prowess and the spirit of freedom that permitted the achievement. But Tackett proposes instead that Ridge criticizes American antebellum “democracy” by moving past American borders to the Atlantic itself, where the poem envisions higher social ideals from a distance and critiques the manifest destiny that displaced Ridge from the east coast. Indeed, Ridge’s depiction of the cable reconfigures the Atlantic slave trade as well as native diasporas as sites of hope and vocal protest that could reshape impoverished American democracy. The result is a technology-driven vision of democracy in transit—a social collective of free migration and communication—that eschews landedness and borders.
Finally, Alex Young’s paper, “Indigeneity and Representation in the Jurisgenerative Poetics of Layli Long Soldier,” reads the poetry of Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier, whose debut collection of poetry, Whereas, has been widely celebrated for its poetic response to the 2009 Joint Resolution of Congress “To acknowledge a long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes and offer an apology to all Native Peoples on behalf of the United States.” Her response has generally been read as a critique of this (non-binding) resolution-- which was passed buried in a defense appropriations bill and was signed by President Obama without public ceremony--as an empty gesture lacking the force of law. Young will argue that Whereas, rather than articulating a plea for redress under the law, gives voice to a radical critique of the United States’ putatively democratic structures of representation (both political and aesthetic). Following Fred Moten’s riffs (in his recent monograph Stolen Life) on the work of legal theorist Robert Cover, we can see in Long Soldier’s “whereas” statements not normative claims on the law but “jurisgenerative” moments that resist the ordering of the settler colonial nomos. Marked by “the extragrammatical run-on, that informal incompletion where the sentence lives against its own execution,” Whereas issues “a kind of anoriginal (declaration of) independence” (Moten). In resisting the forms of representation imposed on her by the settler state, Long Soldier imagines the possibility of a democracy not predicated on her own erasure.