Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations

Abstract

Mishuana Goeman provides feminist interventions into an analysis of colonial spatial restructuring of Native lands and bodies in the twentieth century. Through an examination of the ways that Native women's poetry and prose reveal settler colonialism in North America as an enduring form of gendered spatial violence, she continually ask how rigid spatial categories, such as nations, borders, reservations, and urban areas are formed by settler nation-states structuring of space. As Native people become mobile, reserv/ation land bases become overcrowded, and the state seeks to enforce means of containment and close its borders to incoming, often indigenous, immigrants, it is imperative to refocus Native nations efforts beyond replicating settler models of territory, jurisdiction, borders, and race. The authors imagining of such alternative to gendered and colonial spatial violence, territorial property logics, and uneven regimes of capitalist accumulation and dispossession have deep roots in narrative geographies, thus providing the basis for her Native feminist interventions. The book brings multiple fields into this complex conversation such as Native American Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, Feminist and Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Geography, and American Studies. In (re)mapping colonial logics, Native people hold the power to rethink the way they engage with territory, relationships to each other and with other Native nations and settler nations. It is these stories that will lead the way as they have for generations.