“Erasure Is a Bitch, Isn’t It?”: Deborah Miranda’s Feminist Geographies and Native Women’s Life Writing
2021; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/ail.2021.0004
ISSN1548-9590
Autores Tópico(s)Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights
Resumo“Erasure Is a Bitch, Isn’t It?”Deborah Miranda’s Feminist Geographies and Native Women’s Life Writing Anne Mai Yee Jansen (bio) I woke up today, confused, inside of something feminine and ancestral in its misery. I woke up as the bones of my ancestors locked in government storage. —Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries The horse knows and reveals the truth of broken land, the unbearable histories and geographies that are far from invisible. —Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World “I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about” (110), writes Terese Marie Mailhot (Seabird Island Band) of gendered violence in her memoir Heart Berries (2018). As she explores her emotional state more thoroughly, she muses, “I think I have the blood memory of my neurotic ancestors and their vices” (32). In her memoir Crazy Brave (2012), Joy Harjo (Mvskoke/Creek) tells the story of a community of Native women who gathered together in times of crisis to shelter each other from abusive partners, recalling: “These fathers, boyfriends, and husbands were all men we loved, and were worthy of love. As peoples we had been broken. We were still in the bloody aftermath of a violent takeover of our lands” (158). Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), in her memoir The Woman Who Watches Over the World (2001), muses, “Self-telling is rare for a Native woman, but when I work on reservations with young people they want to know how I survived my life. I wish I could offer up a map and say, ‘This way.’ But it is not so easy. There are no roads through, no paths known, no maps or directions” (14). Mailhot, Harjo, and Hogan are among a growing cadre of Indigenous women who are engaging in what Hogan [End Page 55] calls “self-telling” and who, in so doing, are using memory to grapple with gendered violence and ongoing colonization in pursuit of reeducation and social justice. When taken together, Mailhot’s “neurotic ancestors,” Harjo’s understanding of the “violent takeover of our lands,” and Hogan’s acknowledgement that there are “no maps or directions,” these women’s memoirs help form a more complete picture of the intersections between gender, colonization, and geography (physical or imaginary). Deborah Miranda’s (Chumash/Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen) 2013 book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir explores these intersections in depth, teasing out their complex dynamics by interweaving personal memory and theoretical thought. This complex intertwining of the personal and the theoretical is central to Miranda’s formal experimentation and allows her to connect Native voices across time and space. In so doing, Bad Indians exposes the colonial logic of dominant narratives that function to erase Indigenous presence in California.1 Bad Indians is composed of an introduction that focuses on Miranda’s family history, followed by four sections which move chronologically from the 1700s to the present, which she categorizes in terms of missionization (1776–1836), post-secularization (1836–1900), reinvention (1900–1961), and home (1961–present). The personal and cultural histories of the Miranda family and Indigenous Californians are intertwined throughout the book, hence the centuries-long scope of the text. One of the book’s central aims is to undo the erasure that is so integral to the dominant narrative of California as a place devoid of Native peoples today. This narrative about Indigenous peoples, widely enforced by the California Missions curriculum in schools, is a crucial part of the story told by and about California that Miranda works to undo. The curriculum presents young California schoolchildren with a colonial map (both cartographic and metaphoric) of California that glorifies the Missions—outposts of Spanish Catholic colonial rule—and erases the presence and value of the Indigenous peoples of California. Bad Indians enacts what Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Seneca) describes as (re)mapping. In Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations (2013) Goeman points out that maps have historically been used as colonial tools to visually reinforce “hegemonic conceptions of race, gender, and nation . . . onto Native people both ideologically and physically” (23), arguing that “(re)mapping” is a literary strategy of empowered resistance which acknowledges “the power of Native [End Page 56] epistemologies...
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