Resisting Exile in the "Land of the Free": Indigenous Groundwork at Colonial Intersections

You see, their names for themselves are really the names of their places. That is how [Gad 'O'ááhn—the Juniper Tree Stands Alone People] were known to others and to themselves. They were known by their places. That is how they are still known.

Charles Henry, Apache historian

To this day the Sac and Fox [of the Mississippi in Iowa] still believe that the lands in Illinois belong to them. It is their land by right, and I cannot say whether your people will ever believe that, but we still do, and for a long time in the future the Sac and Fox will always believe the same.

Young Bear, Meskwaki historian

The complex relationship of people to places intimated by the two Indigenous historians and public intellectuals Charles Henry and Young Bear has come under increasing scholarly scrutiny in recent years. Grave transnational conditions of imposed displacements and diasporas, volatile borders, and coerced exiles have brought the political question of place and space into sharper focus. Recent waves of writings on the subject, both within and across fields ranging from environmental psychology to human geography and urban planning, compel us to begin this introduction with a self-effacing question: What is meant to be the contribution of this work, and to whom is it meant to contribute? What were the aims of this particular group of authors in presenting their papers at the American Studies Association annual meeting in 2005 and in revising them in light of the panel presentation, subsequent reader responses, and growing interdisciplinary concern with place and space? Collectively, we have a variety of answers.

Before turning to introduce the four papers that constitute this thematic contribution to American Indian Quarterly, first allow us to establish its broader setting. Readers interested in place and space no doubt are familiar with the contributions made by the late cultural anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz and the cultural and linguistic anthropologist Keith H. Basso. In his prize-winning book Wisdom Sits in Places, Basso uses his long-term relationship with the Western Apache community of Cibecue and the thick description of ethnography to illustrate, in the words of the late Vine Deloria Jr., "the idea that language and linguistics are mutually supportive and irretrievably combined so that knowing language connects an individual to the land and knowing the land holds the personality together in a cohesive, balanced unity."¹ According to Comanche scholar-activist, musical artist, and educator Cornel Pewewardy, Basso shows us how "knowledge of places is closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one's position in the larger scheme of things, including one's own community, and to securing a confident sense of who one is as a person."²

More recent work over the last decade has moved beyond the earlier concern in anthropology with and critical starting point of theorizing spatially constituted Indigenous identities—thick descriptions of people and selfhoods—to theorize place and space from the standpoint of its contestations and linkages to local, national, and global levels of state power. In a 2005 American Ethnologist article entitled "Imagined Geographies," for instance, University of California anthropologist Thomas Biolsi complicates his readers' understanding of Indian nations as what he terms "obligatory categories of modern space" by examining "four kinds of Indigenous space imagined, fought for, and[,] to a remarkable extent, achieved by American Indian people": tribal sovereignty in a homeland (e.g., a modern tribal government with its citizenry on a reservation), territorially based rights to off-reservation resources, rights within a wide-ranging space that ultimately spans the entire contiguous United States, and a variety of interlocking spaces in which Indians assert political and cultural citizenries in their nations and in the United States.³

"Imagined Geographies" embodies a number of critical matters in interdisciplinary research concerned over the last decade with shifting meanings for (and in) social space and the creations and transformations of real places. These concerns have resulted in increasingly complicated understandings of the legal geographies of race and racism, the...