Felt Theory

An ideology is made of what it does not mention; it exists because there are things which must not be spoken of.

—Pierre Machery, A Theory of Literary Production

In Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith speaks eloquently of this generation's reach for indigenous research projects that reflect "a shift . . . between being reviewed as research objects and . . . becoming our own researchers."¹ Our intervention into American studies as a field should come as no surprise. The "Americas" did not exist prior to those Indigenous peoples who are its millennial civilizations, and Canada, the United States, Mexico, and other nations in the hemisphere do not exist today without our presence and our interventions. We remain vital living societies perpetually locked into discursive and material struggle. To paraphrase Anthony Appiah on the inextricably intertwined state of the colonized with the colonial, the Americas and Indigenous knowledges become mutually unintelligible without the full record of what has happened here. Native societies are often characterized as colonized, but that colonization challenges our generation of Indigenous writers to specify its content as it changes and morphs. I prefer to speak of hegemony. Hegemony is not prior to, but is a result of the process that seeks to reconcile the agon, all the divergent elements present when different claims are constituted as "truth." American studies then, is a field where divergent elements contest and constitute differently positioned "truths." American studies is a mutually wrought field of action that should recognize how each account, particularly those that have been silenced make the other. The inclusion of our gendered Native interventions may reconstitute what questions might be considered legitimate in such a field of study. This is the potential of what we are doing.

Beverly TallBear makes the point that the problem with "discourses of conquest" is that they cannot be simply exposed as "false" and its associated policies and conversations "corrected," since they also form the basis for resistance and the claiming of rights. TallBear understands that colonial discourses are the complex outcomes of negotiations where any one strand (position in the conversation) can never be simply extricated from its mutual production in any other. In my essay, an excerpt from a larger work, I argue that contemporary representations of historical abuse are languages, as TallBear notes, mired in the genealogy of conquest. It is a discourse now anchored by an elaborate edifice of memory and emotion in tribal consensus. It is a Canadian nation-state discourse where truth tribunals look to international human rights narratives that force its participants to draw upon the past in order to adjudicate present grievances. Trauma requires all those positioned by its narratives to return to the site of the crime (the past as colonial history) to legitimate their claims. In the present, the victims of Canadian colonial abuse are compelled to "witness," to "tell" therapists, self-help programs, or tribunals about their trauma. This is an important discourse of our times in Canada and the United States, the arena where those who have been powerless attempt to take their power by appealing to the moral discourse of the perpetrator.

In this essay I make the case for remembering and understanding the impact of Canadian First Nation women's first person narratives on white, mostly male Canadian mainstream scholarship. Such narratives, I argue, were political acts in themselves that, in their time, exploded the measured, "objective" accounts of Canadian (and U.S.) colonial histories. Our scholarship today shares a direct lineage with theirs. Like them, we are often judged as polemical or nonobjective by these same academies almost forty years later. My essay contributes to the current project of developing Native feminisms by exploring these first sustained articulations within a dense web of gendered colonialism. I think our work as Indigenous women scholars can only be enriched by such reflection, since we are not very far intellectually from where they stood, struggled, and wrote. We are them and most of those I write of are still here among us. At the same time, the nation-states that seek to subsume us have moved further toward a gendered nationalism that...