Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations by Mishuana Goeman (review)

In Mark My Words, Mishuana Goeman (Seneca) offers a theoretically well grounded and very well written analysis of both the metaphor and practice of mapping as an approach to studying colonialism, race, gender, and belonging in twentieth-century Native women’s literature.

Goeman demonstrates that while places may seem like fixed points—on a compass or a map—they are connected, interlocking, fluid, and layered ideas and identities as well as locations. Mapping is a process with tremendous power: it is one of the primary technologies of colonization used against Native nations. Goeman’s conceptualization of (re)mapping reclaims that power as “the labor of Native authors and the communities they write within and about undertake, in the simultaneously metaphoric and material capacities of map making, to generate new possibilities” (3). These “new possibilities” drive Goeman’s entire project as she seeks to heed Robert Warrior’s “call to examine the intellectual histories of native writers and put forth a ‘generational view’” (13).

The book’s four chapters each focus on the work of a writer from a Native nation: E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), Esther Belin (Diné), Joy Harjo (Muscogee), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo). The conclusion—although brief—returns to the importance of the future as driving the study of the past, requiring us to recognize the ways that this mapping of the Americas “materializes in all our lives—Native and non-Native alike” (204). Scholars and students of Native literature will note particularly Goeman’s work on Belin’s poetry, which has not been widely explored in the field, as well as her rereadings of the more familiar Johnson, Harjo, and Silko.

Readers interested in the literature, culture, and history of the Great Plains will not only find Goeman’s work on Harjo relevant but will also benefit from the triangulation of the space of the Great Plains through the process of (re)mapping that she describes. Moreover, with such a long connection with a variety of Native nations, the Great Plains serves as a key compass point for understanding Goeman’s fundamental argument that space and place are not, for indigenous people, academic, theoretical, or fixed.