Notes toward a Native Feminism’s Spatial Practice

Why is it that settlement or place is so frequently characterized as bounded, as enclosure, and as directly counterposed to spaces as flows?

—Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender

The physical is easier to achieve a boundary drawn to separate people

Navajos say no word exists establishing form to the air we breathe.

—Esther Belin, “On Relocation”

The politics of place in Native American studies is very tricky both socially and politically. While conceptions of Native identity are legislated differently depending on governing nation-states, tribal government systems, histories, and cultural differences, they share spatialized tendencies, identity, social relations, and politics are often conceived, represented, and determined as geographically and historically situated and bound to a particular community. This grounding, even while considered abject space by the settler state, is of utmost importance to the imaginative geographies that create the material consequences of everyday existence for Native people, even while the historical onslaught of legislation continues to rip that grounding out from under Native people. In contemporary politics—and over the last two hundred years—Native communities have been depicted and conceived as transitory, dying communities, despite the reality of vitality and strength of Native people who refuse to give up ground to the forces of settler-colonialism. Yet, in order not to cede the ground, we must also begin to scrutinize the impact of spatial policies in our cognitive mapping of Native lands and bodies. Beyond examining the discursive frameworks located in specific historical, political, and cultural moments, we must also think critically about “sets of choices, omissions, uncertainties, and intentions” that are “critical to, yet obscured within” the mapping of the body polity and nation-state.¹ How do we uproot settler maps that drive our everyday materiality and realities?

During the post–Great Wars era, a heightened sense of nationalism seized the geopolitical imagination of American citizens, resulting in federal Indian policy based on creating a unified political citizenry and political map. Western masculine progress, rooted in the patriarchy of military and legal conquest, defined state practices; its counterpart of feminine progress, derived from Christian morality, came to define national cultural practices symbolically entrenched in the home. Narratives of progress provide the underpinnings for these settler policies. Progress became the mantra for a budding U.S. nation-state and a term evoking American rugged individualism: exemplified by a raw masculinity, reckless bravery, “rational” ingenuity, domination, and ambition.² Although established in the nineteenth century, the language of conquest continues to be rooted in these gendered and racialized ideals. Having supposedly domesticated the “Indian” and in doing so firmly cutting its ties with Europe, the settler government of the United States heightened its nationalist efforts in the Great Wars to become a world power. Yet its look outward belied the mass spatial reconfiguring taking place internally with Native nations who were experiencing the threat of Termination and Relocation.

I focus on the material practices at work in the Relocation program, as it is critiqued in Esther Belin’s (Diné) book of poetry From the Belly of My Beauty as an example of the way we mentally and unconsciously react and negotiate with imposed colonial spatial ideology. In this collection, Belin, “blues-ing on the brown vibe” of the urban landscape of Los Angeles and Oakland, California, collects snapshots of the urban Indian community in these major relocation centers, memories of Dinétah, and instances of the routes that take her back and forth both physically and mentally. It works as a potential site for a critique of dominant spatial norms of fixity of Native people in time and space and allows for a potential spatial restructuring. Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean make clear that material feminism “takes the critical investigation, or reading, in the strong sense, of the artifacts of culture and social history, including literary and artistic texts, archival documents, and works of theory, to be a potential site of political contestation through critique.”³ Belin’s poetry is an example of Native women writers presenting space and time as a matter of narrated relationships constructed not only as...