The Transatlantic Indian Problem

What is the Indian problem? More than an invidious portrayal of Native peoples, as opposed to a multicultural embrace of them, the Indian problem as a set of epistemological and discursive strategies condenses the ongoing crisis management that is the legal and political existence of the Euramerican settler state (like the US).¹ In order to normalize settler sovereignty, Native peoples need to be placed in a state of exception, as a "special" or "peculiar" aberration.² The incommensurability of Indigenous self-determination and the settler state's assertions of its own geopolitical coherence are resolved through the invention and attribution of Indianness. As an apparently extrapolitical set of attributes, it explains exceptionality as a function of innate qualities with which the government and nonnatives must grapple but which remain prior to and outside of the sphere of law and policy proper. The problem of settlement appears instead as the characteristics of Indianness, a localizable phenomenon that can be delimited, contained, regulated, and acknowledged in its alterity. As such, the Indian problem operates as an ideological matrix—a vital technology through which to aggregate the incoherencies of settler colonial governance into a reified figure that can serve as the putative object of administration and knowledge production.

Inasmuch as settlement inheres in the continual reproduction of the nation-state as a cohesive, integrated unit, transnational methodologies would seem to offer powerful tools for undoing the work performed by the Indian problem. However, in the much trumpeted "transnational turn" in American studies, that promise has not been realized.³ Rather, a transnational analytic has seemed to revalue the nation-state, albeit in a negative, deconstructive way. The topologies of transnationality tend to suggest less the disintegration of notions of national boundaries than an emphasis on their porousness. In a recent essay, Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way seek to outline the work of "transnationalism" as "a category of analysis" for American studies: "there is no 'domestic' that is not extensively transected by the transnational" (640); "economics, politics, subjectification, and the family all exceed the nation" (642). Figures of transecting and exceeding foreground the movement between "domestic" and "foreign," ambiguating the distinction, putting them into productive dialectical relation, and challenging forms of nationalist insularity and exceptionalism. However, those intellectual maneuvers do not necessarily yield a greater attention to the discursive and institutional procedures through which state internality is constituted as such and the consequent enforced incorporation of peoples whose place-based collectivity does not exceed the limits of national spatiality. As a critical rubric, transnationalism can end up redeploying the Indian problem, exceptionalizing Native peoples in their locatedness and rendering them peculiar within critical mappings predicated on movements across borders. What would happen if settler-Indigenous conflict and negotiation, contacts and associations among Indigenous peoples, and the transfer of technologies of settlement (policies, discourses, personnel) among different sites were taken as a basis for thinking "transnational" analysis? How might foregrounding indigeneity and settler colonialism highlight the transnational dynamics, deployments, and ideological work of the Indian problem?

These studies map the movement of images of Indianness in ways that could allow for tracing the construction and itinerary of the Indian problem. . . . Yet each [book] remains caught at the level of the image—of the Indian as a figure of exceptional alterity—in ways that block discussion of the role of that representational matrix within projects and networks of settlement.

Recent scholarship increasingly has addressed how representations of Native peoples circulate transatlantically, but even as such work seeks to integrate Euro-Indigenous encounters in the Americas within emergent transnational critical imaginaries, it focuses on the dissemination of the Indian as a kind of trope invested with variable significance in its transit. Three recent studies illustrate this dynamic—Michael Gaudio's Engraving the Savage (2008), Kate Flint's The Transatlantic Indian (2009), and Adam Lifshey's Specters of Conquest (2010). They each...