A Return to the South

Written as a meditation, this essay considers how indigeneity challenges the geopolitical formations of “souths” within and beyond the US nation-state. In particular, Southeastern American Indians provide an important analytic through which to reconceptualize hemispheric understandings of race, place, and temporality that are often collapsed into discussion of a global South or often conscripted into absence in the assumption of a global North. Drawing on Éduoard Glissant and other Caribbean intellectuals to situate Southeastern American Indian histories within a larger hemispheric frame of the Americas, this piece argues for reading practices that disrupt colonialist geographies of absence and removal to demonstrate to importance of return within indigenous understandings of land.