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

A West Virginia bill recently introduced (and later shelved) called for the state recognition of various Native American tribal groups, from well-known tribes like the Shawnees and the Cherokees to the mysterious “Uninh.” A colleague who studies Native American history in this region pointed out to me that “Uninh” was most likely shorthand on old maps for “Uninhabited Region,” a fact that seemed to render this “group” a questionable recipient of state recognition. Leaving the knotty politics of state recognition aside, however, I want to ponder for a moment the gesture that such a name implies: the arrogance of referring to an entire swath of the country as empty and thus available for settlement. Like the blank section on a map that represents “the Louisiana Purchase” as originally French rather than Native territory, this colonial turn-of-hand empties the land of its Indigenous presence.

It is this complicated relationship between maps and the land and peoples they purportedly represent that Mishuana Goeman considers in her book Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Goeman envisions the literature of several twentieth-century Native American women as literary maps: texts that “tell and map a story of survivance and future” (23). Throughout her examination of the work of E. Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), Esther Belin (Diné), Joy Harjo (Muscogee Creek), and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Goeman articulates a theory of (re)mapping, which she defines as “the labor 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). Rather than conceptualizing space as a blank surface, Goeman urges us to see it as, in Doreen Massey’s words, a “meeting up of histories” (5). Her model is of both the past and the future, replacing tired beliefs in the Vanished American. This is a contested space of labor, of traditional and new Native stories, of containment and opportunity. Throughout, Goeman calls for a flexibility in analyses of place and space that serves her well; she is able, for example, to draw connections between migratory movement in Harjo’s and Belin’s poetry while maintaining their tribal and historical specificity.

Goeman’s introduction effectively synthesizes the work of Native American scholars such as Robert Warrior, Colin Calloway, and Andrea Smith with social geographers such as Doreen Massey, Edward Soja, and Ricardo Padrón. This is not, she is careful to point out, a utopian vision of maps offering a kind of “pure,” distinct Native space. What she offers instead is a reconception of the complex relationships that necessarily exist in a colonized land. Although Goeman does not wish to sharply differentiate her approach from American Indian literary nationalism, she does pose a somewhat distinct vision of Native space. Her approach seems more in keeping with that of recent critics such as Renya K. Ramirez, whose book Native Hubs: Culture, Community and Belonging in Silicon Valley and Beyond reimagines cities as sites of dynamic Indigeneity. While Goeman’s book does not consider the recent turn to “transnationalism” (or in Chadwick Allen’s more recent terms “trans-Indigeneity”) in depth, it would be interesting to know how “remapping” coexists with or complicates transnational, trans-Indigenous, and hemispheric models of Native space.

The real power of this book comes in its close readings, particularly of Johnson’s and Silko’s work. Goeman expands previous analyses of two of Johnson’s most well-known short stories by considering them in relation to nineteenth-century versions of Canada’s Indian Act, which among other things declared that any First Nations woman who married a white man would lose her Indian status. In this sense, the act functioned to erase First Nations women from the landscape. Offering up “alternative geographies,” such stories as “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” and “As It Was in the Beginning” display and critique the violence of this racialized...