University of Nebraska Press
Reviewed by:
Mishuana Goeman. Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 256 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $25.00.

In Mark My Words, Mishuana Goeman situates a discussion of twentieth-century Native women writers within a variety of discourses, including [End Page 100] history, feminist theory, critical race theory, and human geography, as well as Native American literary criticism. Goeman’s argument centers on the concept of “(re)mapping,” a term that 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). The argument relies on two major premises: first, that colonialism is a gendered process enacted through the conquest of bodies, especially Native women’s bodies; second, that the act of mapping, as performed through not only mapmaking but also storytelling, has reinforced both the absence of Native peoples and the presence of settler colonial nations. As a result, Native literary texts have the ability to “unsettle settler space” by refusing “the violent erasures” upon which settler colonial societies are built (2). Notably, Goeman does not wish to reclaim “pure ideas of indigeneity”; rather, she hopes to understand “the processes that have defined our current spatialities in order to sustain vibrant Native futures” (3). It is this act of moving forward, the emphasis on connecting events in the past and the future by recognizing Native spaces, that is the most exciting aspect of Mark My Words.

In chapter 1, “‘Remember What You Are’: Gendering Citizenship, the Indian Act, and (Re)mapping the Settler Nation-State,” Goeman considers two short stories by Mohawk writer E. Pauline Johnson. “A Red Girl’s Reasoning” and “As It Was in the Beginning” were both published in the 1890s, and both focus on the romantic relationship between a Native woman and a white man. The chapter situates Johnson and her protagonists in relation to the Indian Act and its limitation of “possibilities for Native women through the intersections of structural, political, and representational social fields” (43). That is, if either of Johnson’s protagonists chooses to marry her love interest, she will lose her legal status as a member of a tribal community. Goeman’s analysis highlights the ways that each woman negotiates her relationship and reinterprets European American concepts of marriage in order to maintain her own identity; ultimately, she demonstrates the power of Indigenous stories to reject colonial narratives and imagine new possibilities for Native peoples.

The second and third chapters address poetry by Esther Belin and Joy Harjo, respectively. Continuing to move chronologically through the twentieth century, “Rerouting Native Mobility, Uprooting Settler Spaces in the Poetry of Esther Belin” situates Belin’s writing within and in response [End Page 101] to the American Indian policies of termination and relocation. Goeman’s analysis illustrates how Belin relies on Indigenous knowledge to resist federal policies aimed at separating Native peoples from one another and their cultures in the 1940s and 1950s. In the third chapter, “From the Stomp Grounds On Up: Indigenous Movement and the Politics of Globalization,” she reads Harjo’s poetry similarly as a response to the neoliberal movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Here Goeman examines Harjo’s engagement with the relationship between tribally specific local needs and the larger demands of globalization. In addition to providing historical and political context, each chapter offers a close reading of several poems, demonstrating both poets’ resistance to colonial structures that would erase or tokenize Native identities. Goeman highlights the ways that Belin’s and Harjo’s use of tribally specific geographies, such as the Navajo emphasis on the four cardinal directions and the Muscogee Creek relationship to the stomp grounds, reasserts Indigenous presence.

In the last chapter, “‘Someday a Story Will Come’: Rememorative Futures,” Goeman tackles Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Mark My Words’s focus on mapping is most clearly relevant in this chapter, which includes a lengthy discussion of the historical role played by almanacs in developing an American identity. Framing her discussion of Silko’s book as a literal almanac and supported by a close reading of the maps in the novel, Goeman argues that Almanac “actively writes the Native into memories and history” and allows “for the movement of characters that represents the continual, multiple, and shifting connections to space and to each other that have existed since time immemorial” (168). She goes on to suggest that the map’s ability to reflect “shifting connections” allows Silko to address issues of transnationalism and draw attention to the artificiality and impermanence of national borders in North America. As in her discussion of Harjo, Goeman emphasizes the ways that Native women’s writing urges Indigenous communities to consider both local and global concerns.

The real strength of Mark My Words lies in its ability to weave various critical approaches into an interdisciplinary conversation that connects the physicality of maps and bodies to the equally concrete work accomplished by Native women’s stories. But Goeman’s reliance on concepts and vocabulary from so many discourses sometimes overwhelms, resulting [End Page 102] in lengthy, jargon-laden paragraphs that require much rereading. This issue is exaggerated by errors—entire sentences, paragraphs, and block quotations sometimes appear in two different sections of the same chapter—yet the arguments in this book are worth the extra effort. Readers will be rewarded by those passages that focus on analysis of primary texts, in which Goeman clearly demonstrates the necessity of combining multiple critical approaches in order to understand the ways that literature can empower us to remap the world.

Miriam Brown Spiers
University of Georgia

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