Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law by Cheryl Suzack (review)

I was delighted to read Cheryl Suzack’s Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Cultural Study of Law. This deftly executed, beautifully organized, transnational, intersectional study is a welcome validation to the significance of literature (and its relationship to law)—in this case, indigenous women’s literature—as a powerful, articulate, historically conscious, worded weapon of defense on behalf of indigenous peoples. Suzack (re)presents indigenous women’s literature as a space of “transhistorical feminist consciousness,” practice, and agency, a site of “indigenous feminist literary activism” and reimagining that contests juridical enforcements propagated by a coloniality-steeped mainstream Western law, to the grievous detriment of indigenous women. She puts in relief the ways in which Silko, Mosionier, Erdrich, LaDuke, and she herself are contributing to the field of literature and law studies, exercising their right to speak, as indigenous women who are expert trackers, hunters, healers, and women of their revelatory word(s) in the pursuit of justice regarding matters of tribal sovereignty, gender, ethnic/racial identities, and the land, always countering “silencing and erasure.”

Suzack demonstrates a mastery of the scholarship on literature and law. She astutely selected four pertinent legal cases, and the work of four indigenous women, three from the Great Plains, to demonstrate how tribal sovereignty and gender empowerment are allied. Her study builds with an elegant force that brings home her main (overlapping) points. In “Gendering the Politics of Tribal Sovereignty: Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978) and Ceremony (1977),” Suzack shows Martinez’s activism as an expression of “Indigenous-feminist tribal sovereignty” within a “dignity-based framework.” Thinking hemispherically, I am reminded of the Zapatista women’s slogan, “Mujeres con la Dignidad Rebelde” [“Women with the Rebellious Dignity”]. In “The Legal Silencing of Indigenous Women: Racine v. Woods (1983) [Canada]” and In Search of April Raintree (1983), Suzack (rightly) posits literature “as a source of cultural authority,” showing Indigenous women’s spirited challenge to the “learned powerlessness” that Mosionier reveals, through her Metís characters’ “bearing witness” (fictionally) to the constant real-life legal, violent assault on Indigenous women’s rights as mothers, as children, as sisters, and their connection to the land. In “Colonial Governmentality and Gender Violence: State of Minnesota v. Zay Zah (1977)” and The Antelope Wife (1978), Suzack addresses how blood quantum is used, via this law, to “separate [Indigenous] bodies from land,” and how Erdrich creates a story of urgency regarding Indigenous women’s agency “as agents of [intergenerational] cultural transmission and tribal values,” who lift up the sacred responsibility of language, naming, and memory. In “Land Claims, Identity Claims: Manypenny v. United States (1991)” and Last Standing Women (1998), Suzack takes on the entrapments caused by legally assumed “identity categories” that impact land (dis)possession, and demonstrates how LaDuke affirms and enacts in her novel the understanding that a higher law guides the Anishinaabe in their spiritual and historically grounded material relations to their land. In this study, Suzack reveals what is needed to transform transitional justice paradigms to processes accountable to Indigenous women’s justice goals, brilliantly anticipating the recovery of traditional indigenous legal systems.