Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism by Natchee Blu Barnd (review)

when the stresses of my graduate program become overwhelming, I lace up my running shoes, escape my hectic schedule, and explore the residential streets of Davis, California. I run up Washoe Street and down Ohlone Street until I make it to Hoopa Place. Amused, I wonder if there has ever been a Hupa Indian in this seemingly grandiose and manicured cul-de-sac before. Natchee Blu Barnd argues, "In non-Native (largely White) communities, the production of Indian-themed spatial markers expresses a colonial ideology and physically marks out the consequences and legacy of anti-Indian spatial practices. … [These] signs stand in place of and to some extent even deny tribal survival and indigenous geographies" (24). And so I keep running.

Native Space explores how Native communities and individuals have reclaimed Indigenous spatialities and asserted Indigenous geographies. Barnd explores diverse articulations of Indianness in settler spatialities while simultaneously centering Native space-making practices. In so doing, Barnd interrogates relationships between race, space, Indigeneity, whiteness, and colonialism.

Indian street names—branded and sold as clusters by development companies—proliferated in the mid-twentieth century amid termination era policies. The spatial equivalent of playing Indian, Indian street names consistently locate whiteness. Why street signs? Mundane, yes; but Barnd is interested in the mundane. He argues that mundane practices normalize colonialism, that street signs are "mundane spatial markers" that "materially stand as labels for the world" (73, 21). Moreover, "street names remain unquestioned as modes of hegemonic cultural production that operate at the intersection of colonialism, identity, race, and space" (73). Street signs perform the ideological labor of settler colonialism; they denote colonized space.

Barnd contrasts spatial markers in exclusive settler spaces with those within Indigenous communities. The differences between Indian street signs in Indian versus white communities include language, community, and cultural context. Barnd argues that using street signs with Indigenous language and cultural representation promotes community health and produces a tribal geography, and, most importantly, that control over geographic expression is "mirror[ed] [in] other regained aspects of self-governance and self-determination: language, education, health, and economic development" (52).

Barnd considers history and settler memory through compelling case studies. One example centers on Set-tainte, a nineteenth-century Kiowa warrior and political figure who dedicated himself to protecting Kiowa lifeways and fighting white oversettlement. He jumped to his death from a prison window. Barnd explores the way Set-tainte is both memorialized and spatialized. Barnd juxtaposes the town of Satanta, Kansas, and a Kiowa community descended from Set-tainte located in Oklahoma, and he does so to demonstrate the ways in which "the production of space (dominant, indigenous, both, or otherwise) is constituted by intersections and overlappings of race, gender, indigeneity, Whiteness, and everyday acts of colonialism" (80).

Every year for the past half century, the predominantly white community of Satanta congregates for the Satanta Ceremony, during which two high school seniors dressed in regalia take center stage: the male senior holds a peace pipe up to the sky, smokes from it, and passes the pipe to the male junior. The male senior then removes his headdress and transfers it to the male junior. The female senior transfers her shawl, necklace, and ring to the female junior. This appropriative example of playing Indian aims to unmake Native space while narrating white innocence in the process. However, despite the fact that Satanta is "an active neocolonial space" (82), the process of unmaking Native space is never complete. For Set-tainte descendants, Kiowa ancestral territory "remain[s] part of an imagined, traditional Kiowa geography. This also means that Satanta and many other places necessarily exist as overlapping indigenous and colonial geographies. While remade, they have not been fully unmade as Native space" (83).

Native Space considers how Indigenous artists and activists contest settler place making in daily practice. Native artists interrogate colonial space and, in turn, reassert Native spaces. Barnd examines artists such as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who employs maps as mediums, redeployed...