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

In Indigenous Women's Writing and the Cultural Study of Law, Cheryl Suzack emphasizes the ways that Indigenous women are enacting their sovereignty by writing for, to, and about indigenous issues of Native America. The Indigenous women writers that Suzack focusses on in the text are Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Beatrice Culleton Mosionier (Canadian Metis), Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa), and Winona LaDuke (Ojibwe White Earth Band of Chippewa). Each of the four Indigenous women have written novels, Ceremony, In Search of April Raintree, the Antelope Wife, and Last Standing Woman, to address real and pressing issues that continue to impact Indigenous women's sovereignty. Suzack discusses these novels in relation to real life Supreme Court cases that have addressed concerns around gender identity, blood quantum, domestic violence, and land, to show the importance of Indigenous women's voices through writing. She engages with interdisciplinary studies of literature, law, Native American and Indigenous studies, Women and Gender studies, and Native activists to build conversations around law and gender identity among Native American and First Nations peoples. Suzack highlights powerful Indigenous women writer activists to strengthen this argument in order to build on the scholarly literature by dissecting and interconnecting law with literature to provide an understanding of the significant roles that Indigenous women (and I'd add to the argument: Two-Spirit) have in and outside of Native communities.

Suzack outlines the main goals of the book in three parts "(1) as an analysis on how law and legal practices provide an essential context for understanding literary texts by Indigenous women writers, (2) to provide new readings of their work by examining this literature within a historically situated framework determined in part by colonial law and legislation, and (3) to trace the formation of an Indigenous feminist subject in cultural texts by Indigenous women writers from the post–civil rights era for whom law practices were especially formative" (Suzack 2017, 5). She draws links among intersectionality, reform as a "single-issue" struggle, and how law shapes the experience of Indigenous peoples. Suzack analyzes Indigenous feminism by focusing on women's storytelling as a source of knowledge about women's identities and their commitment to political struggle (Suzack 2017, 12). Themes that arise in the book are critical for its success in providing the understanding between Indigenous women's writing to the study of law; these themes are sovereignty, gender identity, land, and community. Through this book review, I will focus on the key points of the Supreme Court cases that have been used with short summaries of these novels and how they relate to these themes.

In Chapter 1, "Gendering the Politics of Tribal Sovereignty: Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978) and Ceremony (1977)," Suzack highlights the terms of self-determination and gender empowerment that were central to the Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez case, its dignitybased claim of critical race assessment, and debates concerning gender identity and tribal sovereignty through Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony novel (Suzack 2017, 18). Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez was a Supreme Court case in 1978 that brought tension between tribal sovereignty and Indigenous women's rights. Julia Martinez, Santa Clara Pueblo, has mixed-race children who were denied enrollment into the Santa Clara Pueblo community because tribal enrollment is based on male lineage. Ceremony was published a year before the court case and one year after Pueblo of Laguna acted as a party to the case; "Silko introduces women's gender nonconformity and illicit behavior to rewrite the prescriptive and narrow view of gender identity launched by the Martinez case" (-Suzack 2017, 25). Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez and Ceremony argue for women's gender knowledge among Pueblo communities through the right of tribal sovereignty. Silko, Suzack, and ultimately, Martinez are arguing against the inequalities of gender identity that is deeply ingrained in our tribal and federal nation, in this instance the injustices...