Commodifying Tragedy

By focusing on the representation of violence against Native American women in Craig Johnson’s "The Cold Dish" and the television show "Longmire," this article demonstrates how these cultural productions perpetuate settler-colonial power relations. Although Longmire is one of the more progressive shows thanks to its development of Native American characters and storylines, the settler-colonial status quo is affirmed in four main ways. Not only do the novel and TV show redeploy the racist stock characters of the Magical Indian and the White Savior, but the TV show especially also reiterates a version of the stereotypical Vanishing American narrative inherited from the Western genre. Furthermore, both cultural productions heavily pathologize the Cheyenne community, depriving them of agency. Finally, the novel and show both transform pain, suffering, and grief into transferable commodities. This allows them to disinvest the pain and tragedy suffered by the Native American characters in order to reinvest this tragic potential in white characters, which serves to reinforce the white characters’ heroism. The commodification of tragic potential and emphasis on its sentimentalization help obscure the settler-colonial origins and systemic perpetuation of violence against Native American women. In sum, this analysis shows that the deeply ingrained and normalized settler-colonial ideology inherent to representational strategies limit the progressive potential of even the most benevolent and well-meaning white cultural productions.

Decolonizing VAWA 2021: A Step in the Right Direction for Protecting Native American Women

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was hallmark legislation aimed at combating violence against women. While violence against women is a national issue that affects women of all race/ethnicities, it affects Native American women the most, as Native women experience the highest rates of violence. Violence against Native women is rooted in colonization because it decreases the power of tribal government, diminishes tribal sovereignty, and devalues Native Americans, which in turn leaves Native women more vulnerable to victimization. As such, amendments to VAWA must take particular action on violence against Native women, including actions that support decolonization. The 2013 VAWA reauthorization acknowledged colonization and was the federal government’s first step in the decolonization process. It restored tribal jurisdiction over some VAWA crimes, but there are still gaps regarding protecting Native women. This policy analysis examines the proposed VAWA reauthorization, HR 1620, and provides three specific recommendations in order to better protect Native women: (1) allow tribes to write their own rape laws, (2) expand tribal jurisdiction to all VAWA crimes and stranger and acquaintance violence, and (3) enhance tribes’ abilities to secure VAWA funds and resources. These recommendations are discussed in terms of existing literature and implications for Native people and Native communities.

Complaining but not Forsaken: Native American Women and Romantic Complaint

<p><b>Although Romantic poetry is touted for its melancholic and introspective nature, the presence of complaint poetry in this period has been paid little attention by scholars. Embracing an aesthetic of lament, the mode’s primary intention is to amplify the speaker’s grief and / or protest to a given circumstance or event, privileging the subjective “I” as the central voice of the poem. More commonly known as a mode used by early modern male poets to imagine the grievances of the opposite sex, this thesis considers a poetics of Romantic complaint, looking at two distinct, but intimately connected groups of writers. Chapter one identifies three British Romantic poets – William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and Felicia Hemans – to discuss why they adopted complaint to literarily (note not literally) place themselves in the shoes of the Other: the “forsaken” Native American woman. Simultaneously sympathetic and reprehensible under the British feminine model, this Romantic Indian woman figure embodied the simplicity and “spontaneity” idealised by these British poets, who thereby fabricated her lamenting voice to complement their poetic projects of ballad and song restoration in the name of creating an identifiably British national literature. The mode of complaint and the voice of the Romantic Indian woman are thus argued to be integral to the formation of Romantic poiesis, this chapter emphasising how, by appropriating the voice of the female Other, these poets attempted to establish a sense of British literary identity. </b></p><p>Redressing the fictionalised portraits cast by these British-authored complaints, this thesis then turns to the poetry of actual Native American women writing during and after the Romantic era. Paralleling (although not descending from) the female-authored, female-voiced complaints of early modern women in Europe, the demotic, woeful rhetoric of complaint becomes a similarly powerful tool for a number of Native American women, whose work offers a diverse range of laments from land loss and cultural displacement, to the death of children and the experience of motherhood. Chapter two of this thesis concentrates on a body of complaint poetry by Bamewawagezhikaquay, or Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, a central figure in both Native American and Romantic literature in America. Building on the arguments I make here, chapter three then expands out to offer case studies of the complaints written by four Native women: E. Pauline Johnson (Kanienʼkehá꞉ ka or Mohawk); Ruth Margaret Muskrat (Cherokee); Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux); and Mabel Washbourne Anderson (Cherokee). Acknowledging the centrality of rhetorical sovereignty and kinship to the lives and writings of these women, this thesis determines a way of accessing their English-written poems via the frame of Romantic complaint. In doing so, we can consider a tradition of female-voiced complaint that is not necessarily self-conscious in its construction, but nevertheless vital to how we think about and study Native American literature, women’s writing, and, of course, Romantic literature.</p>

Complaining but not Forsaken: Native American Women and Romantic Complaint

<p><b>Although Romantic poetry is touted for its melancholic and introspective nature, the presence of complaint poetry in this period has been paid little attention by scholars. Embracing an aesthetic of lament, the mode’s primary intention is to amplify the speaker’s grief and / or protest to a given circumstance or event, privileging the subjective “I” as the central voice of the poem. More commonly known as a mode used by early modern male poets to imagine the grievances of the opposite sex, this thesis considers a poetics of Romantic complaint, looking at two distinct, but intimately connected groups of writers. Chapter one identifies three British Romantic poets – William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, and Felicia Hemans – to discuss why they adopted complaint to literarily (note not literally) place themselves in the shoes of the Other: the “forsaken” Native American woman. Simultaneously sympathetic and reprehensible under the British feminine model, this Romantic Indian woman figure embodied the simplicity and “spontaneity” idealised by these British poets, who thereby fabricated her lamenting voice to complement their poetic projects of ballad and song restoration in the name of creating an identifiably British national literature. The mode of complaint and the voice of the Romantic Indian woman are thus argued to be integral to the formation of Romantic poiesis, this chapter emphasising how, by appropriating the voice of the female Other, these poets attempted to establish a sense of British literary identity. </b></p><p>Redressing the fictionalised portraits cast by these British-authored complaints, this thesis then turns to the poetry of actual Native American women writing during and after the Romantic era. Paralleling (although not descending from) the female-authored, female-voiced complaints of early modern women in Europe, the demotic, woeful rhetoric of complaint becomes a similarly powerful tool for a number of Native American women, whose work offers a diverse range of laments from land loss and cultural displacement, to the death of children and the experience of motherhood. Chapter two of this thesis concentrates on a body of complaint poetry by Bamewawagezhikaquay, or Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, a central figure in both Native American and Romantic literature in America. Building on the arguments I make here, chapter three then expands out to offer case studies of the complaints written by four Native women: E. Pauline Johnson (Kanienʼkehá꞉ ka or Mohawk); Ruth Margaret Muskrat (Cherokee); Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Sioux); and Mabel Washbourne Anderson (Cherokee). Acknowledging the centrality of rhetorical sovereignty and kinship to the lives and writings of these women, this thesis determines a way of accessing their English-written poems via the frame of Romantic complaint. In doing so, we can consider a tradition of female-voiced complaint that is not necessarily self-conscious in its construction, but nevertheless vital to how we think about and study Native American literature, women’s writing, and, of course, Romantic literature.</p>