Pocahontas and Settler Memory in the Appalachian West and South

This article utilizes the Pocahontas coalfields in West Virginia and the Indian River Farms Company settlement of Vero Beach Florida as case studies of settler memory. As late as the nineteenth century, setters considered these two very different, but connected, Southern spaces as frontiers. Settlers in both places constructed fantasies about Native peoples that focused primarily on the idea of the Native woman Pocahontas. These are imaginative creations that both attempt to create a settlement and to hearken back to fantasies of the past that never fully existed. With selective constructions of memory, both settlements chose Pocahontas because the name evoked a settler dream of the good Indian yielding to conquest, just as they sought a pliant and willing landscape that would yield mineral and agricultural riches. In fact, both places have longer and deeper Native histories that settler and booster histories have obfuscated and hidden in favor of more “romantic” national narratives such as the Pocahontas myth, in order to sell a place and a product.

The Mexican social unconscious—part I: The roots of a nation

The social unconscious of a country or people is shaped by their origins and by the major collective traumatic experiences of their past. In the case of Mexico, this has been the trauma of the Spanish Conquest, that aimed to subjugate its originary peoples and obliterate their whole culture, language, and religion, which nonetheless subsisted subterraneously, syncretized with those of their invaders. It was a veritable genocide, both physical and cultural. The Mexican population was born from the mating of a brutal foreign conqueror and a subjected native woman, resulting in mestization, both physical and cultural. The psychic and social aftermath of these origins has been a deep ambivalence of Mexicans towards their identity and the foreign invader. This is similar to the fate of the unwelcome and abused child described by Ferenczi. Such underlying factors, derived from the collective history of peoples should be taken into account in any psychoanalytic or group-analytic enquiry of individual patients and groups.

Healthcare for the Poor

Early American poor relief included extensive healthcare. Doctors’ visits, nurses’ care, and medicine could all be covered by poor relief. One nurse, called “One-Eyed” Sarah, healed poor residents of Providence, Rhode Island, in the very early nineteenth century. One of thousands of women, nationwide, who did the hard work of physically tending to their needy neighbors, Sarah’s work was highlighted in newspaper articles in 1811. Sarah was “Indian,” and her impoverished patients requested her by name. While her actual identity remains mysterious, this chapter explores what we can learn about a Native woman who nursed the poor back to health, while being paid by poor relief funds. Sarah’s life shows evidence of being controlled by overseers of the poor, as Cuff Roberts’s was. It also shows how she could use her experience to find income from overseers of the poor like William Larned.

The decolonial perspective on America’s founding mother myth: a study of Paula Gunn Allen’s Pocahontas

Western History and Literature have been perpetuating the image of women who have played an important role in the creation of the nation. According to those narratives, they emerge as figures that have helped European men to understand, connect and be part of native culture.Most importantly, they abandoned their own culture in order to build a more “civilized” nation in alliance with the Europeans and therefore they are seen as traitors. However, more recent studies tell us different stories about those women, stories that reveal that, in fact, these women were subjugated and/or discredited. From this perspective, this article aims at reflecting upon the oppressive patriarchal colonial forces that build the narrative of native people as the other. In that intent, we will analyze the poem “Pocahontas to Her English Husband, John Rolfe,” as well as the biography of Pocahontas, both written by Paula Gunn Allen, a native American writer, who gives voice to the silenced native woman and the tradition of her people.

An Eye for an Eye: the Hapticality of Collaborative Photo-Performance in Native Women of South India

This article examines the haptic politics of the Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004) ‘theatre museum’ composed by Indian performance artist Pushpamala N. and British photographer Clare Arni. Through a transnational collaboration, Native Women re-creates a visual genealogy of ‘popular’ Indian women images, reckoning with legacies of colonial and photographic studio photography. The article focuses on the engagements of Native Women with colonial representations of ‘the native’ (woman) in particular and asks: How does a transnational project resituating colonial ethnographic practices inform feminist performance methodologies? How does this photo-performance develop a haptic attempt at transnational solidarity? In what ways do haptic entanglements with photo-performance constitute new imaginations for collaborative practices? The article repositions Native Women as a performance work that reflects collaboration as a process of political intimacy.

The New Maghrebi Woman and the Occident: From Occidentophilia to Ambivalence

As a reaction to European women’s campaign to save native women from their own men, Algerian authors debated the condition of native women and called for their emancipation through education. Questions around whether French education would divert them from their prime role as the guardians of national culture, whether too much Occidental culture would contaminate and alienate them from their own people, and whether exposure to French ways would incite them to rebel against their traditions and customs were debated at length. These questions and many others were echoed in the work of Djamila Débêche as the first Maghrebi feminist novelist whose novels illustrate the emergence of the French educated native woman, who is active in the public sphere and who, like her male counterparts, she engages with the Occident. Her novels and articles denote a total shift from the image of the silent and secluded native woman to that of the active feminist agent. In order to gain a better understanding of Débêche’s novels this chapter situates them in their feminist context and investigates the influence of French feminism and the emergent Algerian feminist movement on their author’s viewpoints.

Facing the sexual demon of colonial power: Decolonising sexual violence in South Africa

In this article the authors discuss in broad strokes the work of two theorists, namely Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and Argentinian philosopher Maria Lugones to argue that a specific logic of sexualisation accompanied, permeated and coloured the colonial project of racialising the ‘native’. The sexual wound which to a great extent explains the abjection of the racialised body, is a key aspect of the colony and should therefore also be a central theme in any properly critical discourse on decolonisation in Africa. After drawing on Oyĕwùmí and Lugones to make their central argument, the authors apply this framework to the problem of sexual violence in South Africa. Understanding the nature of the sexual-racial wound of coloniality will not only ensure that the problem of sexual violence gets properly addressed as a central question of decolonisation, but will also suggest new ways of concretely addressing the problem. In particular, the dominant discourse needs to shift away from the ‘emasculated man’ trope and towards a critical feminist decoloniality which views the radical dehumanisation of native woman as key to colonial violence understood as a world-destructive.